Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future - EILFE

Beyond Good and Evil
(which is to say: in the form of the foremost living historian), exerts an
almost tyrannical influence these days. But as far as Wagner goes, the
more French music learns to develop according to the real needs of the
âme moderne, 15 the more “Wagnerianized” it becomes; this can be predicted,
– it is already happening now! Nevertheless, there are three things
that, even today, the French can proudly exhibit as their heir and their
own and an enduring mark of an old cultural superiority over Europe,
in spite of any voluntary or involuntary Germanization or vulgarization
of taste. One is the capacity for artistic passions and devotion to “form,”
for which the phrase l’art pour l’art 16 (along with a thousand others) was
invented. Things like this have not been absent from France for the last
three hundred years and, thanks to a reverence for “small numbers,” keep
making possible a type of literary chamber music that is not to be found
anywhere else in Europe –. The second point on which France can base
a claim to superiority over Europe is its old, diverse culture of moralism,
which means that even among little romanciers 17 of newspapers and chance
boulevardiers de Paris 18 you will find, on average, a psychological sensitivity
and curiosity that people in Germany, for instance, have no concept
of (much less the thing itself!). For this, the Germans would need a few
hundred years of moralism which, as I have said, France had not spared
itself. Anyone calling the Germans “naive” on this account is dressing up
a deficiency as a compliment. (As a contrast to the German inexperience
and innocence in voluptate psychologica 19 – which is not at all unrelated to
the tedium of German company –, and as the most successful expression
of a genuinely French curiosity and inventiveness in this realm of delicate
tremblings, we can name Henri Beyle. This remarkable, anticipatory forerunner
ran with a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several
centuries of the European soul, as a pathfinder and discoverer of this soul.
It took two generations to somehow catch up with him, to guess some of
the riddles that tormented and delighted him, this strange Epicurean
and question-mark of a man who was France’s last great psychologist –.)
15 Modern soul.
16 Art for art’s sake.
17 Novelists.
18 People on the Parisian boulevards.
19 Taking pleasure in psychology.
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