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

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

887.

Where the strongest natures are to be sought. The ruin and degeneration of the solitary species is much greater and more terrible: they have the instincts of the herd, and the tradition of values, against them; their weapons of defence, their instincts of self-preservation, are from the beginning insufficiently strong and reliable—fortune must be peculiarly favourable to them if they are to prosper (they prosper best in the lowest ranks and dregs of society; if ye are seeking personalities it is there that ye will find them with much greater certainty than in the middle classes!)

When the dispute between ranks and classes, which aims at equality of rights, is almost settled, the fight will begin against the solitary person. (In a certain sense the latter can maintain and develop himself most easily in a democratic society: there where the coarser means of defence are no longer necessary, and a certain habit of order, honesty, justice, trust, is already a general condition.) The strongest must be most tightly bound, most strictly watched, laid in chains and supervised: this is the instinct of the herd. To them belongs a régime of self-mastery, of ascetic detachment, of "duties" consisting in exhausting work, in which one can no longer call one's soul one's own.

888.

I am attempting an economic justification of virtue. The object is to make man as useful as possible, and to make him approximate as nearly as one can to an infallible machine: to this end he must be equipped with machine-like virtues (he must learn to value those states in which he works in a most mechanically useful way, as the highest of all: to this end it is necessary to make him as disgusted as possible with the other states, and to represent them as very dangerous and despicable).

Here is the first stumbling-block: the tediousness and monotony which all mechanical activity brings with it. To learn to endure this—and not only to endure it, but to see tedium enveloped in a ray of exceeding charm: this hitherto has been the task of all higher schools. To learn something which you don't care a fig about, and to find precisely your "duty" in this "objective" activity; to learn to value happiness and duty as things apart; this is the invaluable task and performance of higher schools. It is on this account that the philologist has, hitherto, been the educator per se: because his activity, in itself, affords the best pattern of magnificent monotony in action; under his banner youths learn to "swat": first prerequisite for the thorough fulfilment of mechanical duties in the future (as State officials, husbands, slaves of the desk, newspaper readers, and soldiers). Such an existence may perhaps require a philosophical glorification and justification more than any other: pleasurable feelings must be valued by some sort of infallible tribunal, as altogether of inferior rank; "duty per se" perhaps even the pathos of reverence in regard to everything unpleasant,—must be demanded imperatively as that which is above all useful, delightful, and practical things.... A mechanical form of existence regarded as the highest and most respectable form of existence, worshipping itself (type: Kant as the fanatic of the formal concept "Thou shalt").

889.

The economic valuation of all the ideals that have existed hitherto—that is to say, the selection and rearing of definite passions and states at the cost of other passions and states. The lawgiver (or the instinct of the community) selects a number of states and passions the existence of which guarantees the performance of regular actions (mechanical actions would thus be the result of the regular requirements of those passions and states).

In the event of these states and passions containing ingredients which were painful, a means would have to be found for overcoming this painfulness by means of a valuation; pain would have to be interpreted as something valuable, as something pleasurable in a higher sense. Conceived in a formula: "How does something unpleasant become pleasant?" For instance, when our obedience and our submission to the law become honoured, thanks to the energy, power, and self-control they entail. The same holds good of our public spirit, of our neighbourliness, of our patriotism, our "humanisation," our "altruism," and our "heroism." The object of all idealism should, be to induce people to do unpleasant things cheerfully.