I. Critique of Religion
1. Genesis of Religions
142 (Jan.-Fall 1888)
Toward a critique of the law-book of Manu.-- The whole book is founded on the holy lie. Was the well-being of mankind the inspiration of this system? Was this species of man, who believes in the interestedness of every action, interested or not in imposing this system? To improve mankind--how is this intention inspired? Where is the concept of improvement derived from?
We find a species of man, the priestly, which feels itself to be the norm, the high point and the supreme expression of the type man: this species derives the concept "improvement" from itself. It believes in its own superiority, it wills itself to be superior in fact: the origin of the holy lie is the will to power--
Establishment of rule: to this end, the rule of those concepts that place a non plus ultra of power with the priesthood. Power through the lie--in the knowledge that one does not possess it physically, militarily--the lie as a supplement to power, a new concept of "truth."
It is a mistake to suppose an unconscious and naive development here, a kind of self-deception-- Fanatics do not invent such carefully thought-out systems of oppression-- The most cold-blooded reflection was at work here; the same kind of reflection as a Plato applied when he imagined his "Republic." "He who wills the end must will the means"--all lawgivers have been clear in their minds regarding this politician's insight.
We possess the classic model in specifically Aryan forms: we may therefore hold the best-endowed and most reflective species of man responsible for the most fundamental lie that has ever been told-- That lie has been copied almost everywhere: Aryan influence has corrupted all the world--
143 (March-June 1888)
A lot is said today about the Semitic spirit of the New Testament: but what is called Semitic is merely priestly--and in the racially purest Aryan law-book, in Manu, this kind of "Semitism," i.e., the spirit of the priest, is worse than anywhere else.
The development of the Jewish priestly state is not original: they learned the pattern in Babylon: the pattern is Aryan. When, later on, the same thing became dominant in a Europe with a preponderance of Germanic blood, this was in accordance with the spirit of the ruling race: a great atavism. The Germanic Middle Ages aimed at a revival of the Aryan order of castes.
Mohammedanism in turn learned from Christianity: the employment of the "beyond" as an instrument of punishment.
The pattern of an unchanging community with priests at its head--this oldest of the great cultural products of Asia in the realm of organization--was bound to invite reflection and imitation in every respect. Again Plato: but above all the Egyptians.
144 (1885)
Moralities and religions are the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man, provided one possesses a superfluity of creative forces and can assert one's will over long periods of time--in the form of legislation, religions, and customs.
145 (1884-1888)
What an affirmative Aryan religion, the product of the ruling class, looks like: the law-book of Manu. (The deification of the feeling of power in Brahma: interesting that it arose among the warrior caste and was only transferred to the priests.)
What an affirmative Semitic religion, the product of the ruling class, looks like: the law-book of Mohammed, the older parts of the Old Testament. (Mohammedanism, as a religion for men, is deeply contemptuous of the sentimentality and mendaciousness of Christianity--which it feels to be a woman's religion.)
What a negative Semitic religion, the product of an oppressed class, looks like: the New Testament (--in Indian-Aryan terms: a chandala religion).
What a negative Aryan religion looks like, grown up among the ruling orders: Buddhism.
It is quite in order that we possess no religion of oppressed Aryan races, for that is a contradiction: a master race is either on top or it is destroyed.
151 (1885-1886)
Religions are destroyed by belief in morality. The Christian moral God is not tenable: hence "atheism"--as if there could be no other kinds of god.
Similarly, culture is destroyed by belief in morality. For when one discovers the necessary conditions out of which alone it can grow, one no longer wants it (Buddhism).
2. History of Christianity
168 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
--The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached--and against which he taught his disciples to fight--
169 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
A god who died for our sins: redemption through faith; resurrection after death--all these are counterfeits of true Christianity for which that disastrous wrong-headed fellow [Paul] must be held responsible.
The exemplary life consists of love and humility; in a fullness of heart that does not exclude even the lowliest; in a formal repudiation of maintaining one's rights, of self-defense, of victory in the sense of personal triumph; in faith in blessedness here on earth, in spite of distress, opposition and death; in reconciliation; in the absence of anger; not wanting to be rewarded; not being obliged to anyone; the completest spiritual-intellectual independence; a very proud life beneath the will to a life of poverty and service.
After the church had let itself be deprived of the entire Christian way of life and had quite specifically sanctioned life under the state, that form of life that Jesus had combatted and condemned, it had to find the meaning of Christianity in something else: in faith in unbelievable things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. The concept "sin," "forgiveness," "reward"--all quite unimportant and virtually excluded from primitive Christianity--now comes into the foreground.
