along which it has been running throughout the ages. The _downward path_--hitherto this had been called the road to "Truth." All obscure impulse--"darkness and dismay"--is at an end, the "_good man_" was precisely he who was least aware of the proper way.[1] And, speaking in all earnestness, no one before me knew the proper way, the way upwards: only after my time could men once more find hope, life-tasks, and roads mapped out that lead to culture--_I am the joyful harbinger of this culture._...On this account alone I am also a fatality.
3 Immediately after the completion of the above-named work, and without letting even one day go by, I tackled the formidable task of the _Transvaluation_ with a supreme feeling of pride which nothing could equal; and, certain at each moment of my immortality, I cut sign after sign upon tablets of brass with the sureness of Fate. The Preface came into being on 3rd September 1888. When, after having written it down, I went out into the open that morning, I was greeted by the most beautiful day I had ever seen in the Upper Engadine--clear, glowing with colour, and presenting all the contrasts and all the intermediary gradations between ice and the south. I left Sils-Maria only on the 20th of September. I had been forced to delay my departure owing to floods, and I was very soon, and for some days, the only visitor in this wonderful spot, on which my gratitude bestows the gift of an immortal name. After a journey that was full of incidents, and not without danger to life,--as for instance at Como, which was flooded when I reached it in the dead of night,--I got to Turin on the afternoon of the 21 st. Turin is the only suitable place for me, and it shall be my home henceforward. I took the same lodgings as I had occupied in the spring, 6111 Via Carlo Alberto, opposite the mighty Palazzo Carignano, in which Vittorio Emanuele was born; and I had a view of the Piazza Carlo Alberto and above it across to the hills.
Without hesitating, or allowing myself to be disturbed for a single moment, I returned to my work, only the last quarter of which had still to be written. On the 30th September, tremendous triumph; the seventh day; the leisure of a god on the banks of the Po.[2] On the same day, I wrote the Preface to _The Twilight of the Idols,_ the correction of the proofs of which provided me with recreation during the month of September. Never in my life have I experienced such an autumn; nor had I ever imagined that such things were possible on earth--a Claude Lorrain extended to infinity, each day equal to the last in its wild perfection.
[Footnote 1: A witty reference to Goethe's well-known passage in the Prologue to _Faust_:-- "A good man, though in darkness and dismay, May still be conscious of the proper way."
The words are spoken by the Lord.--TR. ] [Footnote 2: There is a wonderful promenade along the banks of the Po, for which Turin is famous, and of which Nietzsche was particularly fond.--TR.]
"THE CASE OF WAGNER: A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM" 1 In order to do justice to this essay a man ought to suffer from the fate of music as from an open wound.--From what do I suffer when I suffer from the fate of music? From the fact that music has lost its world-transfiguring, yea-saying character--that it is decadent music and no longer the flute of Dionysus. Supposing, however, that the fate of music be as dear to man as his own life, because joy and suffering are alike bound up with it; then he will find this pamphlet comparatively mild and full of consideration. To be cheerful in such circumstances, and laugh good-naturedly with others at one's justify every sort of hardness,--is humanity itself. Who doubts that I, old artillery-man that I am, would be able if I liked to point my _heavy_ guns at Wagner?--Everything decisive in this question I kept to myself--I have loved Wagner.--After all, an attack upon a more than usually subtle "unknown person" whom another would not have divined so easily, lies in the meaning and path of my life-task. Oh, I have still quite a number of other "unknown persons" to unmask besides a Cagliostro of Music! Above all, I have to direct an attack against the German people, who, in matters of the spirit, grow every day more indolent, poorer in instincts, and more _honest_ who, with an appetite for which they are to be envied, continue to diet themselves on contradictions, and gulp down "Faith" in company with science, Christian love together with anti-Semitism, and the will to power (to the "Empire"), dished up with the gospel of the humble, without showing the slightest signs of indigestion. Fancy this absence of party-feeling in the presence of opposites! Fancy this gastric neutrality and "disinterestedness"! Behold this sense of justice in the German palate, which can grant equal rights to all,--which finds everything tasteful!
Without a shadow of a doubt the Germans are idealists. When I was last in Germany, I found German taste striving to grant Wagner and the _Trumpeter of Sakkingen_[2] equal rights; while I myself witnessed the attempts of the people of Leipzig to do honour to one of the most genuine and most German of musicians,--using German here in the old sense of the word,--a man who was no mere German of the Empire, the master Heinrich Schütz, by founding a Liszt Society, the object of which was to cultivate and spread artful (_listige_[3]) Church music.
