_____________________________________________________
Friedrich Nietzsche
On the Genealogy of Morals
A Polemical Tract
_____________________________________________________
THIRD ESSAY
WHAT DO ASCETIC IDEALS MEAN?
Carefree, mocking, violent—
that what Wisdom wants us to be.
She is a woman. She always loves only a man of war.
Thus
Spoke Zarathustra1
1
What do ascetic
ideals mean?—Among artists they mean nothing or too many different things;
among philosophers and scholars they mean something like having a nose or an
instinct for the most auspicious conditions of a higher spirituality; among
women, at best, one additional seductive charm, a little morbidezza [small morbidity] on
beautiful flesh, the angelic quality of a nice-looking, plump animal; among
physiologically impaired and peevish people (that is, among the majority of
mortals) they are an attempt to imagine themselves as “too good” for this
world, a holy form of orgiastic excess, their chief tool in the fight with
their enduring pain and boredom; among the clergy they are the essential
priestly belief, their best instrument of power, and also the “highest of all”
permits for power; finally among the saints they are a pretext for hibernation,
their novissima gloriae cupido [most
recent desire for glory], their repose in nothingness (“God”), their form
of insanity. However, the fact that generally the ascetic
ideal has meant so much to human beings is an expression of the basic fact of
the human will, its horror vacui [horror
of a vacuum]. It requires a goal—and it prefers to will nothingness than not to
will.—Do you understand me? . . . Have you understood
me? . . . “Not in the slightest, my dear sir!” — so, let’s start from the beginning.
2
What do ascetic
ideals mean?—Or, to take a single example which I have been asked to give
advice about often enough, what does it mean, for instance, when an artist like
Richard Wagner in his later years pays homage to chastity? In a certain sense,
of course, he always did this, but in an ascetic sense he did it for the first
time at the very end. What does this change in “sense” mean, this radical change
in sense?—For that’s what it was: with it Wagner
leapt right over into his opposite. What does it mean when an artist leaps over
into his opposite? . . . If we are willing to pause for a while at this
question, we immediately encounter here the memory of perhaps the best,
strongest, most cheerful, and bravest period in Wagner’s life,
the time when he was inwardly and deeply preoccupied with the idea of Luther’s
marriage. Who knows the circumstances which really saw to it
that today, instead of this wedding music, we have Die Meistersinger?2 And how much of the
former work may perhaps still echo in the latter? But there is no doubt that
this “Luther’s Wedding” would also have involved the praise of chastity. Of
course, it would have contained a praise of sensuality, as well —and that, it
strikes me, would have been very much in order, very “Wagnerian,” too. For
between chastity and sensuality there is no necessary opposition. Every good
marriage, every genuine affair of the heart transcends this opposition. In my
view, Wagner would have done well
if he had enabled his Germans to take this pleasant fact to
heart once more, with the help of a lovely and brave comedy about Luther, for
among the Germans there are and always have been a lot of people who slander
sensuality, and Luther’s merit is probably nowhere greater than precisely here:
in having had the courage of his own sensuality
(—at that time people called it, delicately enough, “evangelical freedom”). But
even if it were the case that there really is that antithesis between chastity
and sensuousness, fortunately there is no need for it to be a tragic antithesis.
At least this should be the case for all successful and cheerful mortals, who are
far from considering their unstable equilibrium between “animal and angel” an
immediate argument against existence—the finest and brightest, like Goethe,
like Hafiz, even saw in this one more attraction of
life. It’s precisely such “contradictions” that make existence
enticing. . . . On the other hand, it’s easy enough to understand that once
pigs who have had bad luck are persuaded to worship chastity—and there are such
swine!—they see in chastity only their opposite, the opposite to unlucky pigs,
and will worship that—and with such zealous tragic grunting! We can imagine
it—that embarrassing and unnecessary antithesis, which Richard Wagner at the
end of his life unquestioningly still wanted to set
to music and produce on stage. But what for? That’s
a fair question. For why should he be concerned about pigs? Why should we?—
3
In this matter
there is, of course, another question we cannot circumvent: why was Wagner
really concerned about that manly (alas, so unmanly) “simpleton from the
country,” that poor devil and nature boy Parsifal, whom he
finally turned into a Catholic in such an embarrassing way.3 What? Was this Parsifal
meant to be taken at all seriously? For we could be tempted to
assume the reverse, even to desire it—that the Wagnerian Parsifal was intended
to be cheerful, a concluding piece and satyr drama, as it were, with which the
tragic writer Wagner wanted to take his farewell, in a respectful manner worthy
of him, from us, also from himself, and, above all, from tragedy,
that is, with an excess of the highest and most high-spirited parody of the
tragic itself, of the entire dreadful earthly seriousness and earthly wailing
of his earlier works, of the crudest form in the anti-nature
of the ascetic ideal, conquered at last. That would have been, as mentioned, particularly
worthy of a great tragedian, who, like every artist, first attains the final
peak of his greatness when he knows how to see himself and his art beneath him—when
he knows how to laugh at himself. Is Parsifal Wagner’s
secret superior laughter at himself, the triumph of his achieving the ultimate
and highest artistic freedom, the artist’s movement into another world [Künstler-Jenseitigkeit]? As I’ve said, we might wish
that. For what would Parsifal be if intended seriously?
Do we need to see in it (as it was put to me) “the epitome of an insane hatred
for knowledge, spirit, and sensuality”? A curse on the
senses and the spirit in one breath of hatred? An
apostasy and going back to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideals? And
finally even a denial of the self, a cancellation of the self on the part of an
artist who up to that point had directed all the power of his will to attain
the reverse, namely, the highest spiritualization and sensuousness in
his art? And not only in his art, but also in his life. We should remember how
Wagner in his day so enthusiastically followed in the footsteps of the philosopher
Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s phrase about “healthy sensuality”—in Wagner’s thirties
and forties, as with many Germans (—they called themselves the “young Germans”), that phrase rang out
like a word of redemption. Did Wagner finally learn something different?
It appears, at least, that he finally wanted to teach something different.
And not only on the stage with the Parsifal trombones:—in the
cloudy writings of his last years—as constricted as they are baffling—there are
a hundred places which betray a secret wish and will, a despondent, uncertain,
unacknowledged will essentially to preach nothing but going back, conversion,
denial, Christianity, medievalism, and to say to his followers “It’s nothing!
Seek salvation somewhere else!” In one place he even calls out to the “Blood of
the Redeemer” . . . .
4
In a case like
Wagner’s, which is in many ways an embarrassing one, although the example is
typical, my opinion is that it’s certainly best to separate an artist far
enough from his work, so that one does not take him with the same seriousness
as one does his work. In the final analysis, he is only the precondition for
his work, its maternal womb, the soil or, in some cases, the dung and manure,
on and out of which it grows—and thus, in most cases, something that we must
forget about, if we want to enjoy the work itself. Insight into the origin of
a work is a matter for physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit, never
the aesthetic men, the artists—never! In a
deep, fundamental, even terrifying way the poet and composer of Parsifal
could not escape living inside and descending into the conflicts of the
medieval soul, a hostile distance from all spiritual loftiness, rigour, and
discipline, a form of intellectual perversity (if you will
forgive the expression), any more than a pregnant woman can escape the repellent
and strange aspects of pregnancy, something which, as I have said, one must forget if
one wants to enjoy the child. We should be on our guard against that confusion
which arises from psychological contiguity (to use an English word), a
confusion in which even an artist can only too easily get caught up, as if he
himself were what he can present, imagine, and express. In fact,
the case is this: if that were what he was, he simply would
not present, imagine, or express it. A Homer would not have written a poem
about Achilles or a Goethe a poem about Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or
if Goethe had been a Faust. A complete and entire artist is forever separated
from the “real,” from what actually is. On the other hand, one can understand
how he can sometimes grow weary of this eternal “unreality” and falseness of
his innermost existence to the point of desperation—and that he then makes an
attempt for once to reach over into what is forbidden precisely to him, into
reality, in an attempt truly to be. What success does he have? We
can guess . . . That is the typical wishfulness of
the artist: the same wishfulness which fell
over Wagner once he’d grown old and for which he had to pay such a high, fatal
price (—because of it he lost a valuable number of his friends). Finally, however,
and quite apart from this mere wishfulness of
his, who could not desire—for Wagner’s own sake—that he had taken his leave of
us and his art in a different manner, not with a Parsifal, but more
victoriously, more self-confidently, more like Wagner—less deceptive, less
ambiguous about all his intentions, less like Schopenhauer, less nihilistic?
5
—So what do
ascetic ideals mean? In the case of an artist, we know the answer immediately:—absolutely
nothing! . . . Or they mean so many things, that they amount to nothing at
all! . . . So let’s eliminate the artists right away. They do not stand independent
of the world and against the world long enough for their
evaluations and the changes in those evaluations to merit our interest for
their own sake! They have in all ages been valets to a morality or
philosophy or religion, quite apart from the fact that, often enough, they
unfortunately have been the all-too-adaptable courtiers of groups of their
followers and their patrons and flatterers with a fine nose for old or simply
newly arriving powers. At the very least, they always need a means of
protection, a support, an already established authority. The artists never
stand for themselves—standing alone contravenes their deepest instincts. Hence,
for example, “once the time had come” Richard Wagner took the philosopher
Schopenhauer as his point man, as his protection. Who could have even imagined
that he would have had the courage for an ascetic ideal
without the support which Schopenhauer’s philosophy offered him, without the
authority of Schopenhauer, which was becoming predominant in
Europe in the 1870's? (And that’s not even considering whether in the new Germany
it would have been generally possible to be an artist without
the milk of a pious, imperially pious way of thinking).4—And with this we come to
the more serious question: What does it mean when real philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal, a truly independent
spirit like Schopenhauer, a man and a knight with an bronze gaze, who is courageous
to himself, who knows how to stand alone and does not first wait for a front
man and hints from higher up?—Here let us consider right away the remarkable
and for many sorts of people even fascinating position of Schopenhauer on art,
for that was apparently the reason Richard Wagner first moved
over to Schopenhauer (persuaded to do that, as we know, by a poet, by Herwegh). That shift was so great that it opened up a
complete theoretical contrast between his earlier and his later aesthetic
beliefs— between, for example, the earlier views expressed in “Opera and Drama”
and the later views in the writings which he published from 1870 on. In particular,
what is perhaps most surprising is that from this point on Wagner ruthlessly
altered his judgment of the value and place of music itself.
Why should it concern him that up to that point he had used music as a means, a
medium, a “woman,” something which simply required a purpose, a man, in order
to flourish—that is, drama! Suddenly he realized that with Schopenhauer’s
theory and innovation he could do more in
majorem musicae gloriam [for the greater glory of music]—that
is, through the sovereignty of music, as Schopenhauer understood
it: music set apart from all other arts, the inherently independent art, not,
like the other arts, offering copies of phenomena, but rather the voice of
the will itself speaking out directly from the “abyss” as its most
authentic, most primordial, least derivative revelation. With this
extraordinary increase in the value of music, as this seemed to grow out of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the musician himself also suddenly
grew in value to an unheard of extent: from now on he would be an oracle, a
priest, more than a priest, in fact, a kind of mouthpiece of the “essence” of
things, a telephone from the world beyond—in future he didn’t speak only of
music, this ventriloquist of God—he talked metaphysics. Is it any wonder that finally
one day he spoke about ascetic ideals? . . .
6
Schopenhauer
used Kant’s formulation of the aesthetic problem— although he certainly did not
examine it with Kantian eyes. Kant thought he had honoured art when among the
predicates of the beautiful he gave priority to and set in the foreground those
which constitute the honour of knowledge—impersonality and universal validity.
Here is not the place to explore whether or not this is for the most part a
false idea. The only thing I wish to stress is that Kant, like all
philosophers, instead of taking aim at the aesthetic problem from the experiences
of the artist (the creator), thought about art and the beautiful only from the
point of view of the “looker on” and in the
process, without anyone noticing it, brought the “spectator” himself into the
concept “beautiful.” If only these philosophers of beauty had also been at
least sufficiently knowledgeable about this “spectator”!— that is, as a great personal fact
and experience, as a wealth of very particular, strong experiences, desires,
surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear the opposite
has always been the case. And so from the very start we get from them
definitions like that famous one which Kant gives for the beautiful, in which
the lack of a finer self-experience sits in the shape of a thick worm of
fundamental error. “The beautiful,” Kant said, “is what pleases in a disinterested way.”
In a disinterested way! Let’s compare this definition with that other one
formulated by a true “spectator” and artist—Stendhal, who once called the
beautiful a promesse de bonheur [a promise of
happiness]. Here, at any rate, the very thing which Kant emphasises in the
aesthetic state is clearly rejected and deleted: désintéressement [disinterestedness]. Who is right,
Kant or Stendhal?5—Naturally, if our
aestheticians never get tired of weighing the issue in Kant’s favour, claiming
that under the magic spell of beauty people can look even at
unclothed female statues “without interest,” we are entitled to laugh a little
at their expense:—in relation to this delicate matter, the experiences of artists are
“more interesting,” and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily
an “unaesthetic man.”6 Let’s think all the
better of the innocence of our aestheticians, which is reflected in such
arguments. For example, let’s count it to Kant’s honour that he knew how to
lecture on the characteristic properties of the sense of touch with the naïveté of
a country parson.—This point brings us back to Schopenhauer, who stood
measurably closer to the arts than Kant but who nonetheless did not get away
from the spell of the Kantian definition. How did that happen? The circumstance
is sufficiently odd. He interpreted the word “disinterested” in the most personal
manner from a single experience which must have been something routine with
him. There are few things Schopenhauer talks about with as much confidence as
he does about the effect of aesthetic contemplation. In connection with that,
he states that it counteracts sexual “interest” in
particular—and thus acts like lupulin or camphor. He
never got tired of extolling this emancipation from the “will”
as the great advantage and use of the aesthetic state. Indeed, we could be
tempted to ask whether his basic conception of “Will and Idea,” the notion that
there could be a redemption from the “will” only through “representation,”
might have taken its origin from a universalizing of that sexual experience.
(With all questions concerning Schopenhauer’s philosophy, incidentally, we
should never fail to consider that it is the conception of a
twenty-six-year-old young man, so that it involves not merely the specific
details of Schopenhauer but also the particular details of that time of life).
If, for example, we listen to one of the most expressive passages from the
countless ones he wrote to honour the aesthetic state (World and Will and
Idea, I, 231), we hear its tone, the suffering, the happiness, the
gratitude uttered in words like these: “That is the painless condition which
Epicurus valued as the highest good and as the condition of the gods. For that
moment, we are relieved of the contemptible drive of the will. We celebrate a
holiday [den Sabbat] from the penal servitude to the will. The wheel of Ixion stands motionless.”7 . . . What vehemence
in the words! What a picture of torment and long weariness! What
an almost pathological temporal contrast between “that moment” and the usual
“wheel of Ixion,” the “penal servitude to the
will,” the “contemptible drive of the will”!—But assuming that Schopenhauer
were right a hundred times about himself, what would that provide by way of insight
into the essence of the beautiful? Schopenhauer wrote about one effect of the
beautiful—the way it calms the will—but is it a regularly occurring effect?
