Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,261

unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?

As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.—

28

Apart from the ascetic ideal, man, the human animal, had no meaning so far. His existence on earth contained no goal; “why man at all?”—was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded as a refrain a yet greater “in vain!” This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void—he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, “why do I suffer?”

Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far—and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all; the ascetic ideal was in every sense the “faute de mieux” par excellence so far. In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism. This interpretation—there is no doubt of it—brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt.

But all this notwithstanding—man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense—the “sense-less”—he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.

We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself—all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion1 to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.2—

1“On Reading and Writing” (Portable Nietzsche).

2Newest lust for glory.

3Horror of a vacuum.

1This paragraph as well as section 3 was included with some revisions in Nietzsche contra Wagner, in the chapter “Wagner as the Apostle of Chastity” (Portable Nietzsche).

1Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was the outstanding “Young” (left-wing) Hegelian philosopher who tried to transform theology into anthropology. His influence on Karl Marx was considerable, but Marx and Engels took sharp issue with him. Feuerbach’s book, Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) was translated into English by George Eliot as The Essence of Christianity (1853, 2nd ed., 1881), and is still considered a classic of humanism.

1Nietzsche uses the English term. The allusion is to David Hume.

1Georg Herwegh, 1817-1875.

2For the greater glory of music.

1Critique of Judgment (1790), sections 1-5.

2A promise of happiness.

3Ed. Julius Frauenstädt; i.e., Book III, section 38.

1Instrument of the devil.

2The philosophical animal.

3Socrates appears in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds.

4Let the world perish, but let there be philosophy, the philosopher, me!

1Here used in the sense of silly asses, which is common in German.

2Reich.

3Nietzsche did not live to publish an essay on this subject, but see his next two books, The Case of Wagner (p. 601 f., below) and Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” section 8ff., 19ff., and 47ff. (Portable Nietzsche.). See also Nietzsche contra Wagner (ibid.) and the sections on “The Will to Power as Art” in The Will to Power, ed. Kaufmann (New York, Random House, 1967).

1Without anger