Part 61

402.

Morality, a useful error; or, more clearly still, a necessary and expedient lie according to the greatest and most impartial of its supporters.

403.

One ought to be able to acknowledge the truth up to that point where one is sufficiently elevated no longer to require the disciplinary school of moral error.--When one judges life morally, it disgusts one.

Neither should false personalities be invented; one should not say, for instance, "Nature is cruel." It is precisely when one perceives that there is no such central controlling and responsible force that one is relieved!

Evolution of man. A. He tried to attain to a certain power over Nature and over himself. (Morality was necessary in order to make man triumph in his struggle with Nature and "wild animals.")

B. If power over Nature has been attained, this power can be used as a help in our development: Will to Power as a self-enhancing and self-strengthening principle.

404.

Morality may be regarded as the illusion of a species, fostered with the view of urging the individual to sacrifice himself to the future, and seemingly granting him such a very great value, that with that self-consciousness he may tyrannise over, and constrain, other sides of his nature, and find it difficult to be pleased with himself.

We ought to be most profoundly thankful for what morality has done hitherto: but now it is no more than a burden which may prove fatal. Morality itself in the form of honesty urges us to deny morality.

405.

To what extent is the self-destruction of morality still a sign of its own strength? We Europeans have within us the blood of those who were ready to die for their faith; we have taken morality frightfully seriously, and there is nothing which we have not, at one time, sacrificed to it. On the other hand, our intellectual subtlety has been reached essentially through the vivisection of our consciences. We do not yet know the "whither" towards which we are urging our steps, now that we have departed from the soil of our forebears. But it was on this very soil that we acquired the strength which is now driving us from our homes in search of adventure, and it is thanks to that strength that we are now in mid-sea, surrounded by untried possibilities and things undiscovered--we can no longer choose, we must be conquerors, now that we have no land in which we feel at home and in which we would fain "survive." A concealed "yea" is driving us forward, and it is stronger than all our "nays." Even our strength no longer bears with us in the old swampy land: we venture out into the open, we attempt the task. The world is still rich and undiscovered, and even to perish were better than to be half-men or poisonous men. Our very strength itself urges us to take to the sea; there where all suns have hitherto sunk we know of a new world....

III.

CRITICISM OF PHILOSOPHY.

1. GENERAL REMARKS.

406.

Let us rid ourselves of a few superstitions which heretofore have been fashionable among philosophers!

407.

Philosophers are prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the things of the body, the senses, fate, bondage, and all that which has no purpose.

In the first place, they believe in: absolute knowledge, (2) in knowledge for its own sake,

(3) in virtue and happiness as necessarily related,

(4) in the recognisability of men's acts. They are led by instinctive determinations of values, in which former cultures are reflected (more dangerous cultures too).

408.

What have philosophers lacked! (1) A sense of history, (2) a knowledge of physiology, (3) a goal in the future.--The ability to criticise without irony or moral condemnation.

409.

Philosophers have had (1) from times immemorial a wonderful capacity for the contradictio in adjecto, (2) they have always trusted concepts as unconditionally as they have mistrusted the senses: it never seems to have occurred to them that notions and words are our inheritance of past ages in which thinking was neither very clear nor very exact.

What seems to dawn upon philosophers last of all: that they must no longer allow themselves to be presented with concepts already conceived, nor must they merely purify and polish up those concepts; but they must first make them, create them, themselves, and then present them and get people to accept them. Up to the present, people have trusted their concepts generally, as if they had been a wonderful dowry from some kind of wonderland: but they constitute the inheritance of our most remote, most foolish, and most intelligent forefathers. This piety towards that which already exists in us is perhaps related to the moral element in science. What we needed above all is absolute scepticism towards all traditional concepts (like that which a certain philosopher may already have possessed--and he was Plato, of course: for he taught the reverse).

410.