Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 06 - Why I Am a Fatality - Ecce Homo - Friedrich Nietzsche
Transcript
- Why I am a fatality. I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable, a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted and hallowed. I am not a man. I am dynamite, And with it all there is naught of the founder of a religion. In me. Religions are matters for the mob. After coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands. I require no believers. It is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself. I never address myself to masses. I am horribly frightened that one day I shall be pronounced wholly. You will understand why I publish this book beforehand. It is to prevent people from wronging me. I refuse to be a saint. I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown, and I am notwithstanding, or rather not notwithstanding, the mouthpiece of truth. For nothing more blown out with falsehood has ever existed than a saint, but my truth is terrible, for hitherto lies have been called truth. The transvaluation of all values. This is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its senses, a step which in me became flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being, and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth, and for the simple reason that I was the first who became conscious of falsehood as falsehood, that is to say, I smelt it as such. My genius resides in my nostrils. I contradict as no one has contradicted hitherto, and am nevertheless the reverse of a negative spirit. I am the harbringer of joy, the like of which has never existed before. I have discovered tasks of such lofty greatness that until my time no one had any idea of such things. Mankind can begin to have fresh hopes only now that I have lived. Thus, I am necessarily a man of fate. For when truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined, even in its dreams. The concept politics then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space, for they are all based on falsehood. There will be wars the like of which have never been seen on Earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on Earth. Two. If you should require a formula for a destiny of this kind that has taken human form, you will find it in my Zarathustra. And he who would be a creator in good and evil. Verily, he must first be a destroyer and break values into pieces. Thus the greatest evil belongeth unto the greatest good. But this is the creative good. I am by far the most terrible man that has ever existed. But this does not alter the fact that I shall become the most beneficent. I know the joy of annihilation to a degree which is commensurate with my power to annihilate. In both cases, I obey my deunesia nature, which knows not how to separate the negative deed from the saying of yea, I am the first immoralist, and in this sense I am essentially the annihilator. Three people never asked me, as they should have done, what the name of Zarathustra precisely meant in my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist. For that which distinguishes this Persian from all others in the past is the very fact that he was the exact reverse of an immoralist. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential weal in the working of things. The translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics as force, cause and in itself is his work. But the very question suggests its own answer. Zarathustra created this most pretentious of all errors, morality. Therefore he must be the first to expose it, not only because he has had longer and greater experience of the subject than any other thinker. All history is indeed the experimental refutation of the theory of the so called moral order of things, but because of the most important fact that Zarathustra was the most truthful of thinkers. In his teaching alone, is truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue, that is to say, as the reverse of the cowardice of the idealist who takes to his heels at a sight of reality. Zarathustra has more pluck in his body than all other thinkers put together, to tell the truth and to aim straight. That is the first Persian virtue. Have I made myself clear? The overcoming of morality by itself through truthfulness, the moralist's overcoming of himself in his opposite in me. That is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth. Four. In reality, two negations are involved in my title immoralist. I first of all deny the type of man that has hitherto been regarded as the highest, the good, the kind, and the charitable. And I also deny that kind of morality which has become recognized and paramount as morality in itself. I speak of the morality of decadence, or, to use a still cruder term, Christian morality. I would agree to the second of the two negations being regarded as the more decisive. For reckoned as a whole, the overestimation of goodness and kindness seems to me already a consequence of decadence, a symptom of weakness, and incompatible with any ascending and YEA saying life. Negation and annihilation are inseparable from a YEA saying attitude towards life. Let me halt for a moment at the question of the psychology of the good man. In order to appraise the value of a certain type of man, the cost of his maintenance must be calculated, and the condition of his existence must be known. The condition of the existence of the good is falsehood, or otherwise expressed. The refusal at any price to see how reality is actually constituted, the refusal to see that this reality is not so constituted as always to be stimulating beneficent instincts, and still less so as to suffer at all moments. The intrusion of ignorant and good natured hands to consider distress of all kinds as an objection, as something which must be done away with, is the greatest nonsense on earth. Generally speaking. It is nonsense of the most disastrous sort, fatal in its stupidity, almost as mad as the will to abolish bad weather out of pity for the poor, so