MAXIMS AND BARBS

I want, once and for all, not to know many things.—Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.

From the Military School of Life.—Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

Everyone else helps those who help themselves. Principle of brotherly love.

If you have your why? for life, then you can get along with almost any how?—Man does not strive for happiness; only the English do that.

The complete woman commits literature as she commits a little sin: to try it out, in passing, looking round to see if anyone has noticed and so that someone will notice...

Put yourself only in situations where you are not allowed any false virtues and where instead, like the tightrope walker on his rope, you either fall or stand—or get away...

I mistrust all systematists and avoid them. The will to system is a lack of integrity.

Rash actions are rarely one-offs. With the first rash action people always do too much. Which is precisely why they usually commit a second—when they do too little...

Only thoughts which come from walking have any value.

Formula for my happiness: a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal...

THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES

With Socrates, Greek taste switches over in favour of dialectics: what is actually going on here? Above all it means a noble taste is defeated; with dialectics the rabble comes out on top. Before Socrates, dialectical manners were disapproved of in polite society: they were seen as bad manners because they were revealing. The young were warned against them. People also mistrusted any such presentation of one’s reasons. Respectable things, like respectable people, do not wear their reasons on their sleeves like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. Anything which needs first to have itself proved is of little value. Wherever it is still good manners to be authoritative, and people do not ‘justify’ but command, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at and not taken seriously.—Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what was actually going on here?

If it is necessary to make a tyrant out of reason, as Socrates did, then there must be no little danger that something else might play the tyrant. At that time people sensed in rationality a deliverance; neither Socrates nor his ‘invalids’ were free to be rational—it was de rigueur it was their last available means. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself on rationality betrays a crisis: they were in danger, they had just one choice: either perish or—be absurdly rational... The moralism of Greek philosophers from Plato onwards is pathologically conditioned: likewise their appreciation of dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness means simply: we must imitate Socrates and establish permanent daylight to combat the dark desires—the daylight of reason. We must be clever, clear, bright at all costs: any yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards..

I have indicated how Socrates fascinated people: he appeared to be a physician, a saviour. Is it still necessary to demonstrate the error which lay in his belief in ‘rationality at all costs’? It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to believe that in waging war on décadence they are already emerging from it. It is beyond their power to emerge from it: whatever they choose as their means, their deliverance, is itself just another expression of décadence—they alter its expression, but they do not get rid of it. Socrates was a misunderstanding; the entire morality of improvement, Christianity’s included, was a misunderstanding... The harshest daylight, rationality at all costs, life bright, cold, cautious, conscious, instinct-free, instinct resistant: this itself was just an illness, a different illness—and definitely not a way back to ‘virtue’, ‘health’, happiness... To have to fight against the instincts—this is the formula for décadence: so long as life is ascendant, happiness equals instinct.—

‘REASON’ IN PHILOSOPHY

You ask me what are all the idiosyncrasies of the philosophers?... For one thing their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think they are doing a thing an honour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni—when they make a mummy out of it. All that philosophers have been handling for thousands of years is conceptual mummies; nothing real has ever left their hands alive. They kill things and stuff them, these servants of conceptual idols, when they worship—they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are objections—even refutations—for them. Whatever is, does not become; whatever becomes, is not... Now they all believe, even to the point of desperation, in being. But because they cannot gain possession of it they look for reasons as to why it is being withheld from them. ‘There must be some pretence, some deception going on, preventing us from perceiving being: where’s the deceiver hiding?’—‘We’ve got him’, they cry in rapturous delight, ‘it’s our sensuousness! These senses, which are otherwise so immoral, too, they are deceiving us about the real world. Moral: free yourself from sense-deception, from becoming, history, lies—history is nothing but belief in the senses, belief in lies. Moral: say no to anything which believes in the senses, to the whole of the rest of humanity: they are all just “the populace”. Be a philosopher, be a mummy, represent monotono-theism by miming a gravedigger!—And above all away with the body, this pitiful idée fixe of the senses! afflicted with every logical error there is, refuted, even impossible, though it is cheeky enough to act as if it were real!’...

