Having read those words I had to share them. Of course, I could quote whole books from this greatest of all German philosophers. Nietzsche had his flaws. Every philosopher has. There have been many thinkers who said things of importance. But only a few have the courage, the strength, the fearless honesty, the fire and the force, the will and the stamina to ask of the truth whether it brings profit or a fatality to him… But there are truths and there is Truth. Find out for yourself, if you are a Hyperborean. And don’t forget: “Your karma is your Dogma.” (Dr. Hyatt)
Taken from “The Antichrist”, by Friedrich Nietzsche (of course Nietzsche in English will never equal Nietzsche in German, but you still get the spirit):
“This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my “Zarathustra”: how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears?–First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me–I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops–and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him… He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner–to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm…Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self…..
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?–The rest are merely humanity.–One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,–in contempt.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE.
1.
–Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans–we know well enough how remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar1,in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death–our life, our happiness…We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?–The man of today?–“I don’t know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the way out or the way in”–so sighs the man of today…This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,–we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds! . . . We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate–it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation” . . . There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast–for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal…
2.
What is good?–All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?–All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness?–The feeling that power increases–that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the ill-consituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.
What is more harmful than any vice?–Practiced sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak–Christianity…
3.
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (–man is an end–): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors ;–and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man–the Christian. . .
4.
Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This “progress” is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.
True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.
5.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts–the strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!–
6.
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used–and I wish to emphasize the fact again–without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward “virtue” and “godliness.” As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”–and it is possible that I’ll have to write it–would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will–that the values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.”
Beautiful.
You know, I love Nietzsche but…he’s kinda shrill and hypocritical, too.
These days it all seems like a bit of a “put on” to me, like he’s playing at a certain identity rather than being it (and by the time he wrote the Antichrist he seems to have lost his grasp on the levity and playfulness of Zarathustra, to his cost).
But I guess given his crippling health problems and near-total isolation it figures that he would idealise the notion of the splendidly isolated overman. I think that if he had possessed as much power as he seems to think he did then he could have tolerated an endless swarm of beggars and theives and not needed to insist on denying the weak…the powerless have nothing to give, and Nietzche’s power seemed to end whenever he put down the pen.
When, filled with passion, we write, we tend to make the uncertain absolute and the merely-passing into an eternal now. Sometimes Nietzsche seems to understand that; sometimes he seems to have no idea at all.
Just some thoughts, thrown out in a tentative spirit.
That’s why I said that Nietzsche had his flaws. THE BEST MEN – heroes, geniuses, philosophers – were often fucked up in many ways. This certainly is also true in Nietzsche’s case: The photo of him (see above) is a ‘lie’ in the sense that he never was a great soldier (only one year in the military), he wasn’t a martial artist and he preached pitilessness but in fact he became insane (until his death) in Italy in the very moment where he saw a coachman mistreat a horse in an invidious way. What did he do? He ran out crying, hugged the horse and freaked out completely shouting at the coachman to leave the horse alone!! After that episode he lost his mind forever! He also lived a long time with his mother and sister and actually never managed to marry / find a woman. He was physically weak and often very sick (the latter not being his fault). This list could be continued. So, to put it shortly: he obviously couldn’t live up to his own ideals (but well, who can?). However, he’s not to be judged on those terms. He wasn’t a magician and thus wasn’t aware of the fact that the linkage of thought and action is paramount, because “speculation without application is a waste of time and reflection without implementation is a recipe for self stagnation” (Jon Sharp). I think Nietzsche is the best teacher concerning morals and their genealogy. In a certain way he was a prophet, seeing that behind the mask of Xtianity there is nihilism, because this cult never suited to the European ’soul’ (the pagan / shamanic idea of Selves, not a monotheistic self asf.).
