“Truth,” as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every free spirit, every socialist, every churchman, is a perfect proof that not even a beginning has been made with that discipline of the spirit, that self-overcoming which is needed if any small, however small, truth is to be found.
The deaths of the martyrs, incidentally, have been a great misfortune in history: they seduced. The inference of all idiots, woman and the people included, that there must be something to a cause for which someone goes to his death (or which even, like early Christianity, generates death-seeking epidemics)—this inference has immeasurably thwarted examination, the spirit of examination, and caution. The martyrs have harmed truth.
Even today it takes only the crudity of a persecution to give an otherwise completely indifferent sectarianism an honorable name. How? Does it change the value of a thing if someone gives his life for it? An error that becomes honorable is an error which is that much more seductive. Do you believe, my dear theologians, that we would give you an occasion to become martyrs for your lie? One refutes a matter by laying it respectfully on ice—that is how one also refutes theologians. This precisely was the world-historical stupidity of all persecutors, that they gave the opposing cause the appearance of being honorable—that they gave it the fascination of martyrdom as a gift. Even today woman lies on her knees before an error because she has been told that somebody died on the cross for it. Is the cross an argument? But about all these things, only one man has said the word which was needed for thousands of years—Zarathustra:
They wrote signs of blood on the way they walked, and their folly taught that with blood one proved truth. But blood is the worst witness of truth; blood poisons even the purest doctrine and turns it into delusion and hatred of the heart. And if a man goes through fire for his doctrine—what does that prove? Verily, it is more if your own doctrine comes out of your own fire.54
54
One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself—behind oneself.
A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom, from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength. Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them—it knows itself sovereign.
Conversely: the need for faith, for some kind of unconditional Yes and No, this Carlylism, if one will forgive me this word, is a need born of weakness. The man of faith, the “believer” of every kind, is necessarily a dependent man—one who cannot posit himself as an end, one who cannot posit any end at all by himself. The “believer” does not belong to himself, he can only be a means, he must be used up, he requires somebody to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honor to a morality of self-abnegation; everything persuades him in this direction: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every kind of faith is itself an expression of self-abnegation, of self-alienation.
If one considers how necessary most people find something regulatory, which will bind them from without and tie them down; how compulsion, slavery in a higher sense, is the sole and ultimate condition under which the more weak-willed human being, woman in particular, can prosper—then one will also understand conviction, "faith.” The man of conviction has his backbone in it. Not to see many things, to be impartial at no point, to be party through and through, to have a strict and necessary perspective in all questions of value—this alone makes it possible for this kind of human being to exist at all. But with this they are the opposite, the antagonists, of what is truthful—of truth.
The believer is not free to have any conscience at all for questions of “true” and “untrue”: to have integrity on this point would at once destroy him. The pathological condition of his perspective turns the convinced into fanatics—Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon: the opposition-type of the strong spirit who has become free. Yet the grand pose of these sick spirits, these epileptics of the concept, makes an impression on the great mass: the fanatics are picturesque; mankind prefers to see gestures rather than to hear reasons.
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One step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith.” Long ago I posed the problem whether convictions are not more dangerous than lies as enemies of truth (Human, All-Too-Human I, aphorisms 54 and 483). Now I should like to ask the decisive question: Is there any contrast at all between a lie and a conviction? All the world believes there is; but what does all the world not believe!
Every conviction has its history, its preliminary forms, its trials and errors: it becomes a conviction after not having been one for a long time, and after scarcely having been one for an even longer time. How? Could not the lie be among these embryonic forms of conviction? Sometimes a mere change of person suffices: in the son that becomes conviction which in the father still was a lie.
By lie I mean: wishing not to see something that one does see; wishing not to see something as one sees it. Whether the lie takes place before witnesses or without witnesses does not matter. The most common lie is that with which one lies to oneself; lying to others is, relatively, an exception.
