Morality
as Anti-Nature
1
THERE is a time with all passions when
they are merely fatalities, when they drag their victim down with the weight of
their folly - and a later, very much later time when they are wedded with the
spirit, when they are 'spiritualized'.
Formerly one made war on passion itself on account of the folly inherent
in it: one conspired for its extermination - all the old moral monsters are
unanimous that 'il faut tuer les passions'. [The passions must be killed.] The most famous formula for doing this is contained in the New
Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, where, by the way, things are not at all
regarded from a lofty standpoint.
There, for example, it is said, with reference to sexuality, 'if the eye offend thee, pluck it out': fortunately no Christian desires
merely in order to do away with their folly and its unpleasant consequences -
this itself seems to us today merely an acute form of folly. We no longer admire dentists who pull out
the teeth to stop them from hurting.... On the other hand, it is only fair to
admit that on the soil out of which Christianity grew the concept 'spiritualization
of passion' could not possibly be conceived.
For the primitive Church, as is well known, fought against the
'intelligent' in favour of the 'poor in spirit': how could one expect from it
an intelligent war against passion? - The Church combats the passions with
excision in every sense of the word: its practice, its 'cure' is castration. It never asks: 'How can one spiritualize,
beautify, deify a desire?' - it
has at all times laid the emphasis of its discipline on extirpation (of
sensuality, of pride, of lust for power, of avarice, of revengefulness). - But
to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the
practice of the Church is hostile to life ...
2
The same expedient - castration,
extirpation - is instinctively selected in a struggle against a desire by those
who are too weak-willed, too degenerate to impose
moderation upon it: by those natures which need La Trappe, [The abbey at Soligny
from which the Trappist order - characterized by the
severity of its discipline - takes it name.] to speak metaphorically (and not metaphorically - ), some sort of
definitive declaration of hostility, a chasm between themselves and a
passion. It is only the degenerate who
cannot do without radical expedients; weakness of will, more precisely the
inability not to react to a stimulus, is itself merely another form of
degeneration. Radical hostility, mortal
hostility towards sensuality is always a thought-provoking symptom: it
justifies making certain conjectures as to the general condition of one who is
excessive in this respect. - That hostility, that hatred reaches its height,
moreover, only when such natures are no longer sufficiently sound even for the
radical cure, for the renunciation of their 'devil'. Survey the entire history of priests and
philosophers, and that of artists as well: the most virulent utterances against
the senses have not come from the impotent, nor from ascetics,
but from those who found it impossible to be ascetics, from those who stood in
need of being ascetics ...
3
The spiritualization of sensuality is
called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity. A further triumph is our spiritualization of enmity. It consists in profoundly grasping the value
of having enemies: in brief, in acting and thinking in the reverse of the way
in which one formerly acted and thought.
The Church has at all times desired the destruction of its enemies: we,
we immoralists and anti-Christians, see that it is to
our advantage that the Church exists.... In politics, too, enmity has become
much more spiritual - much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing. Almost every party grasps that it is in the
interest of its own self-preservation that the opposing party should not decay
in strength; the same is true of grand politics. A new creation in particular, the new Reich
for instance, has more need of enemies than friends: only in opposition does it
feel itself necessary, only in opposition does it become necessary....
We adopt the same attitude towards the 'enemy within': there too we have
spiritualized enmity, there too we have grasped its value. One is fruitful only at the cost of
being rich in contradictions; one remains young only on condition the
soul does not relax, does not long for peace.... Nothing has grown more alien
to us than that desideratum of former times 'peace of soul', the Christian
desideratum; nothing arouses less envy in us than the moral cow and the fat contentment
of the good conscience.... One has renounced grand life when one
renounces war.... In many cases, to be sure, 'peace of soul' is merely a
misunderstanding - something else that simply does not know how to give
itself a more honest name. Here, briefly
and without prejudice, are a few of them.
