By Richard P. Salbato
The
writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche gave birth to a Culture War
that has effected every part of human society. It is a war between
husbands and wives, parents and children, parents and schools, Churches
and governments, science and religion, and created the entire mess of
the 20th Century. This is the thinking that produced two world wars,
created Hitler, created the thinking of Karl Marx, gave birth to
Psychiatry, destroyed the American School System, produced the woman's
lib movement, produced abortion on demand, made people their own gods,
and took the moral law out of governments. It produced an American
Movie Industry that would rather sell immorality than make money, an
industry that stopped making things like "The Ten Commandments", "Ben
Hur", "Shirley Temple", "Pinocchio", "Joan of Ark", etc. that had moral
messages and made a great amount of money and started making movies
about homosexuals, single moms, fiction, or any deviant behavior that
they could think of and they did it even if it did not make money.
Modern technology has saved them from bankruptcy by great graphics when
in fact there is no story at all, like "Star Wars" or "The Matrix".
Instigated
by liberal elites who manipulated—and were manipulated by—the so-called
"youth movement" of the 1960s, this cultural decadence has become
evident in ways that are now all too familiar. The deterioration of art
and music; the popularization of pornography; the collapse of the
family and consequent social disintegration; the radicalization of
academia, law, and politics; legislation for divorce on demand,
abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia; racial politics; and the
decline of religion under multiple assaults from feminism and political
correctness. The revolution has been both deliberate and successful, and
has transformed our society into something no one could have imagined
fifty years earlier.
The Catholic Church can be a major
opponent of the nihilism of modern liberal culture. Pope John Paul II
has been attempting to lead an intellectual and spiritual
reinvigoration, but there is resistance within the Church. Modern
liberal culture has made inroads with some of the Catholic hierarchy as
well as the laity. It remains to be seen whether intellectual orthodoxy
can stand firm against the currents of radical individualism and radical
egalitarianism. The absence of an orthodox Catholic voice in society
was of vital importance in allowing the cultural collapse of the 1960s.
The
cultural war is an international phenomenon and the courts have the
power of judicial review to strike down statues or accept them. They
have taken one side in the culture war — the side of the intellectual
elite, those people who think they have a superior attitude in life and
that those of us lower down the social ladder should be coerced into
accepting their views.
We have been loosing this Culture
War for the last 100 years but what makes me want to write about it now
is that something happened that makes me think we can now turn this war
around and win it. And that is the success of Mel Gibson's "The
Passion of the Christ". What has happened to the people who have seen
this movie gives me hope that the 100 year war can be won. But to win
this war we must understand it, we must see the enemy in our own
distorted thinking, we must see the enemy in the books we read, the
movies we see, the teaching at school, in almost everything secular
today. Our Lady of Fatima said that Communism would spread its errors
throughout the world. Those errors are the first modern atheist
thinking born of the writings of Nietzsche.
Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844. His father died when he
was 4 year old. Most of his family were Lutheran ministers. He was
raized by his mother, Franziska (1826-1897), his paternal grandmother,
Erdmuthe, his father's two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie, and his younger
sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (1846-1935) - all women.
Momentous
for Nietzsche in 1865 was his accidental discovery of Arthur
Schopenhauer's atheistic and turbulent vision of the world, The World as
Will and Representation, a work which criticized materialist
metaphysical theories from the standpoint of Kant's critique of
metaphysics in general. In 1867, he met the composer Richard Wagner.
Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer
Nietzsche's
enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, his studies in classical philology, his
inspiration from Wagner, his reading of Lange, and his frustration with
the contemporary German culture, coalesced in his first book -- The
Birth of Tragedy (1872) -- which was published when he was 28. Wagner
showered the book with unqualified praise. Nietzsche met Paul Rée, who,
while living in close company with Nietzsche, would write On the Origin
of Moral Feelings.
In 1876, at age 32, Nietzsche made
an unsuccessful marriage proposal to a Dutch piano student in Geneva
named Mathilde Trampedach. During this time, His ailing health, which
led to migraine headaches, eyesight problems and vomiting, necessitated
his resignation from the university in June, 1879.
