Chapter 35 Chapter 02 "Guilty", "Conscience Condemnation" and Others (18)

We should be careful not to stop thinking about this phenomenon because it is ugly and painful when it occurs.Ultimately, this is the kind of positive force that makes the work of violent artists better and that enables violent organizers to build nations.This same force, here introverted, small, narrow, directed backwards, is in the "labyrinth of the chest," in Goethe's words, and it is this instinct of freedom, in my own words, the will to power , creating a condemnation of conscience, establishing a negative ideal.So, the constituent material of that innovative, brutal force of nature is man himself, his whole animal self, and not the other, the other, greater and more magnificent extraordinary beings.This secret self-violence, this cruelty of the artist, this joy of shaping oneself as something heavy, obstinate, painful - of imposing will, judgment, opposition and contempt upon oneself, a This ghastly, ghastly work of willingly dividing one's own soul, this work of suffering oneself for the pleasure of inflicting pain, this purely active "conscience" is ultimately—our Already guessed—the true womb of ideal and conjectural events, which at the same time gave birth to a great deal of novel beauty and affirmation, even to beauty itself... If the opposite of the beautiful does not first realize its own existence, if the ugliness does not first Say to yourself: "I am ugly", then what is beauty?This allusion at least helps to solve the puzzle of the extent to which corresponding concepts like selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice can suggest an ideal, a beauty.The reader immediately understands, I have no doubt, that the pleasure of the selfless, of the self-denying and self-sacrificing man is from the beginning a cruel pleasure.Let me say this first about the origin of the moral value of "impersonalism" and the delineation of the soil in which it grows: it is the condemnation of conscience, the will to self-torture that provides the basis for all impersonal values. premise.