|
Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters24
I`ll conclude with three question marks - that`s clear enough. You may perhaps ask me, "Is an ideal being built up here or shattered?" . . . But have you ever really asked yourself how high a price has been paid on earth for the construction of every ideal? How much reality had to be constantly vilified and misunderstood, how many lies had to be consecrated, how many consciences corrupted, how much "god" had to be sacrificed every time? That is the law - show me the case where it has not been fulfilled! . . .
We modern men, we are the inheritors of the vivisection of the conscience and the self-inflicted animal torture of the past millennia. That`s what we have had the most practice doing, that is perhaps our artistry - in any case it is something we have refined to spoil our taste. For too long man has looked at his natural inclinations with an "evil eye," so that finally in him they have become twinned with "bad conscience." An attempt to reverse this might be possible, but who is strong enough for that, that is, to interrelate with bad conscience the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations for what lies beyond us, which goes against our senses, our instincts, nature, animals - in short, the earlier ideals, all the ideals which are anti-life and have vilified the world.
To whom can we turn to today with such hopes and demands? . . . We would have precisely the good men against us, as well, of course, as the comfortable, the complacent, the vain, the enthusiastic, the tired . . . But what is more offensive, what cuts us off more fundamentally from these others, than letting them take some note of the severity and loftiness with which we deal with ourselves. And by contrast how obliging, how friendly all the world is in relation to us, as soon as we act as all the world does and "let ourselves go" just like everyone else! . . .
To attain the goal I`m talking about requires a different sort of spirit that those which really exist at this time: spirits empowered by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have even become a need. That would require getting acclimatized to keen, high air, winter wanderings, to ice and mountains in every sense. That would require even a kind of sublime maliciousness, an ultimate self-conscious wilfulness of knowledge, which comes with great health. Briefly put, that would unfortunately require this great health! . . . Is this even possible today? . . .
But at some time or other, in a more powerful time than this mouldy, self-doubting present, he must nonetheless come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit, constantly pushed away from the sidelines or from the beyond by his own driving power, whose isolation is misunderstood by people as if it were a flight from reality, whereas it is his immersion, burial, and absorption into nothing but reality, so that once he comes out of it into the light again, he brings back the redemption of this reality, its redemption from the curse which the previous ideal had laid upon it. This man of the future, who will release us from that earlier ideal and, in so doing, from those things which had to grow from it, from the great loathing, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism - that stroke of noon and of the great decision which makes the will free once again, who gives back to the earth its purpose and to human beings their hope, this anti-Christ and Anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness - at some point he must come . . .
|
