461.
_Why philosophers are slanderers._--The artful and blind hostility
of philosophers towards the _senses_--what an amount of _mob_ and
_middle-class_ qualities lie in all this hatred!
The crowd always believes that an abuse of which it feels the harmful
results, constitutes an _objection_ to the thing which happens to be
abused: all insurrectionary movements against principles, whether in
politics or agriculture, always follow a line of argument suggested by
this ulterior motive: the abuse must be shown to be necessary to, and,
inherent in, the principle.
It is a _woeful_ history: mankind looks for a principle, from the
standpoint of which he will be able to contemn man--he invents a world
in order to be able to slander and throw mud at this world: as a matter
of fact, he snatches every time at nothing, and construes this nothing
as "God," as "Truth," and, in any case, as judge and detractor of
_this_ existence....
If one should require a proof of how deeply and thoroughly the actually
_barbarous_ needs of man, even in his present state of tameness and
"civilisation," still seek gratification, one should contemplate the
"leitmotifs" of the whole of the evolution of philosophy:--a sort
of revenge upon reality, a surreptitious process of destroying the
values by means of which men live, a _dissatisfied_ soul to which
the conditions of discipline is one of torture, and which takes a
particular pleasure in morbidly severing all the bonds that bind it to
such a condition.
The history of philosophy is the story of a _secret and mad hatred_
of the prerequisities of Life, of the feelings which make for the
real values of Life, and of all partisanship in favour of Life.
Philosophers have never hesitated to affirm a fanciful world, provided
it contradicted this world, and furnished them with a weapon wherewith
they could calumniate this world. Up to the present, philosophy has
been the _grand school of slander_: and its power has been so great,
that even to-day our science, which pretends to be the advocate of
Life, has _accepted_ the fundamental position of slander, and treats
this world as "appearance," and this chain of causes as though it were
only phenomenal. What is the hatred which is active here?
I fear that it is still the _Circe of philosophers--_Morality, which
plays them the trick of compelling them to be ever slanderers.... They
believed in moral "truths," in these they thought they had found the
highest values; what alternative had they left, save that of denying
existence ever more emphatically the more they got to know about it?...
For this life is _immoral...._ And it is based upon immoral first
principles: and morality says _nay_ to Life.
Let us suppress the real world: and in order to do this, we must first
suppress the highest values current hitherto--morals.... It is enough
to show that morality itself _is immoral,_ in the same sense as that in
which immorality has been condemned heretofore. If an end be thus made
to the tyranny of the former values, if we have suppressed the "real
world," a _new order of values_ must follow of its own accord.
The world of appearance and the world _of lies_: this constitutes the
contradiction. The latter hitherto has been the "real world," "truth,"
"God." This is the one which we still have to suppress.
The _logic of my conception_:
(1) _Morality as the highest value_ (it is master of _all_ the phases
of philosophy, even of the Sceptics). _Result_: this world is no good,
it is not the "real world."
(2) _What_ is it that determines the highest value here? What, in
sooth, is morality?--It is the instinct of _decadence_; it is the
means whereby the exhausted and the degenerate _revenge themselves._
_Historical_ proof: philosophers have always been decadents ... in the
service of _nihilistic_ religions.
(3) It is the instinct of decadence coming to the fore as _will to
power._ Proof: the absolute _immorality_ of the means employed by
morality throughout its history.
General aspect: the values which have been highest hitherto constitute
a specific case of the will to power; morality itself is a specific
case of immorality.
462.
_The principal innovations_: Instead of "moral values," nothing but
_naturalistic values._ Naturalisation of morality.