Essay III

Third Essay:

What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?

Carefree, mocking, violent—that is how wisdom wants us: she isa woman, she always loves only awarrior.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

1 What do ascetic ideals mean?—Among artists, nothing or too many different things; among philosophers and scholars, something like a nose and an instinct for the conditions most favorable to a heightened life of the mind; among women, at best, one more alluring charm, a little soft languor on beautiful flesh, the angelic quality of a pretty, plump animal; among the physiologically ill-constituted and out of sorts (the majority of mortals), an attempt to feel “too good” for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief weapon in the struggle with lingering pain and boredom; among priests, the priest’s actual faith, their finest instrument of power, also the “supreme” license for power; among saints, finally, a pretext for hibernation, their last craving for glory, their rest in nothingness (“God”), their form of madness. But that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to humanity at all expresses the fundamental fact of the human will, its horror of the void: it needs a goal—and it would rather will nothingness than not will.—Am I understood?… Have I been understood?… “Not in the least, sir!”—Then let us start again.

2 What do ascetic ideals mean?—Or, to take a particular case about which I have often enough been asked for advice: what does it mean, for instance, when an artist like Richard Wagner pays homage to chastity in his old age? In a certain sense, of course, he always did; but only at the very end in an ascetic sense. What does this change of “mind” mean, this radical reversal of mind?—For that is what it was: with it Wagner leaped straight into his opposite. What does it mean when an artist leaps into his opposite?… Here, if we are willing to pause a little over this question, we immediately recall what may have been the finest, strongest, most cheerful, most courageous period in Wagner’s life: the time when the thought of Luther’s wedding occupied him inwardly and deeply. Who knows what accidents were really responsible for our having The Mastersingers today instead of that wedding music? And how much of it may still echo in them? But there can be no doubt that this “Luther’s Wedding,” too, would have been a praise of chastity. Certainly a praise of sensuality as well—and that is just how it should have been, it seems to me, just how it would have been “Wagnerian.” For there is no necessary opposition between chastity and sensuality; every good marriage, every genuine love affair of the heart, transcends that opposition. Wagner would have done well, I think, to bring this agreeable fact home to his Germans once again through a charming and spirited Luther comedy, for there are and always have been many slanderers of sensuality among the Germans; and perhaps Luther’s merit is nowhere greater than precisely in his having had the courage of his sensuality (which was then called, delicately enough, “evangelical freedom”…) But even where that opposition between chastity and sensuality really exists, it fortunately need not be a tragic one. This, at least, should hold for all the better-constituted, better-spirited mortals, who are far from simply counting their precarious balance between “animal and angel” among the arguments against existence—the subtlest and brightest, like Goethe, like Hafiz, have even seen in it one more enticement to life. Just such “contradictions” seduce us into existence… On the other hand, it is all too understandable that when ill-constituted swine are once induced to worship chastity—and there are such swine!—they will see and worship in it only their opposite, the opposite of the ill-constituted swine—oh, with what tragic grunting and zeal! One can imagine it—that painful and superfluous opposition which Richard Wagner undeniably still wanted to set to music and put on the stage at the end of his life. But what for? one may fairly ask. For what did the swine matter to him, what do they matter to us?—

3 Of course, there is no avoiding the other question: what did he care about that masculine (oh, so unmasculine) “country simpleton,” that poor devil and child of nature, Parsifal, whom he finally makes Catholic by such compromising means—what? Was this Parsifal meant seriously at all? One might be tempted to suspect, even to wish, the reverse—that Wagner’s Parsifal was meant in a spirit of gaiety, as a kind of concluding piece and satyr play with which the tragedian Wagner wished to take leave of us, and of himself, above all of tragedy, in a manner proper and worthy to him: namely, with an extravagance of the highest and most mischievous parody of the tragic itself, of all the dreadful earthly seriousness and earthly misery of former days, of the finally overcome crudest form of the ascetic ideal’s violation of nature. That, as I said, would have been worthy of a great tragedian: for he, like every artist, reaches the final summit of his greatness only when he knows how to see himself and his art beneath him—when he knows how to laugh at himself. Is Wagner’s “Parsifal” his secret laughter of superiority over himself, the triumph of the ultimate, supreme artistic freedom he has won, his transcendence as an artist? One would like to wish it, as I said: for what would a Parsifal meant seriously be? Must we really see in it (as someone put it to me) “the monstrous spawn of a crazed hatred of knowledge, spirit, and sensuality”? A curse on senses and spirit in a single hatred and a single breath? An apostasy and return to Christian, morbid, obscurantist ideals? And finally, even a self-denial, a self-erasure on the part of an artist who until then had bent the entire force of his will toward the opposite, namely, toward the supreme heightening of both spirit and sensuality in his art? And not only in his art: in his life as well. Remember how enthusiastically Wagner once followed in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach: Feuerbach’s phrase “healthy sensuality”—in the thirties and forties it sounded to Wagner, as to many Germans (they called themselves the “Young Germans”), like the word of redemption. Did he finally learn the opposite on this point? Since it seems, at the very least, that he finally had the will to teach the opposite… And not only through Parsifal’s trombones from the stage—in the dismal writings of his last years, as unfree as they are bewildered, there are a hundred passages that betray a secret wish and will, a despondent, uncertain will he could not admit to, quite literally to preach reversal, conversion, denial, Christianity, the Middle Ages, and to tell his disciples, “It is nothing! Seek salvation elsewhere!” Even the “blood of the Redeemer” is invoked at one point…

4 Let me give my opinion on such a case, with all its painful aspects—and it is a typical case: surely the wisest course is to separate an artist from his work far enough not to take the man himself as seriously as his work. He is, after all, only the precondition of his work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the fertilizer and manure on which, out of which, it grows—and thus, in most cases, something one must forget if one wishes to enjoy the work itself. Insight into the origins of a work is the business of the physiologists and vivisectors of the spirit: never, ever that of people of aesthetic sensibility, of artists! The poet and creator of Parsifal was no more spared a deep, thorough, even terrible immersion and descent into medieval oppositions of the soul, a hostile estrangement from all elevation, rigor, and discipline of the spirit, a kind of intellectual perversity (if I may be forgiven the word), than a pregnant woman is spared the repulsions and oddities of pregnancy: things which, as I said, one must forget in order to enjoy the child. We must beware of the confusion into which an artist himself falls all too easily, through psychological contiguity, to speak with the English: as if he himself were what he can portray, conceive, express. The fact is that if he were just that, he simply would not portray, conceive, express it; a Homer would not have written an Achilles, a Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles and Goethe a Faust. A complete and consummate artist is forever severed from the “real,” the actual; on the other hand, it is understandable that at times he can grow weary to the point of despair of this eternal “unreality” and falsity of his innermost existence—and that he may then attempt, for once, to reach across into what is most forbidden to him, into actuality, to be actual. With what success? One can guess… This is the artist’s typical idle wish: the same idle wish to which the aging Wagner also succumbed, and for which he had to pay so dearly, so fatally (it cost him the valuable part of his circle of friends). But finally, even quite apart from this idle wish, who would not wish, for Wagner’s own sake, that he had taken leave of us and his art differently, not with a Parsifal, but more triumphantly, more self-assuredly, more in Wagner’s own way—less misleadingly, less ambiguously with regard to his entire purpose, less in Schopenhauer’s way, less nihilistically?…

5 —What, then, do ascetic ideals mean? In an artist’s case, we are gradually coming to understand: nothing at all!… Or so many different things that it amounts to nothing at all!… Let us first eliminate the artists: they are nowhere near independent enough in the world and against the world for their valuations and the changes in them to deserve attention in themselves! At all times they have been the valets of a morality or philosophy or religion; quite apart from the fact that, unfortunately, they have often enough been the all-too-pliant courtiers of their followers and patrons, and keen-nosed flatterers of powers long established or just now ascending. At the very least, they always need a bulwark, a support, an already established authority: artists never stand on their own; standing alone runs counter to their deepest instincts. Thus Richard Wagner, for example, took the philosopher Schopenhauer, when “the time had come,” as his leader, his bulwark—who could even conceive of his having had the courage for an ascetic ideal without the support Schopenhauer’s philosophy offered him, without Schopenhauer’s authority, which attained predominance in Europe during the seventies? (Not yet taking into account whether, in the new Germany, an artist would have been possible at all without the milk of a pious, Reich-revering way of thinking.)—And with this we have reached the more serious question: what does it mean when a genuine philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal, a genuinely self-reliant mind like Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a gaze of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows how to stand alone and does not first wait for leaders and cues from above?—Let us consider at once Schopenhauer’s remarkable attitude toward art, fascinating even to certain kinds of people: for this was evidently the reason Richard Wagner initially went over to Schopenhauer (persuaded, as we know, by a poet, by Herwegh), to such an extent that a complete theoretical contradiction opened up between his earlier and later aesthetic faith—the former expressed, for example, in “Opera and Drama,” the latter in the writings he published from 1870 onward. In particular—and this may be the strangest thing of all—from that point on Wagner ruthlessly changed his judgment of the value and standing of music itself: what did it matter to him that until then he had made it a means, a medium, a “woman,” which absolutely needed a purpose, a man, to flourish—namely, drama! He grasped all at once that with Schopenhauer’s theory and innovation more could be done for the greater glory of music—namely, with the sovereignty of music as Schopenhauer understood it: music set apart from all the other arts, the independent art in itself, not, like them, offering images of the phenomenal world, but speaking the language of the will itself, directly out of the “abyss,” as its most intimate, most original, least derivative revelation. With this extraordinary rise in the value of music, which seemed to follow from Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the musician himself also rose at a stroke to an unheard-of price: he now became an oracle, a priest, indeed more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece for the “in-itself” of things, a telephone from the beyond—from then on he spoke not only music, this ventriloquist of God—he spoke metaphysics: what wonder that one day he finally spoke ascetic ideals?…

6 Schopenhauer made use of Kant’s formulation of the aesthetic problem—although he certainly did not see it through Kant’s eyes. Kant thought he was doing art an honor when, among the predicates of the beautiful, he favored and brought to the fore those that constitute the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity. Whether this was not, in the main, a mistake is not a question to discuss here; all I wish to stress is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of approaching the aesthetic problem through the experiences of the artist (the creator), reflected on art and the beautiful solely from the standpoint of the “spectator,” and in doing so unwittingly smuggled the “spectator” himself into the concept “beautiful.” If only, at least, the philosophers of beauty had known this “spectator” well enough!—As a great personal fact and experience, that is, as a wealth of intensely individual experiences, desires, surprises, raptures in the realm of beauty! But the reverse, I fear, has always been the case: and so, right from the start, they give us definitions in which, as in that famous definition Kant gives of the beautiful, the lack of a subtler experience of oneself sits like a fat worm of fundamental error. “Beautiful,” Kant said, “is what pleases without interest.” Without interest! Compare this definition with another, made by a genuine “spectator” and artist—Stendhal, who once calls the beautiful a promise of happiness. Here, at any rate, precisely what Kant alone emphasizes in the aesthetic state is rejected and struck out: disinterestedness. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?—If, of course, our aestheticians never tire of throwing into the scales on Kant’s side the claim that under beauty’s spell one can even look at statues of unclothed women “without interest,” we may surely laugh a little at their expense—the experiences of artists on this delicate point are “more interesting,” and Pygmalion was certainly not necessarily an “unaesthetic person.” Let us think all the better of our aestheticians’ innocence, reflected in such arguments; let us credit Kant, for instance, with what he can teach about the peculiar character of the sense of touch, with the naïveté of a country parson!—And here we return to Schopenhauer, who stood far closer to the arts than Kant and yet never escaped the spell of Kant’s definition: how did that happen? The fact is curious enough: he interpreted the phrase “without interest” in the most personal way imaginable, out of an experience that must have been among his most habitual. There are few things Schopenhauer speaks of as confidently as the effect of aesthetic contemplation: he claims that it counteracts precisely sexual “interestedness,” much as lupulin and camphor do; he never tired of extolling this release from the “will” as the great advantage and benefit of the aesthetic state. Indeed, one might be tempted to ask whether his fundamental conception of “will and representation,” the thought that redemption from the “will” could come only through “representation,” originated in a generalization of that sexual experience. (In all questions concerning Schopenhauer’s philosophy, incidentally, we must never lose sight of the fact that it is the conception of a young man of twenty-six; so it partakes not only of what is specific to Schopenhauer but also of what is specific to that season of life.) Let us hear, for example, one of the most explicit among the countless passages he wrote in honor of the aesthetic state (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I 231); let us listen for the tone, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude with which such words were spoken. “This is the painless state which Epicurus praised as the highest good and the state of the gods; for that moment we are freed from the vile pressure of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath from the penal servitude of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still”… What vehemence of language! What images of torment and long disgust! What an almost pathological contrast in time between “that moment” and the usual “wheel of Ixion,” the “penal servitude of willing,” the “vile pressure of the will”!—But suppose Schopenhauer were right a hundred times over about himself: what would that have done for our insight into the essence of the beautiful? Schopenhauer has described one effect of the beautiful, its calming of the will—is it even a regular effect? Stendhal, as I said, a nature no less sensual but more happily constituted than Schopenhauer, emphasizes another effect of the beautiful: “the beautiful promises happiness”; for him, the fact of the matter seems to be precisely the arousal of the will (“of interest”) by the beautiful. And could one not finally object to Schopenhauer himself that he is quite wrong to think himself a Kantian here, that he has not understood Kant’s definition of the beautiful in Kant’s sense at all—that for him, too, the beautiful pleases out of an “interest,” indeed out of the strongest, most personal interest of all: that of a tortured man being released from his torture?… And to return to our first question, “What does it mean when a philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal?”—here, at least, we get a first hint: he wants to escape some torture.—

7 Let us beware of pulling gloomy faces at the word “torture”: in this very case there is enough to set against it, enough to subtract—even something left to laugh at. Above all, let us not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who did indeed treat sexuality as a personal enemy (including its instrument, woman, that “instrument of the devil”), needed enemies to stay in good spirits; that he loved ferocious, bilious, black-green words; that he raged for the sake of raging, out of passion; that he would have fallen ill, would have become a pessimist (for he was not one, much as he wished to be), without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality, and the whole will to exist, to remain in existence. Otherwise Schopenhauer would not have remained, one may wager on that; he would have run away: but his enemies held him fast, his enemies seduced him back into existence again and again; his anger, just as with the ancient Cynics, was his refreshment, his recreation, his compensation, his remedy for disgust, his happiness. So much for what is most personal in Schopenhauer’s case; on the other hand, there is also something typical in him—and only here do we return to our problem. Undeniably, for as long as there have been philosophers on earth, and wherever there have been philosophers (from India to England, to take the opposite poles of the gift for philosophy), there has been a peculiarly philosophical irritability and rancor toward sensuality—Schopenhauer is merely its most eloquent, and, if one has an ear for it, its most captivating and enchanting eruption; likewise, there is a peculiarly philosophical partiality and warmth toward the whole ascetic ideal: let us not deceive ourselves about this, or pretend otherwise. Both, as I said, belong to the type; if both are absent in a philosopher, then—be sure of it—he is always merely a “so-called” philosopher. What does this mean? For this fact must first be interpreted: in itself it stands there dumb for all eternity, like every “thing in itself.” Every animal, and thus also the philosophical beast, instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can let its strength out to the full and reach its maximum feeling of power; every animal just as instinctively, and with a keenness of scent “higher than all reason,” abhors every sort of intruder and obstacle that lies or might lie across its path to that optimum (it is not its path to “happiness” I am speaking of, but its path to power, to action, to the mightiest activity, and in most cases, in fact, its path to unhappiness). In this way the philosopher abhors marriage, along with everything that might persuade him to it—marriage as an obstacle and a fatality on his path to the optimum. What great philosopher has ever been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not; more than that, one cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in comedy: that is my proposition; and that exception, Socrates, the malicious Socrates, seems to have married ironically, expressly to demonstrate precisely this proposition. Every philosopher would speak as Buddha once spoke when the birth of a son was announced to him: “Râhula has been born to me, a fetter has been forged for me” (Râhula here means “a little demon”); every “free spirit,” supposing he has previously had a thoughtless hour, must have a thoughtful one, as that same Buddha once did—“Cramped and confined, he thought to himself, is life in the house, a place of impurity; freedom is a leaving of the house”: “thinking thus, he left the house.” The ascetic ideal points out so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot hear the history of all those resolute people who one day said No to all unfreedom and went into some desert without inward rejoicing and clapping of hands—even supposing they were merely sturdy asses and the very opposite of a strong mind. What, then, does the ascetic ideal mean for a philosopher? My answer is—you will have guessed it long ago: at its sight the philosopher smiles on an optimum of conditions for the highest and boldest life of the mind—he does not thereby deny “existence,” but rather affirms his existence and only his existence, perhaps to the point that he is not far from the sacrilegious wish: let the world perish, let there be philosophy, let there be the philosopher, let me be!…

8 You see, these philosophers are hardly impartial witnesses and judges of the ascetic ideal’s value! They are thinking of themselves—what is “the saint” to them! They are thinking of what is most indispensable to them: freedom from compulsion, disturbance, noise, from business, duties, worries; a clear head; the dance, leap, and flight of thoughts; good air, thin, clear, free, dry, like the air at high altitudes, where all animal being grows more spiritual and sprouts wings; peace in all the basements; all dogs neatly chained up; no barking of hostility and shaggy rancor; no worms of wounded ambition gnawing away; modest and submissive intestines, busy as mills, but far off; the heart estranged, beyond, future, posthumous—all in all, when they think of the ascetic ideal, they think of the cheerful asceticism of an animal become divine and fully fledged, hovering above life rather than resting in it. We know the ascetic ideal’s three great showy words: poverty, humility, chastity. Now take a close look at the lives of all great, fertile, inventive minds—you will always find all three in them again, to a certain degree. Certainly not, it goes without saying, as if these were their “virtues”—what has this kind of person to do with virtues!—but as the most proper and natural conditions of their best existence, their finest fruitfulness. It is quite possible that their dominant intellectual drive first had to rein in an unbridled, touchy pride or a wanton sensuality, or that it had a hard enough struggle to maintain its will to the “desert” against a taste for luxury and the most exquisite things, and likewise against a lavish generosity of heart and hand. But it did so precisely as the dominant instinct, which imposed its demands on all the other instincts—it still does; if it did not, it would simply not be dominant. So there is nothing of “virtue” in this. The desert, incidentally, of which I have just spoken, into which strong, independently constituted minds withdraw and become solitary—oh, how different it looks from the desert that cultivated people dream of!—For in some circumstances they themselves are the desert, these cultivated people. And certainly all the playactors of the spirit could not possibly endure it—it is nowhere near romantic or Syrian enough for them, nowhere near enough of a stage desert! Admittedly, it is not without camels either: but that is the whole extent of the resemblance. Perhaps a chosen obscurity; keeping out of one’s own way; shrinking from noise, veneration, newspapers, influence; a small office, a daily routine, something that conceals more than it brings to light; occasional company with harmless, cheerful beasts and birds, whose sight refreshes; a mountain range for companionship, but not a dead one, one with eyes (that is, with lakes); perhaps even a room in a crowded inn for all comers, where one is sure to be mistaken for someone else and can talk to anyone with impunity—that is “desert” here: oh, it is solitary enough, believe me! When Heraclitus withdrew into the open courts and colonnades of the immense temple of Artemis, that “desert” was more dignified, I admit: why do we lack such temples? (Perhaps we do not lack them: I am just now thinking of my finest study, the Piazza di San Marco, provided it is spring, and also morning, between 10 and 12.) But what Heraclitus avoided is still the same thing that we now keep out of the way of: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their news of the “Reich” (Persia, you understand me), their marketplace junk of “Today”—for we philosophers need peace from one thing before all else: from everything “Today.” We revere the quiet, the cold, the noble, the distant, the past, anything at all at whose sight the soul need not defend itself and lace itself tight—something with which one can speak without speaking loudly. Just listen to the sound a mind makes when it speaks: every mind has its sound, loves its sound. That one over there, for instance, must be an agitator, which is to say an empty head, an empty pot: whatever goes into him, everything comes back out dull and thick, weighed down by the echo of the great void. That one over there seldom speaks except hoarsely: has he perhaps thought himself hoarse? It would be possible—ask the physiologists—but anyone who thinks in words thinks as an orator and not as a thinker (it betrays that fundamentally he is not thinking things, not thinking objectively, but only with reference to things, that he is really thinking of himself and his listeners). This third one speaks intrusively, he comes too close to our bodies, his breath blows over us—involuntarily we shut our mouths, although it is through a book that he speaks to us: the sound of his style tells us why—that he has no time, that he has little faith in himself, that he must get a word in today or never again. But a mind certain of itself speaks softly; it seeks concealment, it lets itself be waited for. One recognizes a philosopher by his avoidance of three glittering, noisy things: fame, princes, and women—which is not to say that they do not come to him. He shuns overly bright light: that is why he shuns his age and its “day.” In this he is like a shadow: the lower the sun sinks for him, the greater he becomes. As for his “humility,” he endures a certain dependence and overshadowing just as he endures the dark; more than that, he fears the disturbance of lightning, he recoils from the vulnerability of an all-too-isolated and exposed tree on which every spell of bad weather vents its mood, every mood its bad weather. His “maternal” instinct, the secret love of what is growing within him, directs him toward circumstances in which he is relieved of thinking of himself; in the same sense that the instinct of the mother in woman has until now maintained woman’s dependent position in general. In the end they ask little enough, these philosophers; their motto is “whoever possesses is possessed”—not, as I must say again and again, out of a virtue, a meritorious will to frugality and simplicity, but because their supreme master demands it of them, shrewdly and inexorably demands it: he has a mind for only one thing, and gathers everything, time, strength, love, interest, only for that, saves it only for that. This kind of person does not like to be disturbed by enmities, nor by friendships either: he easily forgets or despises. He thinks it bad taste to play the martyr; “to suffer for the truth”—he leaves that to the ambitious and the stage heroes of the spirit, and anyone else who has time enough for it (the philosophers themselves have something to do for the truth). They are sparing with grand words; it is said that they recoil even from the word “truth”: it sounds boastful… Finally, as for the philosophers’ “chastity,” this kind of mind plainly has its fruitfulness elsewhere than in children; perhaps also elsewhere the survival of its name, its little immortality (in ancient India philosophers put it still more immodestly: “What need of offspring has he whose soul is the world?”). There is nothing here of chastity out of any ascetic scruple or hatred of the senses, any more than it is chastity when an athlete or jockey abstains from women: rather, their dominant instinct wills it so, at least during times of great pregnancy. Every artist knows how harmful sexual intercourse is in states of great intellectual tension and preparation; the mightiest and most sure of instinct among them do not first need experience, bitter experience, to know it—it is precisely their “maternal” instinct that, for the benefit of the work in the making, ruthlessly disposes of all other stores and supplements of strength, of the vigor of animal life: the greater strength then uses up the lesser.—Incidentally, consider Schopenhauer’s case, discussed above, in the light of this interpretation: the sight of the beautiful evidently acted on him as a trigger for the chief strength of his nature (the strength of reflection and the deepened gaze), so that it then exploded and at once became master of consciousness. This by no means excludes the possibility that the peculiar sweetness and fullness characteristic of the aesthetic state might derive precisely from the ingredient “sensuality” (just as the “idealism” characteristic of girls of marriageable age comes from the same source)—so that, on entering the aesthetic state, sensuality is not abolished, as Schopenhauer believed, but merely transfigures itself and no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus. I shall return to this viewpoint another time, in connection with still more delicate problems of the physiology of aesthetics, until now so untouched, so unexplored.

