Chapter 6 06 Human "improver"

1 People know what I ask of philosophers, to stand beyond good and evil,—beyond the illusion of moral judgment.This demand arose out of an insight which, for the first time, I have reduced to a formula: there are no moral facts at all.Moral judgments have in common with religious judgments the belief in a reality that does not exist.Morality is only an interpretation of a certain phenomenon, to be precise, a misinterpretation.Like religious judgments, moral judgments belong to a stage of ignorance when not even the concept of reality, the distinction between reality and fantasy, is so lacking that "truth" at this stage refers only to what we today call "imagination." thing.For that matter, moral judgment has never been taken seriously, and as such it has always contained nothing but paradoxes.But it has always been of great value as a symptomology: it reveals (at least to the educated) a precious reality of culture and inner life, a reality that does not quite know how to "understand" itself.Morality is only a sign, a symptomology, and one must already know why one acts in order to benefit from it.

2 I give the first example.In all ages men have wanted to "improve" man, and morality means this above all.However, under the same word hides very different tendencies.Both the domestication of savages and the cultivation of certain races are called "improvement."It is these zoological terms that express reality—of which, of course, the typical "improver," the priest, knows nothing and would prefer to know nothing... Calling the domestication of a beast an "improvement" of it , sounds almost like a joke to us.Anyone who knows the conditions of the tame farms suspects that the animals are "improved" there.They are weakened, they are made less harmful, the depression of fear, pain, trauma, hunger make them diseased beasts. —The same is true of the domesticated man "improved" by the priest.In the early Middle Ages, the church was in fact first and foremost a taming ground, and the most beautiful specimens of the "blond beasts" were hunted everywhere—for example, the noble Germans were "improved".But what did such a "improved" Germanic man, taken into a monastery, look like after this?Like a caricature of a person, like a freak.He became a "criminal", he was in a cage, he was shut up among many very terrible ideas...he lay there, sick, weak, with malice against himself; full of hatred for the impulse of life, full of A suspicion of everything that is still strong and happy.In short, a "Christian" . . . in the language of physiology, in combating the beast, sickens it may be the only means of weakening it.The Church knows this, it corrupts, it weakens,—but he claims to "improve" man...  

3 Let us look at another case of what is called morality, namely, the cultivation of a certain race or type.The greatest example of this is Indian morality, which has religious force as the Code of Manu.Its mission is to simultaneously cultivate four castes, namely monks, warriors, farmers and servants (Shudra).Here we are obviously not among the tamers, and a man of a hundred times more tenderness and reason is needed to even conceive such a plan of breeding.One takes a deep breath when one passes from the atmosphere of Christian wards and prisons into this healthier, nobler, wider world.How poor is the New Testament, and how foul-smelling it is, compared with the Code of Manu! — But the system must be terrible just as much, — this time not against the beast, but against its opposite, the uncultivable, the mongrel, the untouchable, and besides making them sick, It has no other means of rendering them harmless—it is dealing with the "majority."Nothing, perhaps, contradicts our sensibility so much as this guard of Indian morality.For example the third edict, "Concerning Unclean Vegetables", states that the only foods allowed to be eaten by the Dalits are garlic and onions, and in connection with this, the sacred scriptures forbid giving the Dalits grain or fruit containing seeds, as well as water and fire .The decree also stipulated that the water they needed could not be drawn from rivers, springs, or pools, but only from the entrance of the swamp or the pit made by the cattle.At the same time, they are forbidden to wash clothes and bathe, and the water given to them can only be used to quench their thirst.Finally, Sudra women are prohibited from helping untouchable women to give birth, and untouchable women are also prohibited from helping each other during childbirth. That is, boys are required to circumcise girls to have their labia minora removed. - Manu himself said: "The untouchables are the products of adultery, incest and crime (--this is the inevitable conclusion of the concept of cultivation). They must wear only shrouds for clothing, eat with broken pots, and decorate with rusty iron , worshiped only by evil spirits; they must wander here and there restlessly. They are not allowed to write from left to right, and from right to left; the use of the right hand and from left to right is reserved only for the virtuous and caste s right."

4 These regulations are instructive, and in them we see Aryan humanity in its utter purity, in its originality—we learn that the concept of "pure blood" is opposed to a harmless one.On the other hand, it is also understood in which people, the hatred of this "humanity", the hatred of the untouchables, was perpetuated, turned into a religion, turned into a genius... From this point of view, the "Gospel" is First-class documents; the Book of Enoch even more so. ①—Christianity, of Jewish roots, and of course only a crop of this soil, embodies a reaction against breeding, race, privilege:—it is a preeminent anti-Aryan religion: Christianity preaches all Aryan values Revaluation, the triumph of untouchable values, the Gospel of the poor and the lowly, the general insurrection of all the downtrodden, unfortunate, defeated, outcasts against the "race"—the immortal untouchable revenge as the religion of love ...

-------- ① "Gospel": The first part of the "Bible New Testament", including the four volumes of "Matthew", "Mark", "Luke", and "John". "The Book of Enoch": A kind of "Old Testament Apocrypha", which uses the mouth of Enoch to tell the visions and parables of the end of the world. 5 Nurtured morality and domesticated morality are each perfect to the other in the way they carry themselves out.We can establish a supreme proposition: In order to create morality, one must have the absolute will to pursue its opposite.The psychology of the human "improver" is one of the great and disturbing questions I have pursued for the longest time.A small, essentially simple fact, the so-called piafraus,1 gave me my first insight on this matter: the pia fraus is the legacy of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind.Neither Manu, Plato, Confucius, nor Jewish and Christian teachers ever doubted their right to lie.They do not doubt all other rights... To put it in a formula, it might be said: All the means hitherto used to make mankind moral are in the last analysis immoral.

-------- ① Latin: conscientious deception.