EXISTENTIALISM
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)
The Revaluation of Values and the ‘Death of God’: Nietzsche’s Critique of
Religion
THE
GAY SCIENCE
(1882)
151. Of the origin of religion
The
metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer
supposed, but merely a late offshoot. Under the rule of religious ideas, one
has become accustomed to the notion of "another world (behind, below, above)
"—and when religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable
emptiness and deprivation. From this feeling grows once again "another
world," but now merely a metaphysical one that is no longer religious. But
what first led to a positing of "another world" in primeval times was not
some impulse or need but an error in the interpretation of certain
natural events, a failure of the intellect.
THE
ANTI-CHRIST
(1888)
2.
What is
good? —Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power
itself, in man. What is evil? —Whatever springs from weakness. What is
happiness? —The feeling that power increases—that resistance is
overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war;
not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense,
virtù, virtue free of moral acid). The weak and the botched shall
perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to
it. What is more harmful than any vice? —Practical sympathy for the botched
and the weak—Christianity...
3.
The problem
that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living
creatures—man is an end—but what type of man must be bred, must be
willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the
most secure guarantee of the future. This more valuable type has appeared
often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception,
never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the
most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors—and
out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and
attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man—the
Christian . . .
5.
We should not
deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against
this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of
this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil
One himself, out of these instincts—the strong man as the typical reprobate,
the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken the part of all the weak,
the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all
the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the
faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by
representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as
full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal,
who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas
it was actually destroyed by Christianity! —
9.
Upon this
theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it everywhere. Whoever
has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonorable in all things.
The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called faith:
in other words, closing one's eyes upon oneself once and for all, to avoid
suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People erect a concept of
morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all things; they
ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no other
sort of vision has value any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct
with the names of "God," "salvation" and "eternity." I unearth this
theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread and the
most subterranean form of falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever
a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a
criterion of truth. His profound instinct of self-preservation stands
against truth ever coming into honor in any way, or even getting stated.
Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of
values, and the concepts "true" and "false" are forced to change places:
whatever is most damaging to life is there called "true," and whatever
exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant
is there called "false."... When theologians, working through the
"consciences" of princes—or of peoples—stretch out their hands for
power, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will
to make an end, the nihilistic will exerts that power...
15.
Under
Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with
actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul," "ego,"
"spirit," "free will"—or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary effects
("sin" "salvation" "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins").
Intercourse between imaginary beings ("God," "spirits," "souls");
an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of
the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology
(misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable
general feelings—for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus
with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical
balderdash—"repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil,"
"the presence of God"); an imaginary teleology (the "kingdom of
God," "the last judgment," "eternal life"). —This purely fictitious
world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world
of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies
it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of "nature" had been opposed
to the concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on the meaning
of "abominable"—the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred
of the natural—the real! —and is no more than evidence of a profound
uneasiness in the presence of reality . . .. This explains everything.
Who alone has any reason for living his way out of reality? The man who
suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched
reality . . .. The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of
this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also
supplies the formula for decadence...
16.
A criticism of
the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same
conclusion. —A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own
god. In him it does honor to the conditions which enable it to survive, to
its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a
being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches;
a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices . . .
Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for
his own existence: to that end he needs a god. —Such a god must be able to
work both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either friend or
foe—he is wondered at for the good he does as well as for the evil he does.
But the castration, against all nature, of such a god, making him a god of
goodness alone, would be contrary to human inclination. Mankind has just as
much need for an evil god as for a good god; it doesn't have to thank mere
tolerance and humanitarianism for its own existence . . .. What would be the
value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning,
violence? who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs
of victory and of destruction? No one would understand such a god: why
should anyone want him? —True enough, when a nation is on the downward path,
when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping
from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the
virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must
overhaul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he
counsels "peace of soul," hate-no-more, leniency, "love" of friend and foe.
He moralizes endlessly; he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the
god of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan . . .
Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything
aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now he is simply
the good god...The truth is that there is no other alternative for
gods: either they are the will to power—in which case they are
national gods—or incapacity for power—in which case they have to be good.
17.
Wherever the
will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an
accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The divinity of
this decadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is
converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak.
Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call
themselves "the good." . . . No hint is needed to indicate the moments in
history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first
became possible. The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce
their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also prompts them to eliminate all
good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their
masters by making a devil of the latter's god. —The good
god, and the devil like him—both are abortions of decadence. —How
can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to join in
their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god of
Israel," the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all
goodness, is to be described as progress? —But even Renan
does this. As if Renan had a right to be naïve! The contrary actually stares
one in the face. When everything necessary to ascending life; when
all that is strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from
the concept of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff
for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he be comes the poor
man's god, the sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and
the attribute of "saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one essential
attribute of divinity—just what is the significance of such a
metamorphosis? what does such a reduction of the godhead imply? —To
be sure, the "kingdom of God" has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only
his own people, his "chosen" people. But since then he has gone wandering,
like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has given up settling
down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home everywhere, and
is the great cosmopolitan—until now he has the "great majority" on his side,
and half the earth. But this god of the "great majority," this democrat
among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains
a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and
crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world! . . His earthly
kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain
kingdom, a ghetto kingdom . . . And he himself is so pale, so weak, so
decadent . . . Even the palest of the pale are able to master
him—messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the intellect. They spun
their webs around him for so long that finally he was hypnotized, and began
to spin himself, and became another metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed
once more his old business of spinning the world out of his inmost being
sub specie Spinozae; thereafter he became ever thinner and paler—became
the "ideal," became "pure spirit," became "the absolute," became "the
thing-in-itself." . . . The collapse of a god: he became a
"thing-in-itself."
