A Nietzsche Compendium (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Ho

By Friedrich Nietzsche and David Taffel

This convenient new compendium contains the five most philosophically significant of Nietzsche’s post-Thus Spoke Zarathustra writings. Nietzsche wrote of these works that he intended them as “fish hooks” for catching readers who shared his sense that a cataclysmic shift in human psychology had suddenly occurred with the advent of nihilism – the uncanny and pervasive feeling that life is devoid of all meaning, purpose, and value. Taken together these books offer the reader a definitive account of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy as he intended it to be presented and a sweeping attack upon everything the modern Western world holds to be good about itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428539

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was an acclaimed German philosopher who rose to prominence during the late nineteenth century. His work provides a thorough examination of societal norms often rooted in religion and politics. As a cultural critic, Nietzsche is affiliated with nihilism and individualism with a primary focus on personal development. His most notable books include The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. and Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche is frequently credited with contemporary teachings of psychology and sociology.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THIS CONVENIENT NEW COMPENDIUM CONTAINS THE FIVE MOST philosophically significant of Nietzsche’s post-Thus Spoke Zarathustra writings. In his characteristically idiosyncratic literary biography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes that the books he composed after his renowned Zarathustra are fish hooks for catching readers who share his sense that a cataclysmic shift in human psychology has just occurred. Alas, Nietzsche laments, in his time there were no fish. No one else had heard the ominous splitting of history in two with the advent of nihilism—the uncanny and pervasive feeling that life is devoid of all meaning, purpose, and value—that so profoundly affected Nietzsche he could do nothing else with his life but articulate this event. Nihilism is at our door, Nietzsche famously wrote. Do we perceive it yet? After more than a century, do we recognize that the psychological landscape in which we move about is the very one described by Nietzsche? How many of us, even after thoroughly reading his books, see that if we burrow deep enough into the intractable dilemmas of our age, we discover at their roots Nietzsche’s preoccupation: The aim is lacking: ‘Why’ finds no answer. . .? It is often said that Nietzsche is self-contradicting, confusing, and even incomprehensible. Yet the books gathered together in this volume articulate his distinct perspective at least as clearly and consistently as most other influential philosophers in the history of the West have articulated theirs. Moreover, these works are written in a beautifully stylized and frequently poetic language that dispenses with virtually all technical jargon. Each of Nietzsche’s sentences and paragraphs, as well as his whole books, are masterfully crafted works of art in addition to being intellectual lightening bolts that lay bare with every flash a radically new way of grasping reality, the world, and ourselves. Why, then, the persistent lament about Nietzsche’s obscurity? Perhaps the fault for this lies not so much in Nietzsche’s writings as in ourselves. Perhaps it is due to the fact that we are in denial about the possible existence of the reality Nietzsche describes. We couldn’t continue with life as usual if we truly took him seriously, yet not knowing how otherwise to proceed, we simply don’t understand him. This, however, would not be the case if we were fish like those Nietzsche seeks to catch with his last major works. Such fish already have gills for the oxygen of the reality Nietzsche describes. In fact, they are anxiously seeking entry to that reality, for they have an intuition that only there will they breathe freely. In the hope that there are by now many such fish, this introduction to Nietzsche’s five most straightforward elaborations of his perspective attempts to bait his hooks with a brief account of several of Nietzsche’s key themes and their direct relevance to easily recognizable features of our contemporary social and cultural reality.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, in Saxony, Germany. His father, a protestant minister, died while Nietzsche was still a youth, and as a result he was raised predominantly by three powerful women: his mother, aunt, and sister. He was a brilliant student and a prodigy in the burgeoning field of philology (the analysis of the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of ancient languages), receiving the position of full professor at the philology department of the University of Basel, Switzerland, at the unprecedented age of twenty-four. His courses, however, were in subjects too arcane to attract many students and lifelong health problems increased during his tenure at Basel to the point of forcing him to step down permanently in 1879. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, published in 1872, propounded a groundbreaking reinterpretation of pre-Socratic, ancient Greek culture which ultimately supplanted the romanticized ideal of ancient Greece that had held sway in European intellectual circles since the Renaissance. Nietzsche’s most conventionally academic book, The Birth of Tragedy was nonetheless controversial and earned its author an enduring reputation as a gifted but unduly contentious writer and thinker. His subsequent publications (which include Untimely Meditations; Human, All Too Human; The Dawn; The Gay Science; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; and The Genealogy of Morals) would do little in Germany during his productive lifetime but cement this reputation. Nietzsche suffered a complete mental breakdown in late 1888 that reduced him to a near vegetative state for his remaining eleven years of life. However, in the period immediately preceding this breakdown he was at his most prolific, producing numerous major works between 1886 and 1889, four of which were penned in 1888 alone. By the time he died in 1900, his works were already becoming internationally recognized as masterpieces of philosophy and literature, prompting his custodian-sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, to publish a complete edition of his writings in 1901 that contained a first, short version of The Will to Power, hastily assembled from Nietzsche’s notebooks at his sister’s behest and in accordance with an outline for the proposed work that Nietzsche had discarded. The facts that Nietzsche’s sister was married to a well-known anti-Semite and was reported to have told Hitler he was the embodiment of her brother’s ideal are largely responsible for the unwarranted historical association of Nietzsche’s thought with Nazism that has greatly prejudiced the reception of his philosophy until this day. This is especially unfortunate since the works Nietzsche completed with his own hand have long been very widely available and offer a sufficiently comprehensive account of his thought to serve as a corrective to any distortions for which either The Will to Power or any of Nietzsche’s sister’s actions may have been responsible.