Without a shadow of doubt the Germans are idealists.
2 But here nothing shall stop me from being rude, and from telling the Germans one or two unpleasant home truths: who else would do it if I did not? I refer to their laxity in matters historical. Not only have the Germans entirely lost the _breadth of vision_ which enables one to grasp the course of culture and the values of culture; not only are they one and all political (or Church) puppets; but they have also actually _put a ban upon_ this very breadth of vision. A man must first and foremost be "German," he must belong to "_the_ race"; then only can he pass judgment upon all values and lack of values in history--then only can he establish them...To be German is in itself an argument, "Germany, Germany above all,"[4] is a principle; the Germans stand for the "moral order of the universe" in history; compared with the Roman Empire, they are the up-holders of freedom; compared with the eighteenth century, they are the restorers of morality, of the "Categorical Imperative." There is such a thing as the writing of history according to the lights of Imperial Germany; there is, I fear, anti-Semitic history--there is also history written with an eye to the Court, and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed of himself. Quite recently an idiotic opinion _in historicis,_ an observation of Vischer the Swabian æsthete, since happily deceased, made the round of the German newspapers as a "truth" to which every German _must assent_ The observation was this: "The Renaissance _and_ the Reformation only together constitute a whole--the æsthetic rebirth, and the moral rebirth." When I listen to such things, I lose all patience, and I feel inclined, I even feel it my duty, to tell the Germans, for once in a way, all that they have on their conscience.
_Every great crime against culture for the last four centuries lies on their conscience..._ And always for the same reason, always owing to their bottomless cowardice in the face of reality, which is also cowardice in the face of truth; always owing to the love of falsehood which has become almost instinctive in them--in short, "idealism."
It was the Germans who caused Europe to lose the fruits, the whole meaning of her last period of greatness--the period of the Renaissance.
At a moment when a higher order of values, values that were noble, that said yea to life, and that guaranteed a future, had succeeded in triumphing over the opposite values, the values of degeneration, in the very seat of Christianity itself,--and _even in the hearts of those sitting there,_--Luther, that cursed monk, not only restored the Church, but, what was a thousand times worse, restored Christianity, and at a time too when it lay defeated. Christianity, the _Denial of the Will to Live,_ exalted to a religion! Luther was an impossible monk who, thanks to his own "impossibility," attacked the Church, and in so doing restored it! Catholics would be perfectly justified in celebrating feasts in honour of Luther, and in producing festival plays[5] in his honour. Luther and the "rebirth of morality"! May all psychology go to the devil! Without a shadow of a doubt the Germans are idealists. On two occasions when, at the cost of enormous courage and self-control, an upright, unequivocal, and perfectly scientific attitude of mind had been attained, the Germans were able to discover back stairs leading down to the old "ideal" again, compromises between truth and the "ideal," and, in short, formulæ for the right to reject science and to perpetrate falsehoods. Leibniz and Kant--these two great breaks upon the intellectual honesty of Europe! Finally, at a moment when there appeared on the bridge that spanned two centuries of decadence, a superior force of genius and will which was strong enough to consolidate Europe and to convert it into a political and economic unit, with the object of ruling the world, the Germans, with their Wars of Independence, robbed Europe of the significance--the marvellous significance, of Napoleon's life. And in so doing they laid on their conscience everything that followed, everything that exists to-day,--this sickliness and want of reason which is most opposed to culture, and which is called Nationalism,--this _névrose nationale_ from which Europe is suffering acutely; this eternal subdivision of Europe into petty states, with politics on a municipal scale: they have robbed Europe itself of its significance, of its reason,--and have stuffed it into a cul-de-sac. Is there any one except me who knows the way out of this cul-de-sac? Does anyone except me know of an aspiration which would be great enough to bind the people of Europe once more together?
