The Untouched Key Read online

  You owl! You bat! Intent to confound! Where are we? Such howling and yelping you have learned from a hound.

  Your lovely little white teeth are gnashing at me; out of a curly little mane your evil eyes are flashing at me.

  That is a dance up high and down low: I am the hunter; would you be my dog or my doe?

  Alongside me now! And swift, you malicious leaping belle! Now up and over there! Alas, as I leaped I fell.

  Oh, see me lying there, you prankster, suing for grace. I should like to walk with you in a lovelier place.

  Love’s paths through silent bushes, past many-hued plants. Or there along that lake: there goldfish swim and dance.

  You are weary now? Over there are sunsets and sheep: when shepherds play on their flutes—is it not lovely to sleep?

  You are so terribly weary? I’ll carry you there; just let your arms sink. And if you are thirsty—I have got something, but your mouth does not want it to drink.

  Oh, this damned nimble, supple snake and slippery witch! Where are you? In my face two red blotches from your hand itch.

  I am verily weary of always being your sheepish shepherd. You witch, if I have so far sung to you, now you shall cry.

  Keeping time with my whip, you shall dance and cry! Or have I forgotten the whip? Not I!

  It is permissible to hate and whip the serpent and the witch but not the mother, grandmother, or aunts. In any case, feelings of anger, outrage, and mistrust are unmistakably present here. They may also be directed at “the mob,” which has the same symbolic function as the serpent and the witch.

  Is this today not the mob’s? But the mob does not know what is great, what is small, what is straight and honest: it is innocently crooked, it always lies.

  Have a good mistrust today, you higher men, you stouthearted ones, you openhearted ones! And keep your reasons secret! For this today is the mob’s.

  What the mob once learned to believe without reasons—who could overthrow that with reasons?

  And in the market place one convinces with gestures. But reasons make the mob mistrustful.

  And if truth was victorious for once, then ask yourself with good mistrust: “What strong error fought for it?”

  Over and over again Nietzsche attempts to find his way out of the mists of confusing moral principles and attain clarity. But his speculating continually obfuscates the truth.

  Do not let yourselves be gulled and beguiled! Who, after all, is your neighbor? And even if you act “for the neighbor”—you still do not create for him.

  Unlearn this “for,” you creators! Your very virtue wants that you do nothing “for” and “in order” and “because.” You shall plug up your ears against these false little words. “For the neighbor” is only the virtue of the little people: there one says “birds of a feather” and “one hand washes the other.” They have neither the right nor the strength for your egoism. In your egoism, you creators, is the caution and providence of the pregnant. What no one has yet laid eyes on, the fruit: that your whole love shelters and saves and nourishes. Where your whole love is, with your child, there is also your whole virtue. Your work, your will, that is your “neighbor”: do not let yourselves be gulled with false values!

  The call to war has essentially only one symbolic meaning for Nietzsche: it represents nothing other than declaring battle against the deadly coercion, lies, and cowardice that constricted his life so painfully as a child. But Nietzsche doesn’t say it clearly enough, he doesn’t reveal the source. That is why he opens the doors to a harmful use of his words.

  A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty! [Italics mine]

  Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune.

  Where the state ends—look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?

  Thus spoke Zarathustra.

  And the man who was dependent all his life on his mother and sister writes: “If you would go high, use your own legs. Do not let yourselves be carried up; do not sit on the backs and heads of others.” In his own mind, Nietzsche was not sitting on the backs of others, but in his life he allowed the person closest to him to sit on his back to the very end.

  On January 14, 1880, he wrote to Malwida von Meysenbug: “For the terrible and almost unceasing martyrdom of my life makes me thirst for the end, and judging by several indications, the stroke that shall deliver me is near enough at hand to allow me to hope.” And in 1887 he said these significant words to Paul Deussen: “I don’t believe I’m going to last much longer. I’m now near the age when my father died, and I feel Im going to succumb to the same affliction he had.”

  The medical diagnosis of the disease that befell Nietzsche at the age of forty-five was “progressive paralysis,” and his biographers seem reassured when they “determine” that this later illness “had nothing at all to do” with the illnesses of his school days. And the 118 attacks in one year (1879) were apparently sheer “coincidence,” for in the opinion of many of his biographers, Nietzche was perfectly healthy until the appearance of his progressive paralysis.

  “WHY I AM SO WISE”

  Sometimes Nietzsche’s words convey something that might be construed as delusions of grandeur and that the reader might easily find offensive. One author has referred to this as Nietzsche’s “God complex,” and there are passages in Ecce Homo (1888) and in the letters that actually point to such a complex. How are we to understand this “arrogance” on the part of a thinker as critical and self-critical as Nietzsche? Those who have read the diaries he kept from age twelve to fourteen will scarcely believe that those pages were written by the same person whose later writing they already know—not because the diaries are so childish but because they are so adult. In great part, they could have been written by his aunts, his grandmother, or his father—and in the same style. The writing is colorless and unassuming, as was expected of him. The feelings expressed strike one as inauthentic, weak, sometimes theatrical, but for the most part false. We sense that what the writer really feels must remain completely beneath the surface without being revealed by a sentence or even a single word.