Stendhal, as mentioned, a no less sensual person, but with a natural
constitution much happier than Schopenhauer’s, emphasizes another effect of the
beautiful: “the beautiful promises happiness.” To him the fact
of the matter seemed to be precisely the arousal of the will (“of interest”)
by the beautiful. And could we not finally object about Schopenhauer himself
that he was very wrong to think of himself as a Kantian in this matter, that he
had completely failed to understand Kant’s definition of the beautiful in a
Kantian manner—that even he found the beautiful pleasing out of an “interest,”
even out of the strongest and most personal interest of all, that of a torture
victim who escapes from his torture? . . . And to come back to our first question,
“What does it mean when a philosopher renders homage to the
ascetic ideal?”—we get here at least our first hint: he wants to escape
a torture.
7
Let’s be
careful not to make gloomy faces right away at that word “torture.” In this
particular case there remain enough objections to take into account, enough to
subtract—there even remains something to laugh about. For let’s not underestimate
the fact that Schopenhauer, who in fact treated sexuality as a personal enemy
(including its instrument, woman, this “instrumentum diaboli” [tool of the devil]), needed enemies in order to maintain
his good spirits, that he loved grim, caustic, black-green words, that he got
angry for the sake of getting passionately angry, that he would have become
ill, would have become a pessimist (—and he wasn’t a pessimist,
no matter how much he wanted to be one) without his enemies, without Hegel,
woman, sensuousness, and the whole will for existence, for continuing on. Had
that not been the case, Schopenhauer would not have kept going—on that we can
wager. He would have run off. But his enemies held him securely; his enemies
seduced him back to existence again and again. Just like the ancient cynics,
his anger was his refreshment, his relaxation, his payment, his remedy for disgust,
his happiness. So much with respect to the most personal features in the case of
Schopenhauer. On the other hand, with him there is still something
typical—and here we only come up against our problem once more. As long as
there have been philosophers on earth and wherever there have been philosophers
(from India to England, to name two opposite poles of talent in philosophy)
there unquestionably have existed a genuine philosophical irritability with and
rancour against sensuousness—Schopenhauer is only the most eloquent eruption of
these and, if one has an ear for it, also the most captivating and delightful.
In addition, there exist a real philosophical bias and affection favouring the
whole ascetic ideal. No one should fool himself about or against that. As
mentioned, both belong to the philosophical type: if both are missing in a
philosopher then he is always only a “so-called philosopher”—of that we may be
certain. What does that mean? For we must first interpret these
facts of the case: in itself stands there eternally stupid,
like every “thing in itself.” Every animal, including also la bête philosophe [the philosophical animal] instinctively
strives for the optimal beneficial conditions in which it can let out all its
power and attain the strongest feeling of its strength. Every animal in an
equally instinctual way and with a refined sense of smell that “is loftier than
all reason” abhors any kind of trouble maker and barrier which lies or which
could lie in its way to these optimal conditions (—I’m not speaking
about its path to “happiness,” but about its way to power, to action, to its
most powerful deeds, and, in most cases, really about its way to unhappiness).
Thus, the philosopher abhors marriage,
as well as what might persuade him into it—marriage is a barrier and a disaster
along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been
married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer—none
of these got married. What’s more, we cannot even imagine them
married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that’s my
principle. And Socrates, that exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears,
ironically got married specifically to demonstrate this very principle. Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha
spoke when someone told him of the birth of a son, “Rahula has
been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me.” (Rahula here
means “a little demon”). To every “free spirit” there must come a reflective
hour, provided that previously he has had one without thought, of the sort that
once came to this same Buddha—“Life in a house,” he thought to himself, “is
narrow and confined, a polluted place. Freedom consists of abandoning the
house”; “because he thought this way, he left the house.” The ascetic ideal
indicates so many bridges to independence that a philosopher
cannot, without an inner rejoicing and applause, listen to the history of all
those decisive people who one day said “No” to all lack of freedom and went off
to some desert or other, even assuming that such people were
merely strong donkeys and entirely opposite to a powerful spirit. So what,
then, does the ascetic ideal mean as far as a philosopher is concerned? My
answer is—you will have guessed it long ago—the philosopher smiles when he sees
in it an optimal set of conditions for the loftiest and boldest spirituality—in
so doing, he does not deny “existence”; rather that’s how he affirms his existence
and only his existence and does this perhaps to such a degree
that he is not far from the wicked desire pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fait philosophus, fiam! [let the world perish, let philosophy exist, let the
philosopher exist, let me exist!] . . .8
8
You see that
these philosophers are not unprejudiced witnesses to and judges of the value of
ascetic ideals! They think about themselves — what concern to
them is “the saint”! In this matter they think about what is most immediately
indispensable to them: freedom from compulsion, disturbance, fuss,
from business, duties, worries: a bright light in the head, dance, the leap and
flight of ideas; good air—thin, clear, free, dry—like the air at high altitudes,
with which everything in animal being grows more spiritual and acquires wings;
calm in all basement areas; all dogs nicely tied up in chains; no hostile
barking and shaggy rancour; no gnawing worm of wounded ambition; modest and
humble inner organs busy as windmills but at a distance; the heart in an alien
place, beyond, in the future, posthumous—all in all, so far as the ascetic
ideal is concerned, they think of the cheerful asceticism of some deified
animal which has become independent, roaming above life rather than being at
rest. We know what the three great catch phrases of the ascetic ideal are:
poverty, humility, chastity. Now look closely at the lives of all great,
prolific, inventive spirits—over and over again you’ll rediscover all three
there to a certain degree. Not at all— this is
self-evident—as if it were something to do with their “virtues” —what does this
kind of man have to do with virtues?—but as the truest and most natural
conditions of their best existence, their most beautiful fecundity.
At the same time, it is indeed entirely possible that their dominating
spirituality at first had to set aside an unbridled and sensitive pride or the
reins of a wanton sensuality or that they perhaps had difficulty enough maintaining
their will for the “desert” against an inclination for luxury, for something
very exquisite, as well as against a lavish liberality of heart and hand. But
their spirituality did it, simply because it was the dominating instinct,
which achieves its own demands in relation to all the other instincts—it still
continues to do so. If it did not, then it would simply not dominate. Hence,
this has nothing to do with “virtue.” Besides, the desert I
just mentioned, into which the strong spirits with an independent nature withdraw
and isolate themselves—O how different it seems from the desert educated people
dream about!—for in some circumstances these educated people are themselves
this desert. And certainly no actor of the spirit could simply endure it—for
them it is not nearly romantic and Syrian enough, not nearly enough of a
theatrical desert!It’s true
there’s no lack of camels there, but that’s the only similarity between them.
Perhaps a voluntary obscurity, a detour away from one’s self, a timidity about
noise, admiration, newspapers, influence; a small official position, a daily
routine, something which hides more than it brings to light, contact now and
then with harmless, cheerful wildlife and birds whose sight is relaxing, a
mountain for company, not a dead one but one with eyes (that
means with lakes); in some circumstances even a room in a full, nondescript
inn, where one is sure to be confused for someone else and can talk to anyone
with impunity—that’s what a “desert” is here. O, it’s lonely enough, believe
me! When Heraclitus withdrew into the courtyard and colonnades of the immense
temple of Artemis, that was a worthier “desert,” I admit. Why do we lack such
temples? (—Perhaps we do not lack
them. I’ve just remembered my most beautiful room for study, the Piazza San
Marco, assuming it’s in the spring, and in the morning, too,
between ten and twelve o’clock).9 But what Heraclitus
was getting away from is still the same thing we go out of our
way to escape nowadays: the noise and the democratic chatter of the Ephesians,
their politics, their news about the “empire” (you understand I mean the
Persians), their market junk of “today”— for we philosophers need peace and
quiet from one thing above all— from everything to do with “today.” We honour
what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, in general everything at the sight
of which the soul does not have to defend itself or tie itself up—something
with which a person can speak without having to speak aloud. People
should just listen to the sound which a spirit has when it is talking. Every
spirit has its own sound, loves its own sound. The man over there, for example,
must be a real agitator, I mean a hollow head, a hollow pot [Hohlkopf, Hohltopf]); no
matter what goes into him, everything comes back out of him dull and thick,
weighed down with the echo of a huge emptiness. That man over there rarely
speaks in anything other than a hoarse voice. Has he perhaps imagined himself
hoarse? That might be possible—ask the physiologists—but whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not as a
thinker (it reveals that fundamentally he does not think of things or think
factually, but only in relation to things, that he really is thinking of himself and
his listeners). A third man over there speaks with an insistent familiarity, he
steps in too close to our bodies, he breathes over us—instinctively we shut our
mouths, even though he is speaking to us through a book. The sound of his style
tells us the reason for that—he has no time, he has little faith in himself,
he’ll have his say today or never again. But a spirit which is sure of itself,
speaks quietly. He’s looking for seclusion. He lets people wait for him. We
recognize a philosopher by the following: he walks away from three glittering
and garish things—fame, princes, and women. That doesn’t mean that they might
not come to him. He shrinks from light which is too bright. Hence, he shies
away from his time and its “day.” In that he’s like a shadow: the lower the sun
sinks, the bigger he becomes. So far as his “humility” is concerned, he endures
a certain dependence and obscurity, as he endures the darkness. More than that,
he fears being disturbed by lightning and recoils from the unprotected and
totally isolated and abandoned tree on which all bad weather can discharge its mood, all moods discharge their bad weather. His
“maternal” instinct, the secret love for what is growing in him, directs him to
places where his need to think of himself is removed, in the
same sense that the maternal instinct in women has up to now
generally kept her in a dependent situation. Ultimately they demand little
enough, these philosophers. Their motto is “Whoever owns things is owned”—not, as I must say again and again,
from virtue, from an admirable desire for modest living and simplicity, but
because their highest master demands that of them, demands
astutely and unrelentingly. He cares for only one thing and for that gathers up
and holds everything—time, power, love, interest. This sort of man doesn’t like
to be disturbed by hostile things and by friendships; he easily forgets or
scoffs. To him martyrdom seems something in bad taste—“to suffer for
the truth”—he leaves that to the ambitious and the stage heroes of the spirit and
anyone else who has time enough for it (—they themselves, the philosophers,
have something to do for the truth). They use big words
sparingly. It’s said that they resist using even the word “truth”: it sounds
boastful. . . . Finally, as far as “chastity” concerns philosophers, this sort
of spirit apparently keeps its fertility in something other than in children;
perhaps they also keep the continuity of their names elsewhere, their small
immortality (among philosophers in ancient India people spoke with even more presumption,
“What’s the point of offspring to the man whose soul is the world?”). There’s
no sense of chastity there out of some ascetic scruple and hatred of the
senses, just as it has little to do with chastity when an athlete or jockey
abstains from women. It’s more a matter of what their dominating instinct
wants, at least during its great pregnant periods. Every artist knows how
damaging the effects of sexual intercourse are to states of great spiritual tension
and preparation. The most powerful and most instinctual artists among them
don’t acquire this knowledge primarily by experience, by bad experience—no,
it’s simply that “maternal” instinct of theirs which here makes the decision
ruthlessly to benefit the developing work among all the other stores and
supplies of energy, of animal vitality. The greater
power then uses up the lesser. Incidentally, apply this
interpretation now to the above-mentioned case of Schopenhauer: the sight of
the beautiful evidently worked in him as the stimulus for the main
power in his nature (the power of reflection and the deep look), so
that this then exploded and suddenly became master of his consciousness. In the
process, we should in no way rule out the possibility that that characteristic
sweetness and abundance typical of the aesthetic condition could originate
precisely from the ingredient “sensuality” (just as from the same source is
derived that “idealism” characteristic of sexually mature young girls)—so that
thus, with the onset of the aesthetic condition, sensuality is not shoved out,
as Schopenhauer believed, but is transformed and does not enter the
consciousness any more as sexual stimulation. (I will come back to this point
of view at another time, in connection with the even more delicate problems of
the physiology of aesthetics, so untouched up to this point, so
unanalyzed).
9
A certain asceticism, as we have seen, a hard and
cheerful renunciation with the best intentions, belongs to those conditions
favourable to the highest spirituality and is also among its most natural
consequences. So it’s no wonder from the outset that philosophers in particular
never treat the ascetic ideal without some bias. A serious historical review
demonstrates that the tie between the ascetic ideal and philosophy is even much
closer and stronger. We could say it was in the leading reins of
this ideal that philosophy in general learned to take its first steps and partial
steps on earth—alas, still so awkwardly, alas, still with such a morose expression,
alas, so ready to fall over and lie on its belly, this small, tentative,
clumsy, loving infant with crooked legs! With philosophy things initially
played themselves out as with all good things: for a long time it had no
courage for itself—it always looked around to see if anyone would come to its
assistance, and even more it was afraid of all those who gazed at it. Just make
a list of the individual drives and virtues of the philosopher—his impulse to
doubt, his impulse to deny, his impulse to wait (the “ephectic”
impulse), his impulse to analyze, his impulse to research, to seek out, to take
chances, his impulse to compare, to weigh evenly, his desire for neutrality and
objectivity, his will to every “sine ira et
studio” [without anger and partiality]—have we not already
understood that for the longest time all of them went against the first demands
of morality and conscience (to say nothing at all about reason in
general, which even Luther liked to call Madam Clever, the Clever Whore) and
that if a philosopher were to have come to an awareness of
himself, he would really have had to feel that he was almost the living
manifestation of “nitimur invetitum” [we search for what’s forbidden]—and
thus taken care not to “feel himself,” not to become conscious
of himself? As I’ve said, the case is no different with all the
good things of which we are nowadays so proud. Even measured by the standards
of the ancient Greeks, our entire modern being, insofar as it is not weakness
but power and consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and godlessness;
for the very opposite of those things we honour today have for the longest
period had conscience on their side and God to guard over them. Our entire
attitude to nature today, our violation of nature, with the help of machines and
the unimaginable inventiveness of our technicians and engineers, is hubris; our
attitude to God is hubris—I mean our attitude to some alleged spider spinning
out purposes and morality behind the fabric of the huge fishing net of
causality—we could say with Charles the Bold in his struggle with Ludwig XI, “Je
combats l’universealle araignée” [I
am fighting the universal spider]; our attitude to ourselves is
hubris—for we experiment with ourselves in a manner we would not permit with
any animal and happily and inquisitively slit the souls of living bodies open.
What do we still care about the “salvation” of the soul? We cure ourselves
later. Being sick teaches us things—we don’t doubt that—it’s even more
instructive than being healthy. The person who makes us ill appears
to us nowadays to be more important even than any medical people and “saviours.”