Nietzsche’s writings have had an enormous impact on European culture, decisively influencing Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, the Symbolists and Surrealists, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault, just to name a few. British and American cultures have proven less openly welcoming to Nietzsche’s influence, but through European scholars’ immigration to both countries following the rise of Nazism as well as through English-language writers and poets such as Joseph Conrad and T. S. Elliot, his impact on the English-speaking world has also been deep and wide, if somewhat subterranean. One need merely look at the number of library shelves groaning under the weight of Nietzsche commentaries to gauge his enduring appeal.

The five books included in this compendium, though each quite different from the others and totally unique, are all cut from the same cloth in terms of philosophical content. Nietzsche’s views on all decisive points had become settled before he began writing Zarathustra (first part published in 1883), and thus each one of his succeeding books functions as a different window onto the same essential set of insights. Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is intended as a prosaic presentation of the main themes treated more symbolically and poetically in Zarathustra: namely, how a hypocritically self-righteous interpretation of everything in the world has insinuated itself into all aspects of modern intellectual life and what getting beyond this interpretation entails and requires. On The Genealogy of Morals (1887) describes in three polemical essays how the denial of the goodness of our everyday world and everything that belongs to it came to be the dominant standpoint and at what expense. In The Twilight of the Idols (written in 1888 and, like the following two books, completed by Nietzsche but published after his mental demise), Nietzsche’s tone becomes more strident, as would increasingly be the case in his last works. This brief book finds Nietzsche slinging arrows seemingly haphazardly in many directions, yet the work as a whole attains a remarkable continuity and unity. Almost all the major themes of Nietzsche’s late works, such as the will to power, the eternal return of the same, and the revaluation of all values, are touched upon here and often very precisely, succinctly, and seemingly effortlessly elucidated. Of Twilight, Nietzsche once commented, This work is my philosophy in a nutshell. . . .¹ The Antichrist (written in 1888) is the first and only completed volume of what Nietzsche projected to be a four-part work titled The Revaluation of All Values, the successor to his abandoned Will to Power project. In it, Nietzsche sets his sights on Christianity—which he carefully distinguishes from what he understands the historical Jesus to have represented and taught—and he attacks it with perhaps the most persuasive anti-Christian arguments that have ever been written. It is no book for fainthearted believers. Finally, Ecce Homo (written in 1888) is Nietzsche’s self-styled autobiography. It illuminates Nietzsche’s concept of the person who affirms the absolute goodness of everyday existence by presenting Nietzsche himself as an example of this type, and it also contains book-by-book accounts of his works that offer important insights into what Nietzsche regarded as their significance. Taken together and read straight through, these books offer the reader a definitive account of Nietzsche’s perspective as he intended it to be presented and a sweeping attack upon everything the modern Western world holds to be good about itself.