  But this boy, who at twelve wrote like an adult, was also capable of other things. What could he do with his sense of pride, with the certitude that he understood more than those around him? If Nietzsche had expressed his pride at that time, he would have been sinning against an important Christian virtue, humility. He certainly would have met with disapproval and indignation. The boy therefore was forced to suppress his healthy and understandable feeling of joy at what he knew as well as his grief at being alone with his knowledge; not until much later—in Ecce Homo, for instance—was he able to express these feelings. But then he did it in a way that people could not tolerate, putting himself in the position of a “sinner,” of someone who violates society’s norms—the norm of modesty, for one. He was sure to reap the moral indignation of his contemporaries and of posterity, an outcome he accepted gladly, presumably even enjoyed, because he felt liberated by his daring. A different kind of liberation, such as having insights that could be shared with others, was unknown to him. This man who was condemned to be alone with his insights never learned that someone can speak the truth without punishing himself for it and without giving others grounds for dismissing what he says by applying the label “delusions of grandeur.”

  But what strikes us as delusions of grandeur in Nietzsche presumably has other roots than simply an inner compulsion to provoke others. Nietzsche was the firstborn child, and even after the birth of his sister he could not count on anyone sharing his experiences and perceptions with him, especially those connected with the change brought about in his father by illness. He therefore found himself alone with his discoveries and was deprived of the reassurance that it would be safe to share them with those close to him. If he had had
older siblings, perhaps his perceptions would not have had such disastrous consequences for him. Perhaps he could at least have counted on an occasional understanding glance from an older brother or sister. As it was, however, he was always alone with his awareness, which in his case meant abandoned with his awareness, a situation that does not necessarily evoke feelings of pride but can also cause pain.

  The many passages in which Nietzsche characterizes Christianity are a key to how he felt about his relatives. We need only substitute “my aunts” or “my family” for the word “Christianity” for his vehement attacks suddenly to make sense.

  In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to the fore: here the lowest classes seek their salvation. The casuistry of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of the conscience, are pursued as a pastime, as a remedy for boredom; the emotional reaction to one who has power, called “God,” is constantly sustained (by means of prayer); and what is highest is considered unattainable, a gift, “grace.” Public acts are precluded; the hiding-place, the darkened room, is Christian. The body is despised, hygiene repudiated as sensuality; the church even opposes cleanliness (the first Christian measure after the expulsion of the Moors was the closing of the public baths, of which there were two hundred and seventy in Cordova alone). Christian too is a certain sense of cruelty against oneself and against others; hatred of all who think differently; the will to persecute. Gloomy and exciting conceptions predominate; the most highly desired states, designated with the highest names, are epileptoid; the diet is so chosen as to favor morbid phenomena and overstimulate the nerves. Christian too is mortal enmity against the lords of the earth, against the “noble”—along with a sly, secret rivalry (one leaves them the “body,” one wants only the “soul”). Christian, finally, is the hatred of the spirit, of pride, courage, freedom, liberty of the spirit; Christian is the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself.

  It is not difficult to imagine how much Nietzsche suffered as a child because of his family’s beliefs and assertions, because of their rejection of his bodily needs and his physical self, and because of their constant moral dictates, such as repentence, piety, neighborly love, chastity, loyalty, purity, and devotion. He regarded them—and rightly so—as empty concepts conflicting with everything that meant life for him, as for every child, and standing for “hatred of the natural (of reality!).” Nietzsche saw the Christian world as a fictitious one, as “the expression of a profound vexation at the sight of reality. But this explains everything. Who alone has good reason to lie his way out of reality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from reality is to be a piece of reality that has come to grief.”

  Couldn’t these words also be the child’s speculations about his do-good maiden aunts, whose main concern in raising the boy was to destroy the vitality in him that had also been destroyed in them? If we see the principles of his own upbringing behind his description of Christianity’s hypocritical morality, then we can easily recognize in the self-proclaimed representative of the “noble lords of the earth” the child who is still rooted in his feelings and is therefore strong, vital, and sincere but also in danger of having to sacrifice his vitality to pedagogical principles. When we read The Antichrist with this key in mind, passages that were previously perplexing now gain a clear meaning.

  If, for example, it makes men happy to believe that they have been redeemed from sin, it is not necessary, as a condition for this, that man is, in fact, sinful, but merely that he feels sinful. And if faith is quite generally needed above all, then reason, knowledge, and inquiry must be discredited: the way to truth becomes the forbidden way.