On a
visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou
Salomé, a twenty-one-year-old Russian woman who was studying philosophy
and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love with her, and offered his
hand in marriage. She declined, and the future of Nietzsche's friendship
with her and Paul Rée appears to have suffered as a consequence. In the
years to follow, Salomé would become an associate of Sigmund Freud, and
would write with psychological insight of her association with
Nietzsche.
On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in
Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an
invalid for the rest of his life. That Nietzsche had an extraordinarily
sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of medications is
well-documented as a more general fact. After a brief hospitalization in
Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic,
and in March 1890 his mother took him back home to Naumburg, where he
lived under her care for the next seven years. After his mother's death
in 1897, his sister Elisabeth -- having previously returned home from
Paraguay, where she had been working with her husband Bernhard Förster
to establish an Aryan, anti-Semitic German colony called "New Germany"
("Nueva Germania") -- assumed responsibility for Nietzsche's welfare. On
August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as he approached his 56th
year, apparently of pneumonia in combination with a stroke.
The Influence of Nietzsche
Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was notoriously unread and un-influential during
his own lifetime, and his works suffered considerable distortion in the
hands of his sister Elisabeth, who managed his literary estate and
twisted his philosophy into a set of ideas supporting Hitler and Nazism
(Hitler had Thus Spoke Zarathustra issued to every soldier in the German
army). By far his most often quoted utterance--seldom understood--is
"God is dead," which placed his thought beyond the pale for many
readers.
But Nietzsche's influence has been much richer
and varied than these simple stereotypes suggest. It is not surprising
that an author who embraced such contradictions should have influenced
thinkers of an extraordinary variety.
Philosophy
The
only philosopher to feel his influence while he could be aware of it
was the Danish critic and philosopher Georg Brandes (1842-1927), who in
the late 1880s developed a philosophy which he called "aristocratic
radicalism" inspired by Nietzsche's notion of the "overman." Nietzsche's
insistence that the decay of religion (the "death of God") requires
that humanity take responsibility for setting its own moral standards
inspired existentialists from Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) and Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976) to Albert Camus (1913-1960).
Nietzsche's
relativism has had a powerful influence on two of the most important
modern French Deconstructionist philosophers, Jacques Derrida (b. 1930)
and Michel Foucault (1926-1984).
Theologians
Oddly
enough, he has also been a powerful influence on certain theologians,
notably Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who developed an Existentialist,
human-centered theology which tried to salvage elements of traditional
faith while drawing on rationalism. Thomas Altizer (b.1927) created a
sensation (and found himself on the cover of Time) in the 1960s by
helping to create the oxymoronically named "death of God theology"
together with a number of other theologians who argued for religion
without God. Their constant use of Nietzsche's catch phrase is a
reminder of their indebtedness to him. Although the direct influence of
this school hardly lasted out the decade, other theologians used
Nietzsche's thought as well, notably embracing his idea that human
values should be based not on denial ("thou shalt not") but on
affirmation ("thou shalt"). The Jewish theologian Martin Buber
(1878-1965)--also a great influence on Christian theology--translated
part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Polish. He read Nietzsche's works
very early, beginning in 1892. His emphasis on process in theology
resembles some of Nietzsche's ideas.
Although he did
not draw directly on Nietzsche's work, the notions of "creative
evolution" espoused by Henri Bergson (1859-1941) had a powerful
influence on the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1885-1957), who
combined his studies under Bergson with his reading of Nietzsche to
produce a version of what is known as "process theology" which is most
readily studied in the little book The Saviors of God and is also
expressed in his most popular novel, Zorba the Greek. According to
Kazantzakis, God is the result of whatever the most energetic and heroic
people value and create. This is clearly very similar to Nietzsche's
ideas about the sources of religion. Nietzsche's notion of heroes as
creators is at the heart of Kazantzakis' philosophy.
