him to affirmation. In himself the Rousseau-Voltaire struggle pro- vides the dominant pressure of his thinking. Just as for him "ascending life" requires decadence, so the Superman, the "trans- valuation of values" and so on, require nihilism as their basis. So that in a sense Nietzschewelcomes the terrible and catastrophic consequences of the nihilism he both abhors and is fascinated by. This accounts for the extraordinary savageness of his joy in denun- ciation coupled always with euphoric hope and innocent wonder. It is not that he offers a "solution" to the nihilistic consequences of his thinking, but that they must be accepted and turned to a positive direction. The world is meaningless, so we create a mean- ing. Just, he urges, as Christianity did. Only Christianity was a fraud, it created the wrong meaning. And perhaps, at times we almost hear him saying, perhaps Nietzsche's "meaning" is a fraud too. "Die Dichter lügen zu viel." (16)
The beast in us needs to be deceived: morality is a necessary lie to save us from being torn to pieces by it: without the errors which con- stitute the basis of morality, man would have remained an animal.
Life--that means continually expelling from oneself something that wishes death; it means being cruel and merciless to all that is weak and old in us, and not only in us. It means, therefore, being without respect for the dying, the miserable and the old. Being continually a murderer. Yet old Moses said: Thou shalt not kill.
All living is an obeying. Good and bad as eternal values--do not exist! Each must continually overcome itself from within itself . . . And if you would be a creator in good and evil, you must first be a destroyer and break up values.
It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is more valuable than falsehood . . . no life could exist except on the basis of perspective judgments and approximations. . . . Anyway, what forces us to accept any fundamental contradiction between "true" and "false"? Is it not sufficient to accept various degrees of probability, so to speak, lighter and darker shadows and tones of appearance--varying "valeurs", as the painters say. Why should not the world, in so far as it concerns us, be a fiction? And if it is asked: "But a fiction requires an author"?--could one not simply retort: "Why?" perhaps this "requires" is also part of the fiction?
-29-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication Information: Book Title: German Men of Letters. Volume: 2. Contributors: Alex Natan - editor. Publisher: Oswald Wolff. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1963. Page Number: 29.
Add a Shared Note
Shared Notes are comments made by Questia users on books,
book pages, or articles that inform other users and enhance
the Questia research community.
This feature allows you to create and manage separate folders for your different research projects. To view markups for a different project, make that project your current project.
This feature allows you to save a link to the publication you are reading or view all the publications you have put on your bookshelf.
This feature allows you to save a link to the page you are reading, which you can later return to from Projects.
This feature allows you to highlight words or phrases on the publication page you are reading.
This feature allows you to save a note you write on the publication page you are reading.
This feature allows you to create a citation to the page you are reading that you can paste into your paper. Highlight a passage to include that passage as a quotation.
This feature allows you to save a reference to a publication you are reading for your bibliography or generate a bibliography you can paste into your paper.
This feature allows you to print the page you are reading,
including your notes or highlights (IE users must have "print background colors and image" setting selected.)
This feature allows you to look up words in encyclopedia.
Questia's powerful research tools allow you to highlight, take notes, bookmark and even create instant citations and bibliographies. To use these features and save hours of work, you must create a Questia account.
Need a Questia account? Sign up for a FREE trial now. Save time, stress and hassle, and get better grades with trusted, online research.
