The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Inveighing against the instincts of life came to be regarded as holy and estimable. The priestly ideal was: absolute chastity, absolute obedience, absolute poverty! The lay ideal: alms, pity, self-sacrifice, renunciation of the beautiful, of reason, and of sensuality, and a dark frown for all the strong qualities that existed.

***

An advance is made: the slandered instincts attempt to re-establish their rights (e.g. Luther's Reformation, the coarsest form of moral falsehood under the cover of "Evangelical freedom"), they are rechristened with holy names.

The calumniated instincts try to demonstrate that they are necessary in order that the virtuous instincts may be possible. Il faut vivre, afin de vivre pour autrui: egoism as a means to an end.[7]

But people go still further: they try to grant both the egoistic and altruistic impulses the right to exist—equal rights for both—from the utilitarian standpoint.

People go further: they see greater utility in placing the egoistic rights before the altruistic—greater utility in the sense of more happiness for the majority, or of the elevation of mankind, etc. etc. Thus the rights of egoism begin to preponderate, but under the cloak of an extremely altruistic standpoint—the collective utility of humanity.

An attempt is made to reconcile the altruistic mode of action with the natural order of things. Altruism is sought in the very roots of life. Altruism and egoism are both based upon the essence of life and nature.

The disappearance of the opposition between them is dreamt of as a future possibility. Continued adaptation, it is hoped, will merge the two into one.

At last it is seen that altruistic actions are merely a species of the egoistic—and that the degree to which one loves and spends one's self is a proof of the extent of one's individual power and personality. In short, that the more evil man can be made, the better he is, and that one cannot be the one without the other. At this point the curtain rises which concealed the monstrous fraud of the psychology that has prevailed hitherto.