Disjecta Membra: Nietzsche’s What is Romanticism?, 1882
First published in German in 1882, and corrected by the author in 1887. Version published in English in 2001 by Cambridge University Press.
What is Romanticism? — It may perhaps be recalled, at least among my friends, that initially I approached the modern world with a few crude errors and overestimations and, in any case, hopefully. Who knows on the basis of what personal experiences, I understood the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as if it were a symptom of a superior force of thought, of more audacious courage, and of more triumphant fullness of life than had characterized the eighteenth century, the age of Hume, Kant, Condillac, and the sensualists. Thus tragic insight appeared to me as the distinctive luxury of our culture, as its most precious, noblest, and most dangerous squandering, but, in view of its over-richness, as a permissible luxury. In the same way, I reinterpreted German music for myself as if it signified a Dionysian power of the German soul: I believed that I heard in it the earthquake through which some primeval force that had been dammed up for ages finally liberated itself — indifferent whether everything else that one calls culture might begin to tremble. You see what I failed to recognize at that time both in philosophical pessimism and in German music was what is really their distinctive character — their romanticism.
What is romanticism? Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life, they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight; and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type, and that included (and includes) Schopenhauer as well as Richard Wagner, to name the two most famous and pronounced romantics whom I misunderstood at that time — not, incidentally, to their disadvantage, as one need not hesitate in all fairness to admit. He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation. In his case, what is evil, absurd, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, owing to an excess of procreating, fertilizing energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland. Conversely, those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed — if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; also logic, the conceptual understandability of existence for logic calms and gives confidence — in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons.
Pablo Picasso, Studio with Plaster Head, 1925. MoMa.
Thus I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist; also the “Christian” who is actually only a kind of Epicurean — both are essentially romantics — and my eye grew ever sharper for that most difficult and captious form of backward inference in which the most mistakes are made: the backward inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to those who need it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the commanding need behind it. Regarding our aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or super abundance that has here become creative?” At first glance, another distinction may seem preferable — it is far more obvious — namely the question whether the desire to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being prompted creation, or the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming. But both of these kinds of desire are seen to be ambiguous when one considers them more closely; they can be interpreted in accordance with the first scheme that is, as it seems to me, preferable. The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future (my term for this is, as is known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages, and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our anarchists closely. The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be prompted, first by gratitude and love; art with this origin will always be an art of apotheoses, perhaps dithyrambic like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, or bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and glory over all things. But it can also be the tyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion — one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his own image, the image of his torture, on them, branding them with it. This last version is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether it be Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music-romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture. (That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism, a classical type — this premonition and vision belongs to me as inseparable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only the word “classical” offends my ears, it is far too trite and has become round and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future — for it comes! I see it coming! — Dionysian pessimism.) //
Pablo Picasso, Print of Pierrot et Arlequin, c.1920. Musée National Picasso.
Jackson Pollock, White Light. 1954 MoMA.
From The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs by Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann. (Vintage Books, 1974): 327-331.
