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To be evil is ‘not to act in accordance with custom’, to practise things not sanctioned by custom, to resist tradition, however rational or stupid that tradition may be;
Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does the good, that is to say: that which seems to him good (useful) according to the relative degree of his intellect, the measure of his rationality.
between good and evil actions there is no difference in kind, but at the most one of degree.
Indeed, in a certain sense all present actions are stupid, for the highest degree of human intelligence which can now be attained will certainly be exceeded in the future: and then all our actions and judgements will seem in retrospect as circumscribed and precipitate as the actions and judgements of still existing primitive peoples now appear to us.
It is in such men as are capable of that suffering – how few they will be! – that the first attempt will be made to see whether mankind could transform itself from a moral to a wise mankind.
the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.
The origin of custom lies in two ideas: ‘the community is worth more than the individual’ and ‘an enduring advantage is to be preferred to a transient one’; from which it follows that the enduring advantage of the community is to take unconditional precedence over the advantage of the individual, especially over his momentary well-being but also over his enduring advantage and even over his survival. Even if the individual suffers from an arrangement which benefits the whole, even if he languishes under it, perishes by it – the custom must be maintained, the sacrifice offered
The belief in authorities is the source of the conscience: it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man.
An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions.
The free human being is immoral [unsittlich] because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon a tradition: in all the original conditions of mankind, ‘evil’ signifies the same as ‘individual’, ‘free’, ‘capricious’, ‘unusual’, ‘unforeseen’, ‘incalculable’.
Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience; the sky above the best men is for this reason to this very moment gloomier than it need be.
the individual hides himself in the general concept ‘man’, or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time or place: and all the subtle ways we have of appearing fortunate, grateful, powerful, enamoured have their easily discoverable parallels in the animal world.
it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal.
That man today feels the sympathetic, disinterested, generally useful, social actions to be the moral actions – this is perhaps the most general effect and conversion which Christianity has produced in Europe: although it was not its intention nor contained in its teaching.
We do not regard the animals as moral beings. But do you suppose the animals regard us as moral beings? – An animal which could speak said: ‘Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free.’
The good men of every age are those who bury the old ideas in the depths of the earth and bear fruit with them, the agriculturalists of the spirit. But that land will at length become exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.
The poison which destroys the weaker nature strengthens the stronger – and he does not call it poison, either.
Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.
There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena
Suppose the abused, oppressed, suffering, unfree, those uncertain of themselves and weary should moralize: what would their moral evaluations have in common? Probably a pessimistic mistrust of the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man together with his situation. The slave is suspicious of the virtues of the powerful: he is sceptical and mistrustful, keenly mistrustful, of everything ‘good’ that is honoured among them – he would like to convince himself that happiness itself is not genuine among them. On the other hand, those qualities which serve to make
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The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who can indemnify themselves only through an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’, what is ‘not itself’: and this No is its creative act.
one should ask rather precisely who is ‘evil’ in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The answer is, in all strictness: precisely the ‘good man’ of the other morality, precisely the noble, powerful man, the ruler, only recoloured, reinterpreted and seen differently by the poisoned eye of ressentiment.
To require of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to conquer, a desire to subdue, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength.
For just as the people separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter as an action, as an operation on the part of a subject called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, operating, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely added to the deed – the deed is everything.
One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil – that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them. This demand follows from an insight first formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever.
A law-book never tells of the utility of a law, of the reason for it, of the casuistry which preceded it: for in that way it would lose the imperative tone, the ‘thou shalt’, the precondition of being obeyed.
Art makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of unclear thinking.
How strong the metaphysical need is, and how hard nature makes it to bid it a final farewell, can be seen from the fact that even when the free spirit has divested himself of everything metaphysical the highest effects of art can easily set the metaphysical strings, which have long been silent or indeed snapped apart, vibrating in sympathy.
Artists are by no means men of great passion but they often pretend to be, in the unconscious feeling that their painted passions will seem more believable if their own life speaks for their experience in this field.