We violate ourselves now, no doubt about it, we nutcrackers of the soul, we questioning
and questionable people, as if life were nothing else but cracking nuts. And in
so doing, we must necessarily become every day constantly more questionable, more
worthy of being questioned, and in the process perhaps also worthier
—to live? All good things were once bad things; every original sin has become
an original virtue. For example, marriage for a long time seemed to be a sin
against the rights of the community. Once people paid a fine for being so
presumptuous as to arrogate a woman to themselves (that involves, for instance,
the jus primae noctis [the right of the first night], even
today in Cambodia the privilege of the priest, this guardian of “good ancient
customs”). The gentle, favourable, yielding, sympathetic feelings—which over
time grew so valuable that they are almost “value in itself”—for the longest
period were countered by self- contempt against them. People were ashamed of
being mild, just as today they are ashamed of being hard (compare Beyond
Good and Evil, Section 260). Subjugation under the law—O with
what resistance of conscience the noble races throughout the earth had to
renounce the vendetta and to concede the power of the law over themselves! For
a long time the “law” was a vetitum [something
prohibited], a sacrilege, an innovation; it appeared with force, as force,
something to which people submitted only with a feeling of shame for their conduct.
Every one of the smallest steps on earth in earlier days was fought for with
spiritual and physical torture. This whole historical point, “that not only
moving forward—no!—but walking, moving, and changing necessarily required their
countless martyrs,” nowadays sounds so strange to us. In The Dawn,
Section 18, I brought out this point. “Nothing has come at a higher price,” it
says there, “than the small amount of human reason and feeling of freedom,
which we are now so proud of. But because of this pride it is now almost impossible
for us to sense how that huge stretch of time of the ‘morality of custom,’
which comes before ‘world history,’ is the really decisive and important history
which established the character of humanity, when everywhere people recognized
suffering as virtue, cruelty as virtue, pretence as virtue, revenge as virtue,
the denial of reason as virtue and, by contrast, well-being as danger, the
desire for knowledge as danger, peace as danger, pity as danger, being pitied
as disgrace, work as disgrace, insanity as divinity, change as
inherently immoral and pregnant with ruin!”
10
The same book,
in Section 42, explains the system of values, the pressure of
a system of values, under which the most ancient race of contemplative men had
to live—a race that was despised exactly to the extent that it was not feared!
Contemplation first appeared on earth in a disguised shape, with an ambiguous
appearance, with an evil heart, and often with a worried head. There’s no doubt
about that. For a long time the inactive, brooding, unwarlike elements in the
instincts of contemplative people fostered a deep mistrust around them, against
which the only way to cope was to arouse an emphatic fear of them. The ancient
Brahmins, for example, understood that! The oldest philosophers knew how to
earn meaning for their existence and their appearance, some security and background,
because of which people learned to fear them. To look at the matter more
closely, this happened because of an even more fundamental need, that is, the
need to win fear and respect for themselves. For they discovered that inside
them all judgments of value had turned against them; they had
to beat down all kinds of suspicions about and resistance to “the philosopher
inside them.” As men of dreadful times, they achieved this with dreadful means:
cruelty against themselves, inventive self-denial—that was the major instrument
of these power-hungry hermits and new thinkers, who found it necessary first to
overthrow the gods and traditions inside themselves, in order to be able to
believe in their innovation. I recall the famous story of King Vishvamitra, who, through a thousand years of self-torments,
acquired such a feeling of power and faith in himself that he committed himself
to building a new heaven, that weird symbol of the oldest and most
recent history of philosophers on earth. Everyone who at some time or another
has built a “new heaven,” found the power to do that first in his own
hell. . . . Let’s condense all these facts into short formulas: the
philosophical spirit always had to begin by disguising itself, wrapping itself
in a cocoon of the previously established forms of the contemplative
man, as priest, magician, prophet, generally as a religious man, in order to
make any kind of life at all possible. The ascetic ideal for
a long time served the philosopher as a form in which he could appear, as a
condition for his existence—he had to play the role, in order to be
able to be a philosopher. And he had to believe in what he was
doing, in order to play that role. The characteristically detached stance of
philosophers, something which denies the world, is hostile to life, has no
faith in the senses, and is free of sensuality, which was maintained right up
to the most recent times and thus became valued almost as the
essence of the philosophical posture—that is, above all, a consequence of
the critical conditions under which, in general, philosophy arose and survived.
In fact, for the longest time on earth philosophy would not have been
at all possible without an ascetic cover and costume, without an
ascetic misunderstanding of the self. To put the matter explicitly and vividly:
up to the most recent times the ascetic priest has provided
the repellent and dark caterpillar form which was the only one in which
philosophy could live and creep around. . . . Has that really changed?
Is the colourful and dangerous winged creature, that “spirit” which this
caterpillar hid within itself, at last really been released and allowed out
into the light, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, brighter world? Nowadays do we
have sufficient pride, daring, bravery, self-certainty, spiritual will, desire
to assume responsibility, and freedom of the will so that from
now on “the philosopher” is truly possible on
earth? . . .
11
Only now that
we have taken a look at the ascetic priest can we seriously
get at our problem: What does the ascetic ideal mean—only now does it become
“serious.” From this point on we confront the actual representative of
seriousness. “What does all seriousness mean?”—this even more fundamental
question perhaps lies already on our lips, a
question for physiologists, naturally, but nonetheless one which we will still
evade for the moment. In that ideal, the ascetic priest preserves, not merely
his faith, but also his will, his power, his interest. His right to existence
stands and falls with that ideal. No wonder that here
we run into a fearful opponent, given, of course, that we were people
antagonistic to that ideal?—an opponent of the sort who fights for his
existence against those who deny the ideal. . . On the other hand, it is from
the outset improbable that such an interesting stance to our problem will be
particularly beneficial to it. The ascetic priest will hardly in himself prove
the most successful defender of his ideal, for the same reason that a woman
habitually fails when it’s a matter of defending “woman as such”—to say nothing
of his being able to provide the most objective assessment of and judgment
about the controversy we are dealing with here. Rather than having to fear that
he will refute us too well—this much is clear enough—it’s more likely we’ll
still have to help him defend himself against us. . . . The idea being contested
at this point is the value of our lives in the eyes of ascetic
priests: this same life (along with what belongs to it, “nature,” “the world,”
the whole sphere of becoming and transience) they set up in relation to an
existence of a totally different kind, a relationship characterized by
opposition and mutual exclusion, except where life somehow turns
against itself, denies itself. In this case, the case of an ascetic
life, living counts as a bridge over to that other existence. The ascetic
treats life as an incorrect road, where we must finally go backwards, right to
the place where it begins, or as a misconception which man refutes by his actions—or should refute.
For he demands that people go with him. Where he can, he
enforces his evaluation of existence. What’s the meaning of
that? Such a monstrous way of assessing value does not stand inscribed in human
history as something exceptional and curious. It is one of the most widespread
and enduring extant facts. If read from a distant star, the block capital
script of our earthly existence might perhaps lead one to conclude that the
earth is the inherently ascetic star, a corner for discontented, arrogant,
and repellent creatures, incapable of ridding themselves of a deep dissatisfaction
with themselves, with the earth, with all living, creatures who inflict as much
harm on themselves as possible for the pleasure of inflicting harm—probably
their single pleasure. We should consider how regularly, how commonly, how in almost
all ages the ascetic priest makes an appearance. He does not belong to one
single race. He flourishes everywhere. He grows from all levels of society. And
it’s not the case that he breeds and replants his way of assessing value
somehow through biological inheritance: the opposite the case—generally
speaking, a deep instinct forbids him from reproducing. There must be a
high-order necessity which makes this species hostile to life always
grow again and flourish—it must be in the interest of life itself not
to have such a type of self-contradiction die out. For an ascetic life is a
self-contradiction. Here a ressentiment without equal is in control, something
with an insatiable instinct and will to power, which wants to become master,
not over something in life but over life itself, over its deepest, strongest,
most basic conditions; here an attempt is being made to use one’s power to
block up the sources of that power; here one directs one’s green and malicious
gaze against one’s inherent physiological health, particularly against its
means of expression—beauty, joy—while one experiences and seeks for
a feeling of pleasure in mistrust, atrophy, pain, accident,
ugliness, voluntary loss, self-denial, self-flagellation, self-sacrifice.10 All this is paradoxical to
the highest degree. Here we stand in front of a dichotomy which essentially wants a
dichotomy, which enjoys itself in
this suffering and always gets even more self-aware and more triumphant in proportion
to the decrease in its own prerequisite, the physiological
capacity for life. “Triumph precisely in the ultimate agony”—under this supreme
sign the ascetic ideal has fought from time immemorial. Inside this riddle of
seduction, in this picture of delight and torment, it sees its highest light,
its salvation, its final victory. Crux, nux, lux [cross, nut, light]—for the ascetic
ideal these are all one thing.
12
Given that such
a living desire for contradiction and hostility to nature is used to practise
philosophy, on what will it discharge its most inner arbitrary power? It
will do that on something it perceives, with the greatest certainty, as true,
as real. It will seek out error precisely where the essential
instinct for life has established its most unconditional truth. For example, it
will demote physical life to an illusion, as the ascetics of the Vedanta
philosophy did. Similarly it will treat pain, the multiplicity of things, the
whole ideational opposition between “subject” and “ object”
as error, nothing but error! To deny faith in one’s own self, to deny one’s own
“reality”—what a triumph!—and not just over the senses, over appearances, but a
much loftier kind of triumph, an overpowering of and act
of cruelty against reason: a process in which the highest peak of
delight occurs when ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason proclaims:
“There is a kingdom of truth and being, but reason is expressly excluded from
it” . . . (By the way, even in the Kantian idea of the “intelligible
character of things” there still remains something of this lecherous ascetic dichotomy,
which loves to turn reason against reason: for the “intelligible character”
with Kant means a sort of composition of things about which the intellect understands
just enough to know that for the intellect it is—wholly and completely unintelligible).—But
precisely because we are people who seek knowledge, we should finally not be
ungrateful for such determined reversals of customary perspectives and
evaluations with which the spirit has for so long raged against itself with
such apparent wickedness and futility. To use this for once to see differently,
the will to see things differently, is no small discipline and
preparation of the intellect for its coming “objectivity”—the latter meant not
in the sense of “disinterested contemplation” (which is inconceivable
nonsense), but as the capability of having power over
one’s positive and negative arguments and of raising them and disposing of them
so that one knows how to make the very variety of perspectives
and interpretations of emotions useful for knowledge. From now on, my philosophical
gentlemen, let us protect ourselves better from the dangerous old conceptual fantasy
which posits a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition”;
let’s guard ourselves against the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as
“pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”—those things
which demand that we think of an eye which simply cannot be imagined, an eye
which is to have no direction at all, in which the active and interpretative
forces are supposed to stop or be absent—the very things through which seeing
first becomes seeing something. Hence, these things always demand from the eye
something conceptually absurd and incomprehensible. The only seeing
we have is seeing from a perspective; the only knowledge we
have is knowledge from a perspective; and the more emotions we
allow to be expressed in words concerning something, the
more eyes, different eyes, we know how to train on the same thing, the
more complete our “idea” of this thing, our “objectivity,” will be. But to
eliminate the will in general, to suspend all our emotions without exception—even
if we were capable of that—what would that be? Wouldn’t we call that castrating
the intellect?
13
But let’s go
back to our problem. The sort of self-contradiction which seems to be present
in ascetic people, “life opposing life,” is—this much is clear—physio-logically (and not only physiologically) considered—simply
absurd. It can only be apparent. It must be some kind of temporary
expression, an interpretation, formula, make up, a psychological misunderstanding
of something whose real nature could not be understood for a long time, could
not for a long time be described in itself—a mere word, caught in
an old gap in human understanding. So let me counter that
briefly with the facts of the matter: the ascetic ideal arises out of
the instinct for protection and salvation in a degenerating life, which
seeks to keep itself going by any means and
struggles for its existence. It indicates a partial physiological inhibition
and exhaustion, against which those deepest instincts for living which still
remain intact continuously fight on with new
methods and innovations. The ascetic ideal is one such method. The facts are
thus precisely the opposite of what those who honour this ideal claim—life is
struggling in that ideal and by means of that ideal with death and against death:
the ascetic ideal is a manoeuvre for the preservation of life.
As history teaches us, to the extent that this ideal could prevail over men and
become powerful, particularly wherever civilization and the taming of humans
have been successfully implemented, it expresses an important fact: the pathological
nature of the earlier form of human beings, at least of those human
beings who had been tamed, the physiological struggle of men against death
(more precisely, against weariness with life, against exhaustion, against desire
for the “end”). The ascetic priest is the incarnation of the desire for another
state of being, an existence somewhere else—indeed, the highest stage of this desire,
its characteristic zeal and passion. But the very power of
this desire is the chain which binds him here. That’s simply what turns him
into a tool which has to work to create more favourable conditions for living
here and for living as a human being—with this very power he
keeps the whole herd of failures, discontents, delinquents, unfortunates, all
sorts of people who inherently suffer, focussed on existence, because
instinctively he goes ahead of them as their herdsman. You understand already
what I mean: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of living, this man
who denies—he belongs precisely with all the great conserving and affirming
forces of life. . . . To what can we ascribe this pathology? For the human
being is more ill, less certain, more changeable, more insecure than any other
animal—there’s no doubt about that. He is the sick animal.
Where does that come from? To be sure, he has also dared more, innovated more,
defied more, and demanded more from fate than all the other animals combined.
He is the great experimenter with himself, unhappy, dissatisfied, who struggles
for ultimate mastery with animals, nature, and gods—still unconquered, always a
man of the future, who no longer gets any rest from the force of his own powers,
so that his future relentlessly burrows like a thorn into the flesh of his
entire present:—how should such a brave and rich animal not also be the animal
in most danger, the one which, of all sick animals, suffers the most lengthy
and most profound illness? Human beings, often enough, get fed up: there are
entire epidemics of this process of getting fed up (—for example, around 1348,
at the time of the dance of death): but even this very disgust, this
exhaustion, this dissatisfaction with himself—all this comes out of him so powerfully
that it immediately becomes a new chain. The No which he speaks to life brings
to light, as if through a magic spell, an abundance of more tender Yeses; in
fact, when he injures himself, this master of destruction, of
self-destruction —it is the wound itself which later forces him to live
on. . . .
14
The more normal
this pathology is among human beings—and we cannot deny its normality—the
higher we should esteem the rare cases of spiritual and physical power, humanity’s strokes
of luck, and the more strongly successful people should protect themselves from
the most poisonous air, the atmosphere of illness. Do people do that? . .
. Sick people are the greatest danger for healthy people. For strong
people disaster does not come from the strongest, but from the
weakest. Are we aware of that? . . . If we consider the big picture, we should
not wish for any diminution of the fear we have of human beings, for this fear
compels the strong people to be strong and, in some circumstances,
terrible—that fear sustains the successful types of people.
