Sunday, June 11, 2023

The Posthumous Man, by Mário Ferreira dos Santos

This is a book about Nietzsche by Mário Ferreira dos Santos. The title of the book in Portuguese was “O Homem Que Nasceu Póstumo”, or literally, “The Man Who Was Born Posthumous”. It is named after the famous quote by Nietzsche from his book “The Anti-Christ”, in which he said that “some men are born posthumously”. The thing is that in Portuguese, this quote is typically rendered “alguns homens nascem póstumos”, i.e., “some men are born posthumous”, with the adjective rather than the adverb. (Which, as far as I know, is equally allowed by the German, “Einige werden posthum geboren”.)

The subtle change in sense given by this common rendering into Portuguese, however, may be highlighted by the fact that, in quotation (rather than translation), people sometimes insert the word “já” after “homens”, giving the sense that “some men are already born posthumous”, or, some men are already posthumous at their birth. It conveys a sense of being fated, since your birth, to be “posthumous”, i.e., to be only known from your remains. It’s not that “the discovery of your remains is your true birth”, but rather that you were a “posthumous person” throughout your whole life, since you were born. It puts quite a different emphasis on Nietzsche’s meaning.

The Posthumous Man

“Some are born posthumously…”
—Nietzsche

Referring to the limited understanding of his books by the common reader, still bound by the prejudices of two thousand years of an education slanderous to life, and dominated only by abstract schemes, Nietzsche said:

As for the problem of understanding or misunderstanding, it will become a superfluous matter, as it is still far from being current.

I myself am not a current man; some are born posthumously.

The time will come when institutes will arise where one will live and teach what I understand by living and teaching; perhaps special chairs will be established to interpret “Zarathustra”. However, I would be in flagrant contradiction with myself if I were to expect to find ears and hands ready to welcome my truths right now: that they do not listen to me today, that nothing of mine is accepted, seems to me not only natural but even just.

In another passage of his work, he presumed that only many years after his death would his readers come. We have now entered that period, and only now is Nietzsche truly studied from more precise angles.

The greatest number of works has been written about three figures in history: Christ, Napoleon, and Nietzsche. In this century, within a fifty-year period, no one has received such abundant literature. And with him, something different happens that does not happen with others who shine brightly and are later forgotten. Nietzsche is read more and more each passing day, more analyzed. His themes are present throughout modern philosophy, placed, whether well or poorly, from the angle he wished to place them.

It is natural that this book we now publish focuses only on some of these themes because Nietzsche’s thematic presents numerous aspects, as well as the complexity of his problems, awaiting exegesis from scholars in all fields of human knowledge.

It can be said without fear, and we will prove it in the future, that there is no general current topic, whether in the natural or cultural sciences, that has not been addressed by him. And his thematic will require not just this century but possibly two centuries of study, of answering the questions he posed, as well as verifying the validity or invalidity of many of his solutions.

He considered that an era could be measured by its capacity to recognize great men. And he had no doubts about the one he lived in. He did not admire the bovine man forming in Europe, who would, in this century, as it turned out, pose the greatest threat of human termite-ism or bee-ism.

He understood that “Zarathustra” deserved interpretation after careful study. A symbolic work, made alcyonic, difficult to penetrate for the uninitiated, it would be one of the most widely read books, a book for everyone, but also for no one.

In our last theme, on mysticism, we will try to give a symbolic analysis of Nietzsche’s work and its mystagogy. We understand that our work is completed with “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” whose notes on symbolism make many aspects clear.

“...To understand just a few phrases ‘from’ ‘Zarathustra,’ which would be equivalent to living them, would elevate the reader to a much higher level of humanity than modern men could achieve…” he affirmed. Penetrating into Zarathustra’s Dionysian world will lead men to a “Goethean gaze of goodwill and love,” bringing them closer at the mountaintop, where they will gaze at the sunrise with the same majesty as eagles. Nietzsche did not seek readers; he sought his readers.

He considered his work as dynamite and deemed it entirely unsuitable for youth because its immorality — and he often affirmed this — would be understood from different angles than those he desired.

Furthermore, how could he convey his “truth” to just anyone? And first of all, it must be understood that, for Nietzsche, a truth is only true when it is transmissible. And he knew that few, very few, would be in that sympathetic disposition to receive it. Moreover, most readers take a feminine stance: they like to be impregnated. Nietzsche did not want to impregnate but only to break chains, break links, dissolve spiderwebs.

Nietzsche, according to Brandes, was a libertarian aristocrat. The dignity of man resided in the use of freedom. Can someone be a Nietzschean when they alienate their personality to a sect?

Let those who are incapable of commanding themselves obey, but the free man cannot merely be a reflection of his superiors. To follow Zarathustra, one must separate from him. The true Nietzschean separates from him; they meet him by the wayside, listen to the indications he offers, benefit from his experience, but bid him farewell to seek oneself, to find oneself, to interpret their own role.

Wasn’t it he who said, by chance: “he who follows his own path brightens my image with a clearer light”?

We must be what he was, sincere always in each of “our” moments, and so sincere that we must not fear contradicting ourselves, rejecting ourselves even in our statements. “I want to walk with men who have their own model and do not see it in me. This would make me responsible for their model and would make me its slave.” “I want to arouse the greatest distrust in myself.”

“Flee from me, beware of Zarathustra. It is for humanity, for a master to put his own disciples on guard.”

Nietzsche was a libertarian, and Brandes was the first to understand.

He is an example of the free man, that free man who for centuries has fought against all obscurantists who insist on denying him the only truly human quality he possesses: the quality of being free, of being able to be free, of being able and obligated to be free, faithful to himself, and fully living himself in all the range of his diversity, contradiction, weakness, and dream.

"There is nothing in me of a founder of religions. I do not want believers; I believe that I am too wicked to believe in myself. I do not speak to the masses.

I have a horrible fear that one day they will sanctify me…" (these words are from “Ecce Homo”) “this book must ward off the danger that may arise from excesses about my person.” He did not want believers, but those who claim to be his followers want believers. He was not a founder of religion, but the founders of new religions, the divinizers of matter who make it infinitely creative, and the idealists of totalitarian authoritarianism, want to establish new religions.

He did not speak to the masses; and they only address the masses. Nietzsche did not flatter the small-minded, he wanted the emergence of great men, and strong ones.

In his last days, he had faith in humanity again, and his words are ones of trust and love. To liberate man from the masses will be our greatest task.

Are these not the attitudes of a true liberator?

The defenders of force and brutality seek a philosophy to justify them. They turned to Nietzsche, who lent himself to interpretations favorable to the twilight of Nazism. However, it must be emphasized:

Nietzsche states that he wished to have written his magnum opus, “Will to Power,” in French. He himself uses French expressions as much as possible. And, furthermore, he adds: “so that this book does not appear as a confirmation of any aspirations of the German Reich.”

“It is expensive to attain power; power brutalizes…” This is Nietzschean. He did not delude himself with the new god adored by the bovine man: the State.

“Culture and State - one cannot deceive oneself - are antagonists.” Cultural state “is only a modern idea. One lives off the other; one prospers at the expense of the other. All great periods of culture are periods of political decadence: what is great in terms of culture was impolitical, even anti-political…”

And he already refuted authoritarian socialism in advance, whose failures in this century corresponded to his criticism.

State socialism is not human progress but a vicious formula. What was socialist about Nazism? The State becomes master, unique, absolute. It is a group autocracy, a caste autocracy, just as it is in Russia with the lords of bureaucratic feudalism. He rejected that “nec-plus-ultra” state of the socialists, that absorptive, totalizing state that creates herd men, denying exceptions. No one could raise the voice of Zarathustra in a state of oppression, of bovine masses. The totalitarian interpretation of Nietzsche’s work is a great lie and a great falsification.

In the “Theme of War and the State,” in the body of this work, we will focus on other aspects where evidence will pile up to refute all this spread falsehood. It is one of the most painful aspects of culture to see how lies manage to impose themselves and endure for so long. It would be worth collecting all the historical lies about human thought, repeated in schools, universities, and books because many do not dedicate themselves primarily to the study of texts but to works of exegesis.

Let us listen to this phrase by Nietzsche:

“In general, the tendency of socialism, like that of nationalism, is a reaction against the formation of the individual. They have their difficulties with the ego, with the semi-mature, foolish ego; they want to place it under the bell jar of order, of the,” of the super-“we” of totalitarianism, we would say.

Those who have read, understood, and felt Nietzsche’s work know that his entire action was true dynamite against generalizing concepts, against all conceptions of totalization. He challenged exaggerated formalism, wielded violence against rationalism, fought against “closed totalities.” Totality, for him, is a simplification, a systematization of human “praxis.” We universalize ideas, giving them a total character, without implying reality but simply because it is convenient.

Humanity, will, instinct, reason, love, fraternity are universalizations. If men fight under the same flag and disagree, it is due to the differentiation of the universalizing concept. Two men talk about love and do not understand each other, and thus they can argue and wrestle in defense of freedom. Through Nietzsche’s work, these statements are clear, expressive, categorical hundreds of times. Totalitarianism is, for him, a primitive and prejudiced formula. Any attempt that tends to totalize represents an affront to human dignity. Nazism leveled men by obedience, accepted the theory of eternal war in Klauss Wagner’s sense, and affirmed the Rosenbergian dialectic of the “struggle of contrasts.” Now, Nietzsche’s tragic dialectic is based on “transubstantiation” and transfiguration. The struggle is eternal because movement is eternal, and accepting equilibrium is to fall into the commonly misunderstood interpretation of Hegelian thought. The Marxist synthesis includes the affirmation and negation of the thesis and the antithesis. But Nietzsche takes a step further and accepts transubstantiation. The synthesis is not simply an affirmation-negation of opposites. It is much more: it is the inseparability of opposites, very close to Proudhon’s antinomies, of contemporary antinomicity, which cooperate to achieve what he called “justice.”

This is what deeply sets Nietzsche’s dialectical conception apart from the Hitlerist conception, which is based on the clash of opposites, an eternal, unsolvable, competitive clash and not cooperation. It is like the eternal preservation of negotiations, without accepting the overcoming of this struggle, as it wants to eternalize it.

These two thousand years of calumny against life have given us a man postponed, relegated to things, beyond the valorization of numbers and abstractions that increase, above all, in the field of those who consider themselves the most realistic, the most objective, as if objectification were not already an abstraction. Nietzsche wielded his weapons against all falsifications, all lies. He knew that he was contemporary with one of the saddest moments in history, because rarely had humanity fallen so low.

“… You, knights of the Sad Figure, fabricators and sellers of spiritual cobwebs, you know very well that it does not matter whether you are right or not; you know that no philosopher, over time, is right; that there is much greater truth in the question marks you put behind your favorite words and phrases (and if it comes to it, also behind yourselves), than in all the solemn splendor with which you adorn yourselves among the accusers and the tribunals…”

Is not much of philosophy still bound by the prejudices of a past that is not the entire past, but only one of its aspects that are preferentially updated? Do we not prefer to preserve what was false, fragile, and deceitful in philosophy and reject what was creative, and build a whole metaphysical “spiderweb” in which even its own creators were trapped? A world of concepts, of standardizations of thought in an anti-vital, acosmic logicism, allowed the construction of a whole science that existed in life but continued to struggle against life.

We have created a passport for all superficiality, and “on the solid and unshakable foundations of ignorance, science can still be founded today; the desire to know can be founded on the basis of a much more powerful will, the will not to know, of uncertainty, of lies. And not as an opposite, but as a feature and refinement…”

And this hypocrisy has penetrated even into the blood. “From time to time we become aware of this, and we laugh inwardly at the thought that the best of our sciences are concerned with entertaining us in this simplified world. Completely artificial, altered, and consciously falsified…” We consider the least skillful process to be analyzing Nietzsche under the schemes of rational thinking. We also know that many would like us to do so. But to confine Nietzsche within schemes would be to deny him and not give the experience of his fiery and contradictory self-production. His free and fragmentary thinking, undisciplined for the categorical defenders of an extreme schematism, led to the incomprehension of his contemporaries. That is why he only became known thanks to the free spirits, in whose thinking they sensed that vitality and understood him as a kindred spirit. It was Brandes, the great critic of the 19th century, the friend of Ibsen and Strindberg, who brought Nietzsche’s name to the world. It was difficult to understand the freedom that breathed through his pages when the bovine man united his forces to threaten culture and destroy it.

Too sincere, convinced of his worth and what he was, he had the audacity to say what he thought of himself. He proclaimed himself a genius. What an extraordinary crime it is for someone to openly proclaim that they are an exception. All those who consider themselves geniuses and proclaim themselves, without the audacity to do so aloud, revolted against Nietzsche in a gesture that the psychoanalyst would soon classify as self-punishment.

The subsequent madness that befell him helped to bolster the arguments of all the lunatics who fought against him. When he saw a brute tormenting a poor pack animal, in a gesture of revolt, he defended it and drove away the aggressor with his whip. Then, in tears, he embraced the poor animal, exclaiming, “My brother, my poor brother!” This Franciscan gesture provoked laughter, loud laughter from “balanced and sane” men.

And then, serene, with a face expressing kindness, he lived the rest of his life devoted to music and silence. During this period, everything he wrote showed incoherence, rational disorder. He had lost his reason… Wasn’t that what he had desired so much? Wasn’t his desire always to free himself from the rigidity of abstract schemes? He reminds us of a religious man who accused Nietzsche of madness and forgot the madness of so many saints and believers. It is because the attack aimed at Christianity was not understood by those who call themselves Christians.

As Nietzsche’s work is alcyonic and always written in a louder tone of voice, it is natural for the men of the plain, lovers of the noisy monotony of “frogs,” to repel his exclamations.1

“There are no more magnificent books, yet so refined, as mine: they reach, here and there, the highest point that can be reached: cynicism; - therefore, they must be conquered with the most delicate fingers and, at the same time, with valorous pulses…” It is phrases like these that support the accusation of Nietzsche’s megalomania.

“… I possess, in short, the most complete art of style that no man has ever possessed.”

“… The art of great rhythm, of the grand style in the construction of sentences, to express in an enormous ‘crescendo’ and ‘diminuendo’ of sublime passion, above-human, was discovered solely by me; like a dithyramb, as is the last one of the third book of Zarathustra, titled ‘The Seven Seals,’ I ascended a thousand miles above what until then was called poetry.”

Reaching his Dionysian desire for alienation from the rational, escaping all the rules that modesty had established for human relations, he fully realized himself in this book. It was the book of a man who had already known the path that would lead to the overman. He spoke of himself with the naivety and cynicism that he always considered essential to any superior work. This book, more than any other, represents the most sincere, loyal, and noble confession that someone has made of themselves.

Nietzsche has always been a loner. He lived apart from other men. His humanity did not consist of sympathizing with men but in enduring their proximity… “My humanity is a continuous victory over myself.” He is accused for this. His absence, this desire for solitude, is unforgivable to the herd man because he does not understand it. The herd man needs the herd.

Megalomania is common to superior men. Schopenhauer also considered himself a genius when he was still surrounded by silence. Goethe, Kant, Napoleon, Epicurus, Alexander, Aristarchus of Samos… history is full of these men who never used false modesty.

Nietzsche’s megalomania has been a feast for the disinherited paleologists. It is easy to search for symptoms of madness in his work, especially in “Ecce Homo.”

The work of an author lives on its own and is independent (in terms of appreciation) of the circumstances that generated it. Madness is always a stigma for the mediocre, and genius is always in that range that precedes madness. At least he knows that border and always thrives in that narrow place, but genius frees itself through creation. Nietzsche’s megalomania would be intolerable if he did not deserve any of those titles. A superficial person who considered himself a genius would deserve smiles, but a genius who is aware of his genius deserves respect.

The purpose of his work is to fight against all kinds of Pharisaism, Sadduceeism, and Philistinism. He fights for the victory of nature against all forces that have imposed themselves to demean it. He fights for the valorization of our instincts, which have been slandered by certain preachers of morality; he fights against hypocrisy. By analyzing morality, he reveals its etiology and exposes the self-suggestion exerted by our own passions on consciousness, and the disturbing influence exerted on the mind by the fatal virus of bad conscience, that millennial poisoning, that moral pessimism that has corrupted the sources of life. As a philologist, he studied the influence of words on metaphysics. Man believed that by giving a name to things, he had determined their essence, and by thinking that he had achieved a higher science of beings, he did nothing more than create a conventional system of terms. And thus, he ended up defining metaphysics as “the science of human errors elevated to the category of fundamental truths.” And he was right about the vicious form that metaphysics had taken in modern philosophy.

Nietzsche established a criterion, a direction in philosophy, seeking to free it from anthropomorphism, which speaks more to appetites and interests than to the true and disinterested thirst for truth that man so claims to possess.

The scope of this dehumanization is to “dispel the shadows that man has projected around himself as a result of his passions, his feelings, his sensitivity.”

Because of these passions, these feelings, and this sensitivity, man burdened himself with chains. He formed shackles, created limits for his vision, narrowed horizons, and imprisoned himself in the plain of false objectivism.

Nietzsche fiercely fights against this objective man, whom he historically situates in Socrates, this objective man who seeks, who struggles “to turn the world, aided by theologians, moralists, and metaphysicians, into a vast school, a laboratory, or a prison.”

And in this moment of limitation for science, when we witness the establishment of a new frontier for it, a more serious frontier than all the ones that have been established before, Nietzsche’s opinion gains value when he denies this science the possibility of explaining the meaning of life. He does not accept it in objectivity but in the union of the two halves of man: the objective and the subjective.

The latter lives hidden, silenced by the moral impositions of the environment, by the chains that men have built for it. Without the union of these two halves, we will not have the complete man, the totality of the individual. For him, all of human history has been nothing more than the struggle of this other half for its liberation, to impose itself, conquering the fields that the gods have forbidden.

“Man has vied inch by inch with the gods for possession of the world and now wants to be the master of his own destiny.”

“Science will never do more than provide us with a culture of means and not of ends. And with this, we remove the error of those who believe that philosophy was born from science and must ultimately become and be reduced to science.”

“...cultures are largely explained by the feeling that illuminates or obscures their lives, and they are transformed by the great metamorphoses of that same feeling.”

Isn’t that Spengler?

For him, the concept of culture includes spiritual, subjective facts, of which science is a small part, an intellectual discipline for practical purposes, which does not absorb in any way the intellectual and subjective activity of man.

“Culture is the fullness of collective spiritual life. Authority is not enough to achieve this unity; it requires latent thought, the radiant action of an inner life, by which we adjust our steps, by which our institutions are conditioned.”

And as for art, it is through exaltation, through art as the empowerment of man, that he says it cannot pretend to encapsulate the total content of a culture within its frames. Despite its “synthetic nature,” art feeds on contemplative, disinterested states, states that refine, select, and rarely weaken life. Generally, it is an empowerment of life, an interpretation, a louder tone of voice in these contemplative states, whether objectively or subjectively.

The unity of the objective and subjective world does not exist in nature, where he does not accept the univocal causation from a scientific point of view, but in the sense of Goethe’s proto-phenomenon, and of Spengler. Furthermore, the unification of life is a personal, subjective act. It is man who unifies the dispersed, man who creates science, art, philosophy. Therefore, in nature, there is aesthetics, but only in man is there art because it is the creation of man, who sees the things of the world with deeper eyes or hears them with a more refined ear. Only this interpretation is capable of elevating man beyond his humanity. Only this way of perceiving the things of the world, with livelier eyes and subtler ears, where there is hyper-tension, hyperesthesia, is capable of elevating man above his smallness. It is art, no longer with the guise and unhappy fate that modern schools of art-for-art’s-sake want to mark it with, with no other purpose, but as a higher end, as strength, as a creator of potentialities, as affective progress, as a means of intensifying natural impulses, as magic and as mysticism.

Science makes us heavy, as he says, makes us limited, narrow; it is the subjective death of man through limits, through contours. In the new ecumenical culture, which comes in a long stream in history and gradually updates itself, we will have the formation of freer, more creative philosophies, free from proselytism. The liberation of man will be achieved by overcoming himself. The new culture will reveal man imposing himself on nature as an interpreter and as a reformer. It is man giving colors where they are scarce and pale, man lending sounds where they are no longer heard, creating and escaping unilateral objectivity, conquering the world, and constructing within himself a new image.

The journey of this culture is difficult, difficult and tragic. The concrete vision, updating the opposites to live and overcome them, is superior to the forces of many who, among the extremes, do not aspire to overcome them but desire the middle ground that gives them the pastoral passivity of long, gentle plains, slightly disturbed in their tranquility by a gentle breeze, afraid of bending the slender stems of the bushes that barely emerge from the earth too much.

To love this world, to save it to save oneself, this will be the motto of the man to come: the liberated new Prometheus.

“The Man Who Was Born Posthumous” emerged from a series of requests we received to present Nietzsche’s work, bringing together the contradictory aspects of his themes and highlighting the “dominant” ones in order to allow for better understanding. It is evident from the outset that it would be impossible to address all the themes. Therefore, we chose some, precisely those that have posed the greatest problems and controversies. In the future, with the support of the reader’s goodwill, we will continue our already initiated work in “The Man Who Was a Battlefield,” which we published as a prologue to the translation of “Will to Power,” edited by Livraria do Globo.

As for that translation, we relied on the work published by Elisabeth Foerster Nietzsche. We hope, in the future, to provide a translation of the text augmented by the “Nietzsche Archive,” but supplemented with new explanatory notes.

We take this opportunity to thank the Brazilian and foreign critics who applauded our work. We would only like to make a simple note to some critics who found our number of notes excessive. However, if they were aware of the numerous letters we received and the countless questions addressed to us, they would know that those notes were still few, as many aspects of the work are not easily comprehensible. In a complete edition of this book, we will have the opportunity to add even more notes that correspond to the arising doubts addressed to us.

In this book, “The Man Who Was Born Posthumous,” we used a different technique. Taking a partially fictional approach, we made Nietzsche speak about his philosophy. We employed his ideas, many of his phrases, to make those more difficult themes intelligible. Merely reading the interpretation of his work, even by great figures of universal thought, is enough to understand that by proceeding as we did, we placed ourselves in the most accessible manner for its proper understanding. Nietzsche would never use our method. His work is fragmentary, and he liked to remain in the fragmentary and among his symbols. If we sought to clarify his themes, to make them more accessible, it should not be understood as a “vulgarization” that would offend Nietzsche himself, for we always respected his severity, his uncompromising nature, and the fidelity of his thought. We only softened that severity as much as possible in order to allow his themes to be presented in a coordinated manner, already reconciled through their contradictions.

Thus, we preemptively respond to the facile accusation that those who do not understand Nietzsche would level against us, claiming that reading him requires such work of exegesis and order, under penalty of his work offering more dangers than advantages.

Considering that the fragmentary nature of his philosophy had deeper roots in his psychological constitution, it is easily understood why we reduced it to an order that is not strictly his own but in no way denies his thought or violates fidelity.

We are going through a crucial moment in our culture, on the threshold of one of the greatest threats to humanity.

We position ourselves among those who are convinced that the current moment of leveling, of speculation in decline, demands men of the mountain who fight for human elevation and greater dignity.

And it is by turning our gaze to the work of the great solitary figure of the nineteenth century, the Alcione-like herald of one of the greatest human possibilities for the century we live in, that we believe we find the signs of a new dawn that will shine, a dawn full of promises but also terrible because it announces an irrevocability: either follow it or be lost in the plain; either surpass man or plunge into the insect-like existence that threatens us; either walk the path of superhuman exceptions or flatten ourselves according to the rule of a sub-humanity that preferred to retreat, lacking the necessary valor to forge its own destiny with its will.

The Theme of the Slave Rebellion and Other Themes

In the warm night, I could only hear a faint rustle as I turned the pages of the book.

The lamp light on the table gave an unreal contour to the upright books on the shelf. Sleep weighed heavy on my eyelids. But I wouldn’t abandon the reading just because my eyes closed more and more slowly. The rhythm of my breathing softened little by little. I don’t remember how much I read. I remember - and I will always remember - the moment when I felt myself softly uttering these words: “We are in a mediocre era of human life. We are in the era of the bovine man. Throughout centuries, man has chained himself to his worldview, created a certain number of words and ideas that best corresponded to the weakness of his instincts and appetites, and chained himself to the narrowness of his concepts. The bovine man dominates today. The weak…”

— That’s right!… That’s right!…

I turned around astonished to the deep voice coming from the corner of the room. I was facing a figure of medium height, with light brown, loose hair. A thick mustache fell over his lips. His gaze was fixed and bright. The clothing was dark and gave me the impression of being from another time.

I received him with astonishment and without a voice. He looked at me and added in a harsh tone:

— You are right. It heartens me to know that there are still men who think in this era. There are still those who defend themselves, who distance themselves from the bovine man, from the mediocre crowds.

That cursed philosophy of the weak has dominated the world, and there we have the beginning of disastrous consequences: mediocrity ruling over mediocrity.

No one knows what will come next. No one wanted to listen to me during my lifetime.

And you hadn’t been born yet, and I was already raising my voice against the growing wave of dominance by the bovine man, which began with that ill-fated French Revolution. They convinced the common man that he would rule.

