Thoughts about Morality as a Prejudice
I
WITH this book begins my campaign against morality. Not that it smells in the slightest of gunpowder – quite other and more pleasant odours will be perceived in it, provided one has some subtlety in one’s nostrils. Neither big nor even small guns: if the effect of the book is negative, its means are all the less so, means from which the effect follows like a conclusion not like a cannon-shot. That one takes leave of the book with a cautious reserve in regard to everything that has hitherto been honoured and even worshipped under the name morality does not contradict the fact that in the entire book there is no negative word, no attack, no malice – that it rather lies in the sun, round, happy, like a sea-beast sunning itself among rocks. In the end it was I myself who was this sea-beast: almost every sentence in the book was thought, tracked down among that confusion of rocks near to Genoa where I was alone and still shared secrets with the sea. Even now, when I chance to light on this book every sentence becomes for me a spike with which I again draw something incomparable out of the depths: its entire skin trembles with tender shudders of recollection. The art in which it is preeminent is no small one in making things which easily slip by without a sound, moments which I call divine lizards, stay still for a little – not with the cruelty of that young Greek god who simply impaled the poor little lizard, but none the less still with something sharp, with the pen… ‘There are so many daybreaks that have not yet dawned’ – this Indian inscription stands on the gateway to this book. Where does its author seek that new dawn, that hitherto still undetected tender roseate sky with which another day – ah, a whole series, a whole world of new days! – breaks? In a revaluation of all values, in an escape from all moral values, in an affirmation of and trust in all that has hitherto been forbidden, despised, accursed. This affirmative book pours its light, its love, its tenderness upon nothing but evil things, it restores to them their ‘soul’, the good conscience, the exalted right and privilege to exist. Morality is not attacked, it only no longer comes into consideration… This book ends with an ‘Or?’ – it is the only book which ends with an ‘Or?’…
2
My task, to prepare a moment of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind, a great noontide when it looks back and looks forward, when it steps out from the dominion of chance and the priesthood and poses the question why? to what end? for the first time as a whole – this task follows of necessity from the insight that mankind is not of itself on the right path, that it is absolutely not divinely directed, that under precisely its hohest value-concepts rather the instinct of denial, of decay, the décadence instinct has seductively ruled. The question of the origin of moral values is therefore for me a question of the first rank because it conditions the future of mankind. The demand that one ought to believe that fundamentally everything is in the best hands, that a book, the Bible, will set one’s mind finally at rest as to divine governance and wisdom in the destiny of mankind, is translated back into reality, the will to suppress the truth as to the pitiable opposite of this, namely that hitherto mankind has been in the worst hands, that it has been directed by the under-privileged, the cunningly revengeful, the so-called ‘saints’, those world-calumniators and desecraters of man. The decisive sign that reveals that the priest (– including the concealed priest, the philosopher) has become master not only within a certain religious community but in general is that décadence morality, the will to the end, counts as morality in itself, is the unconditional value everywhere accorded to the unegoistic and the hostility accorded the egoistic. Whoever does not agree with me on this point I consider infected… But the whole world does not agree with me… For a physiologist such a value-antithesis admits of no dubiety. When within an organism the meanest organ neglects even to the slightest degree to assert with absolute certainty its self-preservation, indemnity for its expenditure of force, its ‘egoism’, the whole degenerates. The physiologist demands excision of the degenerate part, he denies any solidarity with it, he is far from pitying it. But the priest wants precisely the degeneration of the whole, of mankind: that is why he conserves the degenerate part – at this price he dominates mankind… What is the purpose of those lying concepts, the ancillary concepts of morality ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’, ‘God’, if it is not the physiological ruination of mankind?… When one directs seriousness away from self-preservation, enhancement of bodily strength, when one makes of greensickness an ideal, of contempt for the body ‘salvation of the soul’, what else is it but a recipe for décadence? – Loss of centre of gravity, resistance to the natural instincts, in a word ‘selflessness’ – that has hitherto been called morality… With ‘Daybreak’ I first took up the struggle against the morality of unselfing. –