What we should fear, what has a disastrous effect unlike any other, would not
be a great fear of humanity but a great loathing for humanity;
similarly, a great pity for humanity. If both of these were
one day to mate, then something most weird would at once inevitably appear in
the world, the “ultimate will” of man, his will to nothingness, to nihilism.
And, as a matter of fact, a great deal of preparation has gone on for this
union. Whoever possesses, not only a nose to smell with, but also eyes and
ears, senses almost everywhere, no matter where he steps nowadays, an atmosphere
something like that of an insane asylum or hospital—I’m speaking, as usual, of
people’s cultural surroundings, of every kind of “Europe” there is right here
on this earth. The invalids are the great danger to humanity:
not the evil men, not the “predatory animals.” Those
people who are, from the outset, failures, oppressed, broken— they are the
ones, the weakest, who most undermine life among human beings, who
in the most perilous way poison and question our trust in life, in humanity, in
ourselves. Where can we escape it, that downcast glance with which people carry
a deep sorrow, that reversed gaze of the man originally born to fail which
betrays how such a man speaks to himself—that gaze which is a sigh. “I wish I
could be someone else!”—that’s what this glance sighs. “But there is no
hope here. I am who I am. How could I detach myself from myself? And yet—I’ve
had enough of myself!”. . . On such a ground of contempt for oneself, a truly
swampy ground, grows every weed, every poisonous
growth, and all of them so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so sweet. Here the
worms of angry and resentful feelings swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and
duplicity; here are constantly spun the nets of the most malicious
conspiracies—the plotting of suffering people against the successful and
victorious; here the appearance of the victor is despised. And what
dishonesty not to acknowledge this hatred as hatred! What an extravagance of
large words and postures, what an art of “decent” slander! These failures: what
noble eloquence streams from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble
resignation swims in their eyes! What do they really want? At least to
make a show of justice, love, wisdom, superiority— that’s the ambition
of these “lowest” people, these invalids! And how clever such an ambition makes
people! For let’s admire the skilful counterfeiting with which people here
imitate the trademarks of virtue, even its resounding tinkle, the golden sound
of virtue. They have now taken a lease on virtue entirely for themselves, these
weak and hopeless invalids—there’s no doubt about that: “We alone are the good
men, the just men”—that’s how they speak: “We alone are the hominess bonae voluntatis [men
of good will].” They wander around among us like personifications of
reproach, like warnings to us—as if health, success, strength, pride, and a
feeling of power were already inherently depraved things, for which people must
atone some day, atone bitterly. O how ready they themselves basically are to make people
atone, how they thirst to be hangmen! Among them there are plenty
of people disguised as judges seeking revenge. They always have the word
“Justice” in their mouths, like poisonous saliva, with their mouths always
pursed, always ready to spit at anything which does not look discontented and
goes on its way in good spirits. Among them there is no lack of that most
disgusting species of vain people, the lying monsters who aim to present themselves
as “beautiful souls” and who, for example, carry off to market their ruined
sensuality, wrapped up in verse and other swaddling clothes, as “purity of
heart,” the species of self-gratifying moral masturbators. The desire of sick
people to present some form or other of superiority, their
instinct for secret paths leading to a tyranny over the healthy—where can we
not find it, this very will to power of the weakest people! The sick woman, in
particular: no one outdoes her in refined ways to rule others, to exert
pressure, to tyrannize. For that purpose, the sick woman spares nothing living
or dead. She digs up again the most deeply buried things (the Bogos say “The woman is a hyena”). Take a look into
the background of every family, every corporation, every community: everywhere
you see the struggle of the sick against the healthy—a quiet struggle, for the
most part, with a little poison powder, with needling, with deceitful
expressions of long suffering, but now and then also with that sick man’s
Pharisaic tactic of loud gestures, whose favourite role is
“noble indignation.” It likes to make itself heard all the way into the
consecrated rooms of science, that hoarse, booming indignation of the
pathologically ill hound, the biting insincerity and rage of such “noble” Pharisees
(—once again I remind readers who have ears of Eugene Dühring, that apostle
of revenge from Berlin, who in today’s Germany makes the most indecent and most
revolting use of moralistic gibberish [Bumbum]—Dühring, the pre-eminent moral
braggart we have nowadays, even among those like him, the anti-Semites).11 They are all men of
ressentiment, these physiologically impaired and worm-eaten men, a totally
quivering earthly kingdom of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in
its outbursts against the fortunate, and equally in its masquerades of revenge,
its pretexts for revenge. When would they truly attain their ultimate, most
refined, most sublime triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, if they could succeed in
pushing their own wretchedness, all misery in general, into
the consciences of the fortunate, so that the latter one day might
begin to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps would say to themselves,
“It’s shameful to be fortunate. There’s
too much misery!”. . . But there could be no greater and more fateful
misunderstanding than if, through this process, the fortunate, the successful,
the powerful in body and spirit should start to doubt their right to happiness. Away with
this “twisted world”! Away with this disgraceful softening of feelings! That
the invalids do not make the healthy sick—and that would be
such a softening—that should surely be ruling point of view on earth:—but that
would require above everything that the healthy remain separated from
the sick, protected even from the gaze of sick people, so that they don’t
confuse themselves with the ill. Or would it perhaps be their assignment to
attend on the sick or be their doctors? . . . But they could not misjudge or negate their work
more seriously—something higher must not demean itself by becoming
the tool of something lower. The pathos of distance must keep
the work of the two groups forever separate! Their right to exist, the
privilege of a bell with a perfect ring in comparison to one that is cracked
and off key, is indeed a thousand times greater. They alone are the guarantors of
the future; they alone stand as pledge for humanity’s future.
Whatever they can do, whatever they should
do—the sick can never to do and should not do. But so that they
are able to do what only they should do, how can they have the
freedom to make themselves the doctor, the consoler, the “person who cures” for
the invalids? . . . And therefore let’s have fresh air! fresh air!
In any case, let’s keep away from the neighbourhood of all cultural insane
asylums and hospitals! And for that let’s have good companionship, our companionship!
Or loneliness, if that’s necessary! But by all means let’s stay away from the
foul stink of inner rotting and of the secret muck from sick worms! In that
way, my friends, we can defend ourselves, at least for a while, against the two
nastiest scourges which may be lying in wait precisely for us—against a great
disgust with humanity and against a great pity for humanity!
15
If you’ve
grasped the full profundity of this—and precisely here I require that you grasp
deeply, understand profoundly—of the extent to which it simply cannot be
the task of healthy people to attend to the sick, to make invalids well, then
you’ve understood one more necessary matter—the necessity for doctors and
nurses who are themselves ill. And now we have the meaning of the ascetic
priest—we’re holding it in both hands. We need to look on the ascetic priest as
the preordained healer, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd; in that way we
can, for the first time, understand his immense historical mission. The ruling
power over suffering people is his kingdom. His instinct instructs him
to do that; in that he has his very own art, his mastery, his sort of success.
He must be sick himself; he must be fundamentally related to the sick and those
who go astray, in order to understand them—in order to be understood among
them. But he must also be strong, master over himself even more than over
others, that is, undamaged in his will to power, so that he inspires the
confidence and fear of the invalids, so that he can be their support, resistance,
protection, compulsion, discipline, tyrant, god. He has to defend his herd, but
against whom? Against the healthy people undoubtedly,
also against their envy of the healthy. He has to be the natural
opponent and critic of all rough, stormy, unchecked, hard,
violent, predatory health and power. The priest is the first form of the more
delicate animal which despises more easily than it hates. He will not be spared
having to conduct war with predatory animals, a war of cunning (of the
“spirit”) rather than of force, as is obvious—for that purpose, in certain circumstances
it will be necessary for him to develop himself almost into a new type of beast
of prey, or at least to represent himself as such a beast—with
a new animal ferocity in which the polar bear, the sleek, cold, and patient
tiger, and, not least, the fox seem to be combined in a unity which attracts
just as much as it inspires fear. If need compels him to, he will walk even in
the midst of the other sort of predatory animals with the seriousness of a
bear, venerable, clever, cold, and with a duplicitous superiority, as the
herald and oracle of more mysterious forces, determined to sow this ground,
where he can, with suffering, conflict, self-contradiction, and only too sure
of his art, to become the master over suffering people at all
times. There’s no doubt he brings with him ointments and balm. But in order to
be a doctor, he first has to inflict wounds. Then, while he eases the pain
caused by the wound, at the same time he poisons the wound—for that
is, above all, what he knows how to do, this magician and animal trainer,
around whom everything healthy necessarily becomes ill and everything sick
necessarily becomes tame. In fact, he defends his sick herd well enough, this
strange shepherd—he protects them also against themselves, against the
smouldering wickedness, scheming, and maliciousness in the herd itself, against
all those addictions and illnesses characteristic of their associating with
each other. He fights shrewdly, hard, and secretly against the anarchy and
self-dissolution which start up all the time within the herd, in which that
most dangerous explosive stuff and blasting material, ressentiment,
is constantly piling and piling up. To detonate this explosive stuff in such a
way that it does not blow up the herd and its shepherd, that is
his essential work of art and also his most important use. If we want to sum up
the value of the priestly existence in the shortest slogan, we could at once
put it like this: the priest is the person who alters the direction of
ressentiment. For every suffering person instinctively seeks a cause for his
suffering, or, more precisely, an agent, or, even more precisely, a guilty agent
sensitive to suffering—in short, he seeks some living person on whom he can, on
some pretext or other, unload his feelings, either in fact or in effigy: for
the discharge of feelings is the most important way a suffering man seeks
relief—that is, some anaesthetic—it’s his involuntarily desired narcotic
against any kind of torment. In my view, only here can we
find the true physiological cause of ressentiment, revenge, and things related
to them, in a longing for some anaesthetic against pain through one’s emotions.
People usually look for this cause, most incorrectly, in my opinion, in the defensive
striking back, a merely reactive protective measure, a “reflex movement” in the
event of some sudden damage and threat, of the sort a decapitated frog still
makes in order to get rid of corrosive acid. But the difference is fundamental:
in one case, people want to prevent suffering further damage; in the other
case, people want to deaden a tormenting, secret pain which is
becoming unendurable by means of a more violent emotion of some kind and, for
the moment at least, to drive it from their consciousness—for that they need
some emotion, as unruly an emotion as possible, and, in order to stimulate
that, they need the best pretext available. “Someone or other must be guilty of
the fact that I am ill”—this sort of conclusion is characteristic of all sick
people, all the more so if the real cause of their sense that they are sick,
the physiological cause, remains hidden (—it can lie, for example, in an
illness of the nervus sympathicus [sympathetic nerves], or in an
excessive secretion of gall, or in a lack of potassium sulphate and phosphate
in the blood, or in some pressure in the lower abdomen, which blocks the
circulation, or in a degeneration of the ovaries, and so on). Suffering people
all have a horrible willingness and capacity for inventing pretexts for painful
emotional feelings. They enjoy even their suspicions, their brooding over bad actions
and apparent damage. They ransack the entrails of their past and present,
looking for dark, dubious stories, in which they are free to feast on an agonizing
suspicion and to get intoxicated on the poison of their own anger—they rip open
the oldest wounds, they bleed themselves to death from long-healed scars, they
turn friends, wives, children, and anyone else who is closest to them into
criminals. “I am suffering. Someone or other must be to blame for that”—that’s
how every sick sheep thinks. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him:
“That’s right, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for that. But you
yourself are this very person. You yourself are the only one to blame—you
alone are to blame for yourself!” . . . That is bold enough, and false
enough. But one thing at least is attained by that, as I have said, the
direction of ressentiment has been—changed.
16
By now you will
have guessed what, according to my ideas, the healing artistic instinct for
life at least has attempted with the ascetic priest and why he
had to use a temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and illogical ideas, like
“guilt,” “sins,” “sinfulness,” “degeneration,” and “damnation”: to make sick
people to a certain extent harmless, to enable the incurable to destroy
themselves by their own actions, to redirect the ressentiment of the mildly ill
sternly back onto themselves (“there’s one thing necessary”—), and in this
manner to utilize the bad instincts of all suffering people to
serve the purpose of self-discipline, self-monitoring, self-conquest. As is
obvious, this kind of “medication,” a merely emotional medication, has nothing
at all to do with a real cure for an illness, in a
physiological sense. We are never entitled to assert that the instinct for life
has any sort of chance or intention to heal itself in this way. A kind of
pressure to come together and organize the invalids on one side (—the word
“church” is the popular name for this), some form of temporary guarantee for
the more healthy successful people, the ones more completely fulfilled, on
another side, and in the process the creation of rift between
the healthy and sick—for a long time that’s all there was. And that was a lot!
It was a great deal! (In this essay, as you see, I proceed on an assumption
which, so far as the readers I require are concerned, I do not have to prove
first—that the “sinfulness” of human beings is not a matter of fact, but much
rather only the interpretation of a factual condition, that is, of a bad psychological
mood—with the latter seen from a moral-religious perspective, something which
is no longer binding on us.—The fact that someone feels himself
“guilty” or “sinful” does not in itself yet demonstrate clearly that he is
justified in feeling like that, just as the mere fact that someone feels
healthy does not mean that he is healthy. People should remember the famous
witch trials: at that time the most perspicacious and philanthropic judges had
no doubt that they were dealing with guilt; the “witches” themselves
had no doubts about that point—nonetheless, there was no guilt.—To express
that assumption in broader terms: I consider that “spiritual pain” itself is
not, in general, a fact, but only an interpretation (a causal interpretation)
of facts which up to that point have not been precisely formulated, and thus
something that is still completely up in the air and not scientifically binding
—essentially a fat word set in place of a very spindly question mark. To put
the matter crudely, when someone cannot cope with a “spiritual pain,” that has nothing to
do with his “soul”; it’s more likely something to do with his belly (speaking
crudely, as I said: but in saying that I’m not expressing the slightest wish to
be crudely heard or crudely understood . . .). A strong and successful man
digests his experiences (his actions, including his evil actions) as he digests
his meals, even when he has to swallow down some hard mouthfuls. If he is
“unable to finish with” an experience, this kind of indigestion is just as much
a physiological matter as that other one—and in many cases, in fact, only one
of the consequences of that other one.—With such an view, a person can, just between
ourselves, still be the strongest opponent of all materialism. . . .)