The power-hungry, in that struggle, devoured each other, and the people remained the same. They gained hypothetical rights. Those are always the fruits of these revolutions, mountain births, where sacrifices outweigh the results. They gain even more: they gain hope. And then years go by, feeding on hope, and worse, convinced that it nourishes… - And he shook his head. I was amazed and reacted by remaining silent. He asked for permission and sat in front of me. His features were familiar to me. He continued: - The bovine man has a peculiar psychology. Above all, he is deeply resentful. You are familiar with my work on resentment, no doubt… – my response was a silent question.

The pale man smiled, gently closing his eyelids:

— Man did not fully understand the violence of resentment. It developed when they told him he was being postponed and he believed in the injustice of that postponement. There is a resentment that comes from centuries-old nights and is the fruit of dissatisfaction. If one day I meet you again, I will have the opportunity to talk about this theme. I do not wish for the destruction of the bovine man; he is useful up to a certain point and must exist for the simple reason that it is biologically necessary for him to exist. What has always disturbed and led me to dedicate the best of my life to the campaign against him is the fact that he imposed himself through numbers and determined, as a norm, his way of being, his psychology, and his interpretation of life and the universe. This bovine man attributes an exaggerated value to the concept he has of “society,” giving it a subsistence. For him, society is a conscious, living being that stirs, develops, and grows.

Man is merely an integral part, an atom. Even legally, this ontological concept of society exists. This concept nullifies the individual. We see this perfectly alive in oppressive regimes, where the State replaces classes and individuals. It is necessary to understand the concepts of “society” and “humanity” practically. They are words we use, concepts born out of the law of least effort, which, incidentally, is the law that guides the majority of human actions.

They created a conception of society and humanity, and now they cannot escape from it, cannot conceive it otherwise, under penalty of offending the sanctity of the idea. This concept of society is the fruit of weakness, and the weak invented it to create a force. Yet, I do not rebel against them for imposing this concept. They do well. In fact, they do what they alone could do. I have never fought against the weak, because I fought against weakness. Resentment born out of weakness is as harmful to the weak as to anyone else. In other cases - when it concerns a strong and rich nature - it is a superfluous feeling, a feeling that almost demonstrates strength and wealth in those who know how to dominate it. My philosophy has shown with what seriousness I fought against rancor and the desire for revenge, pursuing them even in the doctrine of “free will”… The malicious commentators of my philosophy describe differently - and in doing so, they reveal their absolute lack of intellectual honesty - that my doctrine of the “transvaluation of values” was a simple understanding of values through contradiction. For example: goodness would transvalue into wickedness, into cruelty.

Now, besides being a definite manifestation of bad faith, it is also a sign of ignorance, or perhaps both at the same time. I never separated goodness from wickedness, love from idleness, beauty from ugliness, the beautiful from the horrible. Not in the sense that one cannot understand evil without good, the just without the unjust, the positive without the negative, truth without lies. I went further: I did not conceive truth without lies. Truth was truth-lies. Lies were lies-truth. I included these categories of limitation of our perspectives as inseparable. The transvaluation of all values consisted precisely in a new perspective of the world that included contradictions.

Thus, I denied the absolute, the absolute with which man cemented his logic, his rationalism detached from reality, that very reality which is also illusion. I never desired to be a “metaphysician” and did everything to free myself from those absolutes. Not even the most honest commentators, who better understood my work, have understood the essence of my philosophy.

Why are the weak victorious today? Look at how I saw this problem and the truly dialectical conclusions I drew for the benefit of humanity. In my analysis, I joined the weak and the sick. They are more compassionate and more “human,” sentimental, easily pitying the suffering of others. There is a certain human satisfaction in seeing someone else suffer the same pain. La Rochefoucauld scandalized the world when he “cynically” said that. Man naturally seeks sincerity in his compassion, he seeks to be sincere, which does not prevent him from feeling an intimate satisfaction in the pain of others. This is what underlies the sadomasochistic impulse, which is constant in all human beings to varying degrees, a subject that modern psychology has taken up after I advised it so much.

The weak and the sick are more changeable, multiple, more tumultuous, and I also called them “divertissants,” but malign. And I also affirmed that it was the sick who invented malice (méchanceté, as I wrote in French, in “The Will to Power”). The weak and the sick have in their favor “fascination”; they are more “interesting.” Nothing is more interesting than the madman and the saint, relatives of “genius.” Great “adventurers and criminals,” and even all men, are also sick at certain times in their lives. We are all decadent for half of our existence. Woman turns her weakness into a religion, glorifies it, elevates humility, which is a feminine virtue. Woman has always conspired with types of decadence, with priests against the “powerful,” the strong, the men. She imparts to the child a sense of worship for pity, compassion, love.

The mother represents altruism in a convincing way…

I defined the artist as an intermediate species, separated from active criminality by weakness of will and social fear, which is not yet mature enough for a mental institution but curiously extends its antennae into both spheres.

He paused. His hard gaze seemed to search far away for what he desired.

He continued:

— I have been misunderstood. Don’t think that I desire to justify myself. A man like me doesn’t need justifications. But this theme of the weak is more relevant today than ever. I want to return to my earlier words. For the herd man, “society” assumes the highest evaluation. To this ideal, to this type of man, he has given a cosmic, even metaphysical, value.

“Society” becomes a “destiny” of man, towards which he tends as a purpose that he cannot and should not try to deviate from. Going against the herd provokes a whole series of neuroses, delusional states that transform man into an outcast.

Against this “religious” sense of “society” that the herd man accepts, lives, and nurtures, I opposed “aristocratism.” Aristocratism does not mean the destruction of society. Society, for me, is neither artificially nor solely the herd. For its own balance, so that the herd itself can pass through time and fulfill itself, not as a moral or social categorical imperative but as an intrinsic need of its constituent elements, there must be certain exceptional individuals whose sustenance is solitude, to prevent the herd from disintegrating into a shapeless mass or becoming prey to the often dangerous exploitation by shepherds. The exceptions must remain within the herd, in struggle, in opposition, in conflict, for total balance, vital balance, as I call it, which is balance derived from struggle, which is synthesis and not the putrid balance of static, accommodated forces entwined in the passivity of all shepherd aspirations. I understood that to achieve the “society” of vital balance, the equilibrium of forces in motion, it was necessary, alongside the ideal of the herd man, to have the aristocratism of exceptions, not only to serve as an ideal for those who remain below but also to allow the societal-animal herd to reach a higher degree. By eliminating the contrasts between men that stimulate and drive them, strong love, elevated sentiment, the notion of one’s own worth are suppressed.

There is a need for the desire for responsibility, which the herd man does not want. By diminishing his freedom, or limiting it to the freedom of others, he reduces responsibility and seeks security. This aspect is deeply psychological, and many neuroses arise from this sense of inferiority and insecurity that generates restlessness, anxiety, deviations, ways to escape the struggle against the aggressive environment. These human types exist, and they are the majority. But even within “society,” there are those who desire to increase their own insecurity and responsibility. Oppressing them, because they are a minority, is a solution of a political, anti-social, and anti-psychological nature. These men are necessary for society itself because they are the heroic ones, those who seek beyond themselves, those who lead men to the better conquest of themselves and the world, adapting better and offering, through their efforts, their work, their sacrifices, the well-being of the masses of the herd.

In the end, it must be said once again: the progress of the species requires the exception.

I went further in my analysis: the principle of freedom and equality diminishes, and consequently, the will to be responsible diminishes, which is an indication that autonomy is decreasing. The character of struggle, of controversy, diminishes; the power to command diminishes, and the faculty to keep silent, the great passion, the great mission, the tragedy, the serenity. The herd man withers, breaks under discipline, which strengthens strong, vigorous natures, and drags along with great endeavors.

Thus doubt, the greatness of the heart, experience, and independence are like disciplines that destroy the weak, and the strong are necessary to undertake these efforts.

A despicable and absurd form of idealism is to want mediocrity not to be mediocre and to, instead of seeing triumph in being exceptional, be indignant at cowardice, falsehood, pettiness, and wretchedness.

To make the weak, as a whole, strong, is a utopia and an indignity. Strength often kills weakness. It is necessary that men, when seeking to level down for the sake of balance, or seeking to level up to achieve that same balance, admit a leveling of the starting point. I have already explained this aspect several times. For me, the existence of these cowardly, weak, indecisive types is justified in order to force the appearance and development of their antipodes. Understanding and maintaining distances is what I preached, not creating contrasts, and this addresses the biased interpretations of my work. Any and all approximation would be an indignity. To separate, to increase the ever greater distance between the strong, the vigorous, and the robust from the weak, and not to establish a contrast. To diminish the intermediate formations, reducing their influences, is the only way to preserve distances, which will not prevent those who are below from reaching great heights. This same distance would be the stimulus.

The intermediary obscures the path and does not allow for a stronger desire to surpass oneself.

Intermediaries hinder progress and diminish the great. Often, they imitate the gestures and attitudes of the great and deceive the weaker ones.

The weak must recognize the need for great effort, for a great victory over oneself. I went even further in my analysis. I delved into the social and historical terrain and proposed that small productions be preserved, opposed to waste, without neglecting the larger productions; I proposed temporarily subjugating the destructive nature in order to make it an instrument of this economy of the future.

In Ecce Homo, I said: “The last thing I would propose is to improve people…”

Many concluded that I desired to perpetuate, in society, man with all his flaws, thus denying the evolution that I myself advocated.

However, my concept is different: the sense of improvement is the sense of the good man. To “improve” people, for me, means to make them gentle (civilization is a kind of taming, of domestication). Yet, the concept of improvement does not entail such a simple limitation, not for me. With these words, I wanted to affirm that I would not propose formulas that ensured the transformation of man as a whole.

Human solutions should not be total. Today, unquestionably, we are moving towards a total conception of human society. There were times when small communities knew their autonomy. There were small sovereign states.

Universal consciousness is totalizing, and I wanted to integrate man into the cosmos, to conceive of man as objectivity and subjectivity, as blood and spirit, as earth and heaven. The chthonic trinity, Mother-Earth-Death, would unite with the trinity of Father-Sun-Life, so to speak. I fought against polarizations. Man is complete when cosmic, when subjective and objective. My concept of equalization is the negation of fundamental equality. Seeking general laws oppresses inequality and allows it to persist. Inequality as a foundation is creative. Not as polarization, not as shackles. There should be unequal elements in society, I agree. Each should be given according to their most natural, inherent needs. General laws create dissatisfaction. Totalizing human solutions through general rules would generate discontent.

The universal content is acceptable, but the form must be singular. We reach the universal through the singular. We start from it, affirm it, in order to become universal. So, when I spoke of improving people, it was not in the sense of universalizing a form of improvement. When I advocated a world of the strong, a stronger human species, I knew that this strength would represent degrees that differentiate.

This did not justify the abuse of the stronger over the weaker, but the need to make these weaker ones disappear to prevent abuse.

One of the characteristics of our time is precisely that we think, desire, and fight for an improvement of humanity. We believe it is possible to achieve a higher level as a whole, for everyone. Now, this is still a prejudice from the eighteenth century that we have inherited and accepted as an almost unquestionable postulate. Precisely, I decided to discuss this theme. To reach a stronger kind of men, despite the weaker ones, would not be an affront to them. With differentiations, there would be emulations. These differentiations must be offered so that there is a desire to attain them.

The herd mentality is understandable, and I accept it when the herd does not create a dictatorship and impose its style on everyone. The mass man, in the bovine sense, accepting the whole at the expense of the individual, I have always fought against. Creating exceptions, allowing them to live, accepting their rights, creates a higher step among men that those below can aspire to. If we strive for the transcendence of man, let us not think that this transcendence will be attainable by all. If it is not possible to reach a universal higher level, let us make it particular. From there, we create the possibility for others to attain it, assisting those below to rise. The starting point must be leveled. Let everyone achieve their security, their ability to live normally, without suffering the modern anxieties anymore, that is a leveling of the starting point. But establishing a point of arrival from there, I did not accept. Preventing someone from moving forward while waiting for everyone else to reach the goal is not the true meaning of evolution because it is unnatural. It would oppress those who have reached the goal and make them suffer the anxiety of waiting for those who have lagged behind.

Creating a stronger human species has a purpose. The fact that there will always be weaker ones, as there will be physiologically, does not mean that the strong should weaken themselves in order to level the playing field. That would be leveling humanity through weakness to achieve fairness. Now, that is a mediocre conception of justice.

Leveling, therefore, is absurd. Creating equal opportunities, however, is justice. I accepted the possibility of creating human conditions that would allow for the formation of a stronger human species. Today, science also affirms this. Should we simply stop because some will take longer than others? No! Let us create this stronger species. And let us bring the weak ones to it. We must create social conditions that prevent the abuse of those who can exploit their strength to impose a dictatorship on those below. My psychology obstinately clashed with the spirit of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries.

There are stubbornnesses in my work that are understandable as a reaction to the sense of leveling down preached by some socialists. I rebelled against this sense of leveling.

I opposed the rights of the strong. I said: We want “instruments” (people educated by the then-current educational system) who can serve society. Assuming that the wealth of strength is greater, one could imagine a deduction from this wealth, not for the benefit of society, but for a future benefit. The softening of the men of my time led me to believe in the possibility of a stronger species, a species that would embrace will, responsibility, and the ability to determine its own destiny.

It is necessary, for the understanding of my philosophy, to observe the aspect of the nineteenth century in which I lived. The “softening” of men was growing at a tremendous pace. Romanticism was beginning to yield its great harvest in Europe; Schopenhauer’s pessimism found a rebirth in the defeat of France, spreading to countries dominated by French literature. There was a certain weariness in Europe. At that time, the social revolution was born, prospered, but it was adjusted to the fundamental prejudices of the nineteenth century.

The language of the revolutionaries was entirely composed of the same Rousseauian clichés. I saw in all of this decadence, lamentation, unbearable lamentation. And I was right. The end of the century was processing in all the intensity of its doubts. Science replaced tendencies of a religious nature. A primitive positivism and doubt were vacillating between religion and science. Poetry, the “killers of God,” the “accursed poets,” the cruel expression of Baudelaire that dominated the onslaught of artists, decadent nihilists, who called themselves decadent, who were proud to attribute inferior qualities to themselves that they did not possess, attributing themselves uncommitted infamies, stains on the soul, like the masochistic triumph over their subjective defeat, a self-punishment from which they derived unsuspected pleasures?

This aspect of the end of the century embittered me. I cried out for the necessity of the strong. I preached for the strong. I desired a new aristocratization of men who knew how to suffer without conforming beyond their own suffering, men who did not desire their subjective destruction, their crushing within the rebellious masses, but who aspired to rise from all the darkness of the Middle Ages, because, then, we were still in it despite the historians. The sense of the Middle Ages still persisted. Baeumler is right when he says that it ended with me, forgive my megalomania. I was right about that. The struggle between the light and the darkness of the end of the last century was truly the end of a human era. Man set out for his overcoming – my ideal as will to power – but man was already being overcome. I did not see this overcoming. That is why it pained me, gnawed at me in the anguish of being a spectator of decadence. I turned desperate eyes to a forgotten, despised golden age. I went back to before Socrates, far back, to the analysis of Greek philosophy in the Ionian and Eleatic schools.

I sought the meridian light of the Dionysian and the Apollonian to illuminate all the sadness of Europe. I persisted. My eyes grew dim, so I gently cried out for the sun. I proposed to replace the sadness, which softened into a Buddhist desire for nihilism, with that surplus of the wine of life that would allow for the Dionysian satisfaction of intoxication. My critique, therefore, must be placed within history. I sought to illuminate the darkness, to sweep it away firmly, robustly. My hymn to the strong man was a cry for more, for much more, against the softening, against the nirvana that poisoned the organism of Europe. And I diagnosed: Germany defeated France, as Sparta defeated Athens, but French culture still stands. The Mediterranean light could not be obscured by the mists that came from the north.

I cried out desperately, and I proposed my heroic therapy. It is necessary to believe in the superman. Man must surpass himself. Man must conquer his defeat, rise from his defeat. That was a light for desperate Europe. Pan-Germanism threatened to destroy culture. Wherever Germany goes, culture is destroyed… That was my outcry.

He lowered his face to raise it again. His eyes had a metallic gleam, and his voice was now calm and measured. And he continued:

"And faced with the tendency of ‘leveling,’ I felt that there were no forces to stop it. It was a movement that took root strongly.

That is why I proposed not to fight against it. I said then: ‘The leveling of European man is the great process that cannot be hindered: we must even accelerate it. That is why the need arises to open a chasm, to deepen the distances, to establish a hierarchy: and not the need to slow down this leveling process.’

I knew that the leveling of man would hasten the opening of abysses among men. This leveled species would seek a justification (I have always liked to use French words), a justification that would be a superior species. The ideals that prevailed in the nineteenth century preached absolute leveling. There was a belief that it was possible for men to become equal, absolutely equal. Standardized education, standardized food would make men absolutely equal.

I fought against this danger. Today we know that this “ideal” failed in the face of facts. It still “feared” the danger that threatened exceptions. I rebelled against it in my search for a new hierarchization. The bovine man could not have a non-bovine conception, such as a heroic conception of his fellow beings, for example.

He needs support, the herd, for his strengthening, for his increase in power. His conception is a necessary conception. And he is right. I disagree with him, but he is right. Within his circumstances, his human constitution, his psychology and his soul, he is right in conceiving society as a prepotent and strong whole and as an end, although I see it as a means, simply as a means, as a bridge, as a path, to the greater to come. I do not separate man from the cosmos or from the unalterable biological laws, and they do not have that social sense that the bovine man believes. Therefore, he is tormented against his nature and his impulses because he fights against himself for the benefit of society, not making anyone happy, not even himself.

Then he fell silent. With the tips of his fingers, he touched the vast mustache that gave the impression of a sectioned cylinder covering his lips. He leaned forward and continued:

"The political sense has dominated the biological sense of man in society. And what irritates and revolts me is the dictatorship of these concepts and opinions. This universal concept of society, this ecumenical concept, can be fought against by the ideal of aristocracy. Leveling is the ideal of the bovine man. He poisons himself, intoxicates himself, thinking that this leveling can build his happiness. He received this lie that other irresponsible people preached to him, and he believed it, and made it the basis of his happiness. Differentiation is the ideal of the aristocratized man.

I defend the need for exception. I prefer the exception to the rule, but I accept and defend the rule in order to value the exception. I am, therefore, a seemingly one-sided man, but in truth, I am the least one-sided of men because I see man and his actions from all perspectives, for I accept them, and even justify the error because it is necessary to value what we assume to be certain and absolute. I am tragically dialectical.

And for me, an exception is what reacts to the rule. Man progresses when he reacts, when he creates exceptions, for they are creators. Man advances along discontinuous paths, while bovine men believe in great avenues, in straight perspectives, in macadamized roads, and hate mountains, abysses, rough stretches, ascents, and descents. The continuity of progress and human life would deny adventures, obstacles, difficulties, and victories. It would deny, in short, destiny itself. And man has found his best moments in those instances when he overcomes difficulty. One must truly understand the sense of victory in order to desire difficult victories. Victory is a surpassing, a leap.

If the bovine man were to dominate the world with his mentality, which I fear and already combat, we would reach the dominion of a “standard” philosophy, a “Standard” music, a “Standard” art. Even taste would be standardized. Limits would be created, but those limits would eventually generate yearnings to surpass them.

The victory of the bovine man would be, merely, a provocation. Exceptions would be born despite the bovine education that has existed since childhood.

Human dissatisfactions are stronger, and instincts are not muzzled by attitudes. Man would return to fighting; there would always be exceptions, men of the night, men of destiny, who would want to question the stars, search in the deep blue of the sky, in the lost horizons, for something more, something more… Always more.

I do not want, I repeat, the destruction of the bovine man. Nor do I want his predominance. I appeal to aristocratized souls to react against the chains they want to forge for men. The totalization of man needs limits. It is a creator of limits.

‘Prohibited!’ is the most general order of bovine society. And this creates a psychology of retreat, of limitations, of bad conscience. They fight against individual rights for the equalization of man, for the domination of the average man, the larger average. In an aristocratized society, there is a need for a variety of tastes, oppositions, psychological clashes, and diverse purposes. The bovine man believes in defending his rights, as long as there is only one right and one purpose. But by defending equalized rights, he nullifies his own right because, with his non plus ultra State, he creates his new executioner who possesses all the rights. Contrasts, different levels are lacking, so that men may be stirred, sublimate their instincts, and know the satisfaction of victories.

Where would there be strong love in a bovine society? Where is the conception of elevated feeling, the notion of individual value? The will to be responsible is a sign of autonomy. What the bovine man wants is to diminish his responsibilities.

Totalization creates a mold. As long as one lives within it, everything goes well. Sacrifices must be made within it, and as long as one does not deviate from it, the dangers diminish. Always agree with what comes from above, that is the norm. There will no longer be aggressive intellectuals, men who want to determine different thoughts. Stoicism will be called nirvanic attitude; serenity will be passivity; the sense of the tragic will be a conception of melodramatic defeat. Discipline, which makes the strong stronger, will destroy the bovine man because it will make him more limited, causing him to retreat from his higher levels.

Even to obey, there is a need for a certain greatness, and the obedience of a strong person has something beautiful about it. When the weak obey, they give the impression of an unalterable destiny and assume the proportions of automatons. They have only obedience left. It demoralizes even obedience. When they command, they take on the impression of a mandate, of a fate. They degrade themselves even in their greatness. I do not believe in the possibility of an aristocratized society for the coming decades.

But I believe in it for future ages, a society of men who know how to feel the anguish of doubt, where a good heart is constructive and not destructive. The bovine man has created a new idealism: mediocrity is not mediocre. He does not accept the devaluation of lack of value. This man sees no triumph in being exceptional. The mediocre is the end, the basis, the norm, but man needs, I proclaim, needs to continue preserving the distances… How misunderstood I have been in my conception of the weak!

But, in truth, I never cared if anyone understood me. That was always my attitude, my consolation, my pleasure, a wicked desire to torture those who read me. When I fought against the weak, I did not want the weak to continue being weak. I fought against weakness. It is true that I doubted and never believed in the utopia of a strong humanity. I believed and believe in the superman.

For me, the superman is an individual achievement, not a mass achievement. I have always emphasized this very clearly. Man would only attain superhumanity through himself, each one through himself. It was necessary to love this surpassed man greatly and to despise this vanquished and defeated man so that men could understand the greatness of an exception.

I have always believed that the value of a people is measured by its ability to create exceptional men. I lived closely alongside the “Haustier,” that domesticated herd animal, which was the German of my time, to doubt the superhumanity of the Germans.

When I spoke of the destruction of the weak, I did not advocate the destruction of men, but the destruction of weakness. What did I offer to men if not a heroic attitude towards life, if not a victory, that great medicine of the soul? I pointed out a path for the weak to follow, but I preached to the obstinate ones who wished to remain faithful to death, to seek death. To those obstinate ones who did not want to hear the voices of Alcibiades, who did not want to understand and feel the beauty of life, who longed for their “pale, marble, and cold maiden,” I urged them to seek death. We should not hinder their path.

We should even encourage those who are influenced by death to follow it at once. This immoral sense of my work scandalized the obstinate ones, but I am not to blame for the scandal. The blame lies with the obstinacy of those who desire to perpetuate and construct a vale of tears in life and transform their existence into a continuous preparation for death. Immorality is before nature, not within me.

I, the immoralist, preached a different kind of morality, a morality full of sun, full of life. My experiences as a sick man sharpened my intelligence, my art of filigree, my extraordinary sense of understanding, my instinct for nuances and all the subtleties of my observing organs, sharpened during my long years of illness and healing, allowed me to observe healthier conceptions and values, placing myself within the perspective of a sick person, and, conversely, aware of the fullness and self-feeling possessed by the most abundant life, I could serenely lower my gaze to the secret laboratory of instincts of decadence.

Thus I analyzed myself. I always understood that illness is more instructive than health. It allows progress, modification, transformation. How much do men owe to their diseases? Are these not the moments in which we hover between life and death, between progress and retreat, that a steadfastness of eagles springs forth within us? Is it not often illness that becomes our true teacher in life? Are these not the moments in which we collide with danger that shape our personality? How much do history, biology, evolution, science, and philosophy owe to illness?

Perhaps one day someone will exclaim, with the knowledge of hands, that disease has been not only more instructive than health but also more fecund…

Would the truth lie in agony? In the agony of truth and falsehood, there at that limit, on that frontier between being and non-being?

I spoke of a new rebellion of slaves. Just as I classified Christianity as the great rebellion of slaves in ancient morality, and in reality, this was one of the most popular aspects of the Christian movement, I denounced in my life the new rebellion of slaves in morality, in politics, and in the economy.