Now this wishing-not-to-see what one does see, this wishing-not-to-see as one sees, is almost the first condition for all who are party in any sense: of necessity, the party man becomes a liar. German historiography, for example, is convinced that Rome represented despotism and that the Germanic tribes brought the spirit of freedom into the world. What is the difference between this conviction and a lie? May one still be surprised when all parties, as well as the German historians, instinctively employ the big words of morality, that morality almost continues to exist because the party man of every description needs it at every moment?
“This is our conviction: we confess it before all the world, we live and die for it. Respect for all who have convictions!” I have heard that sort of thing even out of the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of principle.
The priests are much more delicate in such matters and they understand very well the objection which lies in the concept of a conviction, namely, a mendaciousness which is a matter of principle because it serves an end; so they have accepted the clever procedure of the Jews to introduce at this point the concept of “God,” “will of God,” "revelation of God.” Kant too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same path: in this respect, his reason became practical. There are questions in which man is not entitled to a decision about truth and untruth; all the highest questions, all the highest value problems, lie beyond human reason. To comprehend the limits of reason—that alone is truly philosophy. What did God give man revelation for? Would God have done something superfluous? Man is not capable of knowing by himself what is good and evil, therefore God taught him his will. Moral: the priest does not lie; the question of “true” and “untrue” does not exist in the matters about which priests speak; these matters do not allow one to lie at all. For, to be able to lie, one would have to be capable of deciding what is true here. But of this man is not capable; thus the priest is merely the mouthpiece of God.
Such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the shrewdness of “revelation” belong to the priestly ty
pe, to the decadent priests as well as to the priests of paganism (pagans are all those who say Yes to life, for whom “god” is the word for the great Yes to all things). The “law,” the “will of God,” the “holy book,” “inspiration” —all mere words for the conditions under which the priest attains power, with which the priest preserves his power; these concepts are found at the basis of all priestly organizations, of all forms of priestly or philosophic-priestly rule. The “holy lie”—common to Confucius, the law of Manu, Mohammed, the Christian church—is not absent in Plato. “Truth is there”: this means, wherever it is announced, the priest lies.
56
Ultimately, it is a matter of the end to which one lies. That “holy” ends are lacking in Christianity is my objection to its means. Only bad ends: poisoning, slander, negation of life, contempt for the body, the degradation and self-violation of man through the concept of sin—consequently its means too are bad. It is with an opposite feeling that I read the law of Manu, an incomparably spiritual and superior work: even to mention it in the same breath with the Bible would be a sin against the spirit. One guesses immediately: there is a real philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an illsmelling Judaine55 of rabbinism and superstition; it offers even the most spoiled psychologist something to chew on. Not to forget the main point, the basic difference from every kind of Bible: here the noble classes, the philosophers and the warriors, stand above the mass; noble values everywhere, a feeling of perfection, an affirmation of life, a triumphant delight in oneself and in life—the sun shines on the whole book. All the things on which Christianity vents its unfathomable meanness—procreation, for example, woman, marriage —are here treated seriously, with respect, with love and trust.
Really, how can one put a book in the hands of children and women which contains that vile dictum: “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. . . . It is better to marry than to burn”? 56 And how can one be a Christian as long as the notion of the immaculata conceptio christianizes, that is, dirties, the origin of man?
I know no other book in which so many tender and gracious things are said to woman as in the law of Manu; those old greybeards and saints have a way of being courteous to women which has perhaps never been surpassed. “The mouth of a woman”—it is written in one place—"the bosom of a girl, the prayer of a child, the smoke of the sacrifice, are always pure.” Another passage: “There is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow of a cow, the air, water, fire, and the breath of a girl.” A final passage—perhaps also a holy lie: “All apertures of the body above the navel are pure, all below are impure. Only in the girl is the whole body pure.”
57
One catches the unholiness of the Christian means in flagranti if one once measures the Christian end against the end of the law of Manu—if one throws a strong light on this greatest contrast of ends. The critic of Christianity cannot be spared the task of making Christianity look contemptible.
Such a law as that of Manu originates like every good code of laws: it sums up the experience, prudence, and experimental morality of many centuries; it concludes: it creates nothing further. The presupposition for a codification of this sort is the insight that the means of ensuring authority for a truth, which has been won slowly and at considerable expense, are utterly different from the means needed to prove it. A code of laws never relates the advantage, the reasons, the casuistry, in the prehistory of a law: if it did, it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shalt,” the presupposition for being obeyed. This is precisely where the problem lies.
