Part 13

The Periods of the Three Great Passions: contempt, pity, destruction.

The Periods of Catastrophes: the rise of a teaching which will sift mankind ... which drives the weak to some decision and the strong also.

II.

CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN NIHILISM.

(a) MODERN GLOOMINESS.

57.

My friends, we had a hard time as youths; we even suffered from youth itself as though it were a serious disease. This is owing to the age in which we were born--an age of enormous internal decay and disintegration which, with all its weakness and even with the best of its strength, is opposed to the spirit of youth. Disintegration--that is to say, uncertainty--is peculiar to this age: nothing stands on solid ground or on a sound faith. People live for the morrow, because the day-after-to-morrow is doubtful. All our road is slippery and dangerous, while the ice which still bears us has grown unconscionably thin: we all feel the mild and gruesome breath of the thaw-wind--soon, where we are walking, no one will any longer be able to stand!

58.

If this is not an age of decay and of diminishing vitality, it is at least one of indiscriminate and arbitrary experimentalising--and it is probable that out of an excess of abortive experiments there has grown this general impression, as of decay: and perhaps decay itself.

59.

Concerning the history of modern gloominess.

The state-nomads (officials, etc.): "homeless"--.

The break-up of the family.

The "good man" as a symptom of exhaustion.

Justice as Will to Power (Rearing).

Lewdness and neurosis.

Black music: whither has real music gone?

The anarchist.

Contempt of man, loathing.

Most profound distinction: whether hunger or satiety is creative? The first creates the Ideals of Romanticism.

Northern unnaturalness.

The need of Alcohol: the "need" of the working classes.

Philosophical Nihilism.

60.

The slow advance and rise of the middle and lower classes (including the lower kind of spirit and body), which was already well under way before the French Revolution, and would have made the same progress forward without the latter,--in short, then, the preponderance of the herd over all herdsmen and bell-wethers,--brings in its train:--

(1) Gloominess of spirit (the juxtaposition of a stoical and a frivolous appearance of happiness, peculiar to noble cultures, is on the decline; much suffering is allowed to be seen and heard which formerly was borne in concealment);

(2) Moral hypocrisy (a way of distinguishing oneself through morality, but by means of the values of the herd: pity, solicitude, moderation; and not by means of those virtues which are recognised and honoured outside the herd's sphere of power);

(3) A really large amount of sympathy with both pain and joy (a feeling of pleasure resulting from being herded together, which is peculiar to all gregarious animals--"public spirit," "patriotism," everything, in fact, which is apart from the individual).