The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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_Schopenhauer._—Schopenhauer, the last German who is to be reckoned with (—who is a European event like Goethe, Hegel, or Heinrich Heine, and who is not merely local, national), is for a psychologist a case of the first rank: I mean as a malicious though masterly attempt to enlist on the side of a general nihilistic depreciation of life, the very forces which are opposed to such a movement,—that is to say, the great self-affirming powers of the “will to live,” the exuberant forms of life itself. He interpreted Art, heroism, genius, beauty, great sympathy, knowledge, the will to truth, and tragedy, one after the other, as the results of the denial, or of the need of the denial, of the “will”—the greatest forgery, Christianity always excepted, which history has to show. Examined more carefully, he is in this respect simply the heir of the Christian interpretation; except that he knew how to approve in a Christian fashion (_i.e._, nihilistically) even of the great facts of human culture, which Christianity completely repudiates. (He approved of them as paths to “salvation,” as preliminary stages to “salvation,” as _appetisers_ calculated to arouse the desire for “salvation.”)
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.