18.
The Christian
concept of a god—the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of
cobwebs, the god as a spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts that has
ever been set up in the world: it probably touches low-water mark in the
ebbing evolution of the god-type. God degenerated into the contradiction
of life. Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him
war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the
formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for every lie about
the "beyond"! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is
made holy!
24.
Here I barely
touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first
thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity is to be
understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung—it is not a
reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is
simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the words of
the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews." —The second thing to
remember is this: that the psychological type of the Galilean is still to be
recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is at once
maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the
manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Saviour of
mankind. —The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the
world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be,
they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price:
this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all
naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the
outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under
which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been
permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood
in direct opposition to natural conditions—one by one they
distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until
each became a contradiction of its natural significance. We meet
with the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but
only as a copy: the Christian church, put beside the "people of God," shows
a complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the
Jews are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their
influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that
today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is
no more than the final consequence of Judaism. In my "Genealogy of
Morals" I give the first psychological explanation of the concepts
underlying those two antithetical things, a noble morality and a
ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere product of the
denial of the former. The Judaeo-Christian moral system belongs to the
second division, and in every detail. In order to be able to say Nay to
everything representing an ascending evolution of life—that is, to
well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval—the instincts of
ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent an other
world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and
abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted
with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves
facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a
profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts which
make for decadence—not as if mastered by them, but as if
detecting in them a power by which "the world" could be defied. The
Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have simply been
forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill
approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have
managed to put themselves at the head of all decadent movements
(for example, the Christianity of Paul), and so make of them something
stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who
reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity—that is to say, to the
priestly class—decadence is no more than a means to an
end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in
confusing the values of "good" and "bad," "true" and "false" in a manner
that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.
27.
Christianity
sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural, every natural
value, every reality was opposed by the deepest instincts of the
ruling class—it grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and as
such it has never been surpassed. The "holy people," who had adopted
priestly values and priestly names for all things, and who, with a terrible
logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as "unholy,"
"worldly," "sinful"—this people put its instinct into a final formula that
was logical to the point of self-annihilation: as Christianity it
actually denied even the last form of reality, the "holy people," the
"chosen people," Jewish reality itself. The phenomenon is of the
first order of importance: the small insurrectionary movement which took the
name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivus—in
other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can no
longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a state of
existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even
more unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organization.
Christianity actually denies the church... I am unable to determine
what was the target of the insurrection said to have been led (whether
rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not the Jewish
church—"church" being here used in exactly the same sense that the word has
today. It was an insurrection against the "good and just," against the
"prophets of Israel," against the whole hierarchy of society—not
against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was
unbelief in "superior men," a Nay flung at everything that priests
and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy that was called into question,
if only for an instant, by this movement was the structure of piles which,
above everything, was necessary to the safety of the Jewish people in the
midst of the "waters"—it represented their last possibility of
survival; it was the final residuum of their independent political
existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon the most profound national
instinct, the most powerful national will to live, that has ever appeared on
earth. This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the
outcasts and "sinners," the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against
the established order of things—and in language which, if the Gospels are to
be credited, would get him sent to Siberia today—this man was certainly a
political criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so
absurdly unpolitical a community. This is what brought him to the
cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon
the cross. He died for his own sins—there is not the slightest
ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for
the sins of others. —
30.
The
instinctive hatred of reality:
the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation—so
great that merely to be "touched" becomes unendurable, for every sensation
is too profound. The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all
hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling:
the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation—so
great that it senses all resistance, all compulsion to resistance, as
unbearable anguish (that is to say, as harmful, as
prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation), and regards
blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to offer
resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or dangerous—love, as the
only, as the ultimate possibility of life. . . These are the two
physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of
salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime super-development of hedonism
upon a thoroughly insalubrious soil. What stands most closely related to
them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is
Epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was a
typical decadent: I was the first to recognize him. —The fear of pain,
even of infinitely slight pain—the end of this can be nothing save
a religion of love....
36.
—We free
spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding
what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for
integrity which makes war upon the "holy lie" even more than upon all other
lies . . . Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious
neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible
the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with
shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the
church out of denial of the Gospels. . . .
Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great drama
of existence would find no small indication thereof in the stupendous
question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind should be on its
knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the
law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the "church" the very
things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer of glad tidings" regards
as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to
surpass this as a grand example of world-historical irony—
38.
—I cannot, at
this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling
blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. Let me leave no
doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of
today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today—I
am suffocated by his foul breath! . . . Toward the past,
like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say,
generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole
millenniums of this mad house of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian
faith" or the "Christian church," as you will—I take care not to hold
mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out
irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times. Our age
knows better . . . What was formerly merely sickly now becomes
indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust
begins. — I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called
"truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a
man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that
a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but
actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through
"innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows, as every one knows, that there
is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour"—that "free will"
and the "moral order of the world" are lies—: serious reflection, the
profound self-conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he
does not know it . . . All the ideas of the church are now
recognized for what they are—as the worst counterfeits in existence,
invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen
as he actually is—as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous
spider of creation.—— We know, our conscience now knows—just what
the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has
been and what ends they have served, with their debasement of
humanity to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites
loathing—the concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the
immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many in
instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes
master and remains master. . . Every one knows this, but nevertheless
things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of
decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an
unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now
call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at
the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and
arrogance of his people—and yet acknowledging, without any shame,
that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what
does it call "the world"? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a
patriot; to defend one's self; to be careful of one's honor; to desire one's
own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every
instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now
anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to
call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!—
43.