In the eyes of those who misunderstood me, this rebellion was seen as decadence, as a regression. The expression “rebellion of slaves” was what shocked the critics. It was too pejorative to define the modern movement of social transmutations. To some, I assumed the stance of an unrepentant reactionary, to others, that of an untamed nihilist, with a sadistic desire to destroy everything that man had sanctified, loved, and respected. If there are slaves who lick the hand that punishes them, this does not imply that a new rebellion of slaves is simply an “unworthy act of men who lick the hand that punishes them…”

Precisely because slaves rebel, they already achieve greatness. I myself said that the slave is only great when he rebels. The new rebellion of slaves has its grandeur; however, it does not possess as much grandeur, as much sublimity as its followers believe. The historical inevitability of this new rebellion of slaves is a historical justification, it is another fate from which man has not yet liberated himself: that of being disciplined, conditioned by the factors that surround him, and not having yet succeeded in surpassing himself on a plane that would allow him to rise above this conditioning. But this does not include beauty or sublimity unless one accepts aprioristically that beauty lies precisely in the historical fate of events, which would be supreme pragmatism, or rather: a degeneration of pragmatism itself.

Submission to facts constitutes the science of slaves, I said. Insubordination to facts constitutes the active politics of slaves seeking to break their shackles. I highlighted the predominance of slave sentiments in nineteenth-century Europe. But those sentiments prepared the rebellion.

In this struggle for liberation, there was, however, a characteristic that worried me; the slaves did not seek to possess the qualities of masters. One of the characteristics of the Christian movement was that the liberated slaves assumed the bearing and noble qualities of their masters. And if it had not been so, the Middle Ages that fell upon Europe would have been terrible. The nobility that formed in Europe retained the noble qualities of the Romans.

This nobility prevented Europe from falling into greater vulgarity. In my time, however, vulgarity already dominated the rebellious masses. I focused on these characteristics: moral mendacity, incomprehension of culture, of beauty.

Fashion, the press, universal suffrage took on aspects of vulgarity. Acquired rights lost their noble qualities, and man brutalized himself in a vulgarization of superior qualities, and all superior qualities became suspect. I even presented the example of Luther rebelling against the “saints.” And I gave more examples: innocent people no longer believe in saints or great virtues; they no longer believe in the superior qualities of men, the manufacturers of science; they no longer believe in philosophers, and women no longer believe in the superiority of men. All of this predisposes to insurrection. Better yet, they are symptoms of insurrection.

No one will stop the overwhelming march of that nihilistic spirit that seizes men. They believe in their strength and will experience it until they realize their weakness because man, now more than ever, is a bovine man. He depends more than ever on his fellow men, and his gregarious spirit, although diminishing in his relationships, increases at the hour of danger.

Man is increasingly dependent on man himself. And this will create deeper and more painful bitterness. The experiences of life, of the struggles they will experience, will give them those terrible moments in which they will recall all the dreams they dreamed.

Man will once again turn his eyes to the past in search of something that would have indicated a better path or illuminated a new goal.

After their harsh experiences, their defeats, their disillusionments, they will find that man can only rise through his ultra-thought, through his individual transcendence. For me, nihilism is a condition of epochs of human transition. But in my time, I foresaw the clashes that our century would witness, and I was already studying one of the most general signs of this era: man was losing, to an immeasurable degree, his dignity in his own eyes.

This sense of dignity was that tragic spirit of existence in which man was often the obscure hero struggling against the forces that bound him to the earth and to his instincts, to his unconscious, expressed in his desires and impulses for the conquest of the promised reward in the afterlife that would fill him with satisfaction. And in all of this, I was misunderstood, but what does it matter!

Once, did the applause of my fellow beings intoxicate me?

Indeed, the applause of my equals would intoxicate me. But where were my equals? The others… the others… what did I care about the others?

I have always despised bad company, and bad company, to me, is always that which is not formed by our equals. The “profound sterility” of the 19th century terrifies me. I never encountered a man who truly brought something new.

The character of German music was what made me “hope” for a greater time. A “stronger type,” in which our forces were synthetically connected: that was my belief. Everything seemed to be decadence. It was necessary to guide destruction in such a way that the strongest could attain a new form of existence. The rebellion of slaves was carried out within a scale of mercantile values, and the masses were incited to seize power without adequate preparation for such a mission.

What could arise from all this except new dictatorships, terrible dictatorships in which the masses themselves would be the most sacrificed?

History will tell whether I was right or wrong.

I believed in the strong, and even defined them. Who are they? The more moderate ones, those who do not need extreme dogmas. But the herd man needs extreme dogmas.

Those who not only accept, but also love a good portion of chance, of “absurdity.” Those who cannot think of man without significantly diminishing his value, without feeling diminished or weakened themselves.

The richest in terms of health, those who are capable of enduring the greatest misfortune and, for that reason, do not fear misfortune; men who are convinced of their power and who, with conscious pride, represent the pinnacle of human achievement.

I believed in the man who conquers, in the heroic victor of life. I exclaimed and still exclaim: “We want to create a being,” we all want to participate in this creation, to love it, to nurture it, and to honor and esteem ourselves because of it. We must have an aim that makes us love one another. “All other aims are worthy of being destroyed.” This was the thought of Zarathustra. He wanted the strongest in body and soul, for they are the best. From them, Zarathustra wanted to deduce the superior morality, that of the creators; he wanted to reshape man in his own image, that was his loyalty. In any age, in a time stronger than the present, this redeeming man of great love and great disdain, this creative spirit, must come forth, whose impulsive energy will propel man far beyond all that is supernatural, a man whose loneliness will be scorned by many as if it were an escape: this man will delve deep, plunge into the abyss, bury himself in reality, in order to resurrect one day and redeem it from the curse that today’s ideal has cast upon it.

This man of the future, who will liberate us from today’s ideal and its natural consequence, the great nausea, nihilism – this sun of Noon and great judgment, this savior of will, who will restore to the world its purpose and its hope; this anti-nihilist, this conqueror of nothingness, must come one day…

This man, freed from compassion, but who will resurrect the feeling of rebellion that the misfortune of others inspired in the Greeks. He has been forgotten, suffocated, silenced by the Christians. He is the more virile brother of compassion… There isn’t even a name for him anymore. But he will rise again in man when he comprehends and is able to overcome himself. Then he will fill the void in his soul.

How can we fill the void in our souls? Through the intoxication of enthusiasm. And in everything, the man must seek reasons for intoxication. We have the sensation of immense vastness in our souls, and that vastness is also the cause of our emptiness. Therefore, this era has been the most fertile in inventing means of intoxication.

We all know intoxication, be it in the form of music or as blind adoration of certain men and events; we know the intoxication of the tragic, the cruelty in contemplating what succumbs, especially when what succumbs is the noblest; we know other more modest forms of intoxication, such as mechanical work, sacrifice for science or for a political or economic idea; any small fanaticism, no matter how stupid.

There is also a certain eccentric modesty that pleasantly makes us feel the sensation of our own emptiness, and even enjoy the eternal emptiness of all things, a mysticism of belief in nothingness and a sacrifice for this belief. And what senses have we not created for all the joys of knowledge! How we record and, so to speak, carry a larger book of our small pleasures, as if to counterbalance that void, to fill that void!

How deceived we are by this little trick. I have not found any talented man who did not tell me that he has lost the sense of duty or that he has never possessed it. But wisdom will be the overcoming of morality. It will be this overcoming when we witness the asceticism of the spirit, when the epic that has entered the soul of man emerges again, already freed from its great counterfeits.

There, man will overcome his bad tendencies, those that distance him from life and the Cosmos, and drag him into the curse of his existence. Only wisdom will sweeten the bitterness of living, which the resentful have turned into philosophy and attitude. Love will then build great hearts. And it will surpass even the good tendencies…

Nothing of man remains that is not based on his own instincts. My critique of morality was precisely based on the fact that it had built its entire foundation on reason and prejudices. But my critique would be profoundly simplistic if it were guided solely by this aspect.

Ultimately, prejudices are ways of interpreting instincts, but ignoble ways. When the weak establish their morality, they do so based on weakness, and the strong do so based on strength.

These are the reasons that prevailed and built reason itself. I knew this and examined the fundamental foundations of the ideal itself. But what repulsed me was the lack of dignity in affirmations and attitudes. Morality was not based on the purity of instincts, but on their perversion, under the pretext that instincts would lead man to cruelty, to evil, which is only partly justified.

It is yet another prejudice to think that our instincts are bad, perverse, destructive. They are contradictory and compensatory. The perfection of evil can only be attained by a god. Even in evil, man encounters limitations. The liberation of instincts can be harmful and dangerous when it is used by those who have always been enslaved. But the liberation of instincts, as I conceive it, would not be a senseless open door. It would be governed by will and guided by education.

What man needs is to stop slandering himself and to elevate himself in dignity. Dignity will make us respectable in our own eyes and serve as a natural restraint on our bad tendencies, without subjecting us to the full range of their anxieties.

I believed in a Dionysian world that would come. Let us go back a century and admit that my attack against two thousand years of customs against nature and the debasement of man has had a good effect!

This new party of life, which will take on the most sublime task of all, the overcoming of humanity, including the ruthless destruction of everything that is degenerate and parasitic, will make that surplus of wine possible again, from which the Dionysian state will arise… Only then will we cease to be men who pray and become men who bless…

I proclaimed the need to find a new path for men. All the progress we know has only served to make man more unhappy. No one is satisfied with this anymore. From now on, men must better unite their forces without nullifying the individual, that is, by preserving small productions and naturally reducing waste.

It is necessary for man to aspire to climb the ranks and ascend the ladder of life. It brings certain bitterness, no one denies that, but the advantages are greater. The great mistake has been seeking perfect organizations.

Man considers himself a little god and therefore desires for himself a world of perfections, where milk and honey flow on earth, the lost paradise they should find… the promised land that they imagined to fill the weak and the defeated with hope.

All of this, which dates back thousands of years, has caused human dissatisfaction to grow and intensify. Small productions have their disadvantages, but they also have great advantages. They promote the leveling of men, create small victories that fill us with happiness because through them, man experiences the satisfaction of small tasks. Even great human personalities love small things.

There are moments when only the small brings us happiness. You may think that I am showing myself to be a socialist because of this. My socialism is individualistic. I want strong men, I want aristocrats, not shapeless and dominated masses. Man must know the taste of victory and defeat. The desire to feel completely supported in life only interests the weak and the defeated. The strong must experience the pleasure of overcoming their defeat. One of the paths that I advocated, and still offer to men, is the mastery of destructive nature, of dispersing forces, to make them instruments of utility for the economy of the future. Men have built more destructive forces and chained them to their own destruction… To me, the greatness of man lies in remaining the master of his function.

The weak must be supported, even with beliefs that encourage them to live. There will always be greater satisfaction in the victory of a weak person over their weakness than in the courageous gesture of a strong person. I stand for human solidarity. I have always defended it, although my adversaries have claimed that I preached the separation of men.

I preach human solidarity against the instinct of fear and servitude, which we must distinguish. Human solidarity is neither servitude nor fear. Do not think that I do not advocate the need to alleviate the pain of those who suffer. I want to alleviate it, not with palliatives, but with effective remedies. Man suffers more because he has created a mentality of suffering. It is up to us to show him that suffering builds, that it is creative. There are fruitful pains, and they must be understood. Man must believe in pain and transform it into the antechamber of joy. I fight against those who want to turn pain into despair and who want to throw the masses into battle, carrying the banner of suffering. Man must overcome his limitations.

Pain is always a limitation, and he must overcome it with valor and superiority. That is why I have always loved those who suffer and take pride in keeping their suffering silent, as if it were their greatest treasure…

The Theme of Culture

I increasingly identified with his ideas.

And he continued:

"If we were to call the degrees of ‘being’ degrees of ‘appearance’? There are still those who accept the separation between subject, object, and predicate as the foundation of truth. It may be understandable for grammarians, but what about philosophers who still believe in the ‘reality’ of thought itself?

While doctrines based on realism impose limitations on idealists, the latter err by believing that the idea is the only truth and thought is the only given we have. If they accept the idea, they must accept sensation, and if they accept sensation, they end up in realism. But what will they say of me if I go as far as doubting thought itself as reality?

I go even further, not just doubting but affirming that it is not reality. There are those who readily accept immediate certainties, which serves to illustrate the variety of thinking individuals. I do not posit reality as the opposite of appearance. For me, appearance is the only reality, or rather, it is through appearance that reality manifests itself. I have already said that our reality is like that of a rainbow. Who knows, perhaps we are simply a ‘thought of a god’? I once proposed this supposition: Let us suppose that there is something deceitful at the core of things. What good would Descartes' ‘omnibus dubitare’ do us? It would not save us from the trap. And his approach could even be a trick to deceive and drive us mad.

The fact that I do not want to be deceived may be the lure of a deeper, subtler, and more primordial will that precisely wishes the opposite, that is, to deceive itself. I must say it once again: for the subject to be able to demonstrate itself, it would need a fixed point outside of itself, and that is lacking. Thus, seeking ‘truth’ in that ontological, theological concept is one of humanity’s last illusions.

And therein lies the ridiculous and tragic flavor of intelligence that considered itself a divine breath. Thus, man loses one of his dearest illusions: the conviction that he possessed something divine within himself.

Throughout my life, I have struggled to provide well-intentioned individuals with a method that would allow them to better observe the world’s schema. I do not offer them a method for truth if we admit the ontological sense of truth or the conception that most metaphysicians have of it. Truth, for me, has a cosmic sense and, to me, it is a “processus.” Truth is a “processus,” a becoming, a means that allows us to accommodate our knowledge to the dialectical scheme of the universe. That is not quite it, my apologies. It is the result of this “processus,” let me correct myself. It is the stratification of this “processus.” Therefore, it is a becoming. Dialectic because it dialectically reproduces the scheme.

The philosophers have so far relied on the idea of God. They constructed this idea according to their own image. If today the idea of God is in disrepute, the blame lies solely with those who positioned themselves as its representatives on earth. The philosophers constructed a God according to their philosopher’s desire: a monster of wisdom. And this is because they are convinced that wisdom is something divine.2 And naively, they are convinced that to become like God is to be wise, that in wisdom lies the path that allows us mortals to resemble God. Thus, God would be the summit, the ultimate truth, the “Truth.” This conception is a scheme accommodated by the mentality of philosophers. The hunter would see in God the most perfect of hunters, and so on. If there are atheists in the world, the fault lies with the theists. Because they created such a human image of God.

They attribute to God the characteristics of the weak. They make Him a monster of goodness. The idea of the greatest goodness is unworthy of Him, as I have already said. The idea of high wisdom is also unworthy of Him. This can satisfy the vanity of philosophers, and this vanity is the same as that of warlike peoples, like the Germans who made their God a warlike and invincible being, or the Hebrews, hateful and dissatisfied, warriors in their primitive phase, a hateful, warlike, and vengeful god.

Once I said: God is the highest power… And that is sufficient. The best definition of Him is an indefiniteness: Ego sum qui sum. For me, the way philosophers use to define Him is simply scandalous; they reach truly ridiculous forms. The latest metaphysicians replaced, since they find themselves in a century that inherited the materialistic spirit, albeit with variations, from the previous century, the idea of God with other metaphysical ones. They seek the true “reality,” the “thing in itself,” in relation to which everything else is appearance.

Thus, they establish a new dogma: our world, being only appearance, is not, therefore, true. They even go so far as to claim that they cannot trace back to this metaphysical world, which they consider the cause. For them, it is impossible that the unconditioned, when it represents this superior perfection, be the reason for everything that is conditioned.

Kant, as I have already said, formulated the hypothesis of “intelligible freedom” to absolve God, the “ens perfectum,” from his responsibility for the way the world is conditioned in order to explain evil and thus exempt God from this responsibility. Now, that, my friends, is terribly scandalous for a philosopher.

I repeat: the theists are the main culprits of atheism.3

Leibnitz concluded that our world was of supreme perfection because it was the work of a god. This worldview would require the conception that evil is apparent or as a consequence of a special favor from God, in order to allow the choice between good and evil. Thus, God would give man the privilege of not being an automaton. Thus, freedom remained for man… even to err, naively. The weakness of ideals and philosophical doctrines, which should guide man through the labyrinth of life, are partly the determinants of the causes that predispose the advent of pessimism. I have already classified them once, but I can speak of them again because they continue to be experienced. Man has slandered his instincts; he has attributed his instincts to his animality; he has convinced himself that reason belongs to the gods. This conception has given life a sense of curse. Man has thus discredited, in his own eyes, the beauty of life. He has chewed, ground down its natural beauty, reaching mystical exaggerations that have resulted in a true struggle against the flesh, in mortifications and assaults. Today we are witnesses to a rebirth of the Apollonian ideal. But like the Apollonian rebirth, it is decadent.

Man does not rise to this new ideal; he decays. There is vice and hidden wickedness behind this Apollonian manifestation of life. I defend instincts, but I have always fought against their perversions, and if I have accepted great counterfeits, I abhor counterfeit currency and despise the small ones. But returning to the causes that generate human pessimism, which has so predominated in the Western world, after 70 of my century, a consequence of the French defeat in Sedan, and which still dominates intellectual circles today, sublimated into fruits that hide their cursed origin, one of the causes that determine this pessimism is the conviction that instincts cannot be detached from life and therefore become opposed to life. This is the result of the bad faith of philosophers who preach this human conditionality of instincts. And they sin by begging the question: by judging that instincts are against life. Those who do not feel this conflict, the mediocre, for example, do not find moments of anguish in life so vividly, so prominently, so superficially. The superior human species that questions, that seeks, that suffers the tragedies of the spirit and intelligence encounters a closed environment because prosperity belongs to the mediocre. This is the reason for the pessimism of the “elites” or their capitulation to the dominant ideas of the masses.

Civilization is saturation, a coagulation of forms, a shortening, a synthesis. There is no dynamism in it, there is death, there is a hardening that determines uncontrollable restlessness, rushing rumors that rise mysteriously from the shadows.

The individual feels trapped in the tomb of ideas. These rumors, this restlessness is the voice of life reacting against civilization because it is an intelligent and cultured guise with which death dresses to live among men.

All this life that stirs in these cities is death. There is death in these grand buildings that tear through space as if seeking to reach infinity, in a previously failed Babel-like attempt. There is death in this architecture: everything is cold, everything hides behind it the same emptiness. There are all styles, but dead ones. There are Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Mexican, Assyrian, Arab houses, but in all of them there is always death because there is stylization, there is falsification. The metropolis is civilization. And in these modern men, there is accommodation to their instincts. They have imprisoned them in terrible chains; they censor them so that they later emerge, tortured, in the neuroses they can no longer hide. They want to forcibly hold back the free march of emotions and impulses through knowledge.

Man denies himself there, denies himself in his clothing, denies himself in his art, denies himself in his counterfeits, denies himself because life is absence to him. He finds no affirmations in those centers of light or in those arteries that tear through distances. There is always a lie that they suspect but dare not proclaim… But all this, nevertheless, does not prevent another world from being born.

Affirmation will come, and very soon because it is already needed; for me, the “sixth hour” has already sounded. I now have the conviction, and this is my posthumous comfort, that my ideas are beginning to bear fruit. I always feared that I would never be understood, as I never was when I lived among men. But I also feared that they would one day sanctify me. In the autobiography I wrote, I spoke my greatest truths. I was so truthful and sincere that they considered me mad. Anyone who spoke of himself with the same sincerity, innocence, and cynicism as I did would also be classified as mad. Those who attack the general rule are always abnormal. But I still believe in the fruitful value of exceptions.

I was and still am a posthumous man. I have always carried with me the painful certainty that I was born posthumously. Like many, I carried with me the destiny of being understood and loved only when death had closed my eyes. I wander through space, not far from men and close to the gods. You must believe in the gods. Our smallness is not a defeat, believe me. In the immensity of space, there is still hope, and the infinite has not yet answered all the questions. Keep questioning, because the answers are always late and often come when it is already too late for us. But there is a great question after death. If I were to answer, I would betray myself. And do you know why? Because people followed us as disciples, and I never wanted, nor do I want, to have disciples. The strong are those who want to seek the path for themselves.

The weak seek a glimmer of faith to light their steps. Search in darkness, stumble on the paths, hurt your hands, cry in despair, laugh with glorious joy when you find an answer, but go on, dragging your victories and defeats until from within yourselves a bright and warm light will be born to illuminate your steps…

— And this light?

— This light could be called God; you could call it Happiness; you could call it Victory… The words are different, but the profound emotion that will shake you will be the same.

"I know that my actions, like these, distanced me from my contemporaries. I was never understood by them, not even by those who surrounded me. And to this day, many ignore my ideas, while others comment on them without having known or examined them. I was never a definitive, finished man; I was an essay, a mental experiment, and that is why I was always accused of being contradictory. However, there were no irreconcilable contradictions in me. I differed each passing day, just as the world and my circumstances differed. But it was my contemporaries who stabilized and crystallized themselves around a certain number of a priori ideas, as if today were the same as yesterday and tomorrow would repeat itself.

What should I do to be understood by those who did not want and could not understand me? My work was meant to be ruminate, not read. And each of my aphorisms demanded hours of meditation.

They wanted to read my books as if they were reading novels. I did not write for them; I wrote for those who meditate, for those who read little and meditate a lot, that is why they did not understand me. And because they did not understand me, they wanted to interpret me, translate me, analyze me. Just observe what I understand by the tragic. How few have understood it. They have always judged the tragic from the Aristotelian point of view, which involves two depressing emotions: fear and pity. If that were the case, as I have said, art would be detrimental.

For me, art has always been a stimulant of life, an intoxication with living, a will to live. In that conception, it would become decadent, in the service of pessimism, and even dangerous to one’s health. Schopenhauer wanted to conceive of tragedy differently; he wanted to imbue it with resignation, to offer it a renunciation of happiness, hope, and the will to live. This conception, for me, denies art itself.

Tragedy would become a process of decomposition, the instinct of life destroying within itself the instinct of art. It must be seen that tragedy contains a tonic effect. It should increase the emotion and the will to live, not diminish them.

— And love? - I asked.

— Love? I place it in the same Dionysian sense as intoxication. In the entire world, in all the silences of the world, as I have said, love is nothing more than intoxication, both for man and for the animal. In intoxication, we lie to ourselves and to the world, and in love as well. There is a sweet, gentle, deep, and Dionysian lie that makes us stronger, more alive, deeper, and also more superficial. The resemblance between art and love is immense.

In both, there is the same intoxication. They are forms of life where there is a transcendence of reality, a transfiguration. Art is a great stimulus in the face of life and displaces even values. It enhances values and brings new rhythms and new seductions. The man who loves experiences self-transcendence, rises above his weaknesses, grows, surpasses himself. There are even physiological surpassings, just like in the artist. He knows, he has the divine gift of knowing these physiological surpassings. New beliefs are formed, and he believes in virtue, in goodness, in love, in sentiment, in generosity. He even believes in men. There is in the lyricism of artwork that feeling, that music that expresses this self-expansion, there is growth of forces.

I spoke to the strong, and the strong did not listen to me, and since I have often spoken of the weak, let me now speak of the strong. Do you know what the strong are to me? The strong are the most moderate, the strong are those who do not need extreme dogmas, the strong are those who accept and love a good portion of misfortune and nonsense. The strong are those who can think of man, slightly reducing his value, without feeling diminished or weakened by it. The strong are the rich in grace. The strong are those who do not fear suffering, those who know and trust in their power; they are those who proudly represent the power that men have already reached.

It is necessary to consider the need for an inferior species of men to serve as a foundation for a superior species, which will build its destiny upon them. Adventures, idleness, and disbelief can never belong to the weak. They would have devastating effects and would cause their demise, as they always have. History is full of examples. Rule, moderation, and convictions have always been the norms that guided the weak; they have always been their virtue. Only through these paths can the weak attain perfection.

These same elements would be disastrous for the strong, who cannot adhere to rules, exaggerated moderation, or convictions that would nullify them. When the strong lack, the weak vulgarize even the highest things.

What can we say today about the art that they have made a matter for the masses? What can we say about the philosophy that they have made accessible to butchers? They consider this progress when it will only lead to their most fervent tears and drops of blood watering their lands. When the weak dominate, they tyrannize exceptional men. This is what makes them lose faith in themselves, because their weakness crushes and drags them towards nihilistic tendencies.

In the absence of superior men, they attempted to create them by deifying their occasional and fleeting heroes, by proclaiming the Romantics, which was a failed attempt of the past century, by projecting the artist whom they annihilated with the narrowness of their conception and the lie of their applause, by focusing on philosophers whom they made mediocre. They have always resisted superior men, creating barriers to diminish them. They wanted to “humanize” even the characters of history. Through biography, they sought the simplest categories, the elements closest to them to express the lives of superior men. And they did not do this with innocence and cynicism, which would have elevated them. No! They did it to exalt themselves through the unconscious depression of the great.

They sought their elevation through their stunted perspective.

They sought their overcoming where there was depression, they sought to rise where they sank, and afterward proclaimed as a scale for human elevation, as elevation of the soul, compassion for the humble and the suffering. They remained faithful to themselves in this way. The weak thus fulfill the ideal world of their desires. They achieve the greatness of the world in the marsh, in the valleys, in the depressions. Looking up too much hurts the eyes because the sunlight is too intense, and the perspective of birds does not fit the frogs that live in the marsh, creating a philosophy of close horizons because they do not want to deny the marsh.

He made a gesture of disdain and continued:

And men believed themselves to be gods. One of the dearest beliefs to man has been that of his “divinity”; he believed himself to be a God, blessed by the “holy spirit” because God imprinted upon him, when giving him life, the life-giving breath that transformed molded clay into a living body.