Turning to a closer engagement with the substance of Nietzsche’s texts, it is important to note that Nietzsche’s use of bombastic sounding catch-phrases for some of his most central ideas has been at least partly responsible for his thought being so easily misunderstood and wrongly appropriated. For this reason a clarification of some of the most important of these phrases and their place in Nietzsche’s overarching philosophy should serve as a more useful introduction to the books contained in this volume than a more extensive sketch of the contents of each one. It could be fairly said that the most frequently abused of all Nietzsche’s shorthand slogans for his most important insights is the will to power. In the posthumously assembled collection of excerpts from Nietzsche’s late notebooks titled The Will to Power, the term will to power is used in a more technical and philosophically systematic way than it is in the five works completed by Nietzsche and contained here. In fact, the philosophy contained in the book The Will to Power and the notebooks from which its content is drawn is much closer to a full-blown philosophical system than anything one finds in the works Nietzsche intended for publication. The meaning of the slogan will to power in the works contained in this volume is deceptively simple: it stands for the human condition as it is now, always has been, and always will be. What makes this idea deceptively simple is that by pos iting the human condition as essentially unchanging, Nietzsche has in one stroke challenged the general assumption that mankind makes some sort of progress through the course of history. In this context, two of Nietzsche’s other most important insights and their respective slogans, the eternal return of the same and the revaluation of all values, come into the picture as corollaries and elaborations of the idea of will to power. For if there is no progress in human history, then we do not confront something new in the human condition in different historical eras, but rather we continually encounter different incarnations of the same basic reality and the same basic human dynamic—i.e., an eternal return of the same. Moreover, insofar as the common objective of Christianity and modern science has been to affect man and the world in such a way that a more perfect future condition (either here or in the hereafter) could be secured, and as a result the dominant mode of evaluating everything has been in terms of whether it helped or hindered the realization of that more perfect condition, Nietzsche’s challenging the reality of any such ideal forces upon us both a need to consider different possible criteria for evaluating everything and an obligation to consider the consequences of having measured everything in terms of a nonexistent ideal for more than two millennia. Together these comprise the task of a revaluation of all values. Finally, since the reigning interpretation has been one that injected a moral hue into all of its evaluations, Nietzsche’s rejection of the universal validity of this mode of evaluation makes him a challenger of the notion that traditional concepts of good and evil are legitimate measures of the value of things—in other words, he becomes, in his own acerbic terms, an immoralist. Moreover, anyone who frees himself from the need to judge everything from a moralistic perspective, conformity to which has up to now been universally pushed upon the individual by society through all imaginable overt and covert means, places him or herself in the same condition as Nietzsche’s free-spirits—i.e., those who are able to fashion values for themselves and to evaluate each aspect of their experience by the criterion of whether or not it promotes their self-realization and the fulfillment of their unique human potential.

One way of further illuminating the radical new perspective imminent in the web of interwoven Nietzschean themes and slogans just described is by relating it to the prophetic tradition of social criticism that derives its name from the Old Testament prophets and is sometimes also said to include Jesus Christ. The ancient Hebrew prophets decried the situation of mankind during their era, pointing out the persistent cruelty of man against man, the use of physical and psychological force to maintain adherence to social orders that were extremely hierarchical in all respects and radically inequitable. They characterized relations between people as cruel struggles between opposing forces trying to gain advantage over and dominate one another. To this reality they opposed an idealized one in which human relationships were to be ruled by compassion and love, and where social, political, and economic injustices were to be minimized or eliminated. We hear many voices calling for movement toward such a society in our time and almost all of us have some sympathy with them. But Nietzsche in effect takes a big black marker and puts an X over the ideal world that is set against our own everyday one by the prophets and their present-day progeny. It is an illusion. It will not come to pass in this reality or the next. It is a lie that is used by some people to manipulate others into behaving in a way that benefits the former and deceives the latter into thinking it benefits them also.

What, according to Nietzsche, is undeniably real? The everyday world the prophets and their successors condemn is the undeniably real. Yes, it has many vile and horrific aspects, but we should not allow that to drive us into denial of the fact that this is the reality we face, the reality we must come to terms with if we want to be intellectually honest with ourselves. There is no outside, no beyond the reality the prophets decry. As the only world there is, the prophets’ attitude toward it is one of life-denial and negation, which Nietzsche characterizes as No-saying. Moreover, the No-sayers have elevated their life-denying assessment of the one and only reality to the status of highest moral standpoint. Everything that denies the value of this reality is good. Everything that thrives in, bolsters, and says Yes to life as it actually is, is evil. The mere acknowledgement and acceptance of the actually existing state of affairs is stigmatized as morally reprehensible.

