But let us return to our problem. It will be immediately obvious that such a self-contradiction as the ascetic appears to represent, “life against life,” is, physiologically considered and not merely psychologically, a simple absurdity. It can only be apparent; it must be a kind of provisional formulation, an interpretation and psychological misunderstanding of something whose real nature could not for a long time be understood or described as it really was — a mere word inserted into an old gap in human knowledge. Let us replace it with a brief formulation of the facts of the matter: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new expedients and devices. The ascetic ideal is such an expedient; the case is therefore the opposite of what those who reverence this ideal believe: life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
On the Genealogy of Morality (III. §13)

The “law,” the “will of God,” the “holy book,” and “inspiration”—all these things are merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and with which he maintains his power,—these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The “holy lie”—common alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian church—is not even wanting in Plato. “Truth is here”: this means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies....

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (55)

With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Brahmanism; I bring against the brahminical system the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The brahminical system has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.... For example, the worm of sin: it was Brahmanism that first enriched mankind with this misery! — The “inequality of souls before Brahma”—this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in fascism, the modern idea, and the notion of preserving the entire ancient social order—this is brahmanical dynamite.... The “humanitarian” blessings of Brahmanism forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the “humanitarianism” of Brahmanism! — Parasitism as the only practice of the brahminical scheme; with its anæmic and “holy” ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the crooked cross [Swastika] as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself....

This eternal accusation against Brahmanism I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I call Brahmanism the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race....

And india reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell—from the first day of Brahman[ism]! — Why not rather from its last? — From today? — The transvaluation of all values!...

— Frederik-Kali Nietzschappan,
The Anti-Brahman (62)

This work [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] stands altogether apart. Leaving aside the poets: perhaps nothing has ever been done from an equal excess of strength. My concept of the “Dionysian” here became a supreme deed; measured against that, all the rest of human activity seems poor and relative. That a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and height, that Dante is, compared with Zarathustra, merely a believer and not one who first creates truth, a world-governing spirit, a destiny — that the poets of the Veda are priests and not even worthy of tying the shoelaces of a Zarathustra — that is the least thing and gives no idea of the distance, of the azure solitude in which this work lives.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Ecce Homo (X. §6)

On the “Birth of Tragedy”.
VIII.

The new conception of the Greeks is the distinguishing feature of this book; we have already indicated its two other merits — the new conception of art, as the great stimulant of life, to life; likewise the conception of pessimism, a pessimism of strength, a classical pessimism: the word classical used here not for historical but for psychological demarcation. The opposite of classical pessimism is romantic pessimism: that in which weakness, weariness, racial décadence are formulated in concepts and values: the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for example, likewise de Vigny's, Dostoyevsky's, Leopardi's, Pascal's, that of all the great nihilistic religions (Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity — they may be called nihilistic because they all glorified the opposite concept of life, nothingness, as the goal, as the highest good, as “God”).

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1888) (14[25])

A Critique of Manu:

Reduction of nature to morality: a punitive state of man: there are no natural effects — the cause is Brahman.

Reduction of the human impulses to the fear of punishment and the hope of reward: i.e. before the law, which has both in its hand...

One has to live in absolute conformity with the law: the sensible is done because it is commanded; the most natural instinct is satisfied because the law has prescribed it.

This is a school of stultification [Verdummung]: in such a school of theologians (where even the young military man and farmer must undergo a nine-year course in theology in order to become “constant” — the nine-year “military service” of the three highest castes) the Chandalas must have had intelligence and even interest for themselves. They were the only ones who had access to the true source of knowledge, to empiricism... Add to this the inbreeding of the castes...

Nature, technology, history, art, science, --- are missing.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1888) (14[203])

One thing is most difficult to forgive: that one respects oneself. Such a being is simply abominable: he brings to light what tolerance, the only virtue of the rest and of all, is all about...

I wanted people to start by respecting themselves: Everything else follows from that.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1888) (14[205])

212.

[According to Brahmanism:]

The destiny of the woman is to continue the family through children, that of the man to beget them: this double duty, for which man and woman are active together, has its sanctification in Scripture.

Who are to be regarded as the most guilty? The murderer of a Brahmin, the drinker of spirits [liquor], the one who seduces the wife of his spiritual counselor

After the prescribed expiation, he shall sentence them to death or other corporal punishment. He shall stigmatize the forehead of the one who has seduced the wife of his counselor with the image of the female genitalia, the drinker of spirits with the sign of the distillation instrument, the murderer of a Brahmin with the image of a body without a head.

