The Portable Nietzsche (59 page)

1

My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand
beyond
good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment
beneath
himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that
there are altogether no moral facts
. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena—more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus “truth,” at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call “imaginings.” Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity. Semeiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to “understand” themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all about to be able to profit from it.

 

2

A first example, quite provisional. At all times they have wanted to “improve” men: this above all was called morality. Under the same word, however, the most divergent tendencies are concealed. Both the
taming
of the beast, man, and the
breeding
of a particular kind of man have been called “improvement.” Such zoological terms are required to express the realities—realities, to be sure, of which the typical “improver,” the priest, neither knows anything, nor wants to know anything.

To call the taming of an animal its “improvement” sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in menageries doubts that the beasts are “improved” there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has “improved.” In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a menagerie, the most beautiful specimens of the “blond beast” were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were “improved.” But how did such an “improved” Teuton who had been seduced into a monastery look afterward? Like a caricature of man, like a miscarriage: he had become a “sinner,” he was stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, malevolent against himself: full of hatred against the springs of life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian.”

Physiologically speaking: in the struggle with beasts, to make them sick
may
be the only means for making them weak. This the church understood: it
ruined
man, it weakened him—but it claimed to have “improved” him.

 

3

Let us consider the other case of so-called morality, the case of
breeding
a particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of “the law of Manu.” Here the task set is to breed no less than four races at once: one priestly, one warlike, one for trade and agriculture, and finally a race of servants, the Sudras. Obviously, we are here no longer among animal tamers: a kind of man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the condition for even conceiving such a plan of breeding. One heaves a sigh of relief at leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier, higher, and
wider
world. How wretched is the New Testament compared to Manu, how foul it smells!

Yet this organization too found it necessary to be
terrible
—this time not in the struggle with beasts, but with their counter-concept, the unbred man, the mishmash man, the chandala. And again it had no other means for keeping him from being dangerous, for making him weak, than to make him
sick
—it was the fight with the “great number.” Perhaps there is nothing that contradicts our feeling more than
these
protective measures of Indian morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Sastra I), “on impure vegetables,” ordains that the only nourishment permitted to the chandala shall be garlic and onions, seeing that the holy scripture prohibits giving them grain or fruit with grains, or water or fire. The same edict orders that the water they need may not be taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but only from the approaches to swamps and from holes made by the footsteps of animals. They are also prohibited from washing their laundry and
from washing themselves
, since the water they are conceded as an act of grace may be used only to quench thirst. Finally, a prohibition that Sudra women may not assist chandala women in childbirth, and a prohibition that the latter may not
assist each other
in this condition.

The success of such sanitary police measures was inevitable: murderous epidemics, ghastly venereal diseases, and thereupon again “the law of the knife,” ordaining circumcision for male children and the removal of the internal labia for female children. Manu himself says: “The chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (these, the
necessary
consequences of the concept of breeding). For clothing they shall have only rags from corpses; for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron; for divine services, only evil spirits. They shall wander without rest from place to place. They are prohibited from writing from left to right, and from using the right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and of from-left-to-right is reserved for the virtuous, for the people of
race
.”

 

4

These regulations are instructive enough: here we encounter for once
Aryan
humanity, quite pure, quite primordial—we learn that the concept of “pure blood” is the opposite of a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes clear in which people the hatred, the chandala hatred, against this “humaneness” has eternalized itself, where it has become religion, where it has become
genius
. Seen in this perspective, the Gospels represent a document of prime importance; even more, the Book of Enoch. Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, of privilege: it is the
anti-Aryan
religion par excellence. Christianity—the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against “race”: the undying chandala hatred as the
religion of love.

 

5

The morality of
breeding
and the morality of
taming
are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as the supreme principle that, to
make
morality, one must have the unconditional will to its opposite. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the “improvers” of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact—that of the so-called
pia fraus
¹
—offered me the first approach to this problem: the
pia fraus
, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who “improved” mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their
right
to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say:
all
the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through
immoral
.

1

Among Germans today it is not enough to have spirit: one must arrogate it, one must have the
arrogance
to have spirit.