For Nietzsche, the real challenge men and women face today is the one they have always faced: to find a way to comport themselves toward the reality of the world they confront with playfulness, joy, and high spirits, despite its fearful aspects. He does not underestimate the difficulty of this task but maintains that once we have recognized that our ideals of the future or beyond are narcotics with which we numb ourselves to the undeniably real pain of existence and blind ourselves to what is nonetheless beautiful, good, strong, and true in it, we are faced with a choice: living with this knowledge and needing to find a life-affirming way to do so or anesthetizing ourselves once again. Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values places the value of honesty—in particular, intellectual honesty or honesty with oneself—high up in the new table of values, and from the perspective of this valuation, the advocates of continued sleep—the No-sayers—automatically drop to the bottom rung of Nietzsche’s human hierarchy. It is they who desire mankind to be a real mediocrity, cowering from the present in the hope of a future of weak-willed ease. Against them Nietzsche opposes the immoralists and free-spirits who reject the notions that the present is somehow deficient for human fulfillment and that the morally ambiguous abundance of life as it is must be suppressed and denied for ethical reasons. Rather, such life-affirming individuals suspect a non-moral motivation behind the deeds of those who say No to this life: they suffer from it too much to acknowledge that it is the one and only life there is. Such sufferers always exist, says Nietzsche. They are probably always in the majority. And that depressing fact must also be accepted by the Yes-sayers as an essential part of the reality that eternally returns. Nietzsche’s objection to those who suffer from life too much is not that they are weak or have any less right to exist or do what they must to survive than anyone else, but rather that at least since the advent of Christianity they have universalized their own type. It is human nature, they claim, to suffer inexorably from this life and aspire to escape it into some ideal future or beyond. And insofar as the born No-sayers have been effective in propagating this message, they have made those few individuals born with the rare capacity to say Yes to this life believe in the truth of the life-denying viewpoint and see themselves as fellow sufferers. These few potential lucky hits have been stunted in their cradles. All their Yes-saying characteristics have been morally stigmatized. The incipient Yes-sayers’ innate strengths and natural advantages have been blunted or turned against them, used to tie the Yes-sayers down and keep them from discerning that for them there is an alternative to life-denial. They have the potential to be real, everyday life-affirming beings, but the No-sayers have convinced them that no such beings are possible in the world today. It is for suppressing the emergence and self-discovery of the life-affirming few that Nietzsche resents and attacks the life-denying majority with such venom. To belong to the herd is fine for herd members, but to demand that everybody be a herd member, to will that all humanity become herd—this is an outrageous swindle of unprecedented proportions. For Nietzsche, bad taste!

As thus described, Nietzsche’s philosophy is highly contentious. One might well wonder just how it is that a philosopher spewing such pungent notions should come to be not only among the most famous thinkers of our time but also among the most influential. For, as was noted above, it is indisputable that Nietzsche has become exceedingly influential over the course of the past century. Leaving aside for the moment his purely literary appeal, it is worth considering why Nietzsche’s ideas are being found ever-increasingly persuasive by experts in the disciplines to which they relate. The answer to this question lies in the often-overlooked fact that Nietzsche was an acknowledged linguistic genius, a first-rate expert in philology (literally, love of the word [or speech]). While he may not have read closely many of the celebrated tomes of modern philosophy, he mastered at a very early age all the classics and many of the obscurities of Western literature up through the Renaissance. That meant his understanding of human consciousness was the product of a deep and profound grasp of the birth of highly articulate speech (with the ancient Greeks) and its development and change up through the emergence of modern Western languages. He may not have known the nuances of every passage in Hegel’s Logic, but he very likely knew the nuances of every line of Greek tragedy better than Hegel did. Though Nietzsche doesn’t overly celebrate himself as an initiator of what is now called the linguistic turn in philosophy, it is in connection with the intellectual revolution brought about by this turn (in which Nietzsche did play a key role) that his philosophy has become so persuasive. Nietzsche discovers a new level on which to approach philosophical issues, moving beyond argumentative discourse over concepts and values to the analysis of the language used to express concepts and values and the study of how this language emerged and sometimes changed quite radically over time. Suddenly, following Nietzsche, the philosophical issue ceases to be the accuracy of what is said in a given statement (about the world, God, the soul, truth, etc.) and instead becomes what are the possible reasons why a specific person at a specific time might have made precisely this kind of statement and/or found it to be persuasive. This is a radical shift indeed. Once scientific analysis of language revealed that it is inherently fluid and that truth is an attribute of certain uses of language, not something to do with the relation between statements and an independent reality to which they refer, the truth of a given statement became no longer as philosophically significant as the reasons for asserting and holding something to be true. By being among the first to think through the radical consequences of this discovery, Nietzsche transposed the whole of Western philosophical and cultural history into a new key and shifted the philosophical quest from the search for goodness and truth to the search for the largely unconscious reasons for claiming and believing that something is good or true. Exploration of the ramifications of this intellectual revolution with regard to what kinds of knowledge are accessible to human inquiry is among the central concerns of contemporary philosophy and social science. And in this context, no one has been more effective at calling into question what was previously regarded as most certain, good, and true than Friedrich Nietzsche. It is for this reason, as well as because of the intrinsic beauty of his writings and attraction of his counterintuitive but powerfully stated views, that Nietzsche has become a towering figure in the Western philosophical tradition and that the works contained in this compendium will remain timeless masterpieces of the highest intellectual and cultural importance.