3 And after all, why should I not express my suspicions? In my case, too, the Germans will attempt to make a great fate give birth merely to a mouse. Up to the present they have compromised themselves with me; I doubt whether the future will improve them. Alas! how happy I should be to prove a false prophet in this matter! My natural readers and listeners are already Russians, Scandinavians, and Frenchmen--will they always be the same? In the history of knowledge, Germans are represented only by doubtful names, they have been able to produce only "_unconscious_" swindlers (this word applies to Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, just as well as to Kant or Leibniz; they were all mere _Schleiermachers_).[6] The Germans must not have the honour of seeing the first upright intellect in their history of intellects, that intellect in which truth ultimately got the better of the fraud of four thousand years, reckoned as one with the German intellect. "German intellect" is my foul air: I breathe with difficulty in the neighbourhood of this psychological uncleanliness that has now become instinctive--an uncleanliness which in every word and expression betrays a German. They have never undergone a seventeenth century of hard self-examination, as the French have,--a La Rochefoucauld, a Descartes, are a thousand times more upright than the very first among Germans,--the latter have not yet had any psychologists. But psychology is almost the standard of measurement for the cleanliness or uncleanliness of a race...For if a man is not even clean, how can he be deep? The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever I fathom their depths--they haven't any, and that's the end of it. Thus they cannot even be called shallow. That which is called "deep" in Germany, is precisely this instinctive uncleanliness towards one's self, of which I have just spoken: people refuse to be clear in regard to their own natures. Might I be allowed, perhaps, to suggest the word "German" as an international epithet denoting this psychological depravity?--At the moment of writing, for instance, the German Emperor is declaring it to be his Christian duty to liberate the slaves in Africa; among us Europeans, then, this would be called simply "German."...Have the Germans ever produced even a book that had depth? They are lacking in the mere idea of what constitutes a book. I have known scholars who thought that Kant was deep. At the Court of Prussia I fear that Herr von Treitschke is regarded as deep.
And when I happen to praise Stendhal as a deep psychologist, I have often been compelled, in the company of German University Professors, to spell his name aloud.
4 And why should I not proceed to the end? I am fond of clearing the air. It is even part of my ambition to be considered as essentially a despiser of Germans. I expressed my suspicions of the German character even at the age of six-and-twenty (see _Thoughts out of Season,_ vol. ii. pp. 164, 165),--to my mind the Germans are impossible.
When I try to think of the kind of man who is opposed to me in all my instincts, my mental image takes the form of a German. The first thing I ask myself when I begin analysing a man, is, whether he has a feeling for distance in him; whether he sees rank, gradation, and order everywhere between man and man; whether he makes distinctions; for this is what constitutes a gentleman. Otherwise he belongs hopelessly to that open-hearted, open-minded--alas! and always very good-natured species, _la canaille_! But the Germans are _canaille_--alas! they are so good-natured! A man lowers himself by frequenting the society of Germans: the German places every one on an equal footing. With the exception of my intercourse with one or two artists, and above all with Richard Wagner, I cannot say that I have spent one pleasant hour with Germans. Suppose, for one moment, that the profoundest spirit of all ages were to appear among Germans, then one of the saviours of the Capitol would be sure to arise and declare that his own ugly soul was just as great. I can no longer abide this race with which a man is always in bad company, which; has no idea of nuances--woe to me! I am a nuance--and which has not _esprit_ in its feet, and cannot even walk withal! In short, the Germans have no feet at all, they simply have legs. The Germans have not the faintest idea of how vulgar they are--but this in itself is the acme of vulgarity,--they are not even ashamed of being merely Germans. They will have their say in everything, they regard themselves as fit to decide all questions; I even fear that they have decided about me. My whole life is essentially a proof of this remark. In vain have I sought among them for a sign of tact and delicacy towards myself. Among Jews I did indeed find it, but not among Germans. I am so constituted as to be gentle and kindly to every one,--I have the right not to draw distinctions,--but this does not prevent my eyes from being open. I except no one, and least of all my friends,--I only trust that this has not prejudiced my reputation for humanity among them? There are five or six things which I have always made points of honour. Albeit, the truth remains that for many years I have considered almost every letter that has reached me as a piece of cynicism. There is more cynicism in an attitude of goodwill towards me than in any sort of hatred. I tell every friend to his face that he has never thought it worth his while to _study_ any one of my writings: from the slightest hints I gather that they do not even know what lies hidden in my books. And with regard even to my _Zarathustra,_ which of my friends would have seen more in it than a piece of unwarrantable, though fortunately harmless, arrogance? Ten years have elapsed, and no one has yet felt it a duty to his conscience to defend my name against the absurd silence beneath which it has been entombed.
