The Will to Power. Friedrich NietzscheЧитать онлайн книгу.

      52. If nature have no pity on the degenerate, it is not therefore immoral: the growth of physiological and moral evils in the human race, is rather the result of morbid and unnatural morality. The sensitiveness of the majority of men is both morbid and unnatural. Why is it that mankind is corrupt in a moral and physiological respect? The body degenerates if one organ is unsound. The right of altruism cannot be traced to physiology, neither can the right to help and to the equality of fate: these are all premiums for degenerates and failures. There can be no solidarity in a society containing unfruitful, unproductive, and destructive members, who, by the bye, are bound to have offspring even more degenerate than they are themselves.

      53. Decadence exercises a profound and perfectly unconscious influence, even over the ideals of science: all our sociology is a proof of this pro position, and it has yet to be reproached with the fact that it has only the experience of society in the process of decay, and inevitably takes its own decaying instincts as the basis of sociological judgment. The declining vitality of modern Europe formulates its social ideals in its decaying instincts: and these ideals are all so like those of old and effete races, that they might be mistaken for one another. The gregarious instinct, then, now a sovereign power, is something totally different from the instinct of an aristocratic society: and the value of the sum depends upon the value of the units constituting it. ... The whole of our sociology knows no other instinct than that of the herd, of a multitude of mere ciphers of which every cipher has "equal rights," and where it is a virtue to be naught. . . . The valuation with which the various forms of society are judged today is absolutely the same with that which assigns a higher place to peace than to war: but this principle is contrary to the teaching of biology, and is itself a mere outcome of decadent life. Life is a result of war, society is a means to war. . . . Mr. Herbert Spencer was a decadent in biology, as also in morality (he regarded the triumph of altruism as a desideratum!!!).

      54. After thousands of years of error and confusion, it is my good fortune to have rediscovered the road which leads to a yea and to a nay. I teach people to say nay in the face of all that makes for weakness and exhaustion. I teach people to say yea in the face of all that makes for strength, that preserves strength, and justifies the feeling of strength. Up to the present, neither the one nor the other has been taught; but rather virtue, disinterestedness, pity, and even the negation of life. All these are values proceeding from exhausted people. After having pondered over the physiology of exhaustion for some time, I was led to the question: to what extent the judgments of exhausted people had percolated into the world of values. The result at which I arrived was as startling as it could possibly be even for one like my self who was already at home in many a strange world: I found that all prevailing values that is to say, all those which had gained ascendancy over humanity, or at least over its tamer portions, could be traced back to the judgment of exhausted people. Under the cover of the holiest names, I found the most destructive tendencies; people had actually given the name "God" to all that renders weak, teaches weakness, and infects with weakness. ... I found that the "good man" was a form of self-affirmation on the part of decadence. That virtue which Schopenhauer still pro claimed as superior to all, and as the most fundamental of all virtues; even that same pity I recognized as more dangerous than any vice. Nihilism. Deliberately to thwart the law of selection among species, and their natural means of purging their stock of degenerate members this, up to my time, had been the greatest of all virtues. . . . One should do honor to the fatality which says to the feeble: "perish! " The opposing of this fatality, the botching of mankind and the allowing of it to putrefy, was given the name "God." One shall not take the name of the Lord one s God in vain. . . . The race is corrupted not by its vices, but by its ignorance: it is corrupted because it has not recognized exhaustion as exhaustion: physiological misunderstandings are the cause of all evil. Virtue is our greatest misunderstanding. Problem: how were the exhausted able to make the laws of values? In other words, how did they who are the last, come to power? . . . How did the instincts of the animal man ever get to stand on their heads? . . .

      4. THE CRISIS: NIHILISM AND THE IDEA OF RECURRENCE.

      55. Extreme positions are not relieved by more moderate ones, but by extreme opposite positions. And thus the belief in the utter immorality of nature, and in the absence of all purpose and sense, are psychologically necessary attitudes when the belief in God and in an essentially moral order of things is no longer tenable. Nihilism now appears, not because the sorrows of existence are greater than they were formerly, but because, in a general way, people have grown suspicious of the "meaning" which might be given to evil and even to existence. One interpretation has been overthrown: but since it was held to be the interpretation, it seems as though there were no meaning in existence at all, as though every thing were in vain. It yet remains to be shown that this " in vain! " is the character of present nihilism. The mistrust of our former valuations has increased to such an extent that it has led to the question: are not all values merely allurements prolonging the duration of the comedy, without, however, bringing the unraveling any closer? The "long period of time" which has culminated in an "in vain," with out either goal or purpose, is the most paralyzing of thoughts, more particularly when one sees that one is duped without, however, being able to resist being duped. Let us imagine this thought in its worst form: existence, as it is, without either a purpose or a goal, but inevitably recurring, without an end in nonentity: "eternal recurrence." This is the extremest form of nihilism: nothing (purposelessness) eternal! European form of Buddhism: the energy of knowledge and of strength drives us to such a belief. It is the most scientific of all hypotheses. We deny final purposes. If existence had a final purpose it would have reached it. It should be understood that what is being aimed at, here, is a contradiction of pantheism: for "everything perfect, divine, eternal," also leads to the belief in eternal recurrence. Question: has this pantheistic and affirmative attitude to all things also been made possible by morality? At bottom only the moral God has been overcome. Is there any sense in imagining a God "beyond good and evil"? Would pantheism in this sense be possible? Do we withdraw the idea of purpose from the process, and affirm the process notwithstanding? This were so if, within that process, something were attained every moment and always the same thing. Spinoza won an affirmative position of this sort, in the sense that every moment, according to him, has a logical necessity: and he triumphed by means of his fundamentally logical instinct over a like conformation of the world. But his case is exceptional. If every fundamental trait of character, which lies beneath every act, and which finds expression in every act, were recognized by the individual as his fundamental trait of character, this individual would be driven to regard every moment of his existence in general, triumphantly as good. It would simply be necessary for that fundamental trait of character to be felt in oneself as something good, valuable, and pleasurable. Now, in the case of those men and classes of men who were treated with violence and oppressed by their fellows, morality saved life from despair and from the leap into nonentity: for impotence in relation to mankind and not in relation to nature is what generates the most desperate bitterness towards existence. Morality treated the powerful, the violent, and the "masters" in general, as enemies against whom the common man must be protected that is to say, emboldened, strengthened. Morality has therefore always taught the most profound hatred and contempt of the fundamental trait of character of all rulers i.e. their will to power. To suppress, to deny, and to decompose this morality, would mean to regard this most thoroughly detested instinct with the reverse of the old feeling and valuation. If the sufferer and the oppressed man were to lose his belief in his right to contemn the will to power, his position would be desperate. This would be so if the trait above-mentioned were essential to life, in which case it would follow that even that will to morality was only a cloak to this "will to power," as are also even that hatred and contempt. The oppressed man would then perceive that he stands on the same platform with the oppressor, and that he has no individual privilege, nor any higher rank than the latter. On the contrary! There is nothing on earth which can have any value, if it have not a modicum of power granted, of course, that life itself is the will to power. Morality protected the botched and bungled against nihilism, in that it gave every one of them infinite worth, metaphysical worth, and classed them altogether in one order which did not correspond with that of worldly power and order of rank: it taught submission, humility, etc. Admitting that the belief in this morality be destroyed, the botched and the bungled would no longer have any comfort, and would perish. This perishing seems like self-annihilation, like an instinctive selection of that which must be destroyed.