On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 3.24)

—I’ll conclude with three question marks—that’s clear enough. You may perhaps ask me, “Is an ideal actually being built up here or shattered?” . . . But have you ever really asked yourself enough how high a price has been paid on earth for the construction of every ideal? How much reality had to be constantly vilified and misunderstood for that to happen, how many lies had to be consecrated, how many consciences corrupted, how much “god” had to be sacrificed every time? In order to enable a shrine to be built, a shrine must be destroyed: that is the law—show me the case where it has not been fulfilled! We modern men, we are the inheritors of thousands of years of vivisection of the conscience and self-inflicted animal torture. That’s what we have had the longest practice doing, that is perhaps our artistry; in any case, it’s something we have refined, the corruption of our taste. For too long man has looked at his natural inclinations with an “evil eye,” so that finally in him they have become twinned with “bad conscience.” An attempt to reverse this might, in itself, be possible—but who is strong enough for it, that is, to link as siblings bad conscience and the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations for what lies beyond, those things which go against our senses, against our instincts, against nature, against animals—in short, the earlier ideals, all the ideals which are hostile to life, ideals of those who vilify the world? To whom can we turn to today with such hopes and demands? . . . In this we would have precisely the good people against us, as well, of course, as the comfortable, the complacent, the vain, the enthusiastic, the tired. . . . But what is more deeply offensive, what cuts us off so fundamentally, as letting them take some note of the severity and loftiness with which we deal with ourselves? And, by contrast, how obliging, how friendly all the world is in relation to us, as soon as we act as all the world does and “let ourselves go” just like all the world! To attain the goal I’m talking about requires a different sort of spirit from those which are likely to exist at this particular time: spirits empowered by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become a need. That would require getting acclimatized to keen, high air, winter wanderings, to ice and mountains in every sense. That would require even a kind of sublime maliciousness, an ultimate self-conscious wilfulness of knowledge, which comes with great health. Simply and seriously put, that would require just this great health! . . . Is this even possible today? . . . But at some time or other, in a more powerful time than this mouldy, self-doubting present, he must nonetheless come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit, constantly pushed again and again away from every sideline or from the beyond by his own driving power, whose isolation is misunderstood by people as if it were a flight from reality—whereas it is only his immersion, burial, and absorption in reality, so that once he comes out of it into the light again, he brings home the redemption of this reality, its redemption from the curse which the previous ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will release us from that earlier ideal just as much as from what had to grow from it, from the great loathing, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism—that stroke of noon and of the great decision which makes the will free once again, who gives back to the earth its purpose and to the human being his hope, this anti-Christ and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness—at some point he must come . . .