Communal morality is thus promoted here, because it is advantageous; and, in order to make it triumph, war and violence are waged against immorality with what " right "? Without any right whatsoever; but in accordance with the instinct of self-preservation. The same classes avail themselves of immorality when it serves their purpose to do so.
316. Observe the hypocritical color which all civil institutions are painted, just as if they were the offshoots of morality for instance: marriage, work, calling, patriotism, the family, order, and rights. But as they were all established in favour of the most mediocre type of man, to protect him from exceptions and the need of exceptions, one must not be surprised! find them sown with lies.
317. Virtue must be defended against its preachers: they are its worst enemies. For they teach virtue as an ideal for all; they divest virtue of the charm which consists in its rareness, its inimit- ableness, its exceptional and non - average character that is to say, of its aristocratic charm. A stand must also be made against those embittered idealists who eagerly tap all pots and are satisfied to hear them ring hollow: what in genuousness! to demand great and rare things, and then to declare, with anger and contempt of one s fellows, that they do not exist! It is obvious, for instance, that a marriage is worth only as much as those are worth whom it joins that is to say, that on the whole it is something wretched and indecent: no priest or registrar can make anything else of it. Virtue * has all the instincts of the average man against it: it is not profitable, it is not prudent, and it isolates. It is related to passion, and not very accessible to reason; it spoils the character, the head, and the senses always, of course, subject to the medium standard of men; it provokes hostility towards order, and towards the lies which are concealed beneath all order, all institutions, and all reality when seen in the light of its pernicious influence upon others, it is the worst of vices. * TRANSLATOR S NOTE. Virtue is used here, of course, in the sense of "the excellence of man, not in the sense of the Christian negative virtue...I recognise virtue in that: (i) it does not insist upon being recognized; (2) it does not presuppose the existence of virtue everywhere, but precisely something else; (3) it does not suffer from the absence of virtue, but regards it rather as a relation of perspective which throws virtue into relief: it does not proclaim itself; (4) it makes no propaganda; (5) it allows no one to pose as judge because it is always a personal virtue; (6) it does precisely what is generally forbidden: virtue as I understand it is the actual vetitum within all gregarious legislation; (7) in short, I recognise virtue in that it is in the Renaissance style virtu free from all moralic acid...
318. In the first place,* Messrs. Virtue-mongers, you have no superiority over us; we should like to make you take modesty a little more to heart: it is wretched personal interests and prudence which suggest your virtue to you. And if you had more strength and courage in your bodies you would not lower yourselves thus to the level of virtuous nonentities. You make what you can of yourselves: partly what you are obliged to make, that is to say, what your circumstances force you to make, partly what suits your pleasure and seems useful to you. But if you do only what is in keeping with your inclinations, * TRANSLATOR S NOTE. Here Nietzsche returns to Christian virtue which is negative and moral. or what necessity exacts from you, or what is useful to you, you ought neither to praise your selves nor let others praise you!...One is a thoroughly puny kind of man when one is only virtuous: nothing should mislead you in this regard! Men who have to be considered at all, were never such donkeys of virtue: their inmost instinct, that which determined their quantum of power, did not find its reckoning thus: whereas with your minimum amount of power nothing can seem more full of wisdom to you than virtue. But the multitude are on your side: and because you tyrannise over us, we shall fight you...
319. A virtuous man is of a lower species because, in the first place, he has no " personality," but acquires his value by conforming with a certain human scheme which has been once and for ever fixed. He has no independent value: he may be compared; he has his equals, he must not be an individual. Reckoning up the qualities of the good man, why is it they appear pleasant to us? Because they urge us neither to war, to mistrust, to caution, to the accumulating of forces, nor to severity: our laziness, our good nature, and our levity, have a good time. This, our feeling of well-being, is what we project into the good man in the form of a quality, in the form of a valuable possession. 20O 320. Under certain circumstances, virtue is merely a venerable form of stupidity: who could blame you for it? And this form of virtue has not been outlived even today. A sort of honest peasant-simplicity, which is possible, however, in all classes of society, and which one cannot meet with anything else than a respectful smile, still thinks today that everything is in good hands that is to say, in " God s hands ": and when it supports this proposition with that same modest assurance as that with which it would assert that two and two are four, we others naturally refrain from contradiction. Why disturb this pure foolery? Why darken it with our cares concerning man, people, goals, the future? Even if we wished to do so, we shouldn t succeed. In all things these people see the reflection of their own venerable stupidity and goodness (in them the old God deus myops still lives); we others see something else in everything: our problematic nature, our contra dictions, our deeper, more painful, and more suspicious wisdom.