David Taffel is the author of Nietzsche Unbound: The Struggle for Spirit in the Age of Science and the managing editor of The Conversationalist, a global news and culture website. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, where his dissertation was awarded the Hans Jonas Memorial Prize for Philosophy.

003

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

004

TRANSLATED BY HELEN ZIMMERN

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION

HERE, IN SPITE OF ITS NAME, IS ONE OF THE MOST SERIOUS, PROFOUND, AND original philosophical works. It offers a feast of good things to the morally and intellectually fastidious, which will take long to exhaust. There is really something new in the book—much that is new! Burke says, in his Reflexions on the Revolution in France (p. 128), We [Englishmen] know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality. The latter statement, which still represents the general views of Englishmen, is now proved to be entirely mistaken. Discoveries have now been made in the realm of morals, which are perhaps even more practically important than all the discoveries in physical science; and it is to Nietzsche especially that we are indebted for those discoveries, which are set forth, in part at least, in this volume—the very discoveries, in fact, which Burke himself required, in order to give a satisfactory answer to the French Revolutionists.

As, however, many who might otherwise appreciate the book, may stumble over its name at the threshold, it should perhaps be explained that the astounding and portentous designation, Beyond Good and Evil, applies to it properly only from the false point of view of its pseudo-moral opponents; as, however, it is a very striking expression, such as is always wanted for the title of a book, it has been appropriated for the purpose, notwithstanding the fact that to ordinary minds, and in ordinary language, it implies the very reverse of what the book teaches. Of course, there is a certain amount of truth in the designation, and therefore a justification for it: Nietzsche’s position is beyond the spurious good and the spurious evil of the prevalent slave-morality, which deteriorates humanity; but he takes a firm stand on the genuine good and the genuine bad of master-morality, which promotes the advancement of the human race. This is so obvious from a glance at the book that it is scarcely necessary to refer to Nietzsche’s express statement of the fact in the Genealogy of Morals, i. 17. He there says expressly, with reference to "the dangerous watchword inscribed on the outside of his last book: Beyond Good and Evil at any rate, it does not mean, ‘Beyond Good and Bad.’"

(When so many reproaches have been unjustly heaped upon Nietzsche and his disciples, under the false pretence that they repudiate true morality, it is difficult to resist the opportunity to turn round upon those maligners parenthetically, and point out who it is that is really beyond good and bad from the true moral standpoint—is it perhaps those very maligners themselves, whom Nietzsche with his acuteness has touched on the quick? The Kirkcaldyan gospel of The Wealth of Nations, under which we all live more or less, and which in puerile fashion the political economists still repeat almost by rote, not only implicitly disregards morals, but on many occasions boldly and explicitly professes to have nothing to do with them, in fact, professes to be altogether beyond good and bad in the ordinary sense of these words. [See, for example, Walker’s works on Political Economy, and many other writers on the subject.] And is not this Political Economy the unquestioned creed of almost all the non-Socialists who condemn Nietzsche? Even the Königsbergian gospel, with its Sublime Moral Law, and its Categorical Imperative, has allied and adjusted itself to the Kirkcaldyan gospel of universal, insatiable, exclusively individualistic, and absolutely unscrupulous Mammonism. The Benthamites, the Spencerites, and the Neo-Hegelianites or Greenites, have had still less difficulty in forming an alliance with Mammonism, even in its worst aspects. All those good people, therefore, who are so ready to condemn others, have actually themselves taken up a position beyond good and bad in the disreputable sense of these terms, unlike Nietzsche, who occupies the only justifiable position from the true moral standpoint.)

One or two of the leading points in Nietzsche’s philosophy should perhaps be mentioned—but we cannot touch on the numerous details, which may, however, often be deduced from the leading principles here indicated:

1. Nietzsche especially makes the highest excellence of society the ethical end; whereas almost all other moralists adopt ends which lead directly or indirectly, to the degeneration of society. As a necessary consequence, he favours a true aristocracy as the best means for elevating the human race to supermen.