9 A certain asceticism, we have seen, a hard and cheerful renunciation undertaken with the best will, belongs among the conditions favorable to the highest life of the mind, and likewise among its most natural consequences: so it will come as no surprise from the outset that philosophers in particular have never treated the ascetic ideal without a certain partiality. A serious historical reckoning even shows the bond between the ascetic ideal and philosophy to be much closer and tighter still. One might say that it was only on this ideal’s leading strings that philosophy learned to take its first steps and little steps on earth—oh, still so clumsy, oh, still with such sullen faces, oh, so ready to fall over and lie on its belly, this timid little bungler and weakling with crooked legs! At first philosophy fared like all good things—for a long time they lacked the courage to be themselves, they kept looking around to see whether anyone would come to their aid; more than that, they feared everyone who watched them. Count off the philosopher’s individual drives and virtues one by one—his doubting drive, his negating drive, his waiting (“suspending judgment”) drive, his analytical drive, his investigating, searching, daring drive, his comparing, balancing drive, his will to neutrality and objectivity, his will to every “without anger or partiality”—has it ever really been understood that for the longest time every one of these ran counter to the primary demands of morality and conscience? (Not to speak of reason in general, which even Luther still liked to call Lady Clever, the clever whore.) That a philosopher, if he had become conscious of himself, would have had to feel himself the very embodiment of “we strive for the forbidden”—and consequently took care not to “feel himself,” not to become conscious of himself?… As I said, it is no different with all the good things we are proud of today; measured even by the standard of the ancient Greeks, our entire modern existence, insofar as it is not weakness but power and the consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and godlessness: for precisely the opposite things to those we revere today had conscience on their side for the longest time, and God as their guardian. Hubris is our whole stance toward nature today, our violation of nature with the aid of machines and the untroubled inventiveness of technicians and engineers; hubris is our stance toward God, which is to say toward some supposed spider of purpose and morality behind the great snare-web of causality—we might say, like Charles the Bold in his struggle with Louis XI, “I fight the universal spider”; hubris is our stance toward ourselves—for we experiment on ourselves as we would never permit ourselves to do on any animal, and merrily and curiously cut open our souls while we are still alive: what do we care any longer about the soul’s “salvation”! Afterward we heal ourselves: being ill is instructive, we have no doubt of that, more instructive still than being healthy—those who make us ill seem more necessary to us today even than any medicine men and “saviors.” We now violate ourselves, there is no doubt of it, we nutcrackers of the soul, we questioners and questionable ones, as if life were nothing but cracking nuts; in this very way we must necessarily become daily more questionable, more worthy of questioning, and in this very way perhaps also worthier—of living?… All good things were once bad things; every original sin has become an inherited virtue. Marriage, for instance, long seemed a sin against the rights of the community; once one paid a penalty for being so presumptuous as to claim a woman for oneself (here belongs, for example, the right of the first night, still today in Cambodia the privilege of the priests, those preservers of “good old customs”). The gentle, benevolent, yielding, compassionate feelings—gradually valued so highly that they are almost “values in themselves”—had self-contempt ranged against them for the longest time: one was ashamed of mildness as one is now ashamed of harshness (cf. “Beyond Good and Evil,” p. 232). Submission to law—oh, with what resistance of conscience did the noble lineages everywhere on earth renounce vendetta on their own part and concede to law authority over themselves! “Law” was long a forbidden thing, a sacrilege, an innovation; it appeared with force, as a force to which one yielded only with shame before oneself. Every tiniest step on earth was once won through mental and bodily tortures: this whole perspective, “that not only progress—no!—but stepping, movement, change have needed their countless martyrs,” sounds so foreign to us precisely today—I brought it to light in “Daybreak,” pp. 17 ff. “Nothing has been bought more dearly,” it says there (p. 19), “than the little human reason and feeling of freedom that now make up our pride. But it is this pride that now makes it almost impossible for us to feel our way into those immense stretches of the ‘morality of custom’ that precede ‘world history’ as the real and decisive main history that fixed the character of humanity: when suffering counted everywhere as a virtue, cruelty as a virtue, dissimulation as a virtue, revenge as a virtue, the denial of reason as a virtue, while well-being counted as a danger, the thirst for knowledge as a danger, peace as a danger, compassion as a danger, being pitied as a disgrace, work as a disgrace, madness as divinity, change as the immoral and ruin-bearing thing in itself!”—

10 In the same book, p. 39, it is set out under what estimation, under what pressure of estimation the oldest generation of contemplative human beings had to live—despised exactly to the extent that it was not feared! Contemplation first appeared on earth in masked form, with an ambiguous repute, with a wicked heart and often with a frightened head: there is no doubt of it. The inactive, brooding, unwarlike element in the instincts of contemplative human beings long cast a deep mistrust around them: against that there was no other remedy than to awaken a decided fear of oneself. And that, for instance, the old Brahmins understood! The oldest philosophers knew how to give their existence and their appearance a meaning, a support and a background, against which one learned to fear them: considered more exactly, out of an even more fundamental need, namely to win fear and reverence before themselves. For they found in themselves all value judgments turned against themselves, they had to fight down every kind of suspicion and resistance against “the philosopher in themselves.” This they did, as human beings of fearful ages, with fearful means: cruelty toward oneself, the inventive self-castigation—that was the chief means of these power-thirsty hermits and innovators of thought, who first had to do violence to the gods and the traditional in themselves in order to be able to believe in their own innovation. Let me recall the famous story of King Vishvamitra, who from thousand-year self-torments won such a feeling of power and trust in himself that he undertook to build a new heaven: the uncanny symbol of the oldest and the newest philosopher-history on earth—everyone who has ever built a “new heaven” found the power for it first in his own hell… Let us compress the whole state of affairs into brief formulas: the philosophical spirit has first always had to disguise and pupate itself in the previously established types of the contemplative human being, as priest, magician, soothsayer, in general as religious human being, in order to be even possible to any degree: the ascetic ideal long served the philosopher as a form of appearance, as a precondition of existence—he had to present it in order to be able to be a philosopher, he had to believe in it in order to be able to present it. The peculiarly world-denying, life-hostile, sense-distrusting, de-sensualized aloofness of philosophers, which has been held fast into the most recent times and has thereby gained validity almost as the philosophical attitude in itself—it is above all a consequence of the hard necessity of the conditions under which philosophy at all arose and endured: insofar namely as for the longest time philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without an ascetic wrapping and clothing, without an ascetic misunderstanding of itself. Put vividly and plainly: the ascetic priest supplied, into the most recent times, the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form under which alone philosophy was allowed to live and creep about… Has that really changed? Has the colorful and dangerous winged creature, that “spirit” which this caterpillar concealed within itself, really at last been uncowled and let out into the light, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, brighter world? Is there already enough pride, daring, courage, self-certainty, will of the spirit, will to responsibility, freedom of the will present that truly now on earth “the philosopher”—is possible?…

11 Only now, after we have caught sight of the ascetic priest, do we move seriously in upon our problem: what does the ascetic ideal mean?—only now does it become “serious”: we now have the actual representative of seriousness in general before us. “What does all seriousness mean?”—this still more fundamental question may perhaps already be forming on our lips: a question for physiologists, as cheaply as anything, but one we shall for the time being slip past. In that ideal the ascetic priest has not only his faith but also his will, his power, his interest. His right to exist stands and falls with that ideal: what wonder that here we strike a fearful opponent—assuming, namely, that we were the opponents of that ideal? of one who fights for his existence against the deniers of that ideal?… On the other hand, it is from the outset not probable that a position so interested in our problem will especially profit it; the ascetic priest will hardly himself make even the happiest defender of his ideal, for the same reason for which it usually fails when a woman wants to defend “woman in herself”—let alone the most objective judge and critic of the controversy stirred up here. We shall rather have to help him defend himself well against us—so much is already obvious—than have to fear being too well refuted by him… The thought that is fought over here is the valuation of our life on the part of the ascetic priests: the same (together with what belongs to it, “nature,” “world,” the whole sphere of becoming and transience) is by them put in relation to a wholly different kind of existence, to which it stands opposed and exclusive—unless it should turn against itself, deny itself: in this case, the case of an ascetic life, life counts as a bridge to that other existence. The ascetic treats life like a wrong road, which one must finally walk back to where it begins; or like an error which one refutes—ought to refute—by deed: for he demands that one go along with him, he forces, where he can, his valuation of existence. What does that mean? Such a monstrous way of valuing is not inscribed in the history of man as an exceptional case and curiosity: it is one of the broadest and longest facts there are. Read from a distant star, the capital letters of our earthly existence might tempt one to the conclusion that the earth is the actual ascetic star, a corner of discontented, haughty and repulsive creatures who could never rid themselves of a deep annoyance with themselves, with the earth, with all life, and did themselves as much woe as possible, out of pleasure in doing woe—probably their only pleasure. Let us consider how regularly, how generally, how at almost all times the ascetic priest appears; he belongs to no single race; he thrives everywhere; he grows out of every class. Not that he bred and propagated his way of valuing by inheritance: the opposite is the case—a deep instinct forbids him procreation, on the large scale. It must be a necessity of the first rank that makes this life-hostile species grow and thrive again and again—it must well be an interest of life itself that such a type of self-contradiction does not die out. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules a ressentiment without equal, that of an insatiable instinct and will to power which wants to become master, not over something in life, but over life itself, over its deepest, strongest, lowest conditions; here an attempt is made to use the force in order to stop up the sources of force; here the gaze turns green and spiteful against physiological thriving itself, especially against its expression, beauty, joy; while a pleasure is felt and sought in the botched, the stunted, in pain, in accident, in the ugly, in arbitrary loss, in self-divestment, self-scourging, self-sacrifice. All this is in the highest degree paradoxical: we stand here before a duality which wills itself dual, which enjoys itself in this suffering and thereby becomes all the more self-certain and triumphant the more its own precondition, physiological vitality, declines. “The triumph precisely in the last agony”: under this superlative sign the ascetic ideal has fought from of old; in this riddle of seduction, this image of rapture and torment, it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its final victory. Crux, nux, lux—with it these belong together.—

12 Suppose that such a will to contradiction and against nature, made flesh, is brought to philosophize: on what will it vent its innermost arbitrariness? On what is felt most surely as true, as real: it will seek error precisely there where the actual life instinct posits truth most unconditionally. It will, for example, as the ascetics of Vedanta philosophy did, degrade corporeality to illusion, likewise pain, multiplicity, the whole conceptual antithesis “subject” and “object”—errors, nothing but errors! To deny one’s I the belief, to deny oneself one’s “reality”—what a triumph!—no longer merely over the senses, over appearances, a much higher kind of triumph, a doing of violence and cruelty to reason: as which voluptuousness reaches its summit when ascetic self-contempt, self-mockery decrees to reason: “there is a realm of truth and of being, but precisely reason is excluded from it!”… (By the way: even in the Kantian concept “intelligible character of things” there is a residue of this lascivious ascetic duality, which likes to turn reason against reason: “intelligible character” means in Kant namely a kind of constitution of things of which the intellect grasps precisely so much—that it is for the intellect entirely incomprehensible.)—Let us at last, precisely as knowers, not be ungrateful toward such resolute reversals of accustomed perspectives and valuations, with which the spirit has for far too long seemingly wantonly and uselessly raged against itself: to see otherwise once, to will to see otherwise, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its eventual “objectivity”—the latter not understood as “disinterested contemplation” (as which it is a non-concept and an absurdity), but as the capacity to have in one’s power one’s pro and contra and to engage and disengage them: so that one knows how to make precisely the difference of perspectives and of affective interpretations useful for knowledge. Let us guard, namely, from now on the better, my gentleman philosophers, against the dangerous old conceptual fable which has posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge,” let us guard against the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”:—here an eye is always demanded to think which cannot be thought at all, an eye which is to have absolutely no direction, in which the active and interpreting forces are to be bound, are to be absent, through which seeing first becomes a seeing-something; here, then, an absurdity and a non-concept of an eye is always demanded. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we let speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes we know how to employ for the same thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to disengage the affects all together, supposing we were able to do that: how? would that not mean to castrate the intellect?…

13 But let us return. Such a self-contradiction as the ascetic seems to present, “life against life”—so much is at first obvious—reckoned physiologically and no longer psychologically, is simply nonsense. It can only be apparent; it must be a kind of provisional expression, an interpretation, formula, adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding of something whose actual nature was long not understood, long could not be designated in itself—a mere word, wedged into an old gap in human knowledge. And to set the state of affairs briefly against it: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instinct of a degenerating life, which seeks to hold itself with all means and fights for its existence; it points to a partial physiological inhibition and fatigue against which the deepest, intact instincts of life struggle unceasingly with new means and inventions. The ascetic ideal is such a means: it stands thus precisely the opposite of what the admirers of this ideal believe—life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death, the ascetic ideal is an artifice in the preservation of life. That it could, to the extent that history teaches, rule over man and become powerful, especially everywhere where civilization and the taming of man were carried through, expresses a great fact: the morbidity in the human type so far, at least of the tamed human being, the physiological wrestling of man with death (more exactly: with the surfeit of life, with fatigue, with the wish for the “end”). The ascetic priest is the wish for a being-different, being-elsewhere made flesh, and indeed the highest degree of this wish, its actual fervor and passion: but precisely the power of his wishing is the fetter that ties him here, precisely thereby he becomes the tool that must work at creating more favorable conditions for being-here and being-human—precisely with this power he holds the whole herd of the botched, the ill-humored, the utterly ruined, the shipwrecked, the sufferers-from-themselves of every kind fast to existence, in that he instinctively goes before them as shepherd. I am already understood: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier—he precisely belongs among the very great conserving and yes-creating powers of life… What does that morbidity hang on? For man is sicker, more uncertain, more changeable, more unsettled than any other animal, there is no doubt of it—he is the sick animal: where does that come from? Surely he has also dared, innovated, defied, challenged fate more than all the other animals taken together: he, the great experimenter with himself, the unsatisfied, the unappeased, who wrestles for the last mastery with animal, nature and gods—he who is still the unconquered, the eternally future, who finds no more rest before his own urgent force, so that his future burrows inexorably like a spur in the flesh of every present:—how should such a courageous and rich animal not also be the most endangered, the longest and most deeply sick among all sick animals?… Man has had enough of it, often enough, there are whole epidemics of this having-had-enough (—around 1348, at the time of the dance of death): but even this disgust, this weariness, this annoyance with himself—all emerges so powerfully in him that it at once becomes a new fetter. His No, which he speaks to life, brings as though by magic a fullness of more tender Yeses to light; indeed when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, self-destruction—afterward it is the wound itself that forces him to live…

14 The more normal morbidity is in man—and we cannot deny this normality—the higher one should honor the rare cases of spiritual and bodily powerfulness, the lucky accidents of man, the more strictly one should protect the well-formed from the worst air, the sick air. Does one do that?… The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; not from the strongest comes the calamity for the strong, but from the weakest. Does one know that?… On the large scale it is by no means fear of man whose diminution one might wish: for this fear forces the strong to be strong, under circumstances to be fearful—it upholds the well-turned type human. What is to be feared, what works disastrously like no other disaster, would not be the great fear, but the great nausea at man; likewise the great pity with man. Supposing that these two one day mated, then something of the most uncanny would inevitably come into the world at once: the “last will” of man, his will to nothing, nihilism. And indeed: much is prepared for this. Whoever has not only his nose for smelling but also his eyes and ears senses almost everywhere, wherever he steps today, something like madhouse air, like hospital air—I speak, as cheaply as anything, of the cultural areas of man, of every kind of “Europe” that there now is on earth. The morbid are man’s great danger: not the evil, not the “beasts of prey.” Those shipwrecked from the outset, the cast down, the broken—they are it, the weakest are it, who most undermine life among human beings, who most dangerously poison and put in question our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. Where could one escape that disastrous gaze, from which one carries away a deep sadness, that backward-turned gaze of the misborn from the beginning, which betrays how such a human being speaks to himself—that gaze which is a sigh. “If only I were somebody else!” so sighs this gaze: “but there is no hope. I am who I am: how should I get free of myself? And yet—I am sick of myself!”… On such soil of self-contempt, an actual swamp soil, grows every weed, every poisonous plant, and all so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so sweetishly. Here the worms of vengeful and grudgeful feelings swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and unavowables; here the net of the most malignant conspiracy is constantly spun—the conspiracy of the suffering against the well-turned and the victorious, here the aspect of the victorious is hated. And what mendacity, in order not to admit this hatred as hatred! What expenditure of great words and attitudes, what art of “honest” slander! These botched ones: what noble eloquence streams from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble submission swims in their eyes! What do they really want? To represent justice, love, wisdom, superiority at least—that is the ambition of these “lowest,” these sick! And how cleverly such an ambition works! One should admire especially the counterfeiters’ skill with which the stamp of virtue, even the ring, the gold ring of virtue, is imitated here. They have now taken virtue wholly into their monopoly, these weak and incurably sick, there is no doubt: “we alone are the good, the just,” so they speak, “we alone are the homines bonae voluntatis.” They walk about among us as accusations made flesh, as warnings to us—as though health, well-turnedness, strength, pride, feeling of power were in themselves vicious things for which one must one day atone, bitterly atone: oh how they are at bottom ready for that themselves, how they thirst to make atone, how they thirst to be executioners! Among them there is in abundance the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly carry the word “justice” in their mouths like a poisonous spittle, always with pursed mouth, always ready to spit at everything that does not look discontented and goes its road in good spirits. Among them there is also not lacking that most disgusting species of the vain, the mendacious misbirths who set out to represent “beautiful souls” and to bring their ruined sensuality, wrapped in verses and other swaddling clothes, to market as “purity of heart”: the species of moral onanists and “self-satisfiers.” The will of the sick to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for secret paths that lead to a tyranny over the healthy—where would it not be found, this will precisely of the weakest to power! The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements of ruling, oppressing, tyrannizing. The sick woman spares nothing living, nothing dead for that, she digs up the most buried things (the Bogos say: “woman is a hyena”). One should look into the backgrounds of every family, every corporation, every commonwealth: everywhere the war of the sick against the healthy—a silent war mostly with little poison powders, with needle pricks, with the malicious sufferer’s play of faces, but sometimes too with that sick Phariseeism of the loud gesture, which most likes to play “noble indignation.” It wants to make itself heard into the consecrated spaces of science itself, the hoarse indignant barking of the morbid dogs, the biting mendacity and rage of such “noble” Pharisees (—I remind readers who have ears once more of that Berlin apostle of revenge Eugen Dühring, who in today’s Germany makes the most indecent and repulsive use of the moral boom-boom: Dühring, the first moral bigmouth there now is, even among his own kind, the antisemites). They are all human beings of ressentiment, these physiologically shipwrecked and worm-eaten ones, a whole trembling subsoil of underground revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in outbursts against the happy, and equally in masquerades of revenge, in pretexts for revenge: when would they actually come to their last, finest, most sublime triumph of revenge? Without doubt when they succeeded in pushing their own misery, all misery in general, onto the conscience of the happy: so that these one day began to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps said among themselves: “It is a shame to be happy! there is too much misery!”… But there could be no greater and more disastrous misunderstanding than if the happy, the well-turned, the powerful in body and soul began in this way to doubt their right to happiness. Away with this “inverted world”! Away with this shameful softening of feeling! That the sick do not make the healthy sick—and this would be such a softening—that should be the supreme point of view on earth:—but for that it is above all necessary that the healthy remain separated from the sick, protected even from the sight of the sick, that they do not confuse themselves with the sick. Or would it be their task to be nurses or doctors?… But they could not misjudge and deny their task worse—the higher must not degrade itself to the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance should keep tasks apart for all eternity too! Their right to be there, the prerogative of the bell with full sound before the ill-sounding, cracked one, is a thousandfold greater: they alone are the guarantors of the future, they alone are obligated for the human future. What they can, what they should, that sick people should never be able and ought never be—: but for them to be able to do what only they ought, how would it still be free to them to make themselves the doctor, the bringer of comfort, the “savior” of the sick?… And therefore good air! good air! And away in any case from the vicinity of all madhouses and hospitals of culture! And therefore good company, our company! Or solitude, if it must be! But away in any case from the bad exhalations of inner corruption and the secret worm-eatenness of the sick!… So that we ourselves, namely, my friends, defend ourselves at least a while longer against the two worst epidemics that might be reserved precisely for us—against the great nausea at man! against the great pity with man!…

15 Has one grasped in all depth—and I demand that one reach deep here, grasp deep—in what way it simply cannot be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick, to make the sick healthy, then one has thereby grasped one necessity more—the necessity of doctors and nurses who are themselves sick: and now we have and hold the meaning of the ascetic priest with both hands. The ascetic priest must count to us as the predestined savior, shepherd and advocate of the sick herd: only thereby do we understand his monstrous historical mission. Dominion over sufferers is his kingdom, his instinct points him there, in it he has his most own art, his mastery, his kind of happiness. He must himself be sick, he must be related from the ground up to the sick and utterly ruined, in order to understand them, in order to understand himself with them; but he must also be strong, more master over himself than over others, uninjured especially in his will to power, so that he has the trust and the fear of the sick, so that he can be to them support, resistance, prop, compulsion, disciplinarian, tyrant, God. He has to defend them, his herd—against whom? Against the healthy, there is no doubt, also against the envy of the healthy; he must be the natural adversary and despiser of all crude, stormy, unrestrained, hard, violently beast-of-prey-like health and powerfulness. The priest is the first form of the more delicate animal, which more easily despises than hates. He will not be spared from waging war with the beasts of prey, a war of cunning (of “spirit”) more than of violence, as goes without saying—he will under circumstances need for that to breed out of himself almost a new beast-of-prey type, at least to mean it—a new animal-fearfulness in which the polar bear, the supple cold waiting tiger-cat and not least the fox seem bound into a unity as attractive as it is fear-inspiring. Supposing that need compels him, then he steps forth bear-like-serious, venerable, clever, cold, deceptively superior, as herald and mouthpiece of more mysterious powers, right among the other kind of beasts of prey itself, determined to sow suffering, discord, self-contradiction where he can on this soil, and, only too certain of his art, to become master over sufferers at any time. He brings salves and balsam, there is no doubt; but first he needs to wound, in order to be a doctor; while he then stills the pain that the wound makes, he at the same time poisons the wound—that is above all what he understands, this magician and beast-tamer, in whose vicinity everything healthy necessarily becomes sick and everything sick necessarily tame. He defends his sick herd well enough in fact, this strange shepherd—he defends it also against itself, against the meanness, malice, ill will glowing in the herd itself, and whatever else is proper to all addicts and sick among one another; he fights cleverly, hard and secretly with the anarchy and the self-dissolution that begins at any time within the herd, in which that most dangerous explosive, ressentiment, constantly piles itself up and up. To discharge this explosive in such a way that it does not blow apart the herd and not the shepherd, that is his actual trick, also his supreme usefulness; if one wanted to compress the value of the priestly existence into the shortest formula, one would have to say outright: the priest is the direction-changer of ressentiment. Every sufferer namely seeks instinctively a cause for his suffering; more exactly still, a doer; still more precisely, a guilty doer susceptible of suffering—in short, some living thing on which he can discharge his affects in deed, or in effigie on some pretext: for the discharge of affect is the greatest relief—namely anesthetizing—attempt of the sufferer, his involuntarily desired narcotic against torment of any kind. In this alone, in my conjecture, is the actual physiological causality of ressentiment, of revenge and their kin to be found, in a longing, then, for anesthetization of pain through affect:—one commonly seeks the same, very erroneously, as it seems to me, in the defensive counter-blow, a mere protective measure of reaction, a “reflex movement” in the case of some sudden damage and endangerment, of the kind that a frog without a head still performs in order to get rid of a corrosive acid. But the difference is fundamental: in the one case one wants to prevent further being-damaged, in the other one wants to anesthetize a tormenting, secret, becoming-unbearable pain through a more violent emotion of some kind and at least for the moment put it out of consciousness—for that one needs an affect, an affect as wild as possible, and, to excite it, the first pretext at hand. “Somebody must be to blame that I feel bad”—this way of concluding is proper to all the morbid, and indeed the more the true cause of their feeling bad, the physiological one, remains hidden from them (it can lie, say, in a disease of the nervus sympathicus or in an excessive secretion of bile, or in a poverty of the blood in sulphuric and phosphoric potash, or in pressure states of the lower abdomen that dam the circulation, or in degeneration of the ovaries and the like). The sufferers are all possessed of a dreadful readiness and inventiveness in pretexts for painful affects; they enjoy their suspicion already, the brooding over iniquities and apparent injuries, they root through the entrails of their past and present for dark questionable stories where it is free to them to wallow in a tormenting suspicion and to intoxicate themselves on the own poison of malice—they tear open the oldest wounds, they bleed to death on long-healed scars, they make malefactors out of friend, wife, child and whatever else is nearest to them. “I suffer: somebody must be to blame for it”—so thinks every morbid sheep. But its shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to it: “Right so, my sheep! somebody must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it—you yourself alone are to blame for yourself!”… That is bold enough, false enough; but one thing at least is achieved with it, with it, as said, the direction of ressentiment is—changed.