An appalling mishmash of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judging and condemning; order of rank, etc.
191 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
Christians have never put into practice the acts Jesus prescribed for them, and the impudent chatter about "justification by faith" and its unique and supreme significance is only the consequence of the church's lack of courage and will to confess the works which Jesus demanded.
The Buddhist acts differently from the non-Buddhist; the Christian acts as all the world does and possesses a Christianity of ceremonies and moods.
The profound and contemptible mendaciousness of Christianity in Europe--: we really are becoming the contempt of the Arabs, Hindus, Chinese-- Listen to the speeches of German's first statesman on what has really occupied Europe for forty years now--listen to the language, the court-chaplain Tartuffery.
3. Christian Ideals
II. Critique of Morality
1. Origin of Moral Valuations
2. The Herd
3. General Remarks on Morality
4. How Virtue is Made to Dominate
5. The Moral Ideal
A. Critique of Ideals
338 (Jan.-Fall 1888)
What is the counterfeiting aspect of morality?-- It pretends to know something, namely what "good and evil" is. That means wanting to know why mankind is here, its goal, its destiny. That means wanting to know that mankind has a goal, a destiny--
339 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
The very obscure and arbitrary idea that mankind has a single task to perform, that it is moving as a whole towards some goal, is still very young. Perhaps we shall be rid of it again before it becomes a "fixed idea"--
This mankind is not a whole: it is an inextricable multiplicity of ascending and descending life-processes--it does not have a youth followed by maturity and finally by old age; the strata are twisted and entwined together--and in a few millennia there may still be even younger types of man than we can show today. Decadence, on the other hand, belongs to all epochs of mankind: refuse and decaying matter are found everywhere; it is one of life's processes to exclude the forms of decline and decay.
*
When Christian prejudice was a power, this question did not exist: meaning lay in the salvation of the individual soul; whether mankind could endure for a long or a short time did not come into consideration. The best Christians desired that it should end as soon as possible--concerning that which was needful to the individual there was no doubt--
The task of every present individual was the same as for a future individual in any kind of future: value, meaning, domain of values were fixed, unconditional, eternal, one with God-- That which deviated from this eternal type was sinful, devilish, condemned--
For each soul, the gravitational center of valuation was placed within itself: salvation or damnation! The salvation of the immortal soul! Extremest form of personalization-- For every soul there was only one perfecting; only one ideal; only one way to redemption-- Extremest form of equality of rights, tied to an optical magnification of one's own importance to the point of insanity-- Nothing but insanely important souls, revolving about themselves with a frightful fear--
No man believes now in this absurd self-inflation: and we have sifted our wisdom through a sieve of contempt. Nevertheless, the optical habit of seeking the value of man in his approach to an ideal man remains undisturbed: fundamentally, one upholds the perspective of personalization as well as equality of rights before the ideal. In summa: one believes one knows what the ultimate desideratum is with regard to the ideal man--
This belief, however, is only the consequence of a dreadful deterioration through the Christian ideal: as one at once discovers with every careful examination of the "ideal type." One believes one knows, first that an approach to one type is desirable; secondly, that one knows what this type is like; thirdly, that every deviation from this type is a regression, an inhibition, a loss of force and power in man--
To dream of conditions in which this perfect man will be in the vast majority: even our socialists, even the Utilitarians have not gone farther than this.--
In this way a goal seems to have entered the development of mankind: at any rate, the belief in progress towards the ideal is the only form in which a goal in history is thought of today. In summa: one has transferred the arrival of the "kingdom of God" into the future, on earth, in human form--but fundamentally one has held fast to the belief in the old ideal--
B. Critique of the "Good Man," the Saint, etc.
352 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
The concept of power, whether of a god or of a man, always includes both the ability to help and the ability to harm. Thus it is with the Arabs; thus with the Hebrews. Thus with all strong races.
It is a fateful step when one separates the power for the one from the power for the other into a dualism-- In this way, morality becomes the poisoner of life--
C. Disagreement of the So-Called Evil Qualities
377 (1883-1888)
Falsity.--Every sovereign instinct has the others for its tools, retainers, flatterers: it never lets itself be called by its ugly name: and it countenances no praise in which it is not also praised indirectly. All praise and blame in general crystallizes around every sovereign instinct to form a rigorous order and etiquette. This is one of the causes of falsity.
