It is difficult to have sufficient respect for man, when one sees how he understands the art of fighting his way, of enduring, of turning circumstances to his own advantage, and of overthrowing opponents; but when he is seen in the light of his desires, he is the most absurd of all animals. It is just as if he required a playground for his cowardice, his laziness, his feebleness, his sweetness, his submissiveness, where he recovers from his strong virile virtues. Just look at man's "desiderata" and his "ideals." Man, when he desires, tries to recover from that which is eternally valuable in him, from his deeds; and then he rushes into nonentity, absurdity, valuelessness, childishness. The intellectual indigence and lack of inventive power of this resourceful and inventive animal is simply terrible. The "ideal" is at the same time the penalty man pays for the enormous expenditure which he has to defray in all real and pressing duties.—Should reality cease to prevail, there follow dreams, fatigue, weakness: an "ideal" might even be regarded as a form of dream, fatigue, or weakness. The strongest and the most impotent men become alike when this condition overtakes them: they deify the cessation of work, of war, of passions, of suspense, of contrasts, of "reality "—in short, of the struggle for knowledge and of the trouble of acquiring it.
"Innocence" to them is idealised stultification; "blessedness" is idealised idleness; "love," the ideal state of the gregarious animal that will no longer have an enemy. And thus everything that lowers and belittles man is elevated to an ideal.
336.
A desire magnifies the thing desired; and by not being realised it grows—the greatest ideas are those which have been created by the strongest and longest desiring. Things grow ever more valuable in our estimation, the more our desire for them increases: if "moral values" have become the highest values, it simply shows that the moral ideal is the one which has been realised least (and thus it represented the Beyond to all suffering, as a road to blessedness). Man, with ever-increasing ardour, has only been embracing clouds: and ultimately called his desperation and impotence "God."
337.
Think of the naïveté of all ultimate "desiderata"—when the "wherefore" of man remains unknown.
338.
What is the counterfeit coinage of morality? First of all we should know what "good and evil" mean. That is as good as wishing to know why man is here, and what his goal or his destiny is. And that means that one would fain know that man actually has a goal or a destiny.
339.
The very obscure and arbitrary notion that humanity has a general duty to perform, and that, as a whole, it is striving towards a goal, is still in its infancy. Perhaps we shall once more be rid of it before it becomes a "fixed idea." ... But humanity does not constitute a whole: it is an indissoluble multiplicity of ascending and descending organisms—it knows no such thing as a state of youth followed by maturity and then age. But its strata lie confused and superimposed—and in a few thousand years there may be even younger types of men than we can point out to-day. Decadence, on the other hand, belongs to all periods of human history: everywhere there is refuse and decaying matter, such things are in themselves vital processes; for withering and decaying elements must be eliminated.
Under the empire of Christian prejudice this question was never put at all: the purpose of life seemed to lie in the salvation of the individual soul; the question whether humanity might last for a long or a short time was not considered. The best Christians longed for the end to come as soon as possible;—concerning the needs of the individual, there seemed to be no doubt whatsoever. ... The duty of every individual for the present was identical with what it would be in any sort of future for the man of the future: the value, the purpose, the limit of values was for ever fixed, unconditioned, eternal, one with God.... What deviated from this eternal type was impious, diabolic, criminal.
The centre of gravity of all values for each soul lay in that soul itself: salvation or damnation! The salvation of the immortal soul! The most extreme form of personalisation.... For each soul there was only one kind of perfection; only one ideal, only one road to salvation.... The most extreme form of the principle of equal rights, associated with an optical magnification of individual importance to the point of megalomania ... Nothing but insanely important souls, revolving round their own axes with unspeakable terror....
***
Nobody believes in these assumed airs of importance any longer to-day: and we have sifted our wisdom through the sieve of contempt. Nevertheless the optical habit survives, which would fain measure the value of man by his proximity to a certain ideal maw. at bottom the personalisation view is upheld as firmly as that of the equality of rights as regards the ideal. In short: people seem to think that they know what the ultimate desideratum is in regard to the ideal man....
But this belief is merely the result of the exceedingly detrimental influence of the Christian ideal, as anybody can discover for himself every time he carefully examines the "ideal type." In the first place, it is believed that the approach to a given "type" is desirable; secondly, that this particular type is known; thirdly, that every deviation from this type is a retrograde movement, a stemming of the spirit of progress, a loss of power and might in man.... To dream of a state of affairs in which this perfect man will be in the majority: our friends the Socialists and even Messrs. the Utilitarians have not reached a higher level than this. In this way an aim seems to have crept into the evolution of man: at any rate the belief in a certain progress towards an ideal is the only shape in which an aim is conceived in the history of mankind to-day. In short: the coming of the "Kingdom of God" has been placed in the future, and has been given an earthly, a human meaning—but on the whole the faith in the old ideal is still maintained....
340.
The more concealed forms of the cult of Christian, moral ideals.—The insipid and cowardly notion "Nature" invented by Nature-enthusiasts (without any knowledge whatsoever of the terrible, the implacable, and the cynical element in even "the most beautiful" aspects), is only a sort of attempt at reading the moral and Christian notion of "humanity" into Nature;—Rousseau's concept of Nature, for instance, which took for granted that "Nature" meant freedom, goodness, innocence, equity, justice, and Idylls, was nothing more at bottom than the cult of Christian morality. We should collect passages from the poets in order to see what they admired, in lofty mountains, for instance. What Goethe had to do with them—why he admired Spinoza. Absolute ignorance concerning the reasons of this cult....
The insipid and cowardly concept "Man" à la Comte and Stuart Mill, is at times the subject of a cult.... This is only the Christian moral ideal again under another name.... Refer also to the freethinkers—Guyau for example.
The insipid and cowardly concept "Art" which is held to mean sympathy with all suffering and with everything botched and bungled (the same thing happens to history, cf. Thierry): again it is the cult of the Christian moral ideal.
And now, as to the whole socialistic ideal: it is nothing but a blockheaded misunderstanding of the Christian moral ideal.
341.
The origin of the ideal. The examination of the soil out of which it grows.
A. Starting out from those "æsthetic" mental states during which the world seems rounder, fuller, and more perfect: we have the pagan ideal with its dominating spirit of self-affirmation (people give of their abundance). The highest type: the classical ideal—regarded as an expression of the successful nature of all the more important
