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Chapter 3 - Peoples and Ages: The Mortal Soul Writ Large

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2009

Daniel W. Conway
Daniel W. Conway
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. This is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.

(TI 9:39)

Introduction

Nietzsche's experiment with vitalism precipitates his post-Zarathustran rejection of voluntarism. The general condition of an age or a people determines what human “agents” can and cannot do. As involuntary expressiosns of a particular age or people, individual agents have no choice but to reflect and reproduce the (relative) vitality of the age or people for which they stand. Representatives of a decadent age or people cannot help but express its constitutive decadence; the inauguration of a healthy epoch lies beyond the volitional resources at their disposal.

In his writings from the period 1885–88, Nietzsche consistently treats individual human beings as the embodied media through which an age or people expresses its native vitality.

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Chapter
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Nietzsche's Dangerous Game
Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols
 , pp. 67 - 102
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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