Every instinct that struggles for mastery but finds itself under a yoke requires for itself, as strengthening and as support for its self-esteem, all the beautiful names and recognized values: so, as a rule, it ventures forth under the name of the "master" it is combatting and from whom it wants to get free (e.g., the fleshly desires or the desires for power under the dominion of Christian values).-- This is the other cause of falsity.
Perfect naïveté reigns in both cases: the falsity does not become conscious. It is a sign of a broken instinct when man sees the driving force and its "expression" ("the mask") as separate things--a sign of self-contradiction, and victorious far less often. Absolute innocence in bearing, word, affect, a "good conscience" in falsity, the certainty with which one grasps the greatest and most splendid words and postures--all this is necessary for victory.
In the other case: when one has extreme clear-sightedness one needs the genius of the actor and tremendous training in self-control if one is to achieve victory. That is why priests are the most skillful conscious hypocrites; then princes, whom rank and ancestry have endowed with a kind of acting ability. Thirdly, men of society, diplomats. Fourthly, women.
Basic idea: falsity seems so profound, so omnisided, the will so clearly opposed to direct self-knowledge and the calling of things by their right names, that it is very highly probable that truth, will to truth is really something else and only a disguise. (The need for faith is the greatest brake-shoe on truthfulness.)
380 (Spring-Fall 1887)
1. Systematic falsification of history; so that it may provide the proof of moral valuation:
a. decline of a people and corruption;
b. rise of a people and virtue;
c. zenith of a people ("its culture") as a consequence of moral elevation.
2. Systematic falsification of great human beings, the great creators, the great epochs:
one desires that faith should be the distinguishing mark of the great: but slackness, skepticism, "immorality," the right to throw off a faith, belong to greatness (Caesar, also Homer, Aristophanes, Leonardo, Goethe). One always suppresses the main thing, their "freedom of will"--
382 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)
Schopenhauer interpreted high intellectuality as liberation from the will; he did not want to see the freedom from moral prejudice which is part of the emancipation of the great spirit, the typical immorality of the genius; he artfully posited the only thing he held in honor, the moral value of "depersonalization," as the condition of spiritual activity, of "objective" viewing. "Truth," even in art, appears after the withdrawal of the will--
I see a fundamentally different valuation cutting across all the moral idiosyncrasies: I know nothing of such an absurd distinction between "genius" and the moral and immoral world of the will. The moral man is a lower species than the immoral, a weaker species; indeed--he is a type in regard to morality, but not a type in himself; a copy, a good copy at best--the measure of his value lies outside him. I assess a man by the quantum of power and abundance of his will: not by its enfeeblement and extinction; I regard a philosophy which teaches denial of the will as a teaching of defamation and slander-- I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage; I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto--
The high point of the spirit imagined by Schopenhauer was to attain to the recognition that there is no meaning in anything, in short, to recognize what the good man already instinctively does-- He denies the possibility of a higher kind of intellect--he took his insight for a non plus ultra. Here spirituality is placed much lower than goodness; its highest value (e.g., as art) would be to urge and prepare moral conversion: absolute domination of moral values.--
Beside Schopenhauer I would characterize Kant: nothing Greek, absolutely antihistorical (his passage on the French Revolution) and a moral fanatic (Goethe's passage on radical evil). Saintliness was in the background in his case, too.
I need a critique of the saint--
Hegel's value. "Passion."--
Shopkeeper's philosophy of Mr. Spencer; complete absence of an ideal, except that of the mediocre man.
Fundamental instinctive principle of all philosophers and historians and psychologists: everything of value in man, art, history, science, religion, technology must be proved to be of moral value, morally conditioned, in aim, means and outcome. Everything understood in the light of the supreme value: e.g., Rousseau's question concerning civilization: "Does man become better through it?"--an amusing question, since the reverse is obvious and is precisely that which speaks in favor of civilization.
383 (March-June 1888)
Religious morality.-- Affect, great desire, the passion for power, love, revenge, possessions--: moralists want to extinguish and uproot them, to "purify" the soul of them.
The logic is: the desires often produce great misfortune--consequently they are evil, reprehensible. A man must free himself from them: otherwise he cannot be a good man--
This is the same logic as: "if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.: In the particular case in which that dangerous "innocent from the country," the founder of Christianity, recommended this practice to his disciples, the case of sexual excitation, the consequence is, unfortunately, not only the loss of an organ but the emasculation of a man's character-- And the same applies to the moralist's madness that demands, instead of the restraining of the passions, their extirpation. Its conclusion is always: only the castrated man is a good man.