2. Instead of advocating equal and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for which there is at present such an outcry (a regime which necessarily elevates fools and knaves, and lowers the honest and intelligent), Nietzsche advocates simple justice—to individuals and families according to their merits, according to their worth to society; not equal rights, therefore, but unequal rights, and inequality in advantages generally, approximately proportionate to deserts: consequently therefore, a genuinely superior ruling class at one end of the social scale, and an actually inferior ruled class, with slaves at its basis, at the opposite social extreme.

3. Unlike social evolutionists generally, who either stop short in their quest, or neglect Newton’s rule of philosophising, which prohibits the assigning of superfluous, unknown, or imaginary causes, Nietzsche explains social phenomena by familiar, natural causes, assigning to them a human, all-too-human origin, and accounting for them especially, like Larochefoucauld, as a result of the self-interest and self-preservative instinct of individuals and classes—that is to say, practically, in conformity to the true principles of evolution, which recognise in everything a conscious or subconscious will to persist and evolve—a matter which Darwin certainly overlooked too much in his imperfect attempts to explain moral and social evolution.

4. One of Nietzsche’s most important services has been to furnish a true philosophy of the more modern period of history, during the last two thousand years. As the first psychologist of Christianity, he has successfully accounted for the anomalous phenomenon of the Christian religion—the special embodiment of slave-morality—by showing that it is an artful device, consciously and subconsciously evolved for the self-preservation and advantage of the inferior classes of society, who have thus, to the detriment of the race, gained an abnormal and temporary ascendency over the better class of men, to whom the mastership belongs, under the sway of the normally prevailing pagan or master-morality which favours the advance of mankind.

Nietzsche, therefore, differs radically from most of the leaders of English thought with regard to the great questions of ethics and religion. Spencer, Huxley, Alfred R. Wallace, Leslie Stephen, A. J. Balfour, Benjamin Kidd, Frederic Harrison, Grant Allen, T. H. Green, Andrew Lang, and their followers, though differing in many points among themselves, seem all to have a strong instinctive aversion to recognise self-interest as a leading factor in the evolution of morals and religion; indeed, some of the mystifiers among them, especially Green’s time-serving followers, with their fixed idea of a dotard Deity (or God-aping devil?) devolving himself as fast as possible into constitutionalism, democracy, and anarchy, would almost sooner gaze on the Gorgon’s head than contemplate the possibility of such an illuminating, ready, and natural explanation. Most of those leaders of English thought are also equally averse to recognise that the true ethical end must be the highest excellence of society. It would involve in many people such an upsetting of their intellectual furniture to admit Nietzsche’s new ideas—it would also involve ultimately the upsetting of cherished institutions which are profitable to them, or to which they have become satisfactorily adjusted: many responsible people, therefore, prefer to barricade their intellects against such new and danger-threatening ideas, which are far more revolutionary, or rather counterrevolutionary, than Socialism! The great mass even of cultured people in England seem unable to cross the pontes asinorum of morals: they cannot grasp the related facts that what is good for one is not necessarily good for society at large, and that many people, in spite of Socrates, instinctively choose the bad, when it is most profitable to themselves. All popular and superficial writers, however, and all demagogues, take for granted the opposite doctrines—namely, that whatever is advantageous to any person, be he the most wicked and worthless creature on the face of the earth, is therefore necessarily for the good of the whole community; and that everyone instinctively chooses the right course as soon as he knows it.

Some English writers, however, approximate pretty closely to Nietzsche on some of the points in his philosophy: for example, Emerson, Carlyle, Kingdon Clifford, Samuel Butler, Sir Alfred Lyall, Stuart-Glennie, Karl Pearson, and doubtless many others. None of these writers have, however, elaborated the whole subject as Nietzsche has done. Bernard Shaw, as is well known, has also many points in common with Nietzsche. F. C. S. Schiller should likewise be named here, whose Pragmatism, about which there is so much noise at present, has obviously been largely influenced by Nietzsche’s writings. H. G. Wells’ semi-serious writings seem like a coarse and crooked refraction of the ideas of Nietzsche.

