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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?26
Or does modern historical writing collectively perhaps display an attitude more confident about life, more confident about ideals? Its noblest claim nowadays asserts that it is a mirror. It eschews all teleology. It doesn`t want to "prove" anything any more. It spurns playing the role of judge and derives its good taste from that. It affirms as little as it denies. It establishes the facts. It "describes" . . . All this is ascetic to a high degree. However, it is also, to an even higher degree, nihilistic. We must not deceive ourselves on this point. We see a sad, hard, but determined gaze - an eye which looks into the distance, the way a solitary traveller at the North Pole gazes out (perhaps so as not to look inside or behind him?. . .) Here is snow; here life is quite silent. The final crows that make noise here are called "What for?" "in vain" and "nada" [nothing] - here nothing thrives and grows any more - at most Petersburg meta-politics and Tolstoian "pity."
But so far as that other style of historian is concerned, maybe an even more "modern" style, which is more comfortable and sensual and makes eyes at life as well as at the ascetic ideal - this style uses the word "artist" as a glove and has taken an exclusive lease on the praise of contemplation. Oh what a thirst these sweet and witty types arouse in people for ascetics and winter landscapes! No! Let these "meditative" people go to the devil! I would much prefer to keep wandering with those historical nihilists through the gloomiest cold grey fog! In fact, if I had to choose, I might find it better to lend a ear to a completely and essentially unhistorical or anti-historical man (like that Dührung, whose tones intoxicate a species of "beautiful souls" in Germany today, people who up to now have been timid and unassuming, the species anarchistica [the anarchists] within the educated proletariat).
The "contemplative ones" are a hundred times worse. I know nothing that creates so much disgust as such an objective armchair historian, such a sweet-smelling man luxuriating in history, half cleric, half satyr, with perfume by Renan, who reveals at once in the high falsetto of his approval what he lacks, where is he deficient, where in his case the fates have weilded their dreadful shears with, alas, so much surgical precision! That affronts my taste as well as my patience: confronted with such sights, let those be patient who have nothing to lose by them. Such a picture infuriates me, such "lookers on" make me angry with the "performance," even more than the performance itself (history itself, you understand). Seeing that, I fall unexpectedly into an Anacreontic mood. This nature, which gave the bull his horns, the lion his chasm odonton [chasm of teeth], why did nature give me a foot? . . . To kick with, by holy Anacreon! Not merely to run off, but also to kick apart these decrepit armchairs, this cowardly contemplation, this lascivious acting like eunuchs in history, the flirting with ascetic ideals, the hypocritical justice of impotence!
I grant all honour to the ascetic ideal, insofar as it is honest! So long as it believes in itself and does not play games with us! But I can`t stand all these coquettish insects, with their insatiable ambition to smell the infinite, until finally the infinite stinks of bugs. I can`t stand these white sepulchres who treat life as a spectacle. I can`t stand the tired and useless people, who wrap themselves up in wisdom and gaze out "objectively." I can`t stand the agitators who dress themselves up as heroes and who wear a magic hat of ideals on heads stuffed with straw. I can`t stand the ambitious artists, who like to present themselves as ascetics and priests, but who are basically tragic clowns. And I can`t stand these most recent speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who nowadays roll their eyes in a Christian-Aryan-Bourgeois way and seek to inflame all the horned-animal elements among the people by abusing the cheapest forms of agitation, in a way that exhausts my patience. (The fact that every kind of spiritual fraud succeeds in present-day Germany is the result of the absolutely undeniable and tangible desolation of the German spirit, whose cause I look for in an excessively strict diet limited to newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, together with the pre-conditions for such a diet: first, a restricting nationalism and vanity, that strong but narrow principle "Germany, Germany, over everything," as well as the paralysis agitans [trembling palsy] of "modern ideas").
Today Europe is rich and resourceful, above all in ways of arousing people. Nothing seems to be more important to possess than stimulants and firewater: hence, the monstrous falsification of ideals, the most powerful firewater of the spirit. Hence, also the unfavourable, stinking, lying, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. I`d like to know how many shiploads of counterfeit idealism, of heroic costumes and rattles full of nonsensical big words, how many tons of sugary spiritual sympathy (company: la religion de la souffrance [the religion of suffering]), how many stilts of "noble indignation" to assist the spiritually flat-footed, and how many of those play acting the Christian moral ideal would have to be exported from Europe so that its air might smell cleaner once again . . . . Obviously, as far as this overproduction is concerned, a new commercial opportunity has opened up: obviously there is new "business" to be made with small gods of ideals and their accompanying "idealists". People should not fail to respond to this hint! Who has the courage for it? We have it in our hands to "idealize" the entire earth! . . . But why am I talking about courage? Only one thing is necessary here, just the hand, an uninhibited, a very uninhibited hand .
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