Instead of taking into service the great sources of strength, those impetuous torrents of the soul that are so often dangerous and overwhelming, and economizing them, this most shortsighted and pernicious mode of thought, the moral mode of thought, wants to make them dry up.
384 (1885-1886)
Overcoming of the affects?-- No, if what is implied is their weakening and extirpation. But putting them into service: which may also mean subjecting them to a protracted tyranny (not only as an individual, but as a community, race, etc.). At last they are confidently granted freedom again: they love us as good servants and go voluntarily wherever our best interests lie.
385 (Spring-Fall 1887)
Moral intolerance is an expression of weakness in a man: he is afraid of his own "immorality," he must deny his strongest drives because he does not yet know how to employ them. Thus the most fruitful regions of the earth remain uncultivated the longest:-- the force is lacking that could here become master--
386 (Spring-Fall 1887)
There are very naive people and men who believe that continual fine weather is something desirable: even today they believe, in rebus moralibus, [Moral matters.] that the "good man," and nothing but the "good man," is something desirable--and that the course of human evolution is directed toward the survival of the "good man" only (and that one must bend all one's efforts in that direction--). This is in the highest degree an uneconomic thought and, as stated, the acme of naïveté, nothing but the expression of the pleasing effect produced by the "good man" (he arouses no fear, he permits one to relax, he gives what one is able to take).
From a superior viewpoint one desires the contrary: the ever-increasing dominion of evil, the growing emancipation of man from the narrow and fear-ridden bonds of morality, the increase of force, in order to press the mightiest natural powers--the affects--into service.
387 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
The whole conception of an order of rank among the passions: as if the right and normal thing were for one to be guided by reason--with the passions as abnormal, dangerous, semi-animal, and, moreover, so far as their aim is concerned, nothing other than desires for pleasure--
Passion is degraded (1) as if it were only in unseemly cases, and not necessarily and always, the motive force; (2) in as much as it has for its object something of no great value, amusement--
The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason--
388 (Spring-Fall 1887)
How, under the impress of the ascetic morality of depersonalization, it was precisely the affects of love, goodness, pity, even those of justice, magnanimity, heroism, that were necessarily misunderstood:
It is richness in personality, abundance in oneself, overflowing and bestowing, instinctive good health and affirmation of oneself, that produce great sacrifice and great love: it is strong and godlike selfhood from which these affects grow, just as surely as did the desire to become master, encroachment, the inner certainty of having a right to everything. What according to common ideas are opposite dispositions are rather one disposition; and if one is not firm and brave within oneself, one has nothing to bestow and cannot stretch our one's hand to protect and support--
How was one able so to transform these instincts that man thought valuable that which was directed against his self? when he sacrificed his self to another self. Oh the psychological wretchedness and mendaciousness that has hitherto laid down the law in the church and in church-infected philosophy!
If man is sinful through and through, then he ought only to hate himself. Fundamentally, he would have to treat his fellow men on the same basis as he treats himself; charity needs to be justified--its justification lies in the fact that God has commanded it.-- It follows from this, that all the natural instincts of man (the instinct of love, etc.) appear to be forbidden in themselves and only after they have been denied are they restored to their rights on the basis of obedience to God--Pascal, the admirable logician of Christianity, went so far! consider his relations to his sister. "Not to make oneself love" seemed Christian to him.
D. Critique of the Words: Improvement, Perfecting, Elevation
398 (Jan.-Fall 1888)
What I want to make clear by all the means in my power:
a. that there is no worse confusion than the confusion of breeding with taming: which is what has been done-- Breeding, as I understand it, is a means of storing up the tremendous forces of mankind so that the generations can build upon the work of their forefathers--not only outwardly, but inwardly, organically growing out of them and becoming something stronger--
b. that it is extraordinarily dangerous to believe that mankind as a whole will progress and grow stronger if individuals become flabby, equal, average-- Mankind is an abstraction: the goal of breeding, even in the case of a single individual, can only be the stronger man (--the man without breeding is weak, extravagant, unstable--).
6. Further Considerations for a Critique of Morality
III. Critique of Philosophy
1. General Observations
410 (1885-1886)
For the Preface
Deeply mistrustful of the dogmas of epistemology, I loved to look now out of this window, now out of that; I guarded against settling down with any of these dogmas, considered them harmful--and finally: is it likely that a tool is able to criticize its own fitness?-- What I noticed was rather that no epistemological skepticism or dogmatism had ever arisen free from ulterior motives--that it acquires a value of the second rank as soon as one has considered what it was that compelled the adoption of this point of view.