To be sure, all prudent, worldly wise men follow more or less approximately the practise which Nietzsche teaches, notwithstanding the opposite principles which they perhaps profess to hold: they do not willingly allow equal rights to knaves and fools to do as they like, much less are they willing to practise self-sacrifice for the sake of the most worthless specimens of humanity. Not even the special champions and forlorn hope of these ideas—the secularists, rationalists, ethiculturists and philanthropists—are inclined to practise themselves to any great extent, the slave-morality which they preach to others. There is nowadays, also, a healthy tendency in the clergy of the established churches to send people to hell for wickedness, rather than for unbelief as was done formerly, and is still done by the evangelical party. The great majority of people, however, hold, or pretend to hold, principles which are altogether inconsistent with their practise—in fact they are not rational beings in the realm of morals (or are their principles meant only for the practise of other people but not for themselves?). The great advance which Nietzsche has made is that he has harmonised moral theory and practise, and rationalised morality.

As regards its relation to Nietzsche’s other works, this book was meant on the one hand to explain more clearly in prose form the ideas expressed poetically and somewhat obscurely in his previous book, Thus Spake Zarathustra ; and on the other hand, as its subtitle indicates, it was meant as a prologue or prelude to his great, never-completed work on which he was then engaged, The Will to Power: An Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values. The circumstances under which the work was written are very fully set forth in chapter 30 (pp. 588-635) of Das Leben Nietzsches. With the exception of the epode, the book was written partly in the summer of 1885 at Sils-Maria, and partly in the following winter at Nice. It was during this period that Nietzsche’s sister was married and went with her husband to Paraguay, thus leaving her brother more solitary than ever. The spirit of solitude which broods over the book, discloses itself especially in the last chapter. The manuscript was sent to the printer in June 1886, and the book was published in the September following at Nietzsche’s own expense.

Nietzsche was personally acquainted with Miss Helen Zimmern—her important book on Schopenhauer brought her under his notice—and, as appears from his letters, he had her in view as a translator of his works: this led her to undertake the task of rendering this volume into English. A good deal of labour has been spent in making the version as satisfactory as possible by further revision. We here take the opportunity to thank Mr. Alfred E. Zimmern of New College, Oxford, and a German friend of his, Mr. W. Drechsler, Rhodes Scholar of Worcester College, for reading very carefully some of the first proofs and suggesting improvements. Dr. Oscar Levy has also read many of the proofs and made valuable suggestions.

The friends of the cause are, however, still further indebted to Dr. Oscar Levy—whose name is well known to students of Nietzschean literature by his book, The Revival of Aristocracy—for enabling the publication of Nietzsche’s works to be resumed once more. His patronage of the cause stands out in pleasing contrast to the indifference and hostility to Nietzsche of some of the English professional philosophers, who should have been the first to welcome the new knowledge, had they been true men.

THOMAS COMMON

23rd August 1907

PREFACE

SUPPOSING THAT TRUTH IS A WOMAN—WHAT THEN? IS THERE NOT ground for suspecting that all philosophers, insofar as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien—if, indeed, it stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground—nay more, that it is at its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatising in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood what has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief); perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalisation of very restricted, very personal, very human—all-too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its super-terrestrial pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the perspective—the fundamental condition—of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: How did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all a corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock? But the struggle against Plato, or—to speak plainer, and for the people —the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity (for Christianity is Platonism for the people), produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals. As a matter of fact, the European feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow: once by means of Jesuitism, and the second time by means of democratic enlightenment—which, with the aid of liberty of the press and newspaper-reading, might, in fact, bring it about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in distress! (The Germans invented gunpowder—all credit to them! But they again made things square—they invented printing.) But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we good Europeans, and free, very free spirits—we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? The goal to aim at. . . .

SILS-MARIA, UPPER ENGADINE, June 1885

CHAPTER ONE

PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS

1

THE WILL TO TRUTH, WHICH IS TO TEMPT US TO MANY A HAZARDOUS enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? What really is this Will to Truth in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will—until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the value of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and risk raising it. For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.

2

How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? Or the generous deed out of selfishness? Or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of their own—in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the Thing-in-itself—there must be their source, and nowhere else!

This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognised, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this belief of theirs, they exert themselves for their knowledge, for something that is in the end solemnly christened the Truth. The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antitheses of values. It never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, "de omnibus dubitandum. For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some corner, perhaps from below—frog perspectives," as it were, to borrow an expression current among painters. In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous Perhapses! For that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent—philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps in every sense of the term. And to speak in all seriousness, I see such new philosophers beginning to appear.