16 One now divines what, in my conception, the healing-artist instinct of life has at least attempted through the ascetic priest, and what a temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and paralogical concepts as “guilt,” “sin,” “sinfulness,” “corruption,” “damnation” had to serve him for: to make the sick harmless to a certain degree, to destroy the incurable through themselves, to give the mildly ill strictly a direction toward themselves, a backward direction of their ressentiment (“one thing is needful”—) and thus to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, self-overcoming. With a “medication” of this kind, a mere affect-medication, it cannot, as goes without saying, be a matter at all of an actual healing of the sick in the physiological sense; one could not even assert that the instinct of life here had healing in view and intention in any way. A kind of crowding together and organization of the sick on the one side (—the word “church” is the most popular name for it), a kind of provisional securing of the more healthily turned out, the more fully poured out, on the other, the tearing open of a chasm thus between healthy and sick—that was for long everything! And it was much! it was very much!…[In this treatise, as one sees, I proceed from a presupposition which I need not first establish with regard to readers as I need them: that “sinfulness” in man is not a fact, rather only the interpretation of a fact, namely of a physiological ill-humor—the latter seen under a moral-religious perspective, which has nothing binding for us any more.—By the fact that someone feels himself “guilty,” “sinful,” it is not yet proved at all that he feels so with right; just as little as someone is healthy merely because he feels healthy. Let one remember the famous witch trials: the most sharp-sighted and philanthropic judges did not doubt then that a guilt was present; the “witches” themselves did not doubt it—and yet the guilt was lacking.—To express that presupposition in expanded form: “mental pain” itself does not count to me as a fact at all, but only as an interpretation (causal interpretation) of facts not yet to be exactly formulated: thus as something that still floats completely in the air and is scientifically uncommitting—a fat word, properly, merely in place of an even spindle-thin question mark. If someone cannot cope with a “mental pain,” that does not, roughly speaking, depend on his “soul”; more probably still on his belly (roughly speaking, as said: with which by no means the wish is expressed to be heard, and understood, roughly too…). A strong and well-turned human being digests his experiences (deeds, misdeeds included) as he digests his meals, even when he has hard bites to swallow. If he cannot “cope” with an experience, this kind of indigestion is as good physiologically as the other—and often in fact only one of the consequences of that other.—With such a view one can, between ourselves, still always be the strictest opponent of all materialism…]

17 But is he actually a doctor, this ascetic priest?—We already understood in what way it is hardly permitted to call him a doctor, as gladly as he also feels himself “savior,” lets himself be revered as “savior.” Only the suffering itself, the displeasure of the sufferer, is fought by him, not its cause, not the actual being-sick—that must provide our most fundamental objection against the priestly medication. But if one first places oneself in the perspective as the priest alone knows and has it, then one does not easily come to an end in admiration for what he has seen, sought and found under it. The alleviation of suffering, the “consoling” of every kind—that proves to be his genius itself: how inventively has he understood his consoler-task, how unscrupulously and boldly has he chosen the means for it! Christianity especially one could call a great treasure chamber of the most ingenious means of consolation, so much refreshing, mitigating, narcotizing is heaped up in it, so much most dangerous and most reckless is dared for this purpose, so finely, so refinedly, so southern-refinedly has it been divined by it in particular with what stimulating affects the deep depression, the leaden fatigue, the black sadness of the physiologically inhibited can be conquered at least for a time. For generally speaking: in all great religions it was mainly a matter of fighting a certain fatigue and heaviness that had become an epidemic. One can set it from the outset as probable that from time to time at certain places on earth a feeling of physiological inhibition must almost necessarily become master over broad masses, which however, from lack of physiological knowledge, does not enter consciousness as such, so that its “cause,” its remedy too can only be sought and attempted psychologically-morally (—this namely is my most general formula for what is commonly called a “religion”). Such a feeling of inhibition can be of the most various descent: say as a consequence of the crossing of too alien races (or of classes—classes always express differences of descent and race too: the European “world-weariness,” the “pessimism” of the nineteenth century is essentially the consequence of an absurdly sudden class-mixture); or conditioned by a faulty emigration—a race landed in a climate for which its power of adaptation does not suffice (the case of the Indians in India); or the after-effect of age and fatigue of the race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 on); or of a false diet (alcoholism of the Middle Ages; the nonsense of the vegetarians, who indeed have the authority of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Shakespeare for themselves); or from blood corruption, malaria, syphilis and the like (German depression after the Thirty Years’ War, which infected half of Germany with bad diseases and thereby prepared the soil for German servility, German faint-heartedness). In such a case each time a struggle with the feeling of displeasure is attempted on the grandest scale; let us inform ourselves briefly about its most important practices and forms. (I leave aside quite, as cheaply as anything, the actual philosophers’ struggle against the feeling of displeasure, which always tends to be simultaneous—it is interesting enough, but too absurd, too practically indifferent, too cobweb-spinning and corner-loafer-ish, as when pain is to be proved an error, under the naive presupposition that pain must vanish once the error in it is recognized—but behold! it took care not to vanish…) One fights first that dominating displeasure through means which reduce the feeling of life generally to the lowest point. As far as possible no willing at all, no wish any more; avoiding everything that makes affect, that makes “blood” (eat no salt: hygiene of the fakir); not love; not hate; equanimity; not avenge oneself; not enrich oneself; not work; beg; as far as possible no woman, or as little woman as possible: in intellectual respect the principle of Pascal, “il faut s’abêtir.” Result, expressed psychologically-morally: “self-lessness,” “sanctification”; expressed physiologically: hypnotization—the attempt to attain approximately for man what winter sleep is for some animals, summer sleep for many plants of hot climates, a minimum of consumption of matter and metabolism, at which life just barely still exists, without actually entering consciousness any more. An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent on this goal—in vain, perhaps?…That such sportsmen of “holiness,” of whom all ages, almost all peoples are rich, have in fact found a real redemption from what they fought with so rigorous a training, of that one may by no means doubt—they really got rid of that deep physiological depression with the help of their system of hypnotizing means in countless cases: which is why their methodology counts among the most general ethnological facts. Likewise every permission is lacking to count such an intention of starving out corporeality and desire among the symptoms of insanity in itself (as a clumsy kind of roast-beef-eating “free spirits” and other Sir Andrew Aguecheeks like to do). So much the surer is it that it gives, can give, the way to all sorts of mental disorders, to “inner lights” for example, as with the Hesychasts of Mount Athos, to hallucinations of sound and figure, to voluptuous overflowings and ecstasies of sensuality (history of Saint Teresa). The interpretation which is given to such states by those afflicted with them has always been as enthusiast-false as possible, this goes without saying: only one should not overhear the tone of most convinced gratitude which already sounds forth in the will to such a kind of interpretation. The highest state, redemption itself, that finally attained total hypnotization and stillness, always counts to them as the mystery in itself, for whose expression even the highest symbols do not suffice, as a going-in and homecoming into the ground of things, as becoming free of all delusion, as “knowledge,” as “truth,” as “being,” as getting loose from every goal, every wish, every doing, as a beyond also of good and evil. “Good and evil,” says the Buddhist, “both are fetters: over both the perfected one became master”; “done and undone,” says the believer of Vedanta, “cause him no pain; the good and the evil he shakes off as a wise man; his kingdom suffers from no deed any more; over good and evil, over both he has gone out”:—a wholly Indian conception, then, as Brahmanist as Buddhist. (Neither in the Indian nor in the Christian way of thinking does that “redemption” count as attainable through virtue, through moral improvement, however high the hypnotizing value of virtue is also assessed by them: hold fast to this—it corresponds, besides, simply to the fact. To have remained true here may perhaps be regarded as the best piece of realism in the three greatest, otherwise so thoroughly moralized religions. “For the knowing one there is no duty”… “Through adding virtues redemption does not come about: for it consists in being one with Brahman, which is capable of no addition of perfection; and just as little in the laying off of faults: for Brahman, being one with which is what constitutes redemption, is eternally pure”—these passages from the commentary of Çankara, cited by the first actual connoisseur of Indian philosophy in Europe, my friend Paul Deussen.) We will thus hold “redemption” in the great religions in honor; on the other hand it becomes a little hard for us to remain serious at the estimation which even deep sleep receives from these life-weary ones grown too tired even for dreaming—deep sleep namely already as entering into Brahman, as attained unio mystica with God. “When he has then fallen asleep quite and altogether—so it says in the oldest most venerable ‘scripture’—and has come entirely to rest, so that he no longer beholds any dream-image, then he, O dear one, is united with the existent, has entered into himself—embraced by the cognition-like self he has no more consciousness of what is outside or inside. This bridge day and night do not cross, nor age, nor death, nor suffering, nor good work, nor evil work.” “In deep sleep,” say likewise the believers of this deepest of the three great religions, “the soul lifts itself out of this body, goes into the highest light and therewith steps forth in its own form: there it is the highest spirit itself, which walks about, jesting and playing and delighting itself, be it with women or with chariots or with friends, there it no longer thinks back to this appendage of the body, to which the prâna (the breath of life) is harnessed like a draft animal to the cart.” Nevertheless we want also here, as in the case of “redemption,” to keep present to ourselves that thereby at bottom, however much in the splendor of oriental exaggeration, only the same estimation is expressed which was that of the clear, cool, Greek-cool, but suffering Epicurus: the hypnotic feeling of nothing, the rest of the deepest sleep, painlessness in short—that may count to sufferers and thoroughly ill-humored ones as the highest good, as value of values, that must be assessed by them as positive, be felt as the positive itself. (By the same logic of feeling, in all pessimistic religions nothing is called God.)

18 Much more frequently than such a hypnotic total damping of sensibility, of the capacity for pain, which already presupposes rarer forces, above all courage, contempt for opinion, “intellectual stoicism,” another training is attempted against states of depression, one that is in any case easier: mechanical activity. That a suffering existence is eased to no inconsiderable degree by it stands beyond all doubt: today this fact is called, somewhat dishonestly, “the blessing of work.” The easing consists in this, that the interest of the sufferer is fundamentally diverted from the suffering—that constantly a doing and again only a doing enters consciousness and consequently little room remains there for suffering: for it is narrow, this chamber of human consciousness! Mechanical activity and what belongs to it—like absolute regularity, punctual thoughtless obedience, the once-and-for-all of the way of life, the filling up of time, a certain permission, indeed a discipline to “impersonality,” to self-forgetting, to “incuria sui”—:how thoroughly, how finely has the ascetic priest known how to use it in the fight with pain! Precisely when he had to do with sufferers of the lower classes, with work-slaves or prisoners (or with women: who indeed are mostly both at once, work-slaves and prisoners), little more was needed than a small art of name-changing and rebaptizing to make them see a benefaction, a relative happiness, in hated things henceforth:—the slave’s discontent with his lot was in any case not invented by the priests.—An even more esteemed means in the fight with depression is the ordaining of a small joy, which is easily accessible and can be made the rule; one makes use of this medication often in connection with the one just discussed. The most frequent form in which joy is thus ordained as a cure is the joy of joy-making (as benefiting, giving, easing, helping, encouraging, consoling, praising, distinguishing); the ascetic priest ordains it in that he ordains “love of neighbor,” at bottom an excitation of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, though in the most cautious dosage—of the will to power. The happiness of the “smallest superiority,” as all benefiting, useful, helping, distinguishing brings with it, is the most abundant means of consolation which the physiologically inhibited tend to make use of, supposing that they are well advised: in the other case they hurt one another, naturally in obedience to the same fundamental instinct. If one looks for the beginnings of Christianity in the Roman world, one finds associations for mutual support, poor-, sick-, burial-associations, grown up on the lowest soil of the society of that time, in which with consciousness that chief means against depression, the small joy, that of mutual benefiting, was cultivated—perhaps this was something new then, an actual discovery? In a “will to reciprocity,” to herd-formation, to “community,” to “conventicle” thus evoked, that will to power excited thereby, even if in the smallest, must now again come to a new and much fuller outbreak: herd-formation is in the fight with depression an essential step and victory. In the growth of the community a new interest also strengthens for the individual, which often enough lifts him over the most personal element of his ill humor, his aversion to himself (the “despectio sui” of Geulincx). All the sick, the morbid, strive instinctively, from a longing to shake off the dull displeasure and the feeling of weakness, after a herd-organization: the ascetic priest divines this instinct and promotes it; where there are herds, it is the weakness-instinct that has willed the herd, and the priestly cleverness that has organized it. For one should not overlook this: the strong strive just as naturally apart from one another as the weak toward one another; if the former unite, it happens only in the prospect of an aggressive total action and total satisfaction of their will to power, with much resistance of the individual conscience; the latter on the other hand arrange themselves together, with pleasure precisely in this arrangement together—their instinct is satisfied by it, just as the instinct of the born “masters” (that is, of the solitary beast-of-prey species man) is at bottom irritated and disquieted by organization. Under every oligarchy there lies—all history teaches it—always the tyrannical craving hidden; every oligarchy trembles constantly from the tension which every individual in it needs in order to remain master over this craving. (So it was Greek, for example: Plato testifies to it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his own kind—and himself…)

19 The ascetic priest’s remedies we have come to know so far—the general deadening of the feeling of life, mechanical activity, the little pleasure, above all that of “love of one’s neighbor,” the organization of the herd, the awakening of the community’s feeling of power, through which the individual’s discontent with himself is drowned out by his pleasure in the community’s flourishing—these, measured by modern standards, are his innocent remedies in the struggle against displeasure: let us turn now to the more interesting, the “guilty” ones. All of them come down to one thing: some excess of feeling—used against the dull, paralyzing, protracted ache as the most effective means of anesthesia; which is why the priest’s ingenuity has been positively inexhaustible in pondering this one question: “How can an excess of feeling be produced?”… That sounds harsh: plainly, it would sound sweeter and perhaps fall more pleasantly on the ear if I said something like “the ascetic priest has always exploited the inspiration inherent in all strong emotions.” But why go on stroking the pampered ears of our modern tenderlings? Why should we yield even an inch to their Tartuffe-like hypocrisy in words? For us psychologists, that would already be Tartuffe-like hypocrisy in deed, quite apart from the disgust it would cause us. For if a psychologist today shows his good taste in anything—others may say: his integrity—it is in resisting the shamefully moralized manner of speech whose slime has gradually coated every modern judgment of people and things. Let there be no mistake about this: what most characterizes modern souls, modern books, is not lying but an ingrained innocence in moralistic dishonesty. Having to discover this “innocence” everywhere anew—that is perhaps the most repulsive part of all the work, far from harmless in itself, that a psychologist must undertake today; it is part of our great danger—it is a path that may lead precisely us to the great disgust… I have no doubt about the only use modern books would or could have for posterity—assuming they last, which admittedly is nothing to fear, and assuming as well that there is someday a posterity with a stricter, harder, healthier taste—or about the use of everything modern for that posterity: as emetics—and this by virtue of its moral sugariness and falseness, its innermost effeminacy, which likes to call itself “idealism” and in any case believes itself to be idealism. Our cultivated people today, our “good people,” do not lie—that is true; but it does not do them credit! A real lie, a genuine, resolute, “honest” lie—on whose value one should hear Plato—would be something far too stern, too strong for them; it would demand what one must not demand of them: that they open their eyes to themselves, that they know how to distinguish “true” from “false” within themselves. Only the dishonest lie befits them; everything that feels itself a “good person” today is utterly incapable of taking any stand on anything except one that is dishonestly mendacious, abysmally mendacious, but innocently mendacious, trustingly mendacious, wide-eyedly mendacious, virtuously mendacious. These “good people”—they are now all moralized to the core, and as regards honesty, disgraced and mangled for all eternity: which of them could still bear a truth “about humanity”!… Or, to put the question more tangibly: which of them could endure a truthful biography!… A few indications: Lord Byron recorded some of the most personal things about himself, but Thomas Moore was “too good” for them: he burned his friend’s papers. Dr. Gwinner, Schopenhauer’s executor, is said to have done the same: for Schopenhauer too had recorded certain things about himself and perhaps also against himself (“to himself”). The capable American Thayer, Beethoven’s biographer, suddenly stopped work: having reached some point in this venerable and naive life, he could no longer bear it… Moral: what intelligent man today would still write an honest word about himself?—unless, of course, he belonged to the order of holy recklessness. We are promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner: who doubts that it will be a prudent autobiography?… Let us also recall the comical horror that the Catholic priest Janssen aroused in Germany with his inconceivably blockish and harmless picture of the German Reformation movement; what would people do if someone were to tell us the story of this movement differently for once, if a real psychologist were to tell us about a real Luther, no longer with the moralistic simplemindedness of a country parson, no longer with the sugary and considerate modesty of Protestant historians, but with something like Taine’s fearlessness, out of a strength of soul rather than a prudent indulgence toward strength?… (The Germans, incidentally, have lately produced a fine enough classical type of the latter—they may certainly claim him to their account, to their credit: namely, their Leopold Ranke, that born and classical advocate of every stronger cause, that most prudent of all prudent “men of fact.”)

20 But I will already have been understood:—reason enough, is there not, all things considered, why we psychologists today cannot shake off a certain mistrust of ourselves?… Probably we too are still “too good” for our trade; probably we too are still the victims, the prey, the sick of this moralized taste of the age, however much we feel ourselves to despise it—probably it still infects us as well. What was it that diplomat warned against when speaking to his peers? “Let us mistrust above all, gentlemen, our first impulses!” he said. “They are almost always good”… That is how every psychologist today should speak to his peers… And this brings us back to our problem, which does indeed require a certain sternness of us, a certain mistrust, especially of “first impulses.” The ascetic ideal serving the purpose of emotional excess:—anyone who remembers the preceding essay will already anticipate the essentials of what is now to be presented, whose substance is compressed into those nine words. To wrench the human soul out of all its joints for once, to plunge it into terrors, frosts, fires, and raptures in such a way that, as though struck by lightning, it breaks free of everything small and petty in displeasure, dullness, and dejection: what paths lead to this goal? And which of them most surely?… Fundamentally, all the great emotions have the power to do this, provided they discharge themselves suddenly: anger, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and the ascetic priest has in fact enlisted the whole pack of wild dogs in the human being without hesitation, unleashing now this one, now that one, always for the same purpose: to rouse people from their slow sadness, to put their dull pain, their lingering misery to flight, for a time at least, and always under a religious interpretation and “justification.” Every such excess of feeling exacts its payment afterward, that goes without saying—it makes the sick sicker—and that is why this kind of remedy for pain, measured by modern standards, is a “guilty” one. Fairness requires us, however, to insist all the more that it was employed with a good conscience, that the ascetic priest prescribed it with the deepest faith in its usefulness, indeed its indispensability—and often enough almost broke under the misery he created himself; likewise, that the violent physiological reprisals of such excesses, perhaps even mental disturbances, do not, at bottom, really contradict the whole purpose of this kind of medication: which, as was shown earlier, sought not to cure diseases but to combat the displeasure of depression, to relieve it, to anesthetize it. This goal was achieved this way too. The principal device the ascetic priest permitted himself in order to make every kind of agonizing and ecstatic music resound upon the human soul was accomplished—everyone knows this—by exploiting the feeling of guilt. The preceding essay briefly indicated its origin—as a piece of animal psychology, nothing more: there we encountered the feeling of guilt in what might be called its raw state. Only in the hands of the priest, that true artist in feelings of guilt, has it taken shape—oh, what a shape! “Sin”—for that is the priestly reinterpretation of the animal “bad conscience” (cruelty turned back upon itself)—has so far been the greatest event in the history of the sick soul: in it we have the most dangerous and fateful feat of religious interpretation. Suffering from himself in some way, in any case physiologically, perhaps like an animal locked in a cage, unclear why, to what end, hungry for reasons—reasons bring relief—hungry too for remedies and narcotics, the human being at last consults someone who knows even what is hidden—and behold! He receives a hint, he receives from his magician, the ascetic priest, the first hint about the “cause” of his suffering: he is to seek it within himself, in some guilt, in a piece of the past; he is to understand his suffering itself as a state of punishment… The unfortunate man has heard, has understood: now he is like a hen with a line drawn around it. He cannot get out of this circle of lines again: the sick man has been made into “the sinner”… And now, for a few millennia, one cannot escape the sight of this new sick man, “the sinner”—will one ever escape it again?—wherever one looks, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of the sinner, always moving in a single direction (toward “guilt” as the only cause of suffering); everywhere the evil conscience, that “gruesome beast,” to speak with Luther; everywhere the past chewed over, the deed distorted, the “green eye” for everything done; everywhere the will to misunderstand suffering made into the substance of life, its reinterpretation as feelings of guilt, fear, and punishment; everywhere the scourge, the hair shirt, the starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the wheel of a restless, morbidly lustful conscience and its cruel machinery; everywhere the mute torment, the utmost fear, the agony of the martyred heart, the convulsions of an unknown happiness, the cry for “redemption.” In fact, with this system of procedures the old depression, heaviness, and weariness had been thoroughly overcome, life became very interesting again: awake, eternally awake, sleepless, glowing, charred, exhausted and yet not tired—such was the appearance of the human being, “the sinner,” initiated into these mysteries. That great old magician in the struggle against displeasure, the ascetic priest—he had plainly triumphed, his kingdom had come: people no longer complained against pain, they thirsted for pain; “More pain! More pain!”—so the craving of his disciples and initiates cried out for centuries. Every excess of feeling that hurt, everything that broke, overthrew, crushed, transported, enraptured, the secret of the torture chambers, the ingenuity of hell itself—everything had now been discovered, divined, exploited, everything stood at the magician’s service, everything henceforth served the triumph of his ideal, the ascetic ideal… “My kingdom is not of this world”—he went on saying as before: did he really still have the right to speak that way?… Goethe claimed there were only thirty-six tragic situations: one can infer from this, if one did not already know it, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. The priest—knows more…

21 As regards this entire kind of priestly medication, the “guilty” kind, every word of criticism is one too many. That such an excess of feeling as the ascetic priest habitually prescribes for his sick in this case—under the holiest names, of course, and likewise imbued with the holiness of his purpose—has ever really benefited any sick person: who would care to uphold a claim of that kind? At the very least, we should agree on the word “benefit.” If it is meant to say that such a system of treatment has improved the human being, I do not object: except that I add what “improved” means to me—as much as “tamed,” “weakened,” “discouraged,” “refined,” “pampered,” “emasculated” (thus almost as much as harmed…). But where the people in question are chiefly sick, dejected, depressed, such a system makes the sick person sicker under all circumstances, even supposing it made him “better”; one need only ask psychiatrists what a systematic application of penitential torments, contrition, and convulsions of redemption invariably brings in its wake. Likewise, consult history: wherever the ascetic priest has imposed this treatment of the sick, sickness has spread in depth and breadth with uncanny speed every time. What was always the “result”? A shattered nervous system on top of whatever was already diseased; and this on the largest scale as on the smallest, in individuals as in masses. In the wake of training in penance and redemption we find enormous epileptic epidemics, the greatest known to history, such as those of the dancers of St. Vitus and St. John in the Middle Ages; as another form of its aftermath, we find terrible paralyses and lasting depressions, which can sometimes turn the temperament of a people or a city (Geneva, Basel) into its opposite once and for all;—witchcraft hysteria, something akin to sleepwalking, belongs here too (eight major epidemic outbreaks of it between 1564 and 1605 alone)—; in its wake we likewise find those death-hungry mass deliriums whose terrible cry, “Long live death,” was heard across all Europe, interrupted now by lustful, now by destructively frenzied idiosyncrasies: just as the same alternation of emotions, with the same intervals and abrupt reversals, is still observed everywhere today, whenever the ascetic doctrine of sin once again achieves a great success (religious neurosis appears as a form of the “falling sickness”: of that there is no doubt. What it is? That remains the question). On the whole, the ascetic ideal and its sublimely moral cult, this most ingenious, most unscrupulous, and most dangerous systematization of all the means of producing excesses of feeling under the protection of holy intentions, has inscribed itself upon the entire history of humanity in a terrible and unforgettable way; and unfortunately not only upon its history… I can scarcely name anything else that has done such destructive damage to health and racial vigor, particularly among Europeans, as this ideal; without any exaggeration, it may be called the true calamity in the history of human health in Europe. At most, the specifically Germanic influence might be placed alongside it: I mean the alcohol poisoning of Europe, which has so far kept strict pace with the political and racial predominance of the Germanic peoples—wherever they inoculated people with their blood, they inoculated them with their vice as well.—Third in the sequence would come syphilis—next, but a great distance behind.