Psychology
The
two grandfathers of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and
Carl Jung (1875-1961), both had a deep admiration for Nietzsche and
credited him with many insights into the human character.
Alfred
Adler (1870-1937) developed an "individual psychology" which argues
that each individual strives for what he called "superiority," but is
more commonly referred to today as "self-realization" or
"self-actualization," and which was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche's
notions of striving and self-creation. The entire "human potential
movement" and humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo
May, etc.) owes a great debt to this line of thought. Even pop
psychologists of "self-esteem" preach a gospel little different from
that of Zarathustra. The ruthless, self-assertive "objectivism" of Ayn
Rand (1905-1982) is difficult to imagine without the influence of
Nietzsche.
Fiction
Besides
Kanzantzakis, many novelists have drawn on Nietzsche. Thomas Mann
(1875-1955) wrote repeatedly about him and his characters are often
engaged in struggles to define their ideas in a world in which old
philosophies are decaying, like Nietzsche, torn between romanticism and
rationalism (notably in The Magic Mountain). Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
similarly explored the necessity for the individuals to overcome their
social training and traditional ideas to seek their own way (Steppenwolf
and The Glass Bead Game). Many other famous writers influenced by
Nietzsche include André Malraux (1901-1976), André Gide (1869-1951), and
Knut Hamsun (1859-1952).
Poetry
Given
the poetic style in which he wrote, it is not surprising that numerous
poets have been drawn to Nietzsche, including Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926). He, like many writers influenced by Nietzsche, rejected the
kind of traditional Christian dualism which sorts existence into good
and evil with the physical and earthly being regarded as a source of
evil and goodness identified with pure spirit and the life after death.
His celebration of mortal life as a sort of religion is extremely
Nietzschean. He was also became lover of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a woman who
ten years earlier Nietzsche loved unrequitedly.
Among
many others, one can find strong Nietzschean themes in the works of Beat
Generation poets such as Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) and Gary Snyder (b.
1930), who were drawn to the vitalistic, anti-dualistic themes also
earlier expressed in the English and American traditions by William
Blake and Walt Whitman. Blake, Whitman and Nietzsche form a sort of
triumvirate whose influence runs through large swaths of modern
literature in their rejection of dualism and embrace of the body as
good. Like many other poets, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) combined
an admiration for Blake with interest in Nietzsche.
Drama
George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) expressed his version of Nietzsche's struggle
for power in his play Man and Superman, and more than one character in
the plays of Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is under Nietzsche's spell.
Influential ideas
If
there are few names from the second half of the 20th century cited
above that you recognize, it is not because Nietzsche's influence has
dwindled. Rather it so pervades modern culture that many who have never
read him are influenced by his thought indirectly. Consider the
following ideas circulating in American culture today, all of them
traceable at least in part to Nietzsche, although many of them are much
simpler than similar ideas held by him:
· The goal of life should be to find yourself. True maturity means discovering or creating an identity for yourself.
·
The highest virtue is to be true to yourself (consider these song
titles from a generation ago: "I Gotta Be Me," "I Did It My Way").
· When you fall ill, your body is trying to tell you something; listen to the wisdom of your body.
·
People who hate their bodies or are in tension with them need to learn
how to accept and integrate their physical selves with their minds
instead of seeing them as in tension with each other. The mind and body
make up a single whole.
· Athletes, musicians, etc.
especially need to become so attuned to their bodies that their skills
proceed spontaneously from the knowledge stored in their muscles and are
not frustrated by an excess of conscious rational thought. (The
influence of Zen Buddhism on this sort of thinking is also very strong.)
· Sexuality is not the opposite of virtue, but a
natural gift that needs to be developed and integrated into a healthy,
rounded life.
· Many people suffer from impaired self-esteem; they need to work on being proud of themselves.
· Knowledge and strength are greater virtues than humility and submission.
· Overcoming feelings of guilt is an important step to mental health.
· You can't love someone else if you don't love yourself.
· Life is short; experience it as intensely as you can or it is wasted.
