The Untouched Key Page 9

  “And whatever harm those do who slander the world, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm.”

  That these observations derive from Nietzsche’s childhood experiences is corroborated by the following passage:

  The condition of the existence of the good is the lie: put differently, not wanting to see at any price how reality is constituted fundamentally—namely, not in such a way as to elicit benevolent instincts at all times, and even less in such a way as to tolerate at all times the interference of those who are myopically good-natured.

  This awareness leads to boundless loneliness, which was the fate of this man from the beginning. The more he came to understand his environment, the more isolated he felt because he couldn’t communicate his insights and experiences to anyone. After he finally attempted to communicate them in Thus Spake Zarathustra, only to find that his hopes of being understood and of finding acceptance for his ideas had been in vain, he wrote these words in Ecce Homo:

  Except for these ten-day works, the years during and above all after my Zarathustra were marked by distress without equal. One pays dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.

  There is something I call the rancune of what is great: everything great—a work, a deed—is no sooner accomplished than it turns against the man who did it. By doing it, he has become weak; he no longer endures his deed, he can no longer face it. Something one was never permitted to will lies behind one, something in which the knot in the destiny of humanity is tied—and now one labors under it!—It almost crushes one.—The rancune of what is great.

  Then there is the gruesome silence one hears all around one. Solitude has seven skins; nothing penetrates them any more. One comes to men, one greets friends—more desolation, no eye offers a greeting. At best, a kind of revolt. Such revolts I experienced, very different in degree but from almost everybody who was close to me. It seems nothing offends more deeply than suddenly letting others feel a distance; those nobel natures who do not know how to live without reverence are rare.

  Thirdly, there is the absurd sensitivity of the skin to small stings, a kind of helplessness against everything small. This seems to me to be due to the tremendous squandering of all defensive energies which is a presupposition of every creative deed, every deed that issues from one’s most authentic, inmost, nethermost regions. Our small defensive capacitites are thus, as it were, suspended; no energy is left for them.

  I still dare to hint that one digests less well, does not like to move, is all too susceptible to feeling chills as well as mistrust—mistrust that is in many instances merely an etiological blunder. In such a state I once sensed the proximity of a herd of cows even before I saw it, merely because milder and more philanthropic thoughts came back to me: they had warmth.

  Nietzsche’s loneliness was caused by his inner plight, for only the very few were receptive to what he said, and perhaps he wasn’t aware of even these few. Thus, he would rather be alone than together with people who did not understand him. In his solitude, he had new ideas and made new discoveries; since they were based on his most personal experiences, but at the same time concealed them, they were difficult to share with others, and they only deepened his loneliness and the gulf between him and those around him. It was a process that had already begun in childhood, a childhood consisting of his continually being the giver. The boy’s raison d’être was to understand others, to be patient with them, to overlook their failings, and to validate their self-esteem but never to appease his own hunger to be understood. In “Night Song,” Nietzsche describes the tragedy of his attempt to find a solution, the tragedy of the person who gives and who thirsts:

  Light am I; ah, that I were night! But this is my loneliness that I am girt with light. Ah, that I were dark and nocturnal! How I could suck at the breasts of light! And even you would I bless, you little sparkling stars and glowworms up there, and be overjoyed with your gifts of light.

  But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. I do not know the happiness of those who receive; and I have often dreamed that even stealing must be more blessed than receiving. This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving; this is my envy, that I see waiting eyes and the lit-up nights of longing. Oh, wretchedness of all givers! Oh, darkening of my sun! Oh, craving to crave! Oh, ravenous hunger in satiation!

  They receive from me, but do I touch their souls? There is a cleft between giving and receiving; and the narrowest cleft is the last to be bridged. A hunger grows out of my beauty: I should like to hurt those for whom I shine; I should like to rob those to whom I give; thus do I hunger for malice. To withdraw my hand when the other hand already reaches out to it; to linger like the waterfall, which lingers even while it plunges: thus do I hunger for malice. Such revenge my fullness plots: such spite wells up out of my loneliness. My happiness in giving died in giving; my virtue tired of itself in its overflow.

  This text speaks of the envy directed at those who are able to take, who received love as a child, who can feel secure in a group, who are not condemned to open up new worlds in their loneliness, bestowing those worlds on others and reaping hostility in return. But fate cannot be changed. Those who do not want to live without the truth must also endure the cold regions of loneliness. Nietzsche writes:

  How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the r measure of value. Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindn error is cowardice.

  Every attainment, every step forward in knowl follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.

  I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them.

  Nitimur in vetitum: in this sign my philosophy will triumph one day, for what one has forbidden so far as a matter of principle has always been—truth alone.