22 The ascetic priest has ruined the health of the soul wherever he has so much as gained dominion; consequently he has also ruined taste in the arts and letters—and he is still ruining it. “Consequently”?—I hope I may simply be granted this consequence; at the very least, I do not intend to prove it first. A single indication: it concerns the foundational book of Christian literature, its true model, its “book in itself.” Still in the midst of Greco-Roman splendor, which was also a splendor of books, in the presence of an ancient world of writings not yet stunted and shattered, at a time when people could still read certain books for whose possession we would now trade away half of entire literatures, the simplemindedness and vanity of Christian agitators—they are called Church Fathers—already dared to decree: “We too have our classical literature; we have no need of the Greeks’”—and as they did so, they pointed proudly to books of legends, apostolic letters, and little apologetic tracts, much as the English “Salvation Army” today wages its war against Shakespeare and other “heathens” with a kindred literature. I do not love the “New Testament,” as will already have been guessed; it almost unsettles me to stand so alone in my taste regarding this most esteemed, most overesteemed piece of writing (the taste of two millennia is against me): but what of it! “Here I stand, I can do no other”—I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament—yes, that is something altogether different: all respect to the Old Testament! In it I find great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something among the rarest things on earth, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart; more still, I find a people. In the New, by contrast, nothing but petty sectarian doings, nothing but rococo of the soul, nothing but curlicues, odd corners, eccentricities, nothing but the air of the conventicle, not forgetting an occasional breath of bucolic sweetness that belongs to the period (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic. Humility and self-importance cheek by jowl; a garrulousness of feeling that almost stupefies; impassionedness, no passion; an embarrassing display of gestures; plainly, all good breeding was lacking here. How can anyone make so much of his little failings as these pious little men do! Not a rooster crows over them, let alone God. In the end they even want “the crown of eternal life,” all these little people from the provinces: what for? in return for what? Immodesty cannot go any further. An “immortal” Peter: who could bear him! They have an ambition that makes one laugh: they chew over their most personal affairs, their stupidities, sorrows, and street-loafer worries, as though the in-itself of things were obliged to concern itself with them; they never tire of entangling God himself in the smallest misery they happen to be stuck in. And this constant first-name familiarity with God, in the worst of taste! This Jewish, and not merely Jewish, importunity toward God, with snout and paw!… There are small, despised “heathen peoples” in eastern Asia from whom these first Christians could have learned something essential, a little tact in reverence; as Christian missionaries attest, they do not permit themselves even to take the name of their god into their mouths. This strikes me as sufficiently delicate; what is certain is that it is too delicate not only for “first” Christians: to feel the contrast, one need only recall Luther, that “most eloquent” and most immodest peasant Germany has ever had, and the Lutheran tone he liked best in his own dialogues with God. Luther’s resistance to the Church’s mediating saints (especially to “the devil’s sow, the pope”) was, there can be no doubt, at bottom the resistance of a boor irritated by the Church’s good etiquette, that etiquette of reverence belonging to hieratic taste, which admits only the more consecrated and more silent into the holy of holies and shuts it against boors. Here, of all places, they are once and for all to have no say—but Luther the peasant absolutely wanted it otherwise; this was not German enough for him: above all, he wanted to speak directly, to speak himself, to speak “without embarrassment” to his God… Well, he did.—The ascetic ideal, as will readily be guessed, was never and nowhere a school of good taste, still less of good manners—at best it was a school of hieratic manners—: the reason is that it has something in its own body that is the mortal enemy of all good manners—a lack of measure, an aversion to measure; it is itself an “ultimate extreme.”

23 The ascetic ideal has ruined not only health and taste; it has ruined a third, fourth, fifth, sixth thing as well—I shall take care not to say everything it has ruined (when would I ever finish!). It is not what this ideal has done that I intend to bring to light here, but solely what it means, what it allows us to infer, what lies concealed behind it, beneath it, within it, what it provisionally and indistinctly expresses, laden with question marks and misunderstandings. And only with this end in view could I not spare my readers a glimpse of the enormity of its effects, its disastrous effects as well: namely, to prepare them for the final and most terrible aspect that the question of this ideal’s meaning has for me. What does the power of this ideal mean, the enormity of its power? Why has so much room been given to it? Why has it not been resisted more effectively? The ascetic ideal expresses a will: where is the opposing will in which an opposing ideal might find expression? The ascetic ideal has a goal—one broad enough that all the other interests of human existence seem petty and narrow when measured against it; it relentlessly interprets ages, peoples, human beings in terms of this one goal, permits no other interpretation, no other goal to count, rejects, denies, affirms, confirms only in the sense of its interpretation—and has there ever been a more thoroughly thought-out system of interpretation? It submits to no power; rather, it believes in its precedence over every power, in its absolute distance of rank from every power—it believes that there is no power on earth that does not first have to receive from it a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as a tool for its work, as a path and means to its goal, to one goal… Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? Why is the counterpart missing?… Where is the other “one goal”?… But I am told it is not missing, that it has not only waged a long and successful struggle against that ideal but has already mastered it in all essential matters: our whole modern science bears witness to this—that modern science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, plainly believes in itself alone, plainly possesses the courage to be itself, the will to be itself, and has so far managed well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial. Yet such noise and agitators’ chatter achieve nothing with me: these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices quite audibly do not come from the depths, the abyss of scientific conscience does not speak through them—for scientific conscience today is an abyss—the word “science” in such trumpeters’ mouths is simply an obscenity, an abuse, a shamelessness. Precisely the opposite of what is claimed here is the truth: science today has absolutely no faith in itself, let alone an ideal above itself—and wherever it is still passion, love, ardor, suffering at all, it is not the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its latest and noblest form itself. Does that sound strange too?… There are, of course, plenty of decent and modest working people among today’s scholars, people who like their little corner and who, because they like it there, occasionally become a little immodest in loudly demanding that people ought to be content today, particularly in science—there is just so much useful work to be done there. I do not object; the last thing I would want is to spoil these honest workers’ pleasure in their craft: for I take pleasure in their work. But the fact that rigorous work is being done in science now, and that there are contented workers, by no means proves that science as a whole today has a goal, a will, an ideal, a passion born of a great faith. The opposite, as I said, is the case: wherever science is not the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal—the cases in question are too rare, noble, and select to overturn the general judgment—it is today a hiding place for every kind of discontent, unbelief, gnawing worm, self-contempt, bad conscience—it is the very unrest of being without ideals, the suffering from a lack of great love, the dissatisfaction with an involuntary contentment. Oh, what does science not conceal today! How much, at least, is it supposed to conceal! The ability of our best scholars, their mindless industry, their heads smoking day and night, their very mastery of their craft—how often does all this have its real meaning in keeping something from becoming visible to themselves any longer! Science as a means of self-anesthesia: do you know that?… Anyone who deals with scholars learns this: sometimes a harmless word wounds them to the bone; one embitters one’s scholarly friends against oneself at the very moment one thinks one is honoring them, drives them out of all bounds merely because one was too coarse to guess whom one was really dealing with—with sufferers who will not admit to themselves what they are, with anesthetized and stupefied people who fear only one thing: coming to consciousness…

24 —And now consider, by contrast, those rarer cases I spoke of, the last idealists to be found among philosophers and scholars today: might we have in them the opponents of the ascetic ideal we are looking for, its counter-idealists? They do indeed believe themselves to be such, these “unbelievers”—for that is what they all are; being opponents of this ideal seems to be their last remaining article of faith, so earnest are they on this point, so passionate do their words and gestures become precisely here:—but need what they believe therefore be true?… We “knowers” have gradually grown suspicious of every kind of believer; our suspicion has gradually trained us to draw the opposite inference to the one formerly drawn: namely, wherever the strength of a belief thrusts itself conspicuously into the foreground, to infer a certain weakness in its demonstrability, even the improbability of what is believed. Nor do we deny that faith “brings blessedness”: precisely for that reason we deny that faith proves anything—a strong faith that brings blessedness casts suspicion on what it believes in; it establishes not “truth” but a certain probability—of deception. How do things stand in the present case?—These deniers and outsiders of today, these people unconditional in one thing, their demand for intellectual cleanliness, these hard, stern, abstinent, heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age, all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these skeptics, ephectics who withhold judgment, hectics of the spirit (consumptives, as they all are in some sense), these last idealists of knowledge in whom alone intellectual conscience dwells and has become flesh today—they do indeed believe themselves as free as possible of the ascetic ideal, these “free, very free spirits”: and yet, let me tell them what they cannot see for themselves—for they stand too close to themselves—this ideal is precisely their ideal too, they themselves embody it today, and perhaps no one else; they themselves are its most spiritualized offspring, its most advanced troop of warriors and scouts, its most insidious, delicate, elusive form of seduction:—if I am a solver of riddles in anything, let it be in this assertion. They are still a long way from being free spirits: for they still believe in truth… When the Christian Crusaders in the East encountered that invincible order of Assassins, that order of free spirits above all others, whose lowest ranks lived in an obedience no monastic order has ever matched, they somehow also received a hint of that symbol and watchword reserved for the highest ranks alone as their secret: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”… Well, that was freedom of spirit; with that, belief in truth itself was renounced… Has any European, any Christian free spirit ever yet lost his way in this proposition and its labyrinthine implications? Does he know the Minotaur of this cavern from experience?… I doubt it; more than that, I know otherwise:—nothing is more foreign to these people who are unconditional in one thing, these so-called “free spirits,” than freedom and the casting off of fetters in that sense; in no respect are they more firmly bound, precisely in their belief in truth they are firm and unconditional as no one else is. Perhaps I know all this from too close at hand: that venerable philosophical abstinence to which such a faith commits one, that stoicism of the intellect which finally forbids itself to say No as strictly as Yes, that will to stop before the factual, the brute fact, that fatalism of “little facts” (that little factalism, as I call it), in which French science now seeks a kind of moral superiority over German science, that renunciation of interpretation altogether (of violating, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else belongs to the essence of all interpretation)—taken as a whole, this expresses an asceticism of virtue every bit as much as any denial of sensuality does (at bottom it is only a mode of that denial). But what compels it, that unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as its unconscious imperative; let there be no mistake about this—it is faith in a metaphysical value, a value intrinsic to truth, such as is guaranteed and certified in that ideal alone (it stands and falls with that ideal). Strictly speaking, there is no science “without presuppositions”; the thought of such a thing cannot be thought through, is logically fallacious: a philosophy, a “faith,” must always be there first, so that science may draw from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist. (Anyone who understands it the other way around, anyone who sets out, for example, to place philosophy “on a strictly scientific foundation,” must first stand not only philosophy but truth itself on their heads: the worst breach of propriety imaginable toward two such venerable ladies!) Yes, there is no doubt—and here I let my “Gay Science” speak; see its fifth book, p. 263—“the truthful person, in that audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by faith in science, thereby affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this ‘other world,’ what? Must he not thereby deny its counterpart, this world, our world?… It is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—even we knowers of today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, even we still take our fire from the blaze kindled by a faith thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine… But what if precisely this becomes more and more unbelievable, if nothing proves to be divine any longer except error, blindness, the lie—if God himself proves to be our longest lie?”——At this point we need to stop and reflect at length. Science itself now needs a justification—which is not even to say that there is one for it. Consider the oldest and the newest philosophies with this question in mind: in all of them an awareness is missing of how far the will to truth itself first needs a justification; here there is a gap in every philosophy—where does it come from? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been master over all philosophy, because truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest authority itself, because truth was not permitted to be a problem at all. Is this “permitted” understood?—From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is also a new problem: that of the value of truth.—The will to truth needs a critique—let us define our own task in these terms—the value of truth must, for once, be experimentally called into question… (Anyone who finds this too briefly stated is advised to reread the section of “The Gay Science” titled “To What Extent We Too Are Still Pious,” pp. 260 ff., preferably the entire fifth book of that work, and likewise the preface to “Dawn.”)

25 No! Do not come to me with science when I am looking for the natural antagonist of the ascetic ideal, when I ask: “Where is the opposing will in which its opposing ideal finds expression?” Science stands far too little on its own feet for that; in every respect it first needs an ideal of value, a value-creating power, in whose service it is permitted to believe in itself—it is never itself value-creating. Its relationship to the ascetic ideal is in itself by no means antagonistic; indeed, for the most part it represents rather the driving force in that ideal’s inner development. Examined more closely, its opposition and struggle do not concern the ideal itself at all, but only its outworks, its clothing, its masquerade, its temporary hardening, ossification, dogmatization—it frees the life in it again by denying what is exoteric in it. These two, science and the ascetic ideal, do indeed stand on the same ground—I have already suggested this—namely, on the same overestimation of truth (more precisely: on the same faith that truth cannot be valued, cannot be criticized); precisely in this they are necessarily allies—so that, if they are opposed, they can only ever be opposed and called into question together. An appraisal of the value of the ascetic ideal inevitably brings with it an appraisal of the value of science: sharpen your eyes and prick up your ears for this in good time! (Art, to say it in advance, for I shall return to this at length sometime—art, in which precisely the lie sanctifies itself, in which the will to deceive has a good conscience on its side, is far more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than science is: so Plato’s instinct felt, the instinct of the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato against Homer: that is the whole, the genuine antagonism—on one side the most well-intentioned “man of the beyond,” the great slanderer of life, on the other its involuntary deifier, the golden nature. An artist’s servitude in the service of the ascetic ideal is therefore the truest artist’s corruption there can be, unfortunately one of the very commonest: for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Even reckoned physiologically, science rests on the same ground as the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the prerequisite here as there—the emotions grown cool, the tempo slowed, dialectic in place of instinct, seriousness stamped on faces and gestures (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of a more laborious metabolism, of struggling, harder-working life). Look at the periods in a people’s history when the scholar comes to the fore: they are periods of exhaustion, often of evening, of decline—overflowing strength, certainty of life, certainty of the future are gone. The predominance of the mandarin never means anything good: any more than the rise of democracy, of peace tribunals in place of wars, of equal rights for women, of the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms there are of declining life. (Science conceived as a problem; what does science mean?—on this, see the preface to “The Birth of Tragedy.”)—No! This “modern science”—just open your eyes to it!—is for now the best ally of the ascetic ideal, precisely because it is the most unconscious, most involuntary, most concealed and subterranean one! They have so far played the same game, the “poor in spirit” and the scientific adversaries of that ideal (one should take care, incidentally, not to think they are their opposite, perhaps as the rich in spirit:—they are not; I called them hectics, consumptives of the spirit). These famous victories of the latter: unquestionably, they are victories—but over what? The ascetic ideal was by no means defeated in them; rather, it was made stronger, that is, more elusive, more spiritual, more insidious, as science repeatedly and mercilessly stripped away and demolished a wall, an outwork that had been built onto it and coarsened its appearance. Does anyone really think, for example, that the defeat of theological astronomy means the defeat of that ideal?… Has the human being perhaps become less in need of an otherworldly solution to the riddle of his existence because that existence has since come to look still more arbitrary, more like a street-corner idler, more dispensable in the visible order of things? Has not precisely humanity’s self-belittlement, its will to self-belittlement, progressed unstoppably since Copernicus? Alas, the faith in its dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceability in the hierarchy of beings is gone—it has become animal, animal without metaphor, qualification, or reservation, humanity, which in its earlier faith was almost God (“child of God,” “God-man”)… Since Copernicus the human being seems to have gotten onto a sloping plane—he now rolls faster and faster away from the center—where to? Into nothingness? Into the “piercing feeling of his nothingness”?… Well! Would this not be the straight road—into the old ideal?… All science (and by no means only astronomy, about whose humiliating and debasing effect Kant made the remarkable admission, “it annihilates my importance”…) all science, natural as well as unnatural—that is what I call the self-critique of knowledge—is today bent on talking humanity out of its former respect for itself, as though that respect had been nothing but a bizarre conceit; one might even say that it takes its own pride, its own austere form of stoic imperturbability, in sustaining this laboriously won human self-contempt as humanity’s last and most serious claim to self-respect (rightly so, in fact: for the despiser is still someone who “has not unlearned respect”…). Does this really work against the ascetic ideal? Does anyone still seriously believe (as the theologians imagined for a time) that Kant’s victory over the dogmatism of theological concepts (“God,” “soul,” “freedom,” “immortality”) has harmed that ideal?—for now it need not concern us whether Kant himself ever so much as intended anything of the kind. What is certain is that all kinds of transcendentalists have once again been playing a winning game since Kant—they are emancipated from the theologians: what good fortune!—he revealed to them that secret path along which they may now pursue the “wishes of their hearts” on their own initiative and with the very best scientific decorum. Likewise: who could now hold it against the agnostics if, as worshippers of the unknown and mysterious in itself, they now worship the question mark itself as God? (Xaver Doudan speaks somewhere of the havoc wrought by “the habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of simply remaining in the unknown”; he thinks the ancients did without it.) Supposing everything humanity “knows” fails to satisfy its wishes, indeed contradicts those wishes and makes humanity shudder: what a divine escape, to be allowed to seek the fault not in “wishing” but in “knowing”!… “There is no knowledge: consequently—there is a God”: what a new elegance of syllogism! What a triumph of the ascetic ideal!—

26 —Or has the whole of modern historiography perhaps shown a stance more certain of life, more certain of its ideal? Its noblest ambition now is to be a mirror; it rejects all teleology; it no longer wants to “prove” anything; it disdains playing the judge, and in this shows its good taste—it affirms as little as it denies, it establishes facts, it “describes”… All this is ascetic to a high degree; but at the same time, to a still higher degree, it is nihilistic, let there be no mistake about that! One sees a sad, hard, but resolute gaze—an eye that looks outward, as a lonely explorer at the North Pole looks outward (perhaps so as not to look inward? so as not to look back?…). Here there is snow, here life has fallen silent; the last crows to make themselves heard here are called “What for?,” “In vain!,” “Nothing!”—here nothing thrives or grows any longer, at most Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoyan “pity.” But as for that other kind of historian, a perhaps still more “modern” kind, a savoring, voluptuous kind that makes eyes at life quite as much as at the ascetic ideal, that uses the word “artist” as a glove and has now taken an exclusive lease on the praise of contemplation: oh, what a thirst these sugary wits awaken even for ascetics and winter landscapes! No! Let the devil take these “contemplative” people! How much rather would I wander with those historical nihilists through the darkest gray, cold fogs!—Yes, if I must choose, I would not even mind lending an ear to someone thoroughly unhistorical and anti-historical (like that Dühring, whose tones intoxicate a hitherto timid and still unavowed species of “beautiful souls” in today’s Germany, the anarchistic species within the educated proletariat). The “contemplatives” are a hundred times worse—I know nothing that provokes such disgust as an “objective” armchair of this sort, such a perfumed voluptuary before history, half priest, half satyr, Renan perfume, whose very high falsetto of applause betrays what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case the Fate wielded her cruel scissors, alas! all too surgically! This offends my taste, and my patience too: let anyone with nothing to lose by his patience keep it at such sights—I am enraged by such a sight, such “spectators” embitter me against the “spectacle” more than the spectacle itself does (history itself, you understand); unexpectedly, Anacreontic moods come over me. This nature that gave the bull its horn, the lion its gaping maw of teeth—what did nature give me a foot for?… For kicking, by holy Anacreon! And not merely for running away: for kicking to pieces the rotten armchairs, the cowardly contemplativeness, the lustful eunuchdom before history, the flirtation with ascetic ideals, impotence’s Tartuffe-like pretense of justice! All my reverence to the ascetic ideal, insofar as it is honest! So long as it believes in itself and plays no tricks on us! But I do not like all these coquettish bedbugs, whose ambition to smell of the infinite is insatiable, until at last the infinite smells of bedbugs; I do not like the whitewashed tombs that act out life; I do not like the tired and used-up who wrap themselves in wisdom and look “objective”; I do not like the agitators dressed up as heroes, who wear a cap of invisibility made of ideal around the bundle of straw they have for a head; I do not like the ambitious artists who would like to pass for ascetics and priests and are at bottom only tragic buffoons; nor do I like them, these latest speculators in idealism, the antisemites, who today roll their eyes in Christian-Aryan-respectable fashion and try to rouse all the horned-cattle elements of the people by an abuse, exhausting every patience, of the cheapest means of agitation, the moral attitude—the fact that every kind of fraudulent spirit-mongering in today’s Germany meets with some success is connected with the now undeniable and already palpable desolation of the German spirit, whose cause I seek in an all-too-exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, together with the prerequisites of this diet: first, national constriction and vanity, the strong but narrow principle “Germany, Germany above everything,” and then the shaking palsy of “modern ideas.” Europe today is rich and inventive above all in stimulants; it seems to need nothing more than stimulants and distilled spirits: hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most highly distilled spirits of the mind, hence also the repellent, foul-smelling, lying, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. I should like to know how many shiploads of imitation idealism, of heroic costumes and the clattering tin of grand words, how many tons of sugared, spirituous sympathy (trading as: the religion of suffering), how many stilts of “noble indignation” to assist the spiritually flat-footed, how many playactors of the Christian-moral ideal would have to be exported from Europe today to make its air smell cleaner again… Clearly this overproduction opens up a new trading opportunity; clearly a new “business” can be made of little idol-ideals and their attendant “idealists”—do not miss this hint the size of a fence post! Who has courage enough for it?—It is in our hands to “idealize” the whole earth!… But why am I speaking of courage: only one thing is needed here, the hand itself, an uninhibited, a very uninhibited hand…

27 —Enough! Enough! Let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the most modern spirit, which offer as much to laugh at as to resent: precisely our problem can do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal—what has it to do with yesterday and today! I shall deal with those things more thoroughly and more harshly in another context (under the title “Toward a History of European Nihilism”; for this I refer to a work I am preparing: The Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values). All I care to have pointed out here is this: even in the most spiritual sphere, the ascetic ideal still has, for now, only one kind of real enemy and underminer: the playactors of this ideal—for they arouse mistrust. Everywhere else where the spirit is at work today, rigorously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it now dispenses with the ideal altogether—the popular expression for this abstinence is “atheism”—apart from its will to truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, is, if I may be believed, that ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, wholly esoteric, stripped of all outworks, and thus not so much its remnant as its core. Unconditional, honest atheism—and it is its air alone that we breathe, we more spiritual people of this age!—accordingly does not stand opposed to that ideal, as it appears to; rather, it is only one of its final phases of development, one of its concluding forms and inner consequences—it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness, which in the end forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God. (The same course of development in India, in complete independence, and therefore proving something; the same ideal compelling the same conclusion; the decisive point reached five centuries before the European era, with Buddha, more precisely: already with Sankhyam philosophy, then popularized by Buddha and made into a religion.) What, asked in all strictness, has actually triumphed over the Christian God? The answer is in my “Gay Science,” p. 290: “Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken ever more strictly, the confessor-like refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To look at nature as though it were proof of a god’s goodness and care; to interpret history in honor of a divine reason, as a continual testimony to a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; to interpret one’s own experiences as pious people interpreted them long enough, as though everything were providence, everything a sign, everything devised and sent for the sake of the soul’s salvation: that is now over, that has conscience against it, that all finer consciences regard as improper, dishonest, as lying, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice—with this strictness, if with anything, we are indeed good Europeans and heirs to Europe’s longest and bravest self-overcoming”… All great things perish through themselves, through an act of self-abolition: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of life—in the end the call always goes out to the lawgiver himself: “Submit to the law you yourself have enacted.” In this way Christianity as dogma perished through its own morality; in this way Christianity as morality must now perish too—we stand at the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it finally draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; but this happens when it asks the question “What does all will to truth mean?”… And here I touch again on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends—for as yet I know of no friend: what meaning would our whole being have if not that in us this will to truth had become conscious of itself as a problem?… Through this will to truth becoming conscious of itself, morality from now on—there can be no doubt—perishes: that great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for Europe’s next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles…

28 Apart from the ascetic ideal, the human being, the human animal, has had no meaning so far. His existence on earth contained no goal; “What is humanity for at all?” was a question without an answer; the will for humanity and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny a still greater “In vain!” sounded as a refrain. That is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was missing, that an immense gap surrounded humanity—it did not know how to justify itself, explain itself, affirm itself; it suffered from the problem of its meaning. It suffered in other ways too; it was chiefly a sickly animal: but its problem was not suffering itself, but the lack of an answer to the cry of the question “To what end do we suffer?” The human being, the bravest animal and the most accustomed to suffering, does not reject suffering in itself: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose for suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering, was the curse that had lain over humanity until now—and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning! So far it was the only meaning; any meaning is better than none at all; in every respect the ascetic ideal was the supreme “for want of anything better” there had yet been. In it, suffering was interpreted; the immense void seemed filled; the door closed against all suicidal nihilism. The interpretation—there is no doubt—brought new suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more corrosive of life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of guilt… But despite it all—the human being was thereby saved, he had a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense, of “no-sense”; he could now will something—no matter, for the moment, in what direction, to what end, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. There is simply no concealing what all that willing which received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to escape from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself—all this means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against life’s most fundamental presuppositions, but it is and remains a will!… And, to say again in conclusion what I said at the beginning: humanity would rather will nothingness than not will…

Third Essay:

What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?

Carefree, mocking, violent—that is how wisdom wants us: she isa woman, she only ever loves awarrior.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

1 What do ascetic ideals mean?—For artists, nothing, or too many different things. For philosophers and scholars, something like a nose and an instinct for the best conditions for highly developed intellectual life. For women, at best, one more charm to help them seduce: a little softness on beautiful flesh, the angelic quality of a pretty, plump animal. For people whose bodies have turned out badly and whose moods are disturbed (the majority of mortals), an attempt to feel “too good” for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their main weapon against persistent pain and boredom. For priests, the actual priestly faith, their best tool of power, and also the “highest” permission to wield power. Finally, for saints, an excuse to hibernate, their last craving for glory, their rest in nothingness (“God”), their form of madness. But the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to humanity expresses the basic fact about the human will: its fear of emptiness. It needs a goal—and it would rather will nothingness than not will.—Do you understand me?… Have you understood me?… “Absolutely not, sir!”—Then let's start again.

2 What do ascetic ideals mean?—Or let me take a particular case, one I have often enough been asked to advise on. What does it mean, for example, when an artist like Richard Wagner pays tribute to chastity in his old age? In one sense, of course, he had always done this. But only at the very end did he do it in an ascetic sense. What does this change of “sense” mean, this radical reversal of outlook?—For that is what it was: Wagner jumped straight into his own opposite. What does it mean when an artist turns into his opposite?… Suppose we pause over this question for a moment. We immediately remember what may have been the best, strongest, most cheerful, most courageous period in Wagner's life. That was when the idea of Luther's wedding occupied him deeply and inwardly. Who knows what accidents left us with the Mastersingers today instead of that wedding music? And how much of the latter may still echo in the former? But there is no doubt that this “Luther's Wedding,” too, would have praised chastity. Admittedly, it would also have praised sensuality—and that seems just right to me. That would also have been “Wagnerian.” For chastity and sensuality are not necessarily opposites. Every good marriage, every true love affair, goes beyond that opposition. Wagner would have done well, I think, to remind his Germans once again of this pleasant fact with a charming, bold comedy about Luther. There are, and always have been, many slanderers of sensuality among the Germans. And perhaps Luther's greatest achievement was precisely that he had the courage to own his sensuality (—in those days they called it, delicately enough, “evangelical freedom”…). But even where chastity and sensuality really do oppose each other, fortunately their opposition need not be tragic. At least this should hold for all those mortals who have turned out better and are in better spirits. They are far from simply counting their unstable balance between “animal and angel” as an argument against existence. The subtlest and brightest, like Goethe, like Hafiz, have even seen it as one more attraction of life. These very “contradictions” tempt us into existence… On the other hand, it is only too understandable that if badly turned-out pigs are persuaded to worship chastity—and there are such pigs!—they will see and worship in it only their own opposite, the opposite of the badly turned-out pig. Oh, with what tragic grunting and zeal! You can imagine it. That painful, unnecessary opposition is what Richard Wagner unquestionably still wanted to set to music and put on stage at the end of his life. But what for? We may fairly ask. For what were the pigs to him? What are they to us?—

3 Of course, we cannot avoid the other question here. What did that manly (oh, so unmanly) “country innocent” matter to him? That poor devil and child of nature, Parsifal, whom he finally makes Catholic by such compromising means—what? Was this Parsifal even meant seriously? We might be tempted to suspect, even to wish, the opposite. Perhaps Wagner meant Parsifal lightheartedly, as a kind of final piece and satyr play. Through it, Wagner the writer of tragedies might have wished to say goodbye to us, and to himself, and above all to tragedy, in a way that suited him and was worthy of him: with an outburst of the most extreme and mischievous parody. A parody of tragedy itself, of all the dreadful earthly seriousness and earthly misery of the past, of the finally overcome crudest form of the ascetic ideal's opposition to nature. As I said, this would have been worthy of a great writer of tragedies. Like every artist, he only reaches the final peak of his greatness when he can see himself and his art beneath him—when he can laugh at himself. Is Wagner's “Parsifal” his secret laugh of superiority at himself? Is it the triumph of the final, highest artistic freedom he has won, of his position beyond his art? As I said, we might wish so. For what would a seriously intended Parsifal be? Must we really see it—as someone put it to me—as “the offspring of a hatred of knowledge, intellect, and sensuality that has gone mad”? A curse on the senses and the intellect in a single breath of hatred? A renunciation of his faith and a return to sickly Christian ideals hostile to enlightenment? And finally, even a denial and cancellation of himself by an artist who until then had used all the force of his will to pursue the opposite: to make his art as intellectual and as sensual as possible? And not only his art: his life, too. Remember how enthusiastically Wagner once followed in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach. Feuerbach's phrase “healthy sensuality” sounded like a message of salvation to Wagner in the thirties and forties, as it did to many Germans (—they called themselves the “young Germans”). Had he finally learned to think differently about this? At the very least, he seems to have wanted, in the end, to teach a different view of it… And not just from the stage, with Parsifal's trombones. In the murky writing of his last years, as constrained as it is bewildered, there are a hundred passages that reveal a secret wish and will: a discouraged, uncertain will that he could not admit to. It wanted, in quite literal terms, to preach reversal, conversion, denial, Christianity, the Middle Ages, and to tell his disciples: “It is nothing! Look for salvation somewhere else!” Even the “blood of the Redeemer” is invoked once…

4 Let me give my view of a case like this, which has many painful sides—and it is a typical case. Surely we do best to separate an artist from his work far enough not to take him as seriously as we take his work. After all, he is only the precondition of his work: the womb, the soil, sometimes the fertilizer and manure on which, and out of which, it grows. So in most cases he is something we have to forget if we want to enjoy the work itself. Understanding a work's origin is a matter for the physiologists and vivisectors of the mind: never, ever for people with an aesthetic sense, for artists! The poet who shaped Parsifal could not be spared a deep, thorough, even dreadful immersion and descent into the conflicting states of medieval souls. He could not be spared a hostile withdrawal from all intellectual elevation, rigor, and discipline, a kind of intellectual perversity (if you will forgive the word). No more could a pregnant woman be spared the disgusting things and oddities of pregnancy. As I said, these must be forgotten if we are to enjoy the child. We must avoid a confusion that an artist himself all too easily falls into through psychological contiguity, to use the English term. He acts as though he himself were what he can portray, think up, and express. In fact, if that were what he was, he would certainly not portray it, think it up, or express it. Homer would not have written an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles and Goethe a Faust. A complete and fully developed artist is forever cut off from the “real,” from actuality. On the other hand, we can understand how he sometimes grows tired, to the point of despair, of the eternal “unreality” and falseness of his innermost existence. Then he may try to reach over into what is most forbidden to him, into actuality, and be real. With what success? You can guess… This is the artist's typical idle wish. The aging Wagner, too, fell prey to it, and had to pay so dearly, so disastrously for it (—it cost him the valuable part of his circle of friends). But finally, even quite apart from this idle wish, who would not wish, for Wagner's own sake, that he had said goodbye to us and to his art differently? Not with a Parsifal, but more victoriously, more sure of himself, more like Wagner—less misleading, less ambiguous about everything he wanted, less like Schopenhauer, less nihilistic?…

5 —So what do ascetic ideals mean? In an artist's case, we are gradually coming to understand: nothing at all!… Or so many different things that they amount to nothing at all!… Let us leave artists out for now. They are nowhere near independent enough in the world and against the world for their judgments of value, and changes in those judgments, to deserve attention in themselves. At all times they have been valets to some morality or philosophy or religion. This is quite apart from the fact that, sadly, they have often enough been all-too-flexible courtiers to their followers and patrons, and sharp-nosed flatterers of powers that are old or just coming to the top. At the very least, they always need a protective wall, something to fall back on, an already established authority. Artists never stand on their own. Standing alone goes against their deepest instincts. So Richard Wagner, for example, when “the time had come,” took the philosopher Schopenhauer as the man in front of him, as his protective wall. Who could even imagine that he would have had the courage for an ascetic ideal without the support Schopenhauer's philosophy offered him? Without Schopenhauer's authority, which gained the upper hand in Europe in the seventies? (This does not yet take into account whether an artist in the new Germany could have existed at all without the milk of a pious outlook, pious toward the empire.)—And this brings us to the more serious question. What does it mean when a real philosopher pays tribute to the ascetic ideal? A truly self-reliant mind like Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a gaze of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows how to stand alone and does not wait for leaders in front of him or signals from above? Let us consider right away Schopenhauer's remarkable attitude toward art, an attitude that even fascinates certain kinds of people. Clearly, it was first for this that Richard Wagner went over to Schopenhauer (persuaded, as we know, by a poet, Herwegh). He went so far that a complete theoretical contradiction opened up between his earlier and his later beliefs about aesthetics. The former are expressed, for example, in “Opera and Drama”; the latter in the writings he published from 1870 onward. In particular, and perhaps most surprisingly, from that time Wagner changed his judgment about the value and position of music itself without a second thought. What did it matter to him that until then he had made music a means, a medium, a “woman” who absolutely needed a purpose, a man, in order to flourish—namely, drama! He suddenly realized that Schopenhauer's theory and innovation could do more for the greater glory of music. That is, music's sovereignty, as Schopenhauer understood it. Music stood apart from all the other arts, the independent art in itself. It did not, like them, provide images of the world of appearances. Instead it spoke the language of the will itself, directly out of the “abyss,” as the will's own most original revelation, derived from nothing else. With this extraordinary rise in music's value, which seemed to follow from Schopenhauer's philosophy, the musician himself suddenly rose to an unheard-of price. He now became an oracle, a priest, indeed more than a priest: a kind of mouthpiece for the “in-itself” of things, a telephone from the world beyond. From then on this ventriloquist of God did not just speak music—he spoke metaphysics. Is it any wonder that one day he finally spoke ascetic ideals?…

6 Schopenhauer made use of Kant's formulation of the aesthetic problem—though he certainly did not look at it through Kant's eyes. Kant thought he was honoring art when, among the qualities of beauty, he favored and emphasized those that make knowledge honorable: impersonality and universal validity. Whether this was fundamentally a mistake is not something to discuss here. I only want to stress that Kant, like all philosophers, did not approach the aesthetic problem through the artist's experience—the experience of the person creating. He thought about art and beauty only from the “spectator's” point of view. In the process he quietly slipped the “spectator” himself into the concept of “beautiful.” If only the philosophers of beauty had at least known this “spectator” well enough! Known him, that is, as a great personal fact and experience, as a wealth of strong experiences of his very own, of desires, surprises, and delights in the field of beauty! But I fear it was always the opposite. So from the very start they give us definitions that harbor a basic error like a fat worm, born of a lack of finer experience of themselves. One is Kant's famous definition of beauty. “Beautiful,” Kant said, “is what pleases without interest.” Without interest! Compare this definition with another, made by a real “spectator” and artist: Stendhal, who once called beauty a promise of happiness. At any rate, this explicitly rejects and crosses out just what Kant alone emphasizes in the aesthetic state: disinterestedness. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?—Our theorists of aesthetics never tire of arguing for Kant by saying that, under beauty's spell, we can even look at unclothed female statues “without interest.” Surely we may laugh a little at their expense. The experiences of artists on this delicate point are “more interesting.” And Pygmalion, at any rate, did not necessarily lack an aesthetic sense. Let us think all the better of our aesthetic theorists' innocence, reflected in arguments like these. Let us count it to Kant's credit, for instance, that he can teach us about the special nature of the sense of touch with the innocence of a country parson!—And here we return to Schopenhauer. He was much closer to the arts than Kant, yet he did not escape the spell of Kant's definition. How did that happen? The circumstances are strange enough. He interpreted the words “without interest” in the most personal way possible, on the basis of an experience that must have been among his most regular. Schopenhauer speaks about few things with such certainty as the effect of aesthetic contemplation. He says that it works precisely against sexual “interest,” much like lupulin and camphor. He never tired of praising this escape from the “will” as the great advantage and benefit of the aesthetic state. Indeed, we might be tempted to ask whether his basic conception of “will and representation” originated in a generalization from that sexual experience: the thought that deliverance from the “will” is possible only through “representation.” (Incidentally, in all questions about Schopenhauer's philosophy, we must never forget that it was conceived by a young man of twenty-six. So it bears not only Schopenhauer's particular stamp, but also the particular stamp of that season of life.) Listen, for example, to one of the most explicit among the countless passages he wrote in honor of the aesthetic state (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I 231). Listen for the tone, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude with which these words were spoken. “That is the painless state that Epicurus praised as the highest good and as the state of the gods. For that moment, we are freed from the vile pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal labor of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still”… What forceful words! What images of torment and prolonged weariness! What an almost pathological contrast in time between “that moment” and the usual “wheel of Ixion,” the “penal labor of willing,” the “vile pressure of the will”!—But suppose Schopenhauer was right a hundred times over about his own experience. What would that contribute to understanding the nature of beauty? Schopenhauer described one effect of beauty, its calming of the will. Is it even a regular effect? As I said, Stendhal was no less sensual a person, but had a happier disposition than Schopenhauer. He emphasizes another effect of beauty: “Beauty promises happiness.” For him, the actual fact seems to be precisely beauty's arousal of the will (“of interest”). And finally, could we not object to Schopenhauer himself that he is quite wrong to think himself a Kantian here? That he has not understood Kant's definition of beauty in a Kantian way at all? That for him, too, beauty pleases because of an “interest”—indeed, the strongest, most personal interest of all: that of a tortured man escaping his torture?… And to return to our first question, “What does it mean when a philosopher pays tribute to the ascetic ideal?”—here, at least, we get a first hint: he wants to get away from torture.—

7 Let us not pull gloomy faces as soon as we hear the word “torture.” In this particular case there is plenty to set against it, plenty to subtract—even something to laugh at. Above all, we should not underestimate this: Schopenhauer, who really did treat sexuality as a personal enemy (including its tool, woman, this “instrument of the devil”), needed enemies to stay in good spirits. He loved savage, bitter, black-green words. He raged for the sake of raging, out of passion. Without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality, and the whole will to exist and go on existing, he would have become sick, would have become a pessimist (—for he was not one, however much he wished he were). Otherwise Schopenhauer would not have stayed here, you can bet on it. He would have run away. But his enemies held him fast. His enemies tempted him into existence again and again. Just as with the ancient Cynics, his anger was his refreshment, his recreation, his compensation, his remedy for disgust, his happiness. So much for the most personal side of Schopenhauer's case. On the other hand, there is also something typical about him—and only here do we come back to our problem. As long as there have been philosophers on earth, and wherever there have been philosophers (from India to England, to take the opposite poles of talent for philosophy), there has undeniably been a distinctively philosophical irritation and grudge against sensuality. Schopenhauer is only its most eloquent outburst—and, if you have an ear for it, also its most captivating and delightful. Likewise, philosophers have a distinctive partiality and affection for the entire ascetic ideal. We should not deceive ourselves about this or try to talk it away. As I said, both belong to the type. If a philosopher lacks both, you can be sure he is only a “so-called” philosopher. What does this mean? For we must first interpret this fact. In itself, it just stands there stupidly for all eternity, like every “thing in itself.” Every animal, including the philosophical beast, instinctively strives for the best possible set of favorable conditions. Under them, it can fully release its strength and reach its greatest feeling of power. Just as instinctively, and with a keen nose that “surpasses all reason,” every animal recoils in horror from all kinds of troublemakers and obstacles that block, or might block, its path to those best conditions. (I am not talking about its path to “happiness,” but its path to power, to action, to the most powerful activity—and in most cases, in fact, its path to unhappiness.) In this way, the philosopher recoils in horror from marriage and everything that might persuade him to marry: marriage as an obstacle and a disaster on his path to the best conditions. What great philosopher has ever been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not. More than that, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy: that is my claim. And that exception, Socrates, malicious Socrates, seems to have married as an act of irony, precisely to demonstrate this claim. Every philosopher would speak as Buddha once did when he was told of the birth of a son: “Râhula has been born to me; a shackle has been forged for me” (Râhula here means “a little demon”). Every “free spirit” would have to have a thoughtful hour, assuming he had previously had a thoughtless one, like the hour that once came to that same Buddha: “Life at home, he thought to himself, is cramped and crowded, a place of impurity. Freedom means leaving home.” “Thinking this, he left home.” The ascetic ideal points to so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot hear without inward rejoicing and applause the history of all those determined people who one day said No to every kind of unfreedom and went off into some desert. This holds even if they were merely strong donkeys, the very opposite of a strong mind. So what does the ascetic ideal mean for a philosopher? My answer is—you will have guessed it long ago: when the philosopher sees it, he smiles at the best possible conditions for the highest and boldest intellectual life. In doing so, he does not deny “existence.” Rather, he affirms his existence, and only his existence. Perhaps he does so to the point of nearly wishing something outrageous: let the world perish, let philosophy exist, let the philosopher exist, let me exist!…

8 You see, these philosophers are not neutral witnesses and judges of the ascetic ideal's value! They are thinking of themselves—what does “the saint” matter to them! They are thinking of what is most indispensable to them in it. Freedom from pressure, disturbance, noise, business, duties, worries. A clear head. Thoughts that dance, leap, and fly. Good air, thin, clear, free, dry, like mountain air, in which all animal life becomes more intellectual and grows wings. Quiet in all the basements. All the dogs neatly chained up. No barking of hostility and shaggy grudges. No worms of wounded ambition gnawing away. Modest, obedient guts, working busily like mills, but far away. The heart detached, beyond, in the future, posthumous. All in all, when they think of the ascetic ideal, they think of the cheerful asceticism of an animal that has become divine and grown wings, roaming above life more than it rests. We know the ascetic ideal's three great showy words: poverty, humility, chastity. Now look closely at the lives of all the great, productive, inventive minds. You will always find all three there to some extent. Certainly not, as goes without saying, as though these were their “virtues”—what does this kind of person have to do with virtues! Rather, they are the most basic and natural conditions for their best existence, their finest productivity. Their dominant intellectual drive may well have had to rein in an unruly, touchy pride or a reckless sensuality at first. Or it may have had a hard enough time keeping up its will to the “desert” against a liking for luxury and the most exquisite things, and also against lavish generosity of heart and hand. But it did so precisely as the dominant instinct, which forced all the other instincts to meet its demands—and it still does. If it did not, it would not be dominant. So there is nothing of “virtue” in this. As for the desert I just mentioned, where strong, independently minded spirits withdraw to be alone—oh, how different it looks from the desert educated people dream of! Sometimes, in fact, the desert consists of these educated people themselves. And certainly none of the actors of the intellect could bear it there. It is nowhere near romantic and Syrian enough for them, nowhere near enough of a stage desert! Admittedly, it does not lack camels either. But that is where all resemblance ends. Perhaps a deliberately chosen obscurity; getting out of one's own way; shying away from noise, admiration, newspapers, influence. A small job, an everyday routine, something that conceals more than it brings to light. Occasional company with harmless, cheerful animals and birds, whose sight refreshes us. Mountains for company—but not dead ones: mountains with eyes (that is, with lakes). Sometimes even a room in a crowded hotel for all comers, where you can be sure of being mistaken for someone else, and can talk with anyone without being punished for it. That is “desert” here. Oh, it is lonely enough, believe me! When Heraclitus withdrew into the courtyards and colonnades of the enormous temple of Artemis, that “desert” was more dignified, I admit. Why do we lack such temples? (—Perhaps we do not lack them: I am just thinking of my finest study, the Piazza di San Marco, provided it is spring, and also morning, between 10 and 12.) But what Heraclitus avoided is still the same thing that we avoid now: the noise and chatter of the Ephesian democrats, their politics, their news of the “empire” (Persia, you understand me), their market junk of “today.” For we philosophers need peace from one thing above all: from everything “today.” We revere the quiet, the cold, the noble, the distant, the past—anything whose appearance does not force the soul to defend itself and lace itself tight. Something we can talk to without talking loudly. Just listen to the sound a mind makes when it speaks: every mind has its own sound, loves its own sound. That one over there, for example, must be an agitator—in other words, an empty head, an empty pot. Whatever goes into him, everything comes back out dull and thick, weighed down by the echo of the great emptiness. That one over there rarely speaks without being hoarse. Perhaps he has thought himself hoarse? That would be possible—ask the physiologists—but anyone who thinks in words thinks as a speaker, not as a thinker. (It reveals that at bottom he is not thinking about things themselves, not thinking in terms of facts, but only in relation to things; what he is actually thinking about is himself and his listeners.) This third one speaks pushily. He comes too close to our bodies, we feel his breath on us. We involuntarily close our mouths, even though it is through a book that he speaks to us. The sound of his style tells us why: he has no time, he has little faith in himself, he must get a word in today or never again. But a mind sure of itself speaks quietly. It seeks concealment, makes people wait for it. You recognize a philosopher by the way he avoids three glittering, noisy things: fame, princes, and women. That does not mean they do not come to him. He shuns overly bright light, and therefore shuns his age and its “day.” In this he is like a shadow: the lower the sun sinks for him, the larger he grows. As for his “humility,” he can tolerate a certain dependence and obscuring of himself, just as he tolerates the dark. More than that, he fears the disturbance of lightning strikes. He shrinks from the exposure of a tree standing too isolated and unprotected, on which every spell of bad weather vents its mood, every mood its bad weather. His “maternal” instinct, his secret love for what is growing inside him, points him toward situations where he is relieved of having to think about himself. In the same way, the mother's instinct in woman has, until now, kept woman in a dependent position in general. In the end, these philosophers ask for little enough. Their motto is “Whoever owns is owned.” Not, as I must say again and again, out of some virtue or some praiseworthy will to be content with little and live simply. It is because their supreme master demands this of them, demands it wisely and relentlessly. This master cares about only one thing, and gathers and saves everything—time, strength, love, interest—for that alone. This kind of person does not like being disturbed by hostilities, or by friendships either: such people easily forget or despise. They think playing the martyr is bad taste. “To suffer for the truth”—they leave that to the ambitious and the stage heroes of the intellect, and anyone else with time enough for it (—the philosophers themselves have something to do for the truth). They are sparing with big words. People say even the word “truth” goes against their grain: it sounds boastful… Finally, as for the philosophers' “chastity,” this kind of mind clearly bears its fruit somewhere other than in children. Perhaps the survival of its name, its little immortality, lies somewhere else too. (In ancient India, philosophers put this even less modestly: “Why does someone whose soul is the world need descendants?”) There is no chastity here based on some ascetic scruple and hatred of the senses, any more than it is chastity when an athlete or jockey keeps away from women. Rather, this is what their dominant instinct wants, at least during periods of great pregnancy. Every artist knows how harmful sexual intercourse is during states of great intellectual tension and preparation. The most powerful, most sure in their instincts, do not even need experience, bad experience, to know this. Instead, their “maternal” instinct ruthlessly takes charge of all the other stores and extra supplies of strength, of the vigor of animal life, for the benefit of the developing work. Then the greater strength uses up the lesser.—Apply this interpretation, by the way, to Schopenhauer's case, which we discussed above. For him, the sight of beauty clearly worked as a trigger for the main strength in his nature: the strength of reflection and of the deeply searching gaze. It then exploded and suddenly took control of consciousness. This certainly does not rule out the possibility that the special sweetness and fullness of the aesthetic state might originate precisely in the ingredient “sensuality” (just as the “idealism” of girls of marriageable age comes from the same source). In that case, sensuality is not canceled when the aesthetic state begins, as Schopenhauer believed. It is only transformed, and no longer enters consciousness as sexual arousal. I will return to this point of view another time, in connection with still more delicate problems in the physiology of aesthetics, so untouched and unexplored until now.

