The Portable Nietzsche (67 page)

Philosophically, his uncritical use of terms like life, nature, and decadence greatly weakens his case. Historically, he is often ignorant: the two Hebrew words he sticks in for effect do not make sense, and his conception of Jesus—to mention a more important matter—is quite unconvincing, though no more so than most such portraits. That the book is meant to be shockingly blasphemous scarcely needs saying.

Like Nietzsche's first essay,
The Birth of Tragedy
,
The Antichrist
is unscholarly and so full of faults that only a pedant could have any wish to catalogue them. But unlike most scholars, Nietzsche sees vital things and has the power to communicate them vividly. And as he himself noted at twenty-three: The errors of great men are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet. Maybe they will be the readers who understand my
Zarathustra
: how
could
I mistake myself for one of those for whom there are ears even now? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.

The conditions under which I am understood, and then of
necessity
—I know them only too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains —seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking
beneath
oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing. The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; the courage for the
forbidden;
the predestination to the labyrinth. An experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have so far remained mute.
And
the will to the economy of the great style: keeping our strength, our
enthusiasm
in harness. Reverence for oneself; love of oneself; unconditional freedom before oneself.

Well then! Such men alone are my readers, my right readers, my predestined readers: what matter the rest? The rest—that is merely mankind. One must be above mankind in strength, in
loftiness
of soul—in contempt.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

1

Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. “Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans”—Pindar already knew this about us. Beyond the north, ice, and death—
our
life,
our
happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who
else
has found it? Modern man perhaps? “I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,” sighs modern man.

This
modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. This tolerance and
largeur
of the heart, which “forgives” all because it “understands” all, is
sirocco
for us. Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds!

We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists.
Our fatum
—the abundance, the tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, “resignation.” In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—
for we saw no way
. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

 

2

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.

What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.

What is happiness? The feeling that power is
growing,
that resistance is overcome.

Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue,
virtù.
virtue that is moraline
⁴³
-free).

The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of
our
love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance.

What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity.

 

3

The problem I thus pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the sequence of living beings (man is an
end
), but what type of man shall be
bred
, shall be
willed
, for being higher in value, worthier of life, more certain of a future.

Even in the past this higher type has appeared often —but as a fortunate accident, as an exception, never as something
willed
. In fact, this has been the type most dreaded—almost
the
dreadful—and from dread the opposite type was willed, bred, and
attained
: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick human animal—the Christian.

 

4

Mankind does
not
represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher in the sense accepted today. “Progress” is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea. The European of today is vastly inferior in value to the European of the Renaissance: further development is altogether
not
according to any necessity in the direction of elevation, enhancement, or strength.

In another sense, success in individual cases is constantly encountered in the most widely different places and cultures: here we really do find a
higher type
, which is, in relation to mankind as a whole, a kind of overman. Such fortunate accidents of great success have always been possible and
will
perhaps always be possible. And even whole families, tribes, or peoples may occasionally represent such a
bull's-eye.

 

5

Christianity should not be beautified and embellished: it has waged deadly war against this higher type of man; it has placed all the basic instincts of this type under the ban; and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the “reprobate.” Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever
contradicts
the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself; it has corrupted the reason even of those strongest in spirit by teaching men to consider the supreme values of the spirit as something sinful, as something that leads into error—as temptations. The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity.

 

6

It is a painful, horrible spectacle that has dawned on me: I have drawn back the curtain from the
corruption
of man. In my mouth, this word is at least free from one suspicion: that it might involve a moral accusation of man. It is meant—let me emphasize this once more—
moraline-free.
So much so that I experience this corruption most strongly precisely where men have so far aspired most deliberately to “virtue” and “godliness.” I understand corruption, as you will guess, in the sense of decadence: it is my contention that all the values in which mankind now sums up its supreme desiderata are
decadence-values.

I call an animal, a species, or an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is disadvantageous for it. A history of “lofty sentiments,” of the “ideals of mankind”—and it is possible that I shall have to write it—would almost explain too
why
man is so corrupt. Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for
power
: where the will to power is lacking there is decline. It is my contention that all the supreme values of mankind
lack
this will—that the values which are symptomatic of decline,
nihilistic
values, are lording it under the holiest names.

