The Portable Nietzsche (68 page)

Whatever a theologian feels to be true
must
be false: this is almost a criterion of truth. His most basic instinct of self-preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in. Wherever the theologians' instinct extends,
value judgments
, have been stood on their heads and the concepts of “true” and “false” are of necessity reversed: whatever is most harmful to life is called “true”; whatever elevates it, enhances, affirms, justifies it, and makes it triumphant, is called “false.” When theologians reach out for
power
through the “conscience” of princes (or of peoples), we need never doubt what really happens at bottom: the will to the end, the
nihilistic
will, wants power.

 

10

Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologians' blood. The Protestant parson is the grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself, its
peccatum originale.
⁴⁴
Definition of Protestantism: the partial paralysis of Christianity—
and
of reason. One need merely say “Tübingen Seminary” to understand what German philosophy is at bottom: an
insidious
theology. The Swabians are the best liars in Germany: they lie innocently.

Why was Kant's appearance greeted with jubilation among German scholars—of whom three-fourths are the sons of parsons and teachers—and whence came the German conviction, echoed even today, that a change for the
better
began with Kant? The theologians' instinct in the German scholars divined
what
had once again been made possible. A path had been found on which one could sneak back to the old ideal. The conception of a “
true world,”
the conception of morality as the
essence
of the world (these two most malignant errors of all time!), were once again, thanks to a wily and shrewd skepticism, if not provable, at least no longer
refutable.
Reason, the
right
of reason, does not extend that far. Reality had been reduced to mere “appearance,” and a mendaciously fabricated world, the world of being, was honored as reality. Kant's success is merely a theologians' success: like Luther, like Leibniz, Kant was one more clog for German honesty, which was none too steady in the first place.

 

11

One more word against Kant as a
moralist
. A virtue must be
our own
invention,
our
most necessary self-expression and self-defense: any other kind of virtue is merely a danger. Whatever is not a condition of our life
harms
it: a virtue that is prompted solely by a feeling of respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is harmful. “Virtue,” “duty,” the “good in itself,” the good which is impersonal and universally valid—chimeras and expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life, of the Chinese phase of Königsberg. The fundamental laws of self-preservation and growth demand the opposite—that everyone invent
his
own virtue,
his own
categorical imperative. A people perishes when it confuses
its
duty with duty in general. Nothing ruins us more profoundly, more intimately, than every “impersonal” duty, every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction. How could one fail to feel how Kant's categorical imperative endangered life itself! The theologians' instinct alone protected it!

An action demanded by the instinct of life is proved to be
right
by the pleasure that accompanies it; yet this nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an
objection
. What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without
pleasure
—as an automaton of “duty”? This is the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy. Kant became an idiot. And this man was a contemporary of
Goethel
This catastrophic spider was considered the
German
philosopher—he still is!

I beware of saying what I think of the Germans. Did not Kant find in the French Revolution the transition from the inorganic form of the state to the
organic
? Did he not ask himself whether there was any event which could be explained only in terms of a moral disposition of mankind, an event which would
demonstrate
once and for all the “tendency of mankind toward the good”? Kant's answer: “This is the Revolution.” The instinct which errs without fail,
anti-nature
as instinct, German decadence as philosophy—
that is Kant!

 

12

I except a few skeptics—the decent type in the history of philosophy: the rest are simply unaware of the most basic requirements of intellectual honesty. All these great enthusiasts and prodigies behave like our little females: they consider “beautiful sentiments” adequate arguments, regard a heaving bosom as the bellows of the deity, and conviction a
criterion
of truth. In the end, Kant tried, with “German” innocence, to give this corruption, this lack of any intellectual conscience, scientific status with his notion of “practical reason”: he invented a special kind of reason for cases in which one need not bother about reason—that is, when morality, when the sublime command “thou shalt,” raises its voice.

When we consider that among almost all peoples the philosopher is merely the next development of the priestly type, then this legacy of the priest, this self-deceiving counterfeit, ceases to be surprising. Having sacred tasks, such as improving, saving, or redeeming mankind—carrying the deity in his bosom and being the mouthpiece of imperatives from the beyond—with such a mission a man naturally stands outside all merely intellectual valuations:
he himself
is sanctified by such a task, he himself is a type of a higher order! What is
science
to the priest? He is above that! And until now the priest has ruled! He determined the concepts of “true” and “untrue”!

