The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and IINietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and II
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Nihilism (Philosophy); Power (Philosophy); Values
The "_good man_" Or, hemiplegia of virtue.--In the opinion of every
strong and natural man, love and hate, gratitude and revenge, goodness
and anger, affirmative and negative action, belong to each other. A
man is good on condition that he knows how to be evil; a man is evil,
because otherwise he would not know how to be good. Whence comes
the morbidness and ideological unnaturalness which repudiates these
compounds--which teaches a sort of one-sided efficiency as the highest
of all things? Whence this hemiplegia of virtue, the invention of the
good man? The object seems to be to make man amputate those instincts
which enable him to be an enemy, to be harmful, to be angry, and to
insist upon revenge.... This unnaturalness, then, corresponds to that
dualistic concept of a wholly good and of a wholly bad creature (God,
Spirit, Man); in the first are found all the positive, in the second
all the negative forces, intentions, and states. This method of valuing
thus believes itself to be "idealistic"; it never doubts that in its
concept of the "good man," it has found the highest desideratum. When
aspiring to its zenith it fancies a state in which all evil is wiped
out, and in which only good creatures have actually remained over.
It does not therefore regard the mutual dependence of the opposites
good and evil as proved. On the contrary, the latter ought to vanish,
and the former should remain. The first has a right to exist, the
second ought not _to be with us at all...._ What, as a matter of fact,
is the reason of this desire? In all ages, and particularly in the
Christian age, much labour has been spent in trying to reduce men
to this one-sided activity: and even to-day, among those who have
been deformed and weakened by the Church, people are not lacking who
desire precisely the same thing with their "humanisation" generally,
or with their "Will of God," or with their "Salvation of the Soul."
The principal injunction behind all these things is, that man should
no longer do anything evil, that he should under no circumstances be
harmful or _desire_ harm. The way to arrive at this state of affairs is
to amputate all hostile tendencies, to suppress all the instincts of
resentment, and to establish "spiritual peace" as a chronic disease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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