Not True, Only Necessary

But nowadays there are no longer any great thoughts that are accepted without question, for this sceptical age believes neither in God nor in Mankind, neither in crowns nor in morality; or it believes in the whole lot of it all rolled into one, which amounts to the same thing. So business men, who think they cannot get along without some sort of greatness for a compass, have had to make use of the democratic dodge of replacing the immeasurable influence of greatness by the measurable greatness of influence. So now whatever man counts as great is great; only this means that in the last resort whatever is clamorously advertised as great also becomes great.

A Man Without Qualities does not say No to life, he says Not Yet, saving himself up.

[W]hy does man not make history? That is, why does he only attack history like an animal, when he is hurt, when things are on fire close behind him? Why, in short, does he make history only in an emergency?

As soon as any war breaks out anywhere, there also breaks out precisely among the noblest people a pleasure that, to be sure, is kept secret: Rapturously, they throw themselves into the new danger of death because the sacrifice for the fatherland seems to them to offer the long desired permission—to dodge their goal; war offers them a detour to suicide, but a detour with a good conscience. And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. You will also wish to help—but only those whose distress you understand entirely because they share with you one suffering and one hope —your friends—and only in the manner in which you help yourself. I want to make them bolder, more persevering, simpler, gayer. I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by these preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.

340

In fact, my observation of American politics leads me to a very simple understanding of voter sentiments: people care about injustice but not about inequality. The current wave of anger at the top 1% is not fueled by resentment against inequality, but rather against the injustice of the people at the top gaining while others are losing jobs and houses due to the economic elite’s anti-social and greedy machinations.

There is a lake that one day ceased to permit itself to flow off; it formed a dam where it had hitherto flown off; and ever since this lake is rising higher and higher. Perhaps this very renunciation will also lend us the strength needed to bear this renunciation; perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

283.

In the course of our history we have had great men, and we regard it as an institution that goes with us, just the same as prisons or the army: once it is there, someone has to be put into it. And so, with a certain automatism that is inherent in such social needs, one always takes whoever happens to be next and pays him whatever honours are ripe for bestowal. But this veneration is not quite genuine at the bottom of it lurks the familiar conviction that actually not a single one of them deserves it, and it is hard to be sure whether the mouths that open do so in enthusiasm or in a yawn. There is something of the cult of the dead about it these days when a man is referred to as a genius, with the unuttered supplementary remark that there really isn't such a thing any more; and it is something like the hysterical love that makes a tremendous fuss for no other reason that it lacks real feeling.

The fact of the matter nowadays is that the second thought, at least, of every one confronted with an overwhelming phenomenon - and even if it is the beauty of it that overwhelms him--is: 'You needn't think you can take me in! I'll soon put you in your place!' This frenzied determination to get things down into their places and make them smaller--typical of this epoch, which is not only cunning as a fox but runs with the hounds as well--is hardly as yet life's natural division into the crude and the sublime; it is, rather a self-tormenting feature of the mind, an unspeakable enjoyment of the spectacle of how the good can be humiliated and how wonderfully easily it can be destroyed. It looks not unlike a frantic way of trying to give oneself the lie. Perhaps, indeed, it is not so dismal after all to faith in an epoch that has come into the world buttocks first and only needs the Creator's hand to turn it up the other way.

But precisely in the years that should have spurred him on, something queer happened to Ulrich. He was no philosopher. Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by means of locking it up in a system. Probably that is also the reason why where have been great philosophic minds in times of tyranny, whereas times of advanced civilisation and democracy do not succeed in producing a convincing philosophy, at least so far as one can judge from the lamentations one commonly hears on the subject. This is why nowadays there is a terrifying amount of philosophising done in small slices, so much so that shops are the only places where one can still get anything without a philosophic view being involved.

Psychiatry terms great elation a state of hypomanic disturbance, as thought it were a hilarious distress, and has made it clear that all high degrees of intensification, whether of chastity or of sensuality, of scruples or of negligence, of cruelty or of compassion, in the long run end up in something pathological. How meaningless healthy life would be if it had no other goal than a medial state between two extremes! How paltry it would be if its ideal were in fact nothing but a refusal to exaggerate its ideals! Recognising this brings us to the point where we no longer see the moral norm as the immobility of rigid commandments, but as a mobile equilibrium continually demanding exertions towards its renewal. One begins to feel increasingly how narrow-minded it is to ascribe to a person by way of a character a tendency to repetition that he has acquired involuntarily, and then blame his character for the repetitions.

Morality in the usual sense was for Ulrich no more than the senile form of a system of forces that cannot be mistaken for morality without a loss of ethical force.