The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
25.
No! You can't get round me with science, when I search for the natural antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: "_Where_ is the opposed will in which the _opponent ideal_ expresses itself?" Science is not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this function; in every department science needs an ideal value, a power which creates values, and in whose _service_ it _can believe_ in itself --science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is not in itself antagonistic; speaking roughly, it rather represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal. Tested more exactly, its opposition and antagonism are concerned not with the ideal itself, but only with that ideal's outworks, its outer garb, its masquerade, with its temporary hardening, stiffening, and dogmatising--it makes the life in the ideal free once more, while it repudiates its superficial elements. These two phenomena, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same basis––I have already made this clear––the basis, I say, oft the same over-appreciation of truth (more accurately the same belief in the _impossibility_ of valuing and of criticising truth), and consequently they are _necessarily_ allies, so that, in the event of their being attacked, they must always be attacked and called into question together.
A valuation of the ascetic ideal inevitably entails a valuation of science as well; lose no time in seeing this clearly, and be sharp to catch it! (_Art_, I am speaking provisionally, for I will treat it on some other occasion in greater detail,––art, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the _will for deception_ has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato _versus_ Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the _golden_ nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic _corruption_ that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.)
Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain _impoverishment of life_ is the presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening of the _tempo_, the substitution of dialectic for instinct, _seriousness_ impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life). Consider the periods in a nation in which the learned man comes into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often of sunset, of decay--the effervescing strength, the confidence in life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderance of the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. (Science handled as a problem! what is the meaning of science?--upon this point the Preface to the _Birth of Tragedy_.) No! this "modern science"--mark you this well--is at times the _best_ ally for the ascetic ideal, and for the very reason that it is the ally which is most unconscious, most automatic, most secret, and most subterranean!
They have been playing into each other's hands up to the present, have these "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that ideal (take care, by the bye, not to think that these opponents are the antithesis of this ideal, that they are the _rich_ in spirit--that they are _not_; I have called them the _hectic_ in spirit). As for these celebrated victories of science; there is no doubt that they are _victories_--but victories over what? There was not for a single minute any victory among their list over the ascetic ideal, rather was it made stronger, that is to say, more elusive, more abstract, more insidious, from the fact that a wall, an outwork, that had got built on to the main fortress and disfigured its appearance, should from time to time be ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by science. Does any one seriously suggest that the downfall of the theological astronomy signified the downfall of that ideal?--Has, perchance, man grown _less in need_ of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the _visible_ order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his _will_ for belittling himself?
Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniquenesses irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone--he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane--he rolls faster and faster away from the centre--whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"--Well! this would be the straight way--to the old ideal?--All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as _unnatural_--by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason--nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's _contempt of himself_, that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate").
But does all this involve any real effort to _counteract_ the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's _victory_ over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?–– And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they now worship _their very query_ as God? (Xaver Doudan talks somewhere of the _ravages_ which _l'habitude d'admirer l'inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l'inconnu_ has produced––the ancients, he thinks, must have been exempt from those ravages.) Supposing that everything, "known" to man, fails to satisfy his desires, and on the contrary contradicts and horrifies them, what a divine way out of all this to be able to look for the responsibility, not in the "desiring" but in "knowing"!––"There is no knowledge. _Consequently_––there is a God"; what a novel _elegantia syllogism_i! what a triumph for the ascetic ideal!
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.