1
I KNOW my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite. – And with all that there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion – religions are affairs of the rabble, I have need of washing my hands after contact with religious people… I do not want ‘believers’, I think I am too malicious to believe in myself, I never speak to masses… I have a terrible fear I shall one day be pronounced holy: one will guess why I bring out this book beforehand; it is intended to prevent people from making mischief with me… I do not want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon… Perhaps I am a buffoon… And none the less, or rather not none the less – for there has hitherto been nothing more mendacious than saints – the truth speaks out of me. – But my truth is dreadful: for hitherto the lie has been called truth. – Revaluation of all values: this is my formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to know myself in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia… I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie… My genius is in my nostrils… I contradict as has never been contradicted and am none the less the opposite of a negative spirit. I am a bringer of good tidings such as there has never been, I know tasks from such a height that any conception of themhas hitherto been lacking; only after me is it possible to hope again. With all that I am necessarily a man of fatality. For when truth steps into battle with the lie of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed of. The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have been blown into the air – they one and all reposed on the lie: there will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.
2
Does one want a formula for a destiny that has become man? It stands in my Zarathustra.
– and he who wants to he a creator in good and evil has first to be a destroyer and break values.
Thus the greatest evil belongs with the greatest good: this, however, is the creative good.
I am by far the most terrible human being there has ever been; this does not mean I shall not be the most beneficent. I know joy in destruction to a degree corresponding to my strength for destruction – in both I obey my dionysian nature, which does not know how to separate No-doing from Yes-saying. I am the first immoralist: I am therewith the destroyer par excellence. –
3
I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name Zarathustra means in precisely my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that Persian in history is precisely the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things: the translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work. But this question is itself at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he had longer and greater experience here than any other thinker – the whole of history is indeed the experimental refutation of the proposition of a so-called ‘moral world-order’ –: what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His teaching, and his alone, upholds truthfulness as the supreme virtue – that is to say, the opposite of the cowardice of the ‘idealist’, who takes flight in face of reality; Zarathustra has more courage in him than all other thinkers put together. To tell the truth and to shoot well with arrows: that is Persian virtue. – Have I been understood? The self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.
4
At bottom my expression immoralist involves two denials. I deny first a type of man who has hitherto counted as the highest, the good, the benevolent, beneficent; I deny secondly a kind of morality which has come to be accepted and to dominate as morality in itself – décadence morality, in more palpable terms Christian morality. The second contradiction might be seen as the decisive one, since the over-valuation of goodness and benevolence by and large already counts with me as a consequence of décadence, as a symptom of weakness, as incompatible with an ascending and affirmative life: denial and destruction is a condition of affirmation. – I deal first of all with the psychology of the good man. In order to assess what a type of man is worth one has to compute how much his preservation costs – one has to know the conditions of his existence. The condition for the existence of the good is the lie –: expressed differently, the desire not to see at any price what is the fundamental constitution of reality, that is to say not such as to call forth benevolent instincts at all times, even less such as to permit at all times an interference by short-sighted good-natured hands. To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the niaiserie par excellence, in a general sense a real disaster in its consequences, a fatality of stupidity – almost as stupid as would be the will to abolish bad weather – perhaps from pity to the poor… In the general economy of the whole the fearfulnesses of reality (in the affects, in the desires, in the will to power) are to an incalculable degree more necessary than any form of petty happiness, so-called ‘goodness’; since the latter is conditioned by falsity of instinct one must even be cautious about granting it a place at all. I shall have a grand occasion of demonstrating the measure-lessly uncanny consequences for the whole of history of optimism, that offspring of the homines optimi. Zarathustra, the first to grasp that optimism is just as décadent as pessimism and perhaps more harmful, says: good men never tell the truth. The good taught you false shores and false securities: you were born and kept in the lies of the good. Everything has been distorted and twisted down to its very bottom through the good. Fortunately the world has not been constructed for the satisfaction of instincts such as would permit merely good-natured herd animals to find their narrow happiness in it; to demand that everything should become ‘good man’, herd animal, blue-eyed, benevolent, ‘beautiful soul’ – or, as Mr Herbert Spencer wants, altruistic, would mean to deprive existence of its great character, would mean to castrate mankind and to reduce it to a paltry Chinadom. –And this has been attempted!… Precisely this has been called morality… In this sense Zarathustra calls the good now ‘the last men’, now the ‘beginning of the end’; above all he feels them to be the most harmful species of man, because they preserve their existence as much at the expense of truth as at the expense of the future.
The good – cannot create, they are always the beginning of the end–
– they crucify him who writes new values on new law-tables, they sacrifice the future to themselves, they crucify the whole human future!
The good — have always been the beginning of the end…
And whatever harm the world-calumniators may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm.
5
Zarathustra, the first psychologist of the good, is – consequendy – a friend of the wicked. When a décadence-species of man has risen to the rank of the highest species of man, this can happen only at the expense of its antithetical species, the species of man strong and certain of life. When the herd-animal is resplendent in the glow of the highest virtue, the exceptional man must be devalued to the wicked man. When mendaciousness at any price appropriates the word ‘truth’ for its perspective, what is actually veracious must be discovered bearing the worst names. Zarathustra here leaves no doubt: he says that it was knowledge of precisely the good, the ‘best’, which made him feel horror at man in general; it was out of this repugnance that the wings grew which ‘carried him to distant futures’ – he does not dissemble that it is precisely in relation to the good that his type of man, a relatively superhuman type, is superhuman, that the good and just would call his superman a devil…
You highest men my eyes have encountered! This is my doubt of you and my secret laughter: I think you would call my superman – a devil!
Your souls are so unfamiliar with what is great that the superman would be fearful to you in his goodness…
It is at this point and nowhere else that one must make a start if one is to understand what Zarathustra’s intentions are: the species of man he delineates delineates reality as it is: he is strong enough for it – he is not estranged from or entranced by it, he is reality itself, he still has all that is fearful and questionable in reality in him, only thus can man possess greatness…
6
–But there is also another sense in which I have chosen for myself the word immoralist as a mark of distinction and badge of honour; I am proud to possess this word which sets me off against the whole of humanity. No one has yet felt Christian morality as beneath him: that requires a height, a farsightedness, a hitherto altogether unheard-of psychological profundity and abysmalness. Christian morality has hitherto been the Circe of all thinkers – they stood in its service. – Who before me has entered the caverns out of which the poisonous blight of this kind of ideal – world-calumny! – wells up? Who has even ventured to suspect that these caverns exist? Who before me at all among philosophers has been a psychologist and not rather its opposite ‘higher swindler’, ‘idealist’? Before me there was no psychology. –To be the first here can be a curse, it is in any case a destiny: for one is also the first to despise… Disgust at mankind is my danger…
7
Have I been understood? – What defines me, what sets me apart from all the rest of mankind, is that I have unmasked Christian morality. That is why I needed a word which would embody the sense of a challenge to everyone. Not to have opened its eyes here sooner counts to me as the greatest piece of uncleanliness which humanity has on its conscience, as self-deception become instinct, as a fundamental will not to observe every event, every cause, every reality, as false-coinage in psychologicis to the point of crime. Blindness in the face of Christianity is the crime par excellence – the crime against life… The millennia, the peoples, the first and the last, the philosophers and the old women – except for five or six moments of history, me as the seventh – on this point they are all worthy of one another. The Christian has hitherto been the ‘moral being’, a curiosity without equal – and, as ‘moral being’, more absurd, mendacious, vain, frivolous, harmful to himself than even the greatest despiser of mankind could have allowed himself to dream. Christian morality – the most malicious form of the will to the lie, the actual Circe of mankind: that which has ruined it. It is not error as error which horrifies me at the sight of this, not the millennia-long lack of ‘good will’, of discipline, of decency, of courage in spiritual affairs which betrays itself in its victory – it is the lack of nature, it is the utterly ghasdy fact that anti-nature itself has received the highest honours as morality, and has hung over mankind as law, as categorical imperative!… To blunder to this extent, not as an individual, not as a people, but as mankind!