· People's values are shaped by the cultures they live in; as society changes we need changed values.
· Challenge yourself; don't live passively.
It
is notable that none of these ideas flows from the traditional
Judeo-Christian culture which dominated Europe for a thousand years.
Many of them have their roots in Romanticism, with Nietzsche merely
articulating impulses that others shared; but he is a major transmitter
of them to the modern world.
Nietzsche's Writings
The
following are Nietzsche's own words on different subjects taken from
some of his books. This is the thinking that produced two world wars,
created Hitler, created the thinking of Carl Marx, gave birth to
Psychiatry, destroyed the American School System, produced the woman's
lib movement, produced abortion on demand, made people their own gods,
and took the moral law out of governments.
The following are all quotes from Nietzsche's books.
Philosophy
How I understand the philosopher -- as a terrible explosive, endangering everything...
Those who boast so mightily of the scientifically of their metaphysics should receive no answer;
Even
today many educated people think that the victory of Christianity over
Greek philosophy is a proof of the superior truth of the former -
although in this case it was only the coarser and more violent that
conquered the more spiritual and delicate. So far as superior truth is
concerned, it is enough to observe that the awakening sciences have
allied themselves point by point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but
point by point rejected Christianity.
If all goes well,
the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates
rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason... The pathways of
the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him...
Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious
cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that
constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed
the finer intellect.
When we hear the ancient bells
growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible!
This, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's
son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian
religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote
prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is
otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most
ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal
woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look
for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts
the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples
to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins
perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to
which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time
that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how
ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past!
Can one believe that such things are still believed?
Christianity
was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea
and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up
as, faith in "another" or "better" life.
A Jesus Christ
was possible only in a Jewish landscape--I mean one over which the
gloomy and sublime thunder cloud of the wrathful Yahweh was brooding
continually.
All the world still believes in the
authorship of the "Holy Spirit" or is at least still affected by this
belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for "edification."...
Paul
thought up the idea and Calvin rethought it, that for innumerable
people damnation has been decreed from eternity, and that this beautiful
world plan was instituted to reveal the glory of God: heaven and hell
and humanity are thus supposed to exist - to satisfy the vanity of God!
What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man
who thought this up first, or second. Paul has remained Saul after all -
the persecutor of God.
Christianity's Nature - If
the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God, universal sinfulness, election
by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would
be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a
priest, apostle or hermit --
The Christian church is
an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most
diverse origin, and that is why it is so capable of proselytizing.
Christianity
possesses the hunters instinct for all those who can by one means or
another be brought to despair - of which only a portion of mankind is
capable. It is constantly on their track, it lies in wait for them.
Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin.
In
former times, one sought to prove that there is no God - today one
indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief
acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God
thereby becomes superfluous.- When in former times one had refuted the
'proofs of the existence of God' put forward, there always remained the
doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just
refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.
But
in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has
satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable;
they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that
Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over ones inner
depravity and care for ones salvation - all concepts originating in
nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but
obliteration.
Christianity came into existence in order
to lighten the heart; but now it has first to burden the heart so as
afterwards to be able to lighten it. Consequently it shall perish.
After
Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a
tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men,
there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will
be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Every word is a prejudice.
Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.
It
is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility
of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human
head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless
remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.
Even
great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just
beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and
stupidity begins.
What then is truth? A mobile army of
metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human
relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished
poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to a people: Truths are illusions about which
one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out
and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now
matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
We still do not
know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only
of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be
truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the
obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a
style obligatory for all
What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.
The
reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are
the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality
is absolutely indemonstrable.
Let us beware of saying
that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is
nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses... But when
will we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these
shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our
de-deification of nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in
terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? from
Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.109,
We have arranged
for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines,
planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without
these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not
prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include
error.
Over immense periods of time the intellect
produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and
helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these
had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such
erroneous articles of faith... include the following: that there are
things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that
our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.
