_life,_ what is the meaning of--morality?... 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