9 We have seen that a certain asceticism—a tough, cheerful willingness to go without things, undertaken with the best will—belongs among the favorable conditions for the highest intellectual life, and also among its most natural results. So from the outset it is no surprise that philosophers, in particular, have never treated the ascetic ideal without some bias in its favor. A serious historical reckoning even shows that the bond between the ascetic ideal and philosophy is much closer and tighter still. We might say that philosophy only learned to take its first steps and baby steps on earth with this ideal's walking harness to hold it up. Oh, still so clumsy, oh, with such sulky faces, oh, so ready to fall over and lie on its belly, this timid little bowlegged clumsy creature, this pampered darling! At first philosophy fared like all good things. For a long time they had no courage to be themselves. They kept looking around to see if anyone would come to their help. More than that, they were afraid of everyone watching them. Consider the philosopher's individual drives and virtues one by one: his drive to doubt, his drive to deny, his drive to wait and suspend judgment (his “ephectic” drive), his drive to analyze; his drive to investigate, search, and take risks; his drive to compare and balance; his will to neutrality and objectivity, his will to every kind of “without anger and bias.” Have people really understood that for the longest time every one of these went against the first demands of morality and conscience? (Not to mention reason in general, which even Luther still liked to call Lady Clever, the clever whore.) That if a philosopher had become conscious of himself, he would have had to feel himself the very embodiment of “we strive for the forbidden”—and consequently took care not to “feel himself,” not to become conscious of himself?… As I said, it is no different with all the good things we are proud of today. Even measured by the standards of the ancient Greeks, our whole modern existence, wherever it is not weakness but power and awareness of power, looks like nothing but hubris and godlessness. For during the longest stretch of time, it was precisely the opposite of what we honor today that had conscience on its side and God as its guardian. Our whole attitude to nature today is hubris: our violation of nature with machines and the inventive skills of technicians and engineers who have so few scruples. Our attitude to God is hubris: that is, to any supposed spider of purpose and morality behind the great trapping web of causation. Like Charles the Bold fighting Louis the Eleventh, we could say, “I fight the universal spider.” Our attitude to ourselves is hubris. For we experiment on ourselves in ways we would never allow ourselves to use on any animal. With pleasure and curiosity we slit our souls open while we are still alive. What do we care any longer about the soul's “salvation”! Afterward we heal ourselves. Being sick is instructive, we do not doubt it—more instructive than being healthy. Today, those who make us sick seem more necessary to us even than any medicine men and “saviors.” We now violate ourselves, there is no doubt of that: we nutcrackers of the soul, we who ask questions and are open to question, as though life were nothing but cracking nuts. Precisely through this, every day we must necessarily become still more open to question, more worthy of being questioned—and perhaps, through this, also more worthy—of living?… All good things were once bad things. Every original sin has become an inherited virtue. Marriage, for instance, long seemed a sin against the community's rights. People once paid a penalty for being so immodest as to claim a woman for themselves (this includes, for example, the right of the first night, still today in Cambodia the privilege of the priests, those guardians of “good old customs”). Gentle, kindly, yielding, compassionate feelings—now valued so highly that they are almost “values in themselves”—for the longest time had self-contempt working against them. People were ashamed of gentleness, as they are ashamed of harshness today (cf. “Beyond Good and Evil,” p. 232). Submission to the law: oh, how their consciences resisted when the noble families, everywhere on earth, gave up vendetta on their own part and allowed the law power over them! For a long time “law” was something forbidden, an outrage, an innovation. It arrived with violence, as a power to which people submitted only with shame before themselves. Every tiniest step on earth was once won through mental and physical tortures. Today this whole way of looking at things sounds so strange to us: “It was not only stepping forward—no! Stepping, movement, change itself needed countless martyrs.” I brought it to light in “Daybreak,” pp. 17 ff. “Nothing,” it says there (p. 19), “has been bought more dearly than the little bit of human reason and feeling of freedom that now makes us proud. Yet this pride is what now makes it almost impossible for us to feel as people did during those immense stretches of time under the ‘morality of custom’ that came before ‘world history’: the real, decisive main history, which fixed humanity's character. Throughout that time, suffering counted as a virtue, cruelty as a virtue, pretending as a virtue, revenge as a virtue, denial of reason as a virtue. Well-being, on the other hand, counted as a danger, the desire for knowledge as a danger, peace as a danger, compassion as a danger; being pitied as a disgrace, work as a disgrace, madness as divinity, and change as the very essence of immorality and a thing pregnant with ruin!”—

10 The same book, p. 39, explains how the earliest generation of contemplative people was valued, and what pressure that judgment put them under. They were despised exactly to the extent that they were not feared! Contemplation first appeared on earth in disguise, with a doubtful reputation, a wicked heart, and often a frightened head. There is no doubt about that. For a long time, the inactive, brooding, unwarlike side of contemplative people's instincts surrounded them with deep distrust. There was only one remedy: make people decidedly afraid of them. The ancient Brahmins, for example, knew how to do that! The earliest philosophers knew how to give their existence and appearance a meaning, a foundation and background, that taught people to fear them. More precisely, they did this out of an even more basic need: to feel fear and respect for themselves. They found every value judgment within them turned against them. They had to fight down every kind of suspicion and resistance to “the philosopher in themselves.” As people of terrible times, they did this by terrible means. Cruelty to themselves, inventive self-torment—these were the chief means used by those power-hungry hermits and innovators in thought. They first needed to violate the gods and accepted traditions within themselves before they could believe in their own innovation. Think of the famous story of King Vishvamitra. After tormenting himself for a thousand years, he gained such a sense of power and such confidence in himself that he set out to build a new heaven. It is an unsettling symbol of both the earliest and the latest history of philosophy on earth. Everyone who has ever built a “new heaven” first found the power to do it in his own hell … Let us reduce the whole situation to a few short formulas. At first, the philosophical spirit always had to disguise itself and cocoon itself in the already established types of contemplative person: priest, magician, fortune-teller, religious person generally. Only then could it be possible at all, even to a degree. For a long time, the ascetic ideal provided the philosopher with a form in which to appear and a condition of existence. He had to embody it to be a philosopher. He had to believe in it to embody it. Philosophers' peculiar stance of standing apart—denying the world, hostile to life, distrusting the senses, stripped of sensuality—has lasted into the most recent times. It has almost come to count as the philosophical attitude itself. Above all, it results from the desperate conditions in which philosophy first arose and survived. For most of its history, philosophy could not have existed on earth without an ascetic covering and disguise, without an ascetic misunderstanding of itself. To put it in a clear, visible image: until the most recent times, the ascetic priest provided the repulsive, gloomy caterpillar form in which alone philosophy was allowed to live and creep about … Has that really changed? Has the colorful, dangerous winged creature, that “spirit” the caterpillar held inside it, finally shed its monk's robe and been let out into the light, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, brighter world? Is there already enough pride, daring, courage, self-confidence, will of the spirit, will to take responsibility, freedom of the will, for “the philosopher” really to be possible on earth now? …

11 Only now that the ascetic priest has come into view are we seriously closing in on our problem: what does the ascetic ideal mean? Only now does it become “serious.” We are now facing the true representative of seriousness as such. “What does all seriousness mean?” Perhaps that still more basic question is already coming to our lips. It is a question for physiologists, naturally, but for now we will slip past it. The ascetic priest has not only his faith in that ideal, but also his will, his power, his interest. His right to exist stands or falls with it. No wonder we meet a terrible opponent here—assuming, that is, that we are opponents of the ideal. He is fighting for his existence against those who deny it … On the other hand, an approach with so much at stake is unlikely from the start to help us much with our problem. The ascetic priest will hardly even be the most effective defender of his ideal. The reason is the same as the one that usually makes a woman fail when she tries to defend “woman as such.” Still less will he be the most objective assessor and judge of the controversy raised here. So we are more likely to have to help him defend himself well against us—that much is already clear—than to fear that he will refute us too well … What is being fought over here is the ascetic priests' assessment of our life. They set it, together with everything it belongs to—“nature,” “the world,” the whole realm of becoming and passing away—in relation to an entirely different kind of existence. Our life stands opposed to that existence and excludes it, unless it happens to turn against itself and deny itself. In that case, the case of an ascetic life, life counts as a bridge to that other existence. The ascetic treats life as a wrong turn that we must finally retrace to its starting point. Or he treats it as an error that we refute through action—that we should refute. For he demands that we go with him. Wherever he can, he forces his assessment of existence on others. What does that mean? Such a monstrous way of assigning value is not written into human history as an exception or a curiosity. It is one of the most widespread and longest-lasting facts there are. If the capital letters of our earthly existence were read from a distant star, they might tempt the reader to conclude that earth was the truly ascetic star. A corner full of discontented, arrogant, repulsive creatures who could never get rid of their deep disgust with themselves, the earth, and all life, and who hurt themselves as much as possible for the pleasure of causing pain—probably their only pleasure. Just consider how regularly, how universally, at almost all times, the ascetic priest appears. He belongs to no single race. He thrives everywhere. He grows out of every social class. Not that he breeds and passes on his way of assigning value through heredity. The opposite is true. A deep instinct forbids him to reproduce on any large scale. It must be a necessity of the highest order that keeps making this life-hostile species grow and thrive. It must be in the interest of life itself that such a type of self-contradiction does not die out. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction. Here an unparalleled resentment rules: the resentment of an unsatisfied instinct and will to power that wants to master not something in life, but life itself, its deepest, strongest, most basic conditions. Here an attempt is made to use strength to block the sources of strength. Here a green, spiteful gaze turns against physiological flourishing itself, especially against its expressions: beauty and joy. Meanwhile, pleasure is felt and sought in failure, wasting away, pain, misfortune, ugliness, deliberately chosen loss, stripping away the self, self-whipping, self-sacrifice. All this is paradoxical to the highest degree. We face a division that wants itself to be divided, that enjoys itself in this very suffering. It becomes still more sure of itself and triumphant as its own necessary condition, physiological ability to live, declines. “Triumph precisely in the final agony”: the ascetic ideal has always fought under this most extreme of signs. In this seductive riddle, this picture of delight and torment, it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its final victory. Cross, nut, light—crux, nux, lux—for it they belong together. —

12 Suppose such an embodied will to contradiction and opposition to nature is made to philosophize. On what will it unleash its deepest arbitrary urge? On whatever is felt most certainly to be true and real. It will look for error precisely where the basic instinct of life most firmly places truth. For example, like the ascetics of Vedanta philosophy, it will reduce bodily existence to an illusion. The same goes for pain, for multiplicity, for the whole conceptual opposition between “subject” and “object”—errors, nothing but errors! To refuse to believe in one's own self, to deny one's own “reality”—what a triumph! No longer just over the senses, over what plainly appears, but a much higher kind of triumph: a violation of reason, cruelty toward reason. That pleasure reaches its peak when reason's ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery decree: “There is a realm of truth and being, but reason itself is excluded from it!” … (In passing: even Kant's concept of the “intelligible character of things” retains something of this lustful ascetic division, which loves to turn reason against reason. For in Kant, “intelligible character” means a kind of constitution of things about which the intellect understands just this much: that it is utterly incomprehensible to the intellect.)—In the end, as people seeking knowledge, let us not be ungrateful for such determined reversals of the usual perspectives and value judgments. Through them, for far too long, the spirit has raged against itself in ways that seemed outrageous and useless. Seeing differently like this for once, wanting to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its eventual “objectivity.” By that I do not mean “disinterested contemplation,” which is an incoherent and absurd concept. I mean the ability to control one's reasons for and against, to disconnect and reconnect them. That allows us to use the differences between perspectives and between interpretations driven by emotions for the sake of knowledge. From now on, my fellow philosophers, let us be more on guard against that dangerous old fiction of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.” Let us beware of the grasping arms of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge as such.” They always ask us to imagine an eye that cannot possibly be imagined: an eye that is to have no direction at all, in which the active and interpreting forces are to be restrained or absent. Yet only through these forces does seeing become seeing something. So they always ask for an absurd, incoherent concept of an eye. There is only seeing from a perspective, only “knowing” from a perspective. The more emotions we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on the same thing, the more complete our “concept” of that thing, our “objectivity,” will be. But eliminating the will altogether, disconnecting every last emotion—supposing we could do it—what? Wouldn't that mean castrating the intellect? …

13 But let us return. A self-contradiction like the one apparently embodied in the ascetic, “life against life,” is simply nonsense when considered physiologically rather than psychologically. That much is clear at once. It can only be apparent. It must be a provisional expression, an interpretation, a formula, an adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding of something whose real nature could not be understood for a long time, or named in itself for a long time. Just a word wedged into an old gap in human knowledge. To put the facts against it briefly: the ascetic ideal comes from a degenerating life's instinct to protect and heal itself. That life tries every means to keep itself going and fights for its existence. The ideal points to a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion. The deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, constantly fight against these with new means and inventions. The ascetic ideal is one such means. So the situation is exactly the reverse of what its worshippers think. In and through this ideal, life wrestles with death and against death. The ascetic ideal is a device for preserving life. History shows how much it has been able to rule over humanity and gain power, especially wherever human civilization and domestication have been imposed. This expresses a great fact: the sickliness of the human type up to now, at least of domesticated humanity. It expresses the human being's physiological struggle with death—more precisely, with disgust at life, with exhaustion, with the wish for “the end.” The ascetic priest is the wish to be different, to be elsewhere, made flesh. He is this wish at its highest degree, its true intensity and passion. But the very power of his wishing is the chain that binds him here. This very thing makes him a tool that must work to create better conditions for being here and being human. With this same power, he holds the whole herd of failures, the depressed, those who have come off badly, those who have met with disaster, all kinds of people who suffer from themselves, fast to existence. Instinctively, he goes ahead as their shepherd. You already understand me: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier—he belongs precisely among life's greatest preserving and yes-creating powers … What is behind that sickliness? For the human being is sicker, more uncertain, more changeable, less settled than any other animal. There is no doubt of that. The human being is the sick animal. Where does that come from? Certainly, humans have also dared more, innovated more, defied more, challenged fate more than all the other animals put together. The human being, the great experimenter on himself, the dissatisfied, insatiable one, who struggles for final mastery with animals, nature, and gods. Still unconquered, forever belonging to the future, he finds no more rest from his own driving strength. His future relentlessly digs like a spur in the flesh of every present. How could such a courageous and richly gifted animal not also be the most endangered, the longest and most deeply sick of all sick animals? … Humans often have had enough. There are whole epidemics of this feeling of having had enough—for example around 1348, at the time of the dance of death. But even this disgust, this exhaustion, this discontent with oneself—everything comes out so powerfully in humans that it immediately becomes a new chain. The no that humans say to life brings a wealth of more delicate yeses to light, as if by magic. Indeed, when this master of destruction and self-destruction wounds himself, afterward it is the wound itself that forces him to live …

14 The more normal sickliness is in humans—and we cannot deny that it is normal—the more highly we should honor the rare cases of strength in body and soul, the fortunate cases among humans. The more strictly we should protect those who have turned out well from the worst air, the air of the sick. Do people do that? … The sick are the greatest danger to the healthy. Harm to the strong comes not from the strongest, but from the weakest. Do people know that? … On the whole, fear of human beings is certainly not something we should wish to reduce. This fear forces the strong to be strong, sometimes terrible. It keeps the successful human type upright. What we should fear, what has a more disastrous effect than any other disaster, is not great fear, but great disgust with human beings, and likewise great pity for them. Suppose these two mated one day. Something of the most terrible kind would inevitably be born at once: humanity's “last will,” its will to nothingness, nihilism. And in fact, much has been done to prepare for this. Anyone who can smell with not just his nose but his eyes and ears senses something like the air of an insane asylum or a hospital almost everywhere he steps today. I am speaking, of course, of the areas of human culture, of every kind of “Europe” that now exists on earth. The sickly are the great danger to humanity, not the evil, not the “beasts of prey.” Those who have been failures, beaten down, broken from the start—they, the weakest, do the most to undermine life among humans. They most dangerously poison and call into question our trust in life, in humanity, in ourselves. Where could we escape that doomed look that leaves us with a deep sadness? That backward-turned look of someone malformed from the beginning, which reveals how such a person speaks to himself? That look which is a sigh? “I wish I were someone else!” this look sighs. “But there is no hope. I am who I am. How could I get free of myself? And yet—I have had enough of myself!” … Every weed, every poisonous plant grows in this soil of self-contempt, a truly swampy soil. Everything is so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so sickly sweet. Here the worms of revenge and lingering resentment swarm. Here the air stinks of secrets and things people will not admit. Here the web of the most malicious conspiracy is constantly being spun: the conspiracy of the suffering against those who have turned out well and won. Here the very sight of the victorious is hated. And what lying goes on to avoid admitting that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand words and attitudes, what an art of “honest” slander! These failures—what noble eloquence flows from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble submission swims in their eyes! What do they really want? At least to appear just, loving, wise, superior—that is the ambition of these “lowest” people, these sick people! And how skilled that ambition makes them! Especially admire their skill as counterfeiters: how they imitate the stamp of virtue, even its ring, its golden ring. These weak and hopelessly sickly people have now taken an exclusive lease on virtue. There is no doubt about that. “We alone are the good, the just,” they say. “We alone are the people of good will.” They walk around among us as reproaches in the flesh, as warnings to us—as though health, turning out well, strength, pride, a feeling of power were already vices in themselves. As though one would someday have to pay, bitterly pay, for them. Oh, how ready they really are to make others pay! How they thirst to be executioners! Among them are plenty of revenge-seekers dressed up as judges. They constantly carry the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous spit, their lips always pursed, always ready to spit at anything that does not look dissatisfied and goes cheerfully on its way. They also include that most disgusting species of the vain: the lying monstrosities who want to appear to be “beautiful souls.” They market their botched sensuality, wrapped in verses and other diapers, as “purity of heart”: the species of moral masturbators and “self-gratifiers.” The sick people's will to appear superior in some form, their instinct for secret paths leading to tyranny over the healthy—where would we not find it, this will to power of the very weakest! The sick woman especially: no one outdoes her in clever ways of ruling, pressing down, tyrannizing. In doing so, the sick woman spares nothing living and nothing dead. She digs up even the most deeply buried things. (The Bogos say: “Woman is a hyena.”) Look behind the scenes of every family, every association, every community. Everywhere there is the struggle of the sick against the healthy. Mostly it is a quiet struggle, using little poisonous powders, pinpricks, treacherous facial expressions of patient suffering. But sometimes it uses the sick person's Pharisee-like show of noisy gestures, which most likes to act out “noble indignation.” Even in the sacred rooms of scholarship, the hoarse, indignant barking of sickly dogs tries to make itself heard: the biting dishonesty and rage of such “noble” Pharisees. (I remind readers who have ears once again of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen Dühring. In today's Germany, he makes the most indecent and repulsive use of moral drumbeating. Dühring is the foremost moral loudmouth alive today, even among his own kind, the antisemites.) All these physiological failures, these worm-eaten people, are people of resentment: a whole trembling terrain of underground revenge. They are inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts against the happy, and just as much in disguises for revenge and excuses for revenge. When would they actually reach their final, subtlest, most sublime triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, when they managed to push their own misery, all misery generally, onto the consciences of the happy. Then one day the happy would begin to feel ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one another: “It is a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery!” … But there could be no greater or more disastrous misunderstanding than if the happy, those who have turned out well, the powerful in body and soul, began in this way to doubt their right to happiness. Away with this “upside-down world”! Away with this shameful softening of feeling! Making sure the sick do not make the healthy sick—and such a softening would do that—should be the highest priority on earth. Above all, this requires the healthy to remain separated from the sick, protected even from the sight of them, so that they do not confuse themselves with the sick. Or is it perhaps their task to be nurses or doctors? … But they could not misunderstand and deny their task more badly. What is higher should not lower itself into a tool of what is lower. The feeling of distance should keep their tasks apart for all eternity too! Their right to exist, the privilege a bell with a full sound has over a cracked, discordant one, is a thousand times greater. They alone are the guarantors of the future. They alone are responsible for humanity's future. The sick must never be able or required to do what they can and should do. But if they are to be able to do what only they should do, how could they still be free to play doctor, comforter, “savior” to the sick? … So, good air! Good air! And in any case, away from the neighborhood of all the insane asylums and hospitals of culture! So, good company, our company! Or solitude, if necessary! But in any case, away from the foul fumes of inward decay and the hidden worm-damage of sickness! … So that we ourselves, my friends, can defend ourselves for at least a little longer against the two worst epidemics that may be reserved just for us: against great disgust with humanity! Against great pity for humanity! …

15 Once we understand in depth—and here I demand that we reach deep and understand deeply—why it simply cannot be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick or make them healthy, we also understand another necessity. We need doctors and nurses who are sick themselves. Now we have the meaning of the ascetic priest firmly in both hands. We must see him as the predestined savior, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd. Only then do we understand his enormous historical mission. Rule over the suffering is his realm. His instinct directs him to it. In it he has his own particular art, his mastery, his kind of happiness. He must be sick himself. He must be fundamentally related to the sick and those who have come off badly, so that he can understand them—and come to an understanding with them. But he must also be strong, master of himself even more than of others, and especially undamaged in his will to power. Then he can have the trust and fear of the sick and be their anchor, resistance, support, constraint, disciplinarian, tyrant, god. He has to defend his herd—against whom? Against the healthy, there is no doubt, and also against envy of the healthy. He must be the natural opponent and despiser of all rough, stormy, unrestrained, hard health and strength, all health and strength that is violent like a beast of prey. The priest is the first form of the more delicate animal, which despises even more readily than it hates. He will not be spared war with the beasts of prey. Naturally, this is a war of cunning (of “spirit”) more than of force. For it, he may sometimes need almost to develop a new type of beast of prey in himself, or at least to represent one: a new animal terribleness that seems to combine the polar bear, the supple, cold, waiting tiger-cat, and not least the fox into a unity as attractive as it is frightening. If necessity forces him, he may step right among the other kind of beasts of prey, serious as a bear, worthy of respect, clever, cold, deceptively superior, as the herald and mouthpiece of more mysterious powers. He is determined to sow suffering, division, self-contradiction wherever he can on this ground, and is only too sure of his skill in gaining mastery over sufferers at any time. He brings ointments and balms, no doubt. But first he needs to wound in order to be a doctor. Then, as he soothes the pain the wound causes, he also poisons the wound. That, above all, is what this magician and tamer of beasts of prey understands: within his circle, everything healthy necessarily becomes sick and everything sick necessarily becomes tame. This strange shepherd does defend his sick herd well enough. He also defends it against itself: against the badness, treachery, malice, and everything else that smolders within the herd and is shared by all addicts and sick people in their dealings with one another. Cleverly, harshly, secretly, he fights the anarchy and the constant beginnings of self-dissolution within the herd. There, the most dangerous explosive material, resentment, keeps accumulating and accumulating. Discharging this explosive without blowing up either the herd or the shepherd is his real trick, and also his greatest usefulness. To put the value of the priest's existence in the shortest formula, we could say directly: the priest changes the direction of resentment. For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause of his suffering. More precisely, he seeks a perpetrator; more precisely still, a guilty perpetrator who can suffer. In short, some living thing on which he can discharge his emotions through physical action, or against an image of it, on some pretext. For discharging emotion is the sufferer's greatest attempt at relief—that is, at numbing himself. It is the narcotic he wants involuntarily against torment of any kind. I suspect that here alone we can find the real physiological cause of resentment, revenge, and their relatives: in a desire to numb pain through emotion. People generally look for it, quite wrongly I think, in a defensive counterblow, a mere protective reaction, a “reflex movement” in response to sudden harm and danger. Like the movement a headless frog still makes to get rid of a burning acid. But the difference is fundamental. In one case, the aim is to prevent further injury. In the other, it is to numb a tormenting, hidden, increasingly unbearable pain through a more violent emotion of any kind, and at least for the moment remove it from consciousness. For that, one needs an emotion, the wildest possible emotion, and the first available pretext to arouse it. “Someone must be to blame for my feeling bad”—this way of reasoning is common to all sickly people, all the more when the true cause of their feeling bad, the physiological cause, remains hidden from them. (It may lie in a disease of the sympathetic nerve, excessive secretion of bile, a shortage of potassium sulfate and phosphate in the blood, pressure in the lower abdomen that obstructs blood circulation, degeneration of the ovaries, and the like.) All sufferers are terrifyingly ready and inventive when it comes to pretexts for painful emotions. They already enjoy their suspicion, their brooding over wickedness and apparent wrongs done to them. They rummage through the guts of their past and present for dark, questionable stories that allow them to revel in a tormenting suspicion and intoxicate themselves with their own poison of malice. They tear open the oldest wounds. They bleed to death from scars that healed long ago. They turn friends, wives, children, and everyone else closest to them into wrongdoers. “I am suffering. Someone must be to blame for it”—that is how every sickly sheep thinks. But its shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to it: “Quite right, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it. But you yourself are that someone. You alone are to blame for it—you alone are to blame for yourself!” … That is bold enough, false enough. But at least one thing has been achieved: as I said, the direction of resentment has been changed.