213.

Such a code [Manusmriti etc] sums up the experience, wisdom and experimental morality of long centuries: it concludes, it ends an epoch, it creates nothing more —

The means of giving authority to a hard and costly acquired truth are fundamentally different from the means by which one would prove it. A code of laws never proves the utility and the disadvantage of a rule: it only shows the bad consequences for the individual if he does not keep a law as a law, — if he disobeys it.

All the natural bad consequences of breaking a law are never considered in terms of this naturalness: but the bad consequence is a supernatural punishment for not obeying a precept.

The problem is this: at a certain moment in the history of the people, its most intelligent stratum declares the experience of living or not living to be complete. Their aim is to bring the harvest home as rich and complete as possible from the long periods of experiment and bad experience...

What is now to be prevented above all is re-experimentation, the desire to continue in testing and selection: this is opposed by a double wall 1) revelation 2) tradition. Both are sacred lies: the intelligent state that invents them understands them as well as Plato understood them.

Revelation: this is the assertion that the reason of those laws is not of human origin, not sought and found slowly and with mistakes, but that it was communicated all at once by the Godhead...

Tradition: this is the assertion that it has been so since time immemorial. Enough, a fundamental falsification of the whole history of a people. (Example of the Jewish reinterpretation after the exile, — the misunderstanding [Missverstehenwollen] of their past)

a) it is godless to criticize the law

b) it is impious, — it is a crime against the ancestors — one incites them against oneself —

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Nachgelassene Fragmente (1888) (14)

214.

[according to Brahmanism:]

The wife who pushes her husband away because he has a passion for gambling or spirituous liquors, instead of nursing him like a sick man, shall be confined for three months in the inner chambers, without any finery or adornment (avis to George Eliot!)

215.

Transfiguration of the natural consequences of an action

there are no more natural consequences: but disobedience is punished, and virtue is rewarded.

happiness, long life, progeny — all are consequences of virtue, mediated by the eternal order of things —

uncleanness, for example, is forbidden, not because its consequences are detrimental to health: but because it is forbidden, it is detrimental to health...

* *

Thus, principally: the natural consequence of an action is represented as reward or punishment, depending on whether something is commanded or forbidden...

for this it is necessary that the greatest number of punishments are not natural, but supernatural, otherworldly, merely of the future...

* *

Thus, in principle: every calamity, every misfortune is proof of guilt: even every low form of existence (the animals, for example)

The world is perfect: provided that the law is satisfied. All imperfection comes from disobedience to the law.

* * *

The highest caste, as the perfect one, has also to represent happiness: therefore nothing is more inappropriate than pessimism and indignation...

no anger, no retort to evil —

asceticism only as a means to higher happiness, to salvation from many things

the upper class has to maintain a happiness at the price of displaying unconditional obedience, every kind of harshness, self-constraint and severity against itself — it wants to be perceived as the most honorable kind of human being, — also as the most admirable: consequently it cannot need every kind of happiness —

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Nachgelassene Fragmente (1888) (14)

Critique of the [brahminical] law.

The higher reason of such a procedure is to push the consciousness back step by step from the life recognized as right: so that a perfect automatism of instinct is attained...

It is pious, it is customary, it is the badge of good and high-minded men to act thus and thus: — that remains:
the origin, the usefulness, the reasonableness of the precept is repressed from consciousness.

The most essential means of this suppression is that two other concepts come to the fore with tremendous force: both excluding the actual reflection on the origin and the criticism of the law...

1) the reward
2) the punishment

“Every man who has received a punishment for an offense by order of the king goes to heaven free from all defilement, just as pure as he who has always practiced only what is good.”

It becomes a matter of supreme self-preservation, of “one [thing] is necessary”, to obey absolutely here... It is re-stamped as the highest imprudence not to obey here —

Egoism is drawn into play in such a way that obedience and disobedience confront each other like happiness and deepest self-sacrifice

To this end, the whole of life is placed in an afterlife perspective, so that it is understood to be momentous in the most terrifying sense...

— relative immortality is the great magnifying glass to magnify the concept of punishment… reward beyond measure.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1888) (14[216])

...one threw the gods aside – which is what Europe will also have to do one day! ...one no longer had need of the priests and mediators either, and the teacher of the religion of self-redemption, the Buddha, appeared: – how distant Europe still is from this level of culture!