321. He who finds a particular virtue an easy matter, ultimately laughs at it. Seriousness cannot be maintained once virtue is attained. As soon as a man has reached virtue, he jumps out of it whither? Into devilry. Meanwhile, how intelligent all our evil tend- 261 encies and impulses have become! What an amount of inquisitiveness torments them! They are all fishhooks of knowledge!
322. The idea is to associate vice with something so terrible that at last one is obliged to run away from it in order to be rid of its associations. This is the well-known case of Tannhauser. Tannhauser, brought to his wits end by Wagner- ian music, cannot endure life any longer even in the company of Mrs. Venus: suddenly virtue begins to have a charm for him; a Thuringian virgin goes up in price, and what is even worse still, he shows a liking for Wolfram von Eschen- bach s melody...323. The Patrons of Virtue. Lust of property, lust of power, laziness, simplicity, fear; all these things are interested in virtue; that is why it stands so securely.
324. Virtue is no longer believed in; its powers of attraction are dead; what is needed is some one who will once more bring it into the market in the form of an outlandish kind of adventure and of dissipation. It exacts too much extravagance and narrow-mindedness from its believers to allow of conscience not being against it today. Certainly, for people without either consciences or scruples, 262 this may constitute its new charm: it is now what it has never been before a vice.
325. Virtue is still the most expensive vice: let it remain so!
326. Virtues are as dangerous as vices, in so far as they are allowed to rule over one as authorities and laws coming from outside, and not as qualities one develops one s self. The latter is the only right way; they should be the most personal means of defence and most individual needs the determin ing factors of precisely our existence and growth, which we recognise and acknowledge independ ently of the question whether others grow with us with the help of the same or of different principles. This view of the danger of the virtue which is understood as impersonal and objective also holds good of modesty: through modesty many of the choicest intellects perish. The morality of modesty is the worst possible softening influence for those souls for which it is pre-eminently necessary that they become hard betimes.
327. The domain of morality must be reduced and limited step by step; the names of the instincts which are really active in this sphere must be drawn into the light of day and honored, after 263 they have lain all this time in the concealment of hypocritical names of virtue. Out of respect for one s " honesty," which makes itself heard ever more and more imperiously, one ought to unlearn the shame which makes one deny and " explain away " all natural instincts. The extent to which, one can dispense with virtue is the measure of one s strength; and a height may be imagined where the notion " virtue " is understood in such a way as to be reminiscent of virtu the virtue of the Renaissance free from moralic acid. But for the moment how remote this ideal seems! The reduction of the domain of morality is a sign of its progress. Wherever, hitherto, thought has not been guided by causality, thinking has taken a moral turn.
328. After all, what have I achieved? Let us not close our eyes to this wonderful result: I have lent new charms to virtue it now affects one in the same way as something forbidden. It has our most subtle honesty against it, it is salted in the " cum grano salts " of the scientific pang of conscience. It savors of antiquity and of old fashion, and thus it is at last beginning to draw refined people and to make them inquisitive in short, it affects us like a vice. Only after we have once recognized that everything consists of lies and appearance, shall we have again earned the right to uphold this most beautiful of all fictions virtue. There will then remain no further reason to de prive ourselves of it: only when we have shown 264 virtue to be a form of immorality do we again justify it, it then becomes classified, and likened, in its fundamental features, to the profound and general immorality of all existence, of which it is then shown to be a part. It appears as a form of luxury of the first order, the most arrogant, the dearest, and rarest form of vice. We have robbed it of its grimaces and divested it of its drapery; we have delivered it from the importunate famili arity of the crowd; we have deprived it of its ridiculous rigidity, its empty expression, its stiff false hair, and its hieratic muscles.
329. And is it supposed that I have thereby done any harm to virtue?...Just as little as anar chists do to princes. Only since they have been shot at, have they once more sat securely on their thrones...For thus it has always been and will ever be: one cannot do a thing a better service than to persecute it and to run it to earth., This I have done.
5. THE MORAL IDEAL.
A. A Criticism of Ideals.
330. It were the thing to begin this criticism in such- wise as to do away with the word "Ideal": a criticism of desiderata.
