uietness, calm seas, or else the
intoxication, the spasm, the bewilderment which art and philosophy
provide. Revenge upon life itself--this is the most voluptuous form of
intoxication for such indigent souls!{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Now Wagner responds quite as well
as Schopenhauer to the twofold cravings of these people,--they both deny
life, they both slander it but precisely on this account they are my
antipodes.--The richest creature, brimming over with vitality,--the
Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself to gaze upon the
horrible and the questionable; but he can also lend his hand to the
terrible deed, and can indulge in all the luxury of destruction,
disaggregation, and negation,--in him evil, purposelessness and ugliness,
seem just as allowable as they are in nature--because of his bursting
plenitude of creative and rejuvenating powers, which are able to convert
every desert into a luxurious land of plenty. Conversely, it is the
greatest sufferer and pauper in vitality, who is most in need of mildness,
peace and goodness--that which to-day is called humaneness--in thought as
well as in action, and possibly of a God whose speciality is to be a God
of the sick, a Saviour, and also of logic or the abstract intelligibility
of existence even for idiots (--the typical "free-spirits," like the
idealists, and "beautiful souls," are _decadents_--); in short, of a warm,
danger-tight, and narrow confinement, between optimistic horizons which
would allow of stultification.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} And thus very gradually, I began to
understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian Greek, and also the
Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean, and who, with his
belief that "faith saves," carries the principle of Hedonism _as far as
possible_--far beyond all intellectual honesty.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} If I am ahead of all other
psychologists in anything, it is in this fact that my eyes are more keen
for tracing those most difficult and most captious of all deductions, in
which the largest number of mistakes have been made,--the deduction which
makes one infer something concerning the author from his work, something
concerning the doer from his deed, something concerning the idealist from
the need which produced this ideal, and something concerning the imperious
_craving_ which stands at the back of all thinking and valuing--In regard
to all artists of what kind soever, I shall now avail myself of this
radical di