5. A

5. Already in the foreword to Richard Wagner, art---and _not_ morality--is set down as the properly _metaphysical_ activity of man; in the book itself the piquant proposition recurs time and again, that the existence of the world is _justified_ only as an æsthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the entire book recognises only an artist-thought and artist-after-thought behind all occurrences,--a "God," if you will, but certainly only an altogether thoughtless and unmoral artist-God, who, in construction as in destruction, in good as in evil, desires to become conscious of his own equable joy and sovereign glory; who, in creating worlds, frees himself from the _anguish_ of fullness and _overfullness,_ from the _suffering_ of the contradictions concentrated within him. The world, that is, the redemption of God _attained_ at every moment, as the perpetually changing, perpetually new vision of the most suffering, most antithetical, most contradictory being, who contrives to redeem himself only in _appearance:_ this entire artist-metaphysics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if you will,--the point is, that it already betrays a spirit, which is determined some day, at all hazards, to make a stand against the _moral_ interpretation and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism "Beyond Good and Evil" announces itself, here that "perverseness of disposition" obtains expression and formulation, against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling beforehand his angriest imprecations and thunderbolts,--a philosophy which dares to put, derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of phenomena, and not only among "phenomena" (in the sense of the idealistic _terminus technicus_), but among the "illusions," as appearance, semblance, error, interpretation, accommodation, art. Perhaps the depth of this _antimoral_ tendency may be best estimated from the guarded and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout this book,--Christianity, as being the most extravagant burlesque of the moral theme to which mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In fact, to the purely æsthetic world-interpretation and justification taught in this book, there is no greater antithesis than the Christian dogma, which is _only_ and will be only moral, and which, with its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness of God, relegates--that is, disowns, convicts, condemns--art, _all_ art, to the realm of _falsehood._ Behind such a mode of thought and valuation, which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art, I always experienced what was _hostile to life,_ the wrathful, vindictive counterwill to life itself: for all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, necessity of perspective and error. From the very first Christianity was, essentially and thoroughly, the nausea and surfeit of Life for Life, which only disguised, concealed and decked itself out under the belief in "another" or "better" life. The hatred of the "world," the curse on the affections, the fear of beauty and sensuality, another world, invented for the purpose of slandering this world the more, at bottom a longing for. Nothingness, for the end, for rest, for the "Sabbath of Sabbaths"--all this, as also the unconditional will of Christianity to recognise _only_ moral values, has always appeared to me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of a "will to perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most fatal disease, of profoundest weariness, despondency, exhaustion, impoverishment of life,--for before the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that is, unconditional morality) life _must_ constantly and inevitably be the loser, because life _is_ something essentially unmoral,--indeed, oppressed with the weight of contempt and the everlasting No, life _must_ finally be regarded as unworthy of desire, as in itself unworthy. Morality itself what?--may not morality be a "will to disown life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning of the end? And, consequently, the danger of dangers?... It was _against_ morality, therefore, that my instinct, as an intercessory-instinct for life, turned in this questionable book, inventing for itself a fundamental counter--dogma and counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely _anti-Christian._ What should I call it? As a philologist and man of words I baptised it, not without some liberty--for who could be sure of the proper name of the Antichrist?--with the name of a Greek god: I called it _Dionysian._