The base instincts, I said, are what prevent man from proclaiming himself a god. That internal, abyssal, profound struggle within man between his envisioned desire for divinity and his viscera, his instincts, his earthly desires, his material longings, his organic needs - among them, the presence of defecation deserves the greatest interest - does not allow man to conceive himself as a God, which implies such a defeat that there are believers who consider it blasphemy against God to affirm that man has nothing divine. But it would be blasphemy against God if we admitted divinity in man.

Divinity implies detachment from the earthly. Now, to remove man from the world, or to impose upon him the notion that in this world he is an exile, the work of anti-human, anti-cosmic, therefore “anti-divine” religious doctrines for millennia - they transformed man into a nostalgic for a “beyond,” for a “golden age” - (this point deserves special analysis) - conceiving the world as a “vale of tears,” a temporary abode of suffering, etc. To reduce man to “humanity,” to conceive him as a man, as a child of the earth, as a conqueror of this earth, in conflict with his needs because he is conscious of what he possesses and what he lacks, to make him a “patriot of the world,” a lover of the earth, is a duty imposed by truth. Religions have had historical value, which no one should deny them. But perpetuating their interpretation as a continuation of a divorce between man and the world is a crime. Integrating man into the world, reducing human nature to its truly human dimensions, is to learn to love the simple, the small, not as an imposition of divinity but as an impulse of our pride, of self-love, like that of a man who loves his homeland, though weak, though small, though humiliated, though destroyed. That is a noble way to love. Love the small because it is small, not because you should love it. If a man were to claim that he could not love the simple without the finger of divinity, it would be the same as a father who refused to love his children because they were ugly… Now, how could we allow criticisms or praises from the Universe!

Let us refrain from reproaching it for a lack of heart or reason, or even the opposite: the Universe is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble, and it does not seek to become any of these things, it does not seek to imitate man in any way! It is unaffected by any of our aesthetic or moral judgments! It has no instinct for self-preservation, no instinct at all, and it is ignorant of all law.

Let us refrain from saying that it exists in nature. Nature knows only necessity: there is no one there who commands, who obeys, who transgresses. When you know that there are no ends, you will also know that there are no accidents: for it is only in looking at a world of ends that the word “chance” has meaning. Let us refrain from saying that death is the opposite of life: life is nothing more than a variety of death, a very rare variety. Let us refrain from thinking that the world ceases to create anew.

There are no eternally durable substances; matter is an error similar to the god of the Eleatics. But when will we end our fears and precautions? When will we stop being covered by all these shadows of God? When will we have completely “de-divinized” nature? When will we finally be allowed to start becoming natural, to “naturalize” ourselves, we humans, with pure nature, rediscovered nature, liberated nature?

The pause he made demanded answers. And as I remained silent, he continued:

Man seeks to know the world and the universe. This search has been great, and the results have been great as well. But there is a greater universe within us. The human soul is an immense field of new explorations. I have often called for explorers of the human soul, I have called and summoned them.

Fortunately, my call was heard, and today psychology, despite everything, advances in the territory I advised psychologists to penetrate: the territory of what man called the unconscious. But for me, the human soul is conscious and unconscious. In both the conscious and the unconscious, man lives his life. During sleep - the unconscious - nearly half of man’s life passes. Psychology today studies the unconscious with great care, with interest, and the conscious is limitation, exclusivity; it is contemplative, rational. The unconscious is fantasy, memories, projects, unfulfilled desires, longings, as well as irrational experiences. An entire human philosophy - an entire scientific philosophical orientation - has been based on the conscious, Apollonian, delineating, limiting. I proclaimed the need to seek the human foundations of the unconscious. The “message that comes from the unconscious” must be examined, studied, analyzed. Modern science follows the footprints I left behind. I truly built a large part of current psychology, and what psychology has not yet accepted will one day be accepted. I attached great importance to the unconscious - Dionysus: one can even translate the chthonic trinity Mother-Earth-Death as an impulse of the unconscious. Dionysianism comes from the unconscious, that longing for life is a longing for death.

The pleasure of repetition is an impulse of death. Life and death would thus be the same. Dionysus and Apollo would find their con-substantiation in the Conscious-Unconscious. The Apollonian trinity would then be Father-Sun-Life. My tortured cry for life, life, life, for eternity and more eternity, was the longing for con-substantiation. I did not find it. The problem remained unsolvable to me; my commentators did not find it either. But there it is now: the con-substantiation of the unconscious with the conscious is the con-substantiation of Dionysus and Apollo, the con-substantiation of the two trinities.

That is the Ariadne’s thread that I discovered and did not proclaim in life because death prevented me. Some saw in the Apollonian the individual, as aristocratized, separated from the masses, and in the Dionysian, the vital sense of the masses, dispersed, universalized. The conjunction would no longer produce the man-mass but a man of the masses, aristocratized, surpassed. To interpret it as sensibility combined with reason was another sense and orientation of some commentators and interpreters of my work.

They all approached the truth, but not the whole truth. The mistake of man has consisted of having built his entire science and philosophy in the conscious, transforming it into the foundation of his knowledge. He forgot, disregarded the forces that had seemingly fallen asleep - the unconscious, sensitivity, instincts, viscera. Man is also that, and to bring forth the unconscious, to con-substantiate it with the conscious, would give man the sense of imagination, of fantasy, allied with reason, and in that state, transfiguration would occur.

Reason would no longer be Socratic reason, limited, and fantasy would no longer bring the tumultuous sense of the unconscious. Both would experience a new reason and a new fantasy. Then, cosmic transcendence, which man has never developed or created, would occur. The work of aesthetics, the great inspirations, the unleashed unconscious that shapes the spirits that stand out from the common average, would become accessible. That is my sense of leveling, leveling upwards, not leveling downwards. The elevation of the weak to the strong, not the depression of the strong to the weak. The elevation of the masses to art, not art to the masses. Then, there, we could understand why I believed it possible to increase the well-being of the masses through art because art offers transcendence and victory. Sensibility, understanding a work of art, does not provide the same joys as those enjoyed by those who create them.

To give the masses the concept of that enjoyment is to enchant life; it is to exalt it, to bring Apollo closer to Dionysus. It is to make man live, not merely to exist but to live in order to exalt himself, to surpass himself. Art is the path of transcendence; art is dignity. The “bad conscience” was for me the consequence of the clash between the conscious and the unconscious; “bad conscience” with a spirit of guilt, of accusation. To liberate the instincts was to liberate the conscious.

I gave a generic sense to instinct, much broader than that attributed to it by biology; I based it on the Dionysian sense of life. The struggle, which sometimes manifests itself in my work against the Apollonian, is a human exaggeration of a combatant.

The unification of the conscious and the unconscious is possible and human, and sublimation, in psychology, is a false resource.

I advocated another type of sublimation: victory - the best remedy for the soul, and I advised psychologists to use it. Man feels happy when he conquers his impulses. I believed in the sanctity and deep joy of the ascetics, but I considered it contrary to the essence of life. I admired them as conquerors of themselves, but I did not advise them to others. They were examples, but they should uplift man, impel him to seek other solutions, bring forth the instincts; to liberate them would be the solution. To liberate them, to know oneself, to know one’s impulses, but to guide them. This education of the soul would bring subjective well-being to men.

Combined with objective well-being - Apollonian - it would offer the path to happiness. Because for me, happiness is not the lie of a depressing satisfaction, it does not consist of convincing oneself that one must be content with little, that one must not desire, that one must not rebel, but precisely the opposite: happiness lies in recognizing the little and conquering the more, in overcoming one’s difficulties, in surpassing, in improving one’s life. Humanity is happy and capable of the greatest sacrifices and the most selfless gestures when it admits, when it believes in the possibility of increasing its well-being. History, including modern history, is full of examples that prove the will to power of the masses, the driving force behind all great human works, whether collective or individual.

In the late nineteenth century, when psycho-physical materialism dominated scientific consciousness, speaking of inspiration would provoke barely concealed smiles. The prevailing mechanical concept that permeated science did not allow for the revival of theories long forgotten in the night of mythical and barbaric scientific times. When I raised my voice in ECCE HOMO, I had the unheard-of courage to draw the attention of the scientists of that time, the psychologists who searched for tropisms and more mechanistic explanations of psychological facts, and I said that artists were the “mediums” of higher powers of the soul, that in them there was a process of revelation that made something stirring and deeply subversive in the soul audible and visible—they laughed at me. And they laughed even more when I affirmed that there was enchantment in those moments, and that despite the immense tension of the spirit, relief would arise in a torrent of tears or in our hurried or slowed steps, as the emotions that came from the depths of our being dictated. A succession that transcends our will, in which one does not seek, nor inquire who gives, and which, like lightning, gleams within us in a sudden thought…

Today, psychology studies inspiration, that instant when the unconscious sends its messages to the conscious, which receives them with astonishment.

Little things can allow us that instant that breaks the chain of consciousness. Sometimes it is a woman. Inspiration thus enters life again, this time led by the arm of psychology. How would those who laughed at me behave now? They denied inspiration simply because they did not know it, and their conscious mind was too dry, too strong, too granite-like to allow those lightning bolts that illuminate to come from the depths of their being…

He lowered his head as if burdened by his thoughts. I wanted to interrupt him to ask some questions. But at that moment, he raised his face to me. He was transfigured. Sadness, a profound sadness, overwhelmed his pale face, where the bright, watery eyes could indicate a hint of tears. And in a voice, the deepest he had spoken yet, he softly uttered these words:

"The impossibility of communicating is truly the worst of solitudes: the difference in nature is a mask more impenetrable than any other mask of iron. Only among equals can there be real, full, perfect communication. Among equals. Intoxicating words, full of consolation, hopes, seduction, happiness, for someone who has always and necessarily been a solitary; who never encountered a creature specially made to communicate with him, although he sought her through different paths; who in daily interaction was always a dissembling, benevolent, serene man; who knew through far too long an experience the exquisite art called courtesy; but who also knew those painful and dangerous explosions of hidden despair—the poorly contained desire to love suddenly unleashed, deep within his being—the sudden madness of the hours when the lonely person throws himself into the arms of the first newcomer and treats him as a friend, as a heaven-sent messenger, as an invaluable gift, only to push him away with disgust, filled with disgust, also towards himself, with the feeling of carrying something withered within him, a certain inner senility, alien to himself, sick of his own society. A profound man needs friends unless he has found his God. I was precisely that soul that always sought a soul akin to mine. Always seeking a man and finding nothing but a herd beast… It hurt me to say this, but I said it, almost in despair. In the silent depth of my solitude, I did not keep quiet; my cries, my shouts were wounded imprecations. I searched within myself for the cosmic, the universe, God, to fill that tormenting emptiness.

It was right there in that solitude that I felt, as in a battlefield, how I was. Within me raged the eternal struggle of my own despair, of my disillusionments with impossible desires, the path, the Ariadne’s thread that I sought. Sometimes I lied to myself.

Only I know what that means…

After those words, his face remained sadder and his gaze more distant.

And in a tone of voice that made me shudder, he continued somberly:

"Almost always and everywhere, it was madness that paved the way for new ideas, that broke with the prescriptions of customs, of venerable superstitions. Plato himself asserted that madness had brought the greatest benefits to Greece. I believed in madness, even simulated madness, as the only force capable of breaking the chains of society. There is always something terrible and respectable in the madman. And how often, in history, those who wanted to raise a gesture of rebellion pretended to be mad in order to speak the truth. Madness is always generative in these cases, and a grain of madness is needed to see with impersonal eyes and penetrate the depths of things.

I felt the tragic when he, with his eyes lost in the distance, repeated these desperate words:

"Who would dare to cast a glance into the hell of moral anguish, bitter and useless, in which probably the most fruitful men of all times have consumed themselves? Who would dare to listen to the sighs of the lonely and the lost? Who would understand those who asked the divine powers for madness?

Madness, in the end, to end up believing in myself! Send me delusions, convulsions, moments of sudden clarity and obscurity; astonish me with tremors and ardors I have not yet experienced like any mortal; surround me with noise and phantoms; let me howl, moan, and crawl like a vestal, whenever by doing so I can have faith in myself. Doubt devours me; I have killed the law, and it inspires in me the same horror that a corpse inspires in the living; by being above the law, I am the most reprobate of the reprobates. The new spirit within me, where does it come from, from you? Prove to me that I am yours. Only madness will demonstrate it.

These words were not mine, but they were mine and I also used them. I, who analyzed the terrible consequences of anchoretism, became an anchorite; I, who fiercely fought the ascetics, became an ascetic. In Jerusalem, during times of great asceticism, there were establishments for the failed saints, for those who had not succeeded in achieving holiness through their efforts. They were hospitals for those madmen. But who would say that in madness, they had not found the path they desired? I too begged the gods for madness, and they heard me…

The Theme of Morality

Nietzsche, the immoralist! Nietzsche, the destroyer of morality, the “degenerate” and “barbaric devastator,” the “monster of evil,” the “son of Satan”… The world’s literature is full of these exclamations. All those who did not understand him, piously added their accusations to the bonfire of philosophy. Against Nietzsche, the voices of everyone who did not read his works, along with those who were not capable of understanding them, rise in chorus.

However, the “monster” who died in the dawn of our century is present, alive, there, in all the thoughts of our years that could not deviate from the orbit traced by him.

Among the themes that Nietzsche formed the backbone of his philosophy, the theme of morality is one of the most prominent in his work because he was also a great moralist, an analyst of morality, and a rebel against its fallacy.

He rebelled against Christian morality, for him a morality of slander, a morality that escaped from the true human being to transform him into nothing more than a defeated one, a hater of life, a conformist.

In the bourgeois morality that was being established, Nietzsche saw the decadence of a morality already in decline from Christianity. The last noble values were lost in the face of the bourgeois “practical,” complacent, voracious, and petty.

Nietzsche could not bear, tolerate, or ever compromise with ontological realism, the Platonism that permeated idealism in general, and especially in his eyes, Christianity. There is no doubt that all philosophy suffers, needs, and requires abstraction.

In this, it has something of Platonism. Nietzsche exaggerated as much as possible in never condescending to this peculiar and necessary abstraction of philosophy. As Christianity strongly accentuated it, his repulsion was even greater.

On the other hand, it must also be emphasized that Nietzsche, in his criticism of Christianity, followed the romantic path of Rousseau rather than the Enlightenment footsteps of Voltaire, who saw in Christianity only the ferocious and bloodthirsty monster, Torquemada, the Crusaders, the Pizarros, the slaughter of the Albigensians. Nietzsche, like Rousseau, saw in Christianity the emasculation of men, the slanderer of life. He who tried to rebel against romanticism, who desired to surpass it – and did surpass it in many aspects – was nevertheless a romantic in this struggle.

For Nietzsche, the Church betrayed Christ. He was the first and only Christian. The Church did not want to fulfill His commandments or imitate Him, and if Christianity was, for him, a product of resentment, it excluded, however, the figure of Christ who, for him, was free from resentment.

The exaggerated justification through faith was a consequence of the Church’s refusal, due to lack of courage and will, to fulfill the work of Jesus. "Christianity is something different from what it has become, from what its founder did and wanted… Jesus after a true life…

Nothing is so distant from Him as the stupid absurdity of an eternal Peter, of an eternal survival of the individual. Jesus tends directly to create ‘the kingdom of heaven’ in the heart and does not find the means in the observance of the rituals of the Jewish Church." He did not consider the formulas in relations with God; for Him, religion is purely internal.

Thus, Christianity follows the anti-terrestrial philosophy of Socrates, which Plato disseminated. But this spirit exists in man who lives contradictorily, this centrifugal impulse to exile oneself from the earth, like the centripetal impulse to live in it and fall asleep in its final slumber.

For Nietzsche, the true example of Christianity is found in Pascal, whom he greatly admired, and whose “destruction” he never forgave. Pascal’s anguish is a distortion of Christianity. Nietzsche had already understood this; however, in his critique, he saw in Pascal’s “self-abasement” the most typical example of true Christian behavior.

However, we must be fair. If the accusations made by his opponents are unfounded, so are the accusations he made against others. If Nietzsche is not the “crazy degenerate,” because there was great religiosity in his soul, as he demonstrated in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” and we had the opportunity to prove in that work that he “could not believe,” in truth, what he disbelieved was the caricature that he formed, following, in this regard, the influences of so many enemies of Christianity. And here, he was very weak and “very much a herd,” as he allowed himself to be led by all the great accusers who have defamed, throughout time, a religion that, although it gave rise to men who were not worthy of it, still represents the highest that man has known.

He had a distorted vision of Christian morality and confused the great virtues preached by Christianity with the vicious forms in which they appeared throughout time, which he did not refute, but only demonstrated the natural weakness of man, so easily drawn to falsifications.

Christianity is not something other than what Christ preached and did. It is only that and nothing more. If we are weak and do not fulfill this lesson, the fault lies with man and not with his doctrine.

Some Christians can be refuted, not Christianity. And among Christians, it is necessary to understand the greatness of a St. Francis of Assisi, a St. Vincent de Paul, and so many others whose lives are an example of the highest that man can achieve.

If Nietzsche had dedicated himself to the study of Christian ethics, if he had delved a little deeper into the works of its great authors, its great philosophers, he would have understood what he did not comprehend and would not have contributed to yet another falsification.

For those who do not deeply understand the meaning of Christianity, they may judge that Pascal represents the pinnacle. It is not for us to deny the value it holds. However, the complete realization of the Christian is not achieved by bestializing oneself. For the ultimate fulfillment of the Christian is to rise in light, in human transcendence, to reach the highest and most grandiose that is beyond us.

Considering these aspects of his philosophy, I addressed him in these terms: "To me, you were profoundly ethical in your critique of Christian morality. I never felt you as a total destroyer, but as someone who sought, in your attack, to construct more than to destroy. I don’t know if this will please you, but that is how I interpreted it. When I listed the degrees of creative strength, I placed the legislator, the philosopher, at the summit of the hierarchy. The artist and the conqueror I placed far below. To me, the philosopher is an artist, a conqueror, and also a legislator. Multifaceted, he encompasses the entire range of higher degrees of creative strength because, truly, only the philosopher creates.

This discoverer of values, this inventor of values – and I always used this term in its most classical sense – is a creator because, by establishing a different end, he modifies the means.

I have already said that in desiring the transmutation of values, I did not want to replace them with polarly contrary values.

I did not preach a return to man’s primitive nature, and my immoralism was not an inversion of values, nor did I seek to unleash the beast within man, as some say resides within him. Furthermore, I do not slander man by judging him solely as a caged monster driven by will and education. My natural man was neither the Rousseauian romantic nor the monster of the Christians.

Did I not speak of a selection that would slowly realize the superman in man?

Did I not see in man the bridge between the beast and the superman? How could my superman be the beast? Rather, it was the superman that potentially exists chained within the beast. Did I not say in “Daybreak”: 'I do not deny that many acts commonly labeled immoral should be avoided and combated, and equally that others considered moral should be favored and carried out. However, in both cases, it is not for the reasons that are generally considered.’"

The creative man is the free man, and only in the full realization of his freedom is he a creator, because creation exists where there is freedom. The exercise of freedom makes man a creator, although it is not attainable by all, for it is not enough to tell men that they are free for them to truly become free and creative. If many will never be able to exercise freedom, the fault lies not with freedom – that beautiful word that ceases to be just a word when practiced and becomes action – but with the man who fears it. And he who fears freedom is never a creator. And the first liberation of man lies in freeing himself from himself, that immense struggle we wage within ourselves against all our demons, kept for centuries and centuries, which manifest in fierce prejudices.

And these prejudices weave the spider’s web of moral metaphysics. And the immense struggle undertaken by man, who desires to be free, to conquer his freedom, is a struggle against stratified morality. The great immoralist accomplishes this act of liberation, the conqueror of himself, the one who understands that he has only been the lover of himself and despises himself, but in despising himself, he rises above contempt through the contempt for contempt, and through willpower and strength, creates inner freedom.

I have always understood that morality’s function is to make communal life possible. Every herd is moral, every herd needs morality. But here we must examine well what I meant, what I understood, and what few understood. These societal rules are necessary prescriptions, of social utility, and they bear the stamp of their time. They are not immutable or eternal, neither supernatural nor perfect, but created by men to regulate their relations with one another, imposed by leaders on subordinates, by dominators on the dominated. There is not always a justification for this new order, which presents itself as a “moral order,” a “moral imperative,” emanating from a God that justifies it.

This heteronomous, imposed morality, chosen by the dominators, imposed by the past, and predominant in the present by the will of those who represent the interests of the past, is odious to me. I wanted to replace the “thou shalt” with the “I will.” A man is not a man until he can perform this great act of freedom that will make him the master of himself, when he will respect the dignity of others out of love for his own dignity, and he will do so because he wants to, not because he must.

Those who claim that man is incapable of attaining this realm of freedom, I reply that it is their weakness speaking through their words.

I recognize, and have always said, that immense strength is necessary, one must have more strength than a lion, to overcome the resistance of the chain of prejudices and be guided by one’s own conscience to create an autonomous morality, a morality of the free man.

The virtues, I said, are as detrimental as vices when we allow them to reign over us imposed from outside, as authority and law, instead of producing them ourselves. I have always expressed my sympathy for autonomous morality, for morality freely accepted and freely realized, and I also recognized that the weak are precisely those who are incapable of finding freedom within themselves, that creative freedom.

Every free man is a creator and needs to create because creation is his second nature, his joy, his very life. But the good want the old to persist. Every innovator is a blasphemer, a destroyer of idols, a defamer, a corruptor of sacred values.

I have already said that what is labeled as good was once a novelty, that is, judged immoral. I have said that no form that takes good and evil is eternal. Nor should they be eternal. They should proliferate, grow, and transform. It is an act of violence to want to establish good and evil. All good and all evil correspond only to the interest of the good, the dominators, which is why they put so much strength and enthusiasm into their morality and proclaim it with such passion. Look at all these grand words. They contain different meanings. Love, justice, honor, prudence—do they have the same meaning today as in other eras? No, the new dominators retain the same appearances but change the content; they are also innovators in morality, but when they dominate, they become conservers of the past.

Many believed that the creative will, the creative freedom, was an unrestrained impulse. In my “Beyond Good and Evil” and in my “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” I always affirmed that we are “men of duty.” I do not want to justify myself because I dispense justifications. How could they understand that great love, that extraordinary love that would create the men of the future, which I have always desired and always believed in?

I am happy, I wrote, to see that men refuse to think about death. My greatest desire would be to make life a hundred times more worthy of being the only object of their thoughts. Creative will and goodness are one and the same thing. And I said more: Happiness lies in the growth of individual originality. To tyrannize others is to impoverish oneself. To enjoy the originality of others, without ever falling into servile imitation, may one day be the symbol of a new civilization.

This is my morality, the morality of a free man, of those who wish to fulfill the supreme commandment of free men: “to make oneself a complete personality.”

In the history of living beings, the individual has been the most gigantic of events because the individual is an entirely new being and a creator of novelty. I know that few are free today, but I have always cherished the hope that, even in a thousand years, men would be capable of creating as many free beings as they are capable of creating slave souls today.

Personality is an exceptional phenomenon, unheard of, almost a miracle of nature, and its great value lies precisely in being rare, unheard of, astonishing. A flock is needed for individuality to stand out. It is useless to try to bridge the gap; nothing viable will be created. On the contrary, the differences must be deepened incessantly. I interrupted him with these words:

— May I interrupt you? - He did not answer me, but his expectant attitude was an affirmation. I took the opportunity to say: - The difference between the great personality and the flock is what distinguishes the former. Thus, we would reach the conclusion that personality requires the flock, and great personalities can only exist where there is a flock. Pardon me for disagreeing. Your pessimism on this point has always concerned me, although I understood it as the result of the conditions of your time, of your own personality, of your own dialectic. I do not see value in what you said once about exalting someone by depressing the surrounding terrain. To raise great individuals at the expense of the flock and for the maintenance of the flock, we do not value them.

We must believe, indeed, I want to believe because this belief is necessary for my own affirmation, that everyone has the possibility to rise above the flock, as well as the liquidation of the flock by the civilization of numerous, dominant free men.

— But, my dear, I also believed in that. It is natural that in moments of exaltation, I made somewhat exaggerated statements. But I have always been faithful to myself and always said what I felt, what I lived, what I experienced.

I fought against the attempt to level, against the leveling that was an ideal in my time. Leveling was presented so boldly, with so much enthusiasm, so much fervor, that I was forced to react with the same ardor for separation, for the abyss. It is not necessary for superior men to have a humanity of pygmies. My dear, I always proposed the equality of equals and the inequality of unequals. Like-minded individuals should seek each other; the great ones are rare, always rare, but creative freedom can increase their number. The mediocre, the member of the flock, needs a flock morality. When I rebelled against the revolt of the slaves, it was because they did not want to be masters but to make slaves of everyone.

This equalization is a crime because it is the greatest injustice that can be done to superior men. I have always vehemently repudiated the false idealism of those who wish to destroy the selfishness of the individual self. Hypocrites and cowards wanted to destroy it when they themselves were nothing but degenerate products of that same selfishness. When man loves or hates, he experiences the pleasure of himself.

