“Never make unequal things equal.”

Nietzsche condemns modern nihilism as the great, ugly idol of our age.

Though writing in 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols condemns one of the most prevalent philosophies of our own age: nihilism. Put in dictionary terms, nihilism is “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.” To Nietzsche, it is the ugliest philosophy because it is fundamentally anti-life. Anything anti-life as ugly and anything ugly as soul-draining.

Life and all beauty is based upon proportion and orderly harmony, while decay and ugliness is disproportion and disorderly chaos. This general theme goes beyond a simple appreciation of aesthetics. It is crucial, rather, to the state of civilizations as growing or decaying and to human life as energetic or sapped. The deification of equality and justice in the French Revolution, the naive idealism of Rousseau’s state of nature, are hideous to Nietzsche—not only because of the endless executions, war, and self-cannibalizing it wrought on France, but because of its fundamental dishonesty about life. It forces all of humanity to be just the same and thus in chaos and constant competition with one another, rather than in harmony through orderliness.

The obsession with equality and justice has only persisted, evolved, and strengthened, making it the great idol of our age.

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Excerpts 49 and 50 in “Skirmishes in a War with the Age,” Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche).

49 Progress in my sense.—I also speak of a “return to nature,” although it is not a process of going back but of going up—up into lofty, free and even terrible nature and naturalness; such a nature as can play with great tasks and may play with them.... To speak in a parable. Napoleon was an example of a “return to nature,” as I understand it (for instance in rebus tacticis, and still more, as military experts know, in strategy). But Rousseau—whither did he want to return? Rousseau this first modern man, idealist and canaille in one person; who was in need of moral “dignity,” in order even to endure the sight of his own person,—ill with unbridled vanity and wanton self-contempt; this abortion, who planted his tent on the threshold of modernity, also wanted a “return to nature”; but, I ask once more, whither did he wish to return? I hate Rousseau, even in the Revolution itself: the latter was the historical expression of this hybrid of idealist and canaille. The bloody farce which this Revolution ultimately became, its “immorality,” concerns me but slightly; what I loathe however is its Rousseauesque morality—the so-called “truths” of the Revolution, by means of which it still exercises power and draws all flat and mediocre things over to its side. The doctrine of equality! ... But there is no more deadly poison than this; for it seems to proceed from the very lips of justice, whereas in reality it draws the curtain down on all justice.... “To equals equality, to unequals inequality”—that would be the real speech of justice and that which follows from it “Never make unequal things equal.” The fact that so much horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of equality, has lent this “modern idea” par excellence such a halo of fire and glory, that the Revolution as a drama has misled even the most noble minds.—That after all is no reason for honouring it the more.—I can see only one who regarded it as it should be regarded—that is to say, with loathing; I speak of Goethe.

50 Goethe.—No mere German, but a European event: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by means of a return to nature, by means of an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of the century in question.—He bore the strongest instincts of this century in his breast: its sentimentality, and idolatry of nature, its anti-historic, idealistic, unreal, and revolutionary spirit (—the latter is only a form of the unreal). He enlisted history, natural science, antiquity, as well as Spinoza, and above all practical activity, in his service. He drew a host of very definite horizons around him; far from liberating himself from life, he plunged right into it; he did not give in; he took as much as he could on his own shoulders, and into his heart. That to which he aspired was totality; he was opposed to the sundering of reason, sensuality, feeling and will (as preached with most repulsive scholasticism by Kant, the antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself into a harmonious whole, he created himself. Goethe in the midst of an age of unreal sentiment, was a convinced realist: he said yea to everything that was like him in this regard,—there was no greater event in his life than that ens realissimum, surnamed Napoleon. Goethe conceived a strong, highly-cultured man, skilful in all bodily accomplishments, able to keep himself in check, having a feeling of reverence for himself, and so constituted as to be able to risk the full enjoyment of naturalness in all its rich profusion and be strong enough for this freedom; a man of tolerance, not out of weakness but out of strength, because he knows how to turn to his own profit that which would ruin the mediocre nature; a man unto whom nothing is any longer forbidden, unless it be weakness either as a vice or as a virtue. Such a spirit, become free, appears in the middle of the universe with a feeling of cheerful and confident fatalism; he believes that only individual things are bad, and that as a whole the universe justifies and, affirms itself—He no longer denies.... But such a faith is the highest Of all faiths: I christened it with the name of Dionysus.

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