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antichrist
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jennifer
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This page is dedicated to the destruction of the demonic divas, the sultans of suck, yes
I'm talking about the Hanson sisters. In my opinion, the only group worse than the
Spice Girls are Hanson. If you haven't heard anything by them, chances are you're
probably blocking it out. The only people who like Hanson are either in junior high or
dress up in their mother's clothing and make cookies all day. The only thing this group
is good for is insulting America's artistic integrety by spewing out simple unoriginal pop
tunes about love(something they aren't even old enough to understand yet). So if you
like Hanson Get the HELL off my webpage! and if you agree with me please come in
and take a load off. Welcome to the Hanson brothers worst nightmare.
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THE ANTICHRIST
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Published 1895
translation by H.L. Mencken
Published 1920
PREFACE
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 W. 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?--Whatever
augments the feeling of power,
the will to power, power itself,
in man.
What is evil?--Whatever springs
from weakness.
What is happiness?--The feeling
that power increases--that
resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more
power; not peace at any price,
but war; not virtue, but
efficiency (virtue in the
Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue
free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall
perish: first principle of our
charity. And one should help
them to it.
What is more harmful than any
vice?--Practical sympathy for
the botched and the
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.
7.
Christianity is called the
religion of pity.-- Pity stands in
opposition to all the tonic
passions that augment the
energy of the feeling of
aliveness: it is a depressant. A
man loses power when he pities.
Through pity that drain upon
strength which suffering works
is multiplied a thousandfold.
Suffering is made contagious by
pity; under certain
circumstances it may lead to a
total sacrifice of life and living
energy--a loss out of all
proportion to the magnitude of
the cause (--the case of the
death of the Nazarene). This is
the first view of it; there is,
however, a still more important
one. If one measures the effects
of pity by the gravity of the
reactions it sets up, its character
as a menace to life appears in a
much clearer light. Pity thwarts
the whole law of evolution,
which is the law of natural
selection. It preserves whatever
is ripe for destruction; it fights
on the side of those disinherited
and condemned by life; by
maintaining life in so many of
the botched of all kinds, it gives
life itself a gloomy and dubious
aspect. Mankind has ventured to
call pity a virtue (--in every
superior moral system it appears
as a weakness--); going still
further, it has been called the
virtue, the source and
foundation of all other
virtues--but let us always bear
in mind that this was from the
standpoint of a philosophy that
was nihilistic, and upon whose
shield the denial of life was
inscribed. Schopenhauer was
right in this: that by means of
pity life is denied, and made
worthy of denial--pity is the
technic of nihilism. Let me
repeat: this depressing and
contagious instinct stands
against all those instincts which
work for the preservation and
enhancement of life: in the role
of protector of the miserable, it
is a prime agent in the
promotion of decadence--pity
persuades to extinction....Of
course, one doesn't say
"extinction": one says "the other
world," or "God," or "the true
life," or Nirvana, salvation,
blessedness.... This innocent
rhetoric, from the realm of
religious-ethical balderdash,
appears a good deal less innocent
when one reflects upon the
tendency that it conceals
beneath sublime words: the
tendency to destroy life.
Schopenhauer was hostile to
life: that is why pity appeared to
him as a virtue. . . . Aristotle, as
every one knows, saw in pity a
sickly and dangerous state of
mind, the remedy for which was
an occasional purgative: he
regarded tragedy as that
purgative. The instinct of life
should prompt us to seek some
means of puncturing any such
pathological and dangerous
accumulation of pity as that
appearing in Schopenhauer's
case (and also, alack, in that of
our whole literary decadence,
from St. Petersburg to Paris,
from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it
may burst and be discharged. . .
Nothing is more unhealthy, amid
all our unhealthy modernism,
than Christian pity. To be the
doctors here, to be unmerciful
here, to wield the knife
here--all this is our business, all
this is our sort of humanity, by
this sign we are philosophers,
we Hyperboreans !--
8.
It is necessary to say just whom
we regard as our antagonists:
theologians and all who have
any theological blood in their
veins--this is our whole
philosophy. . . . One must have
faced that menace at close hand,
better still, one must have had
experience of it directly and
almost succumbed to it, to
realize that it is not to be taken
lightly (--the alleged
free-thinking of our naturalists
and physiologists seems to me to
be a joke--they have no passion
about such things; they have not
suffered--). This poisoning goes
a great deal further than most
people think: I find the arrogant
habit of the theologian among
all who regard themselves as
"idealists"--among all who, by
virtue of a higher point of
departure, claim a right to rise
above reality, and to look upon
it with suspicion. . . The idealist,
like the ecclesiastic, carries all
sorts of lofty concepts in his
hand (--and not only in his
hand!); he launches them with
benevolent contempt against
"understanding," "the senses,"
"honor," "good living," "science";
he sees such things as beneath
him, as pernicious and seductive
forces, on which "the soul" soars
as a pure thing-in-itself--as if
humility, chastity, poverty, in a
word, holiness, had not already
done much more damage to life
than all imaginable horrors and
vices. . . The pure soul is a pure
lie. . . So long as the priest, that
professional denier, calumniator
and poisoner of life, is accepted
as a higher variety of man, there
can be no answer to the
question, What is truth? Truth
has already been stood on its
head when the obvious attorney
of mere emptiness is mistaken
for its representative.
9.
Upon this theological instinct I
make war: I find the tracks of it
everywhere. Whoever has
theological blood in his veins is
shifty and dishonourable in all
things. The pathetic thing that
grows out of this condition is
called faith: in other words,
closing one's eyes upon one's
self once for all, to avoid
suffering the sight of incurable
falsehood. People erect a
concept of morality, of virtue, of
holiness upon this false view of
all things; they ground good
conscience upon faulty vision;
they argue that no other sort of
vision has value any more, once
they have made theirs
sacrosanct with the names of
"God," "salvation" and "eternity."
I unearth this theological
instinct in all directions: it is the
most widespread and the most
subterranean form of falsehood
to be found on earth. Whatever a
theologian regards as true must
be false: there you have almost a
criterion of truth. His profound
instinct of self-preservation
stands against truth ever | |
