The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Values

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

Postby admin » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:05 pm

(c) Signs of Increasing Strength.

109.

First Principle: everything that characterises modern men savours of decay: but side by side with the prevailing sickness there are signs of a strength and powerfulness of soul which are still untried. The same causes which tend to promote the belittling of men, also force the stronger and rarer individuals upwards to greatness.

110.

General survey: the ambiguous character of our modern world—precisely the same symptoms might at the same time be indicative of either decline or strength. And the signs of strength and of emancipation dearly bought, might in view of traditional (or hereditary) appreciations concerned with the feelings, be misunderstood as indications of weakness. In short, feeling, as a means of fixing valuations, is not on a level with the times.

Generalised: Every valuation is always backward; it is merely the expression of the conditions which favoured survival and growth in a much earlier age: it struggles against new conditions of existence out of which it did not arise, and which it therefore necessarily misunderstands: it hinders, and excites suspicion against, all that is new.

111.

The problem of the nineteenth century.—To discover whether its strong and weak side belong to each other. Whether they have been cut from one and the same piece. Whether the variety of its ideals and their contradictions are conditioned by a higher purpose: whether they are something higher.—For it might be the prerequisite of greatness, that growth should take place amid such violent tension. Dissatisfaction, Nihilism, might be a good sign.

112.

General survey.—As a matter of fact, all abundant growth involves a concomitant process of crumbling to bits and decay: suffering and the symptoms of decline belong to ages of enormous progress; every fruitful and powerful movement of mankind has always brought about a concurrent Nihilistic movement. Under certain circumstances, the appearance of the extremest form of Pessimism and actual Nihilism might be the sign of a process of incisive and most essential growth, and of mankind's transit into completely new conditions of existence. This is what I have understood.

113.

A.

Starting out with a thoroughly courageous appreciation of our men of to-day:—we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by appearance: this mankind is much less effective, but it gives quite different pledges of lasting strength, its tempo is slower, but the rhythm itself is richer. Healthiness is increasing, the real conditions of a healthy body are on the point of being known, and will gradually be created, "asceticism" is regarded with irony. The fear of extremes, a certain confidence in the "right way," no raving: a periodical self-habituation to narrower values (such as "mother-land," "science," etc.).

This whole picture, however, would still be ambiguous: it might be a movement either of increase or decline in Life.

B.

The belief in "progress"—in lower spheres of intelligence, appears as increasing life: but this is self-deception;

in higher spheres of intelligence it is a sign of declining life.

Description of the symptoms.

The unity of the aspect: uncertainty in regard to the standard of valuation.

Fear of a general "in vain."

Nihilism.

114.

As a matter of fact, we are no longer so urgently in need of an antidote against the first Nihilism: Life is no longer so uncertain, accidental, and senseless in modern Europe. All such tremendous exaggeration of the value of men, of the value of evil, etc., are not so necessary now; we can endure a considerable diminution of this value, we may grant a great deal of nonsense and accident: the power man has acquired now allows of a lowering of the means of discipline, of which the strongest was the moral interpretation of the universe. The hypothesis "God" is much too extreme.

115.

If anything shows that our humanisation is a genuine sign of progress, it is the fact that we no longer require excessive contraries, that we no longer require contraries at all....

We may love the senses; for we have spiritualised them in every way and made them artistic;

We have a right to all things which hitherto have been most calumniated.

116.

The reversal of the order of rank.—Those pious counterfeiters—the priests—are becoming Chandala in our midst:—they occupy the position of the charlatan, of the quack, of the counterfeiter, of the sorcerer: we regard them as corrupters of the will, as the great slanderers and vindictive enemies of Life, and as the rebels among the bungled and the botched. We have made our middle class out of our servant-caste—the Sudra—that is to say, our people or the body which wields the political power.

On the other hand, the Chandala of former times is paramount: the blasphemers, the immoralists, the independents of all kinds, the artists, the Jews, the minstrels—and, at bottom, all disreputable classes are in the van.

We have elevated ourselves to honourable thoughts,—even more, we determine what honour is on earth,—"nobility." ... All of us to-day are advocates of life.—We Immoralists are to-day the strongest power: the other great powers are in need of us ... we re-create the world in our own image.

We have transferred the label "Chandala" to the priests, the backworldsmen, and to the deformed Christian society which has become associated with these people, together with creatures of like origin, the pessimists, Nihilists, romanticists of pity, criminals, and men of vicious habits—the whole sphere in which the idea of "God" is that of Saviour....

We are proud of being no longer obliged to be liars, slanderers, and detractors of Life....

117.

The advance of the nineteenth century upon the eighteenth (at bottom we good Europeans are carrying on a war against the eighteenth century):

(1) "The return to Nature" is getting to be understood, ever more definitely, in a way which is quite the reverse of that in which Rousseau used the phrase—away from idylls and operas!

(2) Ever more decided, more anti-idealistic, more objective, more fearless, more industrious, more temperate, more suspicious of sudden changes, anti-revolutionary;

(3) The question of bodily health is being pressed ever more decidedly in front of the health of "the soul": the latter is regarded as a condition brought about by the former, and bodily health is believed to be, at least, the prerequisite to spiritual health.

118.

If anything at all has been achieved, it is a more innocent attitude towards the senses, a happier, more favourable demeanour in regard to sensuality, resembling rather the position taken up by Goethe; a prouder feeling has also been developed in knowledge, and the "reine Thor"[6] meets with little faith.

[6] This is a reference to Wagner's Parsifal. The character as is well known, is written to represent a son of heart's affliction, and a child of wisdom—humble, guileless, loving, pure, and a fool.—TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

119.

We "objective people."—It is not "pity" that opens up the way for us to all that is most remote and most strange in life and culture; but our accessibility and ingenuousness, which precisely does not "pity," but rather takes pleasure in hundreds of things which formerly caused pain (which in former days either outraged or moved us, or in the presence of which we were either hostile or indifferent). Pain in all its various phases is now interesting to us: on that account we are certainly not the more pitiful, even though the sight of pain may shake us to our foundations and move us to tears: and we are absolutely not inclined to be more helpful in view thereof.

In this deliberate desire to look on at all pain and error, we have grown stronger and more powerful than in the eighteenth century; it is a proof of our increase of strength (we have drawn closer to the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries). But it is a profound mistake to regard our "romanticism" as a proof of our "beautified souls." We want stronger sensations than all coarser ages and classes have wanted. (This fact must not be confounded with the needs of neurotics and decadents; in their case, of course, there is a craving for pepper —even for cruelty.)

We are all seeking conditions which are emancipated from the bourgeois, and to a greater degree from the priestly, notion of morality (every book which savours at all of priestdom and theology gives us the impression of pitiful niaiserie and mental indigence). "Good company," in fact, finds everything insipid which is not forbidden and considered compromising in bourgeois circles; and the case is the same with books, music, politics, and opinions on women.

120.

The simplification of man in the nineteenth century (The eighteenth century was that of elegance, subtlety, and generous feeling).—Not "return to nature"; for no natural humanity has ever existed yet. Scholastic, unnatural, and antinatural values are the rule and the beginning; man only reaches Nature after a long struggle—he never turns his "back" to her.... To be natural means, to dare to be as immoral as Nature is.

We are coarser, more direct, richer in irony towards generous feelings, even when we are beneath them.

Our haute volée, the society consisting of our rich and leisured men, is more natural: people hunt each other, the love of the sexes is a kind of sport in which marriage is both a charm and an obstacle; people entertain each other and live for the sake of pleasure; bodily advantages stand in the first rank, and curiosity and daring are the rule.

Our attitude towards knowledge is more natural; we are innocent in our absolute spiritual debauchery, we hate pathetic and hieratic manners, we delight in that which is most strictly prohibited, we should scarcely recognise any interest in knowledge if we were bored in acquiring it.

Our attitude to morality is also more natural. Principles have become a laughing-stock; no one dares to speak of his "duty," unless in irony. But a helpful, benevolent disposition is highly valued. (Morality is located in instinct and the rest is despised. Besides this there are few points of honour.)

Our attitude to politics is more natural: we see problems of power, of the quantum of power, against another quantum. We do not believe in a right that does not proceed from a power which is able to uphold it. We regard all rights as conquests.

Our valuation of great men and things is more natural: we regard passion as a privilege; we can conceive of nothing great which does not involve a great crime; all greatness is associated in our minds with a certain standing-beyond-the-pale in morality.

Our attitude to Nature is more natural: we no longer love her for her "innocence," her "reason," her "beauty," we have made her beautifully devilish and "foolish." But instead of despising her on that account, since then we have felt more closely related to her and more familiar in her presence. She does not aspire to virtue: we therefore respect her.

Our attitude towards Art is more natural: we do not exact beautiful, empty lies, etc., from her; brutal positivism reigns supreme, and it ascertains things with perfect calm.

In short: there are signs showing that the European of the nineteenth century is less ashamed of his instincts; he has gone a long way towards acknowledging his unconditional naturalness and immorality, without bitterness: on the contrary, he is strong enough to endure this point of view alone.

To some ears this will sound as though corruption had made strides: and certain it is that man has not drawn nearer to the "Nature" which Rousseau speaks about, but has gone one step farther in the civilisation before which Rousseau stood in horror. We have grown stronger, we have drawn nearer to the seventeenth century, more particularly to the taste which reigned towards its close (Dancourt, Le Sage, Renard).

121.

Culture versus Civilisation.—The culminating stages of culture and civilisation lie apart: one must not be led astray as regards the fundamental antagonism existing between culture and civilisation. From the moral standpoint, great periods in the history of culture have always been periods of corruption; while on the other hand, those periods in which man was deliberately and compulsorily tamed ("civilisation") have always been periods of intolerance towards the most intellectual and most audacious natures. Civilisation desires something different from what culture strives after: their aims may perhaps be opposed....

122.

What I warn people against: confounding the instincts of decadence with those of humanity;

Confounding the dissolving means of civilisation and those which necessarily promote decadence, with culture;

Confounding debauchery, and the principle, "laisser aller," with the Will to Power (the latter is the exact reverse of the former).

123.

The unsolved problems which I set anew: the problem of civilisation, the struggle between Rousseau and Voltaire about the year 1760. Man becomes deeper, more mistrustful, more "immoral," stronger, more self-confident—and therefore "more natural"; that is "progress." In this way, by a process of division of labour, the more evil strata and the milder and tamer strata of society get separated: so that the general facts are not visible at first sight.... It is a sign of strength, and of the self-control and fascination of the strong, that these stronger strata possess the arts in order to make their greater powers for evil felt as something "higher" As soon as there is "progress" there is a transvaluation of the strengthened factors into the "good."

124.

Man must have the courage of his natural instincts restored to him.—

The poor opinion he has of himself must be destroyed (not in the sense of the individual, but in the sense of the natural man ...)—

The contradictions in things must be eradicated, after it has been well understood that we were responsible for them—

Social idiosyncrasies must be stamped out of existence (guilt, punishment, justice, honesty, freedom, love, etc. etc.)—

An advance towards "naturalness": in all political questions, even in the relations between parties, even in merchants', workmen's, or contractors' parties, only questions of power come into play:— "what one can do" is the first question, what one ought to do is only a secondary consideration.

125.

Socialism—or the tyranny of the meanest and the most brainless,—that is to say, the superficial, the envious, and the mummers, brought to its zenith,—is, as a matter, of fact, the logical conclusion of "modern ideas" and their latent anarchy: but in the genial atmosphere of democratic well-being the capacity for forming resolutions or even for coming to an end at all, is paralysed. Men follow—but no longer their reason. That is why socialism is on the whole a hopelessly bitter affair: and there is nothing more amusing than to observe the discord between the poisonous and desperate faces of present-day socialists—and what wretched and nonsensical feelings does not their style reveal to us!—and the childish lamblike happiness of their hopes and desires. Nevertheless, in many places in Europe, there may be violent hand-to-hand struggles and irruptions on their account: the coming century is likely to be convulsed in more than one spot, and the Paris Commune, which finds defenders and advocates even in Germany, will seem to have been but a slight indigestion compared with what is to come. Be this as it may, there will always be too many people of property for socialism ever to signify anything more than an attack of illness: and these people of property are like one man with one faith, "one must possess something in order to be some one." This, however, is the oldest and most wholesome of all instincts; I should add: "one must desire more than one has in order to become more." For this is the teaching which life itself preaches to all living things: the morality of Development. To have and to wish to have more, in a word, Growth—that is life itself. In the teaching of socialism "a will to the denial of life" is but poorly concealed: botched men and races they must be who have devised a teaching of this sort. In fact, I even wish a few experiments might be made to show that in a socialistic society, life denies itself, and itself cuts away its own roots. The earth is big enough and man is still unexhausted enough for a practical lesson of this sort and demonstratio ad absurdum—even if it were accomplished only by a vast expenditure of lives—to seem worth while to me. Still, Socialism, like a restless mole beneath the foundations of a society wallowing in stupidity, will be able to achieve something useful and salutary: it delays "Peace on Earth" and the whole process of character-softening of the democratic herding animal; it forces the European to have an extra supply of intellect,—that is to say, craft and caution, and prevents his entirely abandoning the manly and warlike qualities,—it also saves Europe awhile from the marasmus femininus which is threatening it.

126.

The most favourable obstacles and remedies of modernity:

(1) Compulsory military service with real wars in which all joking is laid aside.

(2) National thick-headedness (which simplifies and concentrates).

(3) Improved nutrition (meat).

(4) Increasing cleanliness and wholesomeness in the home.

(5) The predominance of physiology over theology, morality, economics, and politics.

(6) Military discipline in the exaction and the practice of one's "duty" (it is no longer customary to praise).

127.

I am delighted at the military development of Europe, also at the inner anarchical conditions: the period of quietude and "Chinadom" which Galiani prophesied for this century is now over. Personal and manly capacity, bodily capacity recovers its value, valuations are becoming more physical, nutrition consists ever more and more of flesh. Fine men have once more become possible. Bloodless sneaks (with mandarins at their head, as Comte imagined them) are now a matter of the past. The savage in every one of us is acknowledged, even the wild animal. Precisely on that account, philosophers will have a better chance. —Kant is a scarecrow!

128.

I have not yet seen any reasons to feel discouraged. He who acquires and preserves a strong will, together with a broad mind, has a more favourable chance now than ever he had. For the plasticity of man has become exceedingly great in democratic Europe: men who learn easily, who readily adapt themselves, are the rule: the gregarious animal of a high order of intelligence is prepared. He who would command finds those who must obey: I have Napoleon and Bismarck in mind, for instance. The struggle against strong and unintelligent wills, which forms the surest obstacle in one's way, is really insignificant Who would not be able to knock down these "objective" gentlemen with weak wills, such as Ranke and Renan!

129.

Spiritual enlightenment is an unfailing means of making men uncertain, weak of will, and needful of succour and support; in short, of developing the herding instincts in them. That is why all great artist-rulers, hitherto (Confucius in China, the Roman Empire, Napoleon, Popedom—at a time when they had the courage of their worldliness and frankly pursued power) in whom the ruling instincts, that had prevailed until their time, culminated, also made use of the spiritual enlightenment—or at least allowed it to be supreme (after the style of the Popes of the Renaissance). The self-deception of the masses on this point, in every democracy for instance, is of the greatest possible value: all that makes men smaller and more amenable is pursued under the title "progress."

130.

The highest equity and mildness as a condition of weakness (the New Testament and the early Christian community—manifesting itself in the form of utter foolishness in the Englishmen, Darwin and Wallace). Your equity, ye higher men, drives you to universal suffrage, etc.; your "humanity" urges you to be milder towards crime and stupidity. In the end you will thus help stupidity and harmlessness to conquer.

Outwardly: Ages of terrible wars, insurrections, explosions. Inwardly: ever more and more weakness among men; events take the form of excitants. The Parisian as the type of the European extreme.

Consequences: (1) Savages (at first, of course, in conformity with the culture that has reigned hitherto); (2) Sovereign individuals (where powerful barbarous masses and emancipation from all that has been, are crossed). The age of greatest stupidity, brutality, and wretchedness in the masses, and in the highest individuals.

131.

An incalculable number of higher individuals now perish: but he who escapes their fate is as strong as the devil. In this respect we are reminded of the conditions which prevailed in the Renaissance.

132.

How are Good Europeans such as ourselves distinguished from the patriots? In the first place, we are atheists and immoralists, but we take care to support the religions and the morality which we associate with the gregarious instinct: for by means of them, an order of men is, so to speak, being prepared, which must at some time or other fall into our hands, which must actually crave for our hands.

Beyond Good and Evil,—certainly; but we insist upon the unconditional and strict preservation of herd-morality.

We reserve ourselves the right to several kinds of philosophy which it is necessary to learn: under certain circumstances, the pessimistic kind as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable.

We should probably support the development and the maturation of democratic tendencies; for it conduces to weakness of will: in "Socialism" we recognise a thorn which prevents smug ease.

Attitude towards the people.. Our prejudices; we pay attention to the results of cross-breeding.

Detached, well-to-do, strong: irony concerning the "press" and its culture. Our care: that scientific men should not become journalists. We mistrust any form of culture that tolerates news-paper reading or writing.

We make our accidental positions (as Goethe and Stendhal did), our experiences, a foreground, and we lay stress upon them, so that we may deceive concerning our backgrounds. We ourselves wait and avoid putting our heart into them. They serve us as refuges, such as a wanderer might require and use—but we avoid feeling at home in them. We are ahead of our fellows in that we have had a disciplina voluntatis. All strength is directed to the development of the will, an art which allows us to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond the passions (also "super-European" thought at times).

This is our preparation before becoming the law-givers of the future and the lords of the earth; if not we, at least our children. Caution where marriage is concerned.

133.

The twentieth century.—The Abbé Galiani says somewhere: "La prévoyance est la cause des guerres actuelles de l'Europe. Si l'on voulait se donner la peine de ne rien prévoir, tout le monde serait tranquille, et je ne crois pas qu'on serait plus malheureux parce qu'on ne ferait pas la guerre." As I in no way share the unwarlike views of my deceased friend Galiani, I have no fear whatever of saying something beforehand with the view of conjuring in some way the cause of wars.

A condition of excessive consciousness, after the worst of earthquakes: with new questions.

134.

It is the time of the great noon, of the most appalling enlightenment: my particular kind of Pessimism: the great starting-point.

(1) Fundamental contradiction between civilisation and the elevation of man.

(2) Moral valuations regarded as a history of lies and the art of calumny in the service of the Will to Power (of the will of the herd, which rises against stronger men).

(3) The conditions which determine every elevation in culture (the facilitation of a selection being made at the cost of a crowd) are the conditions of all growth.

(4). The multiformity of the world as a question of strength, which sees all things in the perspective of their growth. The moral Christian values to be regarded as the insurrection and mendacity of slaves (in comparison with the aristocratic values of the ancient world).
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

Postby admin » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:26 pm

SECOND BOOK. CRITICISM OF THE HIGHEST VALUES THAT HAVE PREVAILED HITHERTO.

I. CRITICISM OF RELIGION.


All the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and imagined things, I will show to be the property and product of man, and this should be his most beautiful apology. Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things in order to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched! Hitherto, this has been his greatest disinterestedness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to conceal from himself that he it was who had created what he admired.

1. Concerning the Origin of Religions.

135.

The origin of religion.—Just as the illiterate man of to-day believes that his wrath is the cause of his being angry, that his mind is the cause of his thinking, that his soul is the cause of his feeling, in short, just as a mass of psychological entities are still unthinkingly postulated as causes; so, in a still more primitive age, the same phenomena were interpreted by man by means of personal entities. Those conditions of his soul which seemed strange, overwhelming, and rapturous, he regarded as obsessions and bewitching influences emanating from the power of some personality. (Thus the Christian, the most puerile and backward man of this age, traces hope, peace, and the feeling of deliverance to a psychological inspiration on the part of God: being by nature a sufferer and a creature in need of repose, states of happiness, peace, and resignation, perforce seem strange to him, and seem to need some explanation.) Among intelligent, strong, and vigorous races, the epileptic is mostly the cause of a belief in the existence of some foreign power; but all such examples of apparent subjection—as, for instance, the bearing of the exalted man, of the poet, of the great criminal, or the passions, love and revenge—lead to the invention of supernatural powers. A condition is made concrete by being identified with a personality, and when this condition overtakes anybody, it is ascribed to that personality. In other words: in the psychological concept of God, a certain state of the soul is personified as a cause in order to appear as an effect.

The psychological logic is as follows: when the feeling of power suddenly seizes and overwhelms a man,—and this takes place in the case of all the great passions,—a doubt arises in him concerning his own person: he dare not think himself the cause of this astonishing sensation—and thus he posits a stronger person, a Godhead as its cause. In short, the origin of religion lies in the extreme feelings of power, which, being strange, take men by surprise: and just as the sick man, who feels one of his limbs unaccountably heavy, concludes that another man must be sitting on it, so the ingenuous homo religiosus, divides himself up into several people. Religion is an example of the "altération de la personalité." A sort of fear and sensation of terror in one's own presence.... But also a feeling of inordinate rapture and exaltation. Among sick people, the sensation of health suffices to awaken a belief in the proximity of God.

136.

Rudimentary psychology of the religious man:—All changes are effects; all effects are effects of will (the notion of "Nature" and of "natural law," is lacking); all effects presuppose an agent. Rudimentary psychology: one is only a cause oneself, when one knows that one has willed something.

Result: States of power impute to man the feeling that he is not the cause of them, that he is not responsible for them: they come without being willed to do so—consequently we cannot be their originators: will that is not free (that is to say, the knowledge of a change in our condition which we have not helped to bring about) requires a strong will.

Consequence of this rudimentary psychology: Man has never dared to credit himself with his strong and startling moods, he has always conceived them as "passive," as "imposed upon him from outside": Religion is the offshoot of a doubt concerning the entity of the person, an altération of the personality: in so far as everything great and strong in man was considered superhuman and foreign, man belittled himself,—he laid the two sides, the very pitiable and weak side, and the very strong and startling side apart, in two spheres, and called the one "Man" and the other "God."

And he has continued to act on these lines; during the period of the moral idiosyncrasy he did not interpret his lofty and sublime moral states as "proceeding from his own will" or as the "work" of the person. Even the Christian himself divides his personality into two parts, the one a mean and weak fiction which he calls man, and the other which he calls God (Deliverer and Saviour).

Religion has lowered the concept "man"; its ultimate conclusion is that all goodness, greatness, and truth are superhuman, and are only obtainable by the grace of God.

137.

One way of raising man out of his self-abasement, which brought about the decline of the point of view that classed all lofty and strong states of the soul, as strange, was the theory of relationship. These lofty and strong states of the soul could at least be interpreted as the influence of our forebears; we belonged to each other, we were irrevocably joined; we grew in our own esteem, by acting according to the example of a model known to us all.

There is an attempt on the part of noble families to associate religion with their own feelings of self-respect. Poets and seers do the same thing; they feel proud that they have been worthy,—that they have been selected for such association,—they esteem it an honour, not to be considered at all as individuals, but as mere mouthpieces (Homer).

Man gradually takes possession of the highest and proudest states of his soul, as also of his acts and his works. Formerly it was believed that one paid oneself the greatest honour by denying one's own responsibility for the highest deeds one accomplished, and by ascribing them to—God. The will which was not free, appeared to be that which imparted a higher value to a deed: in those days a god was postulated as the author of the deed.

138.

Priests are the actors of something which is supernatural, either in the way of ideals, gods, or saviours, and they have to make people believe in them; in this they find their calling, this is the purpose of their instincts; in order to make it as credible as possible, they have to exert themselves to the utmost extent in the art of posing; their actor's sagacity must, above all, aim at giving them a clean conscience, by means of which, alone, it is possible to persuade effectively.

139.

The priest wishes to make it an understood thing, that he is the highest type of man, that he rules,—even over those who wield the power,—that he is indispensable and unassailable,—that he is the strongest power in the community, not by any means to be replaced or undervalued.

Means thereto: he alone is cultured; he alone is the man of virtue; he alone has sovereign power over himself: he alone is, in a certain sense, God, and ultimately goes back to the Godhead; he alone is the middleman between God and others; the Godhead administers punishment to every one who puts the priest at a disadvantage, or who thinks in opposition to him.