I fought hedonism as a false moral precept because it wants to make an end what is only a means for man. Even when humiliated, man wants to ennoble himself, wants to be great when he bows down. Who can deny the pleasure of doing good? I said that magnanimity is a sublimated revenge. The pious man experiences the pleasure of feeling superior to the irreligious or the non-religious.

In essence, the self works like a cell in an organism. It subdues and kills; it appropriates the good of others and uses violence. It wants to regenerate without perpetuating itself and proliferates.

By joining their peers, by supporting each other, they feel the power of the crowd that empowers them and integrates them because they feel stronger. Those who sacrifice themselves for others, like a mother who sacrifices herself for her child, like a soldier who dies for the homeland, perform the sacrifice of a part of themselves for the benefit of another part of themselves. The self is not a unit-block but a plurality, as I have said before. The human soul lives on this plurality. That is why I never believed in disinterestedness and always rejected that disinterested knowledge that Kant spoke of.

Man would cease to be a man if he were to deny himself within himself, if he renounced himself. And by renouncing himself, he would renounce everything that is great and his own. War exists in all existence, in every human soul, but war in the old and broad sense of Heraclitus, not that war that occasionally happens between men, the war of destruction, but the one that is victory over the adversary, the good adversary worthy of respect. I did not completely fight against wars nor was I a mere defender of them. There is war, and there is war…

Theme of Socrates

— Tell me, wouldn’t it be unjust towards Socrates, especially after having praised him so many times?

— Yes, I did indeed praise him in my youth. But when I freed myself from the prejudices that were most dear to me in my youth, I understood the true meaning of Socrates, and since then I have not forgiven him for the influence he had on philosophy and Western thought.

There was a lack of historical sense in Socrates. Socrates is a gap dug between two phases of Greek philosophy. He marks the end of an era and the beginning of another: he is the John the Baptist of the decline of Greek philosophy, of which Aristotle was the Messiah. He did not feel or understand the idea of becoming, and the current sense of the Greeks, which sought its expression in simplicity, did not find an echo in him because Socrates was more Gothic than Apollonian.

He already had a sense of skepticism, sub specie aeternitatis… Did Plato go to Egypt before or after meeting Socrates?

I remained silent in response to his question. And he continued:

Socrates was not very Attic, for to him death surpasses life. It should be noted that life was not favorable to him, and Socrates, rebelling against it, showed his weakness. At the hour of his death, he had these words: “To live is to be sick for a long time; I owe a cock to Asclepius the Healer” ... a kind of weariness. His actions during the trial were those of a weary man. Now, the Greek moment was a moment of fatigue, and Socrates, therefore, did not surpass his own era; that’s what can be said of him: a man of his time, that’s why I classified him as a late man…

With him, the Apollonian phase is born in Greece, but in a decadent aspect, and the Dionysian sense of a people who loved life is agonizing.

Greek rationalism is a necessity to impose hierarchy, order, and discipline at the moment of the decomposition of its economy. Socrates appears as a seducer. For Greek Dionysism, his philosophy represents a betrayal of life, and his death was just a defensive gesture. Didn’t he desire and praise death? In what sense was he Dionysian then?

He was like Christ, who was also another seducer. But Christ fought against Pharisaism, expanded the doctrine of his people beyond the narrowness of surfaces and externals. Socrates inaugurated a world of depression in relation to pre-Socratic Greece; but in relation to Israel, Christ was a progress, an advancement, as well as in relation to other parts of the same, even in relation to the era itself, because both Rome and Greece, at that moment, lived in the worship of mummified idols. In this regard, Christ was progress, an advancement; Socrates was a regression.

Between Christ and the Dionysian era, there was Socrates in between. Christ only purified what had been established. The doctrine of human closeness, of solidarity, was practiced only in externals, and he inaugurated the phase of the inner sincerity of acts of sympathy and solidarity. Christ was thus honest. He did not react against the doctrine; he purified it. Socrates did not! He inaugurated a phase of depression, affirmed decadence, established decadence. But he did not cease to belong to history. He reflected it, that’s all.

Someone at that moment had to be Socrates…

Furthermore, his ugliness was a refutation of Hellenism. He inaugurated the Middle Ages of Greece, but he was Greek, despite that. Greece always remains for us the immortal Greece, and Socrates did not cease to be Greek by denying his previous culture. He did not continue it, that’s true; he initiated an era, to which he gave his name. Plato and Aristotle continued it, and scholasticism followed. Those monks covered themselves in darkness; Greece covered itself in darkness with him. The mournful hour of Hellenic Middle Ages had struck.

Socrates was the product of a tangle of passions and an unsatisfied man. His ugliness, within a people who loved beauty, confuses him, diverts him, fixes him, distorts him. Socrates knows disdain. His wife grinds him, and his whole environment repels him. That serenity was a resource, and he sought in simple placidity the moral beauty. He sought another beauty, an accessible beauty, a conquerable beauty, a beauty that he proclaimed a hundred times superior to physical beauty. Thus, Socrates surpassed himself, and this self-transcendence is almost physiological: that is my interpretation. All Socratic philosophy is a product of his ugliness, filtered through resentment, and thus, Socrates imposed his new conception of beauty on men. It was truly a great victory, his great title of glory that his disciples did not perceive, nor did Plato perceive it. “Know thyself…” is not Socratic, it is from the temple of Delphi, but he knew how to appropriate it. Over time, the resentment of his ugliness could coagulate in his education, and his soul is a tumultuous sea of passions.

He himself does not deny it, and when accused of hiding all vices and evil desires, he confesses to those who accuse him: “You know me, sir!”

Thus, Socrates is a victor over himself and constructs a philosophy to overcome his dissatisfactions. And does he do it consciously?

That is a difficult question to answer. Plato did not study him in this way. The moral beauty of the doctrine was like a sun to him, blinding everything else. Xenophon, although with a different perspective, also does not examine this point. I believe that Socrates proceeded consciously. That’s why there is a hint of revenge in his doctrine.

I interrupted him to say:

— Socrates was an apocryphal man when he externalized what he wanted, not what he was: and that does not imply discredit, but rather victory.

Indeed, there was a victory in Socrates; his serenity in the face of death was the tranquility of a satisfied victor, adored by his disciples, seeing the tears of love on their faces, a more beautiful love because it transcended his ugliness.

Socrates could die peacefully. That’s why he owed a cock to Asclepius…

Why can’t this interpretation be true?

There is a pause, and he continues sententiously:

— I can also accept it, but let’s analyze further: There is another symptom in Socrates: irony. What do psychologists say about this? And his auditory hallucinations, Socrates' “demon”? This equation belongs to him. It is his and it is him: reason = virtue = happiness.

An ugly man in Greece must be concentrated; it is a fate. Reason is a geometric game to torture those who are enthusiastic about life. Reason denies exaltation, denies fantasy. Socrates (touching his face) cannot fantasize for others, only for himself; that’s why he is reason. Virtue is that, because virtue is not fantasy, it is not exaltation, it is not enthusiasm for him; it is only serenity. It is victory over the torment of instincts. Virtue is a victory over life: that is the Socratic victory. And that brings serenity, fixes serenity, in short: happiness. He needed to believe in his happiness.

No, it’s not quite that. He needed to make others believe in his happiness.

Happiness is being Socrates, virtue is being Socrates, reason is being Socrates.

Such a thing, in Greece, was a profound revolution, and he was accused as a seducer, that twilight knight of death…

By forcing him to drink hemlock, they forced him to return to his starting point… It is an endless path to traverse Socrates' labyrinthine soul; there are subterranean passages, hiding places, traps… In his prey, the Hellenic youth would know the prison of rationalism. He promised them another world; he forged a new world of concepts, sought beauties that he could manufacture. He deviated… created a world of ideas. And he did it with irony and serenity. What turmoil he felt within himself upon seeing the religious admiration of his listeners. How little it costs to be happy!… They would never admire him if he did not speak of an impalpable beauty…

How he enjoys his revenge!

At that moment, Greece experienced the agony of anguish, and Greek restlessness was an exit for Socrates. He ventured into it. He proposed control, victory over oneself, to the clash of passions that threatened to destroy everything. That’s how he proceeded. When accused of his base instincts, he proclaimed: “It is true. But I have mastered them all!” That’s the sublimity of Socrates because he sublimated himself. He proposed order to chaos. Reason!… It was a hope! Virtue! - It was a method! Happiness! - a reward!… He seduced, fascinated, and the admiring looks, the smiles of applause, were they not the negation of his ugliness?

Oh! What exaltation to exclaim the moral beauty, the impalpable beauty. To give those Greeks the pleasure of feeling something that is not tangible. To go beyond that sense of boundaries, to expand that horizon where parallels meet. Socrates almost rehearses the Gothic, a remedy for anguish, a new anguish to kill another. Similia similibus curantur. Only he understands the great falsification… How he would laugh alone, alone, without witnesses. Only he can be the witness of his irony. How good it is to be Socrates!… - wouldn’t he have exclaimed to himself?

He was forbidden to love women, as he was forbidden to love external things, forbidden to love the world, forbidden to seek the light of the southern sun. And he forbids everything that is forbidden to him. Everything that is forbidden lowers man, and man must seek inner light - reason must live it, obey it - virtue - so that he may know the enjoyment of true spiritual pleasures - happiness! Thus, Socrates is his own equation. When dying, yes, he must have exclaimed to himself: my instincts tortured me throughout my life, they tormented me! But I have conquered you. I know that life and happiness can go together with you, but dissatisfactions would rebel against that. I was expelled from your banquet. Well, I created another: I created another world that satisfied me. You, instincts, are life, but in this eternal struggle of life and death, death also knows its victories.

Those who, like me, have known eternal agony, now know their final agony. And my truth is here, in this final agony, in this smile of mine, in this serenity of mine, in this courage to face death because they always fear it, because they still love life. I am serene. I surrender myself to the arms of death, which was my life…

He fell silent. Took a few short steps across the room. Then, turning to me, in a harsh tone of voice, as if he had mastered emotions and overcome impulses, and wanting to express a naturalness that reflected the result of great inner battles, he continued:

— Socrates is a philosopher for ordinary spirits. Virtue is always on his lips, just as it is always on the lips of the mediocre. That’s why he asked the noble ones why they practiced virtue. He didn’t know that it is the nobles' nature to practice virtue without asking why? He did not seek wisdom, but a “wise man,” and he did not find one. How pleasant and grand it was for him to always speak of virtue.

A great seducer, this Socrates; just observe the seduction of Plato, whom he converted like a Delphic priest would. He turned popular valuations into divine and imperishable ones and nurtured in Plato that anti-Hellenic taste that led him to disdain life, like any monk of the Middle Ages, and to despise beauty as something unpleasant. A great charlatan who inaugurated the petty phase of Greek culture, as it was becoming Westernized. He was the prelude to a colossal end.

Socrates was vulgar, cunning, self-possessed, quarrelsome, aggressive; however, he possessed a clear intelligence and a Machiavellian taste for dialectics, which served him in keeping the easily fooled youth in his hands. His greatest death was desired by him, and there is a falsification in his martyrdom. He wanted to accuse his homeland of his death, like a suicide who accuses others of the desired act.

A great egoist, not a patriot. He diminished himself through cunning; he wanted to rise through his modesty, and he hid behind it to project himself. His martyr-like attitude was plebeian because he had as many souls as could fit inside him. He made Plato a herald, and after him, philosophy suffered its great defeat and mummified itself in the statics of logic. Concepts were formalized, stratifying ideas and thoughts; the code of precepts. Today, Socrates could well be a butcher. How terribly cruel I must seem to many!

Those words were harsh and did not convince me. Irrationalism spoke in him, and it was unjust.

Socratic work had a role to play, and it played it. But the words that sounded so cruel would awaken new suspicions. And the theme of Socrates would have to continue to be studied and discussed. And that demand itself was an affirmation of the value of a man whose name would serve as a landmark in philosophy.

The Theme of the Creative Will

Nietzsche does not accept that “will” is the cause of any human act. By denying the law of causality, he does not fall into the explanation that his theory of the “will to power” had the vulgar sense that some hasty commentators would formulate. For him, it is difficult today to be able to grasp the dynamic sense of philosophy, to grasp ideas in motion, in movement, to capture in words, in rigid and already mummified terms by rationalism, what we formulate in our thoughts, what we infer from our “reality.” For example, how to employ the word “reality,” whose objective is not related to the concept we make and have of reality, which contains not a thing-in-itself, not an essence, but a movement that opposes itself, in a mixture of reality and appearance? And that is neither reality nor appearance? Admitting appearance requires us to admit a world-truth, and vice versa. Now, the true world is apparent. It is apparent, though true. However, it is not a counter-concept. Our internal reality, the world of our desires and passions, is a reality that we know without opposition. There is no proper antinomy between man and the world, between the self and the non-self, because this opposition is not impassable. There is, indeed, a contradiction between the self and the non-self. And just as we do not objectively know “reality,” as we would formally require, in contrast to the appearance, we also do not know the internal reality in contrast to the internal appearance.

To know is not to possess, to take hold of the object; to know is to infer and regulate within the norms of our inner impulses - our instincts - he said - impulses that, in their relationships with each other, form thought, which are limitations, impulses, pauses, exceedances, volatilizations, transfers. Rationalistic ordering, this mathematization of impulses, was a human progress, but not the end. No, because fantasy arises from impulses, and much remains to be discovered.

Nietzsche accused philosophers of speaking about unknown things as if they were absolutely known, or at least the best known in the world. He cited, among other examples, the ease with which Schopenhauer accepted the popular concept of “truth” and used and abused it. He mercilessly analyzed this thoughtlessness of philosophers in accepting prevailing prejudices through scathing pages.

His concept of will must be explained because it clarifies much of his later views on philosophy. The will, first and foremost, encompasses a varied set of accusations, the sensation of a state from which one desires to move away and the sensation of a state into which one desires to penetrate. Soon “the struggle of these two sensations, in addition to a muscular sensation, which, without agitating arms and legs, actively results from a kind of habit when we will it.” And not only must we recognize feeling as an ingredient of will and a multiple feeling, but also thinking. In every act of will, there is a dominant thought, and one should not believe that this thought can be separated from the “willing,” for then nothing would remain of the will.

Thirdly, the will is not merely a complex of sensations and thoughts, but also an affect, and precisely that of commanding. What is called free will is essentially the feeling of superiority over what must be obeyed: “I am free; he must obey,” this consciousness is found in every will and is also found in intense attention, the straight gaze directed at one thing, immediate esteem - “now this is necessary and not that” - the intimate certainty that obedience will be found. Finally, everything that belongs to the one who commands. A man who wills commands something within himself, which obeys or at least tends to obey.

Nietzsche continues, throughout his work, the analysis of the vulgar sense of the will. A multiple process, which the common people refer to with a single word, when it is we who contemporarily command and obey, and when we obey, we experience the sensations of remorse, oppression, and resistance that follow the act of will, and as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to overlook all this and deceive ourselves about this duality, by virtue of the synthetic concept of “I,” a whole chain of conclusions, unbalanced and false assessments of the will, has been attributed to the “willing.” “In this way, the one who wills confuses the pleasant sensations of the one who commands with those of the one who executes, with the many wills or sub-souls that are at his service since our body is nothing more than a social system of many souls.” This social sense of the human soul is now an achievement of new psychology. Nietzsche unfolded this variety of souls in the act of willing.

He also does not have a predetermination to seek and define truths. He did not accept the concepts of truth and error, the evaluative basis of rationalism. There are no truths in Nietzsche’s work simply because there are no ends in his work. He only indicates the means.

He shows man the means to liberate himself from the prisons that have formed this two-thousand-year-old masturbation of thoughts, this masochistic desire for truth that has tortured and continues to torture him. There is, for man, the possibility of finding perspectives that indicate a practical sense of truth, a historical sense. Perhaps a superhumanity will one day destroy everything that has formed the basis of human culture up to now. All the principles that have so far formed the great treasure of human knowledge may become, tomorrow, the subject of stories to amuse children. Nietzsche felt all this as a possibility. The fact that he felt, understood, and lived this distant possibility already separated him and distinguished him from other men.

The conception of the simplicity of truth, which should be naive, simple, natural, easy, he fought against it. He found it too complex to be so easily accessible. What formed a desire, the fruit of minimal effort, the natural tendency of the herd-like man seeking the easiest ways to face life and the world, he denounced. Thus, if he had been a proponent of truths, he would have betrayed himself; he would have lied to his own philosophy. This is where he differs from all the apostles. To present him as an apostle would be to deny him. He was more dynamite than man, as he defined himself.

How little it would cost me now to ask him something about his philosophical opinions. The love of truth creates profound disappointments, profound tortures, profound anguish. I do not forget his words that “the love of truth is a terrible thing.” Wasn’t it he who had once asked, “Why must this need for truth, this passionate restlessness, follow me everywhere I go? I would like to rest; however, it does not allow me to. - I would like to yield to so many gentle solicitations that incite me to rest. Everywhere I encounter the gardens of Armida, and I must force myself to rid my bleeding heart of their delights.”

How painful and torturous the philosopher’s work is. How many dreams, how much fantasy he must destroy in the seeker of truths! Poor philosopher who is forced to destroy, one by one, the fantasies he nurtured for so long because, although friendly to men, truth is the one that unveils so many of their disappointments and creates so many new anxieties that arise from the new imbalances it establishes in its eternal struggle. What a sad world it would be if truth reigned in it and if it were accessible to everyone!

To take refuge in dreams, in fantasy, is like a resource; but the one who is driven by the desire to know knows that the pleasures offered by illusions satisfy him only for moments, and he continues to seek, an old discoverer of itinerant pleasures that life reveals to him at every step.

Lights and shadows that illuminate and darken his path, and new and different are the values. And what is man to him if not an old evaluator, a Wertender?

What did he want to be? An artist, that is, a creator, a Schaffender, a saint, that is, a lover, a Liebender, and a philosopher, that is, a discoverer of truths, an Erkennender, all of this combined in one person, that was the goal he aspired to. Nietzsche wanted to bless life, to say yes to existence. How confused I always was by those immense words of his in “Human, All Too Human”: “Rather perish than hate and fear, and rather perish twice than make oneself hated or feared. It is necessary for this to become the maxim of all society one day.”

Nietzsche knew that men must be hard in order to destroy this world and build another.

The Theme of Duty

He had discovered my thoughts because he addressed me with these words:

“Nothing is built for the benefit of mankind when we only desire to direct our actions in that direction. Many of the quietest and most personal works turn out to be beneficial to them. Just look at the work of artists, silent work, often selfish and only personal, which helps to liberate and sublimate so much. These great silent gestures are worth more than the charity of Christians, which is so mortifying and false. The Superman has never been an end for me, but a constant transformation. The mediocre will be exalted if the Superman rises above them, and with him an era would be justified. We must always love what is beyond ourselves, the greatest, the most beautiful, and we must fully surrender to this love. In “The Will to Power” I said: ‘Justice must increase in every aspect, and brutal instincts must diminish.’ To free man from the yoke of his multiple slaveries, and to unite in a common purpose because Zarathustra once said: 'We shall all love one another, for we shall have a common love.’”

But would I believe in this unanimity? Perhaps not, and perhaps yes, because I have always lived the battle of my desires and my disappointments.

To achieve an ideal is to surpass it. Perhaps that is why the best of ideals is the one that can never be conquered. It will always be a promise and a stimulus, a desire for more, a possible unrealizable that will always drive us forward, because I desire that man always be the conqueror of himself, the eternal surpasser of himself. But in order to surpass himself, his ideal must always surpass him. In a letter I wrote to my sister, I said these words: “I shudder at the thought that men who are not up to the task and who are absolutely unqualified for it will one day claim my authority. But this is the torment of every great master of humanity, to know that, depending on the circumstances and events, such an attitude can either become a blessing or be fatal to him.”

In “Ecce Homo” I said: “I know my destiny. I know that there will come a day when the memory of something unheard of will be associated with my name. That name will be linked to a crisis in the history of humanity, as has not yet happened on earth.”

That was my destiny, and the subsequent events happened to fulfill that premonition that had tormented me so many times.

However, I was interested in knowing Nietzsche’s philosophical thought, so I interrupted him to say:

"Your ideal of the Superman was an ethical ideal. ‘Man must be surpassed.’ In this statement there is an imperative and also a choice. Someone responded to it in a modern way: ‘Man is what he surpasses himself to be.’

I see no refutation of your opinion in that response, because by the fact that man is the conqueror of himself, when he becomes aware of this surpassing, he can transform it into something more powerful and creative."

I said: "The world exists and the world is not something that passes. It is preferable to say that it is a becoming, and this becoming has no beginning or end. The world lives on its own substance, it feeds on what it rejects. If becoming had to reach either being or nothingness, that state would have already been achieved. Similarly, if the world had an end, a termination to which it is directed, that end should have been reached.

If I admit the existence of ‘spirit’ as an activity in becoming, it shows that the world cannot have an end, because to replace the mobility of becoming with the final immobility of being would be to deny the reversibility of phenomena. I reject mechanicism because it denies the reversibility of phenomena, and in that case, the world would historically be a transition from an initial state to a final state of inertia, of death, as the mechanists conceive it.

For me, becoming is the form of reality. Being, if it is not understood as an eternal becoming, is pure logical form, pure abstraction to me. Being does not precede becoming, nor is it its end. It is by admitting becoming that man is a creator to me. But woe to those who misunderstand my concept of creativity as the classic ex-nihilo.4 In the creation, as I conceive it, there is no taking something out of nothing, but rather a valuing, a combining of elements to increase, intensify physical or spiritual forces. That is what I call ‘will to power.’ I do not conceive of the world as finished, but as a ‘becoming,’ still confused, still chaotic, and I want to oppose to this chaos the creative action, opposing it with the power of an idea, the idea of an end, whose realization will be our task."

Knowledge is for me something aesthetic. We shape reality like an artist who does not slavishly reproduce reality. Knowledge is thus shaping and consequently creating. There was a time when I believed that man lived to know. But I freed myself from this opinion and later understood that science must subordinate itself to life, and I proclaimed that I preferred error to truth if the former was more useful to human existence.

The sage, when creating, resembles the artist, and he increases our power over things, while the other increases our enchantment with life because he beautifies it. I have already said that true art is the “sublimation of the feeling of life, a desire and a stimulus for intensified life.”

The Theme of War and the State

"Rarely in history has a man been so little known in his time as I. My books were not even read, and when my name began to gain recognition, I no longer belonged among the living. Few times has someone’s madness been so exploited to refute his work, as was done in my case. They attempted to refute me by simply pointing out that I had once reached that madness which I had so desired, that madness which gradually freed me from all the apocrypha of prejudices and the counterfeit currency of the rational culture of the Philistines. Almost all of my themes were distorted, and the same was done regarding race, morality, and war. I always considered myself a fatality, indeed, I was a fatality…

He stood up, approached me. His eyes gleamed strangely. In fact, those eyes had frightened everyone who approached him.

But I ventured:

— Undoubtedly. But of all your themes, there are two that have long been the subject of lengthy controversies: the theme of War and the theme of the State. Could you clarify them for me?

He paused and continued:

— Many times it has been claimed that I defended war. In reality, I did. But what irritated me was the fact that they always confused the war I spoke of with the war of gunpowder and lead. Not that in my youth I did not have warlike aspirations. The entire educational environment I had, since Pforta, would have dragged me into the same youthful warlike impulses so peculiar to the Germans. I could not distance myself from that environment. I wrote some passages in defense of war, which later served as arguments for my adversaries. However, in all my mature works, after freeing myself from all prejudices, when I began constructing my philosophy, the culminating theme of my works was an intense struggle against war and the State. On one occasion, I myself expressed the desire to have written “Der Wille zur Macht” in French. Why? Because the word “Macht” in German would provide an opportunity for many to judge that my book was an apology for German imperialism, which I always detested. To me, power brutalizes. Those who attain it become conservatives and reactionaries.

There has never been a doctrine, no matter how revolutionary, that, upon seizing power, did not become an obstacle to the revolution itself and did not create barriers to the continuous transformation of society. I never believed in eternally young societies. But at the same time, I always believed that there was a world that is born and a world that dies. Society knows this death and knows this birth of new cultures that dawn alongside the twilight of fading formulas. But there are convulsions, upheavals, struggles, abrupt transformations. Death does not always know the tranquility of a long autumn twilight. Sometimes the unexpected happens, at other times the transmutation is profoundly revolutionary. Offering a destiny to humanity is different from marking it with a millennial order, the eternal dream of all true utopians, and this last desire has always been a contradiction to me.

Once I said that “it was a vain chimera of generous souls to expect much, or even just a lot, from humanity when it has ceased to wage war.” However, do we know of any other means that can restore to weary peoples that raw energy of the battlefield, that profound impersonal hatred, that cold-bloodedness for homicide, combined with a clear conscience: that fecund collective ardor for the annihilation of the enemy, that indifferent beastliness in the face of great losses, of one’s own life and of loved ones; that deaf breaking of souls, comparable to earthquakes. With as much force and security as any great war, the streams and torrents that then make their way through stones and all kinds of swamps and ruin somewhat delicate cultivated meadows, soon set in motion again, under favorable circumstances, the wheels of the looms of the spirit, which start moving with renewed impetus. Civilization cannot do without passions, vices, and wickedness.