When the
centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the
beyond"—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of
gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all
reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is
beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of
suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is
now the "meaning" of life. . . . Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride
in descent and forefathers? Why labor together, trust one another, or
concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to serve it? . . .
Merely so many "temptations," so many strayings from the "straight path."—"One
thing only is necessary". . . That every man, because he has an
"immortal soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe
of things the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim to
eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane
may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their
behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a
magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence.
And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery
of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the
botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and
off-scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the soul"—in plain
English: "the world revolves around me." . . . The poisonous doctrine,
"equal rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian principle:
out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged
a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and
man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step
upward, to every development of civilization—out of the ressentiment
of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against
everything noble, joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness
on earth . . . To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the
greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever
perpetrated.—And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that
Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any
more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of
honourable pride in himself and his equals—for the pathos of
distance. . . Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!—
The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the
equality of souls; and if belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes
and will continue to make revolution—it is Christianity, let us not
doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into
a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures
that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the
"lowly" lowers....
47.
—The thing
that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history,
or in nature, or behind nature—but that we regard what has been
honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious;
not as a mere error, but as a crime against life . . . We deny that
God is God . . . If any one were to show us this Christian God, we'd
be still less inclined to believe in him. —In a formula: deus, qualem
Paulus creavit, dei negatio. —Such a religion as Christianity, which
does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment
reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy
of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of science—and it
will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and
cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in
matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of
the mind. "Faith," as an imperative, vetoes science—in praxi,
lying at any price. . .. Paul well knew that lying—that "faith"—was
necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.— The God that
Paul invented for himself, a God who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of
this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and
medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute
determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own
will the name of God, thora—that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants
to dispose of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the good
philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school—on them he makes
his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a
physician without being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a
philologian a man sees behind the "holy books," and as a physician he
sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian.
The physician says "incurable"; the philologian says "fraud.". . .
52.
Christianity
also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being—sick
reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; it
takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon
"intellect," upon the superbia of the healthy intellect. Since
sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically
Christian state of "faith" must be a form of sickness too, and that
all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must
be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from
the start. . . . The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the
priest—revealed by a glance at him—is a phenomenon resulting from
decadence—one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children
how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere
sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are
symptoms of decadence. "Faith" means the will to avoid knowing what
is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud because he
is sick: his instinct demands that the truth shall never be allowed
its rights on any point. "Whatever makes for illness is good;
whatever issues from abundance, from super-abundance, from power, is
evil": so argues the believer. The impulse to lie—it is by this
that I recognize every foreordained theologian. —Another characteristic of
the theologian is his unfitness for philology. What I here mean by
philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit—the
capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and
without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to
understand them. Philology as ephexis in interpretation: whether one
be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events
or with weather statistics—not to mention the "salvation of the soul." . . .
The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to
explain, say, a "passage of Scripture," or an experience, or a victory by
the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of
David, is always so daring that it is enough to make a philologian
run up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from
Suabia use the "finger of God" to convert their miserably commonplace and
huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a "providence" and an
"experience of salvation"? The most modest exercise of the intellect, not to
say of decency, should certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of
the perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine
digital dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who
always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into
our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so
absurd a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a
domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man—at bottom, he is' a
mere name for the stupidest sort of chance . . .. "Divine Providence," which
every third man in "educated Germany" still believes in, is so strong an
argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And
in any case it is an argument against Germans!
61.
Here it
becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more
painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great
harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap—the Renaissance.
Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the
Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values—an
attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of
genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more
noble values . . .. This has been the one great war of the past; there
has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance—it is
my question too; there has never been a form of attack more
fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon
the center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat
of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to
insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs
and appetites of those sitting there . . . I see before me the
possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle—it seems
to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty,
and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one
might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I
see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully
full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal
laughter—Caesar Borgia as pope! . . . Am I understood? . . . Well
then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am
longing for today—by it Christianity would have been swept away! —
What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the
vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion
against the Renaissance in Rome . . .. Instead of grasping, with
profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of
Christianity at its capital—instead of this, his hatred was
stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself. —
Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment when
the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum
originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair!
Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there
was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things! . . . And Luther
restored the church: he attacked it . . . . The Renaissance—an event
without meaning, a great futility! —Ah, these Germans, what they have not
cost us! Futility—that has always been the work of the
Germans. — The Reformation; Liebnitz; Kant and so-called German philosophy;
the war of "liberation"; the empire-every time a futile substitute for
something that once existed, for something irrecoverable . . . These
Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in
concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. For
nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their
fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way
measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of—they
also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that
exists, and the most incurable and indestructible—Protestantism . . .. If
mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans will be
to blame....
62.
—With this I
come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn
Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all
the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the
greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate
corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left
nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into
worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness
of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings!
Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it
lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal
. . . . For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched
mankind with this misery! — The "equality of souls before God"—this fraud,
this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded—this
explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of
overthrowing the whole social order—this is Christian dynamite . . .
. The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of
humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie
at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts!
All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism" of Christianity! — Parasitism as
the only practice of the church; with its anaemic and "holy" ideals,
sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as
the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the
most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of—against health, beauty,
well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself. .
. . This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all
walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind
will be able to see . . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one
great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no
means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough—I
call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race. . . .
And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this
fatality befell—from the first day of Christianity! —Why not
rather from its last? — From today? —The transvaluation of all values! .
. .
Decree Against Christianity
Declared on the day of
salvation, on the first day of the Year One
(—on September 30, 1888 of the false time-chronology)
War to the death against depravity: depravity is
Christianity
First proposition. — Every type of anti-nature is
depraved. The most depraved type of man is the priest: He teaches
anti-nature. Against the priest one doesn't use arguments, one uses the
penitentiary.
Second proposition. — Every participation in divine service is an
assassination attempt on public morality. One should be more severe toward
Protestants than toward Catholics, more severe toward liberal Protestants
than toward the orthodox. The criminal character of a Christian increases
when he approaches knowledge [Wissenschaft].
The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher.
Third proposition. — The
accursed places, in which Christianity has hatched its basilisk eggs, should
be razed to the ground and be, as vile places of the earth, the
terror of all posterity. One should breed poisonous snakes there.
Fourth proposition.— The
sermon on chastity is a public instigation to anti-nature. Every display of
contempt for sexual love, and every defilement of it through the concept
"dirty" [unrein]
is original sin against the holy spirit of life.
Fifth proposition. — With a priest at one's table food is pushed
aside: [if not] one excommunicates oneself therewith from honest society.
The priest is our chandala—he should be ostracized, starved, and
driven into every kind of desert.
Sixth proposition. — One should call the "holy" story by the name
that it deserves, as the accursed story; one should use the words
"God," "Saviour," "redeemer," "saint" as invectives, as criminal badges.
Seventh proposition. — The rest follows therefrom
TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
Or How One Philosophizes With a Hammer
(1888)
Preface
Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a
gloomy affair, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat;
and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if
prankishness has no part in it. Excess of strength alone is the proof of
strength. A revaluation of all values, this question mark, so
black, so tremendous that it casts shadows upon the man who puts it
down—such a destiny of a task compels one to run into the sun every moment
to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. Every means is proper for
this; every "case"—a case of luck. Especially, war. War has always
been the great wisdom of all spirits who have become too inward, too
profound; even in a wound there is the power to heal. A maxim, the origin of
which I withhold from scholarly curiosity, has long been my motto:
Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. ["The spirits increase,
vigor grows through a wound."] Another mode of convalescence—under certain
circumstances even more to my liking—is sounding out idols. There
are more idols than realities in the world: that is my "evil eye"
for this world; that is also my "evil ear." For once to pose
questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that
famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails—what a delight for one
who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied
piper before whom just that which would remain silent must become
outspoken. This essay too—the title betrays it—is above all a
recreation, a spot of sunshine, a leap sideways into the idleness of a
psychologist. Perhaps a new war, too? And are new idols sounded out? This
little essay is a great declaration of war; and regarding the
sounding out of idols, this time they are not just idols of the age, but
eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning
fork: there are altogether no older, no more convinced, no more puffed-up
idols—and none more hollow. That does not prevent them from being those in
which people have the most faith; nor does one ever say "idol,"
especially not in the most distinguished instance.
Turin,
September 30, 1888, on the day
when the first book of the Revaluation
of All Values was completed.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Maxims
and Arrows
6.
In our own
wild nature we find the best recreation from our un-nature, from our
spirituality.
7.
What? Is man
merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?
8.
Out
of life's school of war: What does not destroy
me, makes me stronger.
"Reason" in
Philosophy
1.
You ask me
which of the philosophers' traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example,
their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming,
their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a
subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni—when they
turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of
years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive.
When these honorable idolators of concepts worship something, they kill it
and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death,
change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds
objections—even refutations. Whatever has being does not become;
whatever becomes does not have being. Now they all believe,
desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they
seek for reasons why it is kept from them. "There must be mere appearance,
there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that which
has being: where is the deceiver?"
"We have found him," they cry ecstatically; "it is the senses! These senses,
which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning the
true world. Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the
senses, from becoming, from history, from lies; history is nothing but faith
in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: let us say No to all who have faith in
the senses, to all the rest of mankind; they are all 'mob.' Let us be
philosophers! Let us be mummies" Let us represent monotono-theism by
adopting the expression of a gravedigger! And above all, away with the
body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, disfigured by all
the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent
enough to behave as if it were real!"
4.
The other
idiosyncrasy of the philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in
confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the
end—unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!—namely, the "highest
concepts," which means the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last
smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning.
This again is nothing but their way of showing reverence: the higher may
not grow out of the lower, may not have grown at all. Moral: whatever is of
the first rank must be causa sui. Origin out of something else is
considered an objection, a questioning of value. All the highest values are
of the first rank; all the highest concepts, that which has being, the
unconditional, the good, the true, the perfect—all these cannot have become
and must therefore be causes. All these, moreover, cannot be unlike
each other or in contradiction to each other. Thus they arrive at their
stupendous concept, "God." That which is last, thinnest, and emptiest is put
first, as the cause, as ens realissimum. Why did mankind
have to take seriously the brain afflictions of sick web-spinners? They have
paid dearly for it!
