The Genealogy of Morals

of much that is evil and fatal.⁠—Folly, not sin, do you understand?⁠ ⁠… But even this brain disturbance was a problem⁠—“Come, how is it even possible? How could it have really got in brains like ours, the brains of men of aristocratic ancestry, of men of fortune, of men of good natural endowments, of men of the best society, of men of nobility and virtue?” This was the question that for century on century the aristocratic Greek put to himself when confronted with every (to him incomprehensible) outrage and sacrilege with which one of his peers had polluted himself. “It must be that a god had infatuated him,” he would say at last, nodding his head.⁠—This solution is typical of the Greeks,⁠ ⁠… accordingly the gods in those times subserved the functions of justifying man to a certain extent even in evil⁠—in those days they took upon themselves not the punishment, but, what is more noble, the guilt.

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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 does, 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 today?⁠ ⁠… 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 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.

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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.

Third Essay

What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?

“Careless, mocking, forceful⁠—so does wisdom wish us: she is a woman, and never loves anyone but a warrior.”

Thus Spake Zarathustra

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What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too much; in philosophers and scholars, a kind of “flair” and instinct for the conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women, at best an additional seductive fascination, a little morbidezza on a fine piece of flesh, the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in physiological failures and whiners (in the majority of mortals), an attempt to pose as “too good” for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief weapon in the battle with lingering pain and ennui; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best engine of power, and also the supreme authority for power; in saints, finally a pretext for hibernation, their novissima gloriae cupido, their peace in nothingness (“God”), their form of madness.

But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, lies expressed the