When the Romans, masters of the Empire, grew somewhat tired of war, they sought to obtain new strength from fights against fierce beasts, gladiatorial combats, and the persecution of Christians. Today’s English also seem to have renounced war; they practice another means to replenish their diminishing strength: those dangerous voyages of discovery, those crossings, those ascents, undertaken, it is said, for scientific purposes, whose aim is to obtain, through adventures and dangers of all kinds, a supply of energy. In a thousand different forms, other new substitutes for war have been invented, but perhaps they will make us see that a humanity thus educated and therefore as weary as the European race is today needs not only wars but the most terrible wars - hence momentary returns to barbarism - in order not to spend its own civilization and culture on means of civilization. This aphorism of mine was one of the most frequently used to assert that I was an advocate of brutal war. Truly, I wrote it during a phase that I later surpassed. But while I often recognized the inevitability of wars as a means of strengthening weary man, I saw it more as a fatality than a solution. I always hoped that man would attain that Dionysian state of “wine surplus” that could liberate him from brutal wars. War has been a fatality of the human species. But I eventually convinced myself that it would be overcome. That aphorism of mine belonged to a phase in which I felt perfectly like a “domesticated animal of the barracks.” Then I suffered from the same enthusiasm as the German youth. However, in that very aphorism, the genesis of my liberation was already present.

To weary peoples, war was a solution. However, is there no other solution for weary peoples? Does not society continuously undergo the birth of new forms of culture? Is there not a pulsating life that blossoms in society alongside what dies, what is felt to be dying, the first symptom of which is fatigue?

Not long after, I wrote these words, which already showed my painful experience of the cruelty of the 1870 war. Listen to them: "No government today admits that it maintains its army to satisfy, when the time comes, its desire for conquest. On the contrary, the army must serve for the defense of the territory. To justify this state of affairs, one appeals to a morality that approves of legitimate defense.

In this way, each State reserves for itself the privilege of morality and attributes immorality to the neighboring State, for it must assume that the latter is inclined to attack and conquer if the State is to consider the means of defense. Furthermore, the other State, just like ours, denies any intention to attack and affirms that it only maintains the army for defensive reasons: the other State is accused, I say, of being hypocritical and a cunning criminal who wants to pounce without a fight on an innocent and fragile victim. Under these conditions, all States today find themselves in relation to one another: they admit the bad intentions of their neighbor and attribute the good intentions to themselves. But this is a practice so harmful and even worse than war itself. It is already a provocation and a cause for war, for it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus tries to justify warlike sentiments.

The doctrine of the army as a means of defense must be repudiated as categorically as the desire for conquest. And perhaps the day will come when a people distinguished in war and victory, through the highest development of discipline and military talents, accustomed to making the greatest sacrifices for such things, will freely exclaim, ‘We have broken the sword.’ Thus destroying its entire military organization down to its foundations. To become harmless while being feared (once one was feared), guided by elevated sentiments; this is the means to achieve true peace, which must be based on a peaceful disposition of mind, while so-called armed peace, as it is presently practiced in all countries, corresponds to a feeling of discord, a lack of trust in oneself and one’s neighbor, and prevents disarmament, either out of hatred or out of fear. Rather die than hate and fear, and rather die twice than make oneself hated and feared - this will be the superior maxim of any organized society. It is true that liberal representatives of the people lack the time to reflect on the nature of man; otherwise, they would know that they work in vain by preaching a gradual reduction of compulsory military service. On the contrary, only when this misery reaches its peak will the remedy be near. The tree of military glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a single lightning bolt. But the lightning bolt, as you know, comes from the cloud… and from above."

I considered the State as the force that generates wars.

And what I considered the State is that State res facta, better yet res ficta or picta and not res nata. Likewise, I considered the nation, or at least what is called the nation in Europe. But let me further analyze the State. Once I wrote these words: “The governments of the great States have in their hands two means to keep the people subjugated, to make themselves feared and obeyed: a cruder means, the army; a more subtle means, the school. Through the first, they gain the ‘ambition’ of the upper classes and the ‘force’ of the lower classes, at least to the extent that these two classes possess active and robust men, of average or below-average ability. With the help of the other expedient, they win over the ‘endowed’ poverty and, above all, the semi-poverty of intellectual pretensions of the middle class. Primarily, they create an intellectual court in teachers of all categories who aspire to ‘rise!’ by piling obstacle upon obstacle against private schools or private education, which the State especially hates; they ensure the availability of a large number of jobs, positions, which are always coveted by a number five times greater than the vacancies, by eager and hungry beings. But these jobs should only provide a ‘convenient’ livelihood for man; that is how the State keeps in him the feverish thirst for ‘progress,’ linking it more closely to benevolence than to satisfaction, for satisfaction is the mother of value, the grandmother of freedom of spirit and presumption. Through this diseased body, kept in check both physically and spiritually, the entire youth of a country is raised, to a certain level of education useful to the State, and graduated according to need: first, almost imperceptibly, the idea is instilled in weak minds, in the ambitious of all classes, that only a recognized and stamped life direction by the State immediately leads them to play a role in society. Belief in official exams and titles conferred by the State goes so far that even men who have independently educated themselves, who have risen through commerce or the practice of a profession, still carry a trace of bitterness in their hearts until their aptitude is recognized by an official investiture, by a title or an award, until they manage to ‘get noticed.’ Finally, the State links the appointment of thousands and thousands of officials and paid positions dependent on it to the ‘obligation’ to educate oneself and be stamped by State institutions; otherwise, this door will always remain closed to them; social honors are for them possibilities for a family, protection from above, a spirit of camaraderie among those educated together: all this forms a net of hopes in which all young people allow themselves to be caught - how could they feel the slightest suspicion? After all, the obligation of military service has become, after a few generations, a habit and an obligation that is fulfilled without reservations, in view of which life is pre-regulated, the State can still risk the masterstroke of linking education and the army, intelligence, ambition, and strength through donations; that is, attracting to the army men of superior abilities and culture, and instilling in them the military spirit of voluntary obedience, which may even lead them to swear allegiance to the flag for life and, through their abilities, provide a new splendor to the military profession. Then all that remains is to find the occasion for a great war; and it can be foreseen that, because of their profession, diplomats will grow old while remaining innocent, just as newspapers and speculation will, for when the ‘people,’ when it is a people of soldiers, always has a ‘good conscience’ in waging war, and it does not need to be formed in advance.” In a letter I wrote to Gersdorf, already in 1870, I saw the victorious Prussia as the great danger to culture and said:

“In the face of the state of culture that will come, I feel great fear. I suspect that we will have to pay too high a price for great national successes in a region where, at least, I would not permit any concessions. In confidence: I consider present-day Prussia an extremely dangerous power for culture…” And I also wrote:

"The smallness and wretchedness of the German soul was not and is not in any way a consequence of the system of small States. As we know, people have been proud and dignified even in much smaller States.

The system of large States does not make the soul freer and more virile.

In the soul of the one who accepts the servile imperative “you must and have to kneel!” ordering an involuntary inclination of the head before titles of honor, decorations, benevolent glances from top to bottom, this same individual will bow even more before a “Empire,” and will lick the dust before the great sovereign more frequently than he did before the small one: we cannot doubt that. And I would also add:

“I see above all these nationalist wars these new ‘empires’… What interests me is a Unified Europe, because I see it slowly and hesitantly preparing. In all the broadest and deepest individuals of this century, the total work was truly to prepare that new synthesis and to preclude, as an experiment, the ‘European’ of the future. Only in their weak hours, or when they became old, did they fall back into the narrow nationalism of the ‘patriots,’ and then they were ‘patriots.’ I think of men like Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer…”

For me, the unification of Europe would be a matter of time. The cultural foundations already existed. There could be periods of depression, setbacks in this tendency with nationalist awakenings, but they would obstinately give way to a more demanding flow afterward. However, the unification of Europe is still distant.

Much blood has been shed and will continue to be shed to achieve this grand goal for human history. When in my youth, I believed that the Germans were truly a strong people, I wished for them the hegemony of Europe, to force it, to propel it on the path to its overcoming, the first stage toward achieving the path of the superman. But when I understood the bovine spirit of the German people, their fatal education, which is a brutal training to make the individual usable and exploitable for the service of the State within the shortest possible time, I understood that Germany was not destined to play the role of guide to the new humanity, which was the dream of my life. My thoughts on this matter were very clear. So clear that, when discussing the victory of Sparta over Athens, I said:

“The political subjugation of Greece signifies the greatest defeat of culture. This fact gave rise to the establishment of the repugnant theory that culture can only flourish when it is armed to the teeth and engaged in combat. The advent of Christianity was the second great defeat. On one hand, brute force; on the other, suppressed intellect achieved victory over the aristocratic genius among peoples. To be a ‘Philhellene’ means to be an enemy of brute force and musty intellects. In this sense, Sparta was the ruin of Hellas because it forced Athens to proceed in a federal manner and to dedicate itself completely to politics.”

— Culture and state - one cannot deceive oneself - are antagonists: ‘State-culture’ is only a modern idea. One lives at the expense of the other; one thrives at the expense of the other. All great epochs of culture are epochs of political decadence: what is great in terms of culture is impolitical, even antipolitical…"

The least possible State. I have already exclaimed and repeat: I do not need the State. And I would have given myself a better education, one that corresponded to my physique, without the traditional violence, and thus I would have saved the strength that I had to expend later to liberate myself. If the things that surround us were a little more insecure, so much the better! I desire that we live with a little caution and some bellicosity. It is the merchants who wanted to make this cork-State as pleasant as possible; they are the ones who dominate the whole world with their philosophy.

The “industrial” State is not my preference, nor Spencer’s. I myself wanted to be the maximum possible State; I have so many inputs and outputs, so many needs, so much to communicate. Despite everything, I was poor and had no tendency to seek honorary positions, nor did I feel admiration for warrior laurels. I know what will be the ruin of these States: the non-plus-ultra State of the socialists. I am their adversary, and I already hate the present State.

In my youth, I believed in the positive value of the State and believed that it could foster and develop culture. These were certain prejudices that I brought from my upbringing. The modern State does not consider itself a means but an end, and this inversion of purpose was deeply repugnant to me. And as the State sees itself as an end, what it desires is to increase its power, to become more and more powerful among other States. This characteristic is immediately noticeable, and this desire for increased power leads to an increase in military might, the ever-growing expansion and penetration into social life. Nothing is more dangerous for the State than the individual, the awareness of being an individual, of being a person.

I have already said: "The greatest prejudice of the national armies, which now glorify themselves so much, lies in the dissipation of individuals of the highest civilization. In short, they only exist under the protection of all situations. How fearfully and economically they should be treated because great lengths of time are needed to prepare the causal conditions for the creation of such delicately organized brains. But just as the Greeks furiously stirred up Greek blood, so do Europeans today with European blood, and indeed, relatively speaking, those who ensure abundant and good offspring are always sacrificed. These individuals are always at the forefront in the struggle and seek danger more out of ambition. The vulgar patriotism of the Romans, who now face very different and higher problems than homeland and honor, is somewhat disloyal or a sign of backwardness. You cannot spend more than you have, and this truth applies to both individuals and nations. If, through grand politics, for the conquest of power, for science, for parliamentarism, for commercial transactions, for military interests, a quantity of intelligence, seriousness, willpower, self-improvement beyond what one has is required, then all of this will be lacking elsewhere. Humanity today spends too much, excessively, aimlessly, in this field, which will leave it lacking for itself, without even surpassing itself.

Every civilization perishes through its own products because every civilization is a waste of what has been accumulated during centuries of effort and creation. “It is very expensive to attain power, and power brutalizes. The man who is not superfluous begins only where the State ends. There, the song of necessity begins, the unique and irreplaceable melody. Where ‘it ends’ is the State… But look beyond, my brothers! Don’t you see the rainbow and the bridges to the superman?”

Thus spoke Zarathustra. The supremely creative man will only exist when he frees himself from all restraints. I also fought against that chauvinistic nationalism that prevailed in my time and which, for us more spiritual men, is not only insipid but also disloyal, a brutalization of our best knowledge and consciousness…

The Germans, nourished with newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, with their narrow nationalistic views, only smell the repugnant “Deutschland über alles,” and in the end, the paralysis agitans of the “modern ideas”…

Not the existence of the State at any price, but rather that the highest exemplars can live and create within it, that is the goal of the community.

This also serves as the basis for the formation of the State. There was only a mistaken opinion about the classification of superior exemplars: conquerors, dynasties, etc. When it is no longer possible to tolerate the existence of a State, when the great individuals can no longer live in it, then the terrible State of emergency and robbery is formed, in which the strongest individuals take the place of the best. It is not their obligation that the maximum number of comfortable and moral individuals can live in it. It is not about quantity, but about being able to live in it in any way, both well and morally, thereby providing a basis for culture. In short, the goal of the State is a nobler humanity; its end is outside itself because the State is nothing more than a means."

I fought against the State’s claim to be the guiding star of culture and proclaimed, as revolting, the “uniformed State culture,” which was nothing more than a pseudo-culture and hindered creation and experience.

I denounced the Germans for believing that strength must manifest itself in harshness and cruelty. That is why they willingly submit to the State and admire it.

Thus, they distance themselves from their compassionate weakness and their sensitivity to follow mediocrities and devoutly enjoy terror. It is difficult for them to believe that there is strength in gentleness and calmness. The State wants to be the most important animal on earth, and almost everyone believes in this claim.

I have always had the fate of being in the small number of those who have freed themselves from so many prejudices, and above all, from the most dear, the most terrible prejudice of the necessity of that monster, the State, which has demanded so many victims, provoked so many wars, and will continue to demand the bloody tribute of lives and hopes, we do not know until when.

The Theme of Eternal Return

— One of the most criticized theories he elaborated was that of Eternal Return. I want to ask you: wouldn’t it be possible to interpret it as the consequence of a disillusionment caused by the evolution of our mercantile and industrial era, which presented to the most active and elevated minds of Europe the anticipation of a true new captivity for mankind? Isn’t there a kinship with Rousseau’s dream? Don’t they both desire a return to primitiveness, to the creation of a new Humanity that would deny all the lies of current civilization and free it from the chains that oppress it? Even at that time, sir, you foresaw the torture that a civilization would offer, one that tore them away from the earth, accustomed them to live on ground that denied the world itself, in a landscape that denied nature. Perhaps this “Eternal Return” was still a very sharp cry that comes from within our ancestry. A warning, a admonition from our own souls and sub-souls, screaming for the negativity that the world of artificiality was accomplishing.

Perhaps this interpretation holds some truth. Perhaps it better reflects the entire genesis of your doctrine. Personally, who knows, maybe you were a victim of this very civilization that was being forged, whose terrible consequences you already vaguely anticipated. The “Eternal Return” presented itself, thus, as an accommodation to the possibility of eventually combating the primitiveness threatened by “progress.” Wouldn’t the “Eternal Return” be a hope, more than a hope, a reality in which you obstinately believed, for the sake of that belief, for the sake of that certainty, you even surpassed the threshold of madness? He responded very seriously:

— The theory of the “eternal return,” I know, has been unintelligible to many. And many have drawn from it conclusions entirely different from what I intended to convey. I never had that mythical sense of metempsychosis that some have attributed to my theory. Now, I wish to offer men of goodwill an explanation that I believe will be concise and easy and will provide them with an understanding of the doctrine. Listen: I believe that the world, conceived as force, cannot be unlimited. I consider the concept of an infinite force incompatible with the concept of force. That is the first point. However, I must admit that this force is active; otherwise, it would negate the concept itself. Furthermore, it must be eternal, infinitely so, in time.

For this force, I must admit an infinite amount of time, before and after.

If I don’t accept before, then I should accept its creation by a being separate from the force, a creator of the force. I could arrive at the conception of God, which I should accept as infinite, because if it were finite, the simple conception of finite force would suffice. If I accept the infinite, I would limit it with the concept of finite force because force must be finite. If I were to conceive, which naturally repulses me, that an infinite God created finite force, I would have to accept the infiniteness of that force because God would have to be continually creating it, which would make it perpetually infinite, as a creation. Such an opinion would lead me to accept the destruction of force, so that this production of force, which must precede an infinite, replaces it, otherwise I would have to accept it as infinite if its productivity were infinite. Its destruction would thus imply accepting that the existing would be destroyed, returning to nothingness, which is absolutely inadmissible and also repulsive to us. Accepting the finite creation of force by an infinite God would represent a limitation of that God, who would then become finite. However, one could admit that this God creates an infinity of universes of finite force. This creation would either have a beginning or not. If it had a beginning, it would admit a limitation of God.5

If it were infinitely in time, before and after, we would deduce, starting from force, the unnecessary existence of this God. Thus, through continuous exclusions, we arrive at the only admissible conception, which is: force is finite, otherwise, it is not force. If it is finite, it must be qualitatively infinite in time, that is, it must have always been equally eternal and active, which admits an infinity in time. In this way, an infinity has already elapsed, that is, all possible developments of this force have already taken place. If we admit this, we must also admit that its momentary developments must be repetitions. Otherwise, we would have to admit that a finite force has an infinite number of developments and phases, which would be absurd in any case. Thus, force cannot create an infinite number of things or instances of composition; therefore, it must repeat itself. That is my conclusion.

After a somewhat lengthy pause, he continued:

I substitute the word force with the word potency, which better suits the sense of my thesis. The world is infinitely finite. Infinite in time, meaning that the amount of potency has always been the same, active and eternal, and will always remain the same, active and eternal, for we do not admit that something comes from nothing, or that something turns into nothing, because it is a contradiction that, above all, repulses us.

This is a postulate that we must accept. Potency is finite because if it were not, it would negate the sense of potency, the characteristic of potency. Moments are finite and, in turn, discontinuous. We cannot admit an infinite number of force systems (potency); the latter would imply an indeterminate force. And I must admit a number of possible qualities.

We could not admit that the force, which is determined and finite, could create an infinite system of combinations with completely new states. That would be a contradiction to the finitude of force, assuming it to be eternal. In that case, we would need to conclude that it had a beginning in time and, in time, it would have an end and cease.

To admit, in the first case, the beginning of activity, we would have to admit a previous equilibrium. This previous equilibrium would be eternal and could not determine the first activity. In that case, we would have to admit that there are no infinitely new variations, only a circle of a certain number of variations that repeats constantly. The activity of force is eternal; therefore, the number of products and systems of force is infinite, so we must admit the return.

If all combinations of forces had already been exhausted, it would not have reached the infinity of time. Therefore, everything must necessarily have been repeated an infinite number of times. To deny the return, we would have to accept an infinite space where force (potency) would dissipate, thus reaching an unproductive, dead state. But if force (potency) had an end, that end would have already been reached because we admit an infinity in time for before. Or we would have to admit that there was a beginning of force, which would result in accepting a previous state of equilibrium, which we have already proven above to be impossible because it would have remained eternal.

Therefore, we are left with admitting a God who is eternally creative, who eternally creates forces and destroys them afterwards. In this way, we can deny the return. Thus, we would accept a finite work in time, which would negate the return. God, in this manner, would be an eternal and infinite being who would eternally and infinitely create the finite.

The eternal creation of the finite, of forces, would it not imply an infinite act?

In this case, it would not limit God in finitude, nor would this act contradict His attribute, because He would create “infinitely finite forces,” but He would be infinite through the act of creation itself!

However, in this way, we would have to admit that the infinity of God would be in the before, not in the after. Because the creation of the finite would imply the after. There would always be a force that would succeed another force. The very admission of the creative act of a force would limit the infinite action of God, because after the creation of one force, He would create another. Only the acceptance of the mathematical infinity of God would remain. But, on the other hand, would the admission of the creation of a force, of a new finite, not imply limitation, because this creative act would remain infinite in time?

The subsequent destruction of forces would allow for the non-realization of the return and would not imply a limitation of the infinitude of God, nor of the infinitude of His creative act, because God would infinitely continue creating finite forces, and the number of these in the before would end up being infinite in the after, and creation would not imply limitation in number.

And the infinite creation of the finite would therefore imply a creative infinity, which would not negate the attribute of God.

But, admitting an infinity before, the force would be infinite in this case, as it would have already reached infinity.

Now, admitting that man, the finite (the force, the power), creates the eternal of the return and its infinitude. If the conception of the latter repulses him, he will seek God through the negation of the return. Man, thinking about the finite, needs the infinite, just as thinking about the infinite requires the finite. Thus, God becomes an absorbing necessity of the spirit, and man, in this way, does not free himself from his conception. The conception of my finite god remains: Dionysus, who is the return of life.

After a pause, he continued: - The last state of force must necessarily be the first. This is a deduction we make from what has been previously established.

Space, like matter, is a subjective form of force. Time is not! Space arises solely from the hypothesis of empty space. And force is active. If force were to reach rest, it would have already been reached. There is no perfect balance; the balance of forces is impossible because there is no division of quality. Mechanics may admit divisibility of forces, it may go as far as the absolutely divisible; however, it cannot admit equality of divided parts because in each division, there is always quality, and quality is indivisible; thus, the balance of forces cannot occur. If forces could achieve perfect balance, it would still exist. The momentary state contradicts the hypothesis.

If we admit that there was ever a state absolutely equal to the momentary one, this assumption could not be refuted by the momentary rest.

Among the infinite possibilities, that state should have already occurred because an infinite time has passed until now. If balance were possible, it would have already occurred. If that momentary state had occurred, what gave rise to it and what immediately preceded it would have also occurred, etc., which leads to the conclusion that it would have appeared a second time and a third time, countless times, in short, backwards and forwards. This means that all becoming moves in the repetition of a certain number of perfectly equal states; but among all the circumstances, the present state is a possible state, regardless of the capacity or incapacity of our judgment regarding the possible, for it is a real state.

According to this opinion, one would have to say: all real states have already had their equals, assuming that the number of cases is not infinite and, given that time is infinite, a finite number of states have occurred. Because always, from every moment backwards, an infinite time has already passed. It is the state of rest of forces; its equilibrium is another case; but it has not been realized; therefore, the number of possibilities is greater than that of realities. The fact that nothing equal repeats itself cannot be explained by chance but by a premeditation inherent in the essence of things because if we admit an immense number of cases, it is more likely to think that by throwing dice, a chance equality of points is obtained, and not absolute difference.

Let’s simplify: 1) if the world had an end, it would have already been reached; 2) if there were a definitive, unpremeditated state for the world, it would already be realized; 3) if there had been a permanent state and a rest, and if during its course, the world had reached it in its fullness for only a moment, it could not already exist; becoming, and therefore, thinking, would not be possible. We could not contemplate becoming. 4) If the world were an eternally new becoming, it would be something marvelous, something divine, freely created by itself. 5) The eternal return presupposes: that force capriciously increases itself, and that it not only fears the intention but also the means to preserve itself from the repetition of adopting any of its old forms again, and with this, the power to control, at every moment, any movement in this direction, or the inability to reach the same state, which means that the quantity of force is not the same and likewise, the properties of force are not the same. We would have to admit something not fixed, something undulating in force, or else we would fall into the fantastic or into the old creationist ideas (multiplication of nothing, remainder of nothing, absolute arbitrariness and absolute freedom in increment and properties).

Whoever does not believe in a circular process of the whole must believe in the capricious god. Thus, my consideration is conditioned against all theistic doctrines of the past. The “chaos of the whole” as the negation of all purpose is not in contradiction with the idea of circular movement; the latter is simply a blind necessity, without any kind of formal, ethical, or aesthetic purpose. There is no intention in the part or in the whole.

One should not think that the whole tends to realize certain forms that want to be more beautiful, more perfect, more complicated. All of this is anthropomorphism! Disorder, ugliness, form are inadequate concepts. There is no imperfection in mechanics. Everything is repetition: Sirius and Spider, and our ideas at this moment, and this thought that I am now formulating that everything is repetition.

The whole world is a swarm of innumerable living beings, and although what is alive is so small in comparison to the whole, this whole has already lived in another time and will live again. If we admit an eternal time, we must admit an eternal mutation of the existing. Once I said:

Whoever you may be, beloved stranger, whom I meet for the first time, surrender yourself to the charm of this hour and the silence that surrounds us on all sides, and let me address a thought to you that rises before me like a star and that I would like to cast its light upon you as upon anyone else, for it is the mission of stars. The world of forces undergoes no diminution whatsoever; otherwise, in infinite time, these forces would have diminished until they were completely consumed. The world of forces finds no rest; otherwise, it would have already reached it, and the clock of existence would have stopped long ago. Therefore, the world of forces is never in equilibrium; it has no moment of rest; the quantity of force and the amount of motion are always equal at all times.

Whatever state this world may reach, it will have already reached it, and not once, but an infinite number of times. Likewise, this instant has already occurred in another time, and it will happen again, and all the forces will be distributed again as they are now, and the same can be said of the instant that preceded it and the one that will follow.

Man! Your whole life is like an hourglass that is constantly being turned upside down, and it always turns and runs again; a minute of time during which all the conditions that determine your existence repeat themselves in the orbit of time.

