A man so born and bred would be beyond good and evil; he would not hesitate to be böse if his purpose should require it; he would be fearless rather than good. “What is good? . . . To be brave is good.” “What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad (schlecht)? All that comes from weakness.” Perhaps the dominant mark of the superman will be love of danger and strife, provided they have a purpose; he will not seek safety first; he will leave happiness to the greatest number. “Zarathustra was fond of all such as makes distant voyages, and like not to live without danger.”80 Hence all war is good, despite the vulgar pettiness of its causes in modern times; “a good war halloweth any cause.” Even revolution is good; not in itself, for nothing could be more unfortunate than the supremacy of the masses; but because times of strife bring out the latent greatness of individuals who before had insufficient stimulus or opportunity; out of such chaos comes the dancing star; out of the turmoil and nonsense of the French Revolution, Napoleon; out of the violence and disorder of the Renaissance such powerful individualities, and in such abundance, as Europe has hardly known since, and could no longer bear.
Energy, intellect, and pride,—these make the superman. But they must be harmonized: the passions will become powers only when they are selected and unified by some great purpose which moulds a chaos of desires into the power of a personality. “Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but the soil of his plants!” Who is it that follows his impulses? The weakling: he lacks the power to inhibit; he is not strong enough to say No; he is a discord, a decadent. To discipline one’s self—that is the highest thing. “The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.” To have a purpose for which one can be hard upon others, but above all upon one’s self; to have a purpose for which one will do almost anything except betray a friend,—that is the final patent of nobility, the last formula of the superman.81
Only by seeing such a man as the goal and reward of our labors can we love life and live upward. “We must have an aim for whose sake we are all dear to one another.”82 Let us be great, or servants and instruments to the great; what a fine sight it was when millions of Europeans offered themselves as means to the ends of Bonaparte, and died for him gladly, singing his name as they fell! Perhaps those of us who understand can become the prophets of him whom we cannot be, and can straighten the way for his coming; we, indifferent of lands, indifferent of times, can work together, however separated, for this end. Zarathustra will sing, even in his suffering, if he can but hear the voices of these hidden helpers, these lovers of the higher man. “Ye lonely ones of to-day, ye who stand apart, ye shall one day be a people; from you who have chosen yourselves, a chosen people shall arise; and from it the superman.”83
VII. Decadence
Consequently, the road to the superman must lie through aristocracy. Democracy—“this mania for counting noses”—must be eradicated before it is too late. The first step here is the destruction of Christianity so far as all higher men are concerned. The triumph of Christ was the beginning of democracy; “the first Christian was in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything privileged; he lived and struggled unremittingly for ‘equal rights’”; in modern times he would have been sent to Siberia. “He that is greatest among you, let him be your servant”—this is the inversion of all political wisdom, of all sanity; indeed, as one reads the Gospel one feels the atmosphere of a Russian novel; they are a sort of plagiarism from Dostoievski. Only among the lowly could such notions take root; and only in an age whose rulers had degenerated and ceased to rule. “When Nero and Caracalla sat on the throne, the paradox arose that the lowest man was worth more than the man on top.”84
As the conquest of Europe by Christianity was the end of ancient aristocracy, so the overrunning of Europe by Teutonic warrior barons brought a renewal of the old masculine virtues, and planted the roots of the modern aristocracies. These men were not burdened with “morals”: they “were free from every social restraint; in the innocence of their wild-beast conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arrogance and compromise as if nothing but a student’s freak had been perpetrated.” It was such men who supplied the ruling classes for Germany, Scandinavia, France, England, Italy, and Russia.
A herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization, with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers, . . . this herd founded the State. The dream is dispelled which made the State begin with a contract. What has he to do with contracts who can command, who is master by nature, who comes on the scene with violence in deed and demeanour?85
This splendid ruling stock was corrupted, first by the Catholic laudation of feminine virtues, secondly by the Puritan and plebeian ideals of the Reformation, and thirdly by inter-marriage with inferior stock. Just as Catholicism was mellowing into the aristocratic and unmoral culture of the Renaissance, the Reformation crushed it with a revival of Judaic rigor and solemnity. “Does anybody at last understand, will anybody understand what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph . . . I see before me a possibility perfectly magical in its charm and glorious coloring . . . . Cæsar Borgia as Pope . . . . Do you understand me?”86
Protestantism and beer have dulled German wit; add, now, Wagnerian opera. As a result, “the present-day Prussian is one of the most dangerous enemies of culture.” “The presence of a German retards my digestion.” “If, as Gibbon says, nothing but time—though a long time—is required for a world to perish; so nothing but time—though still more time—is required for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany.” When Germany defeated Napoleon it was as disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church; thenceforward Germany put away her Goethes, her Schopenhauers and her Beethovens, and began to worship “patriots”; “Deutschland über Alles—I fear that was the end of German philosophy.”87 Yet there is a natural seriousness and depth in the Germans that gives ground for the hope that they may yet redeem Europe; they have more of the masculine virtues than the French or the English; they have perseverance, patience, industry—hence their scholarship, their science, and their military discipline; it is delightful to see how all Europe is worried about the German army. If the German power of organization could coöperate with the potential resources of Russia, in materials and in men, then would come the age of great politics. “We require an intergrowth of the German and Slav races; and we require, too, the cleverest financiers, the Jews, that we may become the masters of the world . . . . We require an unconditional union with Russia.” The alternative was encirclement and strangulation.