“The Gay Science” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Josefine Nauckhoff)

Nietzsche published the first edition of this treatise in 1882 and the second expanded edition in 1887. In between, he had published both “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and “Beyond Good and Evil”. This book largely consists of a set of aphorisms, paragraph-length topical discussions, and a collection of poems. Nietzsche begins, “What distinguishes the common nature is that it unflinchingly keeps sight of its advantage…. The unreason or odd reason (Unvernunft oder Quervernunft) of passion is what the common type despises in the noble, especially when this passion is directed at objects whose value seems quite fantastic and arbitrary…. The higher nature’s taste is for exceptions, for things that leave most people cold and seem to lack sweetness; the higher nature has a singular value standard…. The most industrious age—our own—doesn’t know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money except still more money and still more industriousness…. The opposite of the world of the madman is not truth and certainty but the generality and universal bindingness of a faith; in short, the non-arbitrary in judgment. And man’s greatest labour so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to lay down a law of agreement—regardless of whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the head which has preserved humanity…. The most select minds bristle at this universal bindingness—the explorers of truth above all!”

Nietzsche pontificates on the necessity of aesthetics to achieve meaning in life, “As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon ourselves.” This goes, hand in hand, in opposition to his conception of morality. “As soon as we see a new picture, we immediately construct it with the help of all the old experiences…. There are no experiences other than moral ones, not even in the realm of sense perception…. Wherever we encounter morality, we find an evaluation and ranking of human drives and actions. These evaluations and rankings are always the expression of the needs of a community and herd: that which benefits it the most…. With morality the individual is instructed to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function.”

Finally, Nietzsche often deals head-on with the problems of modernity and God, “Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition?—Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us?” He gives some suggestions for living the best life, “Either one does not dream, or does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one’s waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.” Nietzsche concludes, “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge!”

“Untimely Meditations” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This collection of four of Nietzsche’s essays broadly revolve around the theme of culture. The writings reflect on the characteristics of a cultured man, the role of the philosopher in society, truth and art, the uses of history in modern life, and, specifically, German culture after the Franco-Prussian war. “Culture is, above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people. Much knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it.” In his next essay, Nietzsche discusses the difference between the everlasting and the historical, “With the word ‘the unhistorical’ I designate the art and power of forgetting and of enclosing oneself within a bounded horizon; I call ‘suprahistorical’ the powers which lead the eye away from becoming towards that which bestows upon existence the character of the eternal and stable, towards art and religion. Science—for it is science which would here speak of poisons—sees in these two forces hostile forces: for science considers the only right and true way of regarding things, that is to say the only scientific way, as being that which sees everywhere things that have been, things historical, and nowhere things that are, things eternal.”

Nietzsche delves into the purpose of true philosophy in his essay championing his predecessor, Schopenhauer, “The truthful man feels that the meaning of his activity is metaphysical, explicable through the laws of another and higher life, and in the profoundest sense affirmative…. So it is that all his acts must become an uninterrupted suffering…. He will, to be sure, destroy his earthly happiness through his courage; he will have to be an enemy to those he loves and to the institutions which have produced him; he may not spare men or things, even though he suffers when they suffer; he will be misunderstood and for long thought an ally of powers he abhors; however much he may strive after justice he is bound, according to the human limitations of his insight, to be unjust; but he may console himself with the words once employed by his great teacher, Schopenhauer: ‘A happy life is impossible: the highest that man can attain to is a heroic one.’”

Finally, in an essay on Wagner, he again explicitly mentions culture, aesthetic truth, and art. “Danger and despair lie in wait for every true artist thrown into the modern world…. We can see how the most serious artist will try forcibly to impose seriousness on the institution of which he is part, an institution which has, however, been constructed frivolously and demands frivolity almost as a matter of principle; how he partially succeeds but in the end always fails; how he begins to feel disgust and wants to flee, how he fails to find anywhere to flee to, and is again and again obliged to return to the gypsies and outcasts of our culture as one of them.”

Nietzsche concludes, “The history of the evolution of culture since the Greeks is short enough, if one takes into account the actual distance covered and ignores the halts, regressions, hesitations, and lingerings. The Hellenization of the world and, to make this possible, the orientalization of the Hellenic—the twofold task of the great Alexander—is still the last great event; the old question whether a culture can be transplanted to a foreign soil at all is still the problem over which the moderns weary themselves.” Finally, Nietzsche describes the fate of any true artist, as opposed to the lone philosopher, who has to live within his cultural milieu, “For it is, to be sure, a life full of torment and shame, to be a homeless wanderer in a world to which one nonetheless has to speak and of which one has to make demands, which one despises and yet is unable to do without—it is the actual predicament of the artist of the future; he cannot, like the philosopher, hunt after knowledge all by himself in a dark corner, for he needs human souls as mediators with the future, public institutions as guarantees of this future, as bridges between the now and the hereafter.”

