The Will to Power

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
II: Criticism of Morality

§253   An attempt at investigating morality without being affected by its charm and not without some mistrust in regard to the beguiling beauty of its attitudes and looks. A world which we can admire, which is in keeping with our capacity for worship which is continually demonstrating itself in small things or in large: this is the Christian standpoint which is common to us all.

Through an increase in our astuteness, in our mistrust and in our scientific spirit (also through a more developed instinct for truth, which again is due to Christian influence), this interpretation has grown ever less and less tenable for us.

The subtlest way of escape: Kantian criticism. The intellect not only denies itself every right to interpret things in that way, but also to reject the interpretation once it has been made. People are satisfied with a greater demand upon their credulity and faith, with a renunciation of all right to reason concerning the proof of their creed, with an intangible and superior “Ideal” (God) as a stop-gap.

The Hegelian way of escape, a continuation of the Platonic, a piece of romanticism and reaction and at the same time a symptom of the historical sense of a new power: “Spirit” itself is the “self-revealing and self-realising ideal”: we believe that in the “process of development” an ever greater proportion of this ideal is being manifested thus the ideal is being realised, faith is vested in the future, into which all its noble needs are projected and in which they are being worshipped. In short:

  1. God is unknowable to us and not to be demonstrated by us (the concealed meaning behind the whole of the epistemological movement).

  2. God may be demonstrated, but as something evolving and we are part of it, as our pressing desire for an ideal proves (the concealed meaning behind the historical movement).

It should be observed that criticism is never levelled at the ideal itself, but only at the problem which gives rise to a controversy concerning the ideal; that is to say, why it has not yet been realised, or why it is not demonstrable in small things as in great.

* * *

It makes all the difference: whether a man recognises this state of distress, as such, owing to a passion or to a yearning in himself, or whether it comes home to him as a problem which he arrives at only by straining his thinking powers and his historical imagination to the utmost.

Away from the religious and philosophical points of view we find the same phenomena. Utilitarianism (socialism and democracy) criticises the origin of moral valuations, though it believes in them just as much as the Christian does. (What guilelessness! As if morality could remain when the sanctioning deity is no longer present! The belief in a “Beyond “is absolutely necessary, if the faith in morality is to be maintained).

Fundamental problem: whence comes this almighty power of Faith? Whence this faith in morality? (It is betrayed by the fact that even the fundamental conditions of life are falsely interpreted in favour of it, despite our knowledge of plants and animals. “Self-preservation “: the Darwinian prospect of a reconciliation of the altruistic and egotistic principles).

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