The Will to Power. Friedrich Nietzsche

The symptoms of this self-destruction of the botched and the bungled: self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication, romanticism, and, above all, the instinctive constraint to acts whereby the powerful are made into mortal enemies (training, so to speak, one s own hangmen), the will to destruction as the will of a still deeper instinct of the instinct of self-destruction, of the will to nonentity. Nihilism is a sign that the botched and bungled have no longer any consolation, that they destroy in order to be destroyed, that, having been deprived of morality, they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves," that they take up their stand on the territory of the opposite principle, and will also exercise power themselves, by compelling the powerful to become their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism, that active negation, after all existence has lost its meaning. It must not be supposed that "poverty" has grown more acute, on the contrary! "God, morality, resignation" were remedies in the very deepest stages of misery: active nihilism made its appearance in circumstances which were relatively much more favorable. The fact, alone, that morality is regarded as overcome, presupposes a certain degree of intellectual culture; while this very culture, for its part, bears evidence to a certain relative well-being. A certain intellectual fatigue, brought on by the long struggle concerning philosophical opinions, and carried to hopeless skepticism against philosophy, shows moreover that the level of these nihilists is by no means a low one. Only think of the conditions in which Buddha appeared! The teaching of the eternal recurrence would have learned principles to go upon (just as Buddha s teaching, for instance, had the notion of causality, etc.). What do we mean today by the words "botched and bungled"? In the first place, they are used physiologically and not politically. The unhealthiest kind of man all over Europe (in all classes) is the soil out of which nihilism grows: this species of man will regard eternal recurrence as damnation once he is bitten by the thought, he can no longer recoil before any action. He would not extirpate passively, but would cause everything to be extirpated which is meaningless and without a goal to this extent; although it is only a spasm, or sort of blind rage in the presence of the fact that everything has existed again and again for an eternity even this period of nihilism and destruction. The value of such a crisis is that it purifies, that it unites similar elements, and makes them mutually destructive, that it assigns common duties to men of opposite persuasions, and brings the weaker and more un certain among them to the light, thus taking the first step towards a new order of rank among forces from the standpoint of health: recognizing commanders as commanders, subordinates as subordinates. Naturally irrespective of all the present forms of society. What class of men will prove they are strongest in this new order of things? The most moderate: they who do not require any extreme forms of belief, they who not only admit of, but actually like, a certain modicum of chance and nonsense; they who can think of man with a very moderate view of his value, without becoming weak and small on that account; the most rich in health, who are able to withstand a maximum amount of sorrow, and who are therefore not so very much afraid of sorrow, men who are certain of their power, and who represent with conscious pride the state of strength to which man has attained. How could such a man think of eternal recurrence?

      56. The Periods of European Nihilism. The period of obscurity: all kinds of groping measures devised to preserve old institutions and not to arrest the progress of new ones. The period of light; men see that old and new are fundamental contraries; that the old values are born of descending life, and that the new ones are born of ascending life that all old ideals are unfriendly to life (born of decadence and determining it, however much they may be decked out in the Sunday finery of morality). We understand the old, but are far from being sufficiently strong for the new. The periods of the three great passions: contempt, pity, destruction. The periods of catastrophes: the rise of a teaching which will sift mankind . . . which drives the weak to some decision and the strong also.

      II. CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN NIHILISM

      (a) MODERN GLOOMINESS.

      57. My friends, we had a hard time as youths; we even suffered from youth itself as though it were a serious disease. This is owing to the age in which we were born an age of enormous internal decay and disintegration which, with all its weakness and even with the best of its strength, is opposed to the spirit of youth. Disintegration that is to say, uncertainty is peculiar to this age: nothing stands on solid ground or on a sound faith. People live for the morrow, because the day-after-tomorrow is doubtful. All our road is slippery and dangerous, while the ice which still bears us has grown unconscionably thin: we all feel the mild and gruesome breath of the thaw-wind soon, where we are walking, no one will any longer be able to stand!

      58. If this is not an age of decay and of diminishing vitality, it is at least one of indiscriminate and arbitrary experimentalizing and it is probable that out of an excess of abortive experiments there has grown this general impression, as of decay: and perhaps decay itself.

      59. Concerning the history of modern gloominess. The state-nomads (officials, etc.): "home less". The break-up of the family. The "good man" as a symptom of exhaustion. Justice as will to power (rearing). Lewdness and neurosis. Black music: whither has real music gone? The anarchist. Contempt of man, loathing. Most profound distinction: whether hunger or satiety is creative? The first creates the ideals of romanticism. Northern unnaturalness. The need of alcohol: the "need" of the working classes. Philosophical nihilism.

      60. The slow advance and rise of the middle and lower classes (including the lower kind of spirit and body), which was already well under way before the French Revolution, and would have made the same progress forward without the latter, in short, then, the preponderance of the herd over all herdsmen and bell-wethers, brings in its train: (i) Gloominess of spirit (the juxtaposition of a stoical and a frivolous appearance of happiness, peculiar to noble cultures, is on the decline; much suffering is allowed to be seen and heard which formerly was borne in concealment; (2) Moral hypocrisy (a way of distinguishing oneself through morality, but by means of the values of the herd: pity, solicitude, moderation; and not by means of those virtues which are recognized and honored outside the herd s sphere of power); (3) A really large amount of sympathy with both pain and joy (a feeling of pleasure resulting from being herded together, which is peculiar to all gregarious animals "public spirit," "patriotism," everything, in fact, which is apart from the individual).

      61. Our age, with its indiscriminate endeavors to mitigate distress, to honor it, and to wage war in advance with unpleasant possibilities, is an age of the poor. Our "rich people" they are the poorest! The real purpose of all wealth has been forgotten.

      62. Criticism of modern man: "the good man," but corrupted and misled by bad institutions (tyrants and priests); reason elevated to a position of authority; history is regarded as the surmounting of errors; the future is regarded as progress; the Christian state ("God of the armies"); Christian sexual intercourse (as marriage); the realm of "justice" (the cult of "mankind"); "freedom." The romantic attitudes of the modern man: the noble man (Byron, Victor Hugo, George Sand) , taking the part of the oppressed and the bungled and the botched: motto for historians and romancers; the Stoics of duty; disinterestedness regarded as art and as knowledge; altruism as the most mendacious form of egoism (utilitarianism), the most sentimental form of egoism. All this savors of the eighteenth century. But it had other qualities which were not inherited, namely, a certain insouciance, cheerfulness, elegance, spiritual clearness. The spiritual tempo has altered; the pleasure which was begotten by spiritual refinement and clearness has given room to the pleasure of color, harmony, mass, reality, etc. etc. Sensuality in spiritual things. In short, it is the eighteenth century of Rousseau.

      63. Taken all in all, a considerable amount of humanity has been attained by our men of today. That we feel this is in itself a proof of the fact that we have become so sensitive in regard to small cases of distress, that we somewhat unjustly overlook what has been achieved. Here we must make allowances for the fact that a great deal of decadence is rife, and that, through such eyes, our world must appear bad and wretched. But these eyes have always seen in the same way, in all ages. (1) A certain hypersensitiveness, even in morality. (2) The quantum of bitterness and gloominess, which pessimism bears with it in its judgments- both together have helped to bring about the preponderance of the other and opposite point of view, that things are not well with our morality. The fact of credit, of the commerce of the world, and the means of traffic are expressions of an extraordinarily mild trustfulness in men. . . . To that may also be added (3) The deliverance of science from