The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality. Nothing but imaginary causes (“God,” “soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will”—for that matter, “unfree will”), nothing but imaginary effects (“sin,” “redemption,” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginary beings (“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; no trace of any concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (nothing but self-misunderstandings, interpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings—for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus—with the aid of the sign language of the religio-moral idiosyncrasy: “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,” “temptation by the devil,” “the presence of God”); an imaginary teleology (“the kingdom of God,” “the Last Judgment,” “eternal life”).

  This world of pure fiction is vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. Once the concept of “nature” had been invented as the opposite of “God,” “natural” had to become a synonym of “reprehensible”: this whole world of fiction is rooted in hatred of the natural (of reality!); it is the expression of a profound vexation at the sight of reality.