At a certain point in the development of a people, the most circumspect stratum, that is, the one which sees farthest back and ahead, declares the experience according to which one should live—that is, can live—to be concluded. Their aim is to bring home as rich and complete a harvest as possible from the times of experiment and bad experience. Consequently, what must now be prevented above all is further experimentation, a continuation of the fluid state of values, testing, choosing, criticizing values in infinitum. Against this a double wall is put up: one, revelation, the claim that the reason in these laws is not of human origin, not sought and found slowly and after many errors, but of divine origin, and hence whole, perfect, without history, a gift, a miracle, merely communicated. Then, tradition, the claim that the law has existed since time immemorial and that it would be irreverent, a crime against one’s forefathers, to raise any doubt against it. The authority of the law is founded on the theses: God gave it, the forefathers lived it. The higher reason in such a procedure lies in the aim, step by step to push consciousness back from what had been recognized as the right life (that is, proved right by a tremendous and rigorously filtered experience), so as to attain the perfect automatism of instinct—that presupposition of all mastery, of every kind of perfection in the art of life. To set up a code of laws after the manner of Manu means to give a people the chance henceforth to become master, to become perfect—to aspire to the highest art of life. To that end, it must be made unconscious: this is the aim of every holy lie.
The order of castes, the supreme, the dominant law, is merely the sanction of a natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no "modern idea” has any power. In every healthy society there are three types which condition each other and gravitate differently physiologically; each has its own hygiene, its own field of work, its own sense of perfection and mastery. Nature, not Manu, distinguishes the pre-eminently spiritual ones, those who are pre-eminently strong in muscle and temperament, and those, the third type, who excel neither in one respect nor in the other, the mediocre ones—the last as the great majority, the first as the elite.
The highest caste—I call them the fewest—being perfect, also has the privileges of the fewest: among them, to represent happiness, beauty, and graciousness on earth. Only to the most spiritual human beings is beauty permitted: among them alone is graciousness not weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum: the good is a privilege. On the other hand, there is nothing that they may be conceded less than ugly manners or a pessimistic glance, an eye that makes ugly—or indignation at the total aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the chandalas; pessimism too.
“The world is perfect”—thus says the instinct of the most spiritual, the Yes-saying instinct; “imperfection, whatever is beneath us, distance, the pathos of distance —even the chandala still belongs to this perfection.” The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments; their joy is self-conquest; asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens which crush others, a recreation. Knowledge—a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man; that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. They rule not because they want to but because they are; they are not free to be second.
The second: they are the guardians of the law, those who see to order and security, the noble warriors, and above all the king as the highest formula of warrior, judge, and upholder of the law. The second are the executive arm of the most spiritual, that which is closest to them and belongs to them, that which does everything gross in the work of ruling for them—their retinue, their right hand, their best pupils.
In all this, to repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing contrived; whatever is different is contrived—contrived for the ruin of nature. The order of castes, the order of rank, merely formulates the highest law of life; the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, to make possible the higher and the highest types. The inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all.
A right is a privilege. A man’s state of being is his privilege. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder; the coldness inc
reases, responsibility increases.
A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its first presupposition is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. Handicraft, trade, agriculture, science, the greatest part of art, the whole quintessence of professional activity, to sum it up, is compatible only with a mediocre amount of ability and ambition; that sort of thing would be out of place among exceptions; the instinct here required would contradict both aristocratism and anarchism. To be a public utility, a wheel, a function, for that one must be destined by nature: it is not society, it is the only kind of happiness of which the great majority are capable that makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre, to be mediocre is their happiness; mastery of one thing, specialization—a natural instinct.
It would be completely unworthy of a more profound spirit to consider mediocrity as such an objection. In fact, it is the very first necessity if there are to be exceptions: a high culture depends on it. When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty.
Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.
What is bad? But I have said this already: all that is born of weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.