It was a foreigner, a Dane, who first showed sufficient keenness of instinct and of courage to do this, and who protested indignantly against my so-called friends. At what German University to-day would such lectures on my philosophy be possible, as those which Dr. Brandes delivered last spring in Copenhagen, thus proving once more his right to the title psychologist? For my part, these things have never caused me any pain; that which is _necessary_ does not offend me. _Amor fati_ is the core of my nature. This, however, does not alter the fact that I love irony and even world-historic irony. And thus, about two years before hurling the destructive thunderbolt of the _Transvaluation,_ which will send the whole of civilisation into convulsions, I sent my _Case of Wagner_ out into the world. The Germans were given the chance of blundering and immortalising their stupidity once more on my account, and they still have just enough time to do it in. And have they fallen in with my plans? Admirably! my dear Germans. Allow me to congratulate you.
[Footnote 1: The motto of _The Case of Wagner._--TR.]
[Footnote 2: An opera by Nessler which was all the rage in Germany twenty years ago.--TR.]
[Footnote 3: Unfortunately it is impossible to render this play on the words in English.--TR.]
[Footnote 4: The German National Song (_Deutschland, Deutschland über alles_).--TR.]
[Footnote 5: Ever since the year 1617 such plays have been produced by the Protestants of Germany.--TR.]
[Footnote 6: _Schleiermacher_ literally means a weaver or maker of veils.--TR.]
WHY I AM A FATALITY 1 I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable--a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands...I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself; I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced "holy." You will understand why I publish this book beforehand--it is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. And I am notwithstanding, or rather not _not_withstanding, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more blown-out with falsehood has ever existed, than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hitherto _lies_ have been called truth.
_The Transvaluation of all Values,_ this is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its senses--a step which in me became flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being, and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehood--that is to say, I smelt it as such. My genius resides in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted hitherto, and am nevertheless the reverse of a negative spirit. I am the harbinger of joy, the like of which has never existed before; I have discovered tasks of such lofty greatness that, until my time, no one had any idea of such things. Mankind can begin to have fresh hopes, only now that I have lived. Thus, I am necessarily a man of Fate. For when Truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes, followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams.
The concept "politics" then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space--for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on earth.
2 If you should require a formula for a destiny of this kind that has taken human form, you will find it in my _Zarathustra_.
"And he who would be a creator in good and evil--verily, he must first be a destroyer, and break values into pieces.
"Thus the greatest evil belongeth unto the greatest good: but this is the creative good."
I am by far the most terrible man that has ever existed; but this does not alter the fact that I shall become the most beneficent. I know the joy of _annihilation_ to a degree which is commensurate with my power to annihilate. In both cases I obey my Dionysian nature, which knows not how to separate the negative deed from the saying of yea. I am the first immoralist, and in this sense I am essentially the annihilator.
3 People have never asked me as they should have done, what the name of Zarathustra precisely meant in my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist; for that which distinguishes this Persian from all others in the past is the very fact that he was the exact reverse of an immoralist. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things.
The translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work. But the very question suggests its own answer. Zarathustra created this most portentous of all errors,--morality; therefore he must be the first to expose it. Not only because he has had longer and greater experience of the subject than any other thinker,--all history is indeed the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things,--but because of the more important fact that Zarathustra was the most truthful of thinkers. In his teaching alone is truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue--that is to say, as the reverse of the cowardice of the "idealist" who takes to his heels at the sight of reality.
Zarathustra has more pluck in his body than all other thinkers put together. To tell the truth and to aim straight: that is the first Persian virtue. Have I made myself clear?...The overcoming of morality by itself, through truthfulness, the moralist's overcoming of himself in his opposite--in me--that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.
4 In reality two negations are involved in my title Immoralist. I first of all deny the type of man that has hitherto been regarded as the highest--the _good,_ the _kind,_ and the _charitable_; and I also deny that kind of morality which has become recognised and paramount as morality-in-itself--I speak of the morality of decadence, or, to use a still cruder term, Christian morality. I would agree to the second of the two negations being regarded as the more decisive, for, reckoned as a whole, the overestimation of goodness and kindness seems to me already a consequence of decadence, a symptom of weakness, and incompatible with any ascending and yea-saying life. Negation and annihilation are inseparable from a yea-saying attitude towards life.