17
But is he
really a doctor, this ascetic priest?—We already understand the extent
to which one can hardly be permitted to call him a doctor, no matter how much
he likes feeling that he is a “saviour” and allowing himself to be honoured as
a “saviour.” But he fights only against suffering itself, the unhappiness of
the suffering person, not against its cause, not against
the essential sickness—this must constitute our most fundamental objection to
priestly medication. But if for once we look at things from the perspective
which only the priest understands and adopts, then it will not be easy for us
to limit our amazement at all the things he has noticed, looked for, and found
by seeing things in that manner. The alleviation of suffering,
every kind of “consolation”—that manifests itself as his particular genius: he
has understood his task as consoler with so much innovation and has selected
the means for that so spontaneously and so fearlessly! We could call
Christianity, in particular, a huge treasure house of the most elegant forms of
consolation —there are so many pleasant, soothing, narcotizing things piled up
in it, and for this purpose it takes so many of the most dangerous and most
audacious chances. It shows such sophistication, such southern refinement,
especially when it guesses what kind of emotional stimulant can overcome, at
least for a while, the deep depression, leaden exhaustion, and black sorrow of
the physiologically impaired. For, generally speaking, with all great
religions, the main issue concerns the fight against a certain endemic
exhaustion and heaviness. We can from the outset assume as probable that from
time to time, in particular places on the earth, a feeling of physiological
inhibition must necessarily become master over wide masses of people,
but, because of a lack of knowledge about physiology, it does not enter
people’s consciousness as something physiological, so they look for and attempt
to find its “cause” and remedy only in psychology and morality (—this, in fact,
is my most general formula for whatever is commonly called a “religion”).
Such a feeling of inhibition can have a varied ancestry; for instance, it can
be the result of cross-breeding between different races (or between classes—for
classes also always express differences in origin and race: European “Weltschmerz” [pain
at the state of the world] and nineteenth-century “pessimism” are
essentially the consequence of an irrational, sudden mixing of the classes), or
it can be caused by incorrect emigration—a race caught in a climate for which
its powers of adaptation are not sufficient (the case of the Indians in India);
or by the influence of the age and exhaustion of the race (Parisian pessimism
from 1850 on); or by an incorrect diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages, the
inanity of vegetarians, who, of course, have on their side the authority of
Squire Christopher in Shakespeare); or by degeneration in the blood, malaria,
syphilis and things like that (German depression after the Thirty Years’ War,
which spread bad diseases in an epidemic through half of Germany
and thus prepared the ground for German servility, German timidity).12 In such a case, a war
against the feeling of a lack of enthusiasm will always be attempted
in the grand style. Let’s briefly go over its most important practices and
forms. (Here I leave quite out of account, as seems reasonable, the actual war of
the philosophers against this lack of enthusiasm, which always has a
habit of appearing at the same time—that war is interesting enough, but too
absurd, with too little practical significance, too full of cobwebs and loafing
around—as, for example, when pain is to be shown an error, on the naive assumption
that the pain must disappear as soon as
it is recognized as a error—but, lo and behold, it sees to it that it does not
disappear . . . ). First, people fight that domineering listlessness
with means which, in general, set our feeling for life at their lowest point.
Where possible, there is generally no more willing, no more desire; they stay
away from everything which creates an emotional response, which makes “blood”
(no salt in the diet, the hygiene of the fakir); they don’t love; they don’t
hate—equanimity—they don’t take revenge, they don’t get wealthy, they don’t
work; they beg; where possible, no women, or as few women as possible; with respect
to spiritual matters, Pascal’s principle “Il faut s’abêtir” [it’s necessary to make oneself stupid].
The result, expressed in moral-psychological terms, is “selflessness,” “sanctification”;
expressed in physiological terms: hypnotizing—the attempt to attain for human beings
something approaching what winter hibernation is for some kinds of
animals and what summer sleep is for many plants in hot climates,
the minimum consumption and processing of material stuff which can still
sustain life but which does not actually enter consciousness. For this purpose
an astonishing amount of human energy has been expended. Has it all gone for
nothing? . . . We should not entertain the slightest doubts that such sportsmen
of “holiness,” whom almost all populations have in abundance at all times, in
fact found a real release from what they were fighting against with such a rigorous
training—with the help of their systemic methods for hypnosis, in countless
cases they really were released from that deep physiological
depression. That’s the reason their methodology belongs with the most universal
ethnological facts. For the same reason, we have no authority for considering
such an intentional starving of one’s desires and of one’s physical well being
as, in itself, symptoms of insanity (the way a clumsy kind of roast-beef-eating
“free spirit” and Squire Christopher like to do). It’s much more the case that
it opens or can open the way to all sorts of spiritual
disruptions, to “inner light,” for example, as with Hesychasts on
Mount Athos, to hallucinating sounds and shapes, to sensual
outpourings and ecstasies of sensuality (the history of St. Theresa).13 It’s self-evident that the
interpretation which has been given for conditions of this sort by those
afflicted with them has always been as effusively false as possible. Still,
people should not fail to catch the tone of totally convincing gratitude ringing
out in the very will to such a form of interpretation. They
always value the highest state, redemption itself, that
finally attained collective hypnosis and quietness, as the inherent mystery,
which cannot be adequately expressed even by the highest symbols, as a stop at
and return home to the basis of things, as an emancipation from all delusions,
as “knowledge,” as “truth,” as “being,” as the removal of all goals, all
wishes, all acts, and thus as a place beyond good and evil. “Good and evil,”
says the Buddhist, “are both fetters: the perfect one became master over both”;
“what’s done and what’s not done,” says the man who believes in the Vedanta,
“give him no pain; as a wise man he shakes good and evil off himself; his
kingdom suffers no more from any deed; good and evil—he has transcended both”—
an entirely Indian conception, whether Brahman or Buddhist. (Neither in the
Indian nor in the Christian way of thinking is this “redemption” considered attainable through
virtue, through moral improvement—no matter how high a value they place on
virtue as a form of hypnotism. People should note this point—it corresponds,
incidentally, to the plain facts. That on this point they kept to the truth might perhaps be considered the
best piece of realism in the three largest religions, which, apart from this,
are religions so fundamentally concerned with moralizing. “The man who knows
has no duties” . . . “Redemption does not come about through an increase in
virtue, for it consists of unity with Brahma, who is incapable of any increase
in perfection; even less does it come through setting aside one’s
faults, for the Brahma, unity with whom creates redemption, is eternally
pure”—these passages from the commentary of Shankara are
cited by the first genuine authority on Indian philosophy in
Europe, my friend Paul Deussen).14 So we want to honour
“redemption” in the great religions; however, it will be a little difficult for
us to remain serious about the way these people, who’ve grown too weary of life
even to dream, value deep sleep—that is, deep sleep as already an access
to the Brahma, as an achieved unio mystica [mysterious union] with God. On this subject,
the oldest and most venerable “Scripture” states: “When he is soundly and completely
asleep and is in a state of perfect calm, so that he is not seeing any more
dream images, at that moment, O dear one, united with Being, he has gone into
himself—now that he has been embraced by a form of his knowing self, he has no
consciousness any more of what is outer or inner. Over this bridge comes neither
night nor day, nor old age, nor death, nor suffering, nor good works, nor evil
works.” Similarly, believers in this most profound of the three great religions
say, “In deep sleep the soul lifts itself up out of this body, goes into the
highest light, and moves out in its own form: there it is the highest spirit
itself which wanders around, while it jokes and plays and enjoys itself,
whether with women or with carriages or with friends; there it no longer thinks back to its bodily appendages, to
which the prana (the breath of life)
is harnessed like a draught animal to a cart.” Nevertheless, as in the case of
“redemption,” we also need to keep in mind here that no matter how great the
splendour of oriental exaggeration, what this states is basically the same
evaluation which was made by that clear, cool, Greek-cool, but suffering Epicurus:
the hypnotic feeling of nothingness, the silence of the deepest sleep, in
short, the loss of suffering—something which suffering and
fundamentally disgruntled people are already entitled to consider their highest
good, their value of values, and which they must appraise as
positive and experience as the positive in itself. (With the
same logic of feeling, in all pessimistic religions nothingness is called God).
18
Against this
condition of depression, a different and certainly easier training is tried far
more often than such a hypnotic collective deadening of the sensibilities, of
the ability to experience pain, for the method requires rare powers, above all,
courage, contempt for opinion, and “intellectual stoicism.” This different training
is mechanical activity. There’s no
doubt whatsoever that this can alleviate a suffering existence to a degree
which is not insignificant. Today we call this fact, somewhat dishonestly, “the
blessings of work.” The relief comes about because the interest of the
suffering person is basically diverted from his suffering—because some action
and then another action are always entering his consciousness, thus leaving
little space there for suffering. For it’s narrow,
this room of human consciousness! Mechanical activity and what’s associated
with it—like absolute regularity, meticulous and mindless obedience, a style of
life set once and for all, filling in time, a certain allowance for, indeed,
training in, “impersonality,” in forgetting oneself, in “incuria sui”
[no care for oneself]—how fundamentally, how delicately the ascetic priest
knew how to use them in the struggle with suffering! Especially when it involved
the suffering people of the lower classes, working slaves, or prisoners (or
women, most of whom are, in fact, simultaneously both working slaves and prisoners)
what was needed was little more than the minor art of changing names and
re-christening, so as to make those people in future see a favour, some
relative good fortune, in things they hated—the slave’s discontent with his
lot, in any case, was not invented by the priests. An even more
valuable tool in the battle against depression is prescribing a small
pleasure which is readily accessible and can be made habitual. People
frequently use this medication in combination with the one just mentioned. The
most common form in which pleasure is prescribed in this way as a cure is the
pleasure in creating pleasure (as in showing kindness, giving
presents, providing relief, helping, encouraging, trusting, praising, honouring).
The ascetic priest orders “love of one’s neighbour”; in so doing, he is
basically prescribing an arousal of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, even
if only in the most cautious doses—the will to power. The happiness
which comes from “the smallest feeling of superiority,” which all doing good,
being useful, helping, and honouring bring with them, is the most plentiful way
of providing consolation, which the physiologically impaired habitually use,
provided that they have been well advised. In a different situation, they harm
each other, doing so, of course, in obedience to the same basic instinct. If we
look for the beginnings of Christianity in the Roman world, we find
organizations growing up for mutual support, combinations of the poor and sick,
for burial, on the lowest levels of society at the time, in which that major
way of combating depression, the minor joys which habitually develop
out of mutual demonstrations of kindness, were consciously employed—perhaps at
the time this was something new, a real discovery? “The will to mutual
assistance,” to the formation of the herd, to “a community,” to “a congregation,”
summoned in this manner, must call up again, if only in the smallest way, that
aroused will to power and come to a new and much greater outburst. In the fight
against depression, the development of the herd is an
essential step and a victory. By growing, the community also reinforces in the
individual a new interest, which often enough raises him up over the most
personal features of his bad disposition, his dislike of himself (Geulincx’s
despectio sui [contempt for oneself]).15 All sick pathological
people, in their desire to shake off a stifling lack of enthusiasm and a
feeling of weakness, instinctively strive for the organization of a herd. The ascetic
priest senses this instinct and promotes it. Where there is a herd, it’s the instinct
of weakness which has willed the herd and the cleverness of the priest which
has organized it. For we should not overlook the following point: through
natural necessity strong people strive to separate from each
other, just as much as weak people strive to be with each other. When the former unite, that happens only at the
prospect of an aggressive combined action and a collective satisfaction of
their will to power, with considerable resistance from the individual conscience.
By contrast, the latter organize themselves collectively, taking pleasure precisely
in this collective—their instinct is satisfied by this in the same way that the
instinct of those born “Masters” (i.e., the solitary man of the predatory
species of human being) is basically irritated and upset by organization. Under
every oligarchy—all history teaches us—is always concealed the craving for tyranny.
Every oligarchy is constantly trembling with the tension which every individual
in it necessarily has in order to remain master of this craving. (That was the
case, for example, with the Greeks. Plato provides evidence of this
in a hundred passages—Plato, who understood his peers—and himself . . .).
19
The ascetic
priest’s methods, which we learned about earlier—the collective deadening of
the feeling for life, mechanical activity, minor joys, above all, the joy in
“loving one’s neighbour,” the organization of the herd, the awakening of the
feeling of power in the community, as a result of which the dissatisfaction of
the individual with himself is drowned out by his pleasure in the flourishing
of the community— these things are, measured by modern standards, his innocent methods
in the war against unhappiness. But now let’s turn our attention to more
interesting methods, to his “guilty” ones. With all of them there is one thing
involved: some kind of excess of feeling —employed as the most
effective anaesthetic against stifling, crippling, and long-lasting pain. For
that reason, the priest’s powers of innovation have been tireless in addressing
this one question in particular: “Through what means do people
reach emotional excess?”. . . That sounds harsh. It’s clear enough that it
would sound more appealing and perhaps please our ears better if I said
something like “The ascetic priest has always used the enthusiasm which
lies in all strong emotions.” But why keep caressing the mollycoddled ears of
our modern delicate sensibilities? Why should we, for our part,
retreat even one step back from the Tartufferie [hypocrisy] of
their vocabulary? Doing something like that would already make us psychologists
active hypocrites—apart from the fact that for us it would be disgusting. For
if a psychologist today has good taste anywhere (others might
say his honesty), it’s because he detests that disgraceful moralizing way
of talking, which effectively covers in slime all modern judgments about human
beings and things. For we must not deceive ourselves in
this business. The most characteristic feature which forms modern
souls and modern books is not lying but the ingrained innocence in
their moralistic lying. To have to discover this “innocence” again all over the
place—that is perhaps the most repellent part of our work, of all the inherently dangerous work which nowadays a psychologist has to
undertake. It is a part of our great danger—it is a path that
perhaps takes us in particular to a great revulsion. I have no
doubt about what single purpose will be served, or can be served, in a coming
world by modern books (provided they last, which, of course, we need not fear,
and provided there will one day be a later world with a stronger, harder, and healthier taste),
or what general purpose all things modern will have: they will
serve as emetics—and they’ll do that thanks to their moralistic sugar and
falsity, their innermost femininity, which likes to call itself “idealism” and
which, at all events, has faith in idealism. Today our educated people, our
“good people,” don’t tell lies—that’s true. But that’s no reason to respect them!
The real lie, the genuine, resolute, “honest” lie (people should listen to
Plato on its value) for them would be something far too demanding, too strong.
It would require what people are not allowed to demand of them, that they
opened up their eyes and looked at themselves, so
that they would know how to differentiate between “true” and “false” with
respect to themselves. But they are fit only for ignoble lies. Everyone
today who feels that he is a “good man” is completely incapable of taking a
stand on any issue at all, other than with dishonest falseness—an
abysmal falsity, which is, however, innocent falsity, true-hearted falsity,
blue-eyed falsity, virtuous falsity. These “good people”—collectively they are
now utterly and completely moralized and, so far as their honesty is concerned,
they’ve been disgraced and ruined for all eternity. Who among them could endure
even one truth “about human beings”! . . . Or, to ask the question
more precisely, who among them could bear a true
biography! Here are a couple of indications: Lord Byron recorded some very
personal things about himself, but Thomas Moore was “too good” for them. He
burned his friend’s papers. The executor of Schopenhauer’s will, Dr. Gwinner, is alleged to have done the same thing, for
Schopenhauer had also recorded some things about himself and also perhaps
against himself (“eis auton” [against himself]). The capable American
Thayer, the biographer of Beethoven, all of a sudden stopped his work: at some
point or other in this venerable and naive life he could no longer continue . .