‘Reason’ is what causes us to falsify the evidence of the senses. If the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie...

The other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers is no less dangerous: it consists in mistaking the last for the first. They put what comes at the end—unfortunately! for it should not come anywhere!—the ‘highest concepts’, i.e. the most general, emptiest concepts, the last wisp of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the beginning. This is once again simply the expression of their kind of reverence: the higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all... Moral: everything first-rate must be causa sui. If it is descended from something else, this is seen as an objection and brings its value into question. All the supreme values are first-rate; all the highest concepts—being, the absolute, the good, the true, the perfect—none of them can have become, so they must be causa sui. Equally, though, none of them can differ from the others or conflict with them... Hence their astounding notion of ‘God’... The last, thinnest, emptiest, is put first, as cause in itself, as ens realissimum... Oh that humanity had to take seriously the brain-feverish fantasies spun out by the sick!—And it has paid dearly for it!...

People will be grateful to me for condensing such an essential new insight into four theses: this way I am easing comprehension; this way I am inviting contradiction. First Proposition. The reasons which have been given for designating ‘this’ world as apparent actually account for its reality—any other kind of reality is absolutely unprovable. Second Proposition. The characteristics which have been given to the ‘true Being’ of things are the characteristics of non-Being, of nothingness—the ‘real world’ has been constructed from the contradiction of the actual world: an apparent world, indeed, to the extent that it is merely a moral-optical illusion. Third Proposition. Concocting stories about a world ‘other’ than this one is utterly senseless, unless we have within us a powerful instinct to slander, belittle, cast suspicion on life: in which case we are avenging ourselves on life with the phantasmagoria of ‘another’, ‘better’ life. Fourth Proposition. Dividing the world into a ‘real’ one and an ‘apparent’ one, whether in the manner of Christianity, or of Kant (a crafty Christian, when all’s said and done), is but a suggestion of decadence—a symptom of declining life... The fact that the artist values appearance more highly than reality is no objection to this proposition. For ‘appearance’ here means reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected... The tragic artist is no pessimist—on the contrary, he says yes to all that is questionable and even terrible; he is Dionysian...

MORALITY AS ANTI-NATURE

The church fights against passion with every kind of excision: its method, its ‘cure’, is castratism. It never asks ‘how does one spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire?’—in disciplining, it has put the emphasis throughout the ages on eradication (of sensuality, pride, the urge to rule, to possess, to avenge).—But attacking the passions at the root means attacking life at the root: the practice of the church is inimical to life...

The same means—castration, eradication—are instinctively chosen by those fighting against a desire who are too weak-willed, too degenerate to be able to set themselves a measure in it: by those types who need La Trappe, metaphorically speaking (and non-metaphorically—), some definitive declaration of enmity, a gulf between themselves and a passion. Only the degenerate find radical means indispensable; weakness of will, more specifically the inability not to react to a stimulus, is itself simply another form of degenerescence.

I shall make a principle into a formula. All naturalism in morality, i.e. every healthy morality, is governed by a vital instinct—one or other of life’s decrees is fulfilled through a specific canon of ‘shalls’ and ‘shall nots’, one or other of the obstructions and hostilities on life’s way is thus removed. Anti-natural morality, i.e. almost every morality which has hitherto been taught, revered, and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the vital instincts—it is at times secret, at times loud and brazen in condemning these instincts. In saying ‘God looks at the heart’ it says no to the lowest and highest of life’s desires, and takes God to be an enemy of life... The saint, in whom God is well pleased, is the ideal castrato... Life ends where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins...

THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS

Error of Confusing Cause and Consequence. The most general formula underlying every religion and morality is: ‘Do this and that, stop this and that—then you will be happy! Or else...’ Every morality, every religion is this imperative—I call it the great original sin of reason, immortal unreason. In my mouth that formula is transformed into its inversion—-first example of my ‘revaluation of all values’: a well-balanced person, a ‘happy man’, has to do certain actions and instinctively shies away from others; he carries over the order which his physiology represents into his relations with people and things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness ... A long life, numerous progeny, are not the reward for virtue; instead, virtue is itself that slowing down of the metabolism which among other things also brings a long life, numerous progeny, in short Cornarism in its wake.—The church and morality say: ‘a race, a people is destroyed by vice and extravagance.’ My restored reason says: if a people is destroyed, if it physiologically degenerates, then this is followed by vice and extravagance (i.e. the need for ever stronger and more frequent stimuli, familiar to every exhausted type). This young man grows prematurely pale and listless. His friends say: such and such an illness is to blame. I say: the fact that he fell ill, the fact that he could not withstand the illness, was already the consequence of an impoverished life, of hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party will destroy itself by such a mistake. My higher politics says: a party which makes such mistakes is already finished—its instinct is no longer sure. Every mistake, in every sense, results from a degeneration of instinct, a disgregation of the will—which is almost a definition of the bad. Everything good is instinct—and therefore easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection; a god is typologically different from a hero (in my language: light feet the foremost attribute of divinity).

Error of a False Causality.—People throughout the ages have believed they knew what a cause is: but where did we get our knowledge, more precisely our belief that we know? From the realm of the celebrated ‘inner facts’, not one of which has so far turned out to be real. We believed that we ourselves, in the act of willing, were causes; we thought that we were at least catching causality there in the act. Likewise people were in no doubt that all the antecedentia of an action, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be rediscovered there if sought—as ‘motives’: otherwise they would not have been free to do it, responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? that the ‘I’ causes the thought?... Of these three ‘inner facts’, by which causality seemed to be authenticated, the first and most convincing one is that of the will as cause; the conception of a consciousness (‘mind’) as cause and, later still, of the I (the ‘subject’) as cause came only afterwards, once the causality of the will had been established as given, as empirical... Since then we have thought better of all this. Nowadays we no longer believe a word of it. The ‘inner world’ is full of illusions and jack-o’-lanterns: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, and therefore no longer explains anything either—it simply accompanies events, and can even be absent.

Error of Imaginary Causes.—Tracing something unknown back to something known gives relief, soothes, satisfies, and furthermore gives a feeling of power. The unknown brings with it danger, disquiet, worry—one’s first instinct is to get rid of these awkward conditions. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Because it is basically just a question of wanting to get rid of oppressive ideas, we are not exactly strict with the means we employ to get rid of them: the first idea which can explain the unknown as known feels so good that it is ‘held to be true’. Proof of pleasure (‘strength’) as criterion of truth. —The causal drive is therefore determined and stimulated by the feeling of fear. The ‘why?’ is intended, if at all possible, not so much to yield the cause in its own right as rather a kind of cause—a soothing, liberating, relief-giving cause.

The Entire Realm of Morality and Religion Belongs Under This Concept of Imaginary Causes.—‘Explanation’ for unpleasant general feelings.—’Explanation’ for pleasant general feelings.

Error of Free Will.—We no longer have any sympathy nowadays for the concept ‘free will’: we know only too well what it is—the most disreputable piece of trickery the theologians have produced, aimed at making humanity ‘responsible’ in their sense, i.e. at making it dependent on them...