Means thereto: Truth exists. There is only one way of attaining to it, and that is to become a priest. Everything good, which relates either to order, nature, or tradition, is to be traced to the wisdom of the priests. The Holy Book is their work. The whole of nature is only a fulfilment of the maxims which it contains. No other source of goodness exists than the priests. Every other kind of perfection, even the warrior's, is different in rank from that of the priests.

Consequence: If the priest is to be the highest type, then the degrees which lead to his virtues must be the degrees of value among men. Study, emancipation from material things, inactivity, impassibility, absence of passion, solemnity;—the opposite of all this is found in the lowest type of man.

The priest has taught a kind of morality which conduced to his being considered the highest type of man. He conceives a type which is the reverse of his own: the Chandala. By making these as contemptible as possible, some strength is lent to the order of castes. The priest's excessive fear of sensuality also implies that the latter is the most serious threat to the order of castes (that is to say, order in general).... Every "free tendency" in puncto puncti overthrows the laws of marriage.

140.

The philosopher considered as the development of the priestly type:—He has the heritage of the priest in his blood; even as a rival he is compelled to fight with the same weapons as the priest of his time;—he aspires to the highest authority.

What is it that bestows authority upon men who have no physical power to wield (no army, no arms at all ...)? How do such men gain authority over those who are in possession of material power, and who represent authority? (Philosophers enter the lists against princes, victorious conquerors, and wise statesmen.)

They can do it only by establishing the belief that they are in possession of a power which is higher and stronger—God. Nothing is strong enough: every one is in need of the mediation and the services of priests. They establish themselves as indispensable intercessors. The conditions of their existence are: (1) That people believe in the absolute superiority of their god, in fact believe in their god; (2) that there is no other access, no direct access to god, save through them. The second condition alone gives rise to the concept "heterodoxy"; the first to the concept "disbelievers" (that is to say, he who believes in another god).

141.

A Criticism of the Holy Lie.—That a lie is allowed in pursuit of holy ends 'is a principle which belongs to the theory of all priestcraft, and the object of this inquiry is to discover to what extent it belongs to its practice.

But philosophers, too, whenever they intend taking over the leadership of mankind, with the ulterior motives of priests in their minds, have never failed to arrogate to themselves the right to lie: Plato above all. But the most elaborate of lies is the double lie, developed by the typically Arian philosophers of the Vedanta: two systems, contradicting each other in all their main points, but interchangeable, complementary, and mutually expletory, when educational ends were in question. The lie of the one has to create a condition in which the truth of the other can alone become intelligible....

How far does the holy lie of priests and philosophers go?—The question here is, what hypotheses do they advance in regard to education, and what are the dogmas they are compelled to invent in order to do justice to these hypotheses?

First: they must have power, authority, and absolute credibility on their side.

Secondly: they must have the direction of the whole of Nature, so that everything affecting the individual seems to be determined by their law.

Thirdly: their domain of power must be very extensive, in order that its control may escape the notice of those they subject: they must know the penal code of the life beyond—of the life "after death,"—and, of course, the means whereby the road to blessedness may be discovered. They have to put the notion of a natural course of things out of sight, but as they are intelligent and thoughtful people, they are able to promise a host of effects, which they naturally say are conditioned by prayer or by the strict observance of their law. They can, moreover, prescribe a large number of things which are exceedingly reasonable —only they must not point to experience or empiricism as the source of this wisdom, but to revelation or to the fruits of the "most severe exercises of penance."

The holy lie, therefore, applies principally to the purpose of an action (the natural purpose, reason, is made to vanish: a moral purpose, the observance of some law, a service to God, seems to be the purpose): to the consequence of an action (the natural consequence is interpreted as something supernatural, and, in order to be on surer ground, other incontrollable and supernatural consequences are foretold).

In this way the concepts good and evil are created, and seem quite divorced from the natural concepts: "useful," "harmful," "life-promoting," "life-retarding,"—indeed, inasmuch as another life is imagined, the former concepts may even be antagonistic to Nature's concepts of good and evil. In this way, the proverbial concept "conscience" is created: an inner voice, which, though it makes itself heard in regard to every action, does not measure the worth of that action according to its results, but according to its conformity or non-conformity to the "law."

The holy lie therefore invented: (1) a god who punishes and rewards, who recognises and carefully observes the law-book of the priests, and who is particular about sending them into the world as his mouthpieces and plenipotentiaries; (2) an After Life, in which, alone, the great penal machine is supposed to be active—to this end the immortality of the soul was invented; (3) a conscience in man, understood as the knowledge that good and evil are permanent values—that God himself speaks through it, whenever its counsels are in conformity with priestly precepts; (4) Morality as the denial of all natural processes, as the subjection of all phenomena to a moral order, as the interpretation of all phenomena as the effects of a moral order of things (that is to say, the concept of punishment and reward), as the only power and only creator of all transformations; (5) Truths given, revealed, and identical with the teaching of the priests: as the condition to all salvation and happiness in this and the next world.

In short: what is the price paid for the improvement supposed to be due to morality?—The unhinging of reason, the reduction of all motives to fear and hope (punishment and reward); dependence upon the tutelage of priests, and upon a formulary exactitude which is supposed to express a divine will; the implantation of a "conscience" which establishes a false science in the place of experience and experiment: as though all one had to do or had not to do were predetermined—a kind of contraction of the seeking and striving spirit;—in short: the worst mutilation of man that can be imagined, and it is pretended that "the good man" is the result.

Practically speaking, all reason, the whole heritage of intelligence, subtlety, and caution, the first condition of the priestly canon, is arbitrarily reduced, when it is too late, to a simple mechanical process: conformity with the law becomes a purpose in itself, it is the highest purpose; Life no longer contains any problems;—the whole conception of the world is polluted by the notion of punishment; —Life itself, owing to the fact that the priests life is upheld as the non plus ultra of perfection, is transformed into a denial and pollution of life;—the concept "God" represents an aversion to Life, and even a criticism and a contemning of it. Truth is transformed in the mind, into priestly prevarication; the striving after truth, into the study of the Scriptures, into the way to become a theologian.

142.

A criticism of the Law-Book of Manu.—The whole book is founded upon the holy lie. Was it the well-being of humanity that inspired the whole of this system? Was this kind of man, who believes in the interested nature of every action, interested or not interested in the success of this system? The desire to improve mankind—whence comes the inspiration to this feeling? Whence is the concept improvement taken?

We find a class of men, the sacerdotal class, who consider themselves the standard pattern, the highest example and most perfect expression of the type man. The notion of "improving" mankind, to this class of men, means to make mankind like themselves. They believe in their own superiority, they will be superior in practice: the cause of the holy lie is The Will to Power....

Establishment of the dominion: to this end, ideas which place a non plus ultra of power with the priesthood are made to prevail. Power acquired by lying was the result of the recognition of the fact that it was not already possessed physically, in a military form.... Lying as a supplement to power—this is a new concept of "truth."

It is a mistake to presuppose unconscious and innocent development in this quarter—a sort of self-deception. Fanatics are not the discoverers of such exhaustive systems of oppression.... Cold-blooded reflection must have been at work here; the same sort of reflection which Plato showed when he worked out his "State"—"One must desire the means when one desires the end." Concerning this political maxim, all legislators have always been quite clear.

We possess the classical model, and it is specifically Arian: we can therefore hold the most gifted and most reflective type of man responsible for the most systematic lie that has ever been told.... Everywhere almost the lie was copied, and thus Avian influence corrupted the world....

143.

Much is said to-day about the Semitic spirit of the New Testament: but the thing referred to is merely priestcraft,—and in the purest example of an Arian law-book, in Manu, this kind of "Semitic spirit"—that is to say, Sacerdotalism, is worse than anywhere else.

The development of the Jewish hierarchy is not original: they learnt the scheme in Babylon—it is Arian. When, later on, the same thing became dominant in Europe, under the preponderance of Germanic blood, this was in conformity to the spirit of the ruling race: a striking case of atavism. The Germanic middle ages aimed at a revival of the Arian order of castes.

Mohammedanism in its turn learned from Christianity the use of a "Beyond" as an instrument of punishment.

The scheme of a permanent community, with priests at its head—this oldest product of Asia's great culture in the domain of organisation—naturally provoked reflection and imitation in every way.—Plato is an example of this, but above all, the Egyptians.

144.

Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can modify men into whatever one; provided one is possessed of an overflow of creative power, and can cause one's will to prevail over long periods of time.

145.

If one wish to see an affirmative Arian religion which is the product of a ruling class, one should read the law-book of Manu. (The deification of the feeling of power in the Brahmin: it is interesting to note that it originated in the warrior-caste, and was later transferred to the priests.)

If one wish to see an affirmative religion of the Semitic order, which is the product of the ruling class, one should read the Koran or the earlier portions of the Old Testament. (Mohammedanism, as a religion for men, has profound contempt for the sentimentality and prevarication of Christianity, ... which, according to Mohammedans, is a woman's religion.)

If one wish to see a negative religion of the Semitic order, which is the product of the oppressed class, one should read the New Testament (which, according to Indian and Arian points of view, is a religion for the Chandala).

If one wish to see a negative Arian religion, which is the product of the ruling classes, one should study Buddhism.

It is quite in the nature of things that we have no Arian religion which is the product of the oppressed classes; for that would have been a contradiction: a race of masters is either paramount or else it goes to the dogs.

146.

Religion, per se, has nothing to do with morality; yet both offshoots of the Jewish religion are essentially moral religions—which prescribe the rules of living, and procure obedience to their principles by means of rewards and punishment.

147.

Paganism—Christianity.—Paganism is that which says yea to all that is natural, it is innocence in being natural, "naturalness." Christianity is that which says no to all that is natural, it is a certain lack of dignity in being natural; hostility to Nature.

"Innocent":—Petronius is innocent, for instance. Beside this happy man a Christian is absolutely devoid of innocence. But since even the Christian status is ultimately only a natural condition, the term "Christian" soon begins to mean the counterfeiting of the psychological interpretation.

148.

The Christian priest is from the root a mortal enemy of sensuality: one cannot imagine a greater contrast to his attitude than the guileless, slightly awed, and solemn attitude, which the religious rites of the most honourable women in Athens maintained in the presence of the symbol of sex. In all non-ascetic religions the procreative act is the secret per se: a sort of symbol of perfection and of the designs of the future: re-birth, immortality.

149.

Our belief in ourselves is the greatest fetter, the most telling spur, and the strongest pinion. Christianity ought to have elevated the innocence of man to the position of an article of belief—men would then have become gods: in those days believing was still possible.

150.

The egregious lie of history: as if it were the corruption of Paganism that opened the road to Christianity. As a matter of fact, it was the enfeeblement and moralisation of the man of antiquity. The new interpretation of natural functions, which made them appear like vices, had already gone before!

151.

Religions are ultimately wrecked by the belief in morality. The idea of the Christian moral God becomes untenable,—hence "Atheism,"—as though there could be no other god.

Culture is likewise wrecked by the belief in morality. For when the necessary and only possible conditions of its growth are revealed, nobody will any longer countenance it (Buddhism).

152.

The physiology of Nihilistic religions.—All in all, the Nihilistic religions are systematised histories of sickness described in religious and moral terminology.

In pagan cultures it is around the interpretation of the great annual cycles that the religious cult turns; in Christianity it is around a cycle of paralytic phenomena.

153.

This Nihilistic religion gathers together all the decadent elements and things of like order which it can find in antiquity, viz.:—

(a) The weak and the botched (the refuse of the ancient world, and that of which it rid itself with most violence).

(b) Those who are morally obsessed and anti-pagan.

(c) Those who are weary of politics and indifferent (the blasé Romans), the denationalised, who know not what they are.

(d) Those who are tired of themselves—who are happy to be party to a subterranean conspiracy.

154.

Buddha versus Christ.—Among the Nihilistic religions, Christianity and Buddhism may always be sharply distinguished. Buddhism is the expression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and mild—it is a sort of gratitude towards all that lies hidden, including that which it entirely lacks, viz., bitterness, disillusionment, and resentment. Finally it possesses lofty intellectual love; it has got over all the subtlety of philosophical contradictions, and is even resting after it, though it is precisely from that source that it derives its intellectual glory and its glow as of a sunset (it originated in the higher classes).

Christianity is a degenerative movement, consisting of all kinds of decaying and excremental elements: it is not the expression of the downfall of a race, it is, from the root, an agglomeration of all the morbid elements which are mutually attractive and which gravitate to one another.... It is therefore not a national religion, not determined by race: it appeals to the disinherited everywhere; it consists of a foundation of resentment against all that is successful and dominant: it is in need of a symbol which represents the damnation of everything successful and dominant. It is opposed to every form of intellectual movement, to all philosophy: it takes up the cudgels for idiots, and utters a curse upon all intellect. Resentment against those who are gifted, learned, intellectually independent: in all these it suspects the element of success and domination.

155.

In Buddhism this thought prevails: "All passions, everything which creates emotions and leads to blood, is a call to action"—to this extent alone are its believers warned against evil. For action has no sense, it merely binds one to existence. All existence, however, has no sense. Evil is interpreted as that which leads to irrationalism: to the affirmation of means whose end is denied. A road to nonentity is the desideratum, hence all emotional impulses are regarded with horror. For instance: "On no account seek after revenge! Be the enemy of no one!"—The Hedonism of the weary finds its highest expression here. Nothing is more utterly foreign to Buddhism than the Jewish fanaticism of St. Paul: nothing could be more contrary to its instinct than the tension, fire, and unrest of the religious man, and, above all, that form of sensuality which sanctifies Christianity with the name "Love." Moreover, it is the cultured and very intellectual classes who find blessedness in Buddhism: a race wearied and besotted by centuries of philosophical quarrels, but not beneath all culture as those classes were from which Christianity sprang.... In the Buddhistic ideal, there is essentially an emancipation from good and evil: a very subtle suggestion of a Beyond to all morality is thought out in its teaching, and this Beyond is supposed to be compatible with perfection,—the condition being, that even good actions are only needed pro tem., merely as a means,—that is to say, in order to be free from all action.

156.

How very curious it is to see a Nihilistic religion such as Christianity, sprung from, and in keeping with, a decrepit and worn-out people, who have outlived all strong instincts, being transferred step by step to another environment—that is to say, to a land of young people, who have not yet lived at all. The joy of the final chapter, of the fold and of the evening, preached to barbarians and Germans! How thoroughly all of it must first have been barbarised, Germanised! To those who had dreamed of a Walhalla: who found happiness only in war!—A supernational religion preached in the midst of chaos, where no nations yet existed even.

157.

The only way to refute priests and religions is this: to show that their errors are no longer beneficent—that they are rather harmful; in short, that their own "proof of power" no longer holds good....
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

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Part 1 of 2

2. CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY.

158.

Christianity as an historical reality should not be confounded with that one root which its name recalls. The other roots, from which it has sprung, are by far the more important. It is an unprecedented abuse of names to identify such manifestations of decay and such abortions as the "Christian Church," "Christian belief," and "Christian life," with that Holy Name. What did Christ deny?—Everything which to-day is called Christian.

159.

The whole of the Christian creed—all Christian "truth," is idle falsehood and deception, and is precisely the reverse of that which was at the bottom of the first Christian movement.

All that which in the ecclesiastical sense is Christian, is just exactly what is most radically anti-Christian: crowds of things and people appear instead of symbols, history takes the place of eternal facts, it is all forms, rites, and dogmas instead of a "practice" of life. To be really Christian would mean to be absolutely indifferent to dogmas, cults, priests, church, and theology.

The practice of Christianity is no more an impossible phantasy than the practice of Buddhism is: it is merely a means to happiness.

160.

Jesus goes straight to the point, the "Kingdom of Heaven" in the heart, and He does not find the means in duty to the Jewish Church; He even regards the reality of Judaism (its need to maintain itself) as nothing; He is concerned purely with the inner man.

Neither does He make anything of all the coarse forms relating to man's intercourse with God: He is opposed to the whole of the teaching of repentance and atonement; He points out how man ought to live in order to feel himself "deified," and how futile it is on his part to hope to live properly by showing repentance and contrition for his sins. "Sin is of no account" is practically his chief standpoint.

Sin, repentance, forgiveness,—all this does not belong to Christianity ... it is Judaism or Paganism which has become mixed up with Christ's teaching.

161.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of the heart (of children it is written, "for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven"): it has nothing to do with superterrestrial things. The Kingdom of God "cometh," not chronologically or historically, not on a certain day in the calendar; it is not something which one day appears and was not previously there; it is a "change of feeling in the individual," it is something which may come at any time and which may be absent at any time....

162.

The thief on the cross;—When the criminal himself, who endures a painful death, declares: "the way this Jesus suffers and dies, without a murmur of revolt or enmity, graciously and resignedly, is the only right way," he assents to the gospel; and by this very fact he is in Paradise....

163.

Jesus bids us:—not to resist, either by deeds or in our heart, him who ill-treats us;

He bids us admit of no grounds for separating ourselves from our wives;

He bids us make no distinction between foreigners and fellow-countrymen, strangers and familiars;

He bids us show anger to no one, and treat no one with contempt;—give alms secretly; not to desire to become rich;—not to swear;—not to stand in judgment;—become reconciled with our enemies and forgive offences;—not to worship in public.

"Blessedness" is nothing promised: it is here, with us, if we only wish to live and act in a particular way.

164.

Subsequent Additions;—The whole of the prophet- and thaumaturgist-attitudes and the bad temper; while the conjuring-up of a supreme tribunal of justice is an abominable corruption (see Mark vi. 11: "And whosoever shall not receive you.... Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha," etc.). The "fig tree" (Matt. xxi. 18, 19): "Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away."

165.

The teaching of rewards and punishments has become mixed up with Christianity in a way which is quite absurd; everything is thereby spoilt. In the same way, the practice of the first ecclesia militans, of the Apostle Paul and his attitude, is put forward as if it had been commanded or predetermined.

The subsequent glorification of the actual life and teaching of the first Christians: as if everything had been prescribed beforehand and had been only a matter of following directions——And as for the fulfilment of scriptural prophecies: how much of all that is more than forgery and cooking?

166.

Jesus opposed a real life, a life in truth, to ordinary life: nothing could have been more foreign to His mind than the somewhat heavy nonsense of an "eternal Peter,"—of the eternal duration of a single person. Precisely what He combats is the exaggerated importance of the "person": how can He wish to immortalise it?

He likewise combats the hierarchy within the community; He never promises a certain proportion of reward for a certain proportion of deserts: how can He have meant to teach the doctrine of punishment and reward in a Beyond?

167.

Christianity is an ingenuous attempt at bringing about a Buddhistic movement in favour of peace, sprung from the very heart of the resenting masses ... but transformed by Paul into a mysterious pagan cult, which was ultimately able to accord with the whole of State organisation ... and which carries on war, condemns, tortures, conjures, and hates.

Paul bases his teaching upon the need of mystery felt by the great masses capable of religious emotions: he seeks a victim, a bloody phantasmagoria, which may be equal to a contest with the images of a secret cult: God on the cross, the drinking of blood, the unio mystica with the "victim."

He seeks the prolongation of life after death (the blessed and atoned after-life of the individual soul) which he puts in causal relation with the victim already referred to (according to the type of Dionysos, Mithras, Osiris).

He feels the necessity of bringing notions of guilt and sin into the foreground, not a new practice of life (as Jesus Himself demonstrated and taught), but a new cult, a new belief, a belief in a miraculous metamorphosis ("Salvation" through belief).

He understood the great needs of the pagan worlds and he gave quite an absolutely arbitrary picture of those two plain facts, Christ's life and death. He gave the whole a new accent, altering the equilibrium everywhere ... he was one of the most active destroyers of primitive Christianity.

The attempt made on the life of priests and theologians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priesthood and theology—a ruling caste and a Church.

The attempt made to suppress the fussy importance of the "person," culminated in the belief in the eternal "personality" (and in the anxiety concerning "eternal salvation" ...), and in the most paradoxical exaggeration of individual egoism.

This is the humorous side of the question—tragic humour: Paul again set up on a large scale precisely what Jesus had overthrown by His life. At last, when the Church edifice was complete, it even sanctioned the existence of the State.

168.

The Church is precisely that against which Jesus inveighed—and against which He taught His disciples to fight.

169.

A God who died for our sins, salvation through faith, resurrection after death—all these things are the counterfeit coins of real Christianity, for which that pernicious blockhead Paul must be held responsible.

The life which must serve as an example consists in love and humility; in the abundance of hearty emotion which does not even exclude the lowliest; in the formal renunciation of all desire of making its rights felt; in conquest, in the sense of triumph over oneself; in the belief in salvation in this world, despite all sorrow, opposition, and death; in forgiveness and the absence of anger and contempt; in the absence of a desire to be rewarded; in the refusal to be bound to anybody; abandonment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual;—in fact, a very proud life controlled by the will of a servile and poor life.

Once the Church had allowed itself to take over all the Christian practice, and had formally sanctioned the State,—that kind of life which Jesus combats and condemns,—it was obliged to lay the sense of Christianity in other things than early Christian ideals—that is to say, in the faith in incredible things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. etc. The notions "sin," "forgiveness," "punishment," "reward"—everything, in fact, which had nothing in common with, and was quite absent from, primitive Christianity, now comes into the foreground.

An appalling stew of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judgments and condemnations; the order of rank, etc.

170.

Christianity has, from the first, always transformed the symbolical into crude realities:

(1) The antitheses "true life" and "false life" were misunderstood and changed into "life here" and "life beyond."

(2) The notion "eternal life," as opposed to the personal life which is ephemeral, is translated into "personal immortality";

(3) The process of fraternising by means of sharing the same food and drink, after the Hebrew-Arabian manner, is interpreted as the "miracle of transubstantiation."

(4) "Resurrection" which was intended to mean the entrance to the "true life," in the sense of being intellectually "born again," becomes an historical contingency, supposed to take place at some moment after death;

(5) The teaching of the Son of man as the "Son of God,"—that is to say, the life-relationship between man and God,—becomes the "second person of the Trinity," and thus the filial relationship of every man—even the lowest—to God, is done away with;

(6) Salvation through faith (that is to say, that there is no other way to this filial relationship to God, save through the practice of life taught by Christ) becomes transformed into the belief that there is a miraculous way of atoning for all sin; though not through our own endeavours, but by means of Christ:

For all these purposes, "Christ on the Cross" had to be interpreted afresh. The death itself would certainly not be the principal feature of the event ... it was only another sign pointing to the way in which one should behave towards the authorities and the laws of the world—that one was not to defend oneself—this was the exemplary life.

171.

Concerning the psychology of Paul.—The important fact is Christ's death. This remains to be explained .... That there may be truth or error in an explanation never entered these people's heads: one day a sublime possibility strikes them, "His death might mean so and so" —and it forthwith becomes so and so. An hypothesis is proved by the sublime ardour it lends to its discoverer....

"The proof of strength": i.e., a thought is demonstrated by its effects ("by their fruits," as the Bible ingenuously says); that which fires enthusiasm must be true,—what one loses one's blood for must be true—

In every department of this world of thought, the sudden feeling of power which an idea imparts to him who is responsible for it, is placed to the credit of that idea:—and as there seems no other way of honouring an idea than by calling it true, the first epithet it is honoured with is the word true. ... How could it have any effect otherwise? It was imagined by some power: if that power were not real, it could not be the cause of anything.... The thought is then understood as inspired: the effect it causes has something of the violent nature of a demoniacal influence—

A thought which a decadent like Paul could not resist and to which he completely yields, is thus "proved" true!!!

All these holy epileptics and visionaries did not possess a thousandth part of the honesty in self-criticism with which a philologist, nowadays, reads a text, or tests the truth of an historical event.... Beside us, such people were moral cretins.

172.

It matters little whether a thing be true, provided it be effective: total absence of intellectual uprightness. Everything is good, whether it be lying, slander, or shameless "cooking," provided it serve to heighten the degree of heat to the point at which people "believe."

