Epilogue

Let us recover our breath in the end by getting away for a moment from the narrow world to which every question about the worth of persons condemns the spirit. A philosopher feels the need to wash his hands after having dealt so long with “The Case of Wagner.”—

I offer my conception of what is modern.—In its measure of strength every age also possesses a measure for what virtues are permitted and forbidden to it. Either it has the virtues of ascending life: then it will resist from the profoundest depths the virtues of declining life. Or the age itself represents declining life: then it also requires the virtues of decline, then it hates everything that justifies itself solely out of abundance, out of the overflowing riches of strength. Aesthetics is tied indissolubly to these biological presuppositions: there is an aesthetics of decadence, and there is a classical aesthetics—the “beautiful in itself”¹ is a figment of the imagination, like all of idealism.—

In the narrower sphere of so-called moral values one cannot find a greater contrast than that between a master morality² and the morality of Christian value concepts: the latter developed on soil that was morbid through and through (the Gospels present us with precisely the same physiological types that Dostoevsky’s novels describe),³ master morality (“Roman,” “pagan,” “classical,” “Renaissance”) is, conversely, the sign language of what has turned out well, of ascending life, of the will to power as the principle of life. Master morality affirms as instinctively as Christian morality negates (“God,” “beyond,” “self-denial”—all of them negations). The former gives to things out of its own abundance—it transfigures, it beautifies the world and makes it more rational—the latter impoverishes, pales and makes uglier the value of things, it negates the world. “World” is a Christian term of abuse.—

These opposite forms in the optics of value are both necessary: they are ways of seeing, immune to reasons and refutations. One cannot refute Christianity; one cannot refute a disease of the eye. That pessimism was fought like a philosophy, was the height of scholarly idiocy. The concepts “true” and “untrue” have, as it seems to me, no meaning in optics.—

What alone should be resisted is that falseness, that deceitful-ness of instinct which refuses to experience these opposites as opposites—as Wagner, for example, refused, being no mean master of such falsehoods. To make eyes at master morality, at noble morality (Icelandic saga is almost its most important document) while mouthing the counterdoctrine, that of the “gospel of the lowly,” of the need for redemption!—

I admire, incidentally, the modesty of the Christians who go to Bayreuth. I myself wouldn’t be able to endure certain words out of the mouth of a Wagner. There are concepts which do not belong in Bayreuth.—

What? A version of Christianity adapted for female Wagnerians, perhaps by female Wagnerians—for Wagner was in his old days by all means feminini generis? To say it once more, the Christians of today are too modest for my taste.—

If Wagner was a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a church father!⁴—The need for redemption, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing to do with such buffoons: it is the most honest expression of decadence, it is the most convinced, most painful affirmation of decadence in the form of sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wants to be rid of himself. Le moi est toujours haïssable.⁵

Noble morality, master morality, conversely, is rooted in a triumphant Yes said to oneself—it is self-affirmation, self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices, but only because “its heart is too full.” All of beautiful, all of great art belongs here: the essence of both is gratitude. On the other hand, one cannot dissociate from it an instinctive aversion against decadents, scorn for their symbolism, even horror: such feelings almost prove it. Noble Romans experienced Christianity as foeda superstitio:⁶ I recall how the last German of noble taste, how Goethe experienced the cross.⁷

One looks in vain for more valuable, more necessary opposites.—^*

But such falseness as that of Bayreuth is no exception today. We are all familiar with the unaesthetic concept of the Christian Junker. Such innocence among opposites, such a “good conscience” in a lie is actually modern par excellence, it almost defines modernity. Biologically, modern man represents a contradiction of values; he sits between two chairs, he says Yes and No in the same breath. Is it any wonder that precisely in our times falsehood itself has become flesh and even genius? that Wagner “dwelled among us”? It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.—

But all of us have, unconsciously, involuntarily in our bodies values, words, formulas, moralities of opposite descent—we are, physiologically considered, false.—A diagnosis of the modern soul—where would it begin? With a resolute incision into this instinctive contradiction, with the isolation of its opposite values, with the vivisection of the most instructive case.—The case of Wagner is for the philosopher a windfall—this essay is inspired, as you hear, by gratitude.—

¹“Schönes an sich” might also be rendered in this context as “inherently beautiful” or “absolutely” or “unconditionally beautiful.”

²See Beyond Good and Evil, section 260.

³Cf. The Antichrist (in Portable Nietzsche), including the translator’s footnotes; also Kaufmann, Nietzsche, Chapter 12, section I.

⁴Franz Liszt (1811–86) was the father of Cosima (1837–1930), Wagner’s second wife. This is not the first allusion to Cosima in this work; cf. Kaufmann, Nietzsche (1950); (1956); i.e., Chapter 1, section II. Liszt had retired to Rome in 1861, joined the Franciscan order in 1865—and eventually joined the Wagners in Bayreuth, where he died in 1886.

⁵“The ego is always hateful.” Cf. Nietzsche contra Wagner (in Portable Nietzsche).

⁶“An abominable superstition.”

⁷See Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams, cited in section 3 above; especially:

Much there is I can stand, and most things not easy to suffer
  1 bear with quiet resolve, just as a god commands it.
Only a few I find as repugnant as snakes and poison—
  These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs, garlic, and†.

   For other examples see Kaufmann, Twenty German Poets; for Nietzsche on Goethe, Twilight of the Idols (in Portable Nietzsche).

^* [Nietzsche’s! Note. The opposition between “noble morality” and “Christian morality” was first explained in my Genealogy of Morals: perhaps there is no more decisive turning point in the history of our understanding of religion and morality. This book, my touchstone for what belongs to me, has the good fortune of being accessible only to the most high-minded and severe spirits: the rest lack ears for it. One must have one’s passion in things where nobody else today has it.—