We reserve ourselves the right to several kinds of philosophy which it is necessary to learn: under certain circumstances, the pessimistic kind as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable.
We should probably support the development and the maturation of democratic tendencies; for it conduces to weakness of will: in "Socialism" we recognise a thorn which prevents smug ease.
Attitude towards the people.. Our prejudices; we pay attention to the results of cross-breeding.
Detached, well-to-do, strong: irony concerning the "press" and its culture. Our care: that scientific men should not become journalists. We mistrust any form of culture that tolerates news-paper reading or writing.
We make our accidental positions (as Goethe and Stendhal did), our experiences, a foreground, and we lay stress upon them, so that we may deceive concerning our backgrounds. We ourselves wait and avoid putting our heart into them. They serve us as refuges, such as a wanderer might require and use—but we avoid feeling at home in them. We are ahead of our fellows in that we have had a disciplina voluntatis. All strength is directed to the development of the will, an art which allows us to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond the passions (also "super-European" thought at times).
This is our preparation before becoming the law-givers of the future and the lords of the earth; if not we, at least our children. Caution where marriage is concerned.
133.
The twentieth century.—The Abbé Galiani says somewhere: "La prévoyance est la cause des guerres actuelles de l'Europe. Si l'on voulait se donner la peine de ne rien prévoir, tout le monde serait tranquille, et je ne crois pas qu'on serait plus malheureux parce qu'on ne ferait pas la guerre." As I in no way share the unwarlike views of my deceased friend Galiani, I have no fear whatever of saying something beforehand with the view of conjuring in some way the cause of wars.
A condition of excessive consciousness, after the worst of earthquakes: with new questions.
134.
It is the time of the great noon, of the most appalling enlightenment: my particular kind of Pessimism: the great starting-point.
(1) Fundamental contradiction between civilisation and the elevation of man.
(2) Moral valuations regarded as a history of lies and the art of calumny in the service of the Will to Power (of the will of the herd, which rises against stronger men).
(3) The conditions which determine every elevation in culture (the facilitation of a selection being made at the cost of a crowd) are the conditions of all growth.
(4). The multiformity of the world as a question of strength, which sees all things in the perspective of their growth. The moral Christian values to be regarded as the insurrection and mendacity of slaves (in comparison with the aristocratic values of the ancient world).
5. Thekla is the sentimental heroine in Schiller's Wallenstein.—TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
6. This is a reference to Wagner's Parsifal. The character as is well known, is written to represent a son of heart's affliction, and a child of wisdom—humble, guileless, loving, pure, and a fool.—TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
Book II.
Criticism of the Highest Values that have Prevailed Hitherto
I. Criticism of Religion
All the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and imagined things, I will show to be the property and product of man, and this should be his most beautiful apology. Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things in order to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched! Hitherto, this has been his greatest disinterestedness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to conceal from himself that he it was who had created what he admired.
1. Concerning the Origin of Religions
135.
The origin of religion.—Just as the illiterate man of to-day believes that his wrath is the cause of his being angry, that his mind is the cause of his thinking, that his soul is the cause of his feeling, in short, just as a mass of psychological entities are still unthinkingly postulated as causes; so, in a still more primitive age, the same phenomena were interpreted by man by means of personal entities. Those conditions of his soul which seemed strange, overwhelming, and rapturous, he regarded as obsessions and bewitching influences emanating from the power of some personality. (Thus the Christian, the most puerile and backward man of this age, traces hope, peace, and the feeling of deliverance to a psychological inspiration on the part of God: being by nature a sufferer and a creature in need of repose, states of happiness, peace, and resignation, perforce seem strange to him, and seem to need some explanation.) Among intelligent, strong, and vigorous races, the epileptic is mostly the cause of a belief in the existence of some foreign power; but all such examples of apparent subjection—as, for instance, the bearing of the exalted man, of the poet, of the great criminal, or the passions, love and revenge—lead to the invention of supernatural powers. A condition is made concrete by being identified with a personality, and when this condition overtakes anybody, it is ascribed to that personality. In other words: in the psychological concept of God, a certain state of the soul is personified as a cause in order to appear as an effect.
The psychological logic is as follows: when the feeling of power suddenly seizes and overwhelms a man,—and this takes place in the case of all the great passions,—a doubt arises in him concerning his own person: he dare not think himself the cause of this astonishing sensation—and thus he posits a stronger person, a Godhead as its cause. In short, the origin of religion lies in the extreme feelings of power, which, being strange, take men by surprise: and just as the sick man, who feels one of his limbs unaccountably heavy, concludes that another man must be sitting on it, so the ingenuous homo religiosus, divides himself up into several people. Religion is an example of the "altération de la personalité." A sort of fear and sensation of terror in one's own presence.... But also a feeling of inordinate rapture and exaltation. Among sick people, the sensation of health suffices to awaken a belief in the proximity of God.
136.
Rudimentary psychology of the religious man:—All changes are effects; all effects are effects of will (the notion of "Nature" and of "natural law," is lacking); all effects presuppose an agent. Rudimentary psychology: one is only a cause oneself, when one knows that one has willed something.