We are face to face with an actual school for the teaching of the means wherewith men are seduced to a belief: we see systematic contempt for those spheres whence contradiction might come (that is to say, for reason, philosophy, wisdom, doubt, and caution); a shameless praising and glorification of the teaching, with continual references to the fact that it was God who presented us with it—that the apostle signifies nothing—that no criticism is brooked, but only faith, acceptance; that it is the greatest blessing and favour to receive such a doctrine of salvation; that the state in which one should receive it, ought to be one of the profoundest thankfulness and humility....

The resentment which the lowly feel against all those in high places, is continually turned to account: the fact that this teaching is revealed to them as the reverse of the wisdom of the world, against the power of the world, seduces them to it. This teaching convinces the outcasts and the botched of all sorts and conditions; it promises blessedness, advantages, and privileges to the most insignificant and most humble men; it fanaticises the poor, the small, and the foolish, and fills them with insane vanity, as though they were the meaning and salt of the earth.

Again, I say, all this cannot be sufficiently contemned, we spare ourselves a criticism of the teaching; it is sufficient to take note of the means it uses in order to be aware of the nature of the phenomenon one is examining. It identified itself with virtue, it appropriated the whole of the fascinating power of virtue, shamelessly, for its own purposes ... it availed itself of the power of paradox, and of the need, manifested by old civilisation, for pepper and absurdity; it amazed and revolted at the same time; it provoked persecutions and ill-treatment.

It is the same kind of well-thought-out meanness with which the Jewish priesthood established their power and built up their Church....

One must be able to discern: (1) that warmth of passion "love" (resting on a base of ardent sensuality); (2) the thoroughly ignoble character of Christianity:—the continual exaggeration and verbosity;—the lack of cool intellectuality and irony;—the unmilitary character of all its instincts;—the priestly prejudices against manly pride, sensuality, the sciences, the arts.

173.

Paul: seeks power against ruling Judaism,—his attempt is too weak.... Transvaluation of the notion "Jew": the "race" is put aside: but that means denying the very basis of the whole structure. The "martyr," the "fanatic," the value of all strong belief. Christianity is the form of decay of the old world, after the latter's collapse, and it is characterised by the fact that it brings all the most sickly and unhealthy elements and needs to the top.

Consequently other instincts had to step into the foreground, in order to constitute an entity, a power able to stand alone—in short, a condition of tense sorrow was necessary, like that out of which the Jews had derived their instinct of self-preservation....

The persecution of Christians was invaluable for this purpose.

Unity in the face of danger; the conversion of the masses becomes the only means of putting an end to the persecution of the individual. (The notion "conversion" is therefore made as elastic as possible.)

174.

The Christian Judaic life: here resentment did not prevail. The great persecutions alone could have driven out the passions to that extent—as also the ardour of love and hate.

When the creatures a man most loves are sacrificed before his eyes for the sake of his faith, that man becomes aggressive; the triumph of Christianity is due to its persecutors.

Asceticism is not specifically Christian: this is what Schopenhauer misunderstood. It only shoots up in Christianity, wherever it would have existed without that religion.

Melancholy Christianity, the torture and torment of the conscience, also only a peculiarity of a particular soil, where Christian values have taken root: it is not Christianity properly speaking. Christianity has absorbed all the different kinds of diseases which grow from morbid soil: one could refute it at one blow by showing that it did not know how to resist any contagion. But that precisely is the essential feature of it. Christianity is a type of decadence.

175.

The reality on which Christianity was able to build up its power consisted of the small dispersed Jewish families, with their warmth, tenderness, and peculiar readiness to help, which, to the whole of the Roman Empire, was perhaps the most incomprehensible and least familiar of their characteristics; they were also united by their pride at being a "chosen people," concealed beneath a cloak of humility, and by their secret denial of all that was uppermost and that possessed power and splendour, although there was no shade of envy in their denial. To have recognised this as a power, to have regarded this blessed state as communicable, seductive, and infectious even where pagans were concerned—this constituted Paul's genius: to use up the treasure of latent energy and cautious happiness for the purposes of "a Jewish Church of free confession," and to avail himself of all the Jewish experience, their propaganda, and their expertness in the preservation of a community under a foreign power—this is what he conceived to be his duty. He it was who discovered that absolutely unpolitical and isolated body of paltry people, and their art of asserting themselves and pushing themselves to the front, by means of a host of acquired virtues which are made to represent the only forms of virtue ("the self-preservative measure and weapon of success of a certain class of man").

The principle of love comes from the small community of Jewish people: a very passionate soul glows here, beneath the ashes of humility and wretchedness: it is neither Greek, Indian, nor German. The song in praise of love which Paul wrote is not Christian; it is the Jewish flare of that eternal flame which is Semitic. If Christianity has done anything essentially new in a psychological sense, it is this, that it has increased the temperature of the soul among those cooler and more noble races who were at one time at the head of affairs; it discovered that the most wretched life could be made rich and invaluable, by means of an elevation of the temperature of the soul....

It is easily understood that a transfer of this sort could not take place among the ruling classes: the Jews and Christians were at a disadvantage owing to their bad manners—spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing (I become aware of these bad manners while reading the New Testament). It was necessary to be related both in baseness and sorrow with this type of lower manhood in order to feel anything attractive in him.... The attitude a man maintains towards the New Testament is a test of the amount of taste he may have for the classics (see Tacitus); he who is not revolted by it, he who does not feel honestly and deeply that he is in the presence of a sort of fœda superstitio when reading it, and who does not draw his hand back so as not to soil his fingers—such a man does not know what is classical. A man must feel about "the cross" as Goethe did.[1]

[1] Vieles kann ich ertragen. Die meisten beschwerlichen Dinge
Duld' ich mit ruhigem Mut, wie es ein Gott mir gebeut.
Wenige sind mir jedoch wie Gift und Schlange zuwider;
Viere: Rauch des Tabaks, Wanzen, und Knoblauch und
Goethe's Venetian Epigrams, No. 67.
Much can I bear. Things the most irksome
I endure with such patience as comes from a god.
Four things, however, repulse me like venom:—Tobacco
smoke, garlic, bugs, and the cross.
(TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.)


176.

The reaction of paltry people:—Love provides the feeling of highest power. It should be understood to what extent, not man in general, but only a certain kind of man is speaking here.

"We are godly in love, we shall be 'the children of God'; God loves us and wants nothing from us save love"; that is to say: all morality, obedience, and action, do not produce the same feeling of power and freedom as love does;—a man does nothing wicked from sheer love, but he does much more than if he were prompted by obedience and virtue alone.

Here is the happiness of the herd, the communal feeling in big things as in small, the living sentiment of unity felt as the sum of the feeling of life. Helping, crying for, and being useful, constantly kindle the feeling of power; visible success, the expression of pleasure, emphasise the feeling of power; pride is not lacking either, it is felt in the form of the community, the House of God, and the "chosen people."

As a matter of fact, man has once more experienced an "altération" of his personality: this time he called his feeling of love—God. The awakening of such a feeling must be pictured; it is a sort of ecstasy, a strange language, a "Gospel"—it was this newness which did not allow man to attribute love to himself—he thought it was God leading him on and taking shape in his heart. "God descends among men," one's neighbour is transfigured and becomes a God (in so far as he provokes the sentiment of love), Jesus is the neighbour, the moment He is transfigured in thought into a God, and into a cause provoking the feeling of power.

177.

Believers are aware that they owe an infinite amount to Christianity, and therefore conclude that its Founder must have been a man of the first rank.... This conclusion is false, but it is typical of the reverents. Regarded objectively, it is, in the first place, just possible that they are mistaken concerning the extent of their debt to Christianity: a man's convictions prove nothing concerning the thing he is convinced about, and in religions they are more likely to give rise to suspicions.... Secondly, it is possible that the debt owing to Christianity is not due to its Founder at all, but to the whole structure, the whole thing—to the Church, etc. The notion "Founder" is so very equivocal, that it may stand even for the accidental cause of a movement: the person of the Founder has been inflated in proportion as the Church has grown: but even this process of veneration allows of the conclusion that, at one time or other, this Founder was something exceedingly insecure and doubtful—in the beginning.... Let any one think of the free and easy way in which Paul treats the problem of the personality of Jesus, how he almost juggles with it: some one who died, who was seen after His death,—some one whom the Jews delivered up to death—all this was only the theme—Paul wrote the music to it.

178.

The founder of a religion may be quite insignificant—a wax vesta and no more!

179.

Concerning the psychological problem of Christianity.—The driving forces are: resentment, popular insurrection, the revolt of the bungled and the botched. (In Buddhism it is different: it is not born of resentment. It rather combats resentment because the latter leads to action!)

This party, which stands for freedom, understands that the abandonment of antagonism in thought and deed is a condition of distinction and preservation. Here lies the psychological difficulty which has stood in the way of Christianity being understood: the force which created it, urges to a struggle against itself.

Only as a party standing for peace and innocence can this insurrectionary movement hope to be successful: it must conquer by means of excessive mildness, sweetness, softness, and its instincts are aware of this. The feat was to deny and condemn the force, of which man is the expression, and to press the reverse of that force continually to the fore, by word and deed.

180.

The pretence of youthfulness.—It is a mistake to imagine that, with Christianity, an ingenuous and youthful people rose against an old culture; the story goes that it was out of the lowest levels of society, where Christianity flourished and shot its roots, that the more profound source of life gushed forth afresh: but nothing can be understood of the psychology of Christianity, if it be supposed that it was the expression of revived youth among a people, or of the resuscitated strength of a race. It is rather a typical form of decadence, of moral-softening and of hysteria, amid a general hotch-potch of races and people that had lost all aims and had grown weary and sick. The wonderful company which gathered round this master-seducer of the populace, would not be at all out of place in a Russian novel: all the diseases of the nerves seem to give one another a rendezvous in this crowd—the absence of a known duty, the feeling that everything is nearing its end, that nothing is any longer worth while, and that contentment lies in dolce far niente.

The power and certainty of the future in the Jew's instinct, its monstrous will for life and for power, lies in its ruling classes; the people who upheld primitive Christianity are best distinguished by this exhausted condition of their instincts. On the one hand, they are sick of everything; on the other, they are content with each other, with themselves and for themselves.

181.

Christianity regarded as emancipated Judaism (just as a nobility which is both racial and indigenous ultimately emancipates itself from these conditions, and goes in search of kindred elements....).

(1) As a Church (community) on the territory of the State, as an unpolitical institution.

(2) As life, breeding, practice, art of living.

(3) As a religion of sin (sin committed against God, being the only recognised kind, and the only cause of all suffering), with a universal cure for it. There is no sin save against God; what is done against men, man shall not sit in judgment upon, nor call to account, except in the name of God. At the same time, all commandments (love): everything is associated with God, and all acts are performed according to God's will. Beneath this arrangement there lies exceptional intelligence (a very narrow life, such as that led by the Esquimaux, can only be endured by most peaceful and indulgent people: the Judæo-Christian dogma turns against sin in favour of the "sinner").

182.

The Jewish priesthood understood how to present everything it claimed to be right as a divine precept, as an act of obedience to God, and also to introduce all those things which conduced to preserve Israel and were the conditions of its existence (for instance: the large number of "works": circumcision and the cult of sacrifices, as the very pivot of the national conscience), not as Nature, but as God.

This process continued; within the very heart of Judaism, where the need of these "works" was not felt (that is to say, as a means of keeping a race distinct), a priestly sort of man was pictured, whose bearing towards the aristocracy was like that of "noble nature"; a sacerdotalism of the soul, which now, in order to throw its opposite into strong relief, attaches value, not to the "dutiful acts" themselves, but to the sentiment....

At bottom, the problem was once again, how to make a certain kind of soul prevail: it was also a popular insurrection in the midst of a priestly people—a pietistic movement coming from below (sinners, publicans, women, and children). Jesus of Nazareth was the symbol of their sect. And again, in order to believe in themselves, they were in need of a theological transfiguration: they require nothing less than "the Son of God" in order to create a belief for themselves. And just as the priesthood had falsified the whole history of Israel, another attempt was made, here, to alter and falsify the whole history of mankind in such a way as to make Christianity seem like the most important event it contained. This movement could have originated only upon the soil of Judaism, the main feature of which was the confounding of guilt with sorrow and the reduction of all sin to sin against God. Of all this, Christianity is the second degree of power.

183.

The symbolism of Christianity is based upon that of Judaism, which had already transfigured all reality (history, Nature) into a holy and artificial unreality—which refused to recognise real history, and which showed no more interest in a natural course of things.

184.

The Jews made the attempt to prevail, after two of their castes—the warrior and the agricultural castes, had disappeared from their midst.

In this sense they are the "castrated people": they have their priests and then—their Chandala....

How easily a disturbance occurs among them—an insurrection of their Chandala. This was the origin of Christianity.

Owing to the fact that they had no knowledge of warriors except as their masters, they introduced enmity towards the nobles, the men of honour, pride, and power, and the ruling classes, into their religion: they are pessimists from indignation....

Thus they created a very important and novel position: the priests in the van of the Chandala—against the noble classes....

Christianity was the logical conclusion of this movement: even in the Jewish priesthood, it still scented the existence of the caste, of the privileged and noble minority—it therefore did away with priests.

Christ is the unit of the Chandala who removes the priest ... the Chandala who redeems himself....

That is why the French Revolution is the lineal descendant and the continuator of Christianity— it is characterised by an instinct of hate towards castes, nobles, and the last privileges.

185.

The "Christian Ideal" put on the stage with Jewish astuteness—these are the fundamental psychological forces of its "nature":—

Revolt against the ruling spiritual powers;

The attempt to make those virtues which facilitate the happiness of the lowly, a standard of all values—in fact, to call God that which is no more than the self-preservative instinct of that class of man possessed of least vitality;

Obedience and absolute abstention from war and resistance, justified by this ideal;

The love of one another as a result of the love of God.

The trick: The denial of all natural mobilia, and their transference to the spiritual world beyond ... the exploitation of virtue and its veneration for wholly interested motives, gradual denial of virtue in everything that is not Christian.
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

Postby admin » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:35 pm

Part 2 of 2

186.

The profound contempt with which the Christian was treated by the noble people of antiquity, is of the same order as the present instinctive aversion to Jews: it is the hatred which free and self-respecting classes feel towards those who wish to creep in secretly, and who combine an awkward bearing with foolish self-sufficiency.

The New Testament is the gospel of a completely ignoble species of man; its pretensions to highest values—yea, to all values, is, as a matter of fact, revolting—even nowadays.

187.

How little the subject matters! It is the spirit which gives the thing life! What a quantity of stuffy and sick-room air there is in all that chatter about "redemption," "love," "blessedness," "faith," "truth," "eternal life"! Let any one look into a really pagan book and compare the two; for instance, in Petronius, nothing at all is done, said, desired, and valued, which, according to a bigoted Christian estimate, is not sin, or even deadly sin. And yet how happy one feels with the purer air, the superior intellectuality, the quicker pace, and the free overflowing strength which is certain of the future! In the whole of the New Testament there is not one bouffonnerie: but that fact alone would suffice to refute any book....

188.

The profound lack of dignity with which all life, which is not Christian, is condemned: it does not suffice them to think meanly of their actual opponents, they cannot do with less than a general slander of everything that is not themselves.... An abject and crafty soul is in the most perfect harmony with the arrogance of piety, as witness the early Christians.

The future: they see that they are heavily paid for it.... Theirs is the muddiest kind of spirit that exists. The whole of Christ's life is so arranged as to confirm the prophecies of the Scriptures: He behaves in such wise in order that they may be right....

189.

The deceptive interpretation of the words, the doings, and the condition of dying people; the natural fear of death, for instance, is systematically confounded with the supposed fear of what is to happen "after death." ...

190.

The Christians have done exactly what the Jews did before them. They introduced what they conceived to be an innovation and a thing necessary to self-preservation into their Master's teaching, and wove His life into it They likewise credited Him with all the wisdom of a maker of proverbs—in short, they represented their everyday life and activity as an act of obedience, and thus sanctified their propaganda.

What it all depends upon, may be gathered from Paul: it is not much. What remains is the development of a type of saint, out of the values which these people regarded as saintly.

The whole of the "doctrine of miracles," including the resurrection, is the result of self-glorification on the part of the community, which ascribed to its Master those qualities it ascribed to itself, but in a higher degree (or, better still, it derived its strength from Him....)

191.

The Christians have never led the life which Jesus commanded them to lead, and the impudent fable of the "justification by faith," and its unique and transcendental significance, is only the result of the Church's lack of courage and will in acknowledging those "works" which Jesus commanded.

The Buddhist behaves differently from the non-Buddhist; but the Christian behaves as all the rest of the world does, and possesses a Christianity of ceremonies and states of the soul.

The profound and contemptible falsehood of Christianity in Europe makes us deserve the contempt of the Arabs, Hindoos, and Chinese....

Let any one listen to the words of the first German statesman, concerning that which has preoccupied Europe for the last forty years.

192.

"Faith" or "works"?—But that the "works," the habit of particular works may engender a certain set of values or thoughts, is just as natural as it would be unnatural for "works" to proceed from mere valuations. Man must practise, not how to strengthen feelings of value, but how to strengthen action: first of all, one must be able to do something.... Luther's Christian Dilettantism. Faith is an asses' bridge. The background consists of a profound conviction on the part of Luther and his peers, that they are enabled to accomplish Christian "works," a personal fact, disguised under an extreme doubt as to whether all action is not sin and devil's work, so that the worth of life depends upon isolated and highly-strained conditions of inactivity (prayer, effusion, etc.).—Ultimately, Luther would be right: the instincts which are expressed by the whole bearing of the reformers are the most brutal that exist. Only in turning absolutely away from themselves, and in becoming absorbed in the opposite of themselves, only by means of an illusion ("faith") was existence endurable to them.

193.

"What was to be done in order to believe?"—an absurd question. That which is wrong with Christianity is, that it does none of the things that Christ commanded.

It is a mean life, but seen through the eye of contempt.

194.

The entrance into the real life—a man saves his own life by living the life of the multitude.

195.

Christianity has become something fundamentally different from what its Founder wished it to be. It is the great anti-pagan movement of antiquity, formulated with the use of the life, teaching, and "words" of the Founder of Christianity, but interpreted quite arbitrarily, according to a scheme embodying profoundly different needs: translated into the language of all the subterranean religions then existing.

It is the rise of Pessimism (whereas Jesus wished to bring the peace and the happiness of the lambs): and moreover the Pessimism of the weak, of the inferior, of the suffering, and of the oppressed.

Its mortal enemies are (1) Power, whether in the form of character, intellect, or taste, and "worldliness"; (2) the "good cheer" of classical times, the noble levity and scepticism, hard pride, eccentric dissipation, and cold frugality of the sage, Greek refinement in manners, words, and form. Its mortal enemy is as much the Roman as the Greek.

The attempt on the part of anti-paganism to establish itself on a philosophical basis, and to make its tenets possible: it shows a taste for the ambiguous figures of antique culture, and above all for Plato, who was, more than any other, an anti-Hellene and Semite in instinct.... It also shows a taste for Stoicism, which is essentially the work of Semites ("dignity" is regarded as severity, law; virtue is held to be greatness, self-responsibility, authority, greatest sovereignty over oneself—this is Semitic.) The Stoic is an Arabian sheik wrapped in Greek togas and notions.

196.

Christianity only resumes the fight which had already been begun against the classical ideal and noble religion.

As a matter of fact, the whole process of transformation is only an adaptation to the needs and to the level of intelligence of religious masses then existing:—those masses which believed in Isis, Mithras, Dionysos, and the "great mother," and which demanded the following things of a religion: (1) hopes of a beyond, (2) the bloody phantasmagoria of animal sacrifice (the mystery), (3) holy legend and the redeeming deed, (4) asceticism, denial of the world, superstitious "purification," (5) a hierarchy as a part of the community. In short, Christianity everywhere fitted the already prevailing and increasing anti-pagan tendency—those cults which Epicurus combated,—or more exactly, those religions proper to the lower herd, women, slaves, and ignoble classes.

The misunderstandings are therefore the following:—

(1) The immortality of the individual;

(2) The assumed existence of another world;

(3) The absurd notion of punishment and expiation in the heart of the interpretation of existence;

(4) The profanation of the divine nature of man, instead of its accentuation, and the construction of a very profound chasm, which can only be crossed by the help of a miracle or by means of the most thorough self-contempt;

(5) The whole world of corrupted imagination and morbid passion, instead of a simple and loving life of action, instead of Buddhistic happiness attainable on earth;

(6) An ecclesiastical order with a priesthood, theology, cults, and sacraments; in short, everything that Jesus of Nazareth combated;

(7) The miraculous in everything and everybody, superstition too: while precisely the trait which distinguished Judaism and primitive Christianity was their repugnance to miracles and their relative rationalism.

197.

The psychological pre-requisites:—Ignorance and lack of culture,—the sort of ignorance which has unlearned every kind of shame: let any one imagine those impudent saints in the heart of Athens;

The Jewish instinct of a chosen people: they appropriate all the virtues, without further ado, as their own, and regard the rest of the world as their opposite; this is a profound sign of spiritual depravity;

The total lack of real aims and real duties, for which other virtues are required than those of the bigot—the State undertook this work for them: and the impudent people still behaved as though they had no need of the State. "Except ye become as little children" —oh, how far we are from this psychological ingenuousness!

198.

The Founder of Christianity had to pay dearly for having directed His teaching at the lowest classes of Jewish society and intelligence. They understood Him only according to the limitations of their own spirit. ... It was a disgrace to concoct a history of salvation, a personal God, a personal Saviour, a personal immortality, and to have retained all the meanness of the "person," and of the "history" of a doctrine which denies the reality of all that is personal and historical.

The legend of salvation takes the place of the symbolic "now" and "all time," of the symbolic "here" and "everywhere"; and miracles appear instead of the psychological symbol.

199.

Nothing is less innocent than the New Testament. The soil from which it sprang is known.

These people, possessed of an inflexible will to assert themselves, and who, once they had lost all natural hold on life, and had long existed without any right to existence, still knew how to prevail by means of hypotheses which were as unnatural as they were imaginary (calling themselves the chosen people, the community of saints, the people of the promised land, and the "Church"): these people made use of their pia fraus with such skill, and with such "clean consciences," that one cannot be too cautious when they preach morality. When Jews step forward as the personification of innocence, the danger must be great. While reading the New Testament a man should have his small fund of intelligence, mistrust, and wickedness constantly at hand.

People of the lowest origin, partly mob, outcasts not only from good society, but also from respectable society; grown away from the atmosphere of culture, and free from discipline; ignorant, without even a suspicion of the fact that conscience can also rule in spiritual matters; in a word—the Jews: an instinctively crafty people, able to create an advantage, a means of seduction out of every conceivable hypothesis of superstition, even out of ignorance itself.

200.

I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed—as the greatest and most impious lie: I can discern the last sprouts and branches of its ideal beneath every form of disguise, I decline to enter into any compromise or false position in reference to it—I urge people to declare open war with it.

The morality of paltry people as the measure of all things: this is the most repugnant kind of degeneracy that civilisation has ever yet brought into existence. And this kind of ideal is hanging still, under the name of "God," over men's heads!!

201.

However modest one's demands may be concerning intellectual cleanliness, when one touches the New Testament one cannot help experiencing a sort of inexpressible feeling of discomfort; for the unbounded cheek with which the least qualified people will have their say in its pages, in regard to the greatest problems of existence, and claim to sit in judgment on such matters, exceeds all limits. The impudent levity with which the most unwieldy problems are spoken of here (life, the world, God, the purpose of life), as if they were not problems at all, but the most simple things which these little bigots know all about!!!

202.

This was the most fatal form of insanity that has ever yet existed on earth:—when these little lying abortions of bigotry begin laying claim to the words "God," "last judgment," "truth," "love," "wisdom," "Holy Spirit," and thereby distinguishing themselves from the rest of the world; when such men begin to transvalue values to suit themselves, as though they were the sense, the salt, the standard, and the measure of all things; then all that one should do is this: build lunatic asylums for their incarceration. To persecute them was an egregious act of antique folly: this was taking them too seriously; it was making them serious.