And then, you will encounter each of your pains and each of your pleasures, each of your friends and each of your enemies, and each hope, and each mistake, and each blade of grass, and each ray of light, and the multitude of objects that surround you. This chain, of which you are a small link, will shine again eternally. And in the course of every human life, there will always be an hour when, first to one, then to many, and then to all, the most powerful idea of all will illuminate them, the idea of the eternal return of things: that will be humanity’s noon hour.

As we give gravity to the inner life without becoming evil and fanatical towards those who do not think like us? Religious faith is declining, and man is approaching the idea that he is an ephemeral and insignificant being, which will eventually diminish him. He no longer cultivates effort, resistance; he wants to enjoy the present moment; he becomes superficial, and perhaps wastes much spirit with this motive…

Political illusion - I laugh at it as a contemporary of the religious illusion of past times - is, above all, secularization, faith in the world, and disregard for the “beyond” and “hell.” The present ideal is the well-being of the ephemeral individual; therefore, the result of such beliefs is socialism, meaning that the ephemeral individual wants to achieve happiness through socialization; he has no reason to wait, like men with eternal souls and eternal becoming and future improvement. My doctrine prays like this: “Live in such a way that you wish to live again; you will live again!”

Whoever desires effort, let them strive; whoever desires order, consequence, obedience, let them obey.

But whoever is conscious of their end, do not retreat from the means!

Carry eternity within you!… “But if everything is fated, what can I do about my actions?” Idea and faith are forces that gravitate upon you alongside other forces, and more than these. You say that food, environment, society transform and condition you? Well, your ideas do so with even greater force, as they determine your choice of food, place, environment, society. When you come to embody the idea of ideas, it will transform you. The question, in everything you set out to do, should be: “Is this of such a nature that I would like to do it for all eternity?” This is the greatest force…

Do you believe that you have a long rest until your rebirth? Well, you are mistaken. Between the last instant of your consciousness and the first reflection of new life, no time will elapse; it will be like a flash, even if there were living creatures that counted for billions of years, they still could not measure it. Timelessness and succession are linked to each other, while the intellect disappears.

"Let us imprint the seal of eternity on our life! This thought contains more than all the religions that despise life as transient and force the gaze towards another uncertain life.

May God save us from preaching this doctrine as an improvised religion: it must infiltrate slowly; whole generations must build upon it, giving it fertility to become a great tree that casts shade on future humanity. What are the two thousand years that Christianity lasted? Many thousands of years are needed for fruitful thoughts; for a long time, they are small and weak. This simple and almost dry idea should not require eloquence. Are you already prepared?

You must have passed through all degrees of skepticism and bathed with delight in the cold water of the stream; otherwise, you would not have the right to this idea; I want to caution you against levity and fantasy.

I want to defend my theories! I want them to be the religion of free, serene, and sublime souls: a valley amidst golden snow and a pure sky! That’s how I have thought about the Eternal Return. But if madness and death had not come to me so soon, I would have surpassed it. Everything in my philosophy promised this victory over myself. But I have always been a fatality…

His words resounded and excited numerous thoughts within me. The profoundly serious expression on my face was an indicator of what was happening inside me. I addressed him with these words:

"The theme of the Eternal Return is one that requires great observations and studies. It is easy to judge, as Unamuno did, simply as a mad idea and not examine it when refuting it with such simple and naive words. The problem addressed in the Eternal Return is not a new one. Lau-Tzu spoke clearly about it. And subsequently, in various parts of the world, the theme was approached. It is an old myth that lives in all eras and cultures.

But let us see simply how an interesting topic was fixed, one that both current science and philosophy are interested in, which is the determined and therefore finite character of the world. Spinoza himself, when seeking to make the world infinite, ultimately had to determine it in two attributes: space and thought. He saw the universe as finite in infinite time. He thus denied an absolute infinity but also did not limit it. For you, the universe would be infinite but determined: an infinite-finite.

The theme of the Eternal Return reappears as a resource. You said that man either accepts it or seeks God. There were no other paths. I do not want to advocate for your theory here. I believe that the theme of the Eternal Return encompasses much broader aspects than a simple and hasty assessment can make. Here, I merely want to establish the data from which you formed this theory, data that intersect with your other ideas but nevertheless encompass a serious and profound philosophical problem, which cannot be refuted by mockery or a simple appeal to traditional rationalism. After your death," I continued, "many scientists became interested in the theme, as well as many philosophers. Abel Rey stood out among the former. There are quotes that should not be forgotten. Surely you must know this phrase from Proclus in the prologue to Euclid’s commentary: ‘For, as the superhuman Aristotle has already said, the same thoughts return to men again and again, following certain determined periods of the universe… but they appear and, one by one, disappear, following the returns of revolutions.’

Closer to us, Auguste Blanqui, in his book ‘L’éternité des astres,’ wrote: ‘What I am writing at this moment, in a prison in the Fort of Taureau, I have already written and will write throughout eternity on a table, with a pen, under penitentiary garb, in similar circumstances… The universe perpetually represents the same roles in infinity.’

And Gustave Le Bon, in ‘L’homme et les sociétés,’ also said: ‘But if the same elements of each world serve, after their destruction, to rebuild new ones, it is easy to understand that the same combinations, meaning the same worlds inhabited by beings, will be repeated many times… Shadows of past times that you thought vanished forever in the mist of ages and that the magic wand of science evokes at will, do not expect rest, you are immortal.’

The law of eternal return had already been perceived by Eastern wisdom. We have the example of Lau-Tzu, Heraclitus in Greek philosophy, and in Hinduism as well. The interpretation of Carnot’s principle by Clausius seemed to many to have definitively settled it. Within current physics, that is what Abel Rey sought to show, the theory of the Eternal Return continues to gather evidence in its favor. But he readily recognizes that this theory truly belongs more to philosophy than to science and is, at the very least, inseparable from it. By accepting the Eternal Return, the principle of identity would be realized, but in disparate times. Thus, at one time, it will be A, and because it happened once, it will happen an infinite number of times as A.

The struggle in physics between the old schools of continuity and discontinuity gives greater or lesser importance to the doctrine of the Eternal Return. If the discontinuous constitution of universal substance is true (the atomic, electronic constitution, and its present and future subdivisions), then the Eternal Return of combinations is a rational postulate, accepting the finiteness - the unboundedness of the universe in the Einsteinian sense, previously expressed in books that you have written. Accepting the continuous substance of the universe, of which the known divisions of physics are nothing more than concentrations of particles, would lead us to the divine conception of the universe, which would allow for the admission, with as much convincing power as the other, of an eternal creation of forms through the acceptance of God.

“I once said: either man accepts the Eternal Return or accepts God. Is there no third way?”

"While I lived, I did not find that third way. The work of physics after me came in favor of my thesis. The Einsteinian conception accepts the return. Before him, I had these words. I know them by heart:

'To this idea - that the world deliberately avoids a goal and artificially safeguards itself from falling into a circular movement - all those who want to decree to the world the eternal faculty of moving away perpetually, or rather impose on a finite force a determined quantity that invariably remains the same, as the world is, the miraculous capacity for an infinite new configuration of its forms and situations must arrive. The world, though not being God, must possess the divine power of creation, the infinite power of transformation; it must willingly refrain from falling back into one of its old forms; it must not only have the intention but also the means to guard against all repetition; therefore, it must control at every moment each of its movements to avoid goals, final states, repetitions, and all other possible consequences of such unforgivably mad opinions and desires. All this always remains the ancient way of thinking and desiring, a kind of aspiration to believe that, in any case, the world is equal to the old beloved God, infinite, unlimitedly creative; that everywhere “the old God still lives,” that aspiration of Spinoza expressed in the words “deus sive natura” (he even went so far as “natura sive deus”). But what is the principle and belief with which the decisive change, the now achieved preponderance of the scientific spirit over the religious spirit, the creator of gods, is more precisely formulated?

Is it perhaps this: the world as force cannot be imagined as infinite because it cannot be imagined thus; we reject the concept of infinite force as incompatible with the concept of force. Therefore, the world lacks the faculty of eternal renewal. And do you know what the world is to me?

Shall I show it to you in the mirror? This world is a monster of force without beginning or end, a quantity of bronzed force that neither grows nor diminishes, that does not consume itself but only transforms, immutable as a whole, a house without expenses or losses, but also without progress, surrounded by ‘nothingness’ as by a border."

This world is not something vague and expendable, nor is it of infinite extension, but rather, being a determined force, it is included in a determined space, and not in a space that would be empty somewhere. Force everywhere, it is a play of forces and waves of forces, both one and multiple simultaneously, accumulating here while diminishing there, a sea of forces that provoke their own storm, eternally transforming in an eternal back-and-forth, with immense years of return, with a perpetual flow of its forces, from the simplest to the most complex, going from the calmest, the most rigid and the coldest to the hottest, the wildest, the most contradictory, towards itself, to return afterwards, from abundance to simplicity, from the play of contradictions to the pleasure of harmony, affirming itself, still in the uniformity of orbits and years, blessing itself as that which must eternally return, as a duty that never knows satiety, never boredom, never fatigue – this is my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal self-destruction, this mysterious world of double voluptuousness, my “beyond good and evil,” endless, except for the end that resides in the happiness of the circle, without will, except for a ring that possesses the goodwill to follow its path, always revolving around itself and nothing more than revolving around itself: this world that I conceive – who, then, possesses the spirit lucid enough to contemplate it without being blind? Who is strong enough to present their soul before this mirror? Their own mirror to Dionysus' mirror? Their own solution to the enigma of Dionysus? And the one who were capable of that, would they not need to do even more? Offer themselves to the “ring of rings”? With the vow of their own return?

As the ring of eternal self-blessing, of eternal self-affirmation? With the will to always want and once more? To want backward, to want all things that have already been? To want forward, to want all things that will be? Do you now know what this world is for me? And what I want when I want this world?

Do you desire a name for this universe, a solution for all enigmas?

A light even for you, the most hidden, the strongest, the most intrepid of all spirits, for you, midnight men? This world is the world of the will to power and nothing more! And you too are this will to power and nothing more…

After these words, I added:

— And if we were to interpret Eternal Return as a desire for regression? Just as the deification of the State, which, for me, is also a result of this desire for regression, this impulse to desire the support that belongs to those who find themselves in a situation of instability and cannot or do not know how to leave it?

— Leave a problem of philosophy for men: Eternal Return. It will often be sketched again and many solutions will be offered. It will often be denied and many times proposed again. What claims to be a cause could not be an effect? I have always desired a third way out of this problem. Not finding it has been one of my great torments.

— And if we were to accept that there is a return, but in accepting it, we did not affirm that all moments can return? There would be situations, combinations, that the universe would experience only once in eternity. The return could be only of certain states among the totality of states, of moments. Is that not another possibility?

He immediately replied to me:

— Yes, that would be a possibility. And in that case, we would have to admit a part of chance in existence, a chance that would allow, at a certain moment, a new combination that would not repeat itself, but we would also have to admit the possibility of a different order of repetition, the sequence of a certain state would not be the same, for example, as what we are living now. At this very moment, I could suddenly stop speaking to you. Then what today appears to us as coordinated and logical would not be so, and the unexpected would be common in our life, which does not happen. Therefore, I prefer to accept that all moments repeat themselves eternally and the eternal return is in every instant. Otherwise, it would be a concession to weakness to create a possibility for a moment of suffering not to repeat itself.

Simply accepting such a thing would be cowardice for me, and I would not stoop to that, for my entire philosophy is a philosophy of heroism.6

The Theme of Mysticism

Mystical Nietzsche?!

After the periods of youth, dominated by Christianity, the Schopenhauerian period followed, with its romantic manifestations, until reaching the positivist and pragmatic phase of youth. However, throughout this period, the reading of his work always shows us a mystical Nietzsche, profoundly mystical, which unfolds later in “Gay Science” - this Alcionic mysticism well Occitan, without him even knowing it.

In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” mysticism blossoms fully. As he himself recounts, the work was accomplished in just a few days, with great enthusiasm, both joyful and painful. There we see the use of mystical archetypes. That is why Zarathustra is one of the most difficult books. Its reading requires exegetical analysis and notes on the mystical meaning of its main expressions.7

It is in the final phase of his life, during the time of transvaluations, when mysticism becomes precise and assumes immense proportions accessible to initiated readers liberated from the dictatorship of prejudices.

What immediately transpires in his work is the always predominantly Alcionic symbolism. He was acquainted with Christian symbolism and, through the works of Schopenhauer and other authors, came into contact with Hindu symbolism from an early age.

Christianity already carries within its symbolism universal archetypes. With the presence of Hindu symbolism and Nietzsche’s profoundly mystical soul, his work is entirely expressed in individual metaphorical symbols. There are cryptophores whose meaning is difficult for the uninitiated. In our “Treatise on Symbolism,” we study the genesis and explanation of the symbol. The symbol is something that stands in place of…; therefore, every symbol points to, indicates a symbolized object. But between the symbol and the symbolized, repetition of some or several notes of the latter is required. Thus, every symbol is analogous to the symbolized. And the repeated notes form its imitative part, which should not be considered solely in an extensive, quantitative sense but in an intensive, qualitative sense. In the gestation of the symbol, there is a predominance of assimilation over accommodation, psychologically speaking. From everything for which we do not have sufficient current accommodation, an imbalanced assimilation is generated in relation to it, which leads to assimilating within previous schemes, and thus the symbol arises.

Therefore, without being able to examine this theme in detail at the moment due to its magnitude, we can state that everything that stands in place of another is a symbol, which has or is thought to have some resemblance (intrinsic, extrinsic, analogical, or participatory). This presence is not currently accommodated, and through the symbol, we seek to convey this non-actual presence to ourselves.

It is not difficult to conclude from this that everything is a symbol because everything stands in place of another. But if everything is a symbol, everything is, in turn, symbolized. Thus, there are polarizations of functions: the symbolizing and the symbolizable, the one that symbolizes and the one that is symbolized. The symbol, as such, is active; the symbolized, as such, is passive. What is the green light if not the symbol of a number of electromagnetic vibrations?

Since humans do not have sufficient accommodation of facts and, above all, do not have sufficient accommodation of what remains hidden from them, they can only speak of the hidden when they have known elements; they speak, through symbols, about the symbolized.

Symbolic language is universal, in time and space. And since there is this language, there is also symbolic thought, which is connected to all human thought and also underlies operative, intellectualized, objective thought. The latter works with concepts, abstract schemes, expressed through verbal signs, terms. Here it is necessary to distinguish between the sign and the symbol. While every sign may or may not have notes of the symbolized, the symbol always has them. Thus, the symbol is a sign, but not every sign is a symbol because it can be conventional, even arbitrary.

Another aspect needs to be emphasized: every symbol is polyvalent, that is, it has multiple meanings, as it can be a symbol of various symbolized objects. Likewise, the symbolized object is poly-symbolizable, capable of receiving multiple symbols.8

Solitude, as a symbolized object, can receive various symbols that indicate it: a tree in a deserted plain or a rock surrounded by ocean waves, etc. In turn, solitude can be a symbol, in mysticism, of the supreme One (the seventh mystical solitude) or of the soul contemplating the Divine.

Thus, we quickly see that each symbol can have multiple meanings, and each symbolized object can be symbolized in various ways.

It is understood, therefore, that in all mystical language, there is symbolism, and mysticism cannot be expressed otherwise, as it is a technique of penetrating the hidden through systematic or non-systematic means. A clear differentiation between mysticism and aesthetics is assumed.

Nietzsche was an aesthetic-mystic; he combined mysticism with philosophy, contemporaneously with aesthetics. And since he did not restrain his mystical impulses by subjecting them to a vicious operative method, as his positivist phase could have allowed, he delved into the deepest depths and had those Alcionic flights that took him to previously unknown heights, enabling him to reach, through himself, the most profoundly human aspects. This placed him, for example, in the field of psychology, at the highest degree anyone had attained in the nineteenth century. It can be said, and we have already shown it in “The Man Who Was a Battlefield,” that all modern psychology revolves around Nietzschean themes and problems.

Aesthetics has its roots in affectivity and not in intellectuality, although they always combine, coexist but to varying degrees of intensity. The artist is “pathic,” and the operative aspect emerges as an auxiliary, and when it dominates, we have intellectualism, which is already a weakening of the aesthetic.

Now, the language of the artist is symbolic language, which can be disposed of operatively, adhering to the logic of intellectuality (formal). Every artist suffers from an anguish present in all their expressive experiences: the limitation of the symbol and the narrowness of the sign. Aesthetic creation is the expression of the symbolized through symbols and signs, which create limits, obstacles, and impossibilities that the artist tries to overcome, master, and escape from. Thus, in aesthetic creation, there is always a crisis that arises from the separation between the symbolized and the symbol, between the hidden and what is manifested.

Immersed in the mystical experience, artists feel that they penetrate the fullness of art. But there is an important difference. The aesthetic experience is a mysticism of the symbol because it encompasses in its impulse the hidden that the symbol expresses, and it works with symbols to arrange them aesthetically, making them speak as tensional parts and wholes. In aesthetics, we virtualize the symbolized in order to let the symbol speak. In mysticism, we have the aesthetics of the symbolized, not just any symbolized object, but the hidden symbolized object. This is actualized in the experience, and the symbol is virtualized, which the mystic only actualizes when expressing it with the intention of conveying the inexpressible, and in this case, they become an aesthete.

Every time the artist lives beyond all symbols, they become mystics. But when they seek to point to the hidden through symbols, they are mystical aesthetes because they combine the mystical with the aesthetic, as Nietzsche exemplifies.

All great art is symbolic language and therefore mystical. If it confines itself only to the symbol, stripping it of its content, it declines.

A theory of decadence would fit in here. An era is in decline when the symbol gradually loses its meaning. And what do we witness today? Is not aesthetics tending only to function with symbols without their meaning? Are we living what the symbols hide? Are we facing them without capturing their content? That is why our art is abstract, and resolutely so, convinced that we grasp everything better by not seeking the language in which they express their content. When Nietzsche exclaimed, “these churches are caves and tombs of God!” was he not referring to the symbolism without meaning in our beliefs?

And does not every cultural cycle perish when its symbols have completely lost contact with their content, when they speak only of themselves?9

In the “Birth of Tragedy,” the mystical already transpired. Let’s examine this passage: “A metaphysical consolation momentarily rescues us from the turmoil of changing appearances. In a few moments, we truly become the primordial Being itself and feel its appetite, its unbridled Happiness of existing. Struggle, pain, the annihilation of phenomena then seem to us imposed by the excess of the countless forms of existence, which burst forth in life and collide, due to the exuberant fecundity of the universal Will. The furious sting of these sufferings places us, at the very moment we are one, with the immense primordial Happiness of existence and in which, in the Dionysian rapture, we present what this Happiness has that is indestructible and eternal. Wonder and compassion do not prevent us from being Happy-living beings, not as individuals, but as identified with the sole Living Being, in the creative intoxication from which we are founded.”

After the positivist phase, it can be said that Nietzsche’s complete incorporation into mysticism occurred in 1881, in the solitude of Sils-Maria. Let’s listen to this letter he wrote to Peter Gast on that occasion (August 14, 1881): “… The August sun is above our heads. The year has passed, and there is increasing silence and peace over the mountains and forests. Thoughts have arisen in my horizon that I had never had before - I do not want to divulge anything, and I must maintain an undisturbed calm. I really need to live a few more years! Ah! My friend, sometimes the vague idea crosses my mind that, deep down, I live a dangerous life, like those machines that can explode. The fervor of my feelings makes me shudder and laugh - sometimes I couldn’t leave the room for the ridiculous reason that my eyes were inflamed - how did that happen? Always because I had cried too much the day before during my walks, and tears not of sentimentality, but of jubilation; singing and saying crazy things, full of a new vision that I had the privilege of having before all other men.”

In the following days, he made this note: “Beginning of August 1881, in Sils-Maria, 6,000 feet above the sea and much higher than all human things.” And later, years later, he said: “6,000 feet above man and time.”

From there, the most joyful, vibrant, nuanced, and profound work emerges, although not always the most appreciated and read: “Gay Science” (“Fröhliche Wissenschaft”). From there, the superhuman figure of Zarathustra and the great theme of Eternal Return were born. It was on this occasion, in Sils-Maria, near Lake Portofino, that the great mystical figure of Zarathustra appeared to him. “Then, suddenly, One became Two - and Zarathustra passed before me.” He claims to have been “assaulted” by him.

It is at this time that the following posthumous fragment arises: “In truth, there are no individual truths, but nothing more than individual errors - the individual itself is an error… We are the branches of a single Tree. Almost always a symbol to him. Let us cease to feel this imaginary ego. Let us gradually learn to repudiate the alleged individuality. Let us discover the errors of the ego. Let us recognize that selfishness is an error. Above all, let us not conceive of altruism as its opposite; that would be the love of other alleged individualities. No; let us surpass “I” and “You”; let us have the cosmic sense.”

Nietzsche always denies the concept of the individual, which for him is false. But to him, each individual is nothing more than a mode of the Absolute Reality. The alliance between Suffering and Joy in the universal Being is the substance of our life. We are nothing but “layers around this mortal nucleus.” It should not be concluded from this that Nietzsche would accept the annihilation of the individual entirely alienated from the State or the party of the totalitarians. Everything we have seen so far would clearly show that this interpretation would be flawed, and we will not repeat it again.

Nietzsche an anti-Christian? It is common to think so, and he himself affirmed it. However, in this “Froeblichwissenschaftslehrer,” in this “teacher of gay science,” in this mystical lover of the cosmic, the struggle against a certain anti-cosmic interpretation of man as divine was updated. Nietzsche never denied the cosmic Christ - let us remember his phrase “the only Christian died on the cross” - and his work reveals to us this love and respect for Christ, the only man without resentments. He rebelled against the interpretations of Christ. "God conceived as the freedom conquered over morality, enclosing all the exuberance of vital oppositions and redeeming them, exonerating them in his martyrdom: - God: the Beyond, the Above in relation to the miserable morality of Mariola, which is that of ‘good and evil’ (he wrote in 1888). And furthermore: “The refutation of God: - in truth, only the moral God is refuted.” What value would a religion have in which God is loved only out of fear or in the hope of benefits? Wouldn’t this God be much more valuable, and wouldn’t we love Him without hope?

His thoughts always turn to God, represented by the Whole, or by the Higher, the Highest in the Whole, infinite and eternal, the synthesis of the diverse, the harmony of discord, the coincidence of opposites, resembling in many ways the thought of Nicholas of Cusa.

Profound midnight, blazing sun, supreme purity, luminous joy, deep desire, will to power above all things, all of this is the voice of the most distant, the strangest, the most unknown. To this God came another, the spirit of Heaviness, the Tempter, the original desire, still divine, still creative, which manifests itself in the fall of being through becoming. Dionysus, the fleet-footed, mediator of salvation, opposed this spirit of heaviness, the eternal masculine, just as Ariadne is the eternal feminine.

And through the two spirits within us, Dionysus and Ariadne, we free ourselves from the spirit of heaviness and reach the divine."

And turning to him, I began to recite:

— “It is in the Heights that I am with myself, the Heights, I do not desire them. I do not raise my eyes; I am the one who lowers his gaze, the one who blesses, because the one who blesses always lowers his gaze…”

I felt his face light up, and he continued:

— “We live among clouds and lightning as among our peers, but also with the rays of the sun, the drops of dew, the snowflakes, with everything that necessarily comes from above and can only, if it moves, move from above to below… Aspirations for the heights are not ours…” - he paused, and as if evoking, he continued: - a bird’s-eye view… to live above us.

Ah, Holy January… my “spring”… those who have blinded eyes and spirit, let them seek the shade, even when they chase the sun… - And in a confidential tone: - After being tired of searching, I learned to find; because only after a contrary wind can we pray for all winds. Is it not the duty of the stars to be pure? And was I not predestined to the astral paths, and as a star, what did the shadow matter to me? - and leaning closer to me: - But the hours will come when you will perceive what infinity is, and that nothing is more irreducible than infinity. Poor bird, who felt yourself free and yet struggle within the walls of this cage. Unfortunate are you if the nostalgia for Earth holds you captive, as if there were more freedom here… when there is no more Earth.

Whoever you are, dear stranger whom I meet for the first time, be aware of this happy hour and the silence that surrounds us and is above us, and let me speak to you of a thought that rose before my eyes like a star and only asks to cast its rays upon me, upon you, and upon all, as is peculiar to the light of the stars. Ephemeral individuals seek happiness through socialization; they have no reason to attain it, just as eternal-souled men have no reason in eternal becoming and future perfection, as I have said before.

Only where there are tombs are there resurrections. My Will wanted to be the destroyer of tombs. It is not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values that the universe revolves; and even though they do not hear it, it revolves. The great events are not the noisiest, but they occur in the quietest hours. They have pushed men’s despair to the maximum, for the destroyers of the human are lurking on every corner of the world, seducing all the naive. How much lie is enshrined as truth, marching hastily towards the abyss. What must die must die, and what is already dead must be buried. But what a terrible spectacle when death plays the role of life. All of this is the prologue to the Catastrophe.

When Zarathustra no longer knew how to obey, it would be his turn to command. But Zarathustra replied to his Silent Voice that he lacked the voice of the lion.