As to ‘the weak’ in Nietzsche’s concept (as I read him), I think he is talking of a special ‘type’ that Xtianity has bred. “Wisdom says: be strong!”, as Crowley pondered (AL II, 70). Xtianity posed that „wisdom says; be weak!“ in some sense and thus destroyed the heroic virtues (to me this isn’t about a ‘militant mindset’, but rather Fearless Honesty, the ancient truth of the divine spark in man, the strength to go beyond one’s boundaries, the will face truth even if it hurts or threatens one’s ego-identity etc.). Weakness, for me is, a certain state of mind (“If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.” – AL II, 30 & 31) – not being a beggar or a thief. “… it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty. ” (AL II, 58) Well, you know what I’m talking about.
Nietzsche’s intriguing concept of going ‘beyond good and evil’ is part the Dagazian paradox, as seeking between two extremes to find a ‘third’ that exists beyond them is the essence of illuminated Oðinnic Consciousness. To realize that good and evil are only attributions of the human mind rather than actual, objective ‘things’ is certainly a difficult challenge that has to be met, a fine line where many will fail, I suppose. It’s a great challenge to live by one’s own law (creating / finding your own values), because it implies the danger of failing and/or becoming a real asshole (and some of them use Nietzsche as a justification). It’s also why magic is nothing for the faint-hearted and weak and why some so-called ‘magicians’ or self-proclaimed ‘Masters’ will prefer to believe in fairytales for little children like the Wiccan ‘threefold law’ and ‘karmic debt’ or whatever.
The main point is that I don’t really care what Nietzsche „really meant“. I interpret Nietzsche’s statements in magical terms and would even apply him in terms of Soul-Lore. When he speaks of “the will to power” I think of the Hamingja, for example, not how to control people or deny the weak.
As I said recently in a post here: In the Heathen Germanic system of magic this will to power manifests differently (more like Assagioli’s Transpersonal Will or Crowley’s True Will). I don’t understand these concepts in soley in a Nietzschean superman fashion. as you know, it is rather the power of the soul that I seek and the ability to let the different ‘parts’ of the soul communicate with eachother. A dynamic balance of Nietzsche’s will to power and de Ropp’s will to transcendence might be another hint. However, „The Antichrist“ has been a necessary antidote to my Catholic upbringing. A good cure against wounds in the soul and fresh mountain air for the elitist (not the fascist! :-) inside of me. “If you feel guilty, you will steal again”, the late Dr. Hyatt used to say.
I wouldn’t dispute anything you have to say here. I suppose I was looking at Nietzsche through the lens of the ways he has threaded through my life…and I could often relate to his furious internal life yet stifled outer life.
Something I wonder: how many of the truly successful and powerful are actually magicians? Most of them would probably laugh their asses off at this stuff. Milton Erickson could have kicked the metaphysical crap out of Aleister Crowley any day, and he was an avowed skeptic!
Perhaps we “magicians” are all just having ourselves on with these dreams of power and transformation.
Or did I just go too far in saying that? Ooooohooohhhh!!!
What do they say? Nothing is True, All is Permitted? Who said that again?
;)
Of course I agree. It’s also the paradox you wrote about some time agon that the mystic perfects his self with effortlessness (or so it seems) whilst the LHP magician tries so hard and fails [?] (or so it seems).
One thing though because this is something a non-magician friend (he’s just a plain atheist and materialist and I love him as he is!) said once, too: “Something I wonder: how many of the truly successful and powerful are actually magicians?”
Again, here ‘truely succesful’ should be defined clearly. I mean, was Nietzsche succesful compared to a professor at university or a business man? Probably he looked like a cranky, sick and old weirdo? However, are we reading the books of the ‘succesful’ professors of that time or books about the lives of ‘succesful business men of that time OR do we read Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’?
