Beauty All Too Human, in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 19

by Corry Shores
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Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

Skirmishes of an Untimely Man

19

Nothing is beautiful in itself. Things are beautiful only to humans. And we see ourselves in what we deem beautiful.

In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone [allein Ja sagen]. Its lowest instinct, that of self‑preservation and self‑expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty — and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty—alas! only with a very human, all‑too‑human beauty ... At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment "beautiful" is the vanity of his species.

The world is beautiful to us only be cause we humanized it.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that man should be the model of beauty. Who knows what he looks like in the eyes of a higher judge of beauty? Daring perhaps? Perhaps even amusing? Perhaps a little arbitrary?

Text from the Nietzsche Channel:

19

Beautiful and ugly ["Schön und hässlich"="Fair and foul"].— Nothing is more conditional—or, let us say, narrower—than our feeling for beauty. Whoever would think of it apart from man's joy in man would immediately lose any foothold. "Beautiful in itself" is a mere phrase, not even a concept. In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone [allein Ja sagen]. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty—and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty—alas! only with a very human, all-too-human beauty ... At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment "beautiful" is the vanity of his species ... For a little suspicion may whisper this question into the skeptic's ear: Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it: that is all. But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that man should be the model of beauty. Who knows what he looks like in the eyes of a higher judge of beauty? Daring perhaps? Perhaps even amusing? Perhaps a little arbitrary? ... "Oh Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull me by my ears?" Ariadne once asked her philosophic lover during one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. "I find a kind of humor in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not even longer?"

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Based on Walter Kaufmann's translation. Available at: http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/twi.htm