“The Birth of Tragedy" by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

In his first book, Nietzsche details the role of Greek tragedy in forming humanity’s conception of aesthetics. “Art derives its continuous development from the duality of the Apolline and Dionysiac…. To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that in the Greek world there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Appolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music. These two very different tendencies walk side by side, usually in violent opposition to one another…. By a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ‘will’, the two seem to be coupled, and in this coupling they seem at last to beget the work of art that is as Dionysiac as it is Appoline— Attic tragedy.”

First, Nietzsche zooms out to convey how aesthetics relate to reality. “We can indeed assume for our own part that we are images and artistic projections for the true creator of that world, and that our highest dignity lies in the meaning of works of art—for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified…. Only in so far as the genius is fused with the primal artist of the world in the act of artistic creation does he know anything of the eternal essence of art.”

Nietzsche describes, in minute detail, the composition and meaning of Attic tragedy, as it was first performed in Athens, “The ground walked upon by the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of the original tragedy, is an ideal ground, a ground lifted high above the real paths of mortal men. For this chorus the Greeks built the floating scaffold of an invented natural state, and placed upon it natural beings invented especially for it. It was on this foundation that tragedy arose…. The satyr, the Dionysiac chorist, lives in a world granted existence under the religious sanction of myth and ritual….

The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of our own more recent age, is the product of a longing for the primal and the natural; but how firmly and fearlessly did the Greeks hold onto this man of the woods…. Nature, still unaffected by knowledge, the bolts of culture still unforced—that is what the Greeks saw in their satyr…. He was the archetype of man, the expression of his highest and most intense emotions, an inspired reveler enraptured by the closeness of his god…. The chorus is a living wall against encroaching reality because it—the satyr chorus—depicts existence more truly, more authentically, more completely than the man of culture who sees himself as the sole reality…. The contrast between this authentic, natural truth and the lie of culture masquerading, as the sole reality is like the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the entire world of phenomena…. The symbolism of the satyr chorus analogously expresses the primal relationship between the thing in itself and the world of appearances….

This interpretation perfectly explains the chorus in Greek tragedy, the symbol of the crowd in a Dionysiac state…. The tragic chorus of the Greeks is older, more primordial, indeed more important than the ‘action’ itself…. We now know that the stage, and the action, were fundamentally and originally conceived only as a vision, that the sole ‘reality’ is the chorus, which generates the vision from within itself…. In its vision this chorus beholds its Lord and master, Dionysus, and hence it is always a chorus of votaries…. In this function of complete devotion to the god, it is the supreme, Dionysiac expression of nature, and therefore, like nature, it speaks under the spell of wise and oracular sayings. Sharing his suffering, it is also wise, heralding the truth from the very heart of the world…. 

This is the Apolline dream state, in which the daylight world is veiled and a new world, more distinct, comprehensible and affecting than the other and yet more shadowy, is constantly reborn before our eyes…. The language, colour, mobility and dynamic of speech become completely separate spheres of expression in the Dionysiac lyric of the chorus and the Apolline dream world of the stage. Everything that comes to the surface in the Apolline part of Greek tragedy, the dialogue, looks simple, transparent and beautiful.”

Finally, Nietzsche concludes by revealing the role myth and tragedy played in shaping our culture at large, “Without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power: only a horizon surrounded by myths can unify an entire cultural movement. Myth alone rescues all the powers of imagination and the Apolline dream from their aimless wanderings. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man’s interpretation of his life and struggles. The state itself has no unwritten laws more powerful than the mythical foundation that guarantees its connection with religion and its growth out of mythical representations.”

“The Anti-Christ” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This short treatise is Nietzsche basically ripping everything about Christianity. He begins, “Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations…. I call an animal, a species, an individual depraved when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers what is harmful to it…. Where the will to power is lacking there is decline.” He continues by ripping into Kantian morality, “Each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general…. What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy? as an automaton of ‘duty’? It is virtually a recipe for decadence, even for idiocy.”