. Moral: What intelligent man nowadays would still write an honest word about
himself?—He would already have to be a member of the Order of Holy Daredevils.
We have been promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner. Who
has any doubts that it will be a prudent autobiography?16 Let’s remember the
comical horror which the Catholic priest Janssen aroused in Germany with his incomprehensibly
bland and harmless picture of the German Reformation movement. How
would people react if one day someone explained this movement differently,
if, for once, a true psychologist with spiritual strength and
not a shrewd indulgence toward strength pictured a true Luther for us, no
longer with the moralistic simplicity of a country parson, no longer with the
sweet and considerate modesty of a protestant historian, but with something
like the fearlessness of a Taine? . . . (Parenthetically, the
Germans have finally produced a sufficiently beautiful classical type of such
shrewd indulgence—they can classify him as one of their own and be proud of
him, namely, their Leopold Ranke, this born classical advocate of
every causa fortior [stronger
cause], the shrewdest of all the shrewd “realists”).17
20
But you will
already have grasped what I’m getting at. All in all, that’s surely reason
enough, is it not, why we psychologists nowadays cannot rid ourselves of a certain distrust in ourselves? . . . We
also are probably “too good” for the work we do. We are probably sacrificial
victims and prey, as well, made sick by this contemporary taste for moralizing,
no matter how much we also feel we’re its critics—it probably infects even us as
well. What was that diplomat warning about, when he addressed his colleagues?
“Gentlemen, let us mistrust our first impulses above all!”
he declared; “they are almost always good” That’s also how every
psychologist today should speak to his peers. And so we come back to
our problem, which, in fact, requires a certain rigour from us, especially some
distrust of our “first impulses.” The ascetic ideal in the service of
intentional emotional excess—whoever remembers the previous essay will,
with the compressed content of these ten words, already have a preliminary
sense of the essential content of what I now have to demonstrate. To remove the human soul for once from its entire frame, to immerse
it in terror, frost, glowing embers, and joys of that kind, so that it rids
itself, as if with a bolt of lightning, of all pettiness and small-mindedness
of lack of interest, apathy, and irritation. What paths lead to this goal?
And which of them is the most reliable? . . . All the greatest emotions
basically have this capacity, provided they discharge themselves suddenly—anger,
fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty. And the ascetic priest
has, in fact, without a second thought, taken the entire pack
of wild hounds in the human being into his service and let loose one of them at
one time, another at another time, always for the same purpose, to wake human
beings up out of their long sadness, to chase away, at least for a while, their
stifling pain, their tentative misery, and always covered up in a religious
interpretation and “justification.” Every emotional excess of this sort demands payment later;
that’s self-evident—it makes sick people sicker. And thus, this way of
providing a remedy for pain, measured by modern standards, is a “guilty”
method. However, to be fair, we must insist all the more that it was used in
good conscience, that the ascetic priest prescribed it with the deepest
faith in its utility, indeed, its indispensability—often enough almost falling
apart himself in front of the misery he created; and, similarly, that the
vehement physiological revenges of such excesses, perhaps even psychic
disturbances, basically do not really contradict the whole meaning of this kind
of medication, which, as I’ve pointed out above, was not designed
to heal sick people, but to fight their enervating depression, to alleviate and
anaesthetize it. With this method that goal was attained. The
main instrumental fingering which the ascetic priest allowed himself in order
to bring every kind of disorienting ecstatic music ringing out in the human
soul was achieved, as everyone knows, by the fact that he made use of the feeling
of guilt. The previous essay indicated, in brief, the origin of this feeling—as
a part of animal psychology, nothing more. The feeling of guilt we encountered
there in its raw state, as it were. In the hands of the priest, this true artist
in guilt feelings, it first acquired a form—and what a form! “Sin”—for that’s
how the priest’s new interpretation of the animal “bad conscience” ran (cruelty
turned backwards)—has been the greatest event in the history of the sick soul
so far. In it we have the most dangerous and the most fateful artistic work of
religious interpretation. The human being, suffering from himself somehow—at
any rate, psychologically—something like an animal barred up in a cage, confused
about why this has happened and what purpose it serves, longing for
reasons—reasons provide relief—longing also for treatments and narcotics,
finally discussed the matter with one who also knew about hidden things—and lo
and behold! He gets a hint. He gets the first hint about the
“cause” of his suffering from his magician, the ascetic priest. He is to seek
this cause in himself, in his guilt, in a piece of the
past. He is to understand his own suffering as a condition
of punishment . . . He heard, he understood—this unfortunate man: now
things stand with him as with a hen around which a line has been drawn. He is
not to come outside this circle of lines again. The “sick man” is turned into
the “sinner” . . . And now for a couple of millennia people have not rid
themselves of the look of this new sick man, the “sinner.”—Will people ever be
rid of him?—No matter where we look, we see everywhere the hypnotic glance of
the sinner, who always moves in one direction (in the direction of “guilt” as
the single cause of suffering), everywhere the bad conscience,
this “horrifying animal,” to use Luther’s words, everywhere the past
regurgitated, the fact distorted, the “green eye” cast on all action, everywhere
the desire to misunderstand suffering turned into the meaning
of life, with suffering reinterpreted into feelings of guilt, fear, and
punishment, everywhere the whip, the hair shirt, the starving body, remorse,
everywhere the sinner’s breaking himself on the terrible torture wheel of a
restless conscience, greedy for its own sickness; everywhere silent torment,
extreme fear, the agony of the tortured heart, the spasms of an unknown joy,
the cry for “redemption.” As a matter of fact, with this system of procedures
the old depression, heaviness, and exhaustion were basically overthrown.
Life became very interesting once again:
lively, always lively, sleepless, glowing, charred, exhausted, and yet not
tired—that’s how man looked, the “sinner,” who was initiated into these mysteries. This grand old magician
in the war against the lack of excitement, the ascetic priest—he had apparently
won. His kingdom had come. Now people no longer moaned against pain;
they longed for pain: “More pain! More pain!”—that
had been the demanding cry of his disciples and initiates for centuries. Every
excess of feeling which brought grief, everything that broke apart, knocked
over, smashed to bits, carried away, enraptured, the secrets of the torture
chambers, the very invention of hell—from now on everything was discovered,
surmised, put into practice. Everything now was available for the magician’s
use. Everything in future served for the victory of his ideal, the ascetic
ideal. . . . “My empire is not of this world”—he said afterwards
(as he said before). Does he really have the right still to speak this way? . .
. Goethe asserted that there were only thirty-six tragic situations. From that
we can surmise, if we did not know it anyway,
that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He—knows more . . .
21
So far as this whole
sort of priestly medication is concerned, the “guilty” sort, any word of
criticism is too much. That an excess of feeling of the sort the ascetic priest
habitually prescribes for his sick people in this case (under the holiest of
names, as is obvious, while convinced of the sanctity of his purpose) has truly
been of use to some invalid: who would really want to defend
the truth of this kind of claim? At least we should come to an understanding of
that phrase “been of use.” If with those words people wish to assert that such
a system of treatment has improved human beings, then I won’t
contradict them. I would only add what “improved” indicates to me—it’s as much as
saying “tamed,” “weakened,” “disheartened,” “refined,” “mollycoddled” (hence, almost
equivalent to damaged . . .). But when we are mainly concerned
with sick, upset, and depressed people, such a system, even supposing that it
makes them “better,” always makes them sicker. You only have to ask
doctors who treat the mentally ill [Irrenärzte] what
a methodical application of the torments of repentance, remorse, and
convulsions of redemption always brings with it. We should also consult
history: wherever the ascetic priest has put in place this way of dealing with
the sick, illness has always spread far and wide at terrifying speed. What has
its “success” always involved? The person who was already ill gets in addition
a shattered nervous system, and that occurs on the largest and smallest scale,
among individuals and among masses of people. As a consequence of a training in repentance and redemption, we witness
huge epidemics of epilepsy, the greatest known to history, as in the St. Vitus’ and St. John’s dances in the Middle Ages. We find
its repercussions in other forms of fearful paralysis and enduring depression,
with which, under certain circumstances, the temperament of an entire people or
city (Geneva, Basel) is changed into its opposite once and for all—with these
belong also the witch crazes, something related to sleep walking (eight major
epidemics of this broke out between 1564 and 1605 alone);—among its
consequences we also find that death-seeking mass hysteria whose horrific cry “eviva la morte” [long
live death] was heard far across the whole of Europe, interrupted by
idiosyncratic outbursts—sometimes of lust, sometimes of destructive frenzies,
just as the same alternation of emotions, with the same intermissions and
reversals, can also still be observed nowadays all over the place, in every
case where the ascetic doctrine of sin once again enjoys a great success
(religious neurosis appears as a form of an “evil
nature”—that’s indisputable. What is it? Quaeritur [that’s what we need to ask]). Generally speaking, the ascetic ideal
and its cult of moral sublimity, this supremely
clever, most dubious, and most dangerous systematization of all the ways to promote
an excess of emotion under the protection of holy purposes, has etched itself
into the entire history of human beings in a dreadful and unforgettable manner,
and, alas, not only into their history. . . Apart from this
ideal, there’s scarcely anything else I would know to point to which has had
such a destructive effect on the health and racial power,
particularly of Europeans. Without any exaggeration, we can call it the
true disaster in the history of the health of European people. At
most, the specifically German influence might be comparable to its effect: I
refer to the alcohol poisoning of Europe, which up to now has marched strictly
in step with the political and racial superiority of the Germans (— wherever
they have infused their blood, they have also infused their vices).—The third
in line would be syphilis—magno sed proxima intervallo [next in line, but after a large gap].
22
Wherever he
achieved mastery, the ascetic priest has ruined spiritual health. As a result,
he has also ruined taste in artibus et litteris [in arts and
letters]—he is still ruining that. “As a result”?—I hope you will simply
concede me this “as a result.” At least, I have no desire to demonstrate it
first. A single indication: it concerns the fundamental text of Christian literature, its essential model, its “book
in itself.” Still in the middle of the Graeco-Roman
magnificence, which was also a magnificent time for books, faced with a ancient
world of writing which had not yet declined and fallen apart, an age in which
people could still read some books for which one would now exchange half of all
literature, the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators—we call them the
church fathers—already dared to proclaim, “We also have our
classical literature. We don’t need Greek literature.”—And with
that, they pointed with pride to books of legends, letters of the apostles, and
little apologetic treatises, in somewhat the same way as nowadays the English
“Salvation Army” with its related literature fights its war against Shakespeare
and other “pagans.” I don’t like the “New Testament”—you will already have
guessed as much. It almost disturbs me that I stand alone in my taste with respect
to this most highly regarded and most overvalued written work (the taste of two
thousand years is against me). But how can I
help it! “Here I stand. I can do no other”18—I have the courage of my
own bad taste. The Old Testament—now, that’s something totally
different: all honour to the Old Testament! In that I find great men, a heroic
landscape, and something of the very rarest of all elements on earth, the incomparable naïveté of
the strong heart; even more—I find a people. In the New Testament,
by contrast, I find nothing but small sectarian households, nothing but
spiritual rococo, nothing but ornament, twisty little corners, oddities,
nothing but conventional air, not to mention an occasional breeze of bucolic
sweet sentimentality, which belongs to the age (and the Roman province),
something not so much Jewish as Hellenistic. Humility and pomposity standing
shoulder to shoulder; a chatting about feelings which are almost stupefying;
vehement feelings but no passion, with awkward gestures. Here, it seems,
there’s a lack of all good upbringing. How can people make such a fuss about
their small vices, the way these devout little men do? No cock—and certainly
not God—would crow about such things. Finally, they even want to possess “the
crown of eternal life,” all these small people from the provinces. But what for? What for? It is impossible to push
presumption any further. An “immortal” Peter: who could endure him?
They have an ambition that makes one laugh: one of them spells out his most
personal things, his stupidities, melancholy, and indolent worries, as if the
essence of all things had a duty to worry about such matters. Another one never
gets tired of wrapping up God himself in the smallest misery he finds himself
stuck in. And the most appalling taste of this constant familiarity with God!
This Jewish, and not merely Jewish, excessive importuning God with mouth and
paw! . . . There are small despised “pagan people” in east Asia
from whom these first Christians could have learned something important, some tact in
their reverence. As Christian missionaries reveal, such people are not
generally allowed to utter the name of their god. This seems to me sufficiently
delicate. It was certainly too delicate not only for the “first” Christians. To
sense the contrast, we should remember something about Luther, the “most
eloquent” and most presumptuous peasant Germany ever had, and the tone Luther
adopted as the one he most preferred in his conversations with God. Luther’s
resistance to the interceding saints of the church (especially to “the devil’s
sow, the Pope”) was undoubtedly, in the last analysis, the resistance of a lout
irritated by the good etiquette of the church, that etiquette
of reverence of the priestly taste, which lets only the more consecrated and
the more discreet into the holy of holies and shuts the door against the louts,
who in this particular place are never to speak. But Luther, the peasant,
simply wanted something different—this situation was not German enough
for him. Above all, he wanted to speak directly, to speak for himself, to speak
“openly” with his God. Well, he did it.—You can
conjecture easily enough that there has never been a place anywhere in which
the ascetic ideal has been a school of good taste, even less of good manners—in
the best cases, it was a school for priestly manners. That comes about because
it carries something in its own body which is the deadly enemy of all good
manners—it lacks moderation, it resists moderation, it is
itself a “non plus ultra” [an ultimate extreme].
23
The ascetic
ideal has not only ruined health and taste; its has also
ruined a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth something as well—I’ll be careful not
to mention everything (when would I come
to the end!). I’m not going to reveal what this ideal has brought about.
I would much rather confine myself to what it means, what it allows
us to surmise, what lies hidden behind, under, and in it, what it provisionally
and indistinctly expresses, overloaded with question marks and misunderstandings. And
only with this purpose in mind, I cannot spare my readers a
glimpse into the monstrosity of its effects, as well as its disastrous consequences,
in order, that is, to prepare them for the ultimate and most terrifying aspects
which the question of the meaning of this ideal has for me. Just what does the power of
this ideal mean, the monstrous nature of this power? Why was
it given room to grow to this extent? Why was there not a more effective
resistance? The ascetic ideal is the expression of a will. Where is
the opposing will, in which an opposing ideal finds its
expression? The ascetic ideal has a goal—a goal which is universal
enough that all other interests in human existence, measured against it, seem
small and narrow. It interprets times, people, and humanity unsparingly with
this goal in mind. It permits no other interpretation. No other goal counts. It
rejects, denies, affirms, and confirms only through its own interpretative
meaning (—and has there ever been a system of interpretation more
thoroughly thought through?); it does not submit to any power; by contrast, it
believes in its privileged position in relation to all power, in its absolutely higher
ranking with respect to every power—it believes that there is no power
on earth which does not have to derive its meaning first from it, a right to
exist, a value, as a tool in its own work, as a way and a
means to its own goal, to a single goal. . . Where is the counterpart to
this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? Why is this counterpart missing?