  Strong hope is a far more powerful stimulant of life than any single realization of happiness could ever be. Those who suffer must be sustained by a hope that can never be contradicted by any reality or be disposed of by any fulfillment—a hope for the beyond.

  So that it could say No to everything on earth that represents the ascending tendency of life, to that which has turned out well, to power, to beauty, to self-affirmation, the instinct of ressentiment, which had here become genius, had to invent another world from whose point of view this affirmation of life appeared as evil, as the reprehensible as such.

  Psychologically considered, “sins” become indispensable in any society organized by priests: they are the real handles of power. The priest lives on sins, it is essential for him that people “sin.” Supreme principle: “God forgives those who repent”—in plain language: those who submit to the priest.

  The tone becomes different when Nietzsche speaks about the man Jesus.

  To repeat, I am against any attempt to introduce the fanatic into the Redeemer type: the word impérieux, which Renan uses, is alone enough to annul the type. The “glad tidings” are precisely that there are no longer any opposites; the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children; the faith which finds expression here is not a faith attained through struggle—it is there, it has been there from the beginning; it is, as it were, an infantilism that has receded into the spiritual. The case of puberty being retarded and not developing in the organism, as a consequence of degeneration, is well known, at least to physiologists. Such a faith is not angry, does not reproach, does not resist: it does not bring “the sword”—it simply does not foresee how it might one day separate. It does not prove itself either by miracle or by reward and promise, least of all “by scripture”: at every moment it is its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own “kingdom of God.” Nor does this faith formulate itself: it lives, it resists all formulas.

  His affirmation of the Redeemer does not, however, prevent him from expressing his disgust for the church and its priests.

  The concepts “beyond,” “Last Judgment,” “immortality of the soul,” and “soul” itself are instruments of torture, systems of cruelties by virtue of which the priest became master, remained master.

  Everybody knows this, and yet everything continues as before.

  From the beginning, he says, the priests used Jesus to attain power for themselves.

  In Paul the priest wanted power once again—he could use only concepts, doctrines, symbols with which one tyrannizes masses and forms herds. What was the one thing that Mohammed later borrowed from Christianity? Paul’s invention, his means to priestly tyranny, to herd formation: the faith in immortality—that is, the doctrine of the “judgment.”

  The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts—whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future now arouses mistrust. To live so, that there is not longer any sense in living, that now becomes the “sense” of life.… that little prigs and three-quarter-madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes—such an intensification of every kind of selfishness into the infinite, into the impertinent, cannot be branded with too much contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this miserable flattery of personal vanity.

  The priest knows only one great danger: that is science, the sound conception of cause and effect.… Man shall not look outside, he shall look into himself; he shall not look into things cleverly and cautiously, like a learner, he shall not look at all—he shall suffer. And he shall suffer in such a way that he has need of the priest at all times.… A priestly attempt! …

  When the natural consequences of a deed are no longer “natural,” but thought of an caused by the conceptual specters of superstition, by “God,” by “spirits,” by “souls,” as if they were merely “moral” consequences, as reward, punishment, hint, means of education, then the presupposition of knowledge has been destroyed—

  I have selected these quotations with various perspectives in mind. In addition to expressing clearly the adult Nietzsche’s feelings about Christianity, they also convey to alert readers his unconscious feelings, repressed since childhood, toward his first attachment figures. These passages reveal as well the child-raising methods and principles
Nietzsche must have been exposed to as a child without being able to call them by name: above all, contempt for everything vital, sensual, and creative; the struggle to replace the child’s feeling of well-being with guilt feelings and repentence; the suppression of his ability to think for himself, of his critical capacities, of his need to understand connections (the intellectual disciplines), and of his need for freedom and spontaneity. Not only obedience and submissiveness were preached to him but also the so-called love of truth, which was pure hypocrisy, for the boy who was forbidden to say anything critical was also forced to lie repeatedly. It is this perversion of values that continually aroused Nietzsche’s ire and that he tried to make tangible by his paradoxical formulations in the hope that he would no longer have to be alone with his anger.

  THE GLORIFICATION OF EVIL

  (Vitality Is Evil)

  Nietzsche considered himself the advocate of evil in only one specific connection: where evil is seen as the opposite of what people call good. He writes:

  When the herd animal is irradiated by the glory of the purest virtue, the exceptional man must have been devaluated into evil. When mendaciousness at any price monopolizes the word “truth” for its perspective, the really truthful man is bound to be branded with the worst names.

  And a few lines earlier he quotes Zarathustra:

  “False coasts and assurances the good have taught you; in the lies of the good you were hatched and huddled. Everything has been made fraudulent and has been twisted through and through by the good.”

  “The good are unable to create; they are always the beginning of the end; they crucify him who writes new values on new tablets; they sacrifice the future to themselves—they sacrifice all man’s future.”

  “The good have always been the beginning of the end.”