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Dawn of Day (96)

Buddhism and monasticism as the production of healthy bodies (against the destructive and debilitating affects).

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1882) (4[217])

Unegoistic acts are impossible; “unegoistic instinct” sounds to my ears like “wooden iron”. I wanted someone to make an attempt to prove the possibility of such acts: that they exist is of course believed by the people and those who are like them — like those who call motherly love or love in general something un-egoistic.

Incidentally, it is a historical error that peoples have always interpreted the moral values of “good” and “evil” as “un-egoistic” and “egoistic”.

Rather, good and evil as “commanded” [geboten] and “forbidden” [verboten] — “in accordance with or contrary to custom” — is much older and more general.

That the insight into the origin of moral value judgments does not yet give a critique and determination of their value — just as a quality is not explained by knowledge of the quantitative conditions under which it arises.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[224])

The problem of freedom and non-freedom of will belongs in the courts of philosophy — for me there is no will. That belief in the will [Willen] is necessary in order to “will” [wollen] — is nonsense.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[254])

I believe I have guessed [erraten] something from the soul of the highest man — perhaps everyone who guesses him will perish, but whoever has seen him must help to make him possible [ermöglichen].

Basic idea: we must take the future as decisive [maßgebend] for all our value judgements — and not look behind us for the laws of our actions!

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[256])

Misunderstandings on a grand scale, e.g., ascetism as a means of self-preservation for wild, overly excitable natures. La Trappe as a “penitentiary” to which one condemns oneself (understandable, especially among the French, like Christianity in the hot air of southern European Hellenization). Puritanism has as its background the conviction of one's own thoroughgoing meanness, of the omnipresent “inner cattle” (ego) — and the gloomy dry pride of the Puritan Englishman wants everyone to think as badly of his “inner human” as he thinks of himself!

The customs and ways of life have been conceived as proven means of preservation — therein first misunderstanding and superficiality. Second misunderstanding: they are now supposed to be the only means.

Piety — consciousness of a higher connection between all experiences

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[261])

The idea that the consequences of actions already contain reward and punishment — this idea of immanent justice is fundamentally wrong. Moreover, it contradicts the idea of an “order of salvation” in the experiences and consequences: according to which bad things of all kinds are to be understood as special favors from a God who wants our best. — Why suffering should follow an evil deed is in itself incomprehensible: in practice it even amounts to saying that an evil deed should be followed by an evil deed. — That one who is different from us must have it bad is an idea of defense, an emergency defense of the ruling caste, a means of breeding, — but nothing particularly “noble”. — All sorts of such ideas about “immanent justice”, “order of salvation”, balancing “transcendent justice” are now going around in everyone's head — they contribute to the chaos of the modern soul.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[279])

The sensualism and hedonism of the last century is the best inheritance this century has made: behind a hundred clauses and fine mummery.

Hedonism = pleasure as a principle.

Pleasure as a yardstick was actually found among the Utilitarians (Comfort-English).

Pleasure as regulative principle (not actually found) among the Schopenhauerians

von Hartmann, a superficial lateral thinker, who distorts pessimism through teleology and wants to turn it into a philosophy of comfort (in this he approaches the English).

What follows pessimism is the doctrine of the meaninglessness of existence

that pleasure and pain have no meaning, that hedonism cannot be a principle

This in the next century.

Doctrine of the great weariness.

What for? Nothing is worthwhile!

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[326])

The faith in the Truth.

The excess and pathological nature of much of what used to be called the “will to truth”.

Philosophers have warned against the senses and the deception of the senses with terrible seriousness. The deep antagonism between the philosophers and the friends of deception, the artists, runs through Greek philosophy: “Plato against Homer” — is the slogan of the philosophers!

But no one has understood the flip side, the unsuitability of truth for life and the conditionality of life through perspective illusion. — It is one of the most dangerous exaggerations to want knowledge not in the service of life, but in itself, at any price: like the lustful man following his instincts, in itself, without the control of the salutary other instincts, if it is not a stupidity, –––

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[334])

“I see more inclination to greatness in the feelings of the Russian nihilists than in those of the English utilitarians.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[335])

To ridicule the school of “objectivists” and “positivists”. They want to get around the value judgments and only discover and present the facts. But look at Taine, for example: in the background he has preferences: for the strong expressive types, for example, and also for the epicures more than for the puritans.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884) (26[348])