  “For what one has forbidden so far as a matter of principle has always been—truth alone.” These words are valid for the history of humankind as well as for Nietzsche’s family. And because he was no longer willing or able to comply with this prohibition, he sought refuge in atheism. He did not want to parrot religious platitudes.

  “God,” “immortality of the soul,” “redemption,” “beyond”—without exception, concepts to which I never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been child-like enough for them?

  I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

  Every evening after saying his prayers and before going to sleep, the little boy tried to make himself remember not to think. This prohibition was directed against life, for the vitality of thoughts is destroyed if one is constantly checking and sorting them out to see if they are permitted or forbidden for the sake of adapting them to dogma.

  This ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life represents not only the highest insight but also the deepest, that which is most strictly confirmed and born out by truth and science. Nothing in existence may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable—those aspects of existence which Christians and other nihilists repudiate are actually on an infinitely higher level in the order of rank among values than that which the instinct of decadence could approve and call good. To comprehend this requires courage and, as a condition of that, an excess of strength: for precisely as far as courage may venture forward, precisely according to that measure of strength one approaches the truth. Knowledge, saying Yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and the flight from reality—as the “ideal” is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness.

  They are not free to know: the decadents need the lie—it is one of the conditions of their preservation.

  Whoever does not merely comprehen
d the word “Dionysian” but comprehends himself in the word “Dionysian” needs no refutation of Plato or Christianity or Schopenhauer—he smells the decay.

  For a physiologist such a juxtaposition of values simply leaves no doubt. When the least organ in an organism fails, however slightly, to enforce with complete assurance its self-preservation, its “egoism,” restitution of its energies—the whole degenerates. The physiologist demands excision of the degenerating part; he denies all solidarity with what degenerates; he is worlds removed from pity for it. But the priest desires precisely the degeneration of the whole, of humanity: for that reason, he conserves what degenerates—at this price he rules.

  When seriousness is deflected from the self-preservation and the enhancement of the strength of the body—that is, of life—when anemia is construed as an ideal, and contempt for the body as “salvation of the soul”—what else is this if not a recipe for decadence?

  The loss of the center of gravity, resistance to the natural instincts—in one word, “selflessness”—that is what was hitherto called morality.—With the Dawn I first took up the fight against the morality that would unself man.

  Nietzsche was of the opinion that the Renaissance was Western civilization’s great opportunity to free itself from Christianity’s life-denying moral system and that this opportunity was lost because of Luther.

  Luther, this calamity of a monk, restored the church and, what is a thousand times worse, Christianity, at the very moment when it was vanquished.—Christianity, this denial of the will to life become religion!—Luther, an impossible monk who, on account of his own “impossibility,” attacked the church and—consequently—restored it.—The Catholics would have good reason to celebrate Luther festivals, to write Luther plays.—Luther—and the “moral rebirth”!

  The morality that would un-self man is the morality of decline par excellence—the fact, “I am declining,” transposed into the imperative, “all of you ought to decline”—and not only into the imperative.—This only morality that has been taught so far, that of un-selfing, reveals a will to the end; fundamentally, it negates life.

  This would still leave open the possibility that not humanity is degenerating but only that parasitical type of man—that of the priest—which has used morality to raise itself mendaciously to the position of determining human values—finding in Christian morality the means to come to power.—Indeed, this is my insight: the teachers, the leaders of humanity, theologians all of them, were also, all of them, decadents: hence the revaluation of all values into hostility to life, hence morality—

  Definition of morality: Morality—the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life—successfully. I attach value to this definition.

  Have I been understood?—I have not said one word here that I did not say five years ago through the mouth of Zarathustra.

  The uncovering of Christian morality is an event without parallel, a real catastrophe. He that is enlightened about that, is a force majeure, a destiny—he breaks the history of mankind in two. One lives before him, or one lives after him.

  The lightning bolt of truth struck precisely what was highest so far: let whoever comprehends what has here been destroyed see whether anything is left in his hands. Everything that has hitherto been called “truth” has been recognized as the most harmful, insidious, and subterranean form of lie; the holy pretext of “improving” mankind, as the ruse for sucking the blood of life itself. Morality as vampirism.

  Whoever uncovers morality also uncovers the disvalue of all values that are and have been believed; he no longer see anything venerable in the most venerated types of man, even in those pronounced holy; he considers them the most calamitous type of abortion—calamitous because they exerted such fascination.

  The concept of “God” invented as a counterconcept of life—everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole hostility unto death against life synthesized in this concept in a gruesome unity! The concept of the “beyond,” the “true world” invented in order to devaluate the only world there is—in order to retain no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality! The concept of the “soul,” the “spirit,” finally even “immortal soul,” invented in order to despise the body, to make it sick, “holy”; to oppose with a ghastly levity everything that deserves to be taken seriously in life, the questions of nourishment, abode, spiritual diet, treatment of the sick, cleanliness, and weather.