The whole fatality was made possible by the fact that a similar form of megalomania was already in existence, the Jewish form (once the gulf separating the Jews from the Christian-Jews was bridged, the Christian-Jews were compelled to employ those self-preservative measures afresh which were discovered by the Jewish instinct, for their own self-preservation, after having accentuated them); and again through the fact that Greek moral philosophy had done everything that could be done to prepare the way for moral-fanaticism, even among Greeks and Romans, and to render it palatable.... Plato, the great importer of corruption, who was the first who refused to see Nature in morality, and who had already deprived the Greek gods of all their worth by his notion "good" was already tainted with Jewish bigotry (in Egypt?).

203.

These small virtues of gregarious animals do not by any means lead to "eternal life": to put them on the stage in such a way, and to use them for one's own purpose is perhaps very smart; but to him who keeps his eyes open, even here, it remains, in spite of all, the most ludicrous performance. A man by no means deserves privileges, either on earth or in heaven, because he happens to have attained to perfection in the art of behaving like a good-natured little sheep; at best, he only remains a dear, absurd little ram with horns—provided, of course, he does not burst with vanity or excite indignation by assuming the airs of a supreme judge.

What a terrible glow of false colouring here floods the meanest virtues—as though they were the reflection of divine qualities!

The natural purpose and utility of every virtue is systematically hushed up; it can only be valuable in the light of a divine command or model, or in the light of the good which belongs to a beyond or a spiritual world. (This is magnificent!—As if it were a question of the salvation of the soul: but it was a means of making things bearable here with as many beautiful sentiments as possible.)

204.

The law, which is the fundamentally realistic formula of certain self-preservative measures of a community, forbids certain actions that have a definite tendency to jeopardise the welfare of that community: it does not forbid the attitude of mind which gives rise to these actions—for in the pursuit of other ends the community requires these forbidden actions, namely, when it is a matter of opposing its enemies. The moral idealist now steps forward and says: "God sees into men's hearts: the action itself counts for nothing; the reprehensible attitude of mind from which it proceeds must be extirpated ..." In normal conditions men laugh at such things; it is only in exceptional cases, when a community lives quite beyond the need of waging war in order to maintain itself, that an ear is lent to such things. Any attitude of mind is abandoned, the utility of which cannot be conceived.

This was the case, for example, when Buddha appeared among a people that was both peaceable and afflicted with great intellectual weariness.

This was also the case in regard to the first Christian community (as also the Jewish), the primary condition of which was the absolutely unpolitical Jewish society. Christianity could grow only upon the soil of Judaism—that is to say, among a people that had already renounced the political life, and which led a sort of parasitic existence within the Roman sphere of government, Christianity goes a step farther: it allows men to "emasculate" themselves even more; the circumstances actually favour their doing so.—Nature is expelled from morality when it is said, "Love ye your enemies": for Nature's injunction, "Ye shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy," has now become senseless in the law (in instinct); now, even the love a man feels for his neighbour must first be based upon something (a sort of love of God). God is introduced everywhere, and utility is withdrawn; the natural origin of morality is denied everywhere: the veneration of Nature, which lies in acknowledging a natural morality, is destroyed to the roots....

Whence comes the seductive charm of this emasculate ideal of man? Why are we not disgusted by it, just as we are disgusted at the thought of a eunuch?... The answer is obvious: it is not the voice of the eunuch that revolts us, despite the cruel mutilation of which it is the result; for, as a matter of fact, it has grown sweeter.... And owing to the very fact that the "male organ" has been amputated from virtue, its voice now has a feminine ring, which, formerly, was not to be discerned.

On the other hand, we have only to think of the terrible hardness, dangers, and accidents to which a life of manly virtues leads—the life of a Corsican, even at the present day, or that of a heathen Arab (which resembles the Corsican's life even to the smallest detail: the Arab's songs might have been written by Corsicans)—in order to perceive how the most robust type of man was fascinated and moved by the voluptuous ring of this "goodness" and "purity." ... A pastoral melody ... an idyll ... the "good man": such things have most effect in ages when tragedy is abroad.

***

With this, we have realised to what extent the "idealist" (the ideal eunuch) also proceeds from a definite reality and is not merely a visionary.... He has perceived precisely that, for his kind of reality, a brutal injunction of the sort which prohibits certain actions has no sense (because the instinct which would urge him to these actions is weakened, thanks to a long need of practice, and of compulsion to practise). The castrator formulates a host of new self-preservative measures for a perfectly definite species of men: in this sense he is a realist. The means to which he has recourse for establishing his legislation, are the same as those of ancient legislators: he appeals to all authorities, to "God," and he exploits the notions "guilt and punishment"—that is to say, he avails himself of the whole of the older ideal, but interprets it differently; for instance: punishment is given a place in the inner self (it is called the pang of conscience).

In practice this kind of man meets with his end the moment the exceptional conditions favouring his existence cease to prevail—a sort of insular happiness, like that of Tahiti, and of the little Jews in the Roman provinces. Their only natural foe is the soil from which they spring: they must wage war against that, and once more give their offensive and defensive passions rope in order to be equal to it: their opponents are the adherents of the old ideal (this kind of hostility is shown on a grand scale by Paul in relation to Judaism, and by Luther in relation to the priestly ascetic ideal). The mildest form of this antagonism is certainly that of the first Buddhists; perhaps nothing has given rise to so much work, as the enfeeblement and discouragement of the feeling of antagonism. The struggle against resentment almost seems the Buddhist's first duty; thus only is his peace of soul secured. To isolate oneself without bitterness, this presupposes the existence of a surprisingly mild and sweet order of men,—saints....

***

The Astuteness of moral castration.—How is war waged against the virile passions and valuations? No violent physical means are available; the war must therefore be one of ruses, spells, and lies—in short, a "spiritual war."

First recipe: One appropriates virtue in general, and makes it the main feature of one's ideal; the older ideal is denied and declared to be the reverse of all ideals. Slander has to be carried to a fine art for this purpose.

Second recipe: A type of man is set up as a general standard; and this is projected into all things, behind all things, and behind the destiny of all things—as God.

Third recipe: The opponents of one's ideal are declared to be the opponents of God; one arrogates to oneself a right to great pathos, to power, and a right to curse and to bless.

Fourth recipe: All suffering, all gruesome, terrible, and fatal things are declared to be the results of opposition to ones ideal—all suffering is punishment even in the case of one's adherents (except it be a trial, etc.).

Fifth recipe: One goes so far as to regard Nature as the reverse of one's ideal, and the lengthy sojourn amid natural conditions is considered a great trial of patience—a sort of martyrdom; one studies contempt, both in one's attitudes and one's looks towards all "natural things."

Sixth recipe: The triumph of anti-naturalism and ideal castration, the triumph of the world of the pure, good, sinless, and blessed, is projected into the future as the consummation, the finale, the great hope, and the "Coming of the Kingdom of God."

I hope that one may still be allowed to laugh at this artificial hoisting up of a small species of man to the position of an absolute standard of all things?

205.

What I do not at all like in Jesus of Nazareth and His Apostle Paul, is that they stuffed so much into the heads of paltry people, as if their modest virtues were worth so much ado. We have had to pay dearly for it all; for they brought the most valuable qualities of both virtue and man into ill repute; they set the guilty conscience and the self-respect of noble souls at loggerheads, and they led the braver, more magnanimous, more daring, and more excessive tendencies of strong souls astray—even to self-destruction.

206.

In the New Testament, and especially in the Gospels, I discern absolutely no sign of a "Divine" voice: but rather an indirect form of the most subterranean fury, both in slander and destructiveness—one of the most dishonest forms of hatred. It lacks all knowledge of the qualities of a higher nature. It makes an impudent abuse of all kinds of plausibilities, and the whole stock of proverbs is used up and foisted upon one in its pages. Was it necessary to make a God come in order to appeal to those publicans and to say to them, etc. etc.?

Nothing could be more vulgar than this struggle with the Pharisees, carried on with a host of absurd and unpractical moral pretences; the mob, of course, has always been entertained by such feats. Fancy the reproach of "hypocrisy!" coming from those lips! Nothing could be more vulgar than this treatment of one's opponents—a most insidious sign of nobility or its reverse....

207.

Primitive Christianity is the abolition of the State: it prohibits oaths, military service, courts of justice, self-defence or the defence of a community, and denies the difference between fellow-countrymen and strangers, as also the order of castes.

Christs example; He does not withstand those who ill-treat Him; He does not defend Himself; He does more, He "offers the left cheek" (to the demand: "Tell us whether thou be the Christ?" He replies: "Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven"). He forbids His disciples to defend Him; He calls attention to the fact that He could get help if He wished to, but will not.

Christianity also means the abolition of society, it prizes everything that society despises, its very growth takes place among the outcasts, the condemned, and the leprous of all kinds, as also among "publicans," "sinners," prostitutes, and the most foolish of men (the "fisher folk "); it despises the rich, the scholarly, the noble, the virtuous, and the "punctilious." ...

208.

The war against the noble and the powerful, as it is waged in the New Testament, is reminiscent of Reynard the Fox and his methods: but plus the Christian unction and the more absolute refusal to recognise one's own craftiness.

209.

The Gospel is the announcement that the road to happiness lies open for the lowly and the poor—that all one has to do is to emancipate one's self from all institutions, traditions, and the tutelage of the higher classes. Thus Christianity is no more than the typical teaching of Socialists.

Property, acquisitions, mother-country, status and rank, tribunals, the police, the State, the Church, Education, Art, militarism: all these are so many obstacles in the way of happiness, so many mistakes, snares, and devil's artifices, on which the Gospel passes sentence—all this is typical of socialistic doctrines.

Behind all this there is the outburst, the explosion, of a concentrated loathing of the "masters,"—the instinct which discerns the happiness of freedom after such long oppression.... (Mostly a symptom of the fact that the inferior classes have been treated too humanely, that their tongues already taste a joy which is forbidden them.... It is not hunger that provokes revolutions, but the fact that the mob have contracted an appetite en mangeant....)

210.

Let the New Testament only be read as a book of seduction: in it virtue is appropriated, with the idea that public opinion is best won with it,—and as a matter of fact it is a very modest kind of virtue, which recognises only the ideal gregarious animal and nothing more (including, of course, the herdsmen): a puny, soft, benevolent, helpful, and gushingly-satisfied kind of virtue which to the outside world is quite devoid of pretensions,—and which separates the "world" entirely from itself. The crassest arrogance which fancies that the destiny of man turns around it, and it alone, and that on the one side the community of believers represents what is right, and on the other the world represents what is false and eternally to be reproved and rejected. The most imbecile hatred of all things in power, which, however, never goes so far as to touch these things. A kind of inner detachment which, outwardly, leaves everything as it was (servitude and slavery; and knowing how to convert everything into a means of serving God and virtue).

211.

Christianity is possible as the most private form of life; it presupposes the existence of a narrow, isolated, and absolutely unpolitical society—it belongs to the conventicle. On the other hand, a "Christian State," "Christian politics," are pieces of downright impudence; they are lies, like, for instance, a Christian leadership of an army, which in the end regards "the God of hosts" as chief of the staff. Even the Papacy has never been able to carry on politics in a Christian way...; and when Reformers indulge in politics, as Luther did, it is well known that they are just as ardent followers of Machiavelli as any other immoralists or tyrants.

212.

Christianity is still possible at any moment. It is not bound to any one of the impudent dogmas that have adorned themselves with its name: it needs neither the teaching of the personal God, nor of sin, nor of immortality, nor of redemption, nor of faith; it has absolutely no need whatever of metaphysics, and it needs asceticism and Christian "natural science" still less. Christianity is a method of life, not a system of belief. It tells us how we should behave, not what we should believe.

He who says to-day: "I refuse to be a soldier," "I care not for tribunals," "I lay no claim to the services of the police," "I will not do anything that disturbs the peace within me: and if I must suffer on that account, nothing can so well maintain my inward peace as suffering"—such a man would be a Christian.

213.

Concerning the history of Christianity.—Continual change of environment: Christian teaching is thus continually changing its centre of gravity. The favouring of low and paltry people.... The development of Caritas.... The type "Christian" gradually adopts everything that it originally rejected (and in the rejection of which it asserted its right to exist). The Christian becomes a citizen, a soldier, a judge, a workman, a merchant, a scholar, a theologian, a priest, a philosopher, a farmer, an artist, a patriot, a politician, a prince ... he re-enters all those departments of active life which he had forsworn (he defends himself, he establishes tribunals, he punishes, he swears, he differentiates between people and people, he contemns, and he shows anger). The whole life of the Christian is ultimately exactly that life from which Christ preached deliverance.... The Church is just as much a factor in the triumph of the Antichrist, as the modern State and modern Nationalism.... The Church is the barbarisation of Christianity.

214.

Among the powers that have mastered Christianity are: Judaism (Paul); Platonism (Augustine); The cult of mystery (the teaching of salvation, the emblem of the "cross"); Asceticism (hostility towards "Nature," "Reason," the "senses,"—the Orient ...).

215.

Christianity is a denaturalisation of gregarious morality: under the power of the most complete misapprehensions and self-deceptions. Democracy is a more natural form of it, and less sown with falsehood. It is a fact that the oppressed, the low, and whole mob of slaves and half-castes, will prevail.

First step: they make themselves free—they detach themselves, at first in fancy only; they recognise each other; they make themselves paramount.

Second step: they enter the lists, they demand acknowledgment, equal rights, "Justice."

Third step: they demand privileges (they draw the representatives of power over to their side).

Fourth step: they alone want all power, and they have it.

There are three elements in Christianity which must be distinguished: (a) the oppressed of all kinds, (b) the mediocre of all kinds, (c) the dissatisfied and diseased of all kinds. The first struggle against the politically noble and their ideal; the second contend with the exceptions and those who are in any way privileged (mentally or physically); the third oppose the natural instinct of the happy and the sound.

Whenever a triumph is achieved, the second element steps to the fore; for then Christianity has won over the sound and happy to its side (as warriors in its cause), likewise the powerful (interested to this extent in the conquest of the crowd)—and now it is the gregarious instinct, that mediocre nature which is valuable in every respect, that now gets its highest sanction through Christianity. This mediocre nature ultimately becomes so conscious of itself (gains such courage in regard to its own opinions), that it arrogates to itself even political power....

Democracy is Christianity made natural: a sort of "return to Nature," once Christianity, owing to extreme anti-naturalness, might have been overcome by the opposite valuation. Result: the aristocratic ideal begins to lose its natural character ("the higher man," "noble," "artist," "passion," "knowledge"; Romanticism as the cult of the exceptional, genius, etc. etc.).

216.

When the "masters" may also become Christians.—It is of the nature of a community (race, family, herd, tribe) to regard all those conditions and aspirations which favour its survival, as in themselves valuable; for instance: obedience, mutual assistance, respect, moderation, pity—as also, to suppress everything that happens to stand in the way of the above.

It is likewise of the nature of the rulers (whether they are individuals or classes) to patronise and applaud those virtues which make their subjects amenable and submissive—conditions and passions which may be utterly different from their own.

The gregarious instinct and the instinct of the rulers sometimes agree in approving of a certain number of qualities and conditions,—but for different reasons: the first do so out of direct egoism, the second out of indirect egoism.

The submission to Christianity on the part of master races is essentially the result of the conviction that Christianity is a religion for the herd, that it teaches obedience: in short, that Christians are more easily ruled than non-Christians. With a hint of this nature, the Pope, even nowadays, recommends Christian propaganda to the ruling Sovereign of China.

It should also be added that the seductive power of the Christian ideal works most strongly upon natures that love danger, adventure, and contrasts; that love everything that entails a risk, and wherewith a non plus ultra of powerful feeling may be attained. In this respect, one has only to think of Saint Theresa, surrounded by the heroic instincts of her brothers:—Christianity appears in those circumstances as a dissipation of the will, as strength of will, as a will that is Quixotic.
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

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3. Christian Ideals.

217.

War against the Christian ideal, against the doctrine of "blessedness" and "salvation" as the aims of life, against the supremacy of the fools, of the pure in heart, of the suffering and of the botched!

When and where has any man, of any note at all, resembled the Christian ideal?—at least in the eyes of those who are psychologists and triers of the heart and reins. Look at all Plutarch's heroes!

218.

Our claim to superiority: we live in an age of Comparisons; we are able to calculate as men have never yet calculated; in every way we are history become self-conscious. We enjoy things in a different way; we suffer in a different way: our instinctive activity is the comparison of an enormous variety of things. We understand everything; we experience everything, we no longer have a hostile feeling left within us. However disastrous the results may be to ourselves, our plunging and almost lustful inquisitiveness, attacks, unabashed, the most dangerous of subjects....

"Everything is good"—it gives us pain to say "nay" to anything. We suffer when we feel that we are sufficiently foolish to make a definite stand against anything.... At bottom, it is we scholars who to-day are fulfilling Christ's teaching most thoroughly.

219.

We cannot suppress a certain irony when we contemplate those who think they have overcome Christianity by means of modern natural science. Christian values are by no means overcome by such people. "Christ on the cross" is still the most sublime symbol—even now....

220.

The two great Nihilistic movements are: (a) Buddhism, (b) Christianity. The latter has only just about reached a state of culture in which it can fulfil its original object,—it has found its level,—and now it can manifest itself without disguise.....

221.

We have re-established the Christian ideal, it now only remains to determine its value.

(1) Which values does it deny? What does the ideal that opposes it stand for?—Pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberant spirits, splendid animalism, the instincts of war and of conquest; the deification of passion, revenge, cunning, anger, voluptuousness, adventure, knowledge—the noble ideal is denied: the beauty, wisdom, power, pomp, and awfulness of the type man: the man who postulates aims, the "future" man (here Christianity presents itself as the logical result of Judaism).

(2) Can it be realised?—Yes, of course, when the climatic conditions are favourable—as in the case of the Indian ideal. Both neglect the factor work.—It separates a creature from a people, a state, a civilised community, and jurisdiction; it rejects education, wisdom, the cultivation of good manners, acquisition and commerce; it cuts adrift everything which is of use and value to men—by means of an idiosyncrasy of sentiment it isolates a man. It is non-political, anti-national, neither aggressive nor defensive,—and only possible within a strictly-ordered State or state of society, which allows these holy parasites to flourish at the cost of their neighbours.....

(3) It has now become the will to be happy—and nothing else! "Blessedness" stands for something self-evident, that no longer requires any justification—everything else (the way to live and let live) is only a means to an end....

But what follows is the result of a low order of thought, the fear of pain, of defilement, of corruption, is great enough to provide ample grounds for allowing everything to go to the dogs.... This is a poor way of thinking, and is the sign of an exhausted race; we must not allow ourselves to be deceived. ("Become as little children." Natures of the same order: Francis of Assisi, neurotic, epileptic, visionary, like Jesus.)

222.

The higher man distinguishes himself from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune: it is a sign of degeneration when eudemonistic values begin to prevail (physiological fatigue and enfeeblement of will-power). Christianity, with its prospect of "blessedness," is the typical attitude of mind of a suffering and impoverished species of man. Abundant strength will be active, will suffer, and will go under: to it the bigotry of Christian salvation is bad music and hieratic posing and vexation.

223.

Poverty, humility, and chastity are dangerous and slanderous ideals; but like poisons, which are useful cures in the case of certain diseases, they were also necessary in the time of the Roman Empire.

All ideals are dangerous: because they lower and brand realities; they are all poisons, but occasionally indispensable as cures.

224.

God created man, happy, idle, innocent, and immortal: our actual life is a false, decadent, and sinful existence, a punishment.... Suffering, struggle, work, and death are raised as objections against life, they make life questionable, unnatural—something that must cease, and for which one not only requires but also has—remedies!

Since the time of Adam, man has been in an abnormal state: God Himself delivered up His Son for Adam's sin, in order to put an end to the abnormal condition of things: the natural character of life is a curse; to those who believe in Him, Christ restores normal life: He makes them happy, idle, and innocent. But the world did not become fruitful without labour; women do not bear children without pain; illness has not ceased: believers are served just as badly as unbelievers in this respect. All that has happened is, that man is delivered from death and sin—two assertions which allow of no verification, and which are therefore emphasised by the Church with more than usual heartiness. "He is free from sin,"—not owing to his own efforts, not owing to a vigorous struggle on his part, but redeemed by the death of the Saviour,—consequently, perfectly innocent and paradisaical.

Actual life is nothing more than an illusion (that is to say, a deception, an insanity). The whole of struggling, fighting, and real existence—so full of light and shade, is only bad and false: everybody's duty is to be delivered from it.

"Man, innocent, idle, immortal, and happy"—this concept, which is the object of the "most supreme desires," must be criticised before anything else. Why should guilt, work, death, and pain (and, from the Christian point of view, also knowledge ...) be contrary to all supreme desires?—The lazy Christian notions: "blessedness," "innocence," "immortality."

225.

The eccentric concept "holiness" does not exist—"God" and "man" have not been divorced from each other. "Miracles" do not exist—such spheres do not exist: the only one to be considered is the "intellectual" (that is to say, the symbolically-psychological). As decadence: a counterpart to "Epicureanism." ... Paradise according to Greek notions was only "Epicurus' Garden."

A life of this sort lacks a purpose: it strives after nothing;—a form of the "Epicurean gods"—there is no longer any reason to aim at anything,—not even at having children:—everything has been done.

226.

They despised the body: they did not reckon with it: nay, more—they treated it as an enemy. It was their delirium to think that a man could carry a "beautiful soul" about in a body that was a cadaverous abortion.... In order to inoculate others with this insanity they had to present the concept "beautiful soul" in a different way, and to transvalue the natural value, until, at last, a pale, sickly, idiotically exalted creature, something angelic, some extreme perfection and transfiguration was declared to be the higher man.

227.

Ignorance in matters psychological.—The Christian has no nervous system;—contempt for, and deliberate and wilful turning away from, the demands of the body, and the naked body; it is assumed that all this is in keeping with man's nature, and must perforce work the ultimate good of the soul;—all functions of the body are systematically reduced to moral values; illness itself is regarded as determined by morality, it is held to be the result of sin, or it is a trial or a state of salvation, through which man becomes more perfect than he could become in a state of health (Pascal's idea); under certain circumstances, there are wilful attempts at inducing illness.

228.

What in sooth is this struggle "against Nature" on the part of the Christian? We shall not, of course, let ourselves be deceived by his words and explanations. It is Nature against something which is also Nature. With many, it is fear; with others, it is loathing; with yet others, it is the sign of a certain intellectuality, the love of a bloodless and passionless ideal; and in the case of the most superior men, it is love of an abstract Nature—these try to live up to their ideal. It is easily understood that humiliation in the place of self-esteem, anxious cautiousness towards the passions, emancipation from the usual duties (whereby, a higher notion of rank is created), the incitement to constant war on behalf of enormous issues, habituation to effusiveness of feelings—all this goes to constitute a type: in such a type the hypersensitiveness of a perishing body preponderates; but the nervousness and the inspirations it engenders are interpreted differently. The taste of this kind of creature tends either (1) to subtilise, (2) to indulge in bombastic eloquence, or (3) to go in for extreme feelings. The natural inclinations do get satisfied, but they are interpreted in a new way; for instance, as "justification before God," "the feeling of redemption through grace," every undeniable feeling of pleasure becomes (interpreted in this way!) pride, voluptuousness, etc. General problem: what will become of the man who slanders and practically denies and belittles what is natural? As a matter of fact, the Christian is an example of exaggerated self-control: in order to tame his passions, he seems to find it necessary to extirpate or crucify them.

229.

Man did not know himself physiologically throughout the ages his history covers; he does not even know himself now. The knowledge, for instance, that man has a nervous system (but no "soul") is still the privilege of the most educated people. But man is not satisfied, in this respect, to say he does not know. A man must be very superior to be able to say: "I do not know this,"—that is to say, to be able to admit his ignorance.

Suppose he is in pain or in a good mood, he never questions that he can find the reason of either condition if only he seeks.... In truth, he cannot find the reason; for he does not even suspect where it lies.... What happens?... He takes the result of his condition for its cause; for instance, if he should undertake some work (really undertaken because his good mood gave him the courage to do so) and carry it through successfully: behold, the work itself is the reason of his good mood.... As a matter of fact, his success was determined by the same cause as that which brought about his good mood—that is to say, the happy co-ordination of physiological powers and functions.

