The
'Improvers' of Mankind
1
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.
Moral judgement has this in common with religious judgement that it
believes in realities which do not exist.
Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely
a misinterpretation. Moral
judgement belongs, as does religious judgement, to a
level of ignorance at which even the concept of the real, the distinction
between the real and the imaginary, is lacking: so that at such a level 'truth'
denotes nothing but things which we today call 'imaginings'. To this extent moral judgement is never to be
taken literally: as such it never contains anything but nonsense. But as semiotics it remains of
incalculable value: it reveals, to the informed man at least, the most precious
realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know enough to
'understand' themselves. Morality is merely sign-language, merely symptomatology: one must already know what it is
about to derive profit from it.
2
A first example, merely
an introduction. In all ages one has wanted to 'improve' men:
this above all is what morality has meant.
But one word can conceal the most divergent tendencies. Both the taming of the beast man and
the breeding of a certain species of man has been called 'improvement':
only these zoological termini express realities - realities, to be sure,
of which the typical 'improver', the priest, knows nothing - wants to
know nothing.... To call the taming of an animal its 'improvement' is in our
ears almost a joke. Whoever knows what
goes on in menageries is doubtful whether the beasts in them are
'improved'. They are weakened, they are
made less harmful, they become sickly beasts
through the depressive emotion of fear, through pain, through injuries, through
hunger. - It is no different with the tamed human being whom the priest has
'improved'. In the early Middle Ages,
when the Church was in fact above all a menageries, one everywhere hunted down
the fairest specimens of the 'blond beast' [Nietzsche introduced this term in TOWARDS A GENEALOGY OF MORALS
1/11: it means man considered as an animal, and the first use of the term is
immediately followed by a reference to 'the Roman, Arab, Teutonic, Japanese
nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings' and to the Athenians of
the age of Pericles as examples of men 'the animal'
in whom 'has to get out again, has to go back to the wilderness.' The uses of 'blond beast' are not fully
intelligible apart from Nietzsche's psychology.] - one 'improved' and led into a
monastery? Like a caricature of a human
being, like an abortion: he had become a 'sinner', he was in a cage, one had
imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts.... There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards
himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all
that was still strong and happy. In short, a 'Christian'.... In physiological terms: in the
struggle with the beast, making it sick can be the only means of making
it weak. This the Church understood: it corrupted
the human being, it weakened him - but it claimed to have 'improved' him ...
3
Let us take the other aspect of so-called
morality, the breeding of a definite race and species. The most grandiose example of this is
provided by Indian morality, sanctioned, as the Law of Manu', into
religion. Here the proposed task is to
breed no fewer than four races simultaneously: a priestly, a warrior, and a
trading and farming race, and finally a menial race, the Sudras. Here we are manifestly no longer among
animal-tamers: a species of human being a hundred times more gentle and
rational is presupposed even to conceive the plan of such a breeding. One draws a breath of relief when coming out
of the Christian sick-house and dungeon atmosphere into this healthier, higher,
wider world. How paltry the 'New
Testament' is compared with Manu, how ill it smells! - But this
organization too need to be dreadful - this time in struggle not
with the beast but with its antithesis, with the non-bred human being,
the hotchpotch human being, the Chandala. [The 'untouchables' excluded from the
caste system.] And again it had no means of making him sick
- it was the struggle with the 'great majority'. Perhaps there is nothing which outrages our
feelings more than these protective measures of Indian morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Shastra 1), that 'concerning unclean
vegetables', ordains that the only nourishment permitted the Chandala shall be garlic and onions, in view of the fact
that the holy scripture forbids one to given them corn or seed-bearing fruits
or water or fire. The same edict
lays it down that the water they need must not be taken from rivers or springs
or pools, but only from the entrances to swamps and holes made by the feet of
animals. They are likewise forbidden to
wash their clothes or to wash themselves, since the water allowed them
as an act of charity must be used only for quenching the thirst. Finally, the Sudra
women are forbidden to assist the Chandala in
childbirth, and the latter are likewise forbidden to assist one another....
- The harvest of such hygienic regulations did not fail to appear: murderous
epidemics, hideous venereal diseases and, as a consequence, 'the law of the
knife' once more, ordaining circumcision for the male and removal of the labia
minora for the female children. - Manu himself
says: 'The Chandala are the fruit of adultery, incest
and crime' ( - this being the necessary
consequence of the concept 'breeding').
'They shall have for clothing only rags from corpses, for utensils broken
pots, for ornaments old iron, for worship only evil spirits; they shall wander
from place to place without rest. They
are forbidden to write from left to right and to use the right hand for
writing: the employment of the right hand and of the left-to-right motion is
reserved for the virtuous, for people of race.' -
4
These regulations are instructive enough:
in them we find for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial -
we learn that the concept 'pure blood' is the opposite of a harmless concept. It becomes clear, on the other hand, in which
people the hatred, the Chandala hatred for this
'humanity' has been immortalized, where it has become religion, where it has
become genius.... From this point of view, the Gospels are documents of
the first rank; the Book of Enoch even more so. - Christianity, growing from
Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a product of this soil, [This is one of the major themes of THE
ANTI-CHRIST.] represents the reaction
against that 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 evangel
preached to the poor and lowly, the collective rebellion of everything
downtrodden, wretched, ill-constituted, underprivileged against the 'race' -
undying Chandala revenge as the religion of love
...
5
The morality of breeding and the
morality of taming are, in the means they employ to attain their ends,
entirely worthy of one another: we may set down as our chief proposition that
to make morality one must have the unconditional will to the
contrary. This is the great, the uncanny
problem which I have pursued furthest: the psychology of the 'improvers' of
mankind. A small and really rather
modest fact, that of so-called pia fraus, [pious
fraud] gave me my first
access to this problem: pia fraus, the heritage of all philosophers and priests who
have 'improved' mankind. Neither Manu
nor Plato, neither Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers, ever
doubted their right to tell lies.
Nor did they doubt their possession of other rights.... Expressed
in a formula one might say: every means hitherto employed with the
intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral. -