The Joyful Wisdom · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
47.
_The Suppression of the Passions._—When one continually prohibits the expression of the passions as something to be left to the "vulgar," to coarser, bourgeois, and peasant natures—that is, when one does not want to suppress the passions themselves, but only their language and demeanour, one nevertheless realises _therewith_ just what one does not want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their weakening and alteration,—as the court of Louis XIV. (to cite the most instructive instance), and all that was dependent on it, experienced. The generation _that followed_, trained in suppressing their expression, no longer possessed the passions themselves, but had a pleasant, superficial, playful disposition in their place,—a generation which was so permeated with the incapacity to be ill-mannered, that even an injury was not taken and retaliated, except with courteous words. Perhaps our own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpart to this period: I see everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not least in all that is written) satisfaction at all the _coarser_ outbursts and gestures of passion; a certain convention of passionateness is now desired,—only not the passion itself! Nevertheless _it_ will thereby be at last reached, and our posterity will have a _genuine savagery_, and not merely a formal savagery and unmannerliness.
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