The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

This innocent rhetoric from the realm of the religiousmoral idiosyncrasy appears much less innocent as soon as we realize which tendency it is that here shrouds itself in sublime words: hostility against life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life; therefore pity became a virtue for him. Aristotle, as is well known, considered pity a pathological and dangerous condition, which one would be well advised to attack now and then with a purge: he understood tragedy as a purge. From the standpoint of the instinct of life, a remedy certainly seems necessary for such a pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as is represented by the case of Schopenhauer (and unfortunately by our entire literary and artistic decadence from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner) —to puncture it and make it burst. In our whole unhealthy modernity there is nothing more unhealthy than Christian pity. To be physicians here, to be inexorable here, to wield the scalpel here —that is our part, that is our love of man, that is how we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans.