Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
1
THE task for the immediately following years was as clear as it could be. Now that the affirmative part of my task was done, it was the turn of the denying, the No-saying and No-doing part: the revaluation of existing values themselves, the great war – the evocation of a day of decision. Included here is the slow search for those related to me, for such as out of strength would offer me their hand for the work of destruction. – From now on all my writings are fish-hooks: perhaps I understand fishing as well as anyone?… If nothing got caught I am not to blame. There were no fish…
2
This book (1886) is in all essentials a critique of modernity, the modern sciences, the modern arts, not even excluding modern politics, together with signposts to an antithetical type who is as little modern as possible, a noble, an affirmative type. In the latter sense the book is a school for gentlemen, that concept taken more spiritually and radically than it has ever been taken. One has to have courage in one even to endure it, one must never have learned fear… All the things of which the age is proud are felt as contradictions of this type, almost as bad manners, for example its celebrated ‘objectivity’, its ‘sympathy with all that suffers’, its ‘historical sense’ with its subjection to the taste of others, with its prostration before petits faits, its ‘scientificality’. – If one considers that the book comes after Zarathustra one will also perhaps divine the dietetic regime to which it owes its existence. The eye grown through a tremendous compulsion accustomed to seeing afar – Zarathustra is more farsighted even than the Tsar – is here constrained to focus sharply on what is close at hand, the age, what is around us. In every aspect of the book, above all in its form, one will discover the same intentional turning away from the instincts out of which a Zarathustra becomes possible. Refinement in form, in intention, in the art of keeping silent, is in the foreground, psychology is employed with an avowed harshness and cruelty – there is not a single good-natured word in the entire book… All this is recuperative: who could in the end divine what kind of recuperation is needed after such an expenditure of goodness as Zarathustra is?… Speaking theologically – pay heed, for I rarely speak as a theologian it was God himself who at the end of his labour lay down as a serpent under the Tree of Knowledge: it was thus he recuperated from being God… He had made everything too beautiful… The Devil is merely the idleness of God on that seventh day…