Nietzsche contrasts Christianity with Buddhist philosophy, “Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity—it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives. Buddhism is the only really positivistic religion history has to show us, even in its epistemology (a strict phenomenalism—), it no longer speaks of ‘the struggle against sin’ but, quite in accordance with actuality, ‘the struggle against suffering’. It already has—and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity—the self-deception of moral concepts behind it—it stands, in my language, beyond good and evil…. Prayer is excluded, as is asceticism, no categorical imperative, no compulsion at all…. He demands no struggle against those who think differently; his teaching resists nothing more than it resists the feeling of revengefulness…. In the teaching of the Buddha egoism becomes a duty…. The precondition for Buddhism is a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness, absence of desire, and this goal is achieved…. In Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to the foreground: it is the lowest classes which seek their salvation in it. Here the caustic business of sin, self-criticism, conscience-inquisition, is practiced as a power…. Here the highest things are considered unachievable, gifts, ‘grace’…. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind is Christian; hatred of the senses, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.”

Science is also opposed to Christianity by Nietzsche, “A religion like Christianity, which is at no point in contact with actuality, which crumbles away as soon as actuality comes into its own at any point whatever, must naturally be a mortal enemy of the ‘wisdom of the world’, that is to say of science…. ‘Faith’ as an imperative is a veto against science.” Nietzsche continues by invoking Genesis, “God had created himself a rival, science makes equal to God—it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden in itself—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original sin…. Happiness, leisure gives room for thought—all thoughts are bad thoughts…. Man shall not think…. The beginning of the Bible contains the entire philosophy of the priest.—The priest knows only one great danger: that is science—the sound conception of cause and effect. But science flourishes in general only under happy circumstances—one must have a superfluity of time and intellect in order to ‘know’…. ‘Consequently man must be made unhappy’—this has at all times been the logic of the priest.—One will have already guessed what only came into the world therewith, in accordance with this logic—‘sin’…. The concept of guilt and punishment, the entire ‘moral world-order’, was invented in opposition to science—in opposition to the detaching man from the priest…. The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of ‘grace’, of ‘redemption’, of ‘forgiveness’—lies through and through and without any psychological reality—were invented to destroy the causal sense of man: they are an outrage on the concept cause and effect!”

To that end, Nietzsche extols the virtues of skepticism, “Great intellects are sceptics. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The vigour of a mind, its freedom through strength and superior strength, is proved by scepticism…. A spirit which wants to do great things, which also wills the means for it, is necessarily a sceptic. Freedom from convictions of any kind, the capacity for an unconstrained view, pertains to strength…. The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort is necessarily a dependent man—such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will use him.”

Finally, Nietzsche pontificates on the natural class divisions amongst men, “The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct. They consider the hard task a privilege, to play with vices which overwhelm others recreation…. Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most venerable kind of human being: this does not exclude their being the most cheerful, the most amiable. They rule not because they want to but because they are.”

“Twilight of the Idols (Or how to Philosophize with a Hammer)” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This short book is a mismatch of aphorisms, blurbs, and short essays that Nietzsche wrote towards the end of his sanity. He begins, “This little book is a grand declaration of war.” From that bold start, he gives a taste of some choice maxims, “Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows…. To live alone one must be an animal or a god—says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both—a philosopher…. Which is it? Is man only God’s mistake or God only man’s mistake?—…. Let us not be cowardly in the face of our actions! Let us not afterwards leave them in a lurch!—Remorse of conscience is indecent.”

In an essay disparaging Socrates, Nietzsche begins by commenting on the value of life, “In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless…. Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound—a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life.” In another essay he discusses morality and nature, “All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life—some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of ‘shall’ and ‘shall not’, some hinderance and hostile element on life’s road is thereby removed. Anti-natural morality, that is virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the instincts of life…. It denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life…. Life is at an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins.” On determinism, he opines, “No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives…. One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole…. Nothing exits apart from the whole!… We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.”

In an essay on German deficiencies, Nietzsche contrasts culture with the nation-state. “Culture and the state—one should not deceive oneself over this—are antagonists: the ‘cultural state’ is merely a modern idea…. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline…. Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum [beauty is for the few].” On a short paragraph on Thomas Carlyle, Nietzsche sneaks in his opinion on faith, “The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is secure enough, firm enough, fixed enough for it.”

Nietzsche bemoans modern customs and takes shots at Schopenhauer and Christ all in one go, “Our softening of customs—this is my thesis, my innovation if you like—is a consequence of decline; stern and frightful customs can, conversely, be a consequence of a superabundance of life…. That movement which with Schopenhauer’s morality of pity attempted to present itself as scientific—a very unsuccessful attempt!—is the actual decadence movement of morality; as such it is profoundly related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, see in pity, in ‘love for one’s neighbor’, in a lack of self and self-reliance, something contemptible…. ‘Equality’, a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights’ is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—that which I call pathos of distance—characterizes every strong age.” He transitions to thoughts on institutional development, “Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained…. They undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug—it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time…. The man who has become free—and how much more the mind that has become free—spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior…. For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-ling responsibility, to solidarity between the succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum.”