331. Only the fewest amongst us are aware of what is involved, from the standpoint of desirability, in every " thus should it be, but it is not," or even " thus it ought to have been ": such expressions of opinion involve a condemnation of the whole course of events. For there is nothing quite isolated in the world: the smallest thing bears the largest on its back; on thy small injustice the whole nature of the future depends; the whole is condemned by every criticism which is directed at the smallest part of it. Now granting that the moral norm even as Kant understood it is never completely fulfilled, and remains like a sort of Beyond hanging over reality without ever falling down to it; then morality would contain in itself a judgment concerning the whole, which would still, however, allow of the question: whence does it get the right thereto? How does the part come to acquire this judicial position relative to the whole? And if, as some have declared, this moral condemnation of, and dissatisfaction with, reality, is an ineradicable instinct, is it not possible that this instinct may perhaps belong to the ineradicable stupidities and immodesties of our species? But in saying this, we are doing pre cisely what we deprecate; the point of view of desirability and of unauthorised fault-finding is part and parcel of the whole character of worldly phenomena just as every injustice and imperfection is it is our very notion of " perfection " which is never gratified. Every instinct which desires to be indulged gives expression to its dissatisfaction with the present state of things: how? Is the whole perhaps made up of a host of dissatisfied parts, which all have desiderata in their heads? Is the " course of things " perhaps " the road hence? the road leading away from reality" that is to say, eternal dissatisfaction in itself? Is the concep tion of desiderata perhaps the essential motive- power of all things? Is it dens? * It seems to me of the utmost importance that we should rid ourselves of the notion of the whole, of an entity, and of any kind of power or form of the unconditioned. For we shall never be able to resist the temptation of regarding it as the supreme being, and of christening it " God." The " All " must be subdivided; we must unlearn our respect for it, and reappropriate that which we have lent the unknown and an imaginary entity, for the purposes of our neighbour and our selves. Whereas, for instance, Kant said: " Two things remain for ever worthy of honor" (at the close of his Practical Reason] today we should prefer to say: " Digestion is more worthy of honor." The concept, " the All," will always give rise to the old problems, " How is evil possible? " etc. Therefore, there is no " All" there is no great sensorium or inventarium or power-magazine.
332. A man as he ought to be: this sounds to me in just as bad taste as: "A tree as it ought to be."
333. Ethics: or the " philosophy of desirability." " Things ought to be otherwise," " things ought to become different ": dissatisfaction would thus seem the heart of ethics. One could find a way out of it, firstj by select ing only those states in which one is free from emotion; secondly, by grasping the insolence and stupidity of the attitude of mind: for to desire that something should be otherwise than it is, means to desire that everything should be different it involves a damaging criticism of the whole. But life itself consists in such desiring! To ascertain what exists, how it exists seems an ever so much higher and more serious matter than every " thus should it be," because the latter, as a piece of human criticism and arrogance, appears to be condemned as ludicrous from the start. It expresses a need which would fain have the organization of the world correspond with our human well-being, and which directs the will as much as possible towards the accomplishment of that relationship. On the other hand, this desire, " thus it ought to be," has only called forth that other desire, " what exists? " The desire of knowing what exists, is already a consequence of the question, "how? is it possible? Why precisely so? " Our wonder at the disagreement between our desires and the course of the world has led to our learning to know the course of the world. Perhaps the matter stands differently: maybe the expression, " thus it ought to be," is merely the utterance of our desire to overcome the world 334. Today when every attempt at determining how man should be is received with some irony, when we adhere to the notion that in spite of all one only becomes what one is (in spite of all that is to say, education, instruction, environment, accident, and disaster), in the matter of morality we have learnt, in a very peculiar way, how to reverse the relation of cause and effect. Nothing perhaps distinguishes us more than this from the ancient believers in morality. We no longer say, for instance, " Vice is the cause of a man s physical ruin," and we no longer say, " A man prospers with virtue because it brings a long life and happiness." Our minds today are much more inclined to the belief that vice and virtue are not causes but only effects. A man becomes a respectable member of society because he was a respectable man from the start that is to say, because he was born in possession of good instincts and prosperous pro pensities...Should a man enter the world poor, and the son of parents who are neither economical nor thrifty, he is insusceptible of being improved that is to say, he is only fit for the prison or the madhouse...Today we are no longer able to separate moral from physical degeneration: the former is merely a complicated symptom of the latter; a man is necessarily bad just as he is necessarily ill...Bad: this word here stands 269 for a certain lack of capacity which is related physiologically with the degenerating type for instance, a weak will, an uncertain and many-sided personality, the inability to resist reacting to a stimulus and to control one s self, and a certain constraint resulting from every suggestion pro ceeding from another s will. Vice is not a cause; it is an effect...Vice is a somewhat arbitrary epitome of certain effects resulting from physio logical degeneracy. A general proposition such as that which Christianity teaches, namely, " Man is evil," would be justified provided one were justified in regarding a given type of degenerate man as normal. But this may be an exaggeration. Of course, wherever Christianity prospers and pre vails, the proposition holds good: for then the existence of an unhealthy soil of a degenerate territory is demonstrated.
