Nietzsche is a harsh, aggressive critic of European modernity and its moral and philosophical values, namely that of “progress,” which he sees as corrosive and destructive to human nature and frustrating the true advancement of humankind. Because of the morality in which Europeans have been immersed, however, they are unable to recognize the damaging effects of modern life. Written in the late 19th century, Nietzsche’s criticisms are very much against the grain of their historical moment, when modernity and the ideology of progress were at their height. The democratic and nationalist movements were in full swing across Europe, and the rise of socialist, anarchist, and utopian religious movements all heralded a great transformation of society in the near future. To Nietzsche, however, these are all expressions of a misguided slave morality and betray a great sense of fear beneath their hopeful ambitions: fear of the other and fear of oneself.
Nietzsche is not, however, a political or religious conservative. He is just as severe in his criticisms of organized religion in Europe, which he blames for paving the way for the morality of progress, and in his attacks on the actual aristocracy of Europe, despite his veneration of the “noble.” For Nietzsche, it is precisely the European aristocrats’ failure to adequately embody their role that has led to the herd man’s domination. Nietzsche gives the specific example of the French Revolution to illustrate how the corruption of the old ruling classes, who ceased to understand the meaning or significance of their existence, and hence the existence of the society they ruled and justified, led directly to the plebeian uprising and bourgeois takeover that came after their downfall. While he firmly believes that going back in time is not possible, Nietzsche does see some value in conservative criticisms of modernity that desire to get away from modern reality, and hopes that the philosophers of the future will have the courage to orient their escape not backwards, but upwards. Rather than moving forward under the sign of supposedly universal values, Nietzsche encourages the philosophers of the future to develop themselves, maximizing the potential each human contains within them.
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The Dark Side of Modernity Quotes in Beyond Good and Evil
In this, it seems to me, we should agree with these skeptical anti-realists and knowledge microscopists of today: their instinct, which repels them from modern reality, is unrefuted—what do their retrograde bypaths concern us! The main thing about them is not that they wish to go “back,” but that they wish to get—away. A little more strength, flight, courage, and artistic power, and they would want to rise—not return!
Modern philosophy, being an epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or overtly, anti-Christian—although, to say this for the benefit of more refined ears, by no means anti-religious.
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated—into a vice.
Every morality is, opposed to laisser aller, a bit of tyranny against “nature”; also against “reason”; but this in itself is no objection, as long as we do not have some other morality which permits us to decree that every kind of tyranny and unreason is impermissible. What is essential and inestimable in every morality is that it constitutes a long compulsion: to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism, one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom—the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm.
Whoever examines the conscience of the European today will have to pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hideouts—the imperative of herd timidity: “we want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!” Some day—throughout Europe, the will and way to this day is now called “progress.”
The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist”—so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down.
Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? To begin with, a type of man that is not noble, with the virtues of a type of man that is not noble, which is to say, a type that does not dominate and is neither authoritative nor self-sufficient: he has industriousness, patient acceptance of his place in rank and file, evenness and moderation in his abilities and needs, an instinct for his equals and for what they need; for example, that bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work, that claim to honor and recognition (which first of all presupposes literal recognition and recognizability), that sunshine of a good name, that constant attestation of his value and utility which is needed to overcome again and again the internal mistrust which is the sediment in the hearts of all dependent men and herd animals.
I do not say this because I want it to happen: the opposite would be rather more after my heart—I mean such an increase in the menace of Russia that Europe would have to resolve to become menacing, too, namely, to acquire one will by means of a new caste that would rule Europe, a long, terrible will of its own that would be able to cast its goals millennia hence—so the long-drawn-out comedy of its many splinter states as well as its dynastic and democratic splinter wills would come to an end. The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to large-scale politics.
The historical sense (or the capacity for quickly guessing the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived; the “divinatory instinct” for the relations of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of active forces)—this historical sense to which we Europeans lay claim as our specialty has come to us in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe had been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races: only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and way of life, of cultures that formerly lay right next to each other or one on top of the other, now flows into us “modern souls,” thanks to this mixture; our instincts now run back everywhere; we ourselves are a kind of chaos.
But while the democratization of Europe leads to the production of a type that is prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense, in single, exceptional cases the strong human being will have to turn out stronger and richer than perhaps ever before—thanks to the absence of prejudice from his training, thanks to the tremendous manifoldness of practice, art, and mask. I meant to say: the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants—taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.
What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things good and bad, and above all one thing that is both of the best and of the worst: the grand style in morality, the terribleness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionabilities—and hence precisely the most attractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is burning now—perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and philosophers are—grateful for this to the Jews.
In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandish”—they were merely taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it against me when I include Richard Wagner, too, with them, for one should not allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves.