He feels bad: consequently he cannot overcome a care, a scruple, or an attitude of self-criticism.... He really fancies that his disagreeable condition is the result of his scruple, of his "sin," or of his "self-criticism."

But after profound exhaustion and prostration, a state of recovery sets in. "How is it possible that I can feel so free, so happy? It is a miracle; only a God could have effected this change."—Conclusion: "He has forgiven my sin." ...

From this follow certain practices: in order to provoke feelings of sinfulness and to prepare the way for crushed spirits it is necessary to induce a condition of morbidity and nervousness in the body. The methods of doing this are well known. Of course, nobody suspects the causal logic of the fact: the maceration of the flesh is interpreted religiously, it seems like an end in itself, whereas it is no more than a means of bringing about that morbid state of indigestion which is known as repentance (the "fixed idea" of sin, the hypnotising of the hen by-means of the chalk-line "sin").

The mishandling of the body prepares the ground for the required range of "guilty feelings"—that is to say, for that general state of pain which demands an explanation....

On the other hand, the method of "salvation" may also develop from the above: every dissipation of the feelings, whether prayers, movements, attitudes, or oaths, has been provoked, and exhaustion follows; very often it is acute, or it appears in the form of epilepsy. And behind this condition of deep somnolence there come signs of recovery—or, in religious parlance, "Salvation."

230.

Formerly, the conditions and results of physiological exhaustion were considered more important than healthy conditions and their results, and this was owing to the suddenness, fearfulness, and mysteriousness of the former. Men were terrified by themselves, and postulated the existence of a higher world. People have ascribed the origin of the idea of two worlds—one this side of the grave and the other beyond it—to sleep and dreams, to shadows, to night, and to the fear of Nature: but the symptoms of physiological exhaustion should, above all, have been considered.

Ancient religions have quite special methods of disciplining the pious into states of exhaustion, in which they must experience such things.... The idea was, that one entered into a new order of things, where everything ceases to be known.—The semblance of a higher power....

231.

Sleep is the result of every kind of exhaustion; exhaustion follows upon all excessive excitement....

In all pessimistic religions and philosophies there is a yearning for sleep; the very notion "sleep" is deified and worshipped.

In this case the exhaustion is racial; sleep regarded psychologically is only a symbol of a much deeper and longer compulsion to rest.... In praxi it is death which rules here in the seductive image of its brother sleep....

232.

The whole of the Christian training in repentance and redemption may be regarded as a folie circulaire arbitrarily produced; though, of course, it can be produced only in people who are predisposed to it—that is to say, who have morbid tendencies in their constitutions.

233.

Against remorse and its purely psychical treatment.—To be unable to have done with an experience is already a sign of decadence. This reopening of old wounds, this wallowing in self-contempt and depression, is an additional form of disease; no "salvation of the soul" ever results from it, but only a new kind of spiritual illness....

These "conditions of salvation" of which the Christian is conscious are merely variations of the same diseased state—the interpretation of an attack of epilepsy by means of a particular formula which is provided, not by science, but by religious mania.

When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.... By far the greatest portion of the psychical apparatus which Christianity has used, is now classed among the various forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

The whole process of spiritual healing must be remodelled on a physiological basis: the "sting of conscience" as such is an obstacle in the way of recovery—as soon as possible the attempt must be made to counterbalance everything by means of new actions, so that there may be an escape from the morbidness of self-torture.... The purely psychical practices of the Church and of the various sects should be decried as dangerous to the health. No invalid is ever cured by prayers or by the exorcising of evil spirits: the states of "repose" which follow upon such methods of treatment, by no means inspire confidence, in the psychological sense....

A man is healthy when he can laugh at the seriousness and ardour with which he has allowed himself to be hypnotised to any extent by any detail in his life—when his remorse seems to him like the action of a dog biting a stone—when he is ashamed of his repentance.

The purely psychological and religious practices, which have existed hitherto, only led to an alteration in the symptoms: according to them a man had recovered when he bowed before the cross, and swore that in future he would be a good man.... But a criminal, who, with a certain gloomy seriousness cleaves to his fate and refuses to malign his deed once it is done, has more spiritual health.... The criminals with whom Dostoiewsky associated in prison, were all, without exception, unbroken natures,—are they not a hundred times more valuable than a "broken-spirited" Christian?

(For the treatment of pangs of conscience I recommend Mitchell's Treatment.[2])

[2] TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.—In The New Sydenham Society's Lexicon of Medicine and the Allied Sciences, the following description of Mitchell's treatment is to be found: "A method of treating cases of neurasthenia and hysteria ... by removal from home, rest in bed, massage twice a day, electrical excitation of the muscles, and excessive feeding, at first with milk."


234.

A pang of conscience in a man is a sign that his character is not yet equal to his deed. There is such a thing as a pang of conscience after good deeds: in this case it is their unfamiliarity, their incompatibility with an old environment.

235.

Against remorse.—I do not like this form of cowardice in regard to one's own actions, one must not leave one's self in the lurch under the pressure of sudden shame or distress. Extreme pride is much more fitting here. What is the good of it all in the end! No deed gets undone because it is regretted, no more than because it is "forgiven" or "expiated." A man must be a theologian in order to believe in a power that erases faults: we immoralists prefer to disbelieve in "faults." We believe that all deeds, of what kind soever, are identically the same at root; just as deeds which turn against us may be useful from an economical point of view, and even generally desirable. In certain individual cases, we admit that we might well have been spared a given action; the circumstances alone predisposed us in its favour. Which of us, if favoured by circumstances, would not already have committed every possible crime?... That is why one should never say: "Thou shouldst never have done such and such a thing," but only: "How strange it is that I have not done such and such a thing hundreds of times already!"—As a matter of fact, only a very small number of acts are typical acts and real epitomes of a personality, and seeing what a small number of people really are personalities, a single act very rarely characterises a man. Acts are mostly dictated by circumstances; they are superficial or merely reflex movements performed in response to a stimulus, long before the depths of our beings are affected or consulted in the matter. A fit of temper, a gesture, a blow with a knife: how little of the individual resides in these acts!—A deed very often brings a sort of stupor or feeling of constraint in its wake: so that the agent feels almost spellbound at its recollection, or as though he belonged to it, and were not an independent creature. This mental disorder, which is a form of hypnotism, must be resisted at all costs: surely a single deed, whatever it be, when it is compared with all one has done, is nothing, and may be deducted from the sum without making the account wrong. The unfair interest which society manifests in controlling the whole of our lives in one direction, as though the very purpose of its existence were to cultivate a certain individual act, should not infect the man of action: but unfortunately this happens almost continually. The reason of this is, that every deed, if followed by unexpected consequences, leads to a certain mental disturbance, no matter whether the consequences be good or bad. Behold a lover who has been given a promise, or a poet while he is receiving applause from an audience: as far as intellectual torpor is concerned, these men are in no way different from the anarchist who is suddenly confronted by a detective bearing a search warrant.

There are some acts which are unworthy of us: acts which, if they were regarded as typical, would set us down as belonging to a lower class of man. The one fault that has to be avoided here, is to regard them as typical. There is another kind of act of which we are unworthy: exceptional acts, born of a particular abundance of happiness and health; they are the highest waves of our spring tides, driven to an unusual height by a storm—an accident: such acts and "deeds" are also not typical. An artist should never be judged according to the measure of his works.

236.

A. In proportion as Christianity seems necessary to-day, man is still wild and fatal....

B. In another sense, it is not necessary, but extremely dangerous, though it is captivating and seductive, because it corresponds with the morbid character of whole classes and types of modern humanity, ... they simply follow their inclinations when they aspire to Christianity—they are decadents of all kinds.

A and B must be kept very sharply apart. In the case of A, Christianity is a cure, or at least a taming process (under certain circumstances it serves the purpose of making people ill: and this is sometimes useful as a means of subduing savage and brutal natures). In the case of B, it is a symptom of illness itself, it renders the state of decadence more acute; in this case it stands opposed to a corroborating system of treatment, it is the invalid's instinct standing against that which would be most salutary to him.

237.

On one side there are the serious, the dignified, and reflective people: and on the other the barbarous, the unclean, and the irresponsible beasts: it is merely a question of taming animals—and in this case the tamer must be hard, terrible, and awe-inspiring, at least to his beasts.

All essential requirements must be imposed upon the unruly creatures with almost brutal distinctness—that is to say, magnified a thousand times.

Even the fulfilment of the requirement must be presented in the coarsest way possible, so that it may command respect, as in the case of the spiritualisation of the Brahmins.

The struggle with the rabble and the herd. If any degree of tameness and order has been reached, the chasm separating these purified and regenerated people from the terrible remainder must have been bridged....

This chasm is a means of increasing self-respect in higher castes, and of confirming their belief in that which they represent—hence the Chandala. Contempt and its excess are perfectly correct psychologically—that is to say, magnified a hundred times, so that it may at least be felt.

238.

The struggle against brutal instincts is quite different from the struggle against morbid instincts; it may even be a means of overcoming brutality by making the brutes ill. The psychical treatment practised by Christianity is often nothing more than the process of converting a brute into a sick and therefore tame animal.

The struggle against raw and savage natures must be a struggle with weapons which are able to affect such natures: superstitions and such means are therefore indispensable and essential.

239.

Our age, in a certain sense, is mature (that is to say, decadent), just as Buddha's was.... That is why a sort of Christianity is possible without all the absurd dogmas (the most repulsive offshoots of ancient hybridism).

240.

Supposing it were impossible to disprove Christianity, Pascal thinks, in view of the terrible possibility that it may be true, that it is in the highest degree prudent to be a Christian. As a proof of how much Christianity has lost of its terrible nature, to-day we find that other attempt to justify it, which consists in asserting, that even if it were a mistake, it nevertheless provides the greatest advantages and pleasures for its adherents throughout their lives:—it therefore seems that this belief should be upheld owing to the peace and quiet it ensures—not owing to the terror of a threatening possibility, but rather out of fear of a life that has lost its charm. This hedonistic turn of thought, which uses happiness as a proof, is a symptom of decline: it takes the place of the proof resulting from power or from that which to the Christian mind is most terrible—namely, fear. With this new interpretation, Christianity is, as a matter of fact, nearing its stage of exhaustion. People are satisfied with a Christianity which is an opiate, because they no longer have the strength to seek, to struggle, to dare, to stand alone, nor to take up Pascal's position and to share that gloomily brooding self-contempt, that belief in human unworthiness, and that anxiety which believes that it "may be damned." But a Christianity the chief object of which is to soothe diseased nerves, does not require the terrible solution consisting of a "God on the cross"; that is why Buddhism is secretly gaining ground all over Europe.

241.

The humour of European culture: people regard one thing as true, but do the other. For instance, what is the use of all the art of reading and criticising, if the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible, whether according to Catholics or Protestants, is still upheld!

242.

No one is sufficiently aware of the barbarity of the notions among which we Europeans still live. To think that men have been able to believe that the "Salvation of the soul" depended upon a book!... And I am told that this is still believed.

What is the good of all scientific education, all criticism and all hermeneutics, if such nonsense as the Church's interpretation of the Bible has not yet turned the colours of our bodies permanently into the red of shame?

243.

Subject for reflection: To what extent does the fatal belief in "Divine Providence"—the most paralysing belief for both the hand and the understanding that has ever existed—continue to prevail; to what extent have the Christian hypothesis and interpretation of Life continued their lives under the cover of terms like "Nature," "Progress," "perfectionment," "Darwinism," or beneath the superstition that there is a certain relation between happiness and virtue, unhappiness and sin? That absurd belief in the course of things, in "Life" and in the "instinct of Life"; that foolish resignation which arises from the notion that if only every one did his duty all would go well—all this sort of thing can only have a meaning if one assumes that there is a direction of things sub specie boni. Even fatalism, our present form of philosophical sensibility, is the result of a long belief in Divine Providence, an unconscious result: as though it were nothing to do with us how everything goes! (As though we might let things take their own course; the individual being only a modus of the absolute reality.)

244.

It is the height of psychological falsity on the part of man to imagine a being according to his own petty standard, who is a beginning, a "thing-in-itself," and who appears to him good, wise, mighty, and precious; for thus he suppresses in thoughts all the causality by means of which every kind of goodness, wisdom, and power comes into existence and has value. In short, elements of the most recent and most conditional origin were regarded not as evolved, but as spontaneously generated and "things-in-themselves," and perhaps as the cause of all things.... Experience teaches us that, in every case in which a man has elevated himself to any great extent above the average of his fellows, every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from Good and Evil as also from "true" and "false," and cannot take into account what goodness dictates: the same holds good of a high degree of wisdom—in this case goodness is just as much suppressed as truthfulness, justice, virtue, and other popular whims in valuations. In fact, is it not obvious that every high degree of goodness itself presupposes a certain intellectual myopia and obtuseness? as also an inability to distinguish at a great distance between true and false, useful and harmful?—not to mention the fact that a high degree of power in the hands of the highest goodness might lead to the most baleful consequences ("the suppression of evil"). In sooth it is enough to perceive with what aspirations the "God of Love" inspires His believers: they ruin mankind for the benefit of "good men." In practice, this same God has shown Himself to be a God of the most acute myopia, devilry, and impotence, in the face of the actual arrangement of the universe, and from this the value of His conception may be estimated. Knowledge and wisdom can have no value in themselves, any more than goodness can: the goal they are striving after must be known first, for then only can their value or worthlessness be judged—a goal might be imagined which would make excessive wisdom a great disadvantage (if, for instance, complete deception were a prerequisite to the enhancement of life; likewise, if goodness were able to paralyse and depress the main springs of the great passions)....

Taking our human life as it is, it cannot be denied that all "truth," "goodness," "holiness," and "Godliness" in the Christian sense, have hitherto shown themselves to be great dangers—even now mankind is in danger of perishing owing to an ideal which is hostile to life.

245.

Let any one think of the loss which all human institutions suffer, when a divine and transcendental, higher sphere is postulated which must first sanction these institutions! By recognising their worth in this sanction alone (as in the case of marriage, for instance) their natural dignity is reduced, and under certain circumstances denied.... Nature is spitefully misjudged in the same ratio as the anti-natural notion of a God is held in honour. "Nature" then comes to mean no more than "contemptible," "bad." ...

The fatal nature of a belief in God as the reality of the highest moral qualities: through it, all real values were denied and systematically regarded as valueless. Thus Anti-Nature ascended the throne. With relentless logic the last step was reached, and this was the absolute demand to deny Nature.

246.

By pressing the doctrine of disinterestedness and love into the foreground, Christianity by no means elevated the interests of the species above those of the individual. Its real historical effect, its fatal effect, remains precisely the increase of egotism, of individual egotism, to excess (to the extreme which consists in the belief in individual immortality). The individual was made so important and so absolute, by means of Christian values, that he could no longer be sacrificed, despite the fact that the species can only be maintained by human sacrifices. All "souls" became equal before God: but this is the most pernicious of all valuations! If one regards individuals as equals, the demands of the species are ignored, and a process is initiated which ultimately leads to its ruin. Christianity is the reverse of the principle of selection. If the degenerate and sick man ("the Christian") is to be of the same value as the healthy man ("the pagan"), or if he is even to be valued higher than the latter, as Pascal's view of health and sickness would have us value him, the natural course of evolution is thwarted and the unnatural becomes law.... In practice this general love of mankind is nothing more than deliberately favouring all the suffering, the botched, and the degenerate: it is this love that has reduced and weakened the power, responsibility, and lofty duty of sacrificing men. According to the scheme of Christian values, all that remained was the alternative of self-sacrifice, but this vestige of human sacrifice, which Christianity conceded and even recommended, has no meaning when regarded in the light of rearing a whole species. The prosperity of the species is by no means affected by the sacrifice of one individual (whether in the monastic and ascetic manner, or by means of crosses, stakes, and scaffolds, as the "martyrs" of error). What the species requires is the suppression of the physiologically botched, the weak and the degenerate: but it was precisely to these people that Christianity appealed as a preservative force, it simply strengthened that natural and very strong instinct of all the weak which bids them protect, maintain, and mutually support each other. What is Christian "virtue" and "love of men," if not precisely this mutual assistance with a view to survival, this solidarity of the weak, this thwarting of selection? What is Christian altruism, if it is not the mob-egotism of the weak which divines that, if everybody looks after everybody else, every individual will be preserved for a longer period of time?... He who does not consider this attitude of mind as immoral, as a crime against life, himself belongs to the sickly crowd, and also shares their instincts.... Genuine love of mankind exacts sacrifice for the good of the species—it is hard, full of self-control, because it needs human sacrifices. And this pseudo-humanity which is called Christianity, would fain establish the rule that nobody should be sacrificed.

247.

Nothing could be more useful and deserves more promotion than systematic Nihilism in action.—As I understand the phenomena of Christianity and pessimism, this is what they say: "We are ripe for nonentity, for us it is reasonable not to be." This hint from "reason" in this case, is simply the voice of selective Nature.

On the other hand, what deserves the most rigorous condemnation, is the ambiguous and cowardly infirmity of purpose of a religion like Christianity,—or rather like the Church,—which, instead of recommending death and self-destruction, actually protects all the botched and bungled, and encourages them to propagate their kind.

Problem: with what kind of means could one lead up to a severe form of really contagious Nihilism—a Nihilism which would teach and practise voluntary death with scientific conscientiousness (and not the feeble continuation of a vegetative sort of life with false hopes of a life after death)?

Christianity cannot be sufficiently condemned for having depreciated the value of a great cleansing Nihilistic movement (like the one which was probably in the process of formation), by its teaching of the immortality of the private individual, as also by the hopes of resurrection which it held out: that is to say, by dissuading people from performing the deed of Nihilism which is suicide.... In the latter's place it puts lingering suicide, and gradually a puny, meagre, but durable life; gradually a perfectly ordinary, bourgeois, mediocre life, etc.

248.

Christian moral quackery.—Pity and contempt succeed each other at short intervals, and at the sight of them I feel as indignant as if I were in the presence of the most despicable crime. Here error is made a duty—a virtue, misapprehension has become a knack, the destructive instinct is systematised under the name of "redemption"; here every operation becomes a wound, an amputation of those very organs whose energy would be the prerequisite to a return of health. And in the best of cases no cure is effected; all that is done is to exchange one set of evil symptoms for another set.... And this pernicious nonsense, this systematised profanation and castration of life, passes for holy and sacred; to be in its service, to be an instrument of this art of healing—that is to say, to be a priest, is to be rendered distinguished, reverent, holy, and sacred. God alone could have been the Author of this supreme art of healing; redemption is only possible as a revelation, as an act of grace, as an unearned gift, made by the Creator Himself.

Proposition I.: Spiritual healthiness is regarded as morbid, and creates suspicion....

Proposition II.: The prerequisites of a strong, exuberant life—strong desires and passions—are reckoned as objections against strong and exuberant life.

Proposition III.: Everything which threatens danger to man, and which can overcome and ruin him, is evil—and should be torn root and branch from his soul.

Proposition IV.: Man converted into a weak creature, inoffensive to himself and others, crushed by humility and modesty, and conscious of his weakness,—in fact, the "sinner,"—this is the desirable type, and one which one can produce by means of a little spiritual surgery....

249.

What is it I protest against? That people should regard this paltry and peaceful mediocrity, this spiritual equilibrium which knows nothing of the fine impulses of great accumulations of strength, as something high, or possibly as the standard of all things.

Bacon of Verulam says: Infimarum virtutum apud vulgus laus est, mediarum admiratio, supremarum sensus nullus. Christianity as a religion, however, belongs to the vulgus: it has no feeling for the highest kind of virtus.

250.

Let us see what the "genuine Christian" does of all the things which his instincts forbid him to do:—he covers beauty, pride, riches, self-reliance, brilliancy, knowledge, and power with suspicion and mud—in short, all culture: his object is to deprive the latter of its clean conscience.

251.

The attacks made upon Christianity, hitherto, have been not only timid but false. So long as Christian morality was not felt to be a capital crime against Life, its apologists had a good time. The question concerning the mere "truth" of Christianity—whether in regard to the existence of its God, or to the legendary history of its origin, not to speak of its astronomy and natural science—is quite beside the point so long as no inquiry is made into the value of Christian morality. Are Christian morals worth anything, or are they a profanation and an outrage, despite all the arts of holiness and seduction with which they are enforced? The question concerning the truth of the religion may be met by all sorts of subterfuges; and the most fervent believers can, in the end, avail themselves of the logic used by their opponents, in order to create a right for their side to assert that certain things are irrefutable—that is to say, they transcend the means employed to refute them (nowadays this trick of dialectics is called "Kantian Criticism").

252.

Christianity should never be forgiven for having ruined such men as Pascal. This is precisely what should be combated in Christianity, namely, that it has the will to break the spirit of the strongest and noblest natures. One should take no rest until this thing is utterly destroyed:—the ideal of mankind which Christianity advances, the demands it makes upon men, and its "Nay" and "Yea" relative to humanity. The whole of the remaining absurdities, that is to say, Christian fable, Christian cobweb-spinning in ideas and principles, and Christian theology, do not concern us; they might be a thousand times more absurd and we should not raise a finger to destroy them. But what we do stand up against, is that ideal which, thanks to its morbid beauty and feminine seductiveness, thanks to its insidious and slanderous eloquence, appeals to all the cowardices and vanities of wearied souls,—and the strongest have their moments of fatigue,—as though all that which seems most useful and desirable at such moments—that is to say, confidence, artlessness, modesty, patience, love of one's like, resignation, submission to God, and a sort of self-surrender—were useful and desirable per se; as though the puny, modest abortion which in these creatures takes the place of a soul, this virtuous, mediocre animal and sheep of the flock—which deigns to call itself man, were not only to take precedence of the stronger, more evil, more passionate, more defiant, and more prodigal type of man, who by virtue of these very qualities is exposed to a hundred times more dangers than the former, but were actually to stand as an ideal for man in general, as a goal, a measure—the highest desideratum. The creation of this ideal was the most appalling temptation that had ever been put in the way of mankind; for, with it, the stronger and more successful exceptions, the lucky cases among men, in which the will to power and to growth leads the whole species "man" one step farther forward, this type was threatened with disaster. By means of the values of this ideal, the growth of such higher men would be checked at the root. For these men, owing to their superior demands and duties, readily accept a more dangerous life (speaking economically, it is a case of an increase in the costs of the undertaking coinciding with a greater chance of failure). What is it we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness and debility, at converting their proud assurance into anxiety and conscience-trouble; that it knows how to poison the noblest instincts and to infect them with disease, until their strength, their will to power, turns inwards, against themselves—until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt and self-immolation: that gruesome way of perishing, of which Pascal is the most famous example.
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

Postby admin » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:40 pm

II. A CRITICISM OF MORALITY.

1. The Origin of Moral Valuations.


253.

This is an attempt at investigating morality without being affected by its charm, and not without some mistrust in regard to the beguiling beauty of its attitudes and looks. A world which we can admire, which is in keeping with our capacity for worship—which is continually demonstrating itself—in small things or in large: this is the Christian standpoint which is common to us all.

But owing to an increase in our astuteness, in our mistrust, and in our scientific spirit (also through a more developed instinct for truth, which again is due to Christian influence), this interpretation has grown ever less and less tenable for us.

The craftiest of subterfuges: Kantian criticism. The intellect not only denies itself every right to interpret things in that way, but also to reject the interpretation once it has been made. People are satisfied with a greater demand upon their credulity and faith, with a renunciation of all right to reason concerning the proof of their creed, with an intangible and superior "Ideal" (God) as a stop-gap.

The Hegelian subterfuge, a continuation of the Platonic, a piece of romanticism and reaction, and at the same time a symptom of the historical sense of a new power: "Spirit" itself is the "self-revealing and self-realising ideal": we believe that in the "process of, development" an ever greater proportion of this ideal is being manifested—thus the ideal is being realised, faith is vested in the future into which all its noble needs are projected and in which they are being worshipped.

