The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Now I should like to ask the decisive question: Is there any contrast at all between a lie and a conviction? All the world believes there is; but what does all the world not believe! Every conviction has its history, its preliminary forms, its trials and errors: it becomes a conviction after not having been one for a long time, and after scarcely having been one for an even longer time. How? Could not the lie be among these embryonic forms of conviction? Sometimes a mere change of person suffices: in the son that becomes conviction which in the father still was a lie. By lie I mean: wishing not to see something that one does see; wishing not to see something as one sees it. Whether the lie takes place before witnesses or without witnesses does not matter. The most common lie is that with which one lies to oneself; lying to others is, relatively, an exception. Now this wishing-not-to-see what one does see, this wishing-not-to-see as one sees, is almost the first condition for all who are party in any sense: of necessity, the party man becomes a liar.

At a certain point in the development of a people, the most circumspect stratum, that is, the one which sees farthest back and ahead, declares the experience according to which one should live—that is, can live—to be concluded. Their aim is to bring home as rich and complete a harvest as possible from the times of experiment and bad experience. Consequently, what must now be prevented above all is further experimentation, a continuation of the fluid state of values, testing, choosing, criticizing values in infinitum. Against this a double wall is put up: one, revelation, the claim that the reason in these laws is not of human origin, not sought and found slowly and after many errors, but of divine origin, and hence whole, perfect, without history, a gift, a miracle, merely communicated. Then, tradition, the claim that the law has existed since time immemorial and that it would be irreverent, a crime against one’s forefathers, to raise any doubt against it. The authority of the law is founded on the theses: God gave it, the forefathers lived it. The higher reason in such a procedure lies in the aim, step by step to push consciousness back from what had been recognized as the right life (that is, proved right by a tremendous and rigorously filtered experience), so as to attain the perfect automatism of instinct—that presupposition of all mastery, of every kind of perfection in the art of life. To set up a code of laws after the manner of Manu means to give a people the chanc...

And Epicurus would have won; every respectable spirit in the Roman Empire was an Epicurean. Then Paul appeared—Paul, the chandala hatred against Rome, against “the world,” become flesh, become genius, the Jew, the eternal Wandering Jew par excellence. What he guessed was how one could use the little sectarian Christian movement apart from Judaism to kindle a “world fire”; how with the symbol of “God on the cross” one could unite all who lay at the bottom, all who were secretly rebellious, the whole inheritance of anarchistic agitation in the Empire, into a tremendous power. “Salvation is of the Jews.” Christianity as a formula with which to outbid the subterranean cults of all kinds, those of Osiris, of the Great Mother, of Mithras, for example—and to unite them: in this insight lies the genius of Paul. His instinct was so sure in this that he took the ideas with which these chandala religions fascinated, and, with ruthless violence, he put them into the mouth of the ‟Savior” whom he had invented, and not only into his mouth—he made something out of him that a priest of Mithras too could understand. This was his moment at Damascus: he comprehended that he needed the belief in immortality to deprive “the world” of value, that the concept of “hell” would become master even over Rome—that with the ‟beyond” one kills life. Nihilism and Christianism: that rhymes, that does not only rhyme. 59 The whole labor of the ancient world in vain: I have no word to express my feelings a...

EPILOGUE 1 I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary—as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy—is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health—one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it. I also owe my philosophy to it. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of great suspicion which turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is, the letter before the penultimate one. Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were—pain which takes its time—only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium— things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us “better,” but I know that it makes us more profound. Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, evens the score with his torturer by the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Nothing, into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction...