The Portable Nietzsche (53 page)

Confronted with a world of “modern ideas,” which would banish everybody into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher—if there could be any philosophers today—would be forced to define the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” in terms precisely of man's comprehensiveness and multiplicity, his wholeness in manifoldness: he would even determine worth and rank according to how much and how many things a person could bear and take upon himself, how far a person could extend his responsibility. Today the taste and virtue of the time weaken and thin out the will; nothing is more timely than weakness of the will. Therefore, according to the philosopher's ideal, it is precisely strength of will, hardness, and the capacity for longrange decisions which must form part of the concept of “greatness”—with as much justification as the opposite doctrine, and the ideal of a dumb, renunciatory, humble, selfless humanity, was suitable for an opposite age, one which, like the sixteenth century, suffered from its accumulated will power and the most savage floods and tidal waves of selfishness.

At the time of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go—“for happiness,” as they said; for pleasure, as they behaved—and who at the same time still used the old ornate words to which their life had long ceased to entitle them,
irony
was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul—that Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as well as into the flesh and heart of the “nobility,” with a glance that said unmistakably: “Don't try to deceive me by dissimulation. Here we are equal.”

Today, conversely, when only the herd animal is honored and dispenses honors in Europe, and when “equality of rights” could all too easily be converted into an equality in violating rights—by that I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, or privileged, on the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and on the wealth of creative power and mastery—today the concept of “greatness” entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being capable of being different, standing alone, and having to live independently; and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he posits: “He shall be the greatest who can be the loneliest, the most hidden, the most deviating, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this should be called
greatness:
to be capable of being as manifold as whole, as wide as full.” And to ask this once more: today—is greatness
possible
?

 

[230]

. . . The commanding something, which the people call “spirit,” wants to be master over itself and its surroundings and to feel its mastery: it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity—a will that would tie together, harness, be master, and that really is masterly. Its needs and capacities are thus the same as those the physiologists find in everything that lives, grows, and reproduces. The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign manifests itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold. . . .

EDITOR'S NOTE

 

Book V was added to the second edition in 1887.

 

[343]

The background of our cheerfulness.
The greatest recent event—that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable—is even now beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few, at least, whose eyes, whose
suspicion
in their eyes, is strong and sensitive enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set just now. . . . In the main, however, this may be said: the event itself is much too great, too distant, too far from the comprehension of the many even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having
arrived
yet, not to speak of the notion that many people might know what has really happened here, and what must collapse now that this belief has been undermined —all that was built upon it, leaned on it, grew into it; for example, our whole European morality. . . .

Even we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains, put there between today and tomorrow and stretched in the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the shadows that must soon envelop Europe really
should
have appeared by now—why is it that even we look forward to it without any real compassion for this darkening, and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves? Is it perhaps that we are still too deeply impressed by the first consequences of this event—and these first consequences, the consequences for us, are perhaps the reverse of what one might expect: not at all sad and dark, but rather like a new, scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn? Indeed, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel as if a new dawn were shining on us when we receive the tidings that “the old god is dead”; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, anticipation, expectation. At last the horizon appears free again to us, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”

 

[344]

How far we too are still pious.
In science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, may they be granted admission and even a certain value within the realm of knowledge—though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But does this not mean, more precisely considered, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would not the discipline of the scientific spirit begin with this, no longer to permit oneself any convictions? Probably that is how it is. But one must still ask whether it is not the case that,
in order that this discipline could begin,
a conviction must have been there already, and even such a commanding and unconditional one that it sacrificed all other convictions for its own sake. It is clear that science too rests on a faith; there is no science “without presuppositions.” The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the principle, the faith, the conviction is expressed: “
nothing
is needed
more
than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.”

This unconditional will to truth: what is it? . . . What do you know in advance of the character of existence, to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting? Yet if both are required, much trust and much mistrust: whence might science then take its unconditional faith, its conviction, on which it rests, that truth is more important than anything else, even than any other conviction? Just this conviction could not have come into being if both truth and untruth showed themselves to be continually useful, as is the case. Thus, though there undeniably exists a faith in science, it cannot owe its origin to such a utilitarian calculus but it must rather have originated in spite of the fact that the inutility and dangerousness of the “will to truth,” of “truth at any price,” are proved to it continually. . . .

Consequently, “will to truth” does not mean “I will not let myself be deceived” but—there is no choice—“I will not deceive, not even myself:
and with this we are on the ground of morality
. For one should ask oneself carefully: “Why don't you want to deceive?” especially if it should appear—and it certainly does appear—that life depends on appearance; I mean, on error, simulation, deception, self-deception; and when life has, as a matter of fact, always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous
polytropoi.
Such an intent, charitably interpreted, could perhaps be a quixotism, a little enthusiastic impudence; but it could also be something worse, namely, a destructive principle, hostile to life. “Will to truth”—that might be a concealed will to death.

Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem, “For what end any morality at all” if life, nature, and history are “not moral”? . . . But one will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it always remains a
metaphysical faith
upon which our faith in science rests—that even we devotees of knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, still take
our
fire too from the flame which a faith thousands of years old has kindled: that Christian faith, which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine. . . .

This book of roughly two hundred pages was first published in 1887. It consists of three inquiries. The first, entitled “Good and Evil versus Good and Bad,” contrasts “slave morality” and “master morality.” The origin of the former is found in
ressentiment.
Nietzsche has reservations about “master morality” too, as he explains in the chapter on “The ‘Improvers' of Mankind” in
The Twilight of the Idols
. The second inquiry has the title: “Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters.” The third: “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?”

The decision to present in this volume, unabridged, Nietzsche's later works rather than his earliest efforts, and to represent his aphoristic books by selections, seemed obvious. The
Genealogy
is a late work and not aphoristic, but its major ideas, and much else too, will be gleaned from
Zarathustra
and the books of 1888 which are offered complete—and from the following selections which represent the core of each of the three inquiries.

The slaves' revolt in morals begins with this, that
ressentiment
itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the
ressentiment
of those who are denied the real reaction, that of the deed, and who compensate with an imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant affirmation of oneself, slave morality immediately says No to what comes from outside, to what is different, to what is not oneself: and
this
No is its creative deed. This reversal of the valuepositing glance—this
necessary
direction outward instead of back to oneself—is of the nature of
ressentiment:
to come into being, slave morality requires an outside world, a counterworld; physiologically speaking, it requires external stimuli in order to react at all: its action is at bottom always a reaction.

The reverse is true of the noble way of evaluating: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks out its opposite only in order to say Yes to itself still more gratefully, still more jubilantly; and its negative concept, “base,” “mean,” “bad,” is only an after-born, pale, contrasting image in relation to the positive basic concept, which is nourished through and through with life and passion: “we who are noble, good, beautiful, happy!”

. . . To be unable to take one's own enemies, accidents, and misdeeds seriously for long—that is the sign of strong and rich natures. . . . Such a man simply shakes off with one shrug much vermin that would have buried itself deep in others; here alone is it also possible—assuming that it is possible at all on earth—that there be real “
love
of one's enemies.” How much respect has a noble person for his enemies! And such respect is already a bridge to love. After all, he demands his enemy for himself, as his distinction; he can stand no enemy but one in whom there is nothing to be despised and
much
to be honored. Conversely, imagine “the enemy” as conceived by a man of
ressentiment
—and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived “the evil enemy,” “
the evil one
”—and indeed as the fundamental concept from which he then derives, as an afterimage and counterinstance, a “good one”—himself.

[12]

Let us add a word here concerning the origin and aim of punishment—two problems which are, or should be, distinct. Unfortunately, they are usually confounded. . . . For every kind of historiography there is no more important proposition than this, which has been discovered with so much effort, but now also ought to be discovered once and for all: the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual usefulness, its actual employment and incorporation into a system of aims, lie worlds apart. . . .

 

[13]

To return to the subject, namely
punishment,
we must distinguish two things: first, the relatively enduring aspect, the custom, the act, the “drama,” a certain strict succession of procedures; on the other hand, the fluid aspect, the meaning, the aim, the expectation which attends the execution of these procedures. . . . Today it is impossible to say definitely
why
punishment is meted out: all concepts in which a whole process is comprehended semeiotically, escape definition; only what has no history is definable. . . .

[28]

Apart from the ascetic ideal, man—the animal, man —had no meaning hitherto. His existence on earth had no goal. “Why have man at all?” was a question without an answer. . . . Precisely this was the meaning of the ascetic ideal, that something was lacking, that a tremendous gap surrounded man: he did not know how to justify, explain, or affirm himself, he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered in other ways too; he was in the main a
sickly
animal: yet suffering as such was not his problem, but that the answer was lacking to the cry of the question “
Why
suffer?” Man, as the animal that is most courageous, most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering as such: he wants it, even seeks it out, provided one shows him some meaning in it, some
wherefore
of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse which hitherto lay spread out over mankind—
and the ascetic ideal offered mankind meaning.
So far it has been the only meaning; any meaning at all is better than no meaning at all; the ascetic ideal was in every respect the
faute de mieux
par excellence that we have had so far. Through this, suffering was
interpreted
; the tremendous emptiness seemed filled out; the door was closed to all suicidal nihilism. The interpretation undoubtedly involved new suffering, even more profound, more inward, more poisonous, that gnawed at life more: it placed all suffering in the perspective of
guilt
. Yet in spite of that—man was saved: he had a
meaning;
henceforth he was no longer like a leaf in the wind, a football of nonsense, of “no-sense”; he could now want something—and to begin with, it mattered not what, whereto, or how he wanted:
the will itself was saved.
In the end, one can hardly conceal what it was that this will really expressed when it received its direction from the ascetic ideal: that hatred against everything human, even more, against everything animal, everything material, this disgust with the senses, with reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to get away from all semblance, change, becoming, death, wish, desire itself—the meaning of all this, should we dare to comprehend it, is a
will to nothingness
, a will running counter to life, a revolt against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; yet it is and remains a
will!
And, to repeat at the end what I said in the beginning: rather than want nothing, man even wants
nothingness.