In short:—

(1) God is unknowable to us and not to be demonstrated by us (the concealed meaning behind the whole of the epistemological movement);

(2) God may be demonstrated, but as something evolving, and we are part of it, as our pressing desire for an ideal proves (the concealed meaning behind the historical movement).

It should be observed that criticism is never levelled at the ideal itself, but only at the problem which gives rise to a controversy concerning the ideal—that is to say, why it has not yet been realised, or why it is not demonstrable in small things as in great.

***

It makes all the difference: whether a man recognises this state of distress as such owing to a passion or to a yearning in himself, or whether it comes home to him as a problem which he arrives at only by straining his thinking powers and his historical imagination to the utmost.

Away from the religious and philosophical points of view we find the same phenomena. Utilitarianism (socialism and democracy) criticises the origin of moral valuations, though it believes in them just as much as the Christian does. (What guilelessness! As if morality could remain when the sanctioning deity is no longer present! The belief in a "Beyond" is absolutely necessary, if the faith in morality is to be maintained.)

Fundamental problem: whence comes this almighty power of Faith? Whence this faith in morality? (It is betrayed by the fact that even the fundamental conditions of life are falsely interpreted in favour of it: despite our knowledge of plants and animals. "Self-preservation": the Darwinian prospect of a reconciliation of the altruistic and egotistic principles.)

254.

An inquiry into the origin of our moral valuations and tables of law has absolutely nothing to do with the criticism of them, though people persist in believing it has; the two matters lie quite apart, notwithstanding the fact that the knowledge of the pudenda origo of a valuation does diminish its prestige, and prepares the way to a critical attitude and spirit towards it.

What is the actual worth of our valuations and tables of moral laws? What is the outcome of their dominion? For whom? In relation to what?—answer: for Life. But what is Life? A new and more definite concept of what "Life" is, becomes necessary here. My formula of this concept is: Life is Will to Power.

What is the meaning of the very act of valuing? Does it point back to another, metaphysical world, or does it point down? (As Kant believed, who lived in a period which preceded the great historical movement.) In short: what is its origin? Or had it no human "origin"?—Answer: moral valuations are a sort of explanation, they constitute a method of interpreting. Interpretation in itself is a symptom of definite physiological conditions, as also of a definite spiritual level of ruling judgments. What is it that interprets?—Our passions.

255.

All virtues should be looked upon as physiological conditions: the principal organic functions, more particularly, should be considered necessary and good. All virtues are really refined passions and elevated physiological conditions.

Pity and philanthropy may be regarded as the developments of sexual relations,—justice as the development of the passion for revenge,—virtue as the love of resistance, the will to power,—honour as an acknowledgment of an equal, or of an equally powerful, force.

256.

Under "Morality" I understand a system of valuations which is in relation with the conditions of a creature's life.

257.

Formerly it was said of every form of morality, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." I say of every form of morality: "It is a fruit, and from it I learn the Soil out of which it grew."

258.

I have tried to understand all moral judgments as symptoms and a language of signs in which the processes of physiological prosperity or the reverse, as also the consciousness of the conditions of preservation and growth, are betrayed—a mode of interpretation equal in worth to astrology, prejudices, created by instincts (peculiar to races, communities, and different stages of existence, as, for instance, youth or decay, etc.).

Applying this principle to the morality of Christian Europe more particularly, we find that our moral values are signs of decline, of a disbelief in Life, and of a preparation for pessimism.

My leading doctrine is this: there are no moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. The origin of this interpretation itself lies beyond the pale of morality.

What is the meaning of the fact that we have imagined a contradiction in existence? This is of paramount importance: behind all other valuations those moral valuations stand commandingly. Supposing they disappear, according to what standard shall we then measure? And then of what value would knowledge be, etc. etc.???

259.

A point of view: in all valuations there is a definite purpose: the preservation of an individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a belief, or a culture.—Thanks to the fact that people forget that all valuing has a purpose, one and the same man may swarm with a host of contradictory valuations, and therefore with a host of contradictory impulses. This is the expression of disease in man as opposed to the health of animals, in which all the instincts answer certain definite purposes.

This creature full of contradictions, however, has in his being a grand method of acquiring knowledge: he feels the pros and cons, he elevates himself to Justice—that is to say, to the ascertaining of principles beyond the valuations good and evil.

The wisest man would thus be the richest in contradictions, he would also be gifted with mental antennæ wherewith he could understand all kinds of men; and with it all he would have his great moments, when all the chords in his being would ring in splendid unison—the rarest of accidents even in us! A sort of planetary movement.

260.

"To will" is to will an object. But "object," as an idea, involves a valuation. Whence do valuations originate? Is a permanent norm, "pleasant or painful," their basis?

But in an incalculable number of cases we first of all make a thing painful, by investing it with a valuation.

The compass of moral valuations: they play a part in almost every mental impression. To us the world is coloured by them.

We have imagined the purpose and value of all things: owing to this we possess an enormous fund of latent power, but the study of comparative values teaches us that values which were actually opposed to each other have been held in high esteem, and that there have been many tables of laws (they could not, therefore, have been worth anything per se).

The analysis of individual tables of laws revealed the fact that they were framed (often very badly) as the conditions of existence for limited groups of people, to ensure their maintenance.

Upon examining modern men, we found that there are a large number of very different values to hand, and that they no longer contain any creative power—the fundamental principle: "the condition of existence" is now quite divorced from the moral values. It is much more superfluous and not nearly so painful. It becomes an arbitrary matter. Chaos.

Who creates the goal which stands above mankind kind and above the individual? Formerly morality was a preservative measure: but nobody wants to preserve any longer, there is nothing to preserve. Thus we are reduced to an experimental morality, each must postulate a goal for himself.

261.

What is the criterion of a moral action? (1) Its disinterestedness, (2) its universal acceptation, etc. But this is parlour-morality. Races must be studied and observed, and, in each case, the criterion must be discovered, as also the thing it expresses: a belief such as: "This particular attitude or behaviour belongs to the principal condition of our existence." Immoral means "that which brings about ruin." Now all societies in which these principles were discovered have met with their ruin: a few of these principles have been used and used again, because every newly established community required them; this was the case, for instance, with "Thou shalt not steal." In ages when people could not be expected to show any marked social instinct (as, for instance, in the age of the Roman Empire) the latter was, religiously speaking, directed towards the idea of "spiritual salvation," or, in philosophical parlance, towards "the greatest happiness." For even the philosophers of Greece did not feel any more for their πολις.

262.

The necessity of false values.—A judgment may be refuted when it is shown that it was conditioned: but the necessity of retaining it is not thereby cancelled. Reasons can no more eradicate false values than they can alter astigmatism in a man's eyes.

The need of their existence must be understood: they are the result of causes which have nothing to do with reasoning.

263.

To see and reveal the problem of morality seems to me to be the new task and the principal thing of all. I deny that this has been done by moral philosophies heretofore.

264.

How false and deceptive men have always been concerning the fundamental facts of their inner world! Here to have no eye; here to hold one's tongue, and here to open one's mouth.

265.

There seems to be no knowledge or consciousness of the many revolutions that have taken place in moral judgments, and of the number of times that "evil" has really and seriously been christened "good" and vice versa. I myself pointed to one of these transformations with the words "Sittlichkeit der Sitte."[3] Even conscience has changed its sphere: formerly there was such a thing as a gregarious pang of conscience.

[3] The morality of custom.

266.

A. Morality as the work of Immorality.

1. In order that moral values may attain to supremacy, a host of immoral forces and passions must assist them.

2. The establishment of moral values is the work of immoral passions and considerations.

B. Morality as the work of error.

C. Morality gradually contradicts itself. Requital—Truthfulness, Doubt, έποχή, Judging. The "Immorality" of belief in morality.

The steps:—

1. Absolute dominion of morality: all biological phenomena measured and judged according to its values.

2. The attempt to identify Life with morality (symptom of awakened scepticism: morality must no longer be regarded as the opposite of Life); many means are sought—even a transcendental one.

3. The opposition of Life and Morality. Morality condemned and sentenced by Life.

D. To what extent was morality dangerous to Life?

(a) It depreciated the joy of living and the gratitude felt towards Life, etc.

(b) It checked the tendency to beautify and to ennoble Life.

(c) It checked the knowledge of Life.

(d) It checked the unfolding of Life, because it tried to set the highest phenomena thereof at variance with itself.

E. Contra-account: the usefulness of morality to Life.

(1) Morality may be a preservative measure for the general whole, it may be a process of uniting dispersed members: it is useful as an agent in the production of the man who is a "tool."

(2) Morality may be a preservative measure mitigating the inner danger threatening man from the direction of his passions: it is useful to "mediocre people."

(3) Morality may be a preservative measure resisting the life-poisoning influences of profound sorrow and bitterness: it is useful to the "sufferers."

(4) Morality may be a preservative measure opposed to the terrible outbursts of the mighty: it is useful to the "lowly."

267.

It is an excellent thing when one can use the expressions "right" and "wrong" in a definite, narrow, and "bourgeois" sense, as for instance in the sentence: "Do right and fear no one";[4]—that is to say, to do one's duty, according to the rough scheme of life within the limit of which a community exists.—Let us not think meanly of what a few thousand years of morality have inculcated upon our minds.

[4] "Thue Recht und scheue Niemand."

268.

Two types of morality must not be confounded: the morality with which the instinct that has remained healthy defends itself from incipient decadence, and the other morality by means of which this decadence asserts itself, justifies itself, and leads downwards.

The first-named is usually stoical, hard, tyrannical (Stoicism itself was an example of the sort of "drag-chain" morality we speak of); the other is gushing, sentimental, full of secrets, it has the women and "beautiful feelings" on its side (Primitive Christianity was an example of this morality).

269.

I shall try to regard all moralising, with one glance, as a phenomenon—also as a riddle. Moral phenomena have preoccupied me like riddles. To-day I should be able to give a reply to the question: why should my neighbour's welfare be of greater value to me than my own? and why is it that my neighbour himself should value his welfare differently from the way in which I value it—that is to say, why should precisely my welfare be paramount in his mind? What is the meaning of this "Thou shalt," which is regarded as "given" even by philosophers themselves?

The seemingly insane idea that a man should esteem the act he performs for a fellow-creature, higher than the one he performs for himself, and that the same fellow-creature should do so too (that only those acts should be held to be good which are performed with an eye to the neighbour and for his welfare) has its reasons—namely, as the result of the social instinct which rests upon the valuation, that single individuals are of little importance although collectively their importance is very great. This, of course, presupposes that they constitute a community with one feeling and one conscience pervading the whole. It is therefore a sort of exercise for keeping one's eyes in a certain direction; it is the will to a kind of optics which renders a view of one's self impossible.

My idea: goals are wanting, and these must be individuals. We see the general drift: every individual gets sacrificed and serves as a tool. Let any one keep his eyes open in the streets—is not every one he sees a slave? Whither? What is the purpose of it all?

270.

How is it possible that a man can respect himself only in regard to moral values, that he subordinates and despises everything in favour of good, evil, improvement, spiritual salvation, etc.? as, for instance, Henri Fréd. Amiel. What is the meaning of the moral idiosyncrasy?—I mean this both in the psychological and physiological sense, as it was, for instance, in Pascal. In cases, then, in which other great qualities are not wanting; and even in the case of Schopenhauer, who obviously valued what he did not and could not have ...—is it not the result of a merely mechanical moral interpretation of real states of pain and displeasure? is it not a particular form of sensibility which does not happen to understand the cause of its many unpleasurable feelings, but thinks to explain them with moral hypotheses? In this way an occasional feeling of well-being and strength always appears under the optics of a "clean conscience," flooded with light through the proximity of God and the consciousness of salvation.... Thus the moral idiosyncratist has (1) either acquired his real worth in approximating to the virtuous type of society: "the good fellow," "the upright man"—a sort of medium state of high respectability: mediocre in all his abilities, but honest, conscientious, firm, respected, and tried, in all his aspirations; (2) or, he imagines he has acquired that worth, simply because he cannot otherwise understand all his states—he is unknown to himself; he therefore interprets himself in this fashion.—Morality is the only scheme of interpretation by means of which this type of man can tolerate himself:—is it a form of vanity?

271.

The predominance of moral values.—The consequence of this predominance: the corruption of psychology, etc.; the fatality which is associated with it everywhere. What is the meaning of this predominance? What does it point to?

To a certain greater urgency of saying nay or yea definitely in this domain. All sorts of imperatives have been used in order to make moral values appear as if they were for ever fixed:—they have been enjoined for the longest period of time: they almost appear to be instinctive, like inner commands. They are the expression of society's preservative measures, for they are felt to be almost beyond question. The practice—that is to say, the utility of being agreed concerning superior values, has attained in this respect to a sort of sanction. We observe that every care is taken to paralyse reflection and criticism in this department—look at Kant's attitude! not to speak of those who believe that it is immoral even to prosecute "research" in these matters.

272.

My desire is to show the absolute homogeneity of all phenomena, and to ascribe to moral differentiations but the value of perspective; to show that all that which is praised as moral is essentially the same as that which is immoral, and was only made possible, according to the law of all moral development—that is to say, by means of immoral artifices and with a view to immoral ends—just as all that which has been decried as immoral is, from the standpoint of economics, both superior and essential; and how development leading to a greater abundance of life necessarily Involves progress in the realm of immorality. "Truth," that is the extent to which we allow ourselves to comprehend this fact.

273.

But do not let us fear: as a matter of fact, we require a great deal of morality, in order to be immoral in this subtle way; let me speak in a parable:—

A physiologist interested in a certain illness, and an invalid who wishes to be cured of that same illness, have not the same interests. Let us suppose that the illness happens to be morality,—for morality is an illness,—and that we Europeans are the invalid: what an amount of subtle torment and difficulty would arise supposing we Europeans were, at once, our own inquisitive spectators and the physiologist above-mentioned! Should we under these circumstances earnestly desire to rid ourselves of morality? Should we want to? This is of course irrespective of the question whether we should be able to do so—whether we can be cured at all?
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

Postby admin » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:41 pm

2. The Herd.

274.

Whose will to power is morality?—The common factor of all European history since the time of Socrates is the attempt to make the moral values dominate all other values, in order that they should not be only the leader and judge of life, but also: (1) knowledge, (2) Art, (3) political and social aspirations. "Amelioration" regarded as the only duty, everything else used as a means thereto (or as a force distributing, hindering, and endangering its realisation, and therefore to be opposed and annihilated ...).—A similar movement to be observed in China and India.

What is the meaning of this will to power on the part of moral values, which has played such a part in the world's prodigious evolutions?

Answer:—Three powers lie concealed behind it; (1) The instinct of the herd opposed to the strong and the independent; (2) the instinct of all sufferers and all abortions opposed to the happy and well-constituted; (3) the instinct of the mediocre opposed to the exceptions.—Enormous advantage of this movement, despite the cruelty, falseness, and narrow-mindedness which has helped it along (for the history of the struggle of morality with the fundamental instincts of life is in itself the greatest piece of immorality that has ever yet been witnessed on earth ...).

275.

The fewest succeed in discovering a problem behind all that which constitutes our daily life, and to which we have become accustomed throughout the ages—our eye does not seem focussed for such things: at least, this seems to me to be the case in so far as our morality is concerned.

"Every man should be the preoccupation of his fellows"; he who thinks in this way deserves honour: no one ought to think of himself.

"Thou shalt": an impulse which, like the sexual impulse, cannot fathom itself, is set apart and is not condemned as all the other instincts are—on the contrary, it is made to be their standard and their judge!

The problem of "equality," in the face of the fact that we all thirst for distinction: here, on the contrary, we should demand of ourselves what we demand of others. That is so tasteless and obviously insane; but—it is felt to be holy and of a higher order. The fact that it is opposed to common sense is not even noticed.

Self-sacrifice and self-abnegation are considered distinguishing, as are also the attempt to obey morality implicitly, and the belief that one should be every one's equal in its presence.

The neglect and the surrender of Life and of well-being is held to be distinguished, as are also the complete renunciation of individual valuations and the severe exaction from every one of the same sacrifice. "The value of an action is once and for all fixed: every individual must submit to this valuation."

We see: an authority speaks—who speaks?—We must condone it in human pride, if man tried to make this authority as high as possible, for he wanted to feel as humble as he possibly could by the side of it. Thus—God speaks!

God was necessary as an unconditional sanction which has no superior, as a "Categorical Imperator": or, in so far as people believed in the authority of reason, what was needed was a "unitarian metaphysics" by means of which this view could be made logical.

Now, admitting that faith in God is dead: the question arises once more: "who speaks?" My answer, which I take from biology and not from metaphysics, is: "the gregarious instinct speaks." This is what desires to be master: hence its "thou shalt!"—it will allow the individual to exist only as a part of a whole, only in favour of the whole, it hates those who detach themselves from everything—it turns the hatred of all individuals against him.

276.

The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the herd: the sorrow of all higher and exceptional men is explained by the fact that everything which distinguishes them from others reaches their consciousness in the form of a feeling of their own smallness and egregiousness. It is the virtues of modern men which are the causes of pessimistic gloominess; the mediocre, like the herd, are not troubled much with questions or with conscience—they are cheerful. (Among the gloomy strong men, Pascal and Schopenhauer are noted examples.)

The more dangerous a quality seems to the herd, the more completely it is condemned.

277.

The morality of truthfulness in the herd. "Thou shalt be recognisable, thou shalt express thy inner nature by means of clear and constant signs—otherwise thou art dangerous: and supposing thou art evil, thy power of dissimulation is absolutely the worst thing for the herd. We despise the secretive and those whom we cannot identify.—Consequently thou must regard thyself as recognisable, thou mayest not remain concealed from thyself, thou mayest not even believe in the possibility of thy ever changing." Thus, the insistence upon truthfulness has as its main object the recognisability and the stability of the individual. As a matter of fact, it is the object of education to make each gregarious unit believe in a certain definite dogma concerning the nature of man: education first creates this dogma and thereupon exacts "truthfulness."

278.

Within the confines of a herd or of a community—that is to say, inter pares, the over-estimation of truthfulness is very reasonable. A man must not allow himself to be deceived—and consequently he adopts as his own personal morality that he should deceive no one!—a sort of mutual obligation among equals! In his dealings with the outside world caution and danger demand that he should be on his guard against deception: the first psychological condition of this attitude would mean that he is also on his guard against his own people. Mistrust thus appears as the source of truthfulness.

279.

A criticism of the virtues of the herd.—Inertia is active: (1) In confidence, because mistrust makes suspense, reflection, and observation necessary. (2) In veneration, where the gulf that separates power is great and submission necessary: then, so that fear may cease to exist, everybody tries to love and esteem, while the difference in power is interpreted as a difference of value: and thus the relationship to the powerful no longer has anything revolting in it. (3) In the sense of truth. What is truth? Truth is that explanation of things which causes us the smallest amount of mental exertion (apart from this, lying is extremely fatiguing). (4) In sympathy. It is a relief to know one's self on the same level with all, to feel as all feel, and to accept a belief which is already current; it is something passive beside the activity which appropriates and continually carries into practice the most individual rights of valuation (the latter process allows of no repose). (5) In impartiality and coolness of judgment: people scout the strain of being moved, and prefer to be detached and "objective." (6) In uprightness: people prefer to obey a law which is to hand rather than to create a new one, rather than to command themselves and others: the fear of commanding—it is better to submit than to rebel. (7) In toleration: the fear of exercising a right or of enforcing a judgment.

280.

The instinct of the herd values the juste milieu and the average as the highest and most precious of all things: the spot where the majority is to be found, and the air that it breathes there. In this way it is the opponent of all order of rank; it regards a climb from the level to the heights in the same light as a descent from the majority to the minority. The herd regards the exception, whether it be above or beneath its general level, as something which is antagonistic and dangerous to itself. Their trick in dealing with the exceptions above them, the strong, the mighty, the wise, and the fruitful, is to persuade them to become guardians, herdsmen, and watchmen—in fact, to become their head-servants: thus they convert a danger into a thing which is useful. In the middle, fear ceases: here a man is alone with nothing; here there is not much room even for misunderstandings; here there is equality; here a man's individual existence is not felt as a reproach, but as the right existence; here contentment reigns supreme. Mistrust is active only towards the exceptions; to be an exception is to be a sinner.

281.

If, in compliance with our communal instincts, we make certain regulations for, ourselves and forbid certain acts, we do not of course, in common reason, forbid a certain kind of "existence," nor a certain attitude of mind, but only a particular application and development of this "existence" and "attitude of mind." But then the idealist of virtue, the moralist, comes along and says: "God sees into the human heart! What matters it that ye abstain from certain acts: ye are not any better on that account!" Answer: Mr. Longears and Virtue-Monger, we do not want to be better at all, we are quite satisfied with ourselves, all we desire is that we should not harm one another—and that is why we forbid certain actions when they take a particular direction—that is to say, when they are against our own interests: but that does not alter the fact that when these same actions are directed against the enemies of our community—against you, for instance—we are at a loss to know how to pay them sufficient honour. We educate our children up to them; we develop them to the fullest extent. Did we share that "god-fearing" radicalism which your holy craziness recommends, if we were green-horns enough to condemn the source of those forbidden "acts" by condemning the "heart" and the "attitude of mind" which recommends them, that would mean condemning our very existence, and with it its greatest prerequisite—an attitude of mind, a heart, a passion which we revere with all our soul. By our decrees we prevent this attitude of mind from breaking out and venting itself in a useless way—we are prudent when we prescribe such laws for ourselves; we are also moral in so doing.... Have you no idea—however vague—what sacrifices it has cost us, how much self-control, self-subjection, and hardness it has compelled us to exercise? We are vehement in our desires; there are times when we even feel as if we could devour each other.... But the "communal spirit" is master of us: have you observed that this is almost a definition of morality?

282.

The weakness of the gregarious animal gives rise to a morality which is precisely similar to that resulting from the weakness of the decadent man: they understand each other; they associate with each other (the great decadent religions always rely upon the support of the herd). The gregarious animal, as such, is free from all morbid characteristics, it is in itself an invaluable creature; but it is incapable of taking any initiative; it must have a "leader"—the priests understand this.... The state is not subtle, not secret enough; the art of "directing consciences" slips its grasp. How is the gregarious animal infected with illness by the priest?

283.

The hatred directed against the privileged in body and spirit: the revolt of the ugly and bungled souls against the beautiful, the proud, and the cheerful. The weapons used: contempt of beauty, of pride, of happiness: "There is no such thing as merit," "The danger is enormous: it is right that one should tremble and feel ill at ease," "Naturalness is evil; it is right to oppose all that is natural—even 'reason'" (all that is antinatural is elevated to the highest place).

It is again the priests who exploit this condition, and who win the "people" over to themselves. "The sinner" over whom there is more joy in heaven than over "the just person." This is the struggle against "paganism" (the pang of conscience, a measure for disturbing the harmony of the soul).

The hatred of the mediocre for the exceptions, and of the herd for its independent members. (Custom actually regarded as "morality.") The revulsion of feeling against "egotism": that only is worth anything which is done "for another." "We are all equal";—against the love of dominion, against "dominion" in general;—against privilege;—against sectarians, free-spirits, and sceptics;—against philosophy (a force opposing mechanical and automatic instincts); in philosophers themselves—"the categorical imperative," the essential nature of morality, "general and universal."

284.

The qualities and tendencies which are praised: peacefulness, equity, moderation, modesty, reverence, respectfulness, bravery, chastity, honesty, fidelity, credulity, rectitude, confidence, resignation, pity, helpfulness, conscientiousness, simplicity, mildness, justice, generosity, leniency, obedience, disinterestedness, freedom from envy, good nature, industry.

We must ascertain to what extent such qualities are conditioned as means to the attainment of certain desires and ends (often an "evil" end); or as results of dominating passions (for instance, intellectuality): or as the expressions of certain states of need—that is to say, as preservative measures (as in the case of citizens, slaves, women, etc.).

In short, every one of them is not considered "good" for its own sake, but rather because it approximates to a standard prescribed either by "society" or by the "herd," as a means to the ends of the latter, as necessary for their preservation and enhancement, and also as the result of an actual gregarious instinct in the individual; these qualities are thus in the service of an instinct which is fundamentally different from these states of virtue. For the herd is antagonistic, selfish, and pitiless to the outside world; it is full of a love of dominion and of feelings of mistrust, etc.