335. It is difficult to have sufficient respect for man, when one sees how he understands the art of fighting his way, of enduring, of turning circum stances to his own advantage, and of overthrowing opponents; but when he is seen in the light of his desires, he is the most absurd of all animals...It is just as if he required a playground for his cowardice, his laziness, his feebleness, his sweetness, his submissiveness, where he recovers from his strong virile virtues. Just look at man s " desiderata " and his " ideals." Man, when he desires, tries to recover from that which is eternally valuable in him, from his deeds; and then he rushes into nonentity, absurdity, valueless- ness, childishness. The intellectual indigence and lack of inventive power of this resourceful and inventive animal is simply terrible. The " ideal " is at the same time the penalty man pays for the enormous expenditure which he has to defray in all real and pressing duties. Should reality cease to prevail, there follow dreams, fatigue, weakness: an " ideal " might even be regarded as a form of dream, fatigue, or weakness. The strongest and the most impotent men become alike when this condition overtakes them: they deify the cessation of work, of war, of passions, of suspense, of contrasts, of " reality " in short, of the struggle for knowledge and of the trouble of acquiring it. " Innocence " to them is idealised stultification; " blessedness " is idealised idleness; " love," the ideal state of the gregarious animal that will no longer have an enemy. And thus everything that lowers and belittles man is elevated to an ideal.
336. A desire magnifies the thing desired; and by not being realized it grows the greatest ideas are those which have been created by the strongest and longest desiring. Things grow ever more valuable in our estimation, the more our desire for them increases: if " moral values " have become the highest values, it simply shows that the moral ideal is the one which has been realized least (and 21 thus it represented the Beyond to all suffering, as a road to blessedness}. Man, with ever-increasing ardour, has only been embracing clouds: and ultimately called his desperation and impotence "God."
337. Think of the nai vetof all ultimate " desiderata " when the " wherefore " of man remains unknown.
338. What is the counterfeit coinage of morality? First of all we should know what " good and evil " mean. That is as good as wishing to know why man is here, and what his goal or his destiny is. And that means that one would fain know that man actually has a goal or a destiny.
339. The very obscure and arbitrary notion that humanity has a general duty to perform, and that, as a whole, it is striving towards a goal, is still in its infancy. Perhaps we shall once more be rid of it before it becomes a " fixed idea."...But humanity does not constitute a whole: it is an indissoluble multiplicity of ascending and descending organisms it knows no such thing as a state of youth followed by maturity and then age. But its strata lie confused and superimposed and in a few thousand years there may be even younger types of men than we can point out today. Decadence, on the other hand, belongs to all periods of human history: everywhere there is refuse and decaying matter, such things are in themselves vital pro cesses; for withering and decaying elements must be eliminated. * * Under the empire of Christian prejudice this question was never put at all: the purpose of life seemed to lie in the salvation of the individual soul; the question whether humanity might last for a long or a short time was not considered. The best Christians longed for the end to come as soon as possible; concerning the needs of the individual, there seemed to be no doubt whatsoever...The duty of every individual for the present was identical with what it would be in any sort of future for the man of the future: the value, the purpose, the limit of values was for ever fixed, unconditioned, eternal, one with God...What deviated from this eternal type was impious, diabolic, . The duty of every individual for the present was identical with what it would be in any sort of future for the man of the future: the value, the purpose, the limit of values was for ever fixed, unconditioned, eternal, one with God...What deviated from this eternal type was impious, diabolic, criminal. The centre of gravity of all values for each soul lay in that soul itself: salvation or damnation! The salvation of the immortal soul! The most extreme form of personalisation...For each soul there was only one kind of perfection; only one ideal, only one road to salvation...The most extreme form of the principle of equal rights, associated with an optical magnification of in dividual importance to the point of megalomania...Nothing but insanely important souls, re volving round their own axes with unspeakable terror...4 * Nobody believes in these assumed airs of im portance any longer today: and we have sifted our wisdom through the sieve of contempt. Nevertheless the optical habit survives, which would fain measure the value of man by his proximity to a certain ideal man: at bottom the personalisation view is upheld as firmly as that of the equality of rights as regards the ideal. In short: people seem to think that they know what the ultimate desideratum is in regard to the ideal man...But this belief is merely the result of the exceedingly detrimental influence of the Christian ideal, as anybody can discover for himself every time he carefully examines the " ideal type." In the first place, it is believed that the approach to a given " type " is desirable; secondly, that this particular type is known; thirdly, that every deviation from this type is a retrograde movement, a stemming of the spirit of progress, a loss of power and might in man...To dream of a state of affairs in which this perfect man will be in the majority: our friends the Socialists and even Messrs, the Utilitarians have not reached a higher level than this. In this way an aim seems to have crept into the evolution of man: at any rate the belief in a certain progress towards an ideal is the only shape in which an aim is con-. S 24 ceived in the history of mankind today. In short: the coming of the " Kingdom of God" has been placed in the future, and has been given an earthly, a human meaning but on the whole the faith in the old ideal is still maintained...