'Peace of soul' can, for example, be the gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) domain. Or the beginning of
weariness, the first of the shadows which evening, every sort of evening,
casts. Or a sign that the air is
damp, that south winds are on the way.
Or unconscious gratitude for a good digestion (sometimes called
'philanthropy'). Or the quiescence of
the convalescent for whom all things have a new taste and who waits.... Or the condition which succeeds a vigorous gratification of our
ruling passion, the pleasant feeling of a rare satiety. Or the decrepitude of our
will, our desires, our vices. Or
laziness persuaded by vanity to deck itself out as morality. Or the appearance of a
certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after the protracted tension and torture
of uncertainty. Or the expression
of ripeness and mastery in the midst of action, creation, endeavour, volition, a quiet breathing, 'freedom of will' attained....
Twilight of the Idols: who knows? perhaps that
too is only a kind of 'peace of soul' ...
4
- I formulate a principle. All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy
morality, is dominated by an instinct of life - some commandment of life is
fulfilled through a certain canon of 'shall' and 'shall not', some hindrance
and hostile element on life's road is thereby removed. Anti-natural morality, that is,
virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and
preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the instincts of life
- it is a now secret, now loud and impudent condemnation of these
instincts. By saying 'God sees into the
heart' it denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for
the enemy of life.... The saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal
castrate.... Life is at an end where the '
5
If one has grasped the blasphemousness of
such a rebellion against life as has, in Christian morality, become virtually
sacrosanct, one has fortunately therewith grasped something else as well: the
uselessness, illusoriness, absurdity, falsity of such a rebellion. For a condemnation of life by the living is
after all no more than a symptom of a certain kind of life: the question
whether the condemnation is just or unjust has not been raised at all. One would have to be situated outside
life, and on the other hand to know it as thoroughly as any, as many, as all
who have experienced it, to be permitted to touch on the problem of the value
of life at all: sufficient reason for understanding that this problem is for us
an inaccessible problem. When we speak
of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life: life
itself evaluates through us when we establish values.... From this it
follows that even that anti-nature of a morality which conceives God as
the contrary concept to and condemnation of life is only a value judgement on
the part of life - of what life? of what
kind of life? - But I have already given the answer: of declining, debilitated,
weary, condemned life. Morality as it
has been understood hitherto - as it was ultimately formulated by Schopenhauer
as 'denial of the will to life' - is the instinct of décadence
itself, which makes out of itself an imperative: it says: 'Perish!' - it is the judgement of the judged ...
6
Let us consider finally what naivety it is
to say 'man ought to be thus and thus!'
Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the luxuriance of a
prodigal play and change of forms: and does some pitiful journeyman moralist
say at the sight of it: 'No! man ought to be different'?
... He even knows how man ought to be, this bigoted wretch; he paints
himself on the wall and says 'ecce homo'!... [Behold the man!] But even when the moralist merely turns
to the individual and says to him: 'You ought to be thus and thus' he
does not cease to make himself ridiculous.
The individual is, in his future and in his past, a piece of fate, one
law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will
be. To say to him 'change yourself'
means to demand that everything should change, even in the past.... And there
have indeed been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, namely
virtuous, who wanted him in their own likeness, namely
that of a bigot: to that end they denied the world! No mean madness! No modest presumption! ... Insofar as
morality condemns as morality and not with regard to the aims and
objects of life, it is a specific error with which one should show no sympathy,
an idiosyncrasy of the degenerate which has caused an unspeakable amount
of harm! ... We others, we immoralists, have on the
contrary opened wide our hearts to every kind of understanding, comprehension, approval. We do not readily deny,
we seek our honour in affirming.
We have come more and more to appreciate that economy which needs and
knows how to use all that which the holy lunacy of the priest, the diseased
reason of the priest rejects; that economy in the law of life which derives
advantage even from the repellent species of the bigot, the priest, the
virtuous man - what advantage? - But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer to that ...