16 We can now guess what, in my view, life's instinct as a healer has at least tried to do through the ascetic priest. We can see what use it had to make of the temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and falsely reasoned concepts as “guilt,” “sin,” “sinfulness,” “corruption,” “damnation”: to make the sick harmless to a degree, to make the incurable destroy themselves, to direct the less seriously sick firmly toward themselves, turning their resentment backward (“One thing is needed”—), and in this way to use the bad instincts of all sufferers for self-discipline, self-monitoring, self-overcoming. Of course, a “medication” like this, which works only on emotions, cannot possibly be a real cure for the sick in the physiological sense. We could not even claim that life's instinct had in any way envisioned or intended a cure here. On one side, a kind of crowding together and organization of the sick—the most popular name for it is “church.” On the other, a kind of provisional protection for those who have turned out healthier, those more generously cast. Thus the opening of a gulf between healthy and sick—that was all, for a long time! And it was much! It was very much! … [As you can see, I start this essay from an assumption that I do not first need to justify to the kind of readers I need: that human “sinfulness” is not a fact, but only an interpretation of a fact, namely a physiological disturbance. It is that disturbance seen from a moral and religious perspective that no longer has any binding force for us.—The fact that someone feels “guilty,” “sinful,” in no way proves that he is right to feel that way, any more than someone is healthy simply because he feels healthy. Just recall the famous witch trials. At the time, the most perceptive and humane judges did not doubt that there was guilt here. The “witches” themselves did not doubt it. Yet there was no guilt.—To state that assumption more broadly: I do not regard “pain of the soul” itself as a fact at all, but only as an interpretation—a causal interpretation—of facts that still cannot be precisely formulated. So it is something that remains entirely up in the air and has no scientific authority: really just a fat word in place of an actually spindly question mark. If someone cannot get over a “pain of the soul,” that is, crudely put, not because of his “soul.” More likely it is because of his belly. (Crudely put, as I said: this by no means expresses a wish to be heard crudely or understood crudely as well …) A strong person who has turned out well digests his experiences, including deeds and misdeeds, as he digests his meals, even when he has hard mouthfuls to swallow. If he “cannot get over” an experience, this kind of indigestion is just as physiological as the other kind—and is actually often just one of the results of that other kind.—Between ourselves, one can hold this view and still be the strictest opponent of all materialism …]

17 But is this ascetic priest really a doctor?—We have already understood why we can hardly allow ourselves to call him one, however much he likes to feel like a “savior” and be honored as one. He fights only the suffering itself, the sufferer's distress, not its cause, not the actual sickness. That must be our most basic objection to priestly medication. But once we adopt the perspective that is the only one the priest knows and has, there is almost no end to our admiration for everything he has seen, sought, and found within it. Easing suffering, “comforting” of every kind—that turns out to be his genius itself. How inventively he has understood his task of comforting! How boldly and without hesitation he has chosen the means for it! Christianity in particular could be called a great storehouse of the most ingenious means of comfort. So much that refreshes, eases, and numbs has been piled up in it. So much that is supremely dangerous and daring has been attempted for this purpose. In particular, with such subtle, refined, southern refinement, it has guessed what stimulating emotions can overcome, at least for a while, the deep depression, the leaden exhaustion, the black sadness of people whose physiology is inhibited. For in general, all great religions have mainly been concerned with fighting a certain exhaustion and heaviness that has become epidemic. From the start, we can take it as probable that, from time to time in certain places on earth, a feeling of physiological inhibition must almost necessarily take hold of broad masses of people. But because physiological knowledge is lacking, people do not become conscious of it as such. Its “cause” and its remedy can therefore only be sought and attempted in psychological and moral terms. (This is my most general formula for what is commonly called a “religion.”) Such a feeling of inhibition can have the most varied origins. It may result from the crossing of races that differ too much, or of social classes. Classes always also express differences in ancestry and race: the European “world-weariness,” the “pessimism” of the nineteenth century, is essentially the result of an absurdly sudden mixing of classes. Or it may be caused by a mistaken emigration: a race has ended up in a climate beyond its powers of adaptation, as happened to the Indians in India. Or it may be the aftereffect of a race's age and exhaustion, as with Parisian pessimism from 1850 onward. Or of a wrong diet: the alcoholism of the Middle Ages; the nonsense of the vegetarians, who admittedly have the authority of Shakespeare's Sir Andrew Aguecheek on their side. Or of corruption of the blood, malaria, syphilis, and the like: German depression after the Thirty Years' War, which infected half of Germany with nasty diseases and so prepared the ground for German servility, German faintheartedness. In each such case, an attempt is made on the grandest scale to fight the feeling of distress. Let us briefly look into its most important practices and forms. (Naturally, I leave entirely aside here the actual philosophers' fight against the feeling of distress, which usually goes on at the same time. It is interesting enough, but too absurd, too irrelevant in practice, too much like spinning cobwebs and hanging around street corners. For instance, when pain is supposed to be proved an error, on the naive assumption that pain must disappear once the error in it is recognized—but look! It took care not to disappear …) First, this dominant distress is fought by means that reduce the overall feeling of being alive to its lowest point. If possible, no more willing, no more wishing at all. Avoid anything that creates emotion, that stirs the “blood” (eat no salt: the fakir's health rule). Do not love; do not hate; be even-tempered; do not take revenge; do not enrich yourself; do not work; beg. If possible, no woman, or as little woman as possible. Intellectually, Pascal's principle: “One must make oneself stupid.” The result, in psychological and moral terms: “stripping away the self,” “sanctification.” In physiological terms: hypnotizing. An attempt to achieve something for humans approximating what hibernation is for some animal species, what summer sleep is for many plants in hot climates: a minimum of consumption and metabolism, at which life only just continues without really entering consciousness anymore. An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent on this goal—was it perhaps in vain? … There can be no doubt at all that such athletes of “holiness,” who abound in every age and almost every people, really did find genuine release from what they fought with such rigorous training. In countless cases they really did get free of that deep physiological depression with the help of their system of hypnotizing methods. That is why their method is among the most universal facts of ethnology. Nor do we have any right to count such an intention to starve bodily life and desire as a symptom of insanity in itself, as a clumsy breed of roast-beef-gobbling “free spirits” and other Sir Andrew Aguecheeks like to do. It is all the more certain that this provides, or can provide, the path to all kinds of mental disorders. To “inner lights,” for instance, as among the Hesychasts of Mount Athos; to hallucinations of sounds and shapes; to floods of lust and ecstasies of sensuality (the history of Saint Teresa). Naturally, those afflicted by such states have always given them the most extravagantly false interpretation possible. But we should not miss the tone of utterly convinced gratitude that already sounds in the very will to interpret them this way. The highest state, redemption itself, that finally achieved complete hypnosis and stillness, always counts for them as the mystery itself, which even the highest symbols cannot adequately express. It is entering and returning home to the ground of things, becoming free of all delusion, “knowledge,” “truth,” “being,” release from every goal, every wish, every action. It is a beyond even of good and evil. “Good and evil,” says the Buddhist, “both are chains. The perfected one has become master over both.” “Things done and undone,” says the believer in Vedanta, “cause him no pain. As a wise man he shakes off good and evil. His realm no longer suffers from any deed. He has gone beyond good and evil, beyond both.” So this is an outlook shared throughout India, as Brahmanist as it is Buddhist. (Neither in Indian nor in Christian thought does that “redemption” count as achievable through virtue, through moral improvement, however highly they rate the hypnotizing value of virtue. Keep that firmly in mind. It simply corresponds to the facts, incidentally. Having remained truthful here may count as the best piece of realism in the three greatest religions, which are otherwise so thoroughly moralized. “For the one who knows, there is no duty” … “Redemption does not come about through the addition of virtues, for it consists in being one with Brahman, to which no perfection can be added. Nor does it consist in the removal of faults, for Brahman, oneness with which constitutes redemption, is eternally pure.” These passages are from Shankara's commentary, quoted by the first real expert on Indian philosophy in Europe, my friend Paul Deussen.) So let us honor “redemption” in the great religions. On the other hand, we find it a little hard to stay serious about the value these people, tired of life and too tired even to dream, already place on deep sleep. Deep sleep is already entering Brahman, already an achieved mystical union with God. “When he has fallen asleep completely,” says the oldest, most respected “scripture” on this subject, “and has come entirely to rest, so that he no longer sees any dream image, then, dear one, he is united with what is; he has entered into himself. Embraced by the knowing self, he is no longer conscious of what is outside or inside. Neither day nor night crosses this bridge, nor old age, nor death, nor suffering, nor good deed, nor evil deed.” “In deep sleep,” the believers in this deepest of the three great religions likewise say, “the soul rises out of this body, enters the highest light, and thereby comes forth in its own form. There it is the highest spirit itself, which wanders about joking, playing, and enjoying itself, whether with women or with chariots or with friends. There it no longer thinks back to this appendage of a body, to which prana (the breath of life) is harnessed like a draft animal to a cart.” Still, here too, as in the case of “redemption,” let us remember that, however magnificent the oriental exaggeration, what is basically being expressed is only the same assessment made by the clear, cool, Greek-cool, but suffering Epicurus. The hypnotic feeling of nothingness, the peace of the deepest sleep, freedom from suffering, in short—sufferers and the profoundly distressed may indeed count that as the highest good, the value of values. They must value it positively and feel it to be the positive itself. (By the same logic of feeling, nothingness is called God in all pessimistic religions.)

18 Much more often than such a hypnotic overall reduction of sensitivity, of the ability to feel pain, people try another kind of training against depressed states. That hypnotic reduction already requires rarer strengths, above all courage, contempt for opinion, “intellectual stoicism.” The other training is easier in any case: mechanical activity. There is no doubt at all that it considerably eases a suffering existence. Today people call this fact, somewhat dishonestly, “the blessing of work.” The relief consists in systematically diverting the sufferer's interest from his suffering. An action, and then only another action, constantly enters consciousness. As a result, little room remains there for suffering. For this room of human consciousness is narrow! Mechanical activity and everything that goes with it: absolute regularity, punctual obedience without thought, a way of life fixed once and for all, filling up time, a certain permission, even a training, to be “impersonal,” to forget oneself, to “neglect oneself.” How thoroughly and subtly the ascetic priest has known how to use these in fighting pain! Especially when he dealt with sufferers from the lower classes, with work slaves or prisoners—or with women, who are usually both at once, work slaves and prisoners—he needed little more than a little skill in renaming and rechristening things. Then they could see a benefit, a relative happiness, in things they had hated. The slave's dissatisfaction with his lot was certainly not invented by the priests.—An even more valued means of fighting depression is to prescribe a small pleasure, one that is easily accessible and can be made a regular practice. This medication is often used together with the one just discussed. The most common form in which pleasure is prescribed as a remedy in this way is the pleasure of giving pleasure: doing good, giving gifts, easing burdens, helping, encouraging, comforting, praising, honoring. By prescribing “love of one's neighbor,” the ascetic priest is basically prescribing stimulation of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, although in the most cautious dose: the will to power. The happiness of the “smallest superiority,” which comes with all doing good, being useful, helping, honoring, is the most abundant means of comfort that the physiologically inhibited commonly use, provided they are well advised. Otherwise, they hurt one another, naturally obeying the same basic instinct. When we look for the beginnings of Christianity in the Roman world, we find mutual-support associations, associations for the poor, the sick, and burials, grown up on the lowest ground of the society of that time. In them, that chief means against depression, the small pleasure of doing good to one another, was consciously cultivated. Perhaps this was something new then, a real discovery? Now, in a “will to mutuality” aroused this way, a will to form a herd, a “congregation,” a “small gathering,” that will to power, stimulated even if only in the smallest way, must in turn erupt in a new and much fuller form. Forming a herd is an essential step and victory in the fight against depression. As the congregation grows, a new interest also strengthens in the individual. Often enough it lifts him above the most personal part of his discontent, his aversion to himself (Geulincx's “self-contempt”). All the sick and sickly instinctively seek an organization into a herd, out of a desire to shake off dull distress and the feeling of weakness. The ascetic priest guesses this instinct and encourages it. Wherever there are herds, it was the instinct of weakness that wanted the herd, and priestly cleverness that organized it. For we must not overlook this: by the same necessity of nature, the strong seek to move apart, while the weak seek to come together. When the strong join forces, it is only in the prospect of a shared aggressive action and a shared satisfaction of their will to power, with much resistance from each individual's conscience. The weak, by contrast, arrange themselves together, taking pleasure in this very arrangement. Their instinct is as satisfied by it as the instinct of the born “masters”—that is, the solitary beast-of-prey species of human being—is basically irritated and unsettled by organization. Under every oligarchy—as all history teaches—there is always a hidden tyrannical craving. Every oligarchy constantly trembles from the tension each of its members needs to keep this craving under control. (That, for example, was the Greek way. Plato testifies to it in a hundred passages: Plato, who knew his own kind—and himself …)

19 The ascetic priest's methods that we have met so far are these: lowering the overall feeling of being alive; mechanical activity; small pleasures, especially the pleasure of “loving your neighbor”; organizing people into a herd; awakening a sense of the community's power, so that the individual's pleasure in the community's success drowns out his unhappiness with himself. By modern standards, these are his innocent methods of fighting distress. Let us now turn to the more interesting ones, the “guilty” ones. They all involve one thing: some kind of emotional excess, used as the most effective way to numb dull, paralyzing, long-lasting pain. This is why priests have shown almost endless inventiveness in thinking through this one question: “How can emotional excess be produced?” … That sounds harsh. It would obviously sound sweeter, and perhaps go down better, if I said something like “the ascetic priest has always made use of the inspiration found in all strong emotions.” But why keep stroking the pampered ears of our modern softies? Why should we give even an inch to their Tartuffe-style hypocrisy with words? For us psychologists, that would already be Tartuffe-style hypocrisy in action, quite apart from the disgust it would cause us. If a psychologist today shows good taste in anything—others might say integrity—it is in resisting the shamefully moralized way of speaking that has gradually covered all modern judgments about people and things with slime. Let us be clear about this. The most distinctive mark of modern souls and modern books is not lying. It is their deeply ingrained innocence in moralistic dishonesty. Having to keep discovering this “innocence” everywhere may be the most disgusting part of all the far from harmless work a psychologist must do today. It is part of our great danger. It is a path that may lead precisely us to the great disgust … I have no doubt about the only use modern books would or could have for later generations—assuming they last, which is admittedly nothing to fear, and assuming there will one day be later generations with stricter, harder, healthier taste. Indeed, this is the use everything modern could have for them: as something to make them vomit. That is because of its moral sugarcoating and falseness, its deepest effeminacy, which likes to call itself “idealism” and certainly believes itself to be idealism. Our educated people today, our “good people,” do not lie—that is true. But it is not to their credit! The real lie, the genuine, determined, “honest” lie—on whose value one should hear Plato—would be far too hard, too strong for them. It would demand something we must not demand of them: that they open their eyes to themselves, that they know how to tell “true” from “false” in themselves. Only the dishonest lie suits them. Anyone who considers himself a “good person” today is completely incapable of taking any position on anything except a dishonestly deceitful one: profoundly deceitful, but innocently deceitful, sincerely deceitful, wide-eyed and deceitful, virtuously deceitful. These “good people” have all now been moralized through and through. As far as honesty goes, they have been disgraced and ruined for all eternity. Which of them could still stand a truth “about human beings”! … Or, to put the question more concretely: which of them could bear a true biography! … A few signs: Lord Byron wrote down some intensely personal things about himself. But Thomas Moore was “too good” for them: he burned his friend's papers. Dr. Gwinner, the executor of Schopenhauer's will, is said to have done the same. Schopenhauer too had written some things about himself and perhaps against himself as well (“to himself”). The capable American Thayer, Beethoven's biographer, suddenly stopped his work. Once his account reached a certain point in this venerable and naive life, he could no longer stand it … The moral: what clever man today would still write an honest word about himself? Unless, of course, he belonged to the order of holy recklessness. We are promised an autobiography by Richard Wagner. Who doubts that it will be a clever autobiography? … Let us also remember the comical horror that the Catholic priest Janssen caused in Germany with his unimaginably blockish and harmless picture of the German Reformation movement. What would people do if someone once told us about this movement differently? If a real psychologist once told us about a real Luther? No longer with a country pastor's moralistic simplicity, no longer with Protestant historians' sugary, considerate bashfulness, but with, say, the fearlessness of a Taine, from a position of strength of soul, rather than clever indulgence toward strength? … (The Germans, incidentally, have recently produced a fine enough example of the classic type of this last quality. They may certainly claim him for themselves, and to their credit: their Leopold Ranke, that born, classic advocate of every stronger cause, that cleverest of all clever “men of facts.”)

20 But I expect I have made myself understood. All in all, there is reason enough, isn't there, for us psychologists today to remain somewhat suspicious of ourselves? … Probably we too are still “too good” for our trade. Probably we too are still the victims, the prey, the sick products of this moralized taste of our time, however much we feel we despise it. Probably it still infects us as well. What was that diplomat's warning when he spoke to his own kind? “Above all, gentlemen, let us distrust our first impulses!” he said. “They are almost always good” … Every psychologist today should speak to his own kind in the same way … And that brings us back to our problem. It really does demand some strictness from us, some distrust, especially of our “first impulses.” The ascetic ideal serving an aim of emotional excess: anyone who remembers the previous essay will already anticipate the main substance of what comes next, compressed into those nine words. To wrench the human soul out of all its joints, to plunge it into terror, chills, burning heat, and rapture so completely that it escapes, as if struck by lightning, from everything small and petty in distress, dullness, and low spirits: what paths lead to this goal? And which of them are the surest? … Basically, all the great emotions can do it, provided they discharge suddenly: anger, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty. And the ascetic priest really has enlisted, without a second thought, the whole pack of wild dogs in human beings. He has let loose now this one, now that one, always for the same purpose: to wake people from their slow sadness, to drive off their dull pain and lingering misery, at least for a while. He has always done this under a religious interpretation and “justification” as well. Every such emotional excess demands its payment afterward, of course: it makes the sick person sicker. By modern standards, that makes this kind of remedy for pain a “guilty” one. Yet fairness requires us to insist all the more that it was used with a good conscience. The ascetic priest prescribed it with the deepest belief that it was useful, indeed essential—often enough almost breaking down himself before the misery he created. We must also insist that the violent physical backlash from such excesses, perhaps even mental disorders, does not really conflict with the basic purpose of this kind of treatment. As shown earlier, it was not aimed at curing diseases. It aimed to fight the distress of depression, to ease it, to numb it. This goal was reached this way too. The main trick the ascetic priest allowed himself, to make the human soul play every kind of agonizing and ecstatic music, was—everyone knows this—to exploit the feeling of guilt. The previous essay briefly suggested where it came from, as a piece of animal psychology and nothing more. There we met the feeling of guilt in something like its raw state. Only in the hands of the priest, the true artist in feelings of guilt, did it take shape—and what a shape! “Sin”—the priest's reinterpretation of the animal's “bad conscience,” its cruelty turned backward—has so far been the greatest event in the history of the sick soul. In it we have religious interpretation's most dangerous and disastrous feat of artistry. A person suffers from himself, somehow, at any rate physically, rather like an animal locked in a cage, unsure why or what for. He longs for reasons—reasons bring relief—and also for remedies and narcotics. At last he consults someone who knows even hidden things. And look! He gets a hint. His magician, the ascetic priest, gives him the first hint about the “cause” of his suffering. He must look for it in himself, in some guilt, in a piece of the past. He must understand his suffering itself as a state of punishment … The unhappy man has listened and understood. Now he is like a hen with a line drawn around it. He can no longer get out of this circle of lines. The sick person has been turned into “the sinner” … And now, for a few thousand years, we cannot escape the sight of this new sick person, “the sinner”—will we ever escape it again? Wherever we look, we find the sinner's hypnotic gaze, always moving in one direction: toward “guilt” as the only cause of suffering. Everywhere the evil conscience, that “horrible beast,” to use Luther's words. Everywhere the past chewed over again, the deed distorted, the “green eye” for every action. Everywhere the will to misunderstand suffering made into the substance of life, its reinterpretation as feelings of guilt, fear, and punishment. Everywhere the scourge, the hair shirt, the starving body, remorse. Everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the wheel, in the cruel machinery of a restless, sickly lustful conscience. Everywhere silent torment, extreme fear, the tortured heart's agony, the spasms of an unknown happiness, the cry for “redemption.” This system of procedures really did thoroughly overcome the old depression, heaviness, and weariness. Life became very interesting again. Awake, eternally awake, sleepless, burning, charred, exhausted and yet not tired—that was how the person looked, “the sinner,” who had been initiated into these mysteries. This old, great magician in the fight against distress, the ascetic priest, had clearly won. His kingdom had come. People no longer complained against pain; they thirsted for pain. “More pain! More pain!” That was the craving cry of his disciples and initiates for centuries. Every emotional excess that hurt, everything that broke, overthrew, crushed, transported, enraptured, the secret of torture chambers, the inventiveness of hell itself—everything had now been discovered, guessed, exploited. Everything was at the magician's command. From then on, everything served the victory of his ideal, the ascetic ideal … “My kingdom is not of this world,” he said, as he had before. Did he really still have the right to say that? … Goethe claimed that there were only thirty-six tragic situations. From this we can guess, if we did not already know, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. That priest knows more …

21 For this whole kind of priestly treatment, the “guilty” kind, every word of criticism is one word too many. Would anyone care to maintain that the kind of emotional excess the ascetic priest usually prescribes for his sick people has ever really helped any sick person? Of course, he prescribes it under the holiest names, and is himself filled with a sense of his purpose's holiness. At least we should agree on what “help” means. If it means that such a system of treatment has improved human beings, I do not object. I only add what “improved” means to me: the same as “tamed,” “weakened,” “discouraged,” “made more refined,” “made soft,” “emasculated”—so almost the same as harmed … But when we are dealing mainly with sick, gloomy, depressed people, such a system makes the sick person sicker in every case, even assuming it makes him “better.” Just ask psychiatrists what systematically applied torments of penance, remorse, and spasms of redemption always bring with them. Ask history as well. Wherever the ascetic priest has imposed this treatment on the sick, sickness has grown alarmingly fast, both deeper and wider. What was always the “result”? A shattered nervous system, added to whatever was already sick. And this happened on the largest and smallest scales, in individuals and in masses. Following this training in penance and redemption, we find enormous epidemics of epilepsy, the greatest history knows, such as the medieval dancers of St. Vitus and St. John. We find another form of its aftermath in terrible paralysis and lasting depression, which can sometimes turn the character of a people or a city—Geneva, Basel—into its opposite once and for all. Witchcraft hysteria belongs here too, something related to sleepwalking: eight major epidemic outbreaks of it between 1564 and 1605 alone. Following this training, we also find those mass deliriums that longed for death. Their dreadful cry, “Long live death,” could be heard across all Europe, interrupted now by outbreaks of lust, now by frenzies of destruction. The same changes of emotion, with the same pauses and sudden turns, can still be observed everywhere today whenever the ascetic teaching of sin once again achieves a great success. (Religious neurosis appears as a form of “epilepsy”: there is no doubt of that. What it is? That remains the question.) Taken as a whole, the ascetic ideal and its sublimely moral worship have written themselves into the whole history of humanity in a terrible and unforgettable way—and unfortunately not only into its history … This is the cleverest, most unscrupulous, and most dangerous system for organizing all the means of emotional excess under the protection of holy intentions. I can think of hardly anything else that has done such destructive damage to health and racial strength, especially among Europeans, as this ideal. Without any exaggeration, we may call it the real catastrophe in the history of European health. At most, the specifically Germanic influence might rank alongside it. I mean Europe's poisoning by alcohol, which has so far kept strict pace with the Germanic peoples' political and racial supremacy—wherever they injected their blood, they also injected their vice. Third in line we should name syphilis—next, but a long way behind.