What can our doctrine be, though?—That no one gives man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor man himself (—the nonsense of the last idea rejected here was taught as ‘intelligible freedom’ by Kant, perhaps already by Plato, too). No one is responsible for simply being there, for being made in such and such a way, for existing under such conditions, in such surroundings. The fatality of one’s being cannot be derived from the fatality of all that was and will be. No one is the result of his own intention, his own will, his own purpose; no one is part of an experiment to achieve an ‘ideal person’ or an ‘ideal of happiness’ or an ‘ideal of morality’—it is absurd to want to discharge one’s being onto some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality, ‘purpose’ is absent... One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole—there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our Being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, condemning the whole... But there is nothing apart from the whole! That no one is made responsible any more, that a kind of Being cannot be traced back to a causa prima that the world is no unity, either as sensorium or as ‘mind’, this alone is the great liberation—this alone re-establishes the innocence of becoming... The concept ‘God’ has been the greatest objection to existence so far... We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: this alone is how we redeem the world.—

THE ‘IMPROVERS’ OF HUMANITY

Throughout the ages people have wanted to ‘improve’ humanity: this above all is what has been called morality. But under the same word the most extraordinary variety of tendencies is hiding. Both the taming of the beast man and the breeding of a particular species of man have been called ‘improvement’: these zoological terms alone express realities—realities, of course, about which the typical ‘improver’, the priest, knows nothing—wants to know nothing... To call the taming of an animal its ‘improvement’ is to our ears almost a joke. Anyone who knows what goes on in menageries will doubt that a beast is ‘improved’ there. It is weakened, it is made less harmful, it is turned into a diseased beast through the depressive emotion of fear, through pain, through wounding, through hunger.—It is no different with the tamed human being whom the priest has ‘improved’. Physiologically speaking: in the struggle with the beast, making it sick is the only possible means of weakening it. The church understood this: it ruined man, it weakened him—but it claimed to have ‘improved’ him...

Let us take the other case of so-called morality, the case of breeding a particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is provided by Indian morality, sanctioned as a religion in the Law of Manu. Here the task is set of breeding no fewer than four races at once: a priestly one, a warrior one, a commercial and agricultural one, and finally a servant race, the Sudras. Clearly we are no longer among animal-tamers here: a kind of human being which is a hundred times milder and more rational is required in order just to conceive such a breeding plan. One breathes a sigh of relief on emerging from the sickly dungeon-air of Christianity into this healthier, higher, wider world. How miserable the ‘New Testament’ is compared to Manu, how badly it smells!—But even this organization needed to be terrible—this time in struggling not with the beast, but with its antithetical concept, the unbred human being, mish-mash man, the Chandala. And again it had no other way of making him harmless and weak than by making him sick—it was a struggle with the ‘great number’.

Christianity, rooted in Judaism and only understandable as having grown from this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of pedigree, of privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence: Christianity is the revaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and the lowly, the total revolt of everything downtrodden, miserable, ill-begotten, botched, against ‘pedigree’—the immortal revenge of the Chandala as religion of love...

WHAT THE GERMANS LACK

I shall describe at once the three tasks for which educators are needed. You have to learn to see, you have to learn to think, you have to learn to speak and write: in all three cases the goal is a noble culture.—Learning to see—accustoming the eye to rest, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgement, to encircle and encompass the individual case on all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling for intellectuality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to take in hand the inhibiting, isolating instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in un-philosophical language ‘strong will’: the most important thing about it is precisely not to ‘will’, to be able to defer decision. Every lack of intellectuality, every vulgarity is based on the inability to resist a stimulus—you must react, you follow every impulse. In many cases such a necessity is already sickliness, decline, a symptom of exhaustion—almost everything which coarse, unphilosophical language calls by the name of ‘vice’ is merely this physiological inability not to react. One lesson from having learnt to see: as a learner you will have become generally slow, mistrustful, reluctant. You will initially greet any kind of alien, new thing with a hostile calm, and let it approach—you will draw your hand back from it. Opening all your doors, subserviently prostrating yourself before every little fact, stepping, rushing into one thing after another, ever ready to pounce, in short our famous modern ‘objectivity’ is bad taste, ignoble par excellence.—

RECONNAISSANCE RAIDS OF AN UNTIMELY MAN

Contenting oneself with people, keeping open house with one’s heart—that is liberal, but it is merely liberal. Those hearts which are capable of noble hospitality are recognizable by their many drawn curtains and closed shutters: they keep their best rooms empty. Why, though?—Because they are expecting guests with whom one cannot ‘content oneself’...