340. The more concealed forms of the cult of Christian, moral ideals. The insipid and cowardly notion " Nature" invented by Nature-enthusiasts (without any knowledge whatsoever of the terrible, the implacable, and the cynical element in even " the most beautiful " aspects), is only a sort of attempt at reading the moral and Christian notion of " humanity " into Nature; Rousseau s concept of Nature, for instance, which took for granted that " Nature " meant freedom, goodness, innocence, equity, justice, and Idylls, was nothing more at bottom than the cult of Christian morality. We should collect passages from the poets in order to see what they admired, in lofty mountains, for instance. What Goethe had to do with them why he admired Spinoza. Absolute ignorance concerning the reasons of this cult...The insipid and cowardly concept " Man" a la Comte and Stuart Mill, is at times the subject of a cult...This is only the Christian moral ideal again under another name...Refer also to the freethinkers Guyau for example. The insipid and cowardly concept " Art" which is held to mean sympathy with all suffering and with everything botched and bungled (the same 275 thing happens to history, cf. Thierry): again it is the cult of the Christian moral ideal. And now, as to the whole socialistic ideal: it is nothing but a blockheaded misunderstanding of the Christian moral ideal.
341. The origin of the ideal. The examination of the soil out of which it grows. A. Starting out from those " aesthetic " mental states during which the world seems rounder, fuller, and more perfect:: we have the pagan ideal with its dominating spirit of self-affirmation (people give of their abundance]. The highest type: the classical ideal regarded as an expres sion of the successful nature of all the more important instincts. In this classical ideal we find the grand style as the highest style. An expression of the " will to power " itself. The instinct which is most feared dares to acknow ledge itself. B. Starting out from the mental states in which the world seemed emptier, paler, and thinner, when " spiritualisation " and the absence of sensu ality assume the rank of perfection, and when all that is brutal, animal, direct, and proximate is avoided (people calculate and selecf): the " sage," " the angel "; priestliness = virginity = ignorance, are the physiological ideals of such idealists: the an&mic ideal. Under certain circumstances this anaemic ideal may be the ideal of such natures as represent paganism (thus Goethe sees his " saint " in Spinoza). C. Starting out from those mental states in which the world seemed more absurd, more evil, poorer, and more deceptive, an ideal cannot even be imagined or desired in it (people deny and annihilate]; the projection of the ideal into the sphere of the anti-natural, anti-actual, anti-logical; the state of him who judges thus (the " impover ishment " of the world as a result of suffering: people take, they no longer bestow): the anti-natural ideal. (The Christian ideal is a transitional form between the second and the third, now inclining more towards the former type, and anon inclining towards the latter.) The three ideals: A. Either a strengthening of Life (paganism}, or B. an impoverishment of Life (an&mid), or C. a denial of Life (anti-naturalism}. The state of beatitude in A. is the feeling of extreme abundance; in B. it is reached by the most fastidious selectiveness; in C. it is the contempt and the destruction of Life.
342. A. The consistent type understands that even evil must not be hated, must not be resisted, and that it is not allowable to make war against one s self; that it does not suffice merely to accept the pain which such behaviour brings in its train; that one lives entirely in positive feelings; that one takes the side of one s opponents in word and deed; that by means of a superfoetation of peaceful, kindly, conciliatory, helpful, and loving states, one impoverishes the soil of the other states,...that one is in need of unremitting practice. What is achieved thereby? The Buddhistic type, or the perfect cow. This point of view is possible only where no moral fanaticism prevails that is to say, when evil is not hated on its own account, but because it opens the road to conditions which are painful (unrest, work, care, complications, dependence). This is the Buddhistic point of view: there is no hatred of sin, the concept " sin," in fact, is entirely lacking. B. The inconsistent type. War is waged against evil there is a belief that war waged for Goodness sake does not involve the same moral results or affect character in the same way as war generally does (and owing to which tend encies it is detested as evil). As a matter of fact, a war of this sort carried on against evil is much more profoundly pernicious than any sort of personal hostility; and generally, it is " the person " which reassumes, at least in fancy, the position of opponent (the devil, evil spirits, etc.).