6.
It will be
appreciated if I condense so essential and so new an insight into four
theses. In that way I facilitate comprehension; in that way I provoke
contradiction.
First proposition.
The reasons for which "this" world has been characterized as "apparent" are
the very reasons that indicate its reality; any other kind of
reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
Second proposition. The
criteria which have been bestowed on the "true being" of things are the
criteria of not-being, of naught; the "true world" has been
constructed out of contradiction to the actual world: indeed an apparent
world, insofar as it is merely a moral-optical illusion.
Third proposition. To
invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no meaning at all,
unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has
gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves
against life with a phantasmagoria of "another," a "better" life.
Fourth proposition. Any
distinction between a "true" and an "apparent" world—whether in the
Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded
Christian)—is only a suggestion of décadence, a symptom of the decline
of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than
reality is no objection to this proposition. For "appearance" in this case
means reality once more, only by way of selection, reinforcement,
and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely
the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the
terrible—he is Dionysian.
How the "True World" Finally
Became a Fable
The History of an Error
1. The true world—attainable for the sage, the
pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.
(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A
circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
2. The true world—unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the
pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible—it
becomes female, it becomes Christian.)
3. The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very
thought of it—a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has
become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world—unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being
unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming,
or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The "true" world—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even
obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently,
a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness;
Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent
one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the
apparent one.
(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point
of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)
Morality as
Anti-Nature
5.
Once one has
comprehended the outrage of such a revolt against life as has become almost
sacrosanct in Christian morality, one has, fortunately, also comprehended
something else: the futility, apparentness, absurdity, and
mendaciousness of such a revolt. A condemnation of life by the living
remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life: the question
whether it is justified or unjustified is not even raised thereby. One would
require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well
as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to
touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to
comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem. When we
speak of values, we speak with the inspiration, with the way of looking at
things, which is part of life: life itself forces us to posit values; life
itself values through us when we posit values. From this it follows
that even that anti-natural morality which conceives of God as the
counter-concept and condemnation of life is only a value judgment of
life—but of what life? of what kind of life? I have
already given the answer: of declining, weakened, weary, condemned life.
Morality, as it has so far been understood—as it has in the end been
formulated once more by Schopenhauer, as "negation of the will to life"—is
the very instinct of decadence, which makes an imperative of
itself. It says: "Perish!" It is a condemnation pronounced by the
condemned.
The Four Great Errors
6.
The
whole realm of morality and religion belongs under this concept of imaginary
causes. The "explanation" of disagreeable
general feelings. They are produced by beings that are hostile to us (evil
spirits: the most famous case—the misunderstanding of the hysterical as
witches). They are produced by acts which cannot be approved (the feeling of
"sin," of "sinfulness," is slipped under a physiological discomfort; one
always finds reasons for being dissatisfied with oneself). They are produced
as punishments, as payment for something we should not have done, for what
we should not have been (impudently generalized by Schopenhauer
into a principle in which morality appears as what it really is—as the very
poisoner and slanderer of life: "Every great pain, whether physical or
spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did
not deserve it." World as Will and Representation II, 666). They
are produced as effects of ill-considered actions that turn out badly. (Here
the affects, the senses, are posited as causes, as "guilty"; and
physiological calamities are interpreted with the help of other
calamities as "deserved.") The "explanation" of agreeable general
feelings. They are produced by trust in God. They are produced by the
consciousness of good deeds (the so-called "good conscience"—a physiological
state which at times looks so much like good digestion that it is hard to
tell them apart). They are produced by the successful termination of some
enterprise (a naive fallacy: the successful termination of some enterprise
does not by any means give a hypochondriac or a Pascal agreeable general
feelings). They are produced by faith, charity, and hope—the Christian
virtues.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
(1886)
53.
Why atheism
today? —"The father" in God has been thoroughly refuted; ditto, "the judge,"
"the rewarder." Also his "free will"; he does not hear—and if he heard he
still would not know how to help. Worst of all: he seems incapable of clear
communication: is he unclear? This is what I found to be causes for the
decline of European theism, on the basis of a great many conversations,
asking and listening. It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed
in the process of growing powerfully—but the theistic satisfaction it
refuses with deep suspicion.
55.
There is a
great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are
the most important. Once one sacrificed human beings to one's god, perhaps
precisely those whom one loved most: the sacrifices of the first-born in all
prehistoric religions belong here, as well as the sacrifice of the Emperor
Tiberius in the Mithras grotto of the isle of Capri, that most gruesome of
all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one
sacrificed to one's god one's own strongest instincts, one's "nature":
this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of the ascetic, the
"anti-natural" enthusiast. Finally—what remained to be sacrificed? At long
last, did one not have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy,
healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and
justices? didn't one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against
oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To
sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty
was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already
know something of this. —
57.
With the
strength of his spiritual eye and insight grows distance and, as it were,
the space around man: his world becomes more profound; ever new stars, ever
new riddles and images become visible for him. Perhaps everything on which
the spirit's eye has exercised its acuteness and thoughtfulness was nothing
but an occasion for this exercise, a playful matter, something for children
and those who are childish. Perhaps the day will come when the most solemn
concepts which have caused the most fights and suffering, the concepts "God"
and "sin," will seem no more important to us than a child's toy and a
child's pain seem to an old man—and perhaps "the old man" will then be in
need of another toy and another pain—still child enough, an eternal child!