We stop appreciating ourselves enough when we communicate. Our actual experiences are not in the least talkative. They could not express themselves even if they wanted to. For they lack the words to do so. When we have words for something we have already gone beyond it. In all speech there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for average, middling, communicable things. The speaker vulgarizes himself as soon as he speaks. —From a morality for deaf-mutes and other philosophers.

The Right to Stupidity.—The weary, slow-breathing worker who looks around good-naturedly and lets things go their own way: this typical figure whom you come across now, in the age of work (and of the ‘Reich’!—), in all social classes, is laying claim these days to art, of all things, including books, above all magazines—and even more to the beauties of nature, Italy... The man of the evening, with the ‘nodding wild drives’ of which Faust speaks, needs the freshness of summer, sea-bathing, glaciers, Bayreuth... In such ages art has a right to pure folly—as a kind of vacation for the spirit, the mind, and the soul. Wagner understood this. Pure folly restores one’s health...

The means by which Julius Caesar protected himself against minor ailments and headaches: immense marches, the simplest of ways of life, uninterrupted periods in the open air, constant exertions—these are by and large the definitive measures for preserving and protecting against the extreme vulnerability of that subtle machine working under the most intense pressure, called genius.—

Natural Value of Egoism.—Selfishness is worth as much as the physiological value of whoever is exhibiting it: it can be worth a great deal; it can be worthless and contemptible. Every single person can be considered from the point of view of whether he represents the ascendant or descendent line of life. A decision on this point gives you a criterion for the value of his selfishness. If he represents the line ascendant then his value is indeed extraordinary—and for the sake of the totality of life, which takes a step further with him, extreme care may even be taken in maintaining and creating the optimum conditions for him. For the single person—the ‘individual’, as the people and the philosophers have understood him thus far—is an error: he is nothing by himself, no atom, no ‘ring in the chain’, nothing which has simply been inherited from the past—he is the whole single line of humanity up to and including himself... If he represents a development downwards, a falling-off, a chronic degeneration, or illness (—illnesses are by and large already the consequences of a falling-off, not the causes of it), then he is worth little, and in all fairness he should detract as little as possible from those who turned out well. He is merely a parasite on them...

Christian and Anarchist.—When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of social strata in decline, waxes indignant and demands ‘rights’, ‘justice’, ‘equal rights’, then he is just feeling the pressure of his lack of culture, which is incapable of understanding why he is actually suffering—what he is poor in, in life... There is a powerful causal drive within him: someone must be to blame for his feeling bad... And ‘waxing indignant’ itself does him good, too; all poor devils take pleasure in grumbling—it gives a little rush of power. Even a complaint, making a complaint, can give life some spice and make it endurable: there is a small dose of revenge in every complaint; people blame those who are different from themselves for the fact that they feel bad, possibly even for their badness—as though it were an injustice, an illicit privilege. ‘If I’m canaille, then so should you be’: this is the logic on which revolutions are based.—Complaining is never any good: it stems from weakness. Whether people attribute their feeling bad to others or to themselves—socialists do the former, Christians, for example, the latter—it makes no real difference. What they have in common, let us say what is unworthy about them, too, is that someone is supposed to be to blame for their suffering—in short, that the sufferer prescribes himself the honey of revenge for his suffering. The objects of this need for revenge, a need for pleasure, are contingent causes: the sufferer will find grounds everywhere for venting his petty revenge—if he is a Christian, to say it again, then he will find them in himself... The Christian and the anarchist—both are decadents.—But even when the Christian condemns, slanders, denigrates the ‘world?’, he does so from the same instinct from which the socialist worker condemns, slanders, denigrates society: the ‘last judgement’ itself is still the sweet consolation of revenge—the revolution which the socialist worker is also awaiting, only taken somewhat further in thought... The ‘hereafter’ itself—why have a hereafter if it is not a means to denigrate this life?...

