The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume SixteenNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy
Now let us consider the other case which is called morality, the
case of the rearing of a particular race and species. The most
magnificent example of this is offered by Indian morality, and is
sanctioned religiously as the “Law of Manu.” In this book the task
is set of rearing no less than four races at once: a priestly race,
a warrior race, a merchant and agricultural race, and finally a race
of servants—the Sudras. It is quite obvious that we are no longer
in a circus watching tamers of wild animals in this book. To have
conceived even the plan of such a breeding scheme, presupposes the
existence of a man who is a hundred times milder and more reasonable
than the mere lion-tamer. One breathes more freely, after stepping out
of the Christian atmosphere of hospitals and prisons, into this more
salubrious, loftier and more spacious world. What a wretched thing the
New Testament is beside Manu, what an evil odour hangs around it!—But
even this organisation found it necessary to be terrible,—not this
time in a struggle with the animal-man, but with his opposite, the
non-caste man, the hotch-potch man, the Chandala. And once again it
had no other means of making him weak and harmless, than by making
him sick,—it was the struggle with the greatest “number.” Nothing
perhaps is more offensive to our feelings than these measures of
security on the part of Indian morality. The third edict, for instance
(Avadana-Sastra I.), which treats “of impure vegetables,” ordains that
the only nourishment that the Chandala should be allowed must consist
of garlic and onions, as the holy scriptures forbid their being given
corn or grain-bearing fruit, water and fire. The same edict declares
that the water which they need must be drawn neither out of rivers,
wells or ponds, but only out of the ditches leading to swamps and out
of the holes left by the footprints of animals. They are likewise
forbidden to wash either their linen or themselves since the water
which is graciously granted to them must only be used for quenching
their thirst. Finally Sudra women are forbidden to assist Chandala
women at their confinements, while Chandala women are also forbidden to
assist each other at such times. The results of sanitary regulations of
this kind could not fail to make themselves felt; deadly epidemics and
the most ghastly venereal diseases soon appeared, and in consequence
of these again “the Law of the Knife,”—that is to say circumcision,
was prescribed for male children and the removal of the small labia
from the females. Manu himself says: “the Chandala are the fruit of
adultery, incest, and crime (—this is the necessary consequence of the
idea of breeding). Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn
from corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken pottery,
their ornaments shall be made of old iron, and their religion shall be
the worship of evil spirits; without rest they shall wander from place
to place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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