In the "herdsman" this antagonism comes to the fore he must have qualities which are the reverse of those possessed by the herd.

The mortal enmity of the herd towards all order of rank: its instinct is in favour of the leveller (Christ). Towards all strong individuals (the sovereigns) it is hostile, unfair, intemperate, arrogant, cheeky, disrespectful, cowardly, false, lying, pitiless, deceitful, envious, revengeful.

285.

My teaching is this, that the herd seeks to maintain and preserve one type of man, and that it defends itself on two sides—that is to say, against those which are decadents from its ranks (criminals, etc.), and against those who rise superior to its dead level. The instincts of the herd tend to a stationary state of society; they merely preserve. They have no creative power.

The pleasant feelings of goodness and benevolence with which the just man fills us (as opposed to the suspense and the fear to which the great innovating man gives rise) are our own sensations of personal security and equality: in this way the gregarious animal glorifies the gregarious nature, and then begins to feel at ease. This judgment on the part of the "comfortable" ones rigs itself out in the most beautiful words—and thus "morality" is born. Let any one observe, however, the hatred of the herd for all truthful men.

286.

Let us not deceive ourselves! When a man hears the whisper of the moral imperative in his breast, as altruism would have him hear it, he shows thereby that he belongs to the herd. When a man is conscious of the opposite feelings,—that is to say, when he sees his danger and his undoing in disinterested and unselfish actions,—then he does not belong to the herd.

287.

My philosophy aims at a new order of rank: not at an individualistic morality.[5] The spirit of the herd should rule within the herd—but not beyond it: the leaders of the herd require a fundamentally different valuation for their actions, as do also the independent ones or the beasts of prey, etc.

[5] TRANSLATOR'S NOTE—Here is a broad distinction between Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer.
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

Postby admin » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:43 pm

3. General Observations Concerning Morality.

288.

Morality regarded as an attempt at establishing human pride.—The "Free-Will" theory is anti-religious. Its ultimate object is to bestow the right upon man to regard himself as the cause of his highest states and actions: it is a form of the growing feeling of pride.

Man feels his power his "happiness"; as they say: there must be a will behind these states—otherwise they do not belong to him. Virtue is an attempt at postulating a modicum of will, past or present, as the necessary antecedent to every exalted and strong feeling of happiness: if the will to certain actions is regularly present in consciousness, a sensation of power may be interpreted as its result. This is a merely psychological point of view, based upon the false assumption that nothing belongs to us which we have not consciously willed. The whole of the teaching of responsibility relies upon the ingenuous psychological rule that the will is the only cause, and that one must have been aware of having willed in order to be able to regard one's self as a cause.

Then comes the counter-movement—that of the moral-philosophers. These men still labour under the delusion that a man is responsible only for what he has willed. The value of man is then made a moral value: thus morality becomes a causa prima; for this there must be some kind of principle in man, and "free will" is posited as prima causa. The arrière pensée is always this: If man is not a causa prima through his will, he must be irresponsible,—therefore he does not come within the jurisdiction of morals,—virtue or vice is automatic and mechanical....

In short: in order that man may respect himself he must be capable of becoming evil.

289.

Theatricalness regarded as the result of "Free Will" morality. It is a step in the development of the feeling of power itself to believe one's self to be the author of one's exalted moments (of one's perfection) and to have willed them....

(Criticism: all perfect action is precisely unconscious and not deliberate; consciousness is often the expression of an imperfect and often morbid constitution. Personal perfection regarded as determined by will, as an act of consciousness, as reason with dialectics, is a caricature, a sort of self-contradiction.... Any degree of consciousness renders perfection impossible. ... A form of theatricalness.)

290.

The moral hypothesis, designed with a view to justifying God, said: evil must be voluntary (simply in order that the voluntariness of goodness might be believed in); and again, all evil and suffering have an object which is salvation.

The notion "guilt" was considered as something which had no connection at all with the ultimate cause of existence, and the notion "punishment" was held to be an educating and beneficent act, consequently an act proceeding from a good God.

The absolute dominion of moral valuations over all others: nobody doubted that God could not be evil and could do no harm—that is to say, perfection was understood merely as moral perfection.

291.

How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality....

The value of an action must be judged by its results, say the utilitarians: to measure it according to its origin involves the impossibility of knowing that origin.

But do we know its results? Five stages ahead, perhaps. Who can tell what an action provokes and sets in motion? As a stimulus? As the spark which fires a powder-magazine? Utilitarians are simpletons.... And finally, they would first of all have to know what is useful; here also their sight can travel only over five stages or so.... They have no notion of the great economy which cannot dispense with evil.

We do not know the origin or the results: has an action, then, any value?

We have yet the action itself to consider: the states of consciousness that accompany it, the yea or nay which follows upon its performance: does the value of an action lie in the subjective states which accompany it? (In that case, the value of music would be measured according to the pleasure or displeasure which it occasions in us ... which it gives to the composer. ...) Obviously feelings of value must accompany it, a sensation of power, restraint, or impotence—for instance, freedom or lightsomeness. Or, putting the question differently: could the value of an action be reduced to physiological terms? could it be the expression of completely free or constrained life?—Maybe its biological value is expressed in this way....

If, then, an action can be judged neither in the light of its origin, nor its results, nor its accompaniments in consciousness, then its value must be x unknown....

292.

It amounts to a denaturalisation of morality, to separate an action from a man; to direct hatred or contempt against "sin"; to believe that there are actions which are good or bad in themselves.

The re-establishment of "Nature": an action in itself is quite devoid of value; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same "crime" may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).

293.

The concept "reprehensible action" presents us with some difficulties. Nothing in all that happens can be reprehensible in itself: one would not dare to eliminate it completely; for everything is so bound up with everything else, that to exclude one part would mean to exclude the whole.

A reprehensible action, therefore, would mean a reprehensible world as a whole....

And even then, in a reprehensible world even reprehending would be reprehensible.... And the consequence of an attitude of mind that condemns everything, would be the affirmation of everything in practice.... If Becoming is a huge ring, everything that forms a part of it is of equal value, is eternal and necessary.—In all correlations of yea and nay, of preference and rejection, love and hate, all that is expressed is a certain point of view, peculiar to the interests of a certain type of living organism: everything that lives says yea by the very fact of its existence.

294.

Criticism of the subjective feelings of value.—Conscience. Formerly people argued: conscience condemns this action, therefore this action is reprehensible. But, as a matter of fact, conscience condemns an action because that action has been condemned for a long period of time: all conscience does is to imitate. It does not create values. That which first led to the condemnation of certain actions, was not conscience: but the knowledge of (or the prejudice against) its consequences.... The approbation of conscience, the feeling of well-being, of "inner peace," is of the same order of emotions as the artist's joy over his work—it proves nothing.... Self-contentment proves no more in favour of that which gives rise to it, than its absence can prove anything against the value of the thing which fails to give rise to it. We are far too ignorant to be able to judge of the value of our actions: in this respect we lack the ability to regard things objectively. Even when we condemn an action, we do not do so as judges, but as adversaries.... When noble sentiments accompany an action, they prove nothing in its favour: an artist may present us with an absolutely insignificant thing, though he be in the throes of the most exalted pathos during its production. It were wiser to regard these sentiments as misleading: they actually beguile our eye and our power, away from criticism, from caution and from suspicion, and the result often is that we make fools of ourselves ... they actually make fools of us.

295.

We are heirs to the conscience-vivisection and self-crucifixion of two thousand years: in these two practices lie perhaps our longest efforts at becoming perfect, our mastery, and certainly our subtlety; we have affiliated natural propensities with a heavy conscience.

An attempt to produce an entirely opposite state of affairs would be possible: that is to say, to affiliate all desires of a beyond, all sympathy with things which are opposed to the senses, the intellect, and nature—in fact, all the ideals that have existed hitherto (which were all anti-worldly), with a heavy conscience.

296.

The great crimes in psychology:—

(1) That all pain and unhappiness should have been falsified by being associated with what is wrong (guilt). (Thus pain was robbed of its innocence.)

(2) That all strong emotions (wantonness, voluptuousness, triumph, pride, audacity, knowledge, assurance, and happiness in itself) were branded as sinful, as seductive, and as suspicious.

(3) That feelings of weakness, inner acts of cowardice, lack of personal courage, should have decked themselves in the most beautiful words, and have been taught as desirable in the highest degree.

(4) That greatness in man should have been given the meaning of disinterestedness, self-sacrifice for another's good, for other people; that even in the scientist and the artist, the elimination of the individual personality is presented as the cause of the greatest knowledge and ability.

(5) That love should have been twisted round to mean submission (and altruism), whereas it is in reality an act of appropriation or of bestowal, resulting in the last case from a superabundance in the wealth of a given personality. Only the wholest people can love; the disinterested ones, the "objective" ones, are the worst lovers (just ask the girls!). This principle also applies to the love of God or of the "home country": a man must be able to rely absolutely upon himself. (Egotism may be regarded as the pre-eminence of the ego, altruism as the pre-eminence of others.)

(6) Life regarded as a punishment (happiness as a means of seduction); the passions regarded as devilish; confidence in one's self as godless.

The whole of psychology is a psychology of obstacles, a sort of barricade built out of fear; on the one hand we find the masses (the botched and bungled, the mediocre) defending themselves, by means of it, against the strong (and finally destroying them in their growth ...); on the other hand, we find all the instincts with which these classes are best able to prosper, sanctified and alone held in honour by them. Let anyone examine the Jewish priesthood.

297.

The vestiges of the depreciation of Nature through moral transcendence: The value of disinterestedness, the cult of altruism; the belief in a reward in the play of natural consequences; the belief in "goodness" and in genius itself, as if the one, like the other, were the result of disinterestedness; the continuation of the Church's sanction of the life of the citizen; the absolutely deliberate misunderstanding of history (as a means of educating up to morality) or pessimism in the attitude taken up towards history (the latter is just as much a result of the depreciation of Nature, as is that pseudo-justification of history, that refusal to see history as the pessimist sees it).

298.

"Morality for its own sake"—this is an important step in the denaturalisation of morals: in itself it appears as a final value. In this phase religion has generally become saturated with it: as, for instance, in the case of Judaism. It likewise goes through a phase in which it separates itself from religion, and in which no God is "moral" enough for it: it then prefers the impersonal ideal.... This is how the case stands at present.

"Art for Art's sake": this is a similarly dangerous principle: by this means a false contrast is lent to things—it culminates in the slander of reality ("idealising" into the hateful). When an ideal is severed from reality, the latter is debased, impoverished, and calumniated. "Beauty for Beauty's sake," "Truth for Truth's sake," "Goodness for Goodness' sake"—these are three forms of the evil eye for reality.

Art, knowledge, and morality are means: instead of recognising a life-promoting tendency in them, they have been associated with the opposite of Life—with "God"—they have also been regarded as revelations of a higher world, which here and there transpires through them....

"Beautiful" and "ugly," "true" and "false," "good" and "evil"—these things are distinctions and antagonisms which betray the preservative and promotive measures of Life, not necessarily of man alone, but of all stable and enduring organisms which take up a definite stand against their opponents. The war which thus ensues is the essential factor: it is a means of separating things, leading to stronger isolation....

299.

Moral naturalism: The tracing back of apparently independent and supernatural values to their real "nature"—that is to say, to natural immorality, to natural "utility," etc.

Perhaps I may designate the tendency of these observations by the term moral naturalism: my object is to re-translate the moral values which have apparently become independent and unnatural into their real nature—that is to say, into their natural "immorality."

N.B.—Refer to Jewish "holiness" and its natural basis. The case is the same in regard to the moral law which has been made sovereign, emancipated from its real feature (until it is almost the opposite of Nature).

The stages in the denaturalisation of morality (or so-called "Idealisation"):—

First it is a road to individual happiness,

then it is the result of knowledge,

then it is a Categorical Imperative,

then it is a way to Salvation,

then it is a denial of the will to live.

(The gradual progress of the hostility of morality to Life.)

300.

The suppressed and effaced Heresy in morality.—Concepts: paganism, master-morality, virtù.

301.

My problem: What harm has mankind suffered hitherto from morals, as also from its own morality? Intellectual harm, etc.

302.

Why are not human values once more deposited nicely in the rut to which they alone have a right—as routinary values? Many species of animals have already become extinct; supposing man were also to disappear, nothing would be lacking on earth. A man should be enough of a philosopher to admire even this "nothing" (Nil admirari).

303.

Man, a small species of very excitable animals, which—fortunately—has its time. Life in general on earth is a matter of a moment, an incident, an exception that has no consequence, something which is of no importance whatever to the general character of the earth; the earth itself is, like every star, a hiatus between two nonentities, an event without a plan, without reason, will, or self-consciousness—the worst kind of necessity—foolish necessity.... Something in us rebels against this view; the serpent vanity whispers to our hearts, "All this must be false because it is revolting.... Could not all this be appearance? And man in spite of all, to use Kant's words"——
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

Postby admin » Thu Jan 18, 2018 9:45 pm

4. How Virtue Is Made to Dominate.

304.

Concerning the ideal of the moralist.—In this treatise we wish to speak of the great politics of virtue. We wrote it for the use of all those who are interested, not so much in the process of becoming virtuous as in that of making others virtuous—in how virtue is made to dominate. I even intend to prove that in order to desire this one thing—the dominion of virtue—the other must be systematically avoided; that is to say, one must renounce all hopes of becoming virtuous. This sacrifice is great: but such an end is perhaps a sufficient reward for such a sacrifice. And even greater sacrifices!... And some of the most famous moralists have risked as much. For these, indeed, had already recognised and anticipated the truth which is to be revealed for the first time in this treatise: that the dominion of virtue is absolutely attainable only by the use of the same means which are employed in the attainment of any other dominion, in any case not by means of virtue itself....

As I have already said, this treatise deals with the politics of virtue: it postulates an ideal of these politics; it describes it as it ought to be, if anything at all can be perfect on this earth. Now, no philosopher can be in any doubt as to what the type of perfection is in politics; it is, of course, Machiavellianism. But Machiavellianism which is pur, sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute sa force, dans toute son âpreté, is superhuman, divine, transcendental, and can never be achieved by man—the most he can do is to approximate it. Even in this narrower kind of politics—in the politics of virtue—the ideal never seems to have been realised. Plato, too, only bordered upon it. Granted that one have eyes for concealed things, one can discover, even in the most guileless and most conscious moralists (and this is indeed the name of these moral politicians and of the founders of all newer moral forces), traces showing that they too paid their tribute to human weakness. They all aspired to virtue on their own account—at least in their moments of weariness; and this is the leading and most capital error on the part of any moralist—whose duty it is to be an immoralist in deeds. That he must not exactly appear to be the latter, is another matter. Or rather it is not another matter: systematic self-denial of this kind (or, expressed morally: dissimulation) belongs to, and is part and parcel of, the moralist's canon and of his self-imposed duties: without it he can never attain to his particular kind of perfection. Freedom from morality and from truth when enjoyed for that purpose which rewards every sacrifice: for the sake of making morality dominate—that is the canon. Moralists are in need of the attitudes of virtue, as also of the attitudes of truth; their error begins when they yield to virtue, when they lose control of virtue, when they themselves become moral or true. A great moralist is, among other things, necessarily a great actor; his only danger is that his pose may unconsciously become a second nature, just like his ideal, which is to keep his esse and his operari apart in a divine way; everything he does must be done sub specie boni—a lofty, remote, and exacting ideal! A divine ideal! And, as a matter of fact, they say that the moralist thus imitates a model which is no less than God Himself: God, the greatest Immoralist in deeds that exists, but who nevertheless understands how to remain what He is, the good God....

305.

The dominion of virtue is not established by means of virtue itself; with virtue itself, one renounces power, one loses the Will to Power.

306.

The victory of a moral ideal is achieved by the same "immoral" means as any other victory: violence, lies, slander, injustice.

307.

He who knows the way fame originates will be suspicious even of the fame virtue enjoys.

308.

Morality is just as "immoral" as any other thing on earth; morality is in itself a form of immorality.

The great relief which this conviction brings. The contradiction between things disappears, the unity of all phenomena is saved——

309.

There are some who actually go in search of what is immoral. When they say: "this is wrong," they believe it ought to be done away with or altered. On the other hand, I do not rest until I am quite clear concerning the immorality of any particular thing which happens to come under my notice. When I discover it, I recover my equanimity.

310.

A. The ways which lead to power: the presentation of the new virtue under the name of an old one,—the awakening of "interest" concerning it ("happiness" declared to be its reward, and vice versâ),—artistic slandering of all that stands in its way,—the exploitation of advantages and accidents with the view of glorifying it,—the conversion of its adherents into fanatics by means of sacrifices and separations,—symbolism on a grand scale.

B. Power attained: (1) Means of constraint of virtue; (2) seductive means of virtue; (3) the (court) etiquette of virtue.

311.

By what means does a virtue attain to power?—With precisely the same means as a political party: slander, suspicion, the undermining of opposing virtues that happen to be already in power, the changing of their names, systematic persecution and scorn; in short, by means of acts of general "immorality."

How does a desire behave towards itself in order to become a virtue?—A process of rechristening; systematic denial of its intentions; practice in misunderstanding itself; alliance with established and recognised virtues; ostentatious enmity towards its adversaries. If possible, too, the protection of sacred powers must be purchased; people must also be intoxicated and fired with enthusiasm; idealistic humbug must be used, and a party must be won, which either triumphs or perishes—one must be unconscious and naïf.

312.

Cruelty has become transformed and elevated into tragic pity, so that we no longer recognise it as such. The same has happened to the love of the sexes which has become amour-passion; the slavish attitude of mind appears as Christian obedience; wretchedness becomes humility; the disease of the nervus sympathicus, for instance, is eulogised as Pessimism, Pascalism, or Carlylism, etc.

313.

We should begin to entertain doubts concerning a man if we heard that he required reasons in order to remain respectable: we should, in any case, certainly avoid his society. The little word "for" in certain cases may be compromising; sometimes a single "for" is enough to refute one. If we should hear, in course of time, that such-and-such an aspirant for virtue was in need of bad reasons in order to remain respectable, it would not conduce to increasing our respect for him. But he goes further; he comes to us, and tells us quite openly: "You disturb my morality, with your disbelief, Mr. Sceptic; so long as you cannot believe in my bad reasons,—that is to say, in my God, in a disciplinary Beyond, in free will, etc.,—you put obstacles in the way of my virtue.... Moral, sceptics must be suppressed: they prevent the moralisation of the masses."

314.

Our most sacred convictions, those which are permanent in us concerning the highest values, are judgments emanating from our muscles.

315.

Morality in the valuation of races and classes.—In view of the fact that the passions and fundamental instincts in every race and class express the means which enable the latter to preserve themselves (or at least the means which have enabled them to live for the longest period of time), to call them "virtuous" practically means:

That they change their character, shed their skins, and blot out their past.

It means that they should cease from differentiating themselves from others.

It means that they are getting to resemble each other in their needs and aspirations—or, more exactly, that they are declining....

It means that the will to one kind of morality is merely the tyranny of the particular species, which is adapted to that kind of morality, over other species: it means a process of annihilation or general levelling in favour of the prevailing species (whether it be to render the non-prevailing species harmless, or to exploit them); the "Abolition of Slavery"—a so-called tribute to "human dignity"; in truth, the annihilation of a fundamentally different species (the undermining of its values and its happiness).

The qualities which constitute the strength of an opposing race or class are declared to be the most evil and pernicious things it has: for by means of them it may be harmful to us (its virtues are slandered and rechristened).

When a man or a people harm us, their action constitutes an objection against them: but from their point of view we are desirable, because we are such as can be useful to them.

The insistence upon spreading "humaneness" (which guilelessly starts out with the assumption that it is in possession of the formula "What is human") is all humbug, beneath the cover of which a certain definite type of man strives to attain to power: or, more precisely, a very particular kind of instinct—the gregarious instinct. "The equality of men": this is what lies concealed behind the tendency of making ever more and more men alike as men.

The "interested nature" of the morality of ordinary people. (The trick was to elevate the great passions for power and property to the positions of protectors of virtue.)

To what extent do all kinds of business men and money-grabbers—all those who give and take credit—find it necessary to promote the levelling of all characters and notions of value? the commerce and the exchange of the world leads to, and almost purchases, virtue.

The State exercises the same influence, as does also any sort of ruling power at the head of officials and soldiers; science acts in the same way, in order that it may work in security and economise its forces. And the priesthood does the same.

Communal morality is thus promoted here, because it is advantageous; and, in order to make it triumph, war and violence are waged against immorality—with what "right"? Without any right whatsoever; but in accordance with the instinct of self-preservation. The same classes avail themselves of immorality when it serves their purpose to do so.

316.

Observe the hypocritical colour which all civil institutions are painted, just as if they were the offshoots of morality—for instance: marriage, work, calling, patriotism, the family, order, and rights. But as they were all established in favour of the most mediocre type of man, to protect him from exceptions and the need of exceptions, one must not be surprised to find them sown with lies.

317.

Virtue must be defended against its preachers: they are its worst enemies. For they teach virtue as an ideal for all; they divest virtue of the charm which consists in its rareness, its inimitableness, its exceptional and non-average character—that is to say, of its aristocratic charm. A stand must also be made against those embittered idealists who eagerly tap all pots and are satisfied to hear them ring hollow: what ingenuousness—to demand great and rare things, and then to declare, with anger and contempt of one's fellows, that they do not exist!—It is obvious, for instance, that a marriage is worth only as much as those are worth whom it joins—that is to say, that on the whole it is something wretched and indecent: no priest or registrar can make anything else of it.

Virtue[6] has all the instincts of the average man against it: it is not profitable, it is not prudent, and it isolates. It is related to passion, and not very accessible to reason; it spoils the character, the head, and the senses—always, of course, subject to the medium standard of men; it provokes hostility towards order, and towards the lies which are concealed beneath all order, all institutions, and all reality—when seen in the light of its pernicious influence upon others, it is the worst of vices.

I recognise virtue in that: (1) it does not insist upon being recognised; (2) it does not presuppose the existence of virtue everywhere, but precisely something else; (3) it does not suffer from the absence of virtue, but regards it rather as a relation of perspective which throws virtue into relief: it does not proclaim itself; (4) it makes no propaganda; (5) it allows no one to pose as judge because it is always a personal virtue; (6) it does precisely what is generally forbidden: virtue as I understand it is the actual vetitum within all gregarious legislation; (7) in short, I recognise virtue in that it is in the Renaissance style—virtù—free from all moralic acid....

[6] TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.—Virtue is used here, of course, in the sense of "the excellence of man," not in the sense of the Christian negative virtue.


318.

In the first place[7] Messrs. Virtue-mongers, you have no superiority over us; we should like to make you take modesty a little more to heart: it is wretched personal interests and prudence which suggest your virtue to you. And if you had more strength and courage in your bodies you would not lower yourselves thus to the level of virtuous nonentities. You make what you can of yourselves: partly what you are obliged to make,—that is to say, what your circumstances force you to make,—partly what suits your pleasure and seems useful to you. But if you do only what is in keeping with your inclinations, or what necessity exacts from you, or what is useful to you, you ought neither to praise yourselves nor let others praise you!... One is a thoroughly puny kind of man when one is only virtuous: nothing should mislead you in this regard! Men who have to be considered at all, were never such donkeys of virtue: their inmost instinct, that which determined their quantum of power, did not find its reckoning thus: whereas with your minimum amount of power nothing can seem more full of wisdom to you than virtue. But the multitude are on your side: and because you tyrannise over us, we shall fight you....

[7] TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.—Here Nietzsche returns to Christian virtue which is negative and moral.


319.

A virtuous man is of a lower species because, in the first place, he has no "personality," but acquires his value by conforming with a certain human scheme which has been once and for ever fixed. He has no independent value: he may be compared; he has his equals, he must not be an individual.

Reckoning up the qualities of the good man, why is it they appear pleasant to us? Because they urge us neither to war, to mistrust, to caution, to the accumulating of forces, nor to severity: our laziness, our good nature, and our levity, have a good time. This, our feeling of well-being, is what we project into the good man in the form of a quality, in the form of a valuable possession.