How
did logic come into existence in man's head? Certainly out of illogic,
whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who
made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that,
their ways might have been truer. Those, for example, who did not know
how to find often enough what is "equal" as regards both nourishment and
hostile animals--those, in other words, who subsumed things too slowly
and cautiously--were favored with a lesser probability of survival than
those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar instances that
they must be equal. The dominant tendency, however, to treat as equal
what is merely similar--an illogical tendency, for nothing is really
equal--is what first created any basis for logic.
In
order that the concept of substance could originate--which is
indispensible for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real
corresponds to it--it was likewise necessary that for a long time one
did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not
see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in
flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and
every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living
beings would have survived if the opposite tendency--to affirm rather
than suspend judgment, to err and make up things rather than wait, to
assent rather than negate, to pass judgment rather than be just-- had
not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.
Cause
and effect, such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are
confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces,
just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it
without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects
stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this
moment of suddenness there are an infinite number of processes which
elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum
and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and
dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny
all conditionality.
To renounce belief in one's ego, to
deny one's own "reality" -- what a triumph! not merely over the senses,
over appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation and
cruelty against reason -- a voluptuous pleasure that reaches its height
when the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason declares:
"there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!"
Henceforth,
my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old
conceptual fiction that posited a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless
knowing subject"; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory
concepts as "pure reason," absolute spirituality," "knowledge in
itself": these always demand that we should think of an eye that is
completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in
which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing
becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always
demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a
perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects
we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can
use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of
this thing, our "objectivity," be. But to eliminate the will altogether,
to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this --
what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?
Morality
Nevertheless.
-- however credit and debit balances may stand: at its present state as
a specific individual science the awakening of moral observation has
become necessary, and mankind can no longer be spared the cruel sight of
the moral dissecting table and its knives and forceps... the older
philosophy... has, with paltry evasions, always avoided investigation of
the origin and history of the moral sensations. With what consequences
is now very clearly apparent, since it has been demonstrated in many
instances how the errors of the greatest philosophers usually have their
point of departure in a false explanation of certain human actions and
sensations; ...a false ethics is erected, religion and mythological
monsters are then in turn called to buttress it, and the shadow of these
dismal spirits in the end falls even across physics and the entire
perception of the world.
Custom represents the
experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and
harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these
experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability
of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of
new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality
is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes
stupid.
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of
custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did
happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was
accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost
exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
What
is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and
overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is
old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old
thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of
the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of
evil must come again and again.
To admit a belief
merely because it is a custom - but that means to be dishonest,
cowardly, lazy! - And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the
preconditions for morality?
... hitherto we have been
permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which
sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having
had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely
as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous
have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many
of them have not yet been discovered.
It is, indeed, a
fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil
inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many
masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one
could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this
falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is
where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere
only a spectacle also at his most beautiful.
Where the
poor power of the eye can no longer see the evil impulse as such
because it has become too subtle, man posits the realm of goodness; and
the feeling that we have now entered the realm of goodness excites all
those impulses which had been threatened and limited by the evil
impulses, like the feeling of security, of comfort, of benevolence.
Hence, the duller the eye, the more extensive the good. Hence the
eternal cheerfulness of the common people and of children. Hence the
gloominess and grief - akin to a bad conscience - of the great thinkers.
All philosophers have the common failing of starting
out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through
an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of 'man' as an aeterna
veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as
a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about
man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a
very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family
failing of all philosophers.
Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?
Mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with them; mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads.
You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass.
The
most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated
saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more
celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. -- In the former, knowledge
of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.
Out
of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words
directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they
are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe
to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants
that grow in him!
It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!
Consider
the following signs of those states of society which are necessary from
time to time and which are designated with the word "corruption." As
soon as corruption sets in anywhere superstition becomes rank. and the
previous common faith of a people becomes pale and powerless against it.
For superstition is second-order free spirit: those who surrender to it
choose certain forms and formulas that they find congenial and permit
themselves some freedom of choice.