Fundamental insight: Kant as well as Hegel and Schopenhauer--the skeptical-epochistic attitude as will as the historicizing, as well as the pessimistic--have a moral origin. I saw no one who had ventured a critique of moral value feelings: and I soon turned my back one the meager attempts made to arrive at a description of the origin of these feelings (as by the English and German Darwinists).
How can Spinoza's position, his denial and rejection of moral value judgments, be explained? (It was one consequence of his theodicy!)
413 (1885)
Ulterior moral motives have hitherto most obstructed the course of philosophy.
423 (March-June 1888)
Theory and practice.-- Fateful distinction, as if there were an actual drive for knowledge that, without regard to questions of usefulness and harm, went blindly for the truth; and then, separate from this, the whole world of practical interests--
I tried to show, on the other hand, what instincts have been active behind all these pure theoreticians--how they have all, under the spell of their instincts, gone fatalistically for something that was "truth" for them--for them and only for them. The conflict between different systems, including that between epistemological scruples, is a conflict between quite definite instincts (forms of vitality, decline, classes, races, etc.).
The so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer: the senses, the memory, the instincts, etc. have developed as a consequence of this drive. The quickest possible reduction of the phenomena, economy, the accumulation of the spoils of knowledge (i.e., of world appropriated and made manageable)--
Morality is such a curious science because it is in the highest degree practical: so that the position of pure knowledge, scientific integrity, is at once abandoned as soon as the claims of morality must be answered. Morality says: I need many answers--reasons, arguments; scruples can come afterward, or not at all--.
"How should one act?"-- If one considers that one is dealing with a sovereignly developed type that has "acted" for countless millennia, and in which everything has become instinct, expediency, automatism, fatality, then the urgency of this moral question must actually seem ridiculous.
"How should one act?"-- Morality has always been a misunderstanding: in reality, a species fated to act in this or that fashion wanted to justify itself, by dictating its norm as the universal norm--
"How should one act?" is not a cause but an effect. Morality follows, the ideal comes at the end.
--On the other hand, the appearance of moral scruples (in other words: the becoming-conscious of the values by which one acts) betrays a certain sickliness; strong ages and peoples do not reflect on their rights, on the principles on which they act, on their instincts and reasons. Becoming-conscious is a sign that real morality, i.e., instinctive certainty in actions, is going to the devil-- Every time a new world of consciousness is created, the moralists are a sign of damage, impoverishment, disorganization.-- The deeply instinctive are shy of logicizing duties: among them are found Pyrrhic opponents of dialectics and of knowability in general-- A virtue is refuted with a "for"--
Thesis: the appearance of moralists belongs to an age in which morality is coming to an end.
Thesis: the moralist disintegrates the moral instincts, however much he may suppose himself to be their restorer.
Thesis: that which really drives the moralist is not the moral instincts but the instincts of decadence translated into the formulas of morality-- (he regards it as corruption when the instincts become uncertain).
Thesis: the instincts of decadence, which, through the moralists, want to become master over the instinctive morality of strong races and ages, are
1. the instincts of the weak and underprivileged;
2. the instincts of the exceptions, the solitaries, the abandoned, of the abortus
[Abortion.] in what is lofty and what is petty.
3. the instincts of those habituated to suffering, who need a noble interpretation
of their condition and therefore must know as little as possible about physiology.
2. Critique of Greek Philosophy
428 (March-June 1888)
How far psychologists have been corrupted by the moral idiosyncrasy:--not one of the ancient philosophers had the courage for a theory of the "unfree will" (i.e., for a theory that denies morality);--no one had the courage to define the typical element in pleasure, every sort of pleasure ("happiness") as the feeling of power: for to take pleasure in power was considered immoral;--no one had the courage to conceive virtue as a consequence of immorality (of a will to power) in the service of the species (or of the race or polis), for the will to power was considered immorality.
In the entire evolution of morality, truth never appears: all the conceptual elements employed are fictions; all the psychologica accepted are falsifications; all the forms of logic dragged into this realm of lies are sophistries. What distinguishes moral philosophers themselves is a complete absence of cleanliness and intellectual self-discipline: they take "beautiful feelings" for arguments: they regard their "heaving bosom" as the bellows of divinity-- Moral philosophy is the scabrous period in the history of the spirit.
The first great example: in the name of morality, under the patronage of morality, an unheard-of wrong was perpetrated, in fact a piece of decadence in every respect. One cannot insist too strongly upon the fact that the great Greek philosophers represent the decadence of every kind of Greek excellence and make it contagious-- "Virtue" made completely abstract was the greatest seduction to make oneself abstract: i.e., to detach oneself.