22 Wherever the ascetic priest has gained power, he has damaged mental health. As a result, he has also damaged taste in the arts and literature—and he is still damaging it. “As a result”? I hope people will simply grant me that “as a result.” At least, I do not intend to prove it first. Just one pointer: it concerns the foundational book of Christian literature, its real model, its “book in itself.” Even amid the splendor of Greece and Rome, which was also a splendor of books, with the ancient world's writings still before them, not yet stunted and smashed, Christian agitators in their simplicity and vanity already dared to decree: “We too have our classical literature; we do not need the Greeks' literature.” We call them Church Fathers. They said this at a time when people could still read certain books we would now trade half of entire literatures to own. And they pointed proudly to books of legends, letters from apostles, and little tracts defending the faith. Much as the English “Salvation Army” today fights its battle against Shakespeare and other “heathens” with a related literature. I do not love the “New Testament,” as you will already have guessed. It almost troubles me to stand so alone in my taste concerning this most valued, most overvalued piece of writing—the taste of two thousand years is against me. But what can I do! “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise”—I have the courage to own my bad taste. The Old Testament—yes, that is something quite different. All respect to the Old Testament! In it I find great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something extremely rare on earth: the unmatched naivety of the strong heart. More than that, I find a people. In the New Testament, by contrast, nothing but petty sectarian goings-on, nothing but rococo ornamentation of the soul, nothing but flourishes, nooks, and oddities, nothing but the atmosphere of little religious gatherings. Nor should we forget an occasional touch of sugary pastoral life. That belongs to the period and to the Roman province, and is Hellenistic rather than Jewish. Humility and self-importance side by side. A chattering of feelings that almost numbs you. Emotional intensity, no passion. Embarrassing gestures. Clearly, all good upbringing was missing here. How can people make as much fuss about their little vices as these pious little men do! Not a rooster crows about them, much less God. In the end, all these little provincial people even want “the crown of eternal life.” What for? In return for what? Presumption cannot go any further. An “immortal” Peter: who could stand him! Their ambition is laughable. They chew over their most personal affairs, their stupidities, sorrows, and street-corner idlers' worries, as if reality in itself were obliged to bother with them. They never tire of dragging God himself into the tiniest misery they find themselves in. And this constant first-name familiarity with God, in the worst taste! This Jewish, not only Jewish, pushing themselves on God with mouth and paw! … There are small, despised “heathen peoples” in eastern Asia from whom these first Christians could have learned something essential: some tact in showing reverence. As Christian missionaries report, those peoples do not allow themselves even to speak their god's name. That seems refined enough to me. It is certainly too refined not just for the “first” Christians. To feel the contrast, remember Luther, that “most eloquent” and most presumptuous peasant Germany ever had. Remember the Lutheran tone that he himself liked best in his private conversations with God. Luther's resistance to the Church's saints as intermediaries—especially to “the devil's sow, the pope”—was undoubtedly, at bottom, the resistance of a lout annoyed by the Church's good etiquette. That etiquette of reverence, born of priestly taste, admits only the more consecrated and quieter people to the holy of holies, and shuts the louts out. Here, of all places, they are never to have a say. But Luther the peasant absolutely wanted things otherwise. This was not German enough for him. Above all, he wanted to speak directly, speak for himself, speak “without restraint” with his God … Well, he did it. The ascetic ideal, as you may guess, has never been a school of good taste anywhere, still less of good manners. At best, it was a school of priestly manners. That is because it has something inside it that is the mortal enemy of all good manners: a lack of restraint, a dislike of restraint. It is itself an “absolute extreme.”

23 The ascetic ideal has damaged not only health and taste. It has damaged a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth thing as well. I will take care not to say everything it has damaged—when would I ever finish! What I want to bring to light here is not what this ideal has done. It is only what it means, what it lets us infer, what lies hidden behind it, beneath it, inside it, what it provisionally and unclearly expresses, overloaded with question marks and misunderstandings. Only for this purpose could I not spare my readers a look at the enormous scale of its effects, including its disastrous effects: to prepare them for the final and most terrible aspect that the question of this ideal's meaning has for me. What does the power of this ideal mean, the enormous scale of its power? Why has it been given so much room? Why hasn't it met with better resistance? The ascetic ideal expresses a will. Where is the opposing will that expresses an opposing ideal? The ascetic ideal has a goal. That goal is broad enough to make all the other interests of human existence seem petty and narrow beside it. It ruthlessly interprets ages, peoples, and individuals in terms of this one goal. It accepts no other interpretation, no other goal. It rejects, denies, affirms, and confirms only in terms of its interpretation—and has any system of interpretation ever been thought through more completely? It submits to no power. Instead, it believes it has priority over every power, that it stands unconditionally apart and above every power in rank. It believes that no power on earth exists without first having to receive from it a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as a tool for its work, as a path and means to its goal, to one goal … Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? Why is that counterpart missing? … Where is the other “one goal”? … But people tell me it is not missing. It has not only fought a long and successful battle with that ideal; in all the main points it has already gained mastery over it. Our whole modern science is said to prove this. This modern science, a genuine philosophy of reality, clearly believes in itself alone, clearly has the courage to be itself and the will to be itself, and has so far managed perfectly well without God, an afterlife, or virtues of denial. But such noise and agitators' chatter get nowhere with me. These trumpeters of reality are bad musicians. It is easy enough to hear that their voices do not come from the depths. The abyss of the scientific conscience does not speak through them—for today the scientific conscience is an abyss. The word “science” in such trumpeters' mouths is simply an obscenity, an abuse, a shamelessness. The truth is exactly the opposite of what is claimed here. Science today has absolutely no faith in itself, let alone an ideal above itself. And where it is still passion, love, burning heat, suffering, it is not the opposite of that ascetic ideal, but its latest and noblest form itself. Does that sound strange too? … Certainly, today's scholars also include plenty of decent, modest working people who like their little corner. Because they like it there, they sometimes grow a little immodest in loudly demanding that people in general ought to be satisfied today, especially in science: there is so much useful work to do in it. I do not object. Least of all would I want to spoil these honest workers' enjoyment of their craft, for I take pleasure in their work. But the fact that hard work is now being done in science, and that there are satisfied workers, does not in any way prove that science as a whole today has a goal, a will, an ideal, a passion born of great faith. As I said, the opposite is true. Where science is not the latest form of the ascetic ideal—the cases in question are too rare, noble, and select to change the overall judgment—it is today a hiding place for every kind of discontent, disbelief, gnawing worm, self-contempt, and bad conscience. It is the very restlessness of having no ideal, the suffering caused by a lack of great love, the dissatisfaction with an unwilling contentment. Oh, what doesn't science hide today! How much it is at least supposed to hide! The competence of our best scholars, their thoughtlessly intense hard work, their heads smoking day and night, their mastery of their craft itself—how often the real point of all this is to keep themselves from seeing something! Science as a means of numbing oneself: do you know about that? … Anyone who deals with scholars discovers that sometimes a harmless word wounds them to the bone. You turn your scholarly friends bitterly against you at the very moment when you think you are honoring them. You drive them completely out of control, simply because you were too insensitive to guess whom you were really dealing with: sufferers who refuse to admit to themselves what they are, numbed people without self-awareness, who fear only one thing: coming to consciousness …

24 Now look, by contrast, at those rarer cases I mentioned, the last idealists among today's philosophers and scholars. Have we perhaps found in them the opponents of the ascetic ideal we were looking for, the holders of its counterideal? These “unbelievers”—for that is what they all are—really do believe they are its opponents. It seems to be their last piece of faith. They are so serious on this point; it is precisely here that their words and gestures become passionate. But must what they believe therefore be true? … We “knowers” have gradually become suspicious of every kind of believer. Our suspicion has gradually trained us to draw the opposite conclusion from the one people used to draw. Wherever the strength of a belief becomes very prominent, we infer a certain weakness in its provability, even the improbability of what is believed. We too do not deny that faith “makes people blessed.” Precisely for that reason, we deny that faith proves anything. A strong faith that makes people blessed casts suspicion on what it believes. It does not establish “truth”; it establishes a certain probability—of deception. How do things stand in this case? These people today who say no and stand apart, these people uncompromising on one point, their demand for intellectual cleanliness; these hard, strict, self-denying, heroic minds who do honor to our age; all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists; these skeptics, these minds withholding judgment, these minds withering with fever—for in some sense they are all that; these last idealists of knowledge, in whom alone the intellectual conscience lives and has taken flesh today: they really believe they are as free as possible from the ascetic ideal, these “free, very free spirits.” And yet, let me tell them what they cannot see for themselves, because they stand too close to themselves: this ideal is precisely their ideal too. They themselves embody it today, perhaps nobody else does. They are its most spiritualized offspring, its most advanced troop of warriors and scouts, its most insidious, delicate, elusive form of seduction. If I can claim to solve riddles in anything, let it be in this statement. They are far from being free spirits, because they still believe in truth … When the Christian Crusaders in the East encountered that invincible order of Assassins, that supreme order of free spirits, whose lowest ranks lived in an obedience no monastic order has ever matched, they somehow also received a hint about the symbol and secret password reserved for the highest ranks as their secret: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” … Well, that was freedom of spirit. That meant giving up faith in truth itself … Has any European, any Christian free spirit ever strayed into this statement and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know the Minotaur of this cave from experience? … I doubt it. More than that, I know otherwise. Nothing is more foreign to these people who are uncompromising on one point, these so-called “free spirits,” than freedom and release from restraints in that sense. In no respect are they more tightly bound. In their very faith in truth they are firm and unconditional as nobody else is. Perhaps I know all this at too close a range: that admirable self-denial of philosophers to which such a faith commits them; that stoicism of the intellect that finally forbids itself to say no just as strictly as it forbids itself to say yes; that wish to stop at the factual, at the brute fact; that fatalism of “little facts”—that little fact-alism, as I call it—in which French science now seeks a kind of moral superiority over German science; that refusal to interpret at all, to do violence, rearrange, shorten, omit, stuff, invent, falsify, and do whatever else belongs to the essence of all interpretation. Taken as a whole, this expresses self-denial as a virtue just as much as any rejection of sensuality does. Basically, it is only a form of that denial. But what compels it, that unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if it operates as that ideal's unconscious command. Let us not deceive ourselves about this. It is faith in a metaphysical value, a value of truth in itself, guaranteed and certified by that ideal alone. It stands and falls with that ideal. Strictly speaking, there is no science “without assumptions” at all. The thought of such a science cannot be thought through; it is logically unsound. A philosophy, a “faith,” must always come first, so that science can gain from it a direction, a meaning, a boundary, a method, a right to exist. (Anyone who understands this the other way around, anyone who sets out, for example, to put philosophy “on a strictly scientific foundation,” first needs to turn not just philosophy but truth itself upside down: the worst possible breach of decency toward two such venerable ladies!) Yes, there is no doubt—and here I let my “Gay Science” speak; see its fifth book, p. 263—“the truthful person, in that daring and ultimate sense presupposed by faith in science, thereby affirms a different world from that of life, nature, and history. And insofar as he affirms this ‘other world,’ what then? Mustn't he thereby deny its counterpart, this world, our world? … It is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests. We too, today's knowers, we godless people and opponents of metaphysics, still take our fire from the blaze lit by a faith thousands of years old: that Christian faith, which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine … But what if precisely this grows more and more unbelievable? What if nothing turns out to be divine except error, blindness, the lie? What if God himself turns out to be our longest lie?”—Here we need to stop and think for a long time. Science itself now needs a justification—which is not even to say that there is one for it. Look at the oldest and the newest philosophies with this question in mind. None of them shows any awareness of how far the will to truth itself first needs a justification. There is a gap here in every philosophy. Why? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been master over all philosophy. Because truth was set up as being, as God, as the highest authority itself. Because truth was not allowed to be a problem at all. Do you understand this “allowed”? From the moment that faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is also a new problem: the problem of the value of truth. The will to truth needs a critique—let us define our own task this way. We must, as an experiment, once call into question the value of truth … (Anyone who finds this too briefly stated should read the section of “The Gay Science” titled “To What Extent We Too Are Still Pious,” pp. 260 ff. Better still, read the whole fifth book of that work, and also the preface to “Daybreak.”)

25 No! Do not offer me science when I am looking for the natural opponent of the ascetic ideal, when I ask: “Where is the opposing will that expresses its opposing ideal?” Science cannot stand on its own nearly well enough for that. In every respect, it first needs an ideal of value, a power that creates values, in whose service it is allowed to believe in itself. It never creates values itself. Its relationship to the ascetic ideal is still by no means inherently hostile. For the most part, it is actually the driving force in that ideal's inner development. Look more closely, and its opposition and struggle do not concern the ideal itself at all. They concern only its outer defenses, its clothing, its play of masks, its temporary hardening, its turning wooden and dogmatic. Science frees up the life within the ideal again by denying its outward, public form. These two, science and the ascetic ideal, stand on the same ground, as I have already suggested. They share the same overvaluation of truth—or, more accurately, the same belief that truth cannot be assessed in value, cannot be criticized. This makes them necessarily allies. So if they are fought, they can only ever be fought and called into question together. An assessment of the ascetic ideal's value inevitably brings with it an assessment of science's value. Get your eyes clear and your ears sharp for this in good time! (Art, let me say in advance, since I will come back to this at length sometime, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than science is. In art, the lie itself is sanctified, and the will to deceive has a good conscience on its side. Plato's instinct sensed this: he was the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato against Homer: that is the whole, the genuine opposition. On one side, the man of the “beyond,” with the best of intentions, the great slanderer of life; on the other, the one who unintentionally makes life divine, the golden nature. An artist's servitude to the ascetic ideal is therefore the truest possible corruption of an artist, unfortunately one of the most common. For nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Calculated in physiological terms too, science rests on the same ground as the ascetic ideal. A certain impoverishment of life is the prerequisite in both: emotions grown cool, a slower pace, dialectic in place of instinct, seriousness stamped on faces and gestures. Seriousness, that most unmistakable badge of a more laborious metabolism, of life struggling and working harder. Look at the periods in a people's history when the scholar steps to the front. They are periods of fatigue, often of evening, of decline. Overflowing strength, confidence in life, confidence in the future are gone. The predominance of mandarins never means anything good. No more than the rise of democracy, of tribunals to arbitrate peace instead of wars, of equal rights for women, of the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. (Science understood as a problem: what does science mean? On this, see the preface to “The Birth of Tragedy.”) No! This “modern science”—just open your eyes to it!—is for now the ascetic ideal's best ally, precisely because it is the least aware of its role, the least intentional, the most hidden and underground! Until now, they have played the same game, the “poor in spirit” and the scientific opponents of that ideal. (Incidentally, take care not to think of the latter as their opposites, as the rich in spirit, say. They are not. I called them minds withering with fever.) Those famous victories of theirs: undoubtedly they are victories—but over what? The ascetic ideal was not defeated in them at all. Rather, it was made stronger, harder to grasp, more spiritual, more insidious, as science repeatedly and ruthlessly stripped off and tore down a wall, an outer defense that had been built onto it and coarsened its appearance. Does anyone really think that the defeat of theological astronomy, for example, means the defeat of that ideal? … Has the human being perhaps grown less in need of an otherworldly solution to the riddle of his existence because that existence has since looked still more arbitrary, more like a street-corner idler, more dispensable in the visible order of things? Hasn't human self-belittlement, the will to self-belittlement, been progressing unstoppably since Copernicus? Ah, faith in human dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceability in the order of beings is gone. The human being has become an animal, an animal without metaphor, qualification, or reservation—he who in his earlier faith was almost God, a “child of God,” a “God-man” … Since Copernicus, humanity seems to have landed on a slope. It now rolls faster and faster away from the center—where to? Into nothingness? Into the “piercing feeling of its nothingness”? … Well! Wouldn't that be the straight road—into the old ideal? … All science—and by no means just astronomy, about whose humbling and degrading effect Kant made a remarkable confession, “it destroys my importance” …—all science today, both natural and unnatural, as I call the self-critique of knowledge, is out to talk people out of their former self-respect, as if it had been nothing but a bizarre conceit. One might even say that science finds its own pride, its own harsh form of stoic peace of mind, in maintaining this hard-won human self-contempt as humanity's last and most serious claim to self-respect. (Rightly so, in fact: for the person who despises is still someone who “has not forgotten how to respect” …) Does this really work against the ascetic ideal? Does anyone still seriously think, as the theologians imagined for a while, that Kant's victory over the dogmatic theology of concepts—“God,” “soul,” “freedom,” “immortality”—harmed that ideal? For now, we need not concern ourselves with whether Kant himself ever even intended anything of the sort. What is certain is that, since Kant, transcendentalists of every kind once again hold a winning hand. They are freed from the theologians: what good luck! He showed them the secret path along which they may now pursue the “wishes of their hearts” on their own initiative and with the utmost scientific respectability. Likewise, who could now blame the agnostics if, as worshippers of the unknown and mysterious in itself, they now worship the question mark itself as God? (Xaver Doudan once speaks of the ravages caused by “the habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of simply remaining in the unknown.” He thinks the ancients managed without it.) Suppose everything that a person “knows” fails to satisfy his wishes, instead contradicting them and making him shudder. What a divine escape, to be allowed to find the fault in “knowing” rather than in “wishing”! … “There is no knowing: therefore—there is a God.” What a new elegance of logical inference! What a triumph for the ascetic ideal!—

26 Or has the whole of modern history writing perhaps shown more confidence in life and in its ideal? Its noblest ambition now is to be a mirror. It rejects every idea of a guiding purpose. It no longer wants to “prove” anything. It refuses to play the judge, and shows good taste in that. It neither affirms nor denies; it establishes facts, it “describes” … All this is highly ascetic. But at the same time, and to an even higher degree, it is nihilistic. Let us not deceive ourselves about that! We see a sad, hard, but determined gaze—an eye that looks outward, as a solitary explorer at the North Pole looks outward. Perhaps to avoid looking inward? To avoid looking back? … Here there is snow; here life has fallen silent. The last crows to make themselves heard here are called “What for?”, “In vain!”, “Nothing!” Nothing grows or thrives here anymore, except perhaps Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoyan “pity.” But as for that other kind of historian, a perhaps even more “modern” kind, pleasure-loving, lustful, flirting as much with life as with the ascetic ideal, using the word “artist” as a glove and now claiming an exclusive lease on the praise of contemplation—oh, what a thirst these sweet, clever people awaken even for ascetics and winter landscapes! No! The devil take these “contemplative” people! How much rather I would wander through the darkest gray, cold mists with those historical nihilists! Yes, if I must choose, I would not even object to listening to someone genuinely unhistorical and anti-historical. (Like that Dühring, whose tones intoxicate a still-shy, still-unacknowledged species of “beautiful souls” in today's Germany, the anarchist species within the educated proletariat.) The “contemplative” ones are a hundred times worse. I know nothing so disgusting as such an “objective” armchair, such a perfumed pleasure-seeker before history, half priest, half satyr, Renan perfume. The high falsetto of his applause already betrays what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case Fate wielded her cruel scissors, alas, all too surgically! This goes against my taste, and my patience too. Anyone who has nothing to lose by being patient may stay patient at such sights. Such a sight enrages me. Such “spectators” turn me more bitterly against the “spectacle” than the spectacle itself does—history itself, you understand. Without warning, all this puts me in moods like Anacreon's. This nature that gave the bull its horn and the lion its gaping, tooth-filled jaws—why did nature give me a foot? … To kick with, by holy Anacreon! And not just to run away with. To kick apart rotten armchairs, cowardly contemplation, the lustful eunuchs before history, flirting with ascetic ideals, impotence's Tartuffe-style hypocritical show of justice! All my respect to the ascetic ideal, insofar as it is honest! As long as it believes in itself and does not play tricks on us! But I do not like all these flirtatious bedbugs whose insatiable ambition is to smell of the infinite, until at last the infinite smells of bedbugs. I do not like the whitewashed tombs that act out life. I do not like the tired and worn-out people who wrap themselves in wisdom and look “objective.” I do not like the agitators dressed up as heroes, wearing an ideal as a cap of invisibility around their straw-bundle heads. I do not like the ambitious artists who want to pass for ascetics and priests and are basically only tragic clowns. I do not like them either, these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who today roll their eyes in a Christian-Aryan-respectable way. Through a misuse of the cheapest means of agitation, the moral pose, that exhausts all patience, they seek to stir up all the cattle-like elements of the people. (That every kind of fraudulent spiritual hocus-pocus in today's Germany has some success is connected with the now undeniable, already tangible desolation of the German mind. I look for its cause in an all too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music. Add to this what makes such a diet possible: first, national confinement and vanity, the strong but narrow principle “Germany, Germany above everything”; then the shaking palsy of “modern ideas.”) Europe today is rich and inventive above all in stimulants. It seems to need nothing more than stimulants and distilled spirits. Hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most highly distilled spirits of the mind. Hence, too, the repulsive, foul-smelling, dishonest, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. I would like to know how many shiploads of imitation idealism, of heroes' costumes and the clattering tin of grand words, how many tons of sugared, alcoholic sympathy—trading as “the religion of suffering”—how many stilts of “noble indignation” to help the mentally flat-footed, how many people pretending to embody the Christian-moral ideal would have to be exported from Europe today to make its air smell cleaner again … Clearly, this overproduction opens up a new possibility for trade. Clearly, there is a new “business” to be done in little idols of ideals and their accompanying “idealists”—do not miss this fence-post-sized hint! Who has enough courage for it? We have it in our hands to “idealize” the whole earth! … But why do I speak of courage? Only one thing is needed here: the hand itself, an uninhibited hand, a very uninhibited hand …

27 Enough! Enough! Let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the most modern mind, which give as much cause for laughter as for annoyance. Our particular problem can do without them: the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal. What does it have to do with yesterday and today! I will deal with those things more thoroughly and harshly in another setting, under the title “On the History of European Nihilism.” For that, I refer readers to a work I am preparing: The Will to Power, An Attempt to Revalue All Values. The only thing I wanted to point out here is this: even in the most intellectual sphere, the ascetic ideal still has for now only one kind of real enemies and people who harm it: those who pretend to embody this ideal, for they awaken distrust. Everywhere else that the mind works strictly, powerfully, and without counterfeiting today, it now has no ideal at all—the popular name for this abstinence is “atheism”—except for its will to truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, that very ideal in its strictest, most intellectual formulation, entirely inward and secret, stripped of all outer defenses. It is therefore not so much its remnant as its core. Unconditional, honest atheism—and we, the more intellectual people of this age, breathe only its air!—is accordingly not opposed to that ideal, as it appears to be. Rather, it is only one of the ideal's last stages of development, one of its final forms and inner logical consequences. It is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year training in truthfulness, which finally forbids itself the lie in belief in God. (The same course of development occurred in India, completely independently, and therefore proving something. The same ideal forced the same conclusion. The decisive point was reached five centuries before the European calendar's starting point, with Buddha—or, more precisely, already with Sankhyam philosophy, which Buddha then popularized and made into a religion.) What, if we ask with complete strictness, has actually defeated the Christian God? The answer is in my “Gay Science,” p. 290: “Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly, the Christian conscience's confessor-like subtlety, translated and raised into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. Looking at nature as if it were evidence of a god's goodness and care; interpreting history in honor of a divine reason, as constant evidence of a moral world order and moral ultimate purposes; interpreting one's own experiences as pious people interpreted them for so long, as if everything were providence, everything a sign, everything devised and sent for the soul's salvation: that is now over. It has conscience against it. Every more sensitive conscience regards it as indecent, dishonest, as lying, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice. Through this strictness, if through anything, we are good Europeans and heirs to Europe's longest and bravest self-overcoming” … All great things destroy themselves through an act of self-cancellation. That is what the law of life demands, the law of necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of life. In the end, the lawgiver himself always hears the call: “Submit to the law you yourself have laid down.” In this way, Christianity as dogma was destroyed by its own morality. In this way, Christianity as morality must now also be destroyed. We stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it finally draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself. This happens when it asks: “What does all will to truth mean?” … And here I touch again on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends—for as yet I know of no friend. What meaning would our whole existence have, if not that in us this will to truth had become conscious of itself as a problem? … From now on, this coming to consciousness of the will to truth will cause morality to perish. There is no doubt of that. That great spectacle in a hundred acts, reserved for Europe's next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles …

28 Apart from the ascetic ideal, the human being, the human animal, has so far had no meaning. His existence on earth had no goal. “What are human beings for at all?” was a question without an answer. The will for humanity and the earth was missing. Behind every great human fate, an even greater “In vain!” sounded as a refrain. That is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: something was missing, an enormous gap surrounded humanity. Human beings did not know how to justify, explain, or affirm themselves. They suffered from the problem of their own meaning. They suffered in other ways too; for the most part, they were sickly animals. But their problem was not suffering itself. It was the lack of an answer to the questioning cry, “What is the point of suffering?” The human being, the bravest animal and the one most used to suffering, does not reject suffering in itself. He wants it, even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose for suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that had so far lain over humanity—and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning! So far, it was the only meaning. Any meaning is better than no meaning at all. In every respect, the ascetic ideal was the supreme case of “for lack of anything better” that had so far existed. In it, suffering was interpreted. The enormous emptiness seemed filled. The door closed against all suicidal nihilism. The interpretation—there is no doubt—brought new suffering with it: deeper, more inward, more poisonous suffering that gnawed more at life. It placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt … But despite everything, human beings were thereby saved. They had a meaning. They were no longer like a leaf in the wind, a ball tossed around by nonsense, by “no-sense.” They could now will something. At first, it did not matter toward what, for what, or with what they willed: the will itself was saved. There is no hiding what all that willing, which took its direction from the ascetic ideal, really expresses. This hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material; this horror of the senses, of reason itself; this fear of happiness and beauty; this desire to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, desire itself—all this means, let us dare to understand it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against life's most basic conditions. But it is and remains a will! … And, to end by saying what I said at the start: human beings would still rather will nothingness than not will …