Fourth, when "morals
decay" those men emerge whom one calls tyrants: they are the precursors
and as it were the precocious harbingers of individuals... In these ages
bribery and treason reach their peak, for the love of the newly
discovered ego is much more powerful now than the love of the old,
used-up "fatherland"... Individuals--being truly in-and-for-themselves--
care, as is well known, more for the moment than do their opposites,
the herd men... The times of corruption are those when the apples fall
from the tree: I mean the individuals, for they carry the seeds of the
future and are the authors of the spiritual colonization and origin of
new states and communities. Corruption is merely a nasty word for the
autumn of a people.
The greatest danger that always
hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of
madness - which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing
and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in
human unreason. Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of
the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a
faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments... Thus the
virtuous intellects are needed - oh, let me use the most unambiguous
word - what is needed is virtuous stupidity, stolid metronomes for the
slow spirit, to make sure that the faithful of the great shared faith
stay together and continue their dance... We others are the exception
and the danger - and we need eternally to be opposed. - Well, there
actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that
it never wants to become the rule.
Suppose nothing else
were "given" as real except our world of desires and passions, and we
could not get down, or up, to any other "reality" besides the reality
of our drives--for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each
other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the
question whether this "given" would not be sufficient for also
understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called
mechanistic (or "material") world?...
In the end not
only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method
demands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the
experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost
limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so)... The question is in
the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we
believe in the causality of the will: if we do--and at bottom our faith
in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself--then we have
to make the experiment of positing causality of the will
hypothetically as the only one. "Will," of course, can affect only
"will"--and not "matter" (not "nerves," for example). In short, one has
to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever
"effects" are recognized--and whether all mechanical occurrences are
not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will.
Suppose,
finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the
development and ramification of one basic form of the will--namely, of
the will to power, as my proposition has it... then one would have
gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as--will to
power. The world viewed from inside... it would be "will to power" and
nothing else.
In order to sustain the theory of a
mechanistic world, therefore, we always have to stipulate to what extent
we are employing two fictions: the concept of motion (taken from our
sense language) and the concept of the atom (=unity, deriving from our
psychical "experience"): the mechanistic theory presupposes a sense
prejudice and a psychological prejudice...
The
mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world
(as "moved") --so as to be calculable-- thus causal unities are
invented, "things" (atoms) whose effect remains constant (--transference
of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom)...
If
we eliminate these additions, no things remain but only dynamic quanta,
in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence
lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their "effect" upon the
same. The will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos
--the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first
emerge--
My idea is that every specific body strives to
become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to
power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it
continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and
ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are
sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power.
[Anything
which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate
will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become
predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is
living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'...
belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is
a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to
life. Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would
simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second. from
Nietzsche's The Wanderer and his Shadow,s. 323
My
philosophy brings the triumphant idea of which all other modes of
thought will ultimately perish. It is the great cultivating idea: the
races that cannot bear it stand condemned; those who find it the
greatest benefit are chosen to rule.
I want to teach the idea that gives many the right to erase themselves - the great cultivating idea..
Everything
becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible! - Supposing we
could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective
principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!)...
To
endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new
means against the fact of pain ( pain conceived as a tool, as the
father of pleasure...); the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty,
experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition
of the concept of necessity; abolition of the "will"; abolition of
"knowledge-in-itself."
Greatest elevation of the consciousness of strength in man, as he creates the overman. from The Will to Power,
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you
want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts
rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a
painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a
laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...
Behold, I teach
you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will
say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my
brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who
speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they
know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned
themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once
the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these
sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful
thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the
meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you
can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your
happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your
virtue.
The hour when you say, 'What matters my
happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my
happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
The hour
when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the
lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not
made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty
and filth and wretched contentment.'
"I say unto
you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a
dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a
star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no
longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
Democratic
institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient
pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very
boring
Marriages contracted from love (so-called love-matches) have error for their father and need for their mother. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2008/09/nietzsche-root-of-culture-war.html]