Nietzsche next discusses aesthetics and the concept of beauty, “Even the beauty of a race or a family, the charm and benevolence of their whole demeanour, is earned by labour: like genius, it is the final result of the accumulatory labour of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste…. One must have possessed in it a selective principle in respect of one’s society, residence, dress, sexual gratification, one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence…. Good things are costly beyond measure: and the law still holds that he who has them is different from him who obtains them. Everything good is inheritance: what is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning.”

Finally, in an essay on the ancients and his love for tradition, Nietzsche finds time for a digression ripping Plato. “One does not learn from the Greeks…. Plato mixes together all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first decadent…. I find him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christian—he already has the concept ‘good’ as the supreme concept…. Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the ‘Cross’…. Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian…. I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”

“On the Genealogy of Morals” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Michael A. Scarpitti)

In these three short essays, Nietzsche brings his unique take on the progression of mankind specifically to the history of morality. He has no problem casually tearing down all received wisdom. “No one has, up to the present, expressed the slightest doubt or hesitation in judging the ‘good man’ to be of a higher value than the ‘evil man’, of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, welfare and prosperity in general.” Nietzsche posits that, in fact, it was the aristocracy, from their position of power, who labeled their own actions as ‘good’, in a self-justifying manner. “The judgement ‘Good’ did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown! Rather it has been the ‘good men’ themselves, that is, the noble, the powerful, those of high degree, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good…. It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values for their own benefit…. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the continuing and dominating collective instinct, and feeling of superiority of a higher race, a master race, in comparison to a subservient race—this is the origin of the opposition of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’.” Modernity has been crippled by its quest for leveling, for the egalitarian spirit. “Our greatest peril lurks in the European drift towards egalitarianism, for it is this prospect which wearies us—we see today nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that everything is still, retreating, going backwards, regressing towards something more reserved, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.” Human advancement marches towards the mass man, towards blandness.

In his second essay, Nietzsche moves on to the origins of obligations, debts, conscience, repression, and religion. “It is then in this sphere of contracts and legal obligations that we find the crucible of moral concepts such as ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’, ‘duty’, the ‘sacredness of duty’—their beginnings, like the beginnings of all great things in this world, are drenched with blood, through and through…. How can suffering be considered a compensation for ‘debts’?—It is because the infliction of suffering produces supreme pleasure, because the injured party will receive in exchange for his loss (including his vexation at his loss) an extraordinary reward: the pleasure of inflicting suffering—a real feast.” The joy of inflicting suffering had to be restrained as humanity matured. “It was that desire for self-torture in the savage who suppresses his cruelty because he was forced to contain himself (incarcerated as he was in ‘the state’, as part of his taming process), who invented bad conscience so as to hurt himself…. This man of bad conscience armed himself with religious precepts so as to carry his martyrdom to its ghastly extreme…. He takes ‘God’ as the most extreme antitheses that he can find to his own characteristic and indomitable animal instincts.”

Finally, Nietzsche takes on the march from ascetic ideals to secular modernity. “All good things were once bad things…. The feelings we call tenderness, benevolence, care, sympathy—which have been valued so highly that they are now almost ‘intrinsic values’—were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors…. The submission to law; oh, how reluctantly the noble races throughout the world renounced the vendetta and gave to the law power over themselves! ‘Law’ was for a long time a vetitum, an outrage, something unheard of; it was introduced with force, as a force, something to which men submitted only in shame.” The State finally usurped from the powerful. Nietzsche questions the values of secular truth and science, supposedly the outgrowth and cure for religion. “The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief. Even we modern men of science—we who are godless foes of metaphysics—light our torches in that conflagration which was kindled by a belief thousands of years old, that Christian belief, which was also Plato’s belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine…. What if God Himself proved to be our oldest lie?” Science is not opposed to asceticism, only art is. “In art, lying is consecrated, and the desire for deception has good conscience on its side. Plato felt this instinctively—Plato, the greatest enemy of art whom Europe has ever produced. Plato versus Homer.” For Nietzsche, only the poet can triumph over the truths. Asceticism alone will never quench man’s thirst. “The ascetic ideal simply means that something was lacking, that Man was surrounded by a tremendous void…. He suffered from the problem of his own meaning…. He was in the main a diseased animal; his problem was not suffering itself, though, but lack of an answer to that crying question, ‘Why do we suffer?’ Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose for suffering…. Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.”

