The Case of Wagner Complete Works, Volume 8 · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
THE DEATH OF THE OLD CULTURE.
The stupidity of the will is Schopenhauer's greatest thought, if thoughts be judged from the standpoint of power. We can see in Hartmann how he juggled away this thought. Nobody will ever call something stupid--God. This, then, is the new feature of all the future progress of the world: men must never again be ruled over by religious conceptions. Will they be any _worse?_ It is not my experience that they behave well and morally under the yoke of religion; I am not on the side of Demopheles.[15] The fear of a beyond, and then again the fear of divine punishments will hardly have made men better. Where something great makes its appearance and lasts for a relatively long time, we may premise a careful breeding, as in the case of the Greeks. How did so many men become free among them? Educate educators! But the first educators must educate themselves! And it is for these that I write. The denial of life is no longer an easy matter: a man may become a hermit or a monk--and what is thereby denied! This conception has now become deeper: it is above all a discerning denial, a denial based upon the will to be just; not an indiscriminate and wholesale denial. The seer must be affectionate, otherwise men will have no confidence in him: Cassandra.
The man who to-day wishes to be good and saintly has a more difficult task than formerly: in order to be "good," he must not be so unjust to knowledge as earlier saints were. He would have to be a knowledge-saint: a man who would link love with knowledge, and who would have nothing to do with gods or demigods or "Providence," as the Indian saints likewise had nothing to do with them. He should also be healthy, and should keep himself so, otherwise he would necessarily become distrustful of himself. And perhaps he would not bear the slightest resemblance to the ascetic saint, but would be much more like a man of the world. The better the state is organised, the duller will humanity be. To make the individual uncomfortable is my task! The great pleasure experienced by the man who liberates himself by fighting. Spiritual heights have had their age in history; inherited energy belongs to them. In the ideal state all would be over with them. The highest judgment on life only arising from the highest energy of life. The mind must be removed as far as possible from exhaustion. In the centre of the world-history judgment will be the most accurate; for it was there that the greatest geniuses existed. The breeding of the genius as the only man who can truly value and deny life.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.