The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV
Nietzsche · en
Privileges of all sorts for fathers who lavish boys upon the world, and
perhaps plural votes as well.
A medical certificate as a condition of any marriage, endorsed by the
parochial authorities, in which a series of questions addressed to the
parties and the medical officers must be answered ("family histories").
As a counter-agent to prostitution, or as its ennoblement, I would
recommend leasehold marriages (to last for a term of years or months),
with adequate provision for the children.
Every marriage to be warranted and sanctioned by a certain number of
good men and true, of the parish, as a parochial obligation.
734.
_Another commandment of philanthropy._--There are cases where to have a
child would be a crime--for example, for chronic invalids and extreme
neurasthenics. These people should be converted to chastity, and for
this purpose the music of _Parsifal_ might at all events be tried. For
Parsifal himself, that born fool, had ample reasons for not desiring
to propagate. Unfortunately, however, one of the regular symptoms of
exhausted stock is the inability to exercise any self-restraint in the
presence of stimuli, and the tendency to respond to the smallest sexual
attraction. It would be quite a mistake, for instance, to think of
Leopardi as a chaste man. In such cases the priest and moralist play
a hopeless game: it would be far better to send for the apothecary.
Lastly, society here has a positive duty to fulfil, and of all the
demands that are made on it, there are few more urgent and necessary
than this one. Society as the trustee of life, is responsible to life
for every botched life that comes into existence, and as it has to
atone for such lives, it ought consequently to make it impossible for
them ever to see the light of day: it should in many cases actually
prevent the act of procreation, and may, without any regard for rank,
descent, or intellect, hold in readiness the most rigorous forms of
compulsion and restriction, and, under certain circumstances, have
recourse to castration. The Mosaic law, "Thou shalt do no murder," is
a piece of ingenuous puerility compared with the earnestness of this
forbidding of life to decadents, "Thou shalt not beget"!!! ... For
life itself recognises no solidarity or equality of rights between the
healthy and unhealthy parts of an organism. The latter must at all
cost be _eliminated,_ lest the whole fall to pieces. Compassion for
decadents, equal rights for the physiologically botched--this would be
the very pinnacle of immorality, it would be setting up Nature's most
formidable opponent as morality itself!
735.
There are some delicate and morbid natures, the so-called idealists,
who can never under any circumstances rise above a coarse, immature
crime: yet it is the great justification of their anæmic little
existence, it is the small requital for their lives of cowardice and
falsehood to have been for one _instant_ at least--strong. But they
generally collapse after such an act.