. . . Where is the other “single goal”? But people tell me
that counterpart is not missing, claiming it has not only
fought a long and successful war with that ideal, but has already mastered that
ideal on all major points: all our modern science is a
testament to that—this modern science, which, as a true philosophy of reality,
evidently believes only in itself, evidently possesses courage and will in
itself, and has got along up to this point
well enough without God, a world beyond, and virtues which deny. However, I’m
not impressed at all with such a fuss and chattering from agitators: these trumpeters
of reality are bad musicians. One can hear well enough that their notes do not sound out of the depths.
The abyss of scientific conscience does not speak through
them—for today the scientific conscience is an abyss—the phrase “science” in such
trumpeting mouths is mere fornication, an abuse, an indecency. The truth is
precisely the opposite of what is claimed here: science nowadays has simply no faith
in itself, to say nothing of an ideal above it—and where it consists
at all of passion, love, ardour, suffering, that doesn’t make it
the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its newest and most
pre-eminent form. Does that sound strange to you? . . .There are indeed a
sufficient number of upright and modest working people among scholars nowadays,
happy in their little corners, and because their work satisfies them, they make
noises from time to time, demanding, with some presumption, that people today should in
general be happy, particularly with science—there are so many useful things to
do precisely there. I don’t deny that. The last thing I want to do
is to ruin the pleasure these honest labourers take in the tasks they perform. For I’m happy about their work. But the fact that
people are working rigorously in science these days and that there are satisfied
workers is simply no proof that science today, as a totality,
has a goal, a will, an ideal, a passion in a great faith. As I’ve said, the
opposite is the case: where science is not the most recently appearing form of
the ascetic ideal—and then it’s a matter of cases too rare, noble, and
exceptional to be capable of countering the general judgment—science today is a hiding
place for all kinds of unhappiness, disbelief, gnawing worms, despectio sui [self-contempt], bad conscience—it
is the anxiety of the very absence of ideals, suffering from
the lack of a great love, the
dissatisfaction with a condition of involuntary modest content. O,
what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to
conceal! The efficiency of our best scholars, their mindless diligence, their
heads smoking day and night, the very mastery of their handiwork—how often has
all that really derived its meaning from the fact that they don’t permit some
things to become visible to them any more! Science as a means of putting themselves to sleep. Are
you acquainted with that? . . . People wound scholars to the
bone—everyone who associates with them experiences this—sometimes with a
harmless word. We make our scholarly friends angry with us when
we intend to honour them. We drive them wild, merely because we were too coarse
to figure out the people we are truly dealing with, suffering people,
who don’t wish to admit to themselves what they are, narcotised and mindless
people, who fear only one thing—coming to consciousness.
24
Now, let’s
consider, on the other hand, those rarer cases
I mentioned, the last idealists remaining today among the philosophers and
scholars. Perhaps in them we have the opponents of the ascetic
ideal we’re looking for, the counter-idealists? In fact, that’s
what they think they are, these “unbelievers” (for that’s what
they are collectively). That, in particular, seems to be their last item of belief,
that they are opponents of this ideal, for they are so serious about this
stance, their words and gestures are so passionate on this very point:—but is
it therefore necessarily the case that what they believe is true?
We “knowledgeable people” are positively suspicious of all forms of believers.
Our suspicion has gradually cultivated the habit in us of concluding the
reverse of what people previously concluded: that is, wherever the strength of
a faith steps decisively into the foreground, we infer a certain weakness in
its ability to demonstrate its truth, even the improbability of
what it believes. We, too, do not deny that the belief “makes blessed,” but for
that very reason we deny that the belief proves something—a
strong belief which confers blessedness creates doubts about what it has faith
in. It does not ground “truth.” It grounds a certain probability— delusion.
Well, how do things stand in this case?—These people who say no today, these
outsiders, these people who are determined on one point, their demand for
intellectual probity, these hard, strong, abstemious, heroic spirits, who
constitute the honour of our age, all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these sceptics, ephectics, hectics of
the spirit (collectively they are all hectic in some sense or other), the last
idealists of knowledge, the only ones in whom intellectual conscience lives and
takes on human form nowadays— they really do believe that they are as free as
possible from the ascetic ideal, these “free, very free
spirits,” and yet I am revealing to them what they cannot see for
themselves—for they are standing too close to themselves—this ascetic ideal is
also their very own ideal. They themselves represent it today.
Perhaps they are the only ones who do. They themselves are its most spiritual
offspring, the furthest advanced of its troops and its crowd of scouts, itsmost awkward, most delicate,
most incomprehensibly seductive form. If I am any kind of solver of puzzles,
then I want to be that with this statement! . . . They are not
free spirits—not by any stretch—for they still believe in the truth. When
the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that unconquerable Order of
Assassins, that free-spirited order par excellence, whose
lowest ranks lived a life of obedience of the sort no order of monks attained,
then they also received by some means or other a hint about that symbol and slogan
which was reserved for only the highest ranks as their secret, “Nothing is
true. Everything is permitted.” . . . Well now, that was freedom of
the spirit. With that the very belief in truth was cancelled.
. . . Has a European, a Christian free spirit ever wandered by
mistake into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences?
Has he come to know the Minotaur of this cavern from experience? .
. . I doubt it. More than that: I know differently:— nothing is more
immediately foreign to people set on one thing, these so-called “free
spirits,” than freedom and emancipation in this sense: in no respect
are they more firmly bound; in their very belief in the truth they are, as no
one else is, firm and unconditional. Perhaps I understand all this from far too
close a distance: that admirable philosophical abstinence which such a belief requires,
that intellectual stoicism, which ultimately forbids one to deny just as
strongly as it forbids one to affirm, that desire to come to a
standstill before the facts, the factum brutum [brute fact], that fatalism of the “petits faits” [small
facts] (what I call ce petit faitalisme [this small factism]),
that quality with which French science nowadays seeks a sort of moral
precedence over German science, the attainment of a state where one, in general,
abandons interpretation (violating, emending, abbreviating, letting go, filling
in the cracks, composing, forging, and the other actions which belong to the nature of
all interpretation)—generally speaking, this attitude expresses just as much
virtuous asceticism as any denial of sensuality (basically it is only one mode
of this denial). However, what compels a person to this unconditional
will for truth is the faith
in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it may be its unconscious
imperative. We should not deceive ourselves on this point— it is a belief in a metaphysical value,
a value of truth in itself, something guaranteed and affirmed only
in that ideal (it stands or falls with that ideal). Strictly speaking, there is
no science “without presuppositions.” The idea of such a science is unimaginable, paralogical: a philosophy, a “belief,” must always be there
first, so that with it science can have a direction, a sense, a border, a
method, a right to exist. (Whoever thinks the reverse,
whoever, for example, is preparing to place philosophy “on a strictly
scientific foundation,” first must place, not just philosophy, but also truth itself on
its head—the worst injury to decency one could possibly give to two such
venerable women!). In fact, there is no doubt about this matter—and here I’m
letting my book The Gay Science have a word (see its fifth
book, Section 344)—“The truthful person, in that daring and ultimate sense
which the belief in science presupposes in him, thus affirms
a world different from the world of life, of nature, and of history,
and to the extent that he affirms this “other world,” well? Must he not in the
process deny its opposite, this world, ourworld?
. . . Our faith in science rests on something which is still a metaphysical
belief—even we knowledgeable people of today, we godless and anti-metaphysical
people—we, too, still take our fire from that blaze kindled by
a thousand years of old belief, that faith in Christianity, which was also
Plato’s belief, that God is the truth, that the truth is divine. .
. . But how can we do that, if this very claim is constantly getting more and
more difficult to believe, if nothing reveals itself as divine any more, unless it’s error, blindness, lies—if even God manifests
himself as our longest lasting lie?” At this point it’s necessary
to pause and reflect for a long while. Science itself from now on requires some
justification (by that I don’t yet mean to claim that there is such a justification
for it). People should examine the oldest and the most recent philosophers on
this question. They all lack an awareness of the problem of the extent to which
the will to truth itself first needs some justification—here is a hole in every
philosophy. How does that come about? It’s because the ascetic ideal up to this
point has been master of all philosophies, because truth has
been established as being, as god, as the highest authority itself, because
truth was not allowed to be problematic. Do you understand
this “allowed”?—From the moment when
the belief in the god of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is also a
new problem: the problem of the value of truth.—The will
to truth requires a critique—let us identify our own work with that requirement—for
once to place in question, as an experiment, the value of truth. .
. . (Anyone who thinks this has been stated too briefly is urged to read over
that section of The Gay Science, pp. 160 ff, which carries the
title “The Extent to Which We Also Are Still Devout,” Section 344—or better,
the entire fifth book of that work, as well as the preface to The Dawn.)
25
No! People
should not come at me with science when I am looking for the natural antagonist
of the ascetic ideal, when I ask, “Where is the opposing will, in
which an opposing ideal expresses itself?” For that purpose,
science does not stand sufficiently on its own, not nearly; for that it first
requires an value ideal, a power to make value,
in whose service it could have faith in
itself—science is never in itself something which creates values. Its relationship
to the ascetic ideal is still not inherently antagonistic at all. It’s even
more that case that, for the most part, it represents the forward-driving force
in the inner development of this ideal. Its resistance and struggle, when we
inspect more closely, are not concerned in any way with the ideal itself, but
only with its external trappings, clothing, masquerade, its temporary
hardening, petrifaction, dogma. Science makes the life in this ideal free
again, since it denies what is exoteric in it. These two things, science and
the ascetic ideal—they really stand on a single foundation—I’ve just clarified
the point—namely, on the same overvaluing of the truth (or more correctly, on
the same faith in the inestimable value of the truth, which is beyond criticism).
In that very claim they are necessarily allies—so that, if
someone is going to fight against them, he can only fight them together and
place them both in question. An appraisal of the value of the ascetic ideal
unavoidably also involves an appraisal of the value of science; while there’s
still time people should to keep their eyes open for that, their ears alert!
(As for art—let me offer a preliminary remark, for I’ll be coming
back to it at some point or other at greater length—the very art in which the lie sanctifies
itself and the will to deceive has good conscience on its side
is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: that’s
what Plato’s instinct experienced—the greatest enemy of art which Europe has
produced up to this point. Plato versus Homer: that’s the
entire, the true antagonism—on one side, the “beyond” of the best will, the
great slanderer of life; on the other side, life’s unintentional worshipper,
the golden nature. An artistic bondage in the service of the ascetic
ideal is thus the truest corruption of the artist there can
be. Unfortunately it’s one of the most common, for nothing is more corruptible
than an artist.) Physiologically considered, science also rests on
the same foundation as the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of
life is the precondition for both—emotions become cool, the tempo
slows down, dialectic replaces instinct, seriousness stamped
on faces and gestures (seriousness, this most unmistakable sign of a
more laborious metabolism, of a life of struggle and hard work). Just look at
those periods in a population when the scholars step up into the foreground:
they are times of exhaustion, often of evening, of decline. The overflowing force, the certainty about life, the certainty about the future have gone.
The preponderance of mandarins never indicates anything good—no more than does
the arrival of democracy, the peace tribunal instead of war, equal rights for
women, the religion of pity, and all the other things symptomatic of a
degenerating life. (Science grasped as a problem: what does science mean?—on
this point see the Preface to The Birth of Tragedy).—No! This “modern
science”—keep your eyes open for this—is for the time being the best ally
of the ascetic ideal, and precisely for this reason: because it is the most
unconscious, the most involuntary, the most secret and most subterranean
ally! They have up to now been playing a single game, the “poor in
spirit” and the scientific opponents of that ideal (we should be careful, incidentally,
not to think that these opponents are the opposite of that ideal, something
like the rich in spirit—that they are not; I call
them hectics of the spirit). The famous
victories of the latter—and they have undoubtedly been victories—but over what?
They in no way overcame the ascetic ideal. With those victories, the ideal instead
became stronger, that is, harder to understand, more spiritual, more dangerous,
as science ruthlessly and continually kept breaking off and demolishing a wall,
an external structure which had built itself onto the ideal and coarsened its
appearance. Do people really think that, for example, the downfall of
theological astronomy indicates a downfall of that
ideal? . . . Because of that, have human beings perhaps become less
dependent on redemption in a world beyond as a solution for the puzzle
of their existence, given that existence since then looks, in the visible order
of things, even more arbitrary, indolent, and dispensable? Isn’t it the case
that since Copernicus the very self-diminution of human beings,
their will to self-diminution, has made inexorable progress?19 Alas, the faith in
their dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceable position in the chain of being has
gone—the human being has become an animal, not a metaphorical
animal, but absolutely and unconditionally—the one who in his earlier faith was
almost God (“child of God,” “God-man”[Gottmensch]) . . . Since
Copernicus human beings seem to have reached an inclined plane—they’re now
rolling at an accelerating rate past the mid-point—where to? Into nothingness? Into the “penetrating sense
of their own nothingness”? . . .Well,
then, wouldn’t this be precisely the way—into the old ideal? . . . All science
(and not just astronomy, about whose humbling and destructive effects Kant made
a noteworthy confession, “it destroys my importance”. . .)—all science, natural
as well as unnatural—the name I give to the self-criticism of
knowledge—is nowadays keen to talk human beings out of the respect they used to
have for themselves, as if the latter were nothing more than a bizarre
arrogance about themselves. In this matter we could even say science has its
own pride, its characteristically acrid form of stoical ataraxia [indifference], in maintaining
this laboriously attained self-contempt for human
beings as their ultimate, most serious demand for self respect (and, in fact,
that’s justified, for the one who despises is still one person who “has not
forgotten respect” . . .). Does doing this really work against the
ascetic ideal? Do people really think in all seriousness (as theologians
imagined for quite a while) that, say, Kant’s victory over
dogmatic theological concepts (“God,” “Soul,” “Freedom,” “Immortality”)
succeeded in breaking up that ideal?—in asking that question, it should not
concern us at the moment whether Kant himself had anything at all like that in
mind. What is certain is that all sorts of transcendentalists since Kant have
once more won the game—they’ve been emancipated from the theologians. What a
stroke of luck!—Kant showed them that secret path by which from now on they
could, on their own initiative and with the finest scientific decency, follow
their “hearts’ desires.” Similarly who could now hold anything against the
agnostics, if they, as admirers of what is inherently unknown and secret, worship the
question mark itself as their God? (Xaver Doudan once spoke of the ravages brought on by “l’habitude d’admirer
l’inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l’incon-nu” [the habit of admiring the unintelligible
instead of simply staying in the unknown]; he claimed that
the ancients had not done this).20 If everything human beings
“know” does not satisfy their wishes and, instead, contradicts them and makes
them shudder, what a divine excuse to be allowed to seek the blame for this not
in “wishes” but in “knowledge”! . . . “There is no knowledge. Consequently—there
is a God”—what a new elegantia syllogismi [syllogistic excellence]! What a triumph of
the ascetic ideal!