59.
He who has
seen deeply into the world knows what wisdom there is in the fact that men
are superficial It is their instinct for preservation which teaches them to
be fickle, light and false. Here and there, among philosophers as well as
artists, one finds a passionate and exaggerated worship of "pure forms": let
no one doubt that he who needs the cult of surfaces to that extent
has at some time or other made a calamitous attempt to get beneath
them. Perhaps there might even exist an order of rank in regard to these
burnt children, these born artists who can find pleasure in life only in the
intention of falsifying its image (as it were in a long-drawn-out
revenge on life—): one could determine the degree to which life has been
spoiled for them by the extent to which they want to see its image
falsified, attenuated and made otherworldly and divine—one could include the
homines religiosi among the artists as their highest rank. It
is the profound suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism which compels
whole millennia to cling with their teeth to—a religious interpretation of
existence: the fear born of that instinct which senses that one might get
hold of the truth too soon, before mankind was sufficiently strong,
sufficiently hard, sufficient of an artist ... Piety, the "life in God,"
would, viewed in this light, appear as the subtlest and ultimate product of
the fear of truth, as the artist's worship of an intoxication before
the most consistent of all falsifications, as the will to inversion of
truth, to untruth at any price. Perhaps there has up till now been no finer
way of making man himself more beautiful than piety: through piety man can
become to so great a degree of art, surface, play of colors, goodness, that
one no longer suffers at the sight of him.
62.
In the end, to
be sure, to present the debit side of the account to these religions and to
bring into the light of day their uncanny perilousness—it costs dear and
terribly when religions hold sway, not as means of education and
breeding in the hands of the philosopher, but in their own right and as
sovereign, when they themselves want to be final ends and not means
beside other means. Among men, as among every other species, there is a
surplus of failures, of the sick, the degenerate, the fragile, of those who
are bound to suffer; the successful cases are, among men too, always the
exception, and. considering that man is the animal whose nature has not
yet been fixed, the rare exception. But worse still: the higher the type
of man a man represents, the greater the improbability he will turn out
well: chance, the law of absurdity in the total economy of mankind,
shows itself in its most dreadful shape in its destructive effect on higher
men, whose conditions of life are subtle, manifold and difficult to compute.
Now what is the attitude of the above-named two chief religions towards this
surplus of unsuccessful cases? They seek to preserve, to retain in
life, whatever can in any way be preserved, indeed they side with it as a
matter of principle as religions for sufferers, they maintain that
all those who suffer from life as from an illness are in the right, and
would like every other feeling of life to be counted false and become
impossible. However highly one may rate this kindly preservative solicitude,
inasmuch as, together with all the other types of man, it has been and is
applied to the highest type, which has hitherto almost always been the type
that has suffered most: in the total accounting the hitherto sovereign
religions are among the main reasons the type "man" has been kept on a lower
level they have preserved too much of that which ought to perish. We
have inestimable benefits to thank them for; and who is sufficiently rich in
gratitude not to be impoverished in face of all that the "spiritual men" of
Christianity, for example, have hitherto done for Europe! And yet, when they
gave comfort to the suffering, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a
staff and stay to the irresolute, and lured those who were inwardly
shattered and had become savage away from society into monasteries and
houses of correction for the soul: what did they have to do in addition so
as thus, with a good conscience, as a matter of principle, to work at the
preservation of everything sick and suffering, which means in fact and truth
at the corruption of the European race? Stand all evaluations on
their head—that is what they had to do! And smash the strong,
contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down
everything autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts
proper to the highest and most successful of the type "man," into
uncertainty, remorse of conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the
whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the
earth and the earthly—that is the task the church set itself and had
to set itself, until in its evaluation "unworldliness," "unsensuality," and
"higher man" were finally fused together into one feeling. Supposing one
were able to view the strangely painful and at the same time coarse and
subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and unconcerned eye
of an Epicurean god, I believe there would be no end to one's laughter and
amazement: for does it not seem that one will has dominated Europe for
eighteen centuries, the will to make of man a sublime abortion? But
he who, with an opposite desire, no longer Epicurean but with some divine
hammer in his hand, approached this almost deliberate degeneration and
stunting of man such as constitutes the European Christian (Pascal for
instance), would he not have to cry out in rage, in pity, in horror: "O you
fools, you presumptuous, pitying fools, what have you done! Was this a work
for your hands! How you have bungled and botched my beautiful stone! What a
thing for you to take upon yourselves!"—What I am saying is:
Christianity has been the most fatal kind of self-presumption ever. Men not
high or hard enough for the artistic refashioning of mankind; men not
strong or farsighted enough for the sublime self-constraint needed to
allow the foreground law of thousandfold failure and perishing to
prevail; men not noble enough to see the abysmal disparity in order of rank
and abysm of rank between men and man—it is such men who, with their
"equal before God," have hitherto ruled over the destiny of Europe, until at
last a shrunken, almost ludicrous species, a herd animal, something full of
good will, sickly and mediocre has been bred, the European of today…
THE WILL TO POWER
(1883-1887)
Book II: Critique of Highest Values Hitherto
I.
Critique of Religion
1. Genesis of Religions
144.