My Idea of Freedom.—The value of a thing sometimes depends not on what we manage to do with it, but on what we pay for it—what it costs us. Let me give an example. Liberal institutions stop being liberal as soon as they have been set up: afterwards there is no one more inveterate or thorough in damaging freedom than liberal institutions. Now we know what they achieve: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley elevated to the status of morality, they make things petty, cowardly, and hedonistic—with them the herd animal triumphs every time. Liberalism: in plain words herd-animalization... While these same institutions are still being fought for, they produce quite different effects: then they are actually powerful promoters of freedom. The nations which were worth something, became worth something, never did so under liberal institutions: it was great danger that turned them into something worthy of respect, the kind of danger without which we would not know our instruments, our virtues, our defences and weapons, our spirit—which forces us to be strong... First principle: you must need to be strong, or else you will never become it.—Those great hothouses for strong, for the strongest kind of people there has yet been—the aristocratic communities such as Rome and Venice—understood freedom in exactly the same sense as I understand the word freedom: as something which one can have and not have, which one can want, which one can conquer...

My Idea of Genius.—Great men, like periods of greatness, are explosives storing up immense energy; historically and physiologically speaking, their precondition is always that they be collected, accumulated, saved, and preserved for over a long period—that there be a long period without explosions. Once the tension in the mass becomes too great, then the most accidental stimulus is enough to bring ‘genius’, ‘action’, a great destiny into the world. What, then, do the environment, the age, the ‘spirit of the age’, ‘public opinion’ have to do with it! Great people are necessary, the age in which they appear is incidental; if they almost always become master of it, then this is simply because they are stronger and older, and result from a longer period of accumulation. The relationship between a genius and his age is like that between strong and weak, or old and young: the age is always comparatively much younger, thinner, more immature, more insecure, more childish.

Beauty No Accident.—Even the beauty of a race or a family, its grace and goodness in all its gestures, is worked for: like genius, it is the end result of the accumulated labour of generations. Great sacrifices need to have been made to good taste; for its sake much needs to have been done and much left undone—seventeenth-century France is admirable in both respects—it needs to have been applied as a principle of selection for society, location, clothing, sexual satisfaction; beauty needs to have been preferred to advantage, habit, opinion, laziness. Highest guiding principle: even with yourself you must not ‘let yourself go’.—Good things are exceedingly costly: and the law always applies that he who has them is different from the one who acquires them. Everything good is inherited: anything not inherited is imperfect, just a beginning... —Now let there be no mistake here about the methodology: a disciplining of feelings and thoughts alone counts for almost nothing (—here lies the great misunderstanding in German education, which is a complete illusion): you have to win over the body first. The strict maintenance of significant and select gestures, a commitment to live only with people who do not ‘let themselves go’, is perfectly sufficient to make you significant and select: within two or three generations everything has already been internalized. It is decisive for the fate of a nation and of humanity that culture is begun in the right place—not in the ‘soul’ (which was the disastrous superstition of the priests and semipriests): the right place is the body, gesture, diet, physiology—the rest follows on from this... This is why the Greeks remain the foremost cultural event in history—they knew, they did what was necessary; Christianity, which has despised the body, has so far been the greatest of humanity’s misfortunes.—

THE HAMMER SPEAKS

‘Why so hard!’—spake the kitchen coal once unto the diamond: ‘for are we not close kin?’

Why so soft? Oh my brethren, this I ask of you: for are you not—my brethren?

Why so soft, so yielding and submitting? Why is there so much denial and disavowal in your hearts? so little destiny in your gazes?

And if you will not be destinies, and inexorable ones: how could you ever join with me in—vanquishing?

And if your hardness will not flash and cut and cleave: how could you ever join with me in—creating?

For all creators are hard. And bliss must it seem to you to press your hands upon millennia as upon wax—

—Bliss to write upon the will of millennia as upon bronze—harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. The noblest alone is truly hard.

This new table, oh my brethren, do I set over you: become hard!——