This list is endless: Do ‘succesful people’ (in a normal sense) make music like John Balance (Coil) or write books like William Burroughs or live outsider lives like Austin Osman Spare? Do they have bands and think about weird things like Chaos Heathen ideas? ;) Would you and me be happy with a ‘normal’ job? (Actually, are you?!?) How much I have Become What I (truely) Am will be my measurement of how ‘truely succesful’ I really was, when the time has come to shed my mortal shell, I believe. I’m also not disputing anything you have to say here. It’s just interesting to think about all this. And just for the record of fearless honesty: There’s nothing I fear more than living a ‘normal’, status quo life. Which brings me back to:
“…we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. … We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out WHERE TO DIRECT OUR COURAGE. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate–it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the [‘truely succesful’?] weakling…”
Just thoughts… Throw in what you think!
Just for the sake of completeness: Of course I agree 100% with what Sweyn said recently on that matter in a slightly different context:
“I have to wonder about the claims of wizards who live on welfare, and don’t contribute articles because they can’t afford a second hand computer, or squander their talents on drugs and self pity. Even if we choose to live economical lives, we still have the choices and abilities to achieve things that matter [!!]. This usually entails a minimum level of material attainment. So some material ambitions are a good thing, if the results support some worthwhile works.”
I just added this to make clear that I don’t find Nietzsche’s extreme gap between his thoughts and his lifestyle worth emulating. Living a ‘normal’, status quo life on the one hand (with a job and family) doesn’t exclude being an extraordinary individual who is engaged in the process of ‘Become-Who-You-Are’! I don’t want to draw a too big dichotomy here. But sometimes the lifestyles of creative ‘self-actualizers’ and the happiness of the mass (a.k.a. ‘nesting-and-digesting’) can be quiet huge. The former lives with the far bigger risk to fail (= being not succesful).
I enjoy the passionate discussion going on here about Nietzsche, who was like an avatar to me in my twenties! When I visited the ruins of the Drachenfels at dusk in Bonn, I paid tribute to Nietzsche who had been to the same spot when he studied at the University of Bonn.
Nietzsche relied on the kindness of his friends a lot – especially the theologian Franz Overbeck. After Nietzsche’s death Overbeck evaluated his close friend as a Christian with a conscience! This view is shared by many Christian scholars to this day.
My interest in Nietzsche is primarily based on the potential for a pagan revival in philosophy through his book “The Birth of Tragedy” and his life-long exaltation of the Dionysian.
A positive aspect of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is his assessment of giving as the main virtue – what he called the “bestowing virtue”. The spirit of Gebo is resonant here, I think. It is also common sense: giving is what sustains life and makes community-building possible. But this is also the spirit of the New Testament: we need to evaluate the positive aspects of Christianity fairly. This is why before state politics got involved, heathens and Christians got on and intermarried in Scandinavia, because the better of the two traditions evaluated each other in terms of one’s deeds.
Indeed, it seems to me that Christianity went wrong once Roman politics got involved. Well, I guess that and the Christian insistence on being the only way, whereas the Jews were (and are) admirable in not insisting that anyone else accept their views (I guess most pagans were like that too).
I agree with you that Nietzsche’s celebration of gift giving is one of the high points of his thinking. I wonder if he (or anyone) could ever really live up to that virtue to the extend that he demanded though ;)
Well there is that Daoist point that sometimes the spiritual master is the disheveled homeless guy and not the splendid prince.
Who defines what success is? How can anyone have that kind of cosmic perspective?
That said when you read about some total overachiever, well I know I find myself thinking “I couldn’t achieve that.”
But then maybe such people would say the same of my life with its different successes, not the grandstanding triumphs of Hollywood, but significant in their own context.
How can anyone really evaluate a standard with certainty for what success entails?
Ohh, I’m throwing stones from the doorstep of a glass house again.
Time to check in for some deconditioning.
;)
Human beings naturally find sympathy to be a good thing because it bonds people together. However, with Nietzchean insight, the following can be said. We want to help people in adversity. That is a human thing. The strong, when struggling against adversity, draw admiration for their courage, strength, tenacity and resilience; the weak, in the same situation, want others to pity them. When Nietzsche talked about “master morality” and “slave morality”, I think this is what he was referring to. This is why he can say, “Sei hart!” (“Be hard!”) He was certainly not advocating heartlessness.