¹
“Holy lie.”

Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths. The new Germany represents a large quantum of fitness, both inherited and acquired by training, so that for a time it may expend its accumulated store of strength, even squander it. It is
not
a high culture that has thus become the master, and even less a delicate taste, a noble “beauty” of the instincts; but more
virile
virtues than any other country in Europe can show. Much cheerfulness and self-respect, much assurance in social relations and in the reciprocality of duties, much industriousness, much perseverance—and an inherited moderation which needs the spur rather than the brake. I add that here one still obeys without feeling that obedience humiliates. And nobody despises his opponent.

One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power
makes stupid
. The Germans—once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters.
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
—I fear that was the end of German philosophy.

“Are there any German philosophers? Are there German poets? Are there
good
German books?” they ask me abroad. I blush; but with the courage which I maintain even in desperate situations I reply: “Well,
Bismarck
.” Would it be permissible for me to confess what books are read today? Accursed instinct of mediocrity!

 

2

What the German spirit
might
be—who has not had his melancholy ideas about that! But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely. Recently even a third has been added—one that alone would be sufficient to dispatch all fine and bold flexibility of the spirit—music, our constipated, constipating German music.

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown—how much
beer
there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality,
the spirit's instinct of self-preservation
—and drink beer? The alcoholism of the young scholars is perhaps no question mark concerning their scholarliness—without spirit one can still be a great scholar—but in every other respect it remains a problem. Where would one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit? Once, in a case that has almost become famous, I put my finger on such a degeneration—the degeneration of our number-one German free spirit, the
clever
David Strauss, into the author of a beer-bench gospel and “new faith.” It was not for nothing that he had made his vow to the “fair brunette”
²⁸
in verse—loyalty unto death.

 

3

I was speaking of the German spirit: it is becoming cruder, it is becoming shallower. Is that enough? At bottom, it is something quite different that alarms me: how German seriousness, German depth, German
passion
in spiritual matters are declining more and more. The verve has changed, not just the intellectuality. Here and there I come into contact with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among their scholars, what desolate spirituality—and how contented and lukewarm it has become! It would be a profound misunderstanding if one wanted to adduce German science against me—it would also be proof that one has not read a word I have written. For seventeen years I have never tired of calling attention to the
despiritualizing
influence of our current science-industry. The hard helotism to which the tremendous range of the sciences condemns every scholar today is a main reason why those with a fuller, richer,
profounder
disposition no longer find a congenial education and congenial
educators
. There is nothing of which our culture suffers more than of the superabundance of pretentious jobbers and fragments of humanity; our universities are,
against
their will, the real hothouses for this kind of withering of the instincts of the spirit. And the whole of Europe already has some idea of this—power politics deceives nobody. Germany is considered more and more as Europe's flat
land
. I am still looking for a German with whom I might be able to be serious in my own way—and how much more for one with whom I might be cheerful!
Twilight of the Idols
: who today would comprehend from what seriousness a philosopher seeks recreation here? Our cheerfulness is what is most incomprehensible about us.

 

4

Even a rapid estimate shows that it is not only obvious that German culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. In the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true of the individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interests—if one spends in this direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction.

Culture and the state—one should not deceive oneself about this—are antagonists: “
Kultur-Staat
” is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even
anti-political
. Goethe's heart opened at the phenomenon of Napoleon—it closed at the “Wars of Liberation.” At the same moment when Germany comes up as a great power, France gains a new importance as a
cultural power
. Even today much new seriousness, much new
passion
of the spirit, have migrated to Paris; the question of pessimism, for example, the question of Wagner, and almost all psychological and artistic questions are there weighed incomparably more delicately and thoroughly than in Germany—the Germans are altogether incapable of this kind of seriousness. In the history of European culture the rise of the “
Reich
” means one thing above all: a displacement of the center of gravity. It is already known everywhere: in what matters most—and that always remains culture—the Germans are no longer worthy of consideration. One asks: Can you point to even a single spirit who counts from a European point of view, as your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer counted? That there is no longer a single German philosopher—about that there is no end of astonishment.