But it is the most silent words that raise storms. It is the thoughts that arise with shadowy steps that move the world. Is it not in the quietest hours of the night that the dew falls?

Zarathustra was still not ripe for his ripest fruits.

— But is Zarathustra ripe now, after having withdrawn to the mountain for meditation?

— I have already said that it is the most silent words that raise storms. There are thoughts with shadowy steps that penetrate all souls. Man is destructive when he cannot create. He must do something… I did not fear the rise of nihilism, for it would tire of its passivity. And active nihilism will also tire of its negativity. And then, an active and positive nihilism will emerge, which is so mine, which was my flesh and my blood.

Men are already tired of hating and tired of their fury, and on the lonely path, they have visions of light that suggest to them: “Why not love after all? - There is such sweet frenzy in Love!”

I was a star, for why would I resign myself to wander without a Homeland?

Solitude, solitude, my Homeland!

I am that predestined man who sets values for millennia.

In truth, everything comes at the hour it must depart!

I preached a new moment of power: the mystical state and the clearest, boldest rationalism, which serve as a path to attain it.

We are no longer Christians because we have surpassed Christianity, not because we lived it too closely, and above all because we moved away from it. It is our piety, made more rigorous and harder to satisfy, that prevents us from being Christians today. Have they accused me of sins against my God? But who knows who my God is?

How could I have lived if I did not have visions of the future, of a future beyond you? The man must be saved from Appearance, no matter the cost. We are in the period of the Catastrophe, and even the weak feel they must do something.

But I want to speak to the strong, to those who have the clearest and sharpest gaze, the longest arm and the hardest heart, to the most resolute, to those men of the most conscious and vast responsibility.

I know that it is impossible to teach the Truth where thought is low.

I speak to those who have blood in their veins, to those capable of hearing the Bird’s song, to the strong who will break all chains! Equality for equals, inequality for unequals! Let those who are exceptions be exceptions; let those who are rules be rules. But there are only exceptions where there is a rule.

Now he disappeared. It was in an impulse that I asked:

— Can men depart from humanity to reach super-humanity?

His distant voice mumbled deeper than ever:

— Since when have men been human? Ah! Do not think that to attain humanity you do not need exceptions. Create them, force them to arise. Your liberation will be gained step by step, as you understand what greatness lies within you. Why do you try to be frogs when it is as eagles that you will ascend to great heights?

When you understand this and act accordingly, then you will hear a new song: the world will be transfigured, and the Heavens will rejoice!

Meditations on Fantasy as Compensation for Reality

What humanity can create lies in the potential of today’s men, just as it did in the men of yesterday. Individually, one man may not possess this potential to the same extent as another, or may even lack it.

However, it exists within today’s men. Some of us are receptacles of something great from tomorrow. Just this awareness is enough to give human life a different dignity. One of us, and many of us, will bear what man can achieve at his greatest. That is why we are the bridge, and it is out of love for this tomorrow that we must love and respect ourselves. We are, therefore, much more than we appear or express; we are the future. Is it not because we have an intuition of this tomorrow that, no matter how much its historical conditions detach us from it, we can never distance ourselves from it? And is it not also the anguish we feel in the face of what we do not do, the disillusionment with our unrealized possibilities?

The discussion about the origins of art is now more than ever subjected to the investigations undertaken by anthropologists and aestheticians (in the philosophical sense, of course) to pinpoint them.

Studies on the psychogenesis of art already offer us a certain number of data that are extraordinarily useful for clarifying some controversial points.

First of all, as we examined in “Aesthetics,” it is essential to distinguish aesthetics as a discipline that studies both transcendent and immanent beauty from art, which is a human creation. Aesthetics is thus returned to philosophy, no longer in its original sense as a discipline that studies sensibility, but rather in the post-Baumgartenian sense as a discipline that studies beautiful things, whether independent or dependent on human activity.

Thus, a twilight, a chain of mountains, a bay are objects of aesthetic analysis, while a painting, a building, a sculpture are objects of art.

Let us clarify a few other aspects, albeit briefly, so that we can analyze themes of Nietzsche’s work on aesthetics and art, which we are currently addressing, without indicating or attempting to be an exhaustive study of his ideas, which we will undertake in the future. Let us merely highlight some aspects that speak to us more directly and are therefore of greater interest.

Primitive man, in transitioning from his original hominid phase to his position as homo faber, entered life with the ability to perceive possibilities of possibilities clearly manifested, a fundamental aspect of human specificity that sets him apart from animals entirely.

Under these special and unique conditions in nature, he could become what he has become: man, homo sapiens.

We cannot repeat here our studies presented in “Aesthetics,” but we must remember that in the face of nature, evil, and above all, in the face of death—the first and profound meditation of man—opposing values would naturally have gained much greater relevance. The cosmic terror that overwhelmed him intensified these values, which, to be actualized, would require man to encounter moments, facts, and events where positive values were present, as he naturally would. But the ephemeral nature of happiness in life is something that primitive man already felt, and that we, cultured and civilized, accentuate with the emphasis given by our consciousness.

Terrified between constant evil and sporadic good, all the religiosity of this man was astonishment, terror, fear, which structured themselves into tombs and petrified into temples.

Until reaching this advanced state, characteristic of high cultures, burdened by the restraints of society from which he cannot free himself but within which he feels, like us, eternally bound to self-awareness, an observer faced with the failure of his own dreams and fantasies, which always accompany him and have their roots so deeply embedded in the sensory-motor system, man sought purification from everything that troubled him. “Catharsis” was a necessary consequence of this condition.

For primitive man, the symmetry of things, plants, crystals had no significance for him. But one day, thanks to his ability to perceive possibilities of possibilities, he managed to extract it from the magic in which it was immersed by creating technique. And it was technique that allowed him to achieve symmetries.

It was technique, starting from chipped stone, that allowed him to feel and perceive, in a still naive affectivity, the balance of forms, the genesis of a subsequent understanding and cultivation of the balance of values.

And this purification, this “catharsis,” when expressed in values of balance, harmony, allowed man to create art.

When he expressed his joy or sadness through leaps, when he articulated his anxieties, fears, and desires in a primitive and vital rhythm, he did not create art. When he carved stone, when he shaped wood to serve as an extension of his muscles, for defense and attack, he still did not create art. But on the day he bestowed upon all of this something of that aesthetic quality, that order revealed in symmetrical harmonies, when he expressed his “catharsis” in aesthetic terms, he became an artist.

Imagination, fantasy, which already reveals itself even in animals (although much debated), and which we observe in visual hallucinations studied by Johannes Muller and sought to be explained by modern neurology, allowed him, thanks to technique, to materialize in aesthetic forms, which was a step towards the realization of art.

And this technique, broken down into its elements, reveals to us intelligence, a will that lies in activity, and an end to which it is destined, allowing it to be subsequently systematized, transmitted, and taught. And, as a predisposing factor, it allowed some men, more sensitive, more affective, to transform it into the great means that brought coherence to “catharsis” and forms. Thus, art emerged, stuttering as in all beginnings of life, but it matured and finally established itself, an eternal revelation of man’s progress that the ebb and flow of history will never erase or destroy.

The birth of art with religion and religion with art? Perhaps one day this question will be answered by saying that art and religion are merely distinct aspects of the same identity, because there is as much of the religious in the artist as there is of the artistic in religion. And in that case, they would both find themselves in a common root, in this “catharsis” of the human soul, which through technique reaches even the aesthetic.

But everything depends on the concept given to religion, and although a thorough study of such a magnitude is beyond the scope here, we would like to say that religion has nothing to do with “religare,” as Cicero said, but rather with “relego,” to gather, to assemble, albeit with veneration, with homage, from “alegeyn,” a Greek verb, also its possible root. But this word offers a twofold meaning, for “alegeyn” also means to worry, to be afflicted. And is not “relego” also a saying anew? And is not religion a speaking anew, a speaking always, about what afflicts us, about what concerns us, paying homage to that which connects us with the unnameable, superior to us? Does not this word contain so much, point so much, that all the origins sought by etymologists say so little about religion? What immense symbol, that one, and with how many meanings.

Nietzsche felt many aspects of religions, but as for art, there is an aphorism that deserves to be quoted and meditated upon:

“Art raises its head when religions lose ground.” (Are we not here facing a reflux of religions that become temporal, distancing themselves from eternity, and art emerges to give them that eternity that has been lost? Let us remember the mysticism of an El Greco, in the midst of the Baroque, and quite musical. Does it not express the piety that times no longer express, and that no longer resonates in hearts? And is not the Counter-Reformation greatly manifested in art, since it can no longer awaken, except in rare cases, that religious fervor that no longer permeates the collective movements that Gothic so clearly revealed? Let us listen to Nietzsche: “It collects a multitude of feelings and tendencies produced by religion, places them on the heart, and then it becomes deeper, more soulful, to the point that it can communicate the elevation and enthusiasm that could no longer be communicated before. The treasure of religious sentiment, thickened until it forms a torrent, overflows again and seeks to conquer new realms; but the progress of enlightenment has shattered the dogmas of religion and inspires a fundamental distrust: thus, the sentiment expelled by the light of the religious sphere takes refuge in art, in some cases also in political life, and even directly in science. Wherever one perceives a darker, superior collaboration in human efforts, it can be conjectured that the fears of spirits, the perfume of incense, and the shadows of the Church remain trapped there.”

This is the panorama of the Baroque. A religiousness already different because much of vitality, of humanity, and of the earthly invades that art which also pays homage to life. It is the era of philanthropy, of awareness of the wretched human condition.

The imbalance of man arises from his dissatisfaction, in which he is always immersed. And this imbalance comes from remote eras, from that moment when the hominid, descending from the trees and traversing the long plains in search of scarce food, suddenly found himself forced by circumstances to choose humanity. This “choice,” which we study in “General Noology,” is one of the most well-founded hypotheses of modern anthropology, for without it, we could not in any way comprehend that qualitative leap that elevated the hominid to humanity.

In this primitive state, still immersed in the concrete, in the most primary phases of intuition, man had not yet constructed his subjectivity, and therefore seeks in the external world, in things, the satisfaction that he lacks.

But things resist him and do not submit immediately. He needs to overcome them, dominate them, use some to dominate others; experience teaches him, and he already has the assimilative capacity that his spirit, not yet fully delineated but already sufficient to build new frameworks, allows him to gradually overcome.

He experiences victories and failures, and dreams of new satisfactions, imagines new victories. Years and millennia pass, the instruments are recreated, he builds new extensions for his weak limbs. And he creates technique. Whenever he cannot technically dominate things, he seeks to dominate them magically. Magic is always where technique is, and technique is where magic is.

And carried away by technique, he gradually submits to it, becoming realistic.

And where technique is not enough, magical thinking ensues, and he dreams and creates possible satisfactions. And amidst dreams, there are realities. And he discovers new means of control and, in turn, submits to them. And thus, from a phase of imagination, a phase of realism emerges. And with satisfactions come dissatisfactions. It is a flux and reflux, rebellion and submission, dream and reality, peace between two wars, war between two sides.

And art is there as an eloquent testimony of all these periods, which continue to succeed in an invariability of functions, despite all the modalities, the new and unprecedented forms that mark its variance of forms.

Two periods always confront each other. Man facing things, self-control, victory over oneself or victory over the corporeal facts of the external world. In one, magic; in the other, technique, following different lines that sometimes intersect, sometimes collide, sometimes diverge, but always opposed and always cooperating despite the opposition. Magic creating possibilities and technique actualizing them, in turn, creating through its satisfactions new dissatisfactions that make one dream of possibilities that are then actualized by technique.

But amidst these periods of ebb and flow, we can visualize some in which there is an emphasis, on one side or the other, greater than on other occasions. Then history tells us of the tragedy of this clash with colors that pale the preceding facts, and the bitterness on the lips of men is very clear and expressive, so that we know they suffer.

The artist never reproduces reality except schematically and symbolically. Realism is a mistake that arises on certain occasions, in decadent periods, when, as a differentiation and opposition to the excesses of fantasy in art, there are artists who feel the imposition of an era that wants and needs to see reality in all its rawness. And the artist believes that he can also be a realist, like any objective man, whose pathic interest is a constant reflection on the objective world that his intellect constructs. “We give back what enchants us in things, what attracts us in them; but these feelings are not respected by reality! You do not know what is the cause of feelings! All good art considered itself realistic!”

The fundamental contradiction between the artist, as a predominantly pathic and affective man, eager for those ecstasies, for that knowledge acquired through his fusion with things, men, and feelings, manifests itself in his realism, which is very different from the realism of the intellectualized and objective man, whose entire activity is extroverted in a desire to dominate things. The realistic man of this sense wants to dominate reality, the artist wants to live it. How could they understand each other then?

Honorable art, bourgeoisly honored, this is presumed realism that, in the artist, reaches a caricatural aspect, not of a dominator of reality, but of a simple dominated, subjected to the object. Miserable naive honesty, afraid of getting intoxicated with its own feelings, hence it copies, imitates, repeats. And above all, it lies to itself when, as Nietzsche shows, it proclaims: “Reality is a perfection”; this sophism has been repeated too often. “What we greatly admire must be true.”

The perfection of nature is aesthetic, and almost always a goal to be achieved; the perfection of the artist is artistic, and also a goal to be achieved. But the artist is, in art, a creator; he is culture, he is a cause. Nature is only an effect. And by copying it, he is not fully himself.

— –

For Nietzsche, every human moment is decadence and ascent. The graduality of these processes lends variety to history.

“Our life must be an ascent step by step, not a flight or a fall; but the latter is the ideal of fantasy-minded men. This bad habit degrades most of life; in turn, we become accustomed to belittling other men because we do not see them in ecstasy: it is insane, for we have to pay for the aesthetic-moral dissipations. When we feel deep discomfort and inner discouragement, the dose of elevation must be stronger and we end up becoming indifferent to merit and succumbing to stronger excitement. Decadence. This process is visible in the history of all arts: the classical period is the one in which ebb and flow differ very little, and the norm is a comfortable feeling of strength: what produces strong commotions is always lacking: these appear in periods of decadence.”

Now, for Nietzsche, there is always a world that is born and a world that dies, a world that ascends and a world that declines. These two processes have gradual intensities. In periods of culture, of youthful creation, the ascension process is intensely strong, and what dies perishes silently and without nostalgia, with its eyes turned toward tomorrow; but that tomorrow is almost always a disappointment, and this bitterness deeply marks life. Dreams and hopes die first, and the equilibrium between an ascension flow and a decadent outflow dynamically balances for a certain period, in which man is satisfied with the already achieved conquests and wants to fully live them; and that’s when the classic period emerges. Then… the bitter aftermath of the descent, a nostalgic ending, full of impulses, a late youthfulness, a senile eroticism, in which one believes to create when one merely repeats, exaggerates, exacerbates acquired values, embarks on false paths that lead to dark abysses. And he returns disappointed, seeking hopes outside himself because inside, in the soul, in the heart, the voices of creation have long been silenced. It is the end, the twilight full of lights and shifting colors, of dull gold and blood reds. But only a twilight in which each moment affirms the darkness that inexorably advances to cover everything with its silence of shadows.

But in this twilight, in this reflux full of splendor and vanities, silently, amidst the darkness, a light ascends, a trembling light at first, but one that will shine afterwards, and eventually merge with the marvelous victorious emergence of the dawns that affirm the light.

This is the history of men. An eternal chapter that repeats a victory between two dawns and an eternal nostalgia between two twilights.

— –

The current lack of culture is a consequence of the advent of capitalism, which allows for a rapid ascent to the highest positions of men with low culture and proven mental weakness. They lacked the leisure of the wise, who undertake study and delve into knowledge.

It is not surprising that today, more than ever, the man of study is fought against, “the man of the study,” the one “who lives in an ivory tower,” and other clichés that all the common people in the world repeat, endlessly, like the croaking of frogs.

The improvisation of knowledge is the rule, and to cover it up with some mantle, a very diaphanous one that gives an appearance of seriousness, the diplomas of higher education exist to assert that their holders know what would be just a mere presumption.

The hasty popularization of knowledge favors the simple reading of any pamphlet, which gives the common man the self-sufficiency of someone who already knows.

And there is no shortage, even for them, of popular philosophies, worldviews presented in little more than a dozen pages, to enrich knowledge, accompanied by that malodorous literature of periodicals, the great convergence field of the most self-sufficient common people of our time.

All of this contributes to the failure of our culture. However, this does not prevent many people from escaping the nauseating contact of the public square, from fleeing the self-praising groups, the systematic literati, and devoting their time and their capacity for work and intelligence to the great adventures of thought and the necessary research to escape from this ignorant primitivism, which clothes itself in the garb of the most perfect revolutionism of all times, as if we were evolving in any direction, transforming the self-sufficient boor into the guide of humanity.

This repulsive chapter in history, which has been going on for a couple of centuries, has not yet concluded its last page. But upon seeing the characters who will play the final act, we can already foresee the histrionics of the ending. It hurts, it pains us, however, that all of this will be profoundly tragic.

— –

One of the most important aspects of Nietzsche’s work is undoubtedly the theme of value. He was the one who paved the way for the study of this theme, the great theme of our time. As early as the last century, he understood that man would bring the problem of value to the table, because in general, man had lost so much in dignity that little remained.

Nietzsche being a romantic is nothing original in that statement. But Nietzsche is a Nietzschean romantic, with a heroism that has nothing to do with romantic condorism. He felt, in his own flesh, the decadence that overwhelmed the world. However, he did not blame capitalism for it. Capitalism only dominated because decadence had already established itself; therefore, it was only a consequence and not a factor. But in turn, the capitalist would hasten this decadence, and the easy rise of men with low culture to high positions would accelerate the process of decadence. And what arises in these periods when they reach their climax? The inevitable question is: what is the value of all this? What value does it have?

And this question, which arose from his lips, did not dance around in a mere nihilistic “nitchevo” of the steppes. Nietzsche wanted to answer the question because he was a positive and active nihilist, as he defined himself, and therefore, he needed to answer. And thanks to his answers, new questions arose, and thus the theme of value grew to such an extent that today we have disciplines like Axiology and Timology dedicated to its study. Never before has so much been written about a theme like this. And the question remains terribly demanding: what is the value of all this?

And there are only two answers: none or something. Why none and why something? And what would that something of value consist of?

— –

But Nietzsche, who understood value as linked only to life, already comprehended in his words what Camus would later express in a different way: “Il n’est pas de destin qu’on ne surmonte par le mépris” (There is no destiny that cannot be overcome through contempt).

But for Nietzsche, this contempt was, beyond heroic and supremely heroic, a gesture of love towards transcendence. Because in despising and overcoming one’s fate, one also needed to love it (“amor fati”), to love it as the inseparable companion of one’s life. But there is love with submission, as well as love with transcendence. It is this love that Nietzsche spoke of. And the value of life was in life itself, as life, and in ourselves as we exalted it through our heroism. Now, heroism was the value of value for Nietzsche. And truly so it was. Therefore, a Nietzschean category of values would require not only positive and negative values but also virtuous positive and negative values. And towering above them all, as the value that values values, is the heroic.

Thus, the kind would be the vicious value of the good, to which evil would be its opposite, and the wicked would be the vicious form of evil. And what is their position then? Between being bad and being wicked, between being good and being kind, Nietzsche prefers normal values and disdains the vicious ones. Either men are good or bad, never kind or wicked. There is greatness in evil, just as there is in good. But there is a valuation of these values when heroism enters the picture because there is heroism in both good and evil. This heroism (and Nietzsche’s entire philosophy is the philosophy of heroism, and it is pointless to search for Nietzschean systems or constructions as many think) is the impetus, the value-assigning vector of all values.

One might say that Nietzsche then wanted either good or evil? We should indeed choose, but choose what would give us reasons for greater heroism. And the greatest would be in good because it is genuinely easier to be evil.

To desire to bless mankind is a Nietzschean cry, a loving gaze upon suffering humanity, but a greater love for humanity that surpasses itself, the gaze of Zarathustra. “What good have I done today?” This is the prayer of all heroic men before life. We must overcome the smallness of our existence through great contempt, but contempt for weakness, fragility, and passive compassion, and fight for that virile brother of compassion, the active, rebellious, creative one.

Always the heroic. However, there are passages in which Nietzsche considered the hero only an acceptable type, placing the saint and the sage above him. It is true, but it must be considered that heroism is not an exclusive characteristic of heroes alone. Heroism exists in heroes, but there is heroism in the face of the mystery of the world, in the face of fate, in thought, and even in ourselves, above all, in ourselves. The saint is heroic, and so is the sage. That is the ever-present heroism that values values.

And all this digression we have made was necessary because we are talking about art. Is there a possibility of heroism for the artist as well?

Yes, would be Nietzsche’s answer, and it was his answer throughout his life and in his entire work, which, as an artist, was a manifestation of heroism. But not every artist is a hero, for there are desperate ones. And because they exist, they destroy what they cannot create or what has already constituted the greatness of others.

“When an artist cannot give birth to the fruits of his imagination in a clear and good environment but needs darkness and caves to fertilize it, let us leave him. Likewise, when he needs hatred and envy to remain faithful to his artistic character. An artist is not a guide to life, as I have said before,” and that says it all.

The Hindu, immobile, contemplating the world, observes the mutability of things, the eternally changing Maya; the Roman, active, conqueror of the world, homogenizing distances, sees immutability, the eternally same, the identical being.

A similar observation comes to mind when we think of Nietzsche’s personality. Those who read him without delving into him will easily conclude that he is extremely volatile, that his work is a constant variation, and that incoherence prevails in his statements, now energetic, harsh, and dry, now gentle, sweet, and tender, now affirmative, now negative; now accepting, now rejecting.

However, volatility in Nietzsche is superficial in his work. Like the immobile Hindu before the spectacle of the world, he sees the mutability of things, of men, and even of himself. And therein lies the greatness of his work; Nietzsche transforms himself into a spectacle, an object that he analyzes and reanalyzes, decomposes, examines, observes, sometimes with gentle and indulgent eyes, tender and condescending, sometimes stern, cruel, and harsh, with rigorous intolerance.

There are variations, but there are invariants in his work.

And among these invariants, never contradicted by him, is his immense faithfulness to himself, never ceasing to be what he is at each moment, naive and cynical, but extremely heroic at every stage of his journey, even in moments when everything wavers around him, when the body can no longer bear it, the heroic spirit, quixotic and arrogant, does not hesitate and always advances on its march. But there is more: there is that immense cosmic love, that amor fati, without a note of despair or complaint, that eternal trust in human transcendence, despite all the disappointments he witnesses.

His work is never a justification of weakness but an exaltation of strength, not in the superficial and purely physical sense. The strength Nietzsche speaks of is not the strength of muscles or weapons, but the strength of the strong, of the courageous and heroic man, the man capable of facing all dangers, whether of the body or of the spirit. That is why the philosopher, the sage, the saint, the hero were exalted. However, never weakness.

  1. Could we accept a Napoleon without exclamation marks? An Alcibiades, a Caesar, an Alexander?

    Could we express this sentence as follows:

    “From the top of these pyramids, forty centuries gaze upon you.” Don’t we all feel that something is missing? And thus:

    “From the top of these pyramids, forty centuries gaze upon you!”

    Don’t we feel the tone of voice? The exclamation mark is one of the high curves of literature, art, poetry, and oratory.

    Who are those who rise against the exclamation mark and against eloquence? The accents of surprise, astonishment, admiration, ecstasy, revolt, anger, hatred, enthusiasm require exclamation marks.↩

  2. Nietzsche forgets that the happiness of a being must be in its highest perfection. The happiness of a plant would be plant-like plenitude, and that of an animal, in being animalistic. The highest perfection of man, which does not exclude the animalistic, lies in intelligence. Therefore, well-being can be animalistic, but human felicity must be intellectual because that is its highest perfection. Nietzsche did not develop a greater philosophical speculation; therefore, he speaks more as a “litterateur.”↩

  3. Despite his genius and knowledge, N. did not sufficiently understand Theology, which is why he considered the caricature made exoterically of the idea of God to be the genuine thought of the great theistic philosophers.↩

  4. Creation for Christianity is not the act of extracting something out of nothing, for nothing has nothing, but rather the affirmation that before finite things were created, there was nothing of finite things. However, there was the Supreme Being, who is the Creator.↩

  5. We will not discuss here the theological aspect of Nietzsche’s statement, but in fact, it is evident that he did not understand or was unaware of the analyses already carried out regarding creation, which would have allowed him to understand that the act of creation is an infinite act because only an infinite power could create something from nothing, which the finite cannot accomplish. This is the explanation attributed to Thomas Aquinas, the discussion of which is beyond the scope here, and we do so in “Man in the Face of the Infinite.”↩

  6. In presenting this theme, we have sought to remain faithful to Nietzsche’s thought without discussing it from a philosophical angle, as doing so would require many restrictions that would deviate us from the intended purpose of this work.↩

  7. This is what we did in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” under a new direct translation from German, accompanied by explanatory notes and symbolic analyses that make the text clearer.↩

  8. The symbolic dialectic is analyzed in our book “Treatise on Symbolism.”↩

  9. This thesis is developed in our book “Philosophy and History of Culture.”↩

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