The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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I conclude with three queries, as you will see. "Is an ideal actually set up here, or is one pulled down?" I am perhaps asked.... But have ye sufficiently asked yourselves how dear a payment has the setting up of every ideal in the world exacted? To achieve that consummation how much truth must always be traduced and misunderstood, how many lies must be sanctified, how much conscience has got to be disturbed, how many pounds of "God" have got to be sacrificed every time? To enable a sanctuary to be set up _a sanctuary has got to be destroyed_: that is a law--show me an instance where it has not been fulfilled!... We modern men, we inherit the immemorial tradition of vivisecting the conscience, and practising cruelty to our animal selves. That is the sphere of our most protracted training, perhaps of our artistic prowess, at any rate of our dilettantism and our perverted taste. Man has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an "evil eye," so that eventually they have become in his system affiliated to a bad conscience.
A converse endeavour would be intrinsically feasible --but who is strong enough to attempt it?--namely, to affiliate to the "bad conscience" all those _unnatural_ proclivities, all those transcendental aspirations, contrary to sense, instinct, nature, and animalism--in short, all past and present ideals, which are all ideals opposed to life, and traducing the world. To whom is one to turn nowadays with _such_ hopes and pretensions?--It is just the _good_ men that we should thus bring about our ears; and in addition, as stands to reason, the indolent, the hedgers, the vain, the hysterical, the tired.... What is more offensive or more thoroughly calculated to alienate, than giving any hint of the exalted severity with which we treat ourselves? And again how conciliatory, how full of love does all the world show itself towards us so soon as we do as all the world docs, and "let ourselves go" like all the world. For such a consummation we need spirits of _different_ calibre than seems really feasible in this age; spirits rendered potent through wars and victories, to whom conquest, adventure, danger, even pain, have become a need; for such a consummation we need habituation to sharp, rare air, to winter wanderings, to literal and metaphorical ice and mountains; we even need a kind of sublime malice, a supreme and most self-conscious insolence of knowledge, which is the appanage of great health; we need (to summarise the awful truth) just this _great health_!
Is this even feasible to-day?... But some day, in a stronger age than this rotting and introspective present, must he in sooth come to us, even the _redeemer_ of great love and scorn, the creative spirit, rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again away from every transcendental plane and dimension, he whose solitude is misunderstanded (sic) of the people, as though it were a flight _from_ reality;--while actually it is only his diving, burrowing, and penetrating _into_ reality, so that when he comes again to the light he can at once bring about by these means the _redemption_ of this reality; its redemption from the curse which the old ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who in this wise will redeem us from the old ideal, as he will from that ideal's necessary corollary of great nausea, will to nothingness, and Nihilism; this tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, which renders the will again free, who gives back to the world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of Nothingness--_he must one day come_. But what am I talking of? Enough! Enough? At this juncture I have only one proper course, silence: otherwise tresspass on a domain open alone to one who is younger than I, one stronger, more "_future_" than I--open alone to _Zarathustra, Zarathustra the godless._ [1] The German is: "_Sittlichkeit der Sitte_." H. B. S. [2] The German world "_schuld_" means both debt and guilt. Cp. the English "owe" and "ought," by which I occasionally render the double meaning.--H. B. S. [3] German: "_Verbrecher_."--H.B.S. [4] An allusion to _Der Zweck im Recht_, by the great German jurist, Professor Ihering. "Careless, mocking, forceful--so does wisdom wish us: she is a woman, and never loves any one but a warrior." Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.