3

Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read between their lines long enough, I now say to myself that the greater part of conscious thinking must be counted amongst the instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical thinking; one has here to learn anew, as one learned anew about heredity and innateness. As little as the act of birth comes into consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity, just as little is being-conscious opposed to the instinctive in any decisive sense; the greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels. And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, there are valuations, or to speak more plainly, physiological demands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of life. For example, that the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that illusion is less valuable than truth: such valuations, in spite of their regulative importance for us, might notwithstanding be only superficial valuations, special kinds of niaiserie, such as may be necessary for the maintenance of beings such as ourselves. Supposing, in effect, that man is not just the measure of things. . . .

4

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgements a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us; that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. To recognise untruth as a condition of life: that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

5

That which causes philosophers to be regarded half-distrustfully and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are—how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike they are—but that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of inspiration); whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or suggestion, which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub truths—and very far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself; very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic byways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his categorical imperative—makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. Or, still more so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which Spinoza has as it were clad his philosophy in mail and mask—in fact, the "love of his wisdom," to translate the term fairly and squarely—in order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on that invincible maiden, that Pallas Athene: how much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!

6

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: What morality do they (or does he) aim at? Accordingly, I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as inspiring genii (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all practised philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate lord over all the other impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and as such, attempts to philosophise. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise—better, if you will; there there may really be such a thing as an impulse to knowledge, some kind of small, independent clockwork, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, without the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein. The actual interests of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction—in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not characterised by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who he is—that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.

7

How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on Plato and the Pla tonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. In its original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies Flatterers of Dionysius—consequently, tyrants’ accessories and lick-spittles; besides this, however, it is as much as to say, "They are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them" (for Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise-en-scène style of which Plato and his scholars were masters—of which Epicurus was not a master! He, the old schoolteacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out who the garden-god Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?

8

There is a point in every philosophy at which the conviction of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery:

Adventavit asinus,

Pulcher et fortissimus.

9

You desire to live according to Nature? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves indifference as a power—how could you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, living according to Nature, means actually the same as living according to life—how could you do differently? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature according to the Stoa, and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalisation of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature falsely, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that because you are able to tyrannise over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannised over: is not the Stoic a part of Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to creation of the world, the will to the causa prima.

10

The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness, with which the problem of the real and the apparent world is dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a Will to Truth in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician’s ambition of the forlorn hope— has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of certainty to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life. In that they side against appearance, and speak superciliously of perspective, in that they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence that the earth stands still, and thus, apparently, allowing with complacency their securest possession to escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than in one’s body?) who knows if they are not really trying to win back something which was formerly an even securer possession, something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps the immortal soul, perhaps the old God, in short, ideas by which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously and more joyously, than by modern ideas? There is distrust of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure the bric-à-brac of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness. Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those sceptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present day; their instinct, which repels them from modern reality, is unrefuted . . . what do their retrograde bypaths concern us! The main thing about them is not that they wish to go back, but that they wish to get away therefrom. A little more strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be off—and not back!

11

It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his Table of Categories; with it in his hand he said: This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics. Let us only understand this could be! He was proud of having discovered a new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic judgement a priori. Granting that he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover if possible something—at all events new faculties—of which to be still prouder! But let us reflect for a moment—it is high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? Kant asks himself—and what is really his answer? By means of a means (faculty)" but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered a moral faculty in man—for at that time Germans were still moral, not yet dabbling in the Politics of hard fact. Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the young theologians of the Tübingen institution went immediately into the groves—all seeking for faculties. And what did they not find—in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German spirit, to which Romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet distinguish between finding and inventing! Above all a faculty for the transcendental; Schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally pious-inclined Germans. One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and eccentric movement (which was really youthfulness, notwithstanding that it disguised itself so boldly in hoary and senile conceptions), than to take it seriously, or even treat it with moral indignation. Enough, however—the world grew older, and the dream vanished. A time came when people rubbed their foreheads, and they still rub them today. People had been dreaming, and first and foremost—old Kant. By means of a means (faculty) he had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that—an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? By means of a means (faculty), namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Molière,

Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,

Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.

But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary ?" in effect, it is high time that we should understand that such judgements must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they still might naturally be false judgements! Or, more plainly spoken, and roughly and readily—synthetic judgements a priori should not be possible at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgements. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective view of life. And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which German philosophy—I hope you understand its right to inverted commas (goosefeet?) has exercised throughout the whole of Europe, there is no doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva had a share in it; thanks to German philosophy, it was a delight to the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, the artists, the three-fourths Christians, and the political obscurantists of all nations, to find an antidote