 

7

Christianity is called the religion of
pity
. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious. Under certain circumstances, it may engender a total loss of life and vitality out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (as in the case of the death of the Nazarene). That is the first consideration, but there is a more important one.

Suppose we measure pity by the value of the reactions it usually produces; then its perilous nature appears in an even brighter light. Quite in general, pity crosses the law of development, which is the law of
selection
. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect.

Some have dared to call pity a virtue (in every
noble
ethic it is considered a weakness); and as if this were not enough, it has been made
the
virtue, the basis and source of all virtues. To be sure—and one should always keep this in mind—this was done by a philosophy that was nihilistic and had inscribed the
negation of life
upon its shield. Schopenhauer was consistent enough: pity negates life and renders it
more deserving of negation.

Pity is the
practice
of nihilism. To repeat: this depressive and contagious instinct crosses those instincts which aim at the preservation of life and at the enhancement of its value. It multiplies misery and conserves all that is miserable, and is thus a prime instrument of the advancement of decadence: pity persuades men to
nothingness!
Of course, one does not say “nothingness” but “beyond” or “God,” or “
true
life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.

This innocent rhetoric from the realm of the religiousmoral idiosyncrasy appears much less innocent as soon as we realize which tendency it is that here shrouds itself in sublime words:
hostility against life.
Schopenhauer was hostile to life; therefore pity became a virtue for him.

Aristotle, as is well known, considered pity a pathological and dangerous condition, which one would be well advised to attack now and then with a purge: he understood tragedy as a purge. From the standpoint of the instinct of life, a remedy certainly seems necessary for such a pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as is represented by the case of Schopenhauer (and unfortunately by our entire literary and artistic decadence from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner) —to puncture it and make it
burst
.

In our whole unhealthy modernity there is nothing more unhealthy than Christian pity. To be physicians
here
, to be inexorable
here
, to wield the scalpel
here
—that is
our
part, that is
our
love of man, that is how
we
are philosophers, we
Hyperboreans.

 

8

It is necessary to say whom we consider our antithesis: it is the theologians and whatever has theologians' blood in its veins—and that includes our whole philosophy.

Whoever has seen this catastrophe at close range or, better yet, been subjected to it and almost perished of it, will no longer consider it a joking matter (the freethinking of our honorable natural scientists and physiologists is, to my mind, a joke: they lack passion in these matters, they do not suffer them as their passion and martyrdom). This poisoning is much more extensive than is generally supposed: I have found the theologians' instinctive arrogance wherever anyone today considers himself an “idealist”—wherever a right is assumed, on the basis of some higher origin, to look at reality from a superior and foreign vantage point.

The idealist, exactly like the priest, holds all the great concepts in his hand (and not only in his hand!); he plays them out with a benevolent contempt for the “understanding,” the “senses,” “honors,” “good living,” and “science”; he considers all that
beneath
him, as so many harmful and seductive forces over which “the spirit” hovers in a state of pure for-itselfness—as if humility, chastity, poverty, or, in one word,
holiness
, had not harmed life immeasurably more than any horrors or vices. The pure spirit is the pure lie.

As long as the priest is considered a
higher
type of man—this
professional
negator, slanderer, and poisoner of life—there is no answer to the question: what is truth? For truth has been stood on its head when the conscious advocate of nothingness and negation is accepted as the representative of “truth.”

 

9

Against this theologians' instinct I wage war: I have found its traces everywhere. Whoever has theologians' blood in his veins, sees all things in a distorted and dishonest perspective to begin with. The pathos which develops out of this condition calls itself
faith
: closing one's eyes to oneself once and for all, lest one suffer the sight of incurable falsehood. This faulty perspective on all things is elevated into a morality, a virtue, a holiness; the good conscience is tied to faulty vision; and no
other
perspective is conceded any further value once one's own has been made sacrosanct with the names of “God,” “redemption,” and “eternity.” I have dug up the theologians' instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, really
subterranean,
form of falsehood found on earth.