Part 69

The dangerous distinction between "theoretical" and "practical" in Kant for instance, but also in the ancient philosophers:--they behave as if pure intellectuality presented them with the problems of science and metaphysics;--they behave as if practice should be judged by a measure of its own, whatever the judgment of theory may be.

Against the first tendency I set up my psychology of philosophers: their strangest calculations and "intellectuality" are still but the last pallid impress of a physiological fact; spontaneity is absolutely lacking in them, everything is instinct, everything is intended to follow a certain direction from the first....

Against the second tendency I put my question: whether we know another method of acting correctly, besides that of thinking correctly; the last case is action, the first presupposes thought Are we possessed of a means whereby we can judge of the value of a method of life differently from the value of a theory: through induction or comparison?... Guileless people imagine that in this respect we are better equipped, we know what is "good"--and the philosophers are content to repeat this view. We conclude that some sort of faith is at work in this matter, and nothing more....

"Men must act; consequently rules of conduct are necessary"--this is what even the ancient Sceptics thought. The urgent need of a definite decision in this department of knowledge is used as an argument in favour of regarding something as true!...

"Men must not act"--said their more consistent brothers, the Buddhists, and then thought out a mode of conduct which would deliver man from the yoke of action....

To adapt one's self, to live as the "common man" lives, and to regard as right and proper what he regards as right: this is submission to the gregarious instinct. One must carry one's courage and severity so far as to learn to consider such submission a disgrace. One should not live according to two standards!... One should not separate theory and practice!...

459.

Of all that which was formerly held to be true, not one word is to be credited. Everything which was formerly disdained as unholy, forbidden, contemptible, and fatal--all these flowers now bloom on the most charming paths of truth.

The whole of this old morality concerns us no longer: it contains not one idea which is still worthy of respect. We have outlived it--we are no longer sufficiently coarse and guileless to be forced to allow ourselves to be lied to in this way.... In more polite language: we are too virtuous for it.... And if truth in the old sense were "true" only because the old morality said "yea" to it, and had a right to say "yea" to it: it follows that no truth of the past can any longer be of use to us.... Our criterion of truth is /certainly not morality: we refute an assertion when we show that it is dependent upon morality and is inspired by noble feelings.

460.

All these values are empirical and conditioned. But he who believes in them and who honours them, refuses to acknowledge this aspect of them. All philosophers believe in these values, and one form their reverence takes is the endeavour to make a priori truths out of them. The falsifying nature of reverence....

Reverence is the supreme test of intellectual honesty, but in the whole history of philosophy there is no such thing as intellectual honesty,--but the "love of goodness ..."

On the one hand, there is an absolute lack of method in testing the value of these values; secondly, there is a general disinclination either to test them or to regard them as conditioned at all.--All anti-scientific instincts assembled round moral values in order to keep science out of this department....

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS IN THE CRITICISM OF PHILOSOPHY.

461.

Why philosophers are slanderers.--The artful and blind hostility of philosophers towards the senses--what an amount of mob and middle-class qualities lie in all this hatred!

The crowd always believes that an abuse of which it feels the harmful results, constitutes an objection to the thing which happens to be abused: all insurrectionary movements against principles, whether in politics or agriculture, always follow a line of argument suggested by this ulterior motive: the abuse must be shown to be necessary to, and, inherent in, the principle.

It is a woeful history: mankind looks for a principle, from the standpoint of which he will be able to contemn man--he invents a world in order to be able to slander and throw mud at this world: as a matter of fact, he snatches every time at nothing, and construes this nothing as "God," as "Truth," and, in any case, as judge and detractor of this existence....

If one should require a proof of how deeply and thoroughly the actually barbarous needs of man, even in his present state of tameness and "civilisation," still seek gratification, one should contemplate the "leitmotifs" of the whole of the evolution of philosophy:--a sort of revenge upon reality, a surreptitious process of destroying the values by means of which men live, a dissatisfied soul to which the conditions of discipline is one of torture, and which takes a particular pleasure in morbidly severing all the bonds that bind it to such a condition.

The history of philosophy is the story of a secret and mad hatred of the prerequisities of Life, of the feelings which make for the real values of Life, and of all partisanship in favour of Life. Philosophers have never hesitated to affirm a fanciful world, provided it contradicted this world, and furnished them with a weapon wherewith they could calumniate this world. Up to the present, philosophy has been the grand school of slander: and its power has been so great, that even to-day our science, which pretends to be the advocate of Life, has accepted the fundamental position of slander, and treats this world as "appearance," and this chain of causes as though it were only phenomenal. What is the hatred which is active here?

I fear that it is still the Circe of philosophers--Morality, which plays them the trick of compelling them to be ever slanderers.... They believed in moral "truths," in these they thought they had found the highest values; what alternative had they left, save that of denying existence ever more emphatically the more they got to know about it?... For this life is immoral.... And it is based upon immoral first principles: and morality says nay to Life.

Let us suppress the real world: and in order to do this, we must first suppress the highest values current hitherto--morals.... It is enough to show that morality itself is immoral, in the same sense as that in which immorality has been condemned heretofore. If an end be thus made to the tyranny of the former values, if we have suppressed the "real world," a new order of values must follow of its own accord.

The world of appearance and the world of lies: this constitutes the contradiction. The latter hitherto has been the "real world," "truth," "God." This is the one which we still have to suppress.

The logic of my conception:

(1) Morality as the highest value (it is master of all the phases of philosophy, even of the Sceptics). Result: this world is no good, it is not the "real world."

(2) What is it that determines the highest value here? What, in sooth, is morality?--It is the instinct of decadence; it is the means whereby the exhausted and the degenerate revenge themselves. Historical proof: philosophers have always been decadents ... in the service of nihilistic religions.

(3) It is the instinct of decadence coming to the fore as will to power. Proof: the absolute immorality of the means employed by morality throughout its history.

General aspect: the values which have been highest hitherto constitute a specific case of the will to power; morality itself is a specific case of immorality.