 

13

Let us not underestimate this:
we ourselves
, we free spirits, are nothing less than a “revaluation of all values,” an
incarnate
declaration of war and triumph over all the ancient conceptions of “true” and “untrue.” The most valuable insights are discovered last; but the most valuable insights are the
methods
.
All
the methods,
all
the presuppositions of our current scientific outlook, were opposed for thousands of years with the most profound contempt. For their sake, men were excluded from the company of “decent” people and considered “enemies of God,” despisers of the truth, and “possessed.” Anyone with a scientific bent was a Chandala.

We have had the whole pathos of mankind against us—their conception of what truth
ought
to be, of what the service of the truth
ought
to be: every “thou shalt” has hitherto been aimed against us. Our objectives, our practice, our quiet, cautious, mistrustful manner—all these were considered utterly unworthy and contemptible.

In the end one might well ask whether it was not really an
aesthetic
taste that kept mankind in blindness for so long: a picturesque effect was demanded of the truth, and the lover of knowledge was expected to make a strong impression on the senses. Our
modesty
offended men's taste longest of all. How well they divined that, these turkeycocks of God!

 

14

We have learned differently. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from “the spirit” or “the deity”; we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his spirituality is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too—as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, he is of course the most
interesting.

As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as
machina:
the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically. Formerly man was given a “free will” as his dowry from a higher order: today we have taken his will away altogether, in the sense that we no longer admit the will as a faculty. The old word “will” now serves only to denote a resultant, a kind of individual reaction, which follows necessarily upon a number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli: the will no longer “acts” or “moves.”

Formerly, the proof of man's higher origin, of his divinity, was found in his consciousness, in his “spirit” To become
perfect,
he was advised to draw in his senses, turtle fashion, to cease all intercourse with earthly things, to shed his mortal shroud: then his essence would remain, the “pure spirit.” Here too we have reconsidered: the development of consciousness, the “spirit,” is for us nothing less than the symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism; it means trying, groping, blundering—an exertion which uses up an unnecessary amount of nervous energy. We deny that anything can be done perfectly as long as it is still done consciously. The “pure spirit” is a pure stupidity: if we subtract the nervous system and the senses—the “mortal shroud”—
then we miscalculate
—that is all!

 

15

In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality. Nothing but imaginary
causes
(“God,” “soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will”—for that matter, “unfree will”), nothing but imaginary
effects
(“sin,” “redemption,” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginary
beings
(“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary
natural
science (anthropocentric; no trace of any concept of natural causes); an imaginary
psychology
(nothing but self-misunderstandings, interpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings—for example, of the states of the
nervus sympathicus
—with the aid of the sign language of the religio-moral idiosyncrasy: “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
world of pure fiction is
vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter
mirrors
reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. Once the concept of “nature” had been invented as the opposite of “God,” “natural” had to become a synonym of “reprehensible”: this whole world of fiction is rooted in
hatred
of the natural (of reality!); it is the expression of a profound vexation at the sight of reality.

But this explains everything
. Who alone has good reason to lie his way out of reality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from reality is to be a piece of reality that has come to grief. The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion; but such a preponderance provides the very formula for decadence.

 

16

A critique of the
Christian conception of God forces
us to the same conclusion. A people that still believes in itself retains its own god. In him it reveres the conditions which let it prevail, its virtues: it projects its pleasure in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. Whoever is rich wants to give of his riches; a proud people needs a god: it wants to
sacrifice
. Under such conditions, religion is a form of thankfulness. Being thankful for himself, man needs a god. Such a god must be able to help and to harm, to be friend and enemy—he is admired whether good or destructive. The
anti-natural
castration of a god, to make him a god of the good alone, would here be contrary to everything desirable. The evil god is needed no less than the good god: after all, we do not owe our own existence to tolerance and humanitarianism.

What would be the point of a god who knew nothing of wrath, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, and violence? who had perhaps never experienced the delightful
ardeurs
of victory and annihilation? No one would understand such a god: why have him then?

To be sure, when a people is perishing, when it feels how its faith in the future and its hope of freedom are waning irrevocably, when submission begins to appear to it as the prime necessity and it becomes aware of the virtues of the subjugated as the conditions of self-preservation, then its god
has
to change too. Now he becomes a sneak, timid and modest; he counsels “peace of soul,” hate-no-more, forbearance, even “love” of friend and enemy. He moralizes constantly, he crawls into the cave of every private virtue, he becomes god for everyman, he becomes a private person,
⁴⁵
a cosmopolitan.

Formerly, he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a people; now he is merely the good god.

Indeed, there is no other alternative for gods:
either
they are the will to power, and they remain a people's gods, or the incapacity for power, and then they necessarily become
good
.