The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
779.
The quantitative estimate of aims and its influence upon the valuing standpoint, the _great_ and the _small_ criminal. The greatness or smallness of the aims will determine whether the doer feels respect for himself with it all, or whether he feels pusillanimous and miserable. The degree of intellectuality manifested in the means employed may likewise influence our valuation. How differently the philosophical innovator, experimenter, and man of violence stands out against robbers, barbarians, adventurers!--There is a semblance of disinterestedness in the former. Finally, noble manners, bearing, courage, self-confidence,--how they alter the value of that which is attained by means of them! *** Concerning the optics of valuation:-- The influence of the greatness or smallness of the aims. The influence of the intellectuality of the means. The influence of the behaviour in action. The influence of success or failure. The influence of opposing forces and their value. The influence of that which is permitted and that which is forbidden. The tricks by means of which actions, measures, and passions are legitimised, which from an individual standpoint are no longer good form or even in good taste.-- Art, which allows us to enter such strange worlds, makes them tasteful to us. Historians prove its justification and reason; travels, exoticism, psychology, penal codes, the lunatic asylum, the criminal, sociology. Impersonality (so that as media of a collective whole we allow ourselves these passions and action--the Bar, juries, the bourgeois, the soldier, the minister, the prince, society, "critics") makes us feel that we are _sacrificing something._
Preoccupations concerning one's self and one's eternal salvation are not expressive either of a rich or of a self-confident nature, for the latter lets all questions of eternal bliss go to the devil,--it is not interested in such matters of happiness it is all power, deeds, desires; it imposes itself upon things; it even violates things. The Christian is a romantic hypochondriac who does not stand firmly on his legs. Whenever hedonistic views come to the front, one can always presuppose the existence of pain and a certain ill-constitutedness. "The growing autonomy of the individual"--Parisian philosophers like M. Fouillée talk of such things: they would do well to study the _race moutonnière_ for a moment; for they belong to it. For Heaven's sake open your eyes, ye sociologists who deal with the future! The individual grew strong under quite opposite conditions: ye describe the extremest weakening and impoverishment of man; ye actually want this weakness and impoverishment, and ye apply the whole lying machinery of the old ideal in order to achieve your end. Ye are so constituted that ye actually regard your gregarious wants as an ideal! Here we are in the presence of an absolute lack of psychological honesty.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.