(1885)
Moralities and
religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes
out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can
assert one's will over long periods of time—in the form of legislation,
religions, and customs.
151.
(1885-1886)
Religions are
destroyed by belief in morality. The Christian moral God is not tenable:
hence "atheism"—as if there could be no other kinds of god. Similarly,
culture is destroyed by belief in morality. For when one discovers the
necessary conditions out of which alone it can grow, one no longer wants it
(Buddhism).
2. History of Christianity
168.
(Nov. 1887-March 1888)
—The church is
precisely that against which Jesus preached—and against which he taught his
disciples to fight—
5. The Moral Ideal
A. Critique of Ideals
338.
(Jan.-Fall 1888)
What is the
counterfeiting aspect of morality? — It pretends to know
something, namely what "good and evil" is. That means wanting to know why
mankind is here, its goal, its destiny. That means wanting to know that
mankind has a goal, a destiny—
339.
(Nov. 1887-March 1888)
The very
obscure and arbitrary idea that mankind has a single task to perform, that
it is moving as a whole towards some goal, is still very young. Perhaps we
shall be rid of it again before it becomes a "fixed idea"— This mankind is
not a whole: it is an inextricable multiplicity of ascending and descending
life-processes—it does not have a youth followed by maturity and finally by
old age; the strata are twisted and entwined together—and in a few millennia
there may still be even younger types of man than we can show today.
Decadence, on the other hand, belongs to all epochs of mankind: refuse and
decaying matter are found everywhere; it is one of life's processes to
exclude the forms of decline and decay. When Christian prejudice was a
power, this question did not exist: meaning lay in the salvation of the
individual soul; whether mankind could endure for a long or a short time did
not come into consideration. The best Christians desired that it should end
as soon as possible—concerning that which was needful to the individual
there was no doubt— The task of every present individual was the same as for
a future individual in any kind of future: value, meaning, domain of values
were fixed, unconditional, eternal, one with God— That which deviated from
this eternal type was sinful, devilish, condemned— For each soul, the
gravitational center of valuation was placed within itself: salvation or
damnation! The salvation of the immortal soul! Extremest form of
personalization— For every soul there was only one perfecting; only one
ideal; only one way to redemption— Extremest form of equality of rights,
tied to an optical magnification of one's own importance to the point of
insanity— Nothing but insanely important souls, revolving about themselves
with a frightful fear— No man believes now in this absurd self-inflation:
and we have sifted our wisdom through a sieve of contempt. Nevertheless, the
optical habit of seeking the value of man in his approach to an ideal man
remains undisturbed: fundamentally, one upholds the perspective of
personalization as well as equality of rights before the ideal. In
summa: one believes one knows what the ultimate desideratum is
with regard to the ideal man— This belief, however, is only the consequence
of a dreadful deterioration through the Christian ideal: as one at once
discovers with every careful examination of the "ideal type." One believes
one knows, first that an approach to one type is desirable;
secondly, that one knows what this type is like; thirdly, that
every deviation from this type is a regression, an inhibition, a loss of
force and power in man— To dream of conditions in which this perfect man
will be in the vast majority: even our socialists, even the Utilitarians
have not gone farther than this. — In this way a goal seems to have entered
the development of mankind: at any rate, the belief in progress towards the
ideal is the only form in which a goal in history is thought of today.
In summa: one has transferred the arrival of the "kingdom of God" into
the future, on earth, in human form—but fundamentally one has held fast to
the belief in the old ideal—
ON THE
GENEALOGY OF MORALS
(1887)
First Essay: "Good and Evil,"
"Good and Bad"
7.
One will
have divined already how easily the priestly mode of valuation can branch
off from the knightly-aristocratic and then develop into its opposite; this
is particularly likely when the priestly caste and the warrior caste are in
jealous opposition to one another and are unwilling to come to terms. The
knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality, a
flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which
serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in
general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity. The
priestly-noble mode of valuation presupposes, as we have seen, other things:
it is disadvantageous for when it comes to war! As is well known, the
priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most
impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to
monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind
of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests;
likewise the most ingenious [Geistreich] haters: other kinds of
spirit [Geist]
hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly
vengefulness. Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without
the spirit that the impotent have introduced into it—let us take at once the
most notable example. All that has been done on earth against "the noble,"
"the powerful," "the masters," "the rulers," fades into nothing compared
with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly
people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately
satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies'
values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For
this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the
most deeply repressed [Zurückgetretensten] priestly vengefulness. It
was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the
aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy =
beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth
of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying "the wretched
alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the
suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God,
blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the
contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to
all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and
damned!" . . . One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation . . .
In connection with the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative
provided by the Jews through this most fundamental of all declarations of
war, I recall the proposition I arrived at on a previous occasion (Beyond
Good and Evil, section 195)—that with the Jews there began the slave
revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand
years behind it and which we no longer see because it—has been victorious.
8.