to speak, in the great economy of the whole universe, the terrors of reality, in the passions, in the desires, in the will to power, are incalculably more necessary than that form of petty happiness which is called goodness. It is even needful to practice leniency in order so much as to allow the latter a place at all, Seeing that it is based upon a falsification of the instincts, I shall have an excellent opportunity of showing the incalculable calamitous consequences to the whole of history of the creedo of optimism, this monstrous offspring of the hominis opdomy Zarathustra. The first you recognized that the optimist is just as degenerate as the pessimists, though perhaps more detrimental. Says, good men never speak the truth, false shores and false harbors. Were ye taught by the good in the lies of the good, were ye born and bred through the good? Everything hath become false and crooked from the roots translator's note, needless to say, this is Nietzsche, and no longer the Persian and translator's note. Fortunately, the world is not built merely upon those instincts which would secure to the good natured herd animal his paltry happiness, to desire everybody to become a good man, a gregarious animal, a blue eyed, benevolent, beautiful soul, or, as Herbert Spencer wished, a creature of altruism would mean robbing existence of its greatest character, castrating man, and reducing humanity to a sort of wretched chinadom. And this some have tried to do. It is precisely this than men called morale. In this sense, Zarathustra calls the good now the last man, and Anon the beginning of the end. And above all, he considers them as the most detrimental kind of men, because they secure their existence at the cost of truth and at the cost of the future. The good they cannot create. They are ever the beginning of the end. They crucify him who writeth new values on new tables. They sacrifice, unto themselves the future. They crucify the whole future of humanity. The good they are ever the beginning of the end. And whatever harm the slanderers of the world may do, the harm of the good is the most calamitous of all harm. Five. Zarathustra, as the first psychologist of the good man, is perforce the friend of the evil man. When a degenerate kind of man has succeeded to the highest rank among the human species, his position must have been gained at the cost of the reverse type, at the cost of the strong man, who is certain of life. When the gregarious animal stands in the glorious rays of the purest virtue, the exceptional man must be degraded to the rank of evil. If falsehood insists at all costs on claiming the word truth for its own particular standpoint, the really truthful man must be sought out among the despised. Zarathustra allows no doubt here. He says, it was precisely the knowledge of the good and of the best which inspired his absolute horror of men, and it was out of this feeling of repulsion that he grew the wings which allowed him to soar into remote futures. He does not conceal a fact that his type of man is one which is relatively superhuman, especially as opposed to the good man, and that the good and the just would regard his superman as the devil. Ye hire men on whom my gaze now falls. This is the doubt that ye waken my breast, and this is my secret laughter. Methinks you would call my superman the devil. So strange are ye in your souls to all that is great, that the superman would be terrible in your eyes for his goodness. It is from this passage, and from no other, that you must set out to understand the goal to which Zarathustra aspires. The kind of man that he conceives sees reality as it is. He is strong enough for this. He is not estranged or far removed from it. He is that reality himself, in his own nature, can be found all the terrible and questionable character of reality. Only thus can man have greatness. Six. But I have chosen the title of immoralist as a surname and as a badge of honor, and yet another sense. I am very proud to possess this name, which distinguishes me from all the rest of mankind. No one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him. To that end, there were needed height, a remoteness of vision, and an abysmal psychological depth not believed to be possible hitherto. Up to the present, Christian morality has been the cursay of all thinkers. They stood at her service what man before my time has descended into the underground caverns, from out of which the poisonous fumes of this ideal of the slandering of the world burst forth. What man had even dared to suppose that they were underground caverns was a single one of all the philosophers who preceded me, a psychologist at all, and not the very reverse of a psychologist, that is to say, a superior swindler, an idealist. Before my time there was no psychology. To be the first in this new realm may amount to a curse. At all events. It is a fatality, for one is also the first to despise. My danger is the loathing of mankind. Seven Have you understood me? That which defines me, that which makes me stand apart from the whole of the rest of humanity, is the fact that I unmasked Christian morality. For this reason, I was in need of a word which conveyed the idea of a challenge to everybody not to have awakened to these discoveries before struck me as being the sign of the greatest uncleanliness that mankind has on his conscience. As self deception become instinctive as the fundamental will to be blind to every phenomenon, all course, history, and all reality. In fact, as an all most criminal fraud in sukilokikis blindness in regard to Christianity is the essence of criminality, for it is the crime against life, ages, and peoples. The first as well as the last, philosophers and old women, with the exception of five or six moments in history, and of myself a seventh, are all alike in this. Hitherto, the Christian has been the moral being, a peerless oddity, and as a moral being he was more absurd, more vain, more thoughtless, and a greater disadvantage to himself than the greatest despiser of humanity