When our aestheticians never weary of maintaining, in favour of Kant, that under the spell of beauty one can view even undraped female statues ‘without interest’, we may, to be sure, laugh a little at their expense
How closely related to the whole of European décadence Wagner must be that it does not feel him as décadent! He belongs to it: he is its protagonist, its greatest name
Man really mirrors himself in things, that which gives him back his own reflection he considers beautiful: the judgement ‘beautiful’ is his conceit of his species.
Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ‘ugly’. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride – they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful
If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else.
I find no more than six essentially different methods of combating the vehemence of a drive. Firstly, one can avoid opportunities for gratification of the drive, and through long and ever longer periods of non-gratification weaken it and make it wither away. Then, one can impose upon oneself strict regularity in its gratification […] one has then gained intervals during which one is no longer troubled by it – and from there one can perhaps go over to the first method. Thirdly, one can deliberately give oneself over to the wild and unrestrained gratification of a drive in order to generate
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What? The ultimate goal of science is to create for man the greatest possible amount of pleasure and the least possible amount of pain? But suppose pleasure and pain were so linked together that he who wants to have the greatest possible amount of the one must have the greatest possible amount of the other also […]?
man will rather will nothingness than not will …
Every error, of whatever kind, is a consequence of degeneration of instinct, disgregation of will: one has thereby virtually defined the bad. Everything good is instinct – and consequently easy, necessary, free.
The whole of nature is in the conception of religious men a sum of actions by conscious and volitional beings, a tremendous complex of arbitrarinesses.
A god who begets children on a mortal woman; a sage who calls upon us no longer to work, no longer to sit in judgement, but to heed the signs of the imminent end of the world; a justice which accepts an innocent man as a substitute sacrifice; someone who bids his disciples drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god atoned for by a god; fear of a Beyond to which death is the gateway: the figure of the Cross as a symbol in an age which no longer knows the meaning and shame of the Cross – how gruesomely all this is wafted to us, as if out of the grave of
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But he compares himself with a being which alone is capable of those actions called unegoistic and lives continually in the consciousness of a selfless mode of thought, with God; it is because he looks into this brilliant mirror that his own nature seems to him so dismal, so uncommonly distorted.
It was Christianity which first painted the Devil on the world’s wall; it was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to its deepest roots: but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exist
Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be a sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature – is sin!
The invention of gods, heroes and supermen of all kinds, together with that of fictitious fellow men and sub-men, of dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons and devils, was the invaluable preparatory exercise for the justification of the selfishness and autocracy of the individual: the freedom one accorded the god in relation to other gods one at last gave oneself in relation to laws and customs and neighbour.
Polytheism was a prefigurement of free spiritedness and multi-spiritedness: the power to create new and personal eyes for oneself and again and again new and even more personal ones: so that for man alone of all the animals there is no eternally fixed horizon and perspectives.
The metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer will have it, but only an aftershoot of them. Under the domination of religious notions one became accustomed to the idea of ‘another (back, under, over) world’ and with the destruction of religious notions felt an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation – and out of this feeling there again grew ‘another world’, but this time only a metaphysical and no longer a religious one. That which in primeval times led to the assumption of ‘another world’ at all was, however, not a drive and need but an error in the interpretation of
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The Christian faith is from the beginning a sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit, at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘ego’, ‘spirit’, ‘free-will’ – or ‘unfree-will’): nothing but imaginary effects (‘sin’, ‘redemption’, ‘grace’, ‘punishment’, ‘forgiveness of sins’). A traffic between imaginary beings (‘God’, ‘spirits’, ‘souls’); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; complete lack of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (nothing but self-misunderstandings, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general feelings, for example the condition of the
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Of what consequence would be a God who knew nothing of anger, revengefulness, envy, mockery, cunning, acts of violence? to whom even the rapturous ardeurs of victory and destruction were unknown? One would not understand such a God: why should one have him?
The divinity of décadence, pruned of all its manliest drives and virtues, from now on necessarily becomes the God of the physiologically retarded, the weak. They do not call themselves the weak, they call themselves’ the good’…