But you do not
comprehend this? You are incapable of seeing something that required two
thousand years to achieve victory?—There is nothing to wonder at in that:
all protracted things are hard to see, to see whole. That,
however, is what has happened: from the trunk of that tree of vengefulness
and hatred, Jewish hatred—the profoundest and sublimest kind of hatred,
capable of creating ideals and reversing values, the like of which has never
existed on earth before—there grew something equally incomparable, a new
love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love—and from what other
trunk could it have grown? One should not imagine it grew up as the denial
of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the
reverse is true! That love grew out of it as its crown, as its triumphant
crown spreading itself farther and farther into the purest brightness and
sunlight, driven as it were into the domain of light and the heights in
pursuit of the goals of that hatred—victory, spoil, and seduction—by the
same impulse that drove the roots of that hatred deeper and deeper and more
and more covetously into all that was profound and evil. This Jesus of
Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this "Redeemer" who brought
blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not
this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and
bypath to precisely those Jewish values and new ideals? Did Israel
not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through
the bypath of this "Redeemer," this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of
Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand
politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and
premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of
its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross,
so that "all the world," namely all the opponents of Israel, could
unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine
any more dangerous bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing,
intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the
"holy cross," that ghastly paradox of a "God on the cross," that mystery of
an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the
salvation of man? What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo
[under this sign] Israel, with its vengefulness and revaluation of all
values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over
all nobler ideals.
9.
"But why are
you talking about nobler ideals! Let us stick to the facts: the
people have won—or 'the slaves' or 'the mob' or 'the herd' or whatever you
like to call them—if this has happened through the Jews, very well! in that
case no people ever had a more world-historic mission. 'The masters' have
been disposed of; the morality of the common man has won. One may conceive
of this victory as at the same time a blood-poisoning (it has mixed the
races together)—I shan't contradict; but this intoxication has undoubtedly
been successful. The 'redemption' of the human race (from 'the
masters,' that is) is going forward; everything is visibly becoming
Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized (what do the words matter!). The progress
of this poison through the entire body of mankind seems irresistible, its
pace and tempo may from now on even grow slower, subtler, less audible, more
cautious—there is plenty of time. — To this end, does the church today still
have any necessary role to play? Does it still have the right to
exist? Or could one do without it? Quaeritur [One asks]. It seems to
hinder rather than hasten this progress. But perhaps that is its usefulness.
— Certainly it has, over the years, become something crude and boorish,
something repellent to a more delicate intellect, to a truly modern taste.
Ought it not to become at least a little more refined? — Today it alienates
rather than seduces. — Which of us would be a free spirit if the church did
not exist? It is the church, and not its poison, that repels us. — Apart
from the church, we, too, love the poison. —" This is the epilogue of a
"free spirit" to my speech; an honest animal, as he has abundantly revealed,
and a democrat, moreover; he had been listening to me till then and could
not endure to listen to my silence. For at this point I have much to be
silent about.
10.
The slave
revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative
and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are
denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an
imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant
affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is
"outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is
its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need
to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of
ressentiment; in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a
hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli
in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction. One should not
overlook the almost benevolent nuances that the Greek nobility, for example,
bestows on all the words it employs to distinguish the lower orders from
itself; how they are continuously mingled and sweetened with a kind of pity,
consideration, and forbearance, so that finally almost all the words
referring to the common man have remained as expressions signifying
"unhappy," "pitiable" (campore deilos, deilaios, poneros,
mochtheros, the last two of which properly designate the common man
as work-slave and beast of burden) [Greek: The first four mean wretched;
and also, deilos: cowardly, worthless, vile; deilaios:
paltry; poneros: oppressed by toils, good for nothing, worthless,
knavish, base, cowardly; mochtheros: suffering hardship, knavish]—and
how on the other hand "bad," "low," "unhappy" have never ceased to sound to
the Greek ear as one note with a tone-color in which "unhappy"
preponderates: this as an inheritance from the ancient nobler aristocratic
mode of evaluation, which does not belie itself even in its contempt
(—philologists should recall the sense in which oïzyros [woeful,
miserable, toilsome; wretch], anolbos [unblest, wretched, luckless,
poor], tlemon [wretched, miserable], dystychein [to be
unlucky, unfortunate], xymphora [misfortune] are employed).
The "well-born" felt themselves to be the "happy"; they did not have
to establish their happiness artificially by examining their enemies, or to
persuade themselves, deceive themselves, that they were happy (as all
men of ressentiment are in the habit of doing); and they likewise
knew, as rounded men replete with energy and therefore necessarily
active, that happiness should not be sundered from action—being active was
with them necessarily a part of happiness (whence eu prattein [To do
well in the sense of faring well.] takes its origin)—all very much the
opposite of "happiness" at the level of the impotent, the oppressed, and
those in whom poisonous and inimical feelings are festering, with whom it
appears as essentially narcotic, drug, rest, peace, "sabbath," slackening of
tension and relaxing of limbs, in short passively. While the noble
man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios [high-born,
noble, high-minded] "of noble descent" underlines the nuance "upright" and
probably also "naïve"), the man of ressentiment is neither upright
nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints;
his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything
covert entices him as his world, his security, his
refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to
wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble. A race of such
men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer
than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree:
namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance; while with
nobler men cleverness can easily acquire a subtle flavor of luxury and
subtlety—for here it is far less essential than the perfect functioning of
the regulating unconscious instincts or even that a certain
imprudence, perhaps a bold recklessness whether in the face of danger or of
the enemy, or that enthusiastic impulsiveness in anger, love, reverence,
gratitude, and revenge by which noble souls have at all times recognized one
another. Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man,
consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does
not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear at all on countless
occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and impotent. To be
incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds
seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom
there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to
forget (a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau [Honoré Gabriel
Riqueti, Comte]
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