The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and II

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The re-establishment of "Nature": an action in itself is quite devoid of value; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same "crime" may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).

293.

The concept "reprehensible action" presents us with some difficulties. Nothing in all that happens can be reprehensible in itself: one would not dare to eliminate it completely; for everything is so bound up with everything else, that to exclude one part would mean to exclude the whole.

A reprehensible action, therefore, would mean a reprehensible world as a whole....

And even then, in a reprehensible world even reprehending would be reprehensible.... And the consequence of an attitude of mind that condemns everything, would be the affirmation of everything in practice.... If Becoming is a huge ring, everything that forms a part of it is of equal value, is eternal and necessary.—In all correlations of yea and nay, of preference and rejection, love and hate, all that is expressed is a certain point of view, peculiar to the interests of a certain type of living organism: everything that lives says yea by the very fact of its existence.

294.

Criticism of the subjective feelings of value.—Conscience. Formerly people argued: conscience condemns this action, therefore this action is reprehensible. But, as a matter of fact, conscience condemns an action because that action has been condemned for a long period of time: all conscience does is to imitate. It does not create values. That which first led to the condemnation of certain actions, was not conscience: but the knowledge of (or the prejudice against) its consequences.... The approbation of conscience, the feeling of well-being, of "inner peace," is of the same order of emotions as the artist's joy over his work—it proves nothing.... Self-contentment proves no more in favour of that which gives rise to it, than its absence can prove anything against the value of the thing which fails to give rise to it. We are far too ignorant to be able to judge of the value of our actions: in this respect we lack the ability to regard things objectively. Even when we condemn an action, we do not do so as judges, but as adversaries.... When noble sentiments accompany an action, they prove nothing in its favour: an artist may present us with an absolutely insignificant thing, though he be in the throes of the most exalted pathos during its production. It were wiser to regard these sentiments as misleading: they actually beguile our eye and our power, away from criticism, from caution and from suspicion, and the result often is that we make fools of ourselves ... they actually make fools of us.

295.

We are heirs to the conscience-vivisection and self-crucifixion of two thousand years: in these two practices lie perhaps our longest efforts at becoming perfect, our mastery, and certainly our subtlety; we have affiliated natural propensities with a heavy conscience.

An attempt to produce an entirely opposite state of affairs would be possible: that is to say, to affiliate all desires of a beyond, all sympathy with things which are opposed to the senses, the intellect, and nature—in fact, all the ideals that have existed hitherto (which were all anti-worldly), with a heavy conscience.