… That contempt has been taught for the primary instincts of life; that a ‘soul’, a ‘spirit’ has been lyingly invented in order to destroy the body; that one teaches that there is something unclean in the precondition of life, sexuality; that the evil principle is sought in that which is most profoundly necessary for prosperity, in strict selfishness (– the very word is slanderous!); that on the other hand one sees in the typical signs of decline and contradictoriness of instinct, in the ‘selfless’, in loss of centre of gravity, in ‘depersonalization’ and ‘love of one’s neighbour’ (– lust for one’s neighbour!) the higher value, what am I saying! value in itself… What! could mankind itself be in décadence? has it always been? – What is certain is that it has been taught only décadence values as supreme values. The morality of unselfing is the morality of decline par excellence, the fact ‘I am perishing’ translated into the imperative ‘you all shall perish’ – and not only into the imperative!… This sole morality which has hitherto been taught, the morality of unselfing, betrays a will to the end, it denies the very foundations of life. – Let us here leave the possibility open that it is not mankind which is degenerating but only that parasitic species of man the priest, who with the aid of morality has lied himself up to being the determiner of mankind’s values – who divines in Christian morality his means to power… And that is in fact my insight: the teachers, the leaders of mankind, theologians included, have also one and all been décadents: thence the revaluation of all values into the inimical to life, thence morality… Definition of morality: morality – the idiosyncrasy of décadents with the hidden intention of avenging themselves on life – and successfully. I set store by this definition. –
8
– Have I been understood? – I have not just now said a word that I could not have said five years ago through the mouth of Zarathustra. – The unmasking of Christian morality is an event without equal, a real catastrophe. He who exposes it is a force majeure, a destiny – he breaks the history of mankind into two parts. One lives before him, one lives after him… The lightning-bolt of truth struck precisely that which formerly stood highest: he who grasps what was then destroyed had better see whether he has anything at all left in his hands. Everything hitherto called ‘truth’ is recognized as the most harmful, malicious, most subterranean form of the lie; the holy pretext of ‘improving’ mankind as the cunning to suck out life itself and to make it anaemic. Morality as vampirism… He who unmasks morality has therewith unmasked the valuelessness of all values which are or have been believed in; he no longer sees in the most revered, even canonized types of man anything venerable, he sees in them the most fateful kind of abortion, fateful because they exercise fascination… The concept ‘God’ invented as the antithetical concept to life – everything harmful, noxious, slanderous, the whole mortal enmity against life brought into one terrible unity! The concept ‘the Beyond’, ‘real world’ invented so as to deprive of value the only world which exists – so as to leave over no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality! The concept ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, finally even ‘immortal soul’, invented so as to despise the body, so as to make it sick – ‘holy’ – so as to bring to all the things in life which deserve serious attention, the questions of nutriment, residence, cleanliness, weather, a horrifying frivolity! Instead of health ‘salvation of the soul’ – which is to say a folie circulaire between spasms of atonement and redemption hysteria! The concept ‘sin’ invented together with the instrument of torture which goes with it, the concept of ‘free will’, so as to confuse the instincts, so as to make mistrust of the instincts into second nature! In the concept of the ‘selfless’, of the ‘self-denying’ the actual badge of décadence, being lured by the harmful, no longer being able to discover where one’s advantage lies, self-destruction, made the sign of value in general, made ‘duty’, ‘holiness’, the ‘divine’ in man! Finally – it is the most fearful – in the concept of the good man common cause made with everything weak, sick, ill-constructed, suffering from itself, all that which ought to perish – the law of selection crossed, an ideal made of opposition to the proud and well-constituted, to the affirmative man, to the man certain of the future and guaranteeing the future – the latter is henceforth called the evil man… And all this was believed in as morality! – Ecrasez l’ infame! –
9
– Have I been understood? – Dionysos against the Crucified…