26
Or does modern
historical writing collectively perhaps display an attitude more confident
about life, more confident about ideals? Its noblest claim nowadays asserts
that it is a mirror. It eschews all teleology. It doesn’t want to
“prove” anything any more. It spurns playing the
role of judge and derives its good taste from that—it affirms as little as it
denies. It establishes the facts. It “describes” . . . All this is ascetic to a
high degree. However, it is also, to an even higher degree, nihilistic.
We must not deceive ourselves on this point. We see a sad, hard, but determined
gaze—an eye which looks into the distance, the way a solitary traveller
at the North Pole gazes out (perhaps so as not to look inside? not to look behind?
. . .) Here is snow; here life is quite silent. The final crows that make noise
here are called “what for?” “in vain,” “nada” [nothing]—here
nothing thrives and grows any more, at most Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoian “pity.” But so far as that other style of
historian is concerned, maybe an even “more modern” style, which is comfortable
and sensual and makes eyes at life as much as at the ascetic ideal—this style
uses the word “artist” as a glove and has taken an exclusive lease on the
praise of contemplation. O what a thirst these sweet and witty types arouse in
people even for ascetics and winter landscapes! No! Let the devil take these
“meditative” people! I would much prefer to keep wandering with those
historical nihilists through the gloomiest cold gray fog!—In fact, if I had to
choose, I might find it better to lend a ear to a completely and essentially
unhistorical or anti-historical man (like that Dührung,
whose tones intoxicate a species of “beautiful souls” in Germany today, people
who up to now have been a still timid, still unassuming species, the species anarchistica [the anarchists] within
the educated proletariat). The “contemplative ones” are a hundred times worse—:
I know nothing that creates so much disgust as such an objective armchair, such
a sweet-smelling man luxuriating in history, half cleric, half satyr, with
perfume by Renan, who reveals at once in the high falsetto of his approval what
he lacks, where is he deficient, where in his
case the Fates have wielded their dreadful shears
with, alas, so much surgical precision!21 That affronts my
taste as well as my patience: confronted with such sights, let those be patient
who have nothing to lose by them—such a picture infuriates me, such “lookers
on” make me angry with the “spectacle,” even more than the spectacle itself
(history itself, you understand). Seeing that, I fall unexpectedly into an Anacreontic mood. This nature, which gave the bull his
horns, the lion his chasm odonton [chasm of teeth], why did nature give me a foot? . . .
To kick with—by holy Anacreon!22—and not merely to run off,
but to kick apart these decrepit armchairs, this cowardly contemplation, this
lascivious acting like eunuchs in front of history, the flirting with ascetic
ideals, the Tartufferie [hypocrisy] in
the justice of impotence! I grant all honour to the ascetic ideal, insofar
as it is honest! So long as it believes in itself and does not play games
with us! But I can’t stand all these coquettish insects, with their insatiable
ambition to sniff out the infinite, until finally the infinite stinks of bugs.
I can’t stand these white sepulchres who treat
life as play acting. I can’t stand the tired and useless people, who wrap
themselves up in wisdom and gaze out “objectively.” I can’t stand the agitators
who dress themselves up as heroes, who wear a magic hat of ideals on heads
stuffed with straw. I can’t stand the ambitious artists, who like to present
themselves as ascetics and priests, but who are basically tragic clowns. And I
can’t stand these most recent speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who
nowadays roll their eyes around in a Christian-Aryan-Bourgeois way and seek to
inflame all the horned-animal elements among the people by abusing the cheapest
form of agitation, moral posturing, in a way that exhausts all my patience
(—the fact that every kind of spiritual fraud succeeds in
present-day Germany is the result of the absolutely undeniable and already tangible desolation of
the German spirit, whose cause I look for in an excessively strict diet limited
to newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, together with the
pre-condition for such a diet: first, a restricting nationalism and vanity,
that strong but narrow principle “Germany, Germany, over
everything,” as well as the paralysis agitans [trembling
palsy] of “modern ideas”).23 Today Europe is rich
and resourceful, above all, in ways of arousing people. Nothing seems to be
more important to possess than stimulants and firewater: hence, the monstrous
falsification of ideals, the most powerful firewater of the spirit. Hence also
the unfavourable, stinking, lying, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere.
I’d like to know how many shiploads of counterfeit idealism, of heroic costumes
and rattles full of nonsensical big words, how many tons of sugary spiritual
sympathy (its business name: la religion de la souffrance
[the religion of suffering]), how many stilts of “noble indignation” to assist
the spiritually flat-footed, and how many play actors of the
Christian moral ideal would have to be exported from Europe today so that its
air might smell cleaner once again. . . . Obviously, as far as this overproduction
is concerned, a new commercial possibility has opened up:
obviously there is new “business” to be made with small gods of ideals and
their accompanying “idealists”—people should not fail to hear this hint! Who
has the courage for it? We have it in our hands to “idealize”
the entire earth! . . . But why am I talking about courage? Only one thing is
necessary here, just the hand, an uninhibited, a very uninhibited hand.—
27
Enough! Enough!
Let’s leave these curiosities and complexities of the most modern spirit, which
inspire as much laughter as irritation. Our problem can do without them, the
problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal. What has that to do with yesterday
and today! I am going to approach these issues more fundamentally and more
forcefully in another connection (under the title On The History of European Nihilism. I refer to a work
which I am preparing: The Will to Power: An
Attempt To Re-evaluate all Values). What I have been dealing
with here is only the following—to establish that the ascetic ideal has, for
the time being, even in the most spiritual sphere, only one kind of true enemy
who can inflict harm, and that enemy is those who play-act this ideal—for they
awaken distrust. Everywhere else, where the spirit nowadays is strong,
powerful, and working without counterfeiting, it generally dispenses with the
ideal—the popular expression for this abstinence is “atheism,” except for its
will to truth. But this will, this remnant of the ideal is, if people wish to
believe me, that very ideal in its strongest, most spiritual formulation, thoroughly
esoteric, stripped of all its outer structures, and thus not so much a remnant,
as its kernel. Consequently, absolutely unconditional atheism (—and that’s the
only air we breathe, we more spiritual men of this age!) does not stand opposed
to this ideal, as it appears to do. It is much rather only one of its last
stages of development, one of its concluding forms and innerly logical
outcomes. It demands reverence, this catastrophe of two thousand years of
breeding for the truth which concludes by forbidding itself the lie of a faith in God. (The same process of development
in India, which was fully independent of Europe and therefore proof of something—this
same ideal forced things to a similar conclusion. The decisive point was
reached five centuries before the European calendar, with Buddha, or more precisely,
with the Sankhya philosophy. For this was
popularized by Buddha and made into a religion.) Putting the question as
forcefully as possible, what really triumphed over the Christian God? The
answer stands in my Gay Science, p. 290: “Christian morality
itself, the increasingly strict understanding of the idea of truthfulness, the
subtlety of the father confessor of the Christian conscience, transposed and
sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any
price. To look at nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and care of a
god, to interpret history in such a way as to honour divine reason, as a
constant testament to a moral world order and moral intentions, to interpret
one’s own experiences, as devout men have interpreted them for long enough, as
if everything was divine providence, everything was a sign, everything was
thought out and sent for the salvation of the soul out of love—now that’s over
and done with. That has conscience against it. Among more sensitive consciences
that counts as something indecent, dishonest, as lying, feminism, weakness,
cowardice. With this rigour, if with anything, we are good Europeans and heirs
to Europe’s longest and bravest overcoming of the self. All great things
destroy themselves by an act of self-cancellation. That’s what the law of life
wills, that law of the necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of
life—eventually the call always goes out to the lawmaker himself, “patere legem, quam
ipse tulisti” [submit to the law
which you yourself have established]. That’s the way Christianity was
destroyed as dogma by its own morality; that’s the way Christendom as morality
must now also be destroyed. We stand on the threshold of this event. After
Christian truthfulness has come to a series of conclusions, it will draw its
strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself. However, this will occur
when it poses the question: “What is the meaning of all will to truth?” Here I
move back again to my problem, to our problem, my unknown friends (—for I still
don’t know anything about friends): what sense would our whole being have if
not for the fact that in us that will to truth became aware of itself as a
problem? . . . Because this will to truth from now on is growing conscious of
itself, morality from now on is dying—there’s no doubt about that. That great spectacle
in one hundred acts, which remains reserved for the next two centuries in
Europe, that most fearful, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of
all spectacles . . .
28
If we leave
aside the ascetic ideal, then man, the animal man, has had no
meaning up to this point. His existence on earth has had no purpose. “Why man
at all?” was a question without an answer. The will for man
and earth was missing. Behind every great human destiny echoes as refrain an
even greater “in vain!” That’s just what the ascetic ideal means:
that something is missing, that a huge hole surrounds
man—he did not know how to justify himself to himself, to explain, to affirm;
he suffered from the problem of his
meaning. He also suffered in other ways as well: he was for the most part a pathological animal,
but the suffering itself was not his problem, rather the fact
that he lacked an answer to the question he screamed out, “Why this
suffering?” Man, the bravest animal, the one most accustomed to suffering, does
not deny suffering in itself; he desires it;
he seeks it out in person, provided that people show him a meaning for
it, a purpose of suffering. The curse that earlier spread itself
over men was not suffering, but the senselessness of suffering—and
the ascetic ideal offered him a meaning! The ascetic ideal has been the
only meaning offered up to this point. Any meaning is better than no meaning at
all; however one looks at it, the ascetic ideal has so far been the “faute de mieux” [for
lack of something better] par excellence. In it suffering was interpreted,
the huge hole appeared filled in, the door shut against all suicidal nihilism.
The interpretation undoubtedly brought new suffering with it—more profound,
more inner, more poisonous, and more life-gnawing suffering; it brought all
suffering under the perspective of guilt. . . . But
nevertheless—with it man was saved. He had a meaning;
from that point on he was no longer like a leaf in the wind, a toy ball of
nonsense, of “without sense”; he could now will something—at
first it didn’t matter where, why, or how he willed: the will itself
was saved. We simply cannot conceal from ourselves what is
really expressed by that total will which received its direction from the
ascetic ideal: this hate against what is human, even more against animality, even more against material things—this
abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty,
this longing for the beyond away from all appearance, change, becoming, death,
desire, even longing itself—all this means, let’s have the courage to
understand this, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a revolt
against the most fundamental preconditions of life—but it is and remains a will!
. . . And to finish up by repeating what I said at the beginning: man will sooner
will nothingness than not will
. . .
ENDNOTES
1Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a work written by
Nietzsche between 1883 and 1885. [Back to Text]
2Luther: Martin Luther (1483-1546), German monk and
university professor whose revolutionary break with the Catholic Church
launched the Reformation; Die Meistersinger: The
Mastersingers of Nuremburg, an opera by Richard Wagner, first performed in
1868. [Back to Text]
3Parsifal: the hero of Wagner’s
opera of the same name, first performed in
1882. [Back to Text]
4Schopenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860), influential German philosopher, whose work emphasized the
importance of the Will. [Back to
Text]
5Stendhal: pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842), a French novelist whom Nietzsche
admired for his psychological acuity. [Back to Text]
6Pygmalion In
classical mythology a sculptor who carved a woman so lifelike and beautiful,
that he fell in love with it. [Back to
Text]
7Ixion: In Greek mythology a mortal man who tried to
seduce Zeus’ wife, Hera, and was punished in Hades by being bound on a fiery
wheel which was always spinning. [Back to Text]
8The Latin here
is a reworking of the famous legal saying “Fiat
Justitia et pereat mundus” [Let justice be done, though the world perish].
The saying is attributed to Ferdinand I (1503-1564), the Holy Roman Emperor,
who adopted it as his motto. [Back to Text]
9Piazza San Marco: the main city square in
Venice. [Back to Text]
10. . . ressentiment: Nietzsche introduces this
important term in the First Essay of Genealogy of Morals, in
Section 10: a short definition is as follows: “deep-seated resentment,
frustration, and hostility, accompanied by a sense of being powerless to
express these feelings directly” (Merriam-Webster). [Back to Text]
11. . . Eugene Dühring (1833-1921), a German
philosopher and socialist who attacked Marxism, Christianity, and Judaism. [Back to Text]
12The reference
to Shakespeare’s Squire Christopher [Junker Christoph] may be (as Walter Kaufmann suggests) an
allusion to The Taming of the Shrew, where the hero, Petruchio refers to a vegetarian diet (see Kaufmann’s
translation of Genealogy of Morals, 131); or it may be (as Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen propose)
an allusion to Twelfth Night, where Sir Andrew Aguecheek (called Junker Christoph in
one German translation of the play) comments on his eating habits. See the
Clark and Swensen translation of Genealogy
of Morality, 156. Nietzsche refers to Junker Christoph’s meat-eating
habits again later on in this section. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648)
was a disastrous European conflict which began as a fight over religion. [Back to Text]
13Hesychasts: a religious tradition in
the Eastern Orthodox Church which emphasizes an inner spiritual retreat and
abandonment of sense experience. St Theresa (1515-1582), a
famous Spanish mystic. [Back to
Text]
14Shankara (788?-820), Indian
philosopher who played a formative role in the historical development of Hinduism. Paul Deussen (1845-1919), an important German scholar
of Indian religion. [Back to
Text]
15Geulincx: Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669), a Flemish philosopher. [Back to Text]
16Thomas Moore (1779-1852), an Irish
poet; Dr. Gwinner: Wilhelm von Gwinner (1825-1917), German lawyer and civil servant. Thayer:
Alexander Thayer (1817-1897). [Back to
Text]
17Taine: Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-1893), a French historian; Leopold Ranke:
(1795 to 1886) a very famous and
influential German historian. [Back to Text]
18. . . no other”: This is one of Martin
Luther’s most famous quotations, allegedly his reply when asked to take back
his criticisms of the church, a response which launched the Reformation in
1521. [Back to Text]
19Copernicus: Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473-1543), the Polish astronomer and monk who produced a scientifically based
theory of a sun-centred solar system. [Back to Text]
20Xaver Doudan: Ximénès Doudan (1800-1872), a French writer. [Back to Text]
21Renan: Ernest Renan (1823-1892), French writer and
philosopher, particularly famous for his Life of Jesus. [Back to Text]
22Anacreon: (born c. 570 BC), Greek
lyric poet famous for his drinking songs. [Back to Text]
23“Germany,
Germany, over everything”: the opening lines of the German national anthem
“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles”; the lyrics were written in 1841 to music by Haydn.
The song was adopted as the national anthem in 1922. [Back to Text]
[Table of Contents for Genealogy of Morals]
[Back
to johnstonia Home
Page]
Page loads on johnstonia web files
20,785,275 
View Stats