Let me halt for a moment at the question of the psychology of the good man. In order to appraise the value of a certain type of man, the cost of his maintenance must be calculated,--and the conditions of his existence must be known. The condition of the existence of the _good_ is falsehood: or, otherwise expressed, the refusal at any price to see how reality is actually constituted. The refusal to see that this reality is not so constituted as always to be stimulating beneficent instincts, and still less, so as to suffer at all moments the intrusion of ignorant and good-natured hands. To consider distress of all kinds as an objection, as something which must be done away with, is the greatest nonsense on earth; generally speaking, it is nonsense of the most disastrous sort, fatal in its stupidity--almost as mad as the will to abolish bad weather, out of pity for the poor, so to speak. In the great economy of the whole universe, the terrors of reality (in the passions, in the desires, in the will to power) are incalculably more necessary than that form of petty happiness which is called "goodness"; it is even needful to practise leniency in order so much as to allow the latter a place at all, seeing that it is based upon a falsification of the instincts. I shall have an excellent opportunity of showing the incalculably calamitous consequences to the whole of history, of the credo of optimism, this monstrous offspring of the _homines optimi._ Zarathustra,[1] the first who recognised that the optimist is just as degenerate as the pessimist, though perhaps more detrimental, says: "_Good men never speak the truth. False shores and false harbours were ye taught by the good. In the lies of the good were ye born and bred. Through the good everything hath become false and crooked from the roots._" Fortunately the world is not built merely upon those instincts which would secure to the good-natured herd animal his paltry happiness. To desire everybody to become a "good man," "a gregarious animal," "a blue-eyed, benevolent, beautiful soul," or--as Herbert Spencer wished--a creature of altruism, would mean robbing existence of its greatest character, castrating man, and reducing humanity to a sort of wretched Chinadom. _And this some have tried to do! It is precisely this that men called morality._ In this sense Zarathustra calls "the good," now "the last men," and anon "the beginning of the end"; and above all, he considers them as _the most detrimental kind of men,_ because they secure their existence at the cost of Truth and at the cost of the Future.
"The good--they cannot create; they are ever the beginning of the end.
"They crucify him who writeth new values on new tables; they sacrifice _unto themselves_ the future; they crucify the whole future of humanity!
"The good--they are ever the beginning of the end.
"And whatever harm the slanderers of the world may do, _the harm of the good is the most calamitous of all harm._" 5 Zarathustra, as the first psychologist of the good man, is perforce the friend of the evil man. When a degenerate kind of man has succeeded to the highest rank among the human species, his position must have been gained at the cost of the reverse type--at the cost of the strong man who is certain of life. When the gregarious animal stands in the glorious rays of the purest virtue, the exceptional man must be degraded to the rank of the evil. If falsehood insists at all costs on claiming the word "truth" for its own particular standpoint, the really truthful man must be sought out among the despised. Zarathustra allows of no doubt here; he says that it was precisely the knowledge of the good, of the "best," which inspired his absolute horror of men. And it was out of this feeling of repulsion that he grew the wings which allowed him to soar into remote futures. He does not conceal the fact that his type of man is one which is relatively superhuman--especially as opposed to the "good" man, and that the good and the just would regard his superman as the _devil._ "Ye higher men, on whom my gaze now falls, this is the doubt that ye wake in my breast, and this is my secret laughter: methinks ye would call my Superman--the devil! So strange are ye in your souls to all that is great, that the Superman would be terrible in your eyes for his goodness."
It is from this passage, and from no other, that you must set out to understand the goal to which Zarathustra aspires--the kind of man that he conceives sees reality _as it is;_ he is strong enough for this--he is not estranged or far removed from it, he is that reality himself, in his own nature can be found all the terrible and questionable character of reality: _only thus can man have greatness._ 6 But I have chosen the title of Immoralist as a surname and as a badge of honour in yet another sense; I am very proud to possess this name which distinguishes me from all the rest of mankind. No one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him; to that end there were needed height, a remoteness of vision, and an abysmal psychological depth, not believed to be possible hitherto. Up to the present Christian morality has been the Circe of all thinkers--they stood at her service. What man, before my time, had descended into the underground caverns from out of which the poisonous fumes of this ideal--of this slandering of the world--burst forth? What man had even dared to suppose that they were underground caverns? Was a single one of the philosophers who preceded me a psychologist at all, and not the very reverse of a psychologist--that is to say, a "superior swindler," an "Idealist"?
Before my time there was no psychology. To be the first in this new realm may amount to a curse; at all events, it is a fatality: _for one is also the first to despise._ My danger is the loathing of mankind.