  In place of health, the “salvation of the soul”—that is, a folie circulaire between penitential convulsions and hysteria about redemption. The concept of “sin” invented along with the torture instrument that belongs with it, the concept of “free will,” in order to confuse the instincts, to make mistrust of the instincts second nature. In the concept of the “selfless,” the “self-denier,” the distinctive sign of decadence, feeling attracted by what is harmful, being unable to find any longer what profits one, self-destruction is turned into the sign of value itself, into “duty,” into “holiness,” into what is “divine” in man. Finally—this is what is most terrible of all—the concept of the good man signifies that one sides with all that is weak, sick, failure, suffering of itself—all that ought to perish: the principle of selection is crossed—an ideal is fabricated from the contradiction against the proud and well-turned-out human being who says Yes, who is sure of the future, who guarantees the future—and he is now called evil.—And all this was believed, as morality!—Ecrasez l’infâme!—

  If we didn’t already know that Nietzsche’s forebears on both sides were theologians for several generations back, the following words would at least indicate that Nietzsche’s outburst is not simply a philosopher’s mental gymnastics but the bitter earnest produced by vivid, first-hand experiences.

  It is necessary to say whom we consider our antithesis: it is the theologians and whatever has theologians’ blood in its veins—and that includes our whole philosophy.

  Whoever has seen this catastrophe at close range or, better yet, been subjected to it and almost perished of it, will no longer consider it a joking matter.

  Not until he was an adult did Nietzsche read the books by the theologians. But his hatred of “the lie” has deeper roots and is connected with his hatred of the women who passed his theological heritage on to him as a child.

  May I here venture the surmise that I know women? That is part of my Dionysian dowry. Who knows? Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the eternally feminine. They all love me—an old story—not counting abortive females, the “emancipated” who lack the stuff for children.—Fortunately, I am not willing to be torn to pieces: the perfect woman tears to pieces when she loves.—I know these charming maenads.—Ah, what a dangerous, creeping, subterranean little beast of prey she is! And yet so agreeable!—A little woman who pursues her revenge would run over fate itself.—Woman is indescribably more evil than man; also cleverer: good nature is in a woman a form of degeneration.—In all so-called “beautiful souls” something is physiologically askew at bottom; I do not say everything, else I should become medi-cynical. The fight for equal rights is actually a symptom of a disease: every physician knows that.—Woman, the more she is a woman, resists rights in general hand and foot: after all, the state of nature, the eternal war between the sexes, gives her by far the first rank.

  But the furious child doesn’t stop with women; he also attacks their idol. For everything they did to him happened in the name of God.

  The Christian conception of God—God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God—the formula for every slander against “this world,” for every lie about the “beyond”! God—the deification of nothingness
, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!

  Nietzsche was not permitted to vent his feelings—of rage, indignation, vindictiveness, mockery, and contempt, which were caused by concrete, tragic experiences—on those who made him suffer. In his intellectual prison he could attack only ideas or people in the abstract, such as, for example, “women.”

  Although it is not difficult for us to recognize which experiences incited his anger, Nietzsche himself was not conscious of its source. Thus, he is able to say: “When I wage war against Christianity I am entitled to this because I have never experienced misfortunes and frustrations from that quarter—the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me. I myself, an opponent of Christianity de rigueur, am far from blaming individuals for the calamity of millennia.”

  It is tragic that Nietzsche was unable to blame specific individuals for what he observed “in general.” For the living roots of his insights, contrary to all appearances, remained concealed from his conscious self. Caught in the labyrinth of his thoughts, he was incapable of locating these roots. The only permissible way out was that he lose his mind.

  PHILOSOPHY AS A PROTECTION FROM THE TRUTH

  When I hear in Nietzsche’s works, especially The Antichrist, the cry of the angry child who has never been heard, when I perceive the mute, despairing, but also colossal battle that this wounded, highly expressive child waged against the untruthfulness, insensitivity, confusion, stupidity, inconsistency, and weakness of those who raised him, I am by no means relativizing what Nietzsche has to say about Christianity but am simply pointing to its origins. We could ask ourselves the same question that we ask about poets: If Nietzsche had been allowed to experience consciously the suffering caused by the way he was brought up, would The Antichrist have turned out the way it did? Presumably, he would not have needed to write it in the form he did, as an outpouring of stored-up affect; he surely would have found a different form, appropriate for telling what he had discovered with the aid of his feelings. If it had not been written as an abstract analysis of Christianity but as a document about his own suffering, many readers would have rediscovered themselves in what they read. It would have been an indictment and testimony concerning conditions that people know from experience, but only subliminally. For most people do not have Nietzsche’s ability to describe feelings of revulsion, contempt, and disgust with such sensitivity and to justify them so convincingly.