320.

Under certain circumstances, virtue is merely a venerable form of stupidity: who could blame you for it? And this form of virtue has not been outlived even to-day. A sort of honest peasant-simplicity, which is possible, however, in all classes of society, and which one cannot meet with anything else than a respectful smile, still thinks to-day that everything is in good hands—that is to say, in "God's hands": and when it supports this proposition with that same modest assurance as that with which it would assert that two and two are four, we others naturally refrain from contradiction.

Why disturb this pure foolery? Why darken it with our cares concerning man, people, goals, the future? Even if we wished to do so, we shouldn't succeed. In all things these people see the reflection of their own venerable stupidity and goodness (in them the old God—deus myops— still lives); we others see something else in everything: our problematic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, and more suspicious wisdom.

321.

He who finds a particular virtue an easy matter, ultimately laughs at it. Seriousness cannot be maintained once virtue is attained. As soon as a man has reached virtue, he jumps out of it—whither? Into devilry.

Meanwhile, how intelligent all our evil tendencies and impulses have become! What an amount of inquisitiveness torments them! They are all fishhooks of knowledge!

322.

The idea is to associate vice with something so terrible that at last one is obliged to run away from it in order to be rid of its associations. This is the well-known case of Tannhäuser. Tannhäuser, brought to his wits' end by Wagnerian music, cannot endure life any longer even in the company of Mrs. Venus: suddenly virtue begins to have a charm for him; a Thuringian virgin goes up in price, and what is even worse still, he shows a liking for Wolfram von Eschenbach's melody....

323.

The Patrons of Virtue.—Lust of property, lust of power, laziness, simplicity, fear; all these things are interested in virtue; that is why it stands so securely.

324.

Virtue is no longer believed in; its powers of attraction are dead; what is needed is some one who will once more bring it into the market in the form of an outlandish kind of adventure and of dissipation. It exacts too much extravagance and narrow-mindedness from its believers to allow of conscience not being against it to-day. Certainly, for people, without either consciences or scruples, this may constitute its new charm: it is now what it has never been before—a vice.

325.

Virtue is still the most expensive vice: let it remain so!

326.

Virtues are as dangerous as vices, in so far as they are allowed to rule over one as authorities and laws coming from outside, and not as qualities one develops one's self. The latter is the only right way; they should be the most personal means of defence and most individual needs—the determining factors of precisely our existence and growth, which we recognise and acknowledge independently of the question whether others grow with us with the help of the same or of different principles. This view of the danger of the virtue which is understood as impersonal and objective also holds good of modesty: through modesty many of the choicest intellects perish. The morality of modesty is the worst possible softening influence for those souls for which it is pre-eminently necessary that they become hard betimes.

327.

The domain of morality must be reduced and limited step by step; the names of the instincts which are really active in this sphere must be drawn into the light of day and honoured, after have lain all this time in the concealment of hypocritical names of virtue. Out of respect for one's "honesty," which makes itself heard ever more and more imperiously, one ought to unlearn the shame which makes one deny and "explain away" all natural instincts. The extent to which one can dispense with virtue is the measure of one's strength; and a height may be imagined where the notion "virtue" is understood in such a way as to be reminiscent of virtù—the virtue of the Renaissance—free from moralic acid. But for the moment—how remote this ideal seems!

The reduction of the domain of morality is a sign of its progress. Wherever, hitherto, thought has not been guided by causality, thinking has taken a moral turn.

328.

After all, what have I achieved? Let us not close our eyes to this wonderful result: I have lent new charms to virtue—it now affects one in the same way as something forbidden. It has our most subtle honesty against it, it is salted in the "cum grano salis" of the scientific pang of conscience. It savours of antiquity and of old fashion, and thus it is at last beginning to draw refined people and to make them inquisitive—in short, it affects us like a vice. Only after we have once recognised that everything consists of lies and appearance, shall we have again earned the right to uphold this most beautiful of all fictions—virtue. There will then remain no further reason to deprive ourselves of it: only when we have shown virtue to be a form of immorality do we again justify it,—it then becomes classified, and likened, in its fundamental features, to the profound and general immorality of all existence, of which it is then shown to be a part. It appears as a form of luxury of the first order, the most arrogant, the dearest, and rarest form of vice. We have robbed it of its grimaces and divested it of its drapery; we have delivered it from the importunate familiarity of the crowd; we have deprived it of its ridiculous rigidity, its empty expression, its stiff false hair, and its hieratic muscles.

329.

And is it supposed that I have thereby done any harm to virtue?... Just as little as anarchists do to princes. Only since they have been shot at, have they once more sat securely on their thrones.... For thus it has always been and will ever be: one cannot do a thing a better service than to persecute it and to run it to earth.... This—I have done.
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Re: The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Va

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5. The Moral Ideal.

A. A Criticism of Ideals.


330.

It were the thing to begin this criticism in suchwise as to do away with the word "Ideal": a criticism of desiderata.

331.

Only the fewest amongst us are aware of what is involved, from the standpoint of desirability, in every "thus should it be, but it is not," or even "thus it ought to have been": such expressions of opinion involve a condemnation of the whole course of events. For there is nothing quite isolated in the world: the smallest thing bears the largest on its back; on thy small injustice the whole nature of the future depends; the whole is condemned by every criticism which is directed at the smallest part of it. Now granting that the moral norm—even as Kant understood it—is never completely fulfilled, and remains like a sort of Beyond hanging over reality without ever falling down to it; then morality would contain in itself a judgment concerning the whole, which would still, however, allow of the question: whence does it get the right thereto? How does the part come to acquire this judicial position relative to the whole? And if, as some have declared, this moral condemnation of, and dissatisfaction with, reality, is an ineradicable instinct, is it not possible that this instinct may perhaps belong to the ineradicable stupidities and immodesties of our species?—But in saying this, we are doing precisely what we deprecate; the point of view of desirability and of unauthorised fault-finding is part and parcel of the whole character of worldly phenomena just as every injustice and imperfection is—it is our very notion of "perfection" which is never gratified. Every instinct which desires to be indulged gives expression to its dissatisfaction with the present state of things: how? Is the whole perhaps made up of a host of dissatisfied parts, which all have desiderata in their heads? Is the "course of things" perhaps "the road hence? the road leading away from reality "—that is to say, eternal dissatisfaction in itself? Is the conception of desiderata perhaps the essential motive-power of all things? Is it—deus?

***

It seems to me of the utmost importance that we should rid ourselves of the notion of the whole, of an entity, and of any kind of power or form of the unconditioned. For we shall never be able to resist the temptation of regarding it as the supreme being, and of christening it "God." The "All" must be subdivided; we must unlearn our respect for it, and reappropriate that which we have lent the unknown and an imaginary entity, for the purposes of our neighbour and ourselves. Whereas, for instance, Kant said: "Two things remain for ever worthy of honour" (at the close of his Practical Reason)—to-day we should prefer to say: "Digestion is more worthy of honour." The concept, "the All," will always give rise to the old problems, "How is evil possible?" etc. Therefore, there is no "All", there is no great sensorium or inventarium or power-magazine.

332.

A man as he ought to be: this sounds to me in just as bad taste as: "A tree as it ought to be."

333.

Ethics: or the "philosophy of desirability."—"Things ought to be otherwise," "things ought to become different": dissatisfaction would thus seem the heart of ethics.

One could find a way out of it, first, by selecting only those states in which one is free from emotion; secondly, by grasping the insolence and stupidity of the attitude of mind: for to desire that something should be otherwise than it is, means to desire that everything should be different—it involves a damaging criticism of the whole. But life itself consists in such desiring!

To ascertain what exists, how it exists seems an ever so much higher and more serious matter than every "thus should it be," because the latter, as a piece of human criticism and arrogance, appears to be condemned as ludicrous from the start. It expresses a need which would fain have the organisation of the world correspond with our human well-being, and which directs the will as much as possible towards the accomplishment of that relationship.

On the other hand, this desire, "thus it ought to be," has only called forth that other desire, "what exists?" The desire of knowing what exists, is already a consequence of the question, "how? is it possible? Why precisely so?" Our wonder at the disagreement between our desires and the course of the world has led to our learning to know the course of the world. Perhaps the matter stands differently: maybe the expression, "thus it ought to be," is merely the utterance of our desire to overcome the world——

334.

To-day when every attempt at determining how man should be—is received with some irony, when we adhere to the notion that in spite of all one only becomes what one is(in spite of all—that is to say, education, instruction, environment, accident, and disaster), in the matter of morality we have learnt, in a very peculiar way, how to reverse the relation of cause and effect. Nothing perhaps distinguishes us more than this from the ancient believers in morality. We no longer say, for instance, "Vice is the cause of a man's physical ruin," and we no longer say, "A man prospers with virtue because it brings a long life and happiness." Our minds to-day are much more inclined to the belief that vice and virtue are not causes but only effects. A man becomes a respectable member of society because he was a respectable man from the start—that is to say, because he was born in possession of good instincts and prosperous propensities.... Should a man enter the world poor, and the son of parents who are neither economical nor thrifty, he is insusceptible of being improved—that is to say, he is only fit for the prison or the madhouse.... To-day we are no longer able to separate moral from physical degeneration: the former is merely a complicated symptom of the latter; a man is necessarily bad just as he is necessarily ill.... Bad: this word here stands for a certain lack of capacity which is related physiologically with the degenerating type—for instance, a weak will, an uncertain and many-sided personality, the inability to resist reacting to a stimulus and to control one's self, and a certain constraint resulting from every suggestion proceeding from another's will. Vice is not a cause; it is an effect. ... Vice is a somewhat arbitrary-epitome of certain effects resulting from physiological degeneracy. A general proposition such as that which Christianity teaches, namely, "Man is evil," would be justified provided one were justified in regarding a given type of degenerate man as normal. But this may be an exaggeration. Of course, wherever Christianity prospers and prevails, the proposition holds good: for then the existence of an unhealthy soil—of a degenerate territory—is demonstrated.

335.

It is difficult to have sufficient respect for man, when one sees how he understands the art of fighting his way, of enduring, of turning circumstances to his own advantage, and of overthrowing opponents; but when he is seen in the light of his desires, he is the most absurd of all animals. It is just as if he required a playground for his cowardice, his laziness, his feebleness, his sweetness, his submissiveness, where he recovers from his strong virile virtues. Just look at man's "desiderata" and his "ideals." Man, when he desires, tries to recover from that which is eternally valuable in him, from his deeds; and then he rushes into nonentity, absurdity, valuelessness, childishness. The intellectual indigence and lack of inventive power of this resourceful and inventive animal is simply terrible. The "ideal" is at the same time the penalty man pays for the enormous expenditure which he has to defray in all real and pressing duties.—Should reality cease to prevail, there follow dreams, fatigue, weakness: an "ideal" might even be regarded as a form of dream, fatigue, or weakness. The strongest and the most impotent men become alike when this condition overtakes them: they deify the cessation of work, of war, of passions, of suspense, of contrasts, of "reality "—in short, of the struggle for knowledge and of the trouble of acquiring it.

"Innocence" to them is idealised stultification; "blessedness" is idealised idleness; "love," the ideal state of the gregarious animal that will no longer have an enemy. And thus everything that lowers and belittles man is elevated to an ideal.

336.

A desire magnifies the thing desired; and by not being realised it grows—the greatest ideas are those which have been created by the strongest and longest desiring. Things grow ever more valuable in our estimation, the more our desire for them increases: if "moral values" have become the highest values, it simply shows that the moral ideal is the one which has been realised least (and thus it represented the Beyond to all suffering, as a road to blessedness). Man, with ever-increasing ardour, has only been embracing clouds: and ultimately called his desperation and impotence "God."

337.

Think of the naïveté of all ultimate "desiderata"—when the "wherefore" of man remains unknown.

338.

What is the counterfeit coinage of morality? First of all we should know what "good and evil" mean. That is as good as wishing to know why man is here, and what his goal or his destiny is. And that means that one would fain know that man actually has a goal or a destiny.

339.

The very obscure and arbitrary notion that humanity has a general duty to perform, and that, as a whole, it is striving towards a goal, is still in its infancy. Perhaps we shall once more be rid of it before it becomes a "fixed idea." ... But humanity does not constitute a whole: it is an indissoluble multiplicity of ascending and descending organisms—it knows no such thing as a state of youth followed by maturity and then age. But its strata lie confused and superimposed—and in a few thousand years there may be even younger types of men than we can point out to-day. Decadence, on the other hand, belongs to all periods of human history: everywhere there is refuse and decaying matter, such things are in themselves vital processes; for withering and decaying elements must be eliminated.

Under the empire of Christian prejudice this question was never put at all: the purpose of life seemed to lie in the salvation of the individual soul; the question whether humanity might last for a long or a short time was not considered. The best Christians longed for the end to come as soon as possible;—concerning the needs of the individual, there seemed to be no doubt whatsoever. ... The duty of every individual for the present was identical with what it would be in any sort of future for the man of the future: the value, the purpose, the limit of values was for ever fixed, unconditioned, eternal, one with God.... What deviated from this eternal type was impious, diabolic, criminal.

The centre of gravity of all values for each soul lay in that soul itself: salvation or damnation! The salvation of the immortal soul! The most extreme form of personalisation.... For each soul there was only one kind of perfection; only one ideal, only one road to salvation.... The most extreme form of the principle of equal rights, associated with an optical magnification of individual importance to the point of megalomania ... Nothing but insanely important souls, revolving round their own axes with unspeakable terror....

***

Nobody believes in these assumed airs of importance any longer to-day: and we have sifted our wisdom through the sieve of contempt. Nevertheless the optical habit survives, which would fain measure the value of man by his proximity to a certain ideal maw. at bottom the personalisation view is upheld as firmly as that of the equality of rights as regards the ideal. In short: people seem to think that they know what the ultimate desideratum is in regard to the ideal man....

But this belief is merely the result of the exceedingly detrimental influence of the Christian ideal, as anybody can discover for himself every time he carefully examines the "ideal type." In the first place, it is believed that the approach to a given "type" is desirable; secondly, that this particular type is known; thirdly, that every deviation from this type is a retrograde movement, a stemming of the spirit of progress, a loss of power and might in man.... To dream of a state of affairs in which this perfect man will be in the majority: our friends the Socialists and even Messrs. the Utilitarians have not reached a higher level than this. In this way an aim seems to have crept into the evolution of man: at any rate the belief in a certain progress towards an ideal is the only shape in which an aim is conceived in the history of mankind to-day. In short: the coming of the "Kingdom of God" has been placed in the future, and has been given an earthly, a human meaning—but on the whole the faith in the old ideal is still maintained....

340.

The more concealed forms of the cult of Christian, moral ideals.—The insipid and cowardly notion "Nature" invented by Nature-enthusiasts (without any knowledge whatsoever of the terrible, the implacable, and the cynical element in even "the most beautiful" aspects), is only a sort of attempt at reading the moral and Christian notion of "humanity" into Nature;—Rousseau's concept of Nature, for instance, which took for granted that "Nature" meant freedom, goodness, innocence, equity, justice, and Idylls, was nothing more at bottom than the cult of Christian morality. We should collect passages from the poets in order to see what they admired, in lofty mountains, for instance. What Goethe had to do with them—why he admired Spinoza. Absolute ignorance concerning the reasons of this cult....

The insipid and cowardly concept "Man" à la Comte and Stuart Mill, is at times the subject of a cult.... This is only the Christian moral ideal again under another name.... Refer also to the freethinkers—Guyau for example.

The insipid and cowardly concept "Art" which is held to mean sympathy with all suffering and with everything botched and bungled (the same thing happens to history, cf. Thierry): again it is the cult of the Christian moral ideal.

And now, as to the whole socialistic ideal: it is nothing but a blockheaded misunderstanding of the Christian moral ideal.

341.

The origin of the ideal. The examination of the soil out of which it grows.

A. Starting out from those "æsthetic" mental states during which the world seems rounder, fuller, and more perfect: we have the pagan ideal with its dominating spirit of self-affirmation (people give of their abundance). The highest type: the classical ideal—regarded as an expression of the successful nature of all the more important instincts. In this classical ideal we find the grand style as the highest style. An expression of the "will to power" itself. The instinct which is most feared dares to acknowledge itself.

B. Starting out from the mental states in which the world seemed emptier, paler, and thinner, when "spiritualisation" and the absence of sensuality assume the rank of perfection, and when all that is brutal, animal, direct, and proximate is avoided (people calculate and select): the "sage," "the angel"; priestliness = virginity = ignorance, are the physiological ideals of such idealists: the anæmic ideal. Under certain circumstances this anæmic ideal may be the ideal of such natures as represent paganism (thus Goethe sees his "saint" in Spinoza).

C. Starting out from those mental states in which the world seemed more absurd, more evil, poorer, and more deceptive, an ideal cannot even be imagined or desired in it (people deny and annihilate); the projection of the ideal into the sphere of the anti-natural, anti-actual, anti-logical; the state of him who judges thus (the "impoverishment" of the world as a result of suffering: people take, they no longer bestow): the anti-natural ideal.

(The Christian ideal is a transitional form between the second and the third, now inclining more towards the former type, and anon inclining towards the latter.)

The three ideals: A. Either a strengthening of Life (paganism,) or B. an impoverishment of Life (anæmia), or C. a denial of Life (anti-naturalism). The state of beatitude in A. is the feeling of extreme abundance; in B. it is reached by the most fastidious selectiveness; in C. it is the contempt and the destruction of Life.

342.

A. The consistent type understands that even evil must not be hated, must not be resisted, and that it is not allowable to make war against one's self; that it does not suffice merely to accept the pain which such behaviour brings in its train; that one lives entirely in positive feelings; that one takes the side of one's opponents in word and deed; that by means of a superfœtation of peaceful, kindly, conciliatory, helpful, and loving states, one impoverishes the soil of the other states, ... that one is in need of unremitting practice. What is achieved thereby?—The Buddhistic type, or the perfect cow.

This point of view is possible only where no moral fanaticism prevails—that is to say, when evil is not hated on its own account, but because it opens the road to conditions which are painful (unrest, work, care, complications, dependence).

This is the Buddhistic point of view: there is no hatred of sin, the concept "sin," in fact, is entirely lacking.

B. The inconsistent type. War is waged against evil—there is a belief that war waged for Goodness' sake does not involve the same moral results or affect character in the same way as war generally does (and owing to which tendencies it is detested as evil). As a matter of fact, a war of this sort carried on against evil is much more profoundly pernicious than any sort of personal hostility; and generally, it is "the person" which reassumes, at least in fancy, the position of opponent (the devil, evil spirits, etc.). The attitude of hostile observation and spying in regard to everything which may be bad in us, or hail from a bad source, culminates in a most tormented and most anxious state of mind: thus "miracles," rewards, ecstasy, and transcendental solutions of the earth-riddle now became desirable. ... The Christian type: or the perfect bigot.

C. The stoical type. Firmness, self-control, imperturbability, peace in the form of the rigidity of a will long active—profound quiet, the defensive state, the fortress, the mistrust of war—firmness of principles; the unity of knowledge and will; great self-respect. The type of the anchorite. The perfect blockhead.

343.

An ideal which is striving to prevail or to assert itself endeavours to further its purpose (a) by laying claim to a spurious origin; (b) by assuming a relationship between itself and the powerful ideals already existing; (c) by means of the thrill produced by mystery, as though an unquestionable power were manifesting itself; (d) by the slander of its opponents' ideals; (e) by a lying teaching of the advantages which follow in its wake, for instance: happiness, spiritual peace, general peace, or even the assistance of a mighty God, etc.—Contributions to the psychology of the idealists: Carlyle, Schiller, Michelet.

Supposing all the means of defence and protection, by means of which an ideal survives, are discovered, is it thereby refuted? It has merely availed itself of the means of which everything lives and grows—they are all "immoral."

My view: all the forces and instincts which are the source of life are lying beneath the ban of morality: morality is the life-denying instinct. Morality must be annihilated if life is to be emancipated.

344.

To avoid knowing himself is the prudence of the idealist. The idealist: a creature who has reasons for remaining in the dark concerning himself, and who is also clever enough to remain in the dark concerning these reasons also.

345.

The tendency of moral evolution.—Every one's desire is that there should be no other teaching and valuation of things than those by means of which he himself succeeds. Thus the fundamental tendency of the weak and mediocre of all times, has been to enfeeble the strong and to reduce them to the level of the weak: their chief weapon in this process was the moral principle. The attitude of the strong towards the weak is branded as evil; the highest states of the strong become bad bywords.

The struggle of the many against the strong, of the ordinary against the extraordinary, of the weak against the strong: meets with one of its finest interruptions in the fact that the rare, the refined, the more exacting, present themselves as the weak, and repudiate the coarser weapons of power.

346.

(1) The so-called pure instinct for knowledge of all philosophers is dictated to them by their moral "truths," and is only seemingly independent.

(2) The "Moral Truths," "thus shall things be done," are mere states of consciousness of an instinct which has grown tired, "thus and thus are things done by us." The "ideal" is supposed to re-establish and strengthen an instinct; it flatters man to feel he can obey when he is only an automaton.

347.

Morality as a means of seduction.—"Nature is good; for a wise and good God is its cause. Who, therefore, is responsible for the 'corruption of man'? Tyrants and seducers and the ruling classes are responsible—they must be wiped out": this is Rousseau's logic (compare with Pascals logic, which concludes by an appeal to original sin).

Refer also to Luther's logic, which is similar. In both cases a pretext is sought for the introduction of an insatiable lust of revenge as a moral and religious duty. The hatred directed against the ruling classes tries to sanctify itself ... (the "sinfulness of Israel" is the basis of the priest's powerful position).

Compare this with Pauls logic, which is similar. It is always under the cover of God's business that these reactions appear, under the cover of what is right, or of humanity, etc. In the case of Christ the rejoicings of the people appear as the cause of His crucifixion. It was an anti-priestly movement from the beginning. Even in the anti-Semitic movement we find the same trick: the opponent is overcome with moral condemnations, and those who attack him pose as retributive Justice.

348.

The incidents of the fight: the fighter tries to transform his opponent into the exact opposite of himself—imaginatively, of course. He tries to believe in himself to such an extent that he may have the courage necessary for the "good Cause" (as if he were the good Cause); as if reason, taste, and virtue were being assailed by his opponents.... The belief of which he is most in need, as the strongest means of defence and attack, is the belief in himself, which, however, knows how to misinterpret itself as a belief in 1God. He never pictures the advantages and the uses of victory, but only understands victory for the sake of victory—for God's sake. Every small community (or individual), finding itself involved in a struggle, strives to convince itself of this: "Good taste, good judgment, and virtue are ours." War urges people to this exaggerated self-esteem....

349.

Whatever kind of eccentric ideal one may have (whether as a "Christian," a "free-spirit," an "immoralist," or a German Imperialist), one should try to avoid insisting upon its being the ideal; for, by so doing, it is deprived of all its privileged nature. One should have an ideal as a distinction; one should not propagate it, and thus level one's self down to the rest of mankind.

How is it, that in spite of this obvious fact, the majority of idealists indulge in propaganda for their ideal, just as if they had no right to it unless the majority acquiesce therein?—For instance, all those plucky and insignificant girls behave in this way, who claim the right to study Latin and mathematics. What is it urges them to do this? I fear it is the instinct of the herd, and the terror of the herd: they fight for the "emancipation of woman," because they are best able to achieve their own private little distinction by fighting for it under the cover of a charitable movement, under the banner bearing the device "For others."

The cleverness of idealists consists in their persistently posing as the missionaries and "representatives" of an ideal: they thus "beautify" themselves in the eyes of those who still believe in disinterestedness and heroism. Whereas real heroism consists, not in fighting under the banner of self-sacrifice, submission, and disinterestedness, but in not fighting at all.... "I am thus; I will be thus—and you can go to the devil!"

350.

Every ideal assumes love, hate, reverence, and contempt. Either positive feeling is the primum mobile, or negative feeling is. Hatred and contempt are the primum mobile in all the ideals which proceed from resentment.
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