could have deemed possible. Christian morality is the most malignant form of all falsehood, the actual cursay of humanity, that which has corrupted mankind. It is not error, as error which infuriates me at the sight of this spectacle. It is not the millenniums of absence of good will, of discipline, of decency, and of bravery in spiritual things, which betrays itself in the triumph of Christianity. It is rather the absence of nature. It is the perfectly ghastly fact that anti nature itself received the highest honors as morality and as law, and remains suspended over man as the categorical imperative. Fancy blundering in this way not as an individual, not as a people, but as a whole species, as humanity, to teach the contempt of all the principal instincts of life, to posit falsely the existence of a soul of a spirit in order to be able to defy the body. To spread the feeling that there was something impure in the very first prequisite of life, in sex, to seek the principle of evil, in the profound need of growth and expansion, that is to say, in severe self love, the term itself is slanderous. And conversely, to see a higher moral value. But what am I talking about? I mean the moral value, say, in the typical signs of decline, in the antagonism of the instincts, in selflessness, in a loss of ballast, in the suppression of the personal element, and in love of one's neighbor neighbor itis. What is humanity itself in a state of degeneration? Has it always been in the state. One thing is certain, that ye are taught only the values of decadence as the highest values. The morality of self renunciation is essentially the morality of degeneration. The fact I am going to the dogs is translated into the imperative ye shall or go to the dogs, and not only into the imperative. This morality of self renunciation, which is the only kind of morality that has been taught hitherto, betrays the will to nonentity. It denies life to the very roots. There still remains the possibility that it is not mankind that is in a state of degeneration, but only that parasitical kind of man, the priest, who, by means of morality and lies, has climbed up to his position of determinator of values, who divined in Christian morality his road to power and to tell the truth. This is my opinion. The teachers and the leaders of mankind, including the theologians, have been every one of them decadence, Hence the transvaluation of all values into a hostility towards life, hence morality. Definition of morality. Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadence actuated by a desire to avenge themselves with success upon life. I attach great value to this definition. Eight have you understood me? I have not uttered a single word which I have not already said five years ago through my mouthpiece Zarathustra. The unmasking of Christian morality is an event which is unequaled in history. It is a real catastrophe. The man who throws light upon it is a forcaint majeur, a fatality. He breaks the history of man into two. Time is reckoned up before him and after him. The lightning flash of truth struck precisely that which theretofore had stood highest. He who understands what was destroyed by that flash should look to see whether he still holds anything in his hands. Everything which until then was called truth has been revealed as the most detrimental, most spiteful, and most subterranean form of life. The Holy pretext, which was the improvement of man, has been recognized as a ruse for draining life of its energy and of its blood. Morality conceived as vampirism. The man who unmasks morality has also unmasked the worthlessness of the values in which men either believe or have believed. He no longer sees anything to be revered in the most venerable men, even in the types of men that have been pronounced wholly. All he can see in them is the most fatal kind of abortions, fatal because they fascinate. The concept God was invented as the opposite of the concept life. Everything detrimental, poisonous and slanderous, and all deadly hostility to life was bound together in one horrible unit in Him. The concepts beyond and true world were invented in order to depreciate the only world that exists, in order that no goal or aim, no sense or task might be left to earthly reality. The concepts soul, spirit, and last of all, concept immortal soul were invented in order to throw contempt on the body in order to make it sick and holy, in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling levity towards all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously, i e. The questions of nutrition and habitation, of intellectual diet, the treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather. Instead of health, we find the salvation of the soul. That is to say, a fully seculaire fluctuating between convulsions and penitence, and the hysteria of redemption. The concept sin, together with the torture instrument appertaining to it, which is the concept for very will, was invented in order to confuse and muddle our instincts, and to render the mistrust of them man's second nature. In the concepts disinterestedness and self denial, the actual signs of decadence are to be found. The allurement of that which is detrimental, the inability to discover one's own advantage, and self destruction are made into absolute qualities, into the duty, the holiness, and the divinity of man. Finally, to keep the worst to the last. By the notion of the good man, all that is favored, which is weak, ill botched, and sick in itself, which ought to be wiped out, the law of selection is thwarted. An ideal is made out of opposition to the proud, well constituted man, to him who says yea to life, to him who is certain of the future, and who guarantees the future. This man is henceforth called the evil one. And all this was believed in as morality. Ecraseelan fam nine, have you understood me. Dionysius verses Christ end of why I Am A Fatality recording by Tim shem Chase w w W dot s H E E R M A N. Hyphen Chase dot org dot UK. End of Ake Homer by Furish Nietzsche