“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This is Nietzsche at his enigmatic best. “He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.” Nietzsche creates an alter-ego, Zarathustra, half-hermit and half-superman, who wanders the mountains and spits out life advice in the form of riddles to his small band of followers. He also occasionally takes time out of his day to talk with animals and fly through the air over passing ships. This is no stale philosophical treatise.

Nietzsche begins, “It is not your sin, but your moderation that cries to heaven…. Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman—a rope over an abyss.” Nietzsche is not concerned with the common man, but the remnant living above the mob. “To lure many away from the herd—that is why I have come…. Behold the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? Him who smashes their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker—but he is the creator. Behold the faithful of all faiths! Whom do they hate the most? Him who smashes their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker—but he is the creator…. I shall leap over the hesitating and the indolent. Thus may my going-forward be their going-down!” 

Nietzsche explains religious faith and higher virtue thus, “It was suffering and impotence—that created all afterworlds; and that brief madness of happiness that only the greatest sufferer experiences…. If you have a virtue and it is your own virtue, you have it in common with no one…. Let your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names; and if you speak of it, do not be ashamed to stammer…. only thus do I wish the good…. To have many virtues is to be distinguished, but it is a hard fate; and many a man has gone into the desert and killed himself because he was tired of being a battle and battleground of virtues…. Every virtue is jealous of the others, and jealousy is a terrible thing…. Man is something that must be overcome: and for that reason you must love your virtues—for you will parish by them.”

Nietzsche continues by describing relations between humans. He waxes on about the nature of the State, of wealth, power and freedom. “Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law…. But the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies—and whatever it has, it has stolen…. I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called—life…. Just look at these superfluous people! They acquire wealth and make themselves poorer with it…. They all strive towards the throne: it is a madness they have—as if happiness sat upon the throne! Often filth sits upon the throne—and often the throne upon filth, too…. A free life remains for great souls. Truly, he who possesses little is so much the less possessed: praised be a moderate poverty! Only there, where the state ceases, does the man who is not superfluous begin.” 

Nietzsche is obsessed with the creators, especially the creators of subjective value. “Truly, men have given themselves all their good and evil. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven. Man first implanted values into things to maintain himself—he created the meaning of things, a human meaning!… A change in values—that means a change in the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.” Nietzsche knows that the creator of values will be disdained by the mob. “It is more noble to declare yourself wrong than to maintain you are right, especially when you are right. Only you must be rich enough for it.”

Cultural inertia and contingency block the creative path. “Not only the reason of millennia—the madness of millennia too breaks out in us. It is dangerous to be an heir. We are still fighting step by step with the giant Chance, and hitherto the senseless, the meaningless, has still ruled over mankind.” The way forward is solitary learning. “Guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil…. The enlightened man goes among men as among animals…. As long as men have existed, man has enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin!”

Nietzsche pitches war against the good and the just. “With whom does the greatest danger for the whole human future lie? Is it not with the good and just?—with those who say and feel in their hearts: ‘We already know what is good and just, we possess it too; woe to those who are still searching for it!’ And whatever harm the wicked may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm! And whatever harm the world-calumniators may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm. Oh my brothers, someone who once looked into the heart of the good and just said: ‘They are the Pharisees.’ But he was not understood. The good and just themselves could not understand him: their spirit is imprisoned in their good conscience. The stupidity of the good is unfathomably clever…. The good have to crucify him who devises his own virtue…. For the good—cannot create: they are the beginning of the end.”

Nietzsche espouses almost Buddhist-like ideas on the nature of the Self and the cycle of life. “You are the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now your destiny!… We know what you teach: that all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us…. “Now I die and decay,” you would say, “and in an instant I shall be nothingness. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! I myself am part of these causes of the eternal recurrence.””

Nietzsche speaks of the temptations of the secure and easy life of the everyman. “Even a prison at last seems bliss to such restless people as you. Have you ever seen how captured criminals sleep? They sleep peacefully, they enjoy their new security. Take care that you are not at last captured by a narrow belief, a hard, stern illusion! For henceforth everything that is narrow and firm will entice and tempt you.” Nietzsche, again, reiterates that even his followers must chart their own paths. “I am a law only for my own, I am not a law for all…. And let us not be equal before the mob. You Higher Men, depart from the market-place!” Man must create to overcome himself, but also know his limits, if he has them. “And you should not pretend to be saints in those matters in which your fathers were vicious!” Famously, Nietzsche advised, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”