Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal§351 The “good man:” Or, the hemiplegia of virtue. In the opinion of every strong and natural man, love and hate, gratitude and revenge, goodness and anger, affirmative and negative action, belong to each other. A man is good on condition that he knows how to be evil; a man is evil, because otherwise he would not know how to be good. From where comes the morbidity and ideological unnaturalness which repudiates these compounds which teaches a sort of one-sided efficiency as the highest of all things? From where comes this hemiplegia of virtue, the invention of the good man?
The object seems to be to make man amputate those instincts which enable him to be an enemy, to be harmful, to be angry and to insist upon revenge —
This unnaturalness, then, corresponds to that dualistic concept of a wholly good and of a wholly bad creature (God, Spirit, Man); in the first are found all the positive, in the second all the negative forces, intentions and states.
This method of valuing thus believes itself to be “idealistic”; it never doubts that in its concept of the “good man” it has found the highest desideratum. When aspiring to its zenith it fancies a state in which all evil is wiped out and in which only good creatures have actually remained over. It does not therefore regard the mutual dependence of the opposites good and evil as proved. On the contrary, the latter ought to vanish and the former should remain. The first has a right to exist, the second ought not to be with us at all—.
What, as a matter of fact, is the reason of this desire?
In all ages and particularly in the Christian age, much labour has been spent in trying to reduce men to this one—sided activity and even today, among those who have been deformed and weakened by the Church, people are not lacking who desire precisely the same thing with their “humanisation” generally, or with their “Will of God”, or with their “Salvation of the Soul”. The principal injunction behind all these things is, that man should no longer do anything evil, that he should under no circumstances be harmful or desire harm. The way to arrive at this state of affairs is to amputate all hostile tendencies, to suppress all the instincts of resentment and to establish “spiritual peace” as a chronic disease.
This attitude of mind, in which a certain type of man is bred, starts out with this absurd hypothesis: good and evil are postulated as realities which are in a state of mutual contradiction (not as complementary values, which they are), people are advised to take the side of the good and it is insisted upon that a good man resists and forswears evil until every trace of it is uprooted, but with this valuation Life is actually denied, for in all its instincts Life has both Yes and No. But far from understanding these facts, this valuation dreams rather of returning to the wholeness, oneness and feeling of strength of Life: it actually believes that a state of blessedness will be reached when the inner anarchy and state of unrest which result from these opposed impulses is brought to an end. It is possible that no more dangerous ideology, no greater mischief in the science of psychology has ever yet existed, than this will to good: the most repugnant type of man has been reared, the man who is not free, the bigot; it was taught that only as a bigot could one tread the path which leads to God and that only a bigot’s life could be a godly life.
And even here, Life is still in the right — Life that knows not how to separate Yes from No: what is the good of declaring with all one’s might that war is an evil, that one must harm no-one, that one must not act negatively? One is still waging a war even in this, it is impossible to do otherwise! The good man who has renounced all evil and who is afflicted according to his desire with the hemiplegia of virtue, does not therefore cease from waging war, or from making enemies, or from saying “No” and doing “No”. The Christian, for instance, hates “sin” — and what on earth is there which he does not call “sin”! It is precisely because of his belief in a moral antagonism between good and evil, that the world for him has grown so full of hatefulness and things that must be combated eternally. The “good man” sees himself surrounded by evil and, thanks to the continual onslaughts of the latter, his eye grows more keen and in the end discovers traces of evil in every one of his acts. And thus he ultimately arrives at the conclusion, which to him is quite logical, that Nature is evil, that man is corrupted and that being good is an act of grace (that is to say, it is impossible to man when he stands alone). In short: he denies Life, he sees how “good”, as the highest value, condemns Life —
And thus his ideology concerning good and evil ought to strike him as refuted. But one cannot refute a disease. Therefore he is obliged to conceive another life!