The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen
Nietzsche · en
Admitting that you have understood the villainy of such a mutiny
against life as that which has become almost sacrosanct in Christian
morality, you have fortunately understood something besides; and that
is the futility, the fictitiousness, the absurdity and the falseness
of such a mutiny. For the condemnation of life by a living creature is
after all but the symptom of a definite kind of life: the question as
to whether the condemnation is justified or the reverse is not even
raised. In order even to approach the problem of the value of life,
a man would need to be placed outside life, and moreover know it as
well as one, as many, as all in fact, who have lived it These are
reasons enough to prove to us that this problem is an inaccessible one
to us. When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, and
through the optics of life: life itself urges us to determine values:
life itself values through us when we determine values. From which it
follows that even that morality which is antagonistic to life, and
which conceives God as the opposite and the condemnation of life, is
only a valuation of life—of what life? of what kind of life? But I
have already answered this question: it is the valuation of declining,
of enfeebled, of exhausted and of condemned life. Morality, as it has
been understood hitherto—as it was finally formulated by Schopenhauer
in the words “The Denial of the Will to Life,” is the instinct of
degeneration itself, which converts itself into an imperative: it says:
“Perish!” It is the death sentence of men who are already doomed.
6