It is a very remarkable moment: the Sophists verge upon the first critique of morality, the first insight into morality:--they juxtapose the multiplicity (the geographical relativity) of the moral value judgments;--they let it be known that every morality can be dialectically justified; i.e., they divine that all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical--a proposition later proved on the grand scale by the ancient philosophers, from Plato onwards (down to Kant);--they postulate the first truth that a "morality-in-itself," a "good-in-itself" do not exist, that it is a swindle to talk of "truth" in this field.
Where was intellectual integrity in those days?
The Greek culture of the Sophists had developed out of all the Greek instincts; it belongs to the culture of the Periclean age as necessarily as Plato does not: it has its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of the old philosophy; it finds expression in, e.g., the high culture of Thucydides. And--it has ultimately shown itself to be right: every advance in epistemological and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists-- Our contemporary way of thinking is to a great extent Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean: it suffices to say Protagorean, because Protagoras represented a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus.
(Plato: a great Cagliostro--remember how Epicurus judged him; how Timon, the friend of Pyrrho, judged him--— Is Plato's integrity beyond question?-- But we know at least that he wanted to have taught as absolute truth what he himself did not regard as even conditionally true: namely, the separate existence and separate immortality of "souls.")
430 (March-June 1888)
The great rationality of all education in morality has always been that one tried to attain to the certainty of an instinct: so that neither good intentions nor good means had to enter consciousness as such. As the soldier exercises, so should man learn to act. In fact, this unconsciousness belongs to any kind of perfection: even the mathematician employs his combinations unconsciously--
What, then, is the significance of the reaction of Socrates, who recommended dialectics as the road to virtue and made mock when morality did not know how to justify itself logically?-- As if this were not part of its value--without consciousness it is no good--
Positing proofs as the presupposition for personal excellence in virtue signified nothing less than the disintegration of Greek instincts. They are themselves types of disintegration, all these great "virtuous men" and word-spinners.
In praxi, this means that moral judgments are torn from their conditionality, in which they have grown and alone possess any meaning, from their Greek and Greek-political ground and soil, to be denaturalized under the pretense of sublimation. The great concepts "good" and "just" are severed from the presuppositions to which they belong and, as liberated "ideas," become objects of dialectic. One looks for truth in them, one takes them for entities or signs of entities: one invents a world where they are at home, where they originate--
In summa: the mischief has already reached its climax in Plato-- And then one had need to invent the abstractly perfect man as well:--good, just, wise, a dialectician--in short, the scarecrow of the ancient philosopher: a plant removed from all soil; a humanity without any particular regulating instincts; a virtue that "proves" itself with reasons. The perfectly absurd "individuum" in itself! unnaturalness of the first water--
In short, the consequence of the denaturalization of moral values was the creation of a degenerate type of man--"the good man," "the happy man," "the wise man."-- Socrates represents a moment of the profoundest perversity in the history of values.
440 (Jan.-Fall 1888)
When morality--that is to say subtlety, caution, bravery, equity--has been as it were stored up through the practice of a whole succession of generations, then the total force of this accumulated virtue radiates even into that sphere where integrity is most seldom found, into the spiritual sphere. In all becoming-conscious there is expressed a discomfiture of the organism; it has to try something new, nothing is sufficiently adapted for it, there is toil, tension, strain--all this constitutes becoming-conscious--
Genius resides in instinct; goodness likewise. One acts perfectly only when one acts instinctively. Even from the viewpoint of morality, all conscious thinking is merely tentative, usually the reverse of morality. Scientific integrity is always ruptured when the thinker begins to reason: try the experiment of putting the wisest men on the most delicate scales by making them talk about morality--
It could be proved that all conscious thinking would also show a far lower standard of morality than the thinking of the same man when it is directed by his instincts.
3. Truth and Error of Philosophers
456 (March-June 1888)
A certain degree of faith serves us today as an objection to what is believed--even more as a question mark against the spiritual health of the believer.
4. Further Considerations for a Critique of Philosophy
462 (Spring-Fall 1887)
Fundamental innovations: In place of "moral values," purely naturalistic values. Naturalization of morality.
In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.
In place of "society," the culture complex, as my chief interest (as a whole or in its parts).
In place of "epistemology," a perspective theory of affects (to which belongs a hierarchy of the affects; the affects transfigured; their superior order, their "spirituality").
In place of "metaphysics," and religion, the theory of eternal recurrence (this as a means of breeding and selection).