7 Have you understood me? That which defines me, that which makes me stand apart from the whole of the rest of humanity, is the fact that I _unmasked_ Christian morality. For this reason I was in need of a word which conveyed the idea of a challenge to everybody. Not to have awakened to these discoveries before, struck me as being the sign of the greatest uncleanliness that mankind has on its conscience, as self-deception become instinctive, as the fundamental will to be blind to every phenomenon, all causality and all reality; in fact, as an almost criminal fraud _in psychologicis._ Blindness in regard to Christianity is the essence of criminality--for it is the crime _against_ life. Ages and peoples, the first as well as the last, philosophers and old women, with the exception of five or six moments in history (and of myself, the seventh), are all alike in this. Hitherto the Christian has been _the_ "moral being," a peerless oddity, and, _as_ "a moral being," he was more absurd, more vain, more thoughtless, and a greater disadvantage to himself, than the greatest despiser of humanity could have deemed possible. Christian morality is the most malignant form of all false too the actual Circe of humanity: that which has corrupted mankind. It is not error as error which infuriates me at the sight of this spectacle; it is not the millenniums of absence of "goodwill," of discipline, of decency, and of bravery in spiritual things, which betrays itself in the triumph of Christianity; it is rather the absence of nature, it is the perfectly ghastly fact that _anti-nature_ itself received the highest honours as morality and as law, and remained suspended over man as the Categorical Imperative. Fancy blundering in this way, _not_ as an individual, _not_ as a people, but as a whole species! as _humanity_! To teach the contempt of all the principal instincts of life; to posit falsely the existence of a "soul," of a "spirit," in order to be able to defy the body; to spread the feeling that there is something impure in the very first prerequisite of life--in sex; to seek the principle of evil in the profound need of growth and expansion--that is to say, in severe self-love (the term itself is slanderous); and conversely to see a higher moral value--but what am I talking about?--I mean the _moral value per se,_ in the typical signs of decline, in the antagonism of the instincts, in "selflessness," in the loss of ballast, in "the suppression of the personal element," and in "love of one's neighbour" (neighbouritis!). What! is humanity itself in a state of degeneration?
Has it always been in this state? One thing is certain, that ye are taught only the values of decadence as the highest values. The morality of self-renunciation is essentially the morality of degeneration; the fact, "I am going to the dogs," is translated into the imperative," Ye shall all go to the dogs"--and not only into the imperative. This morality of self-renunciation, which is the only kind of morality that has been taught hitherto, betrays the will to nonentity--it denies life to the very roots. There still remains the possibility that it is not mankind that is in a state of degeneration, but only that parasitical kind of man--the priest, who, by means of morality and lies, has climbed up to his position of determinator of values, who divined in Christian morality his road to power. And, to tell the truth, this is my opinion. The teachers and I leaders of mankind--including the theologians--have been, every one of them, decadents: hence their) transvaluation of all values into a hostility towards; life; hence morality. _The definition of morality;_ Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents, actuated by a desire _to avenge themselves with success upon life._ I attach great value to this definition.
8 Have you understood me? I have not uttered a single word which I had not already said five years ago through my mouthpiece Zarathustra.
The unmasking of Christian morality is an event which unequalled in history, it is a real catastrophe. The man who throws light upon it is a _force majeure,_ a fatality; he breaks the history of man into two. Time is reckoned up before him and after him. The lightning flash of truth struck precisely that which theretofore had stood highest: he who understands what was destroyed by that flash should look to see whether he still holds anything in his hands. Everything which until then was called truth, has been revealed as the most detrimental, most spiteful, and most subterranean form of life; the holy pretext, which was the "improvement" of man, has been recognised as a ruse for draining life of its energy and of its blood. Morality conceived as _Vampirism_...The man who unmasks morality has also unmasked the worthlessness of the values in which men either believe or have believed; he no longer sees anything to be revered in the most venerable man--even in the types of men that have been pronounced holy; all he can see in them is the most fatal kind of abortions, fatal, _because they fascinate._ The concept "God" was invented as the opposite of the concept life--everything detrimental, poisonous, and slanderous, and all deadly hostility to life, wad bound together in one horrible unit in Him. The concepts "beyond" and "true world" were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists--in order that no goal or aim, no sense or task, might be left to earthly reality. The concepts "soul," "spirit," and last of all the concept "immortal soul," were invented in order to throw contempt on the body, in order to make it sick and "holy," in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling levity towards all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously, _i.e._ the questions of nutrition and habitation, of intellectual diet, the treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and