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

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Wise weariness: Pyrrho. To live humbly among the humble. Devoid of pride. To live in the vulgar way; to honour and believe what every one believes. To be on one's guard against science and intellect, and against everything that puffs one out. ... To be simply patient in the extreme, careless and mild;—ὰπάθεια or, better still, πραῢτης. A Buddhist for Greece, bred amid the tumult of the Schools; born alter his time; weary; an example of the protest of weariness against the eagerness of dialecticians; the incredulity of the tired man in regard to the importance of everything. He had seen Alexander; he had seen the Indian penitents. To such late-arrivals and creatures of great subtlety, everything lowly, poor, and idiotic, is seductive. It narcoticises: it gives them relaxation (Pascal). On the other hand, they mix with the crowd, and get confounded with the rest. These weary creatures need warmth.... To overcome contradiction; to do away with contests; to have no will to excel in any way; to deny the Greek instincts (Pyrrho lived with his sister, who was a midwife.) To rig out wisdom in such a way that it no longer distinguishes; to give it the ragged mantle of poverty; to perform the lowest offices, and to go to market and sell sucking-pigs.... Sweetness, clearness, indifference; no need of virtues that require attitudes; to be equal to all even in virtue: final conquest of one's self, final indifference.

Pyrrho and Epicurus;—two forms of Greek decadence; they are related in their hatred of dialectics and all theatrical virtues. These two things together were then called philosophy; Pyrrho and Epicurus intentionally held that which they loved in low esteem; they chose common and even contemptible names for it, and they represented a state in which one is neither ill, healthy, lively, nor dead.... Epicurus was more naïf, more idyllic, more grateful; Pyrrho had more experience of the world, had travelled more, and was more nihilistic. His life was a protest against the great doctrine of Identity (Happiness = Virtue = Knowledge). The proper way of living is not promoted by science: wisdom does not make "wise." ... The proper way of living does not desire happiness, it turns away from happiness....

438.

The war against the "old faith," as Epicurus waged it, was, strictly speaking, a struggle against pre-existing Christianity—the struggle against a world then already gloomy, moralised, acidified throughout with feelings of guilt, and grown old and sick.

Not the "moral corruption" of antiquity, but precisely its moral infectedness was the prerequisite which enabled Christianity to become its master. Moral fanaticism (in short: Plato) destroyed paganism by transvaluing its values and poisoning its innocence. We ought at last to understand that what was then destroyed was higher than what prevailed! Christianity grew on the soil of psychological corruption, and could only take root in rotten ground.

439.

Science: as a disciplinary measure or as an instinct—I see a decline of the instincts in Greek philosophers: otherwise they could not have been guilty of the profound error of regarding the conscious state as the more valuable state. The intensity of consciousness stands in the inverse ratio to the ease and speed of cerebral transmission. Greek philosophy upheld the opposite view, which is always the sign of weakened instincts.

We must, in sooth, seek perfect life there where it is least conscious (that is to say, there where it is least aware of its logic, its reasons, its means, its intentions, and its utility). The return to the facts of common sense, the facts of the common man and of "paltry people." Honesty and intelligence stored up for generations of people who are quite unconscious of their principles, and who even have some fear of principles. It is not reasonable to desire a reasoning virtue. ... A philosopher is compromised by such a desire.

440.

When morality—that is to say, refinement, prudence, bravery, and equity—have been stored up in the same way, thanks to the moral efforts of a whole succession of generations, the collective power of this hoard of virtue projects its rays even into that sphere where honesty is most seldom present—the sphere of intellect. When a thing becomes conscious, it is the sign of a state of ill-ease in the organism; something new has got to be found, the organism is not satisfied or adapted, it is subject to distress, suspense, and it is hypersensitive—precisely all this is consciousness....