Let us not underestimate the fact that we ourselves, we free spirits, already constitute a ‘revaluation of all values’, a living declaration of war on and victory over all old concepts of ‘true’ and ‘untrue’.
Category: Antichrist (book)
Mantra Law
The execrable location where Christianity brooded over its basilisk eggs [the Vatican] should be razed to the ground and, being the depraved spot on earth, it should be the horror of all posterity.
One more word against Kant as a moralist. ‘Virtue’, ‘duty’, ‘goodness in itself’, goodness that has been stamped with the character of the impersonal and the universally valid—these are all chimeras, and expression of decay, of the final exhaustion of life, of the Königsberg Chineseanity.
A people is destroyed when it confuses its own duty with the concept of duty in general…
Kant became an idiot. — And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This disaster of a spider passed for the German philosopher — and still does!
Germans understand me immediately when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologian blood…
What German philosophy really is—an underhanded theology…
Why were Germans so convinced that Kant marked a change for the better? The theologian instinct of the German scholar had guessed just what was possible again: a hidden path to the old ideal lay open…
Kant’s success is just a theologian success: Kant, like Luther, like Leibniz, was one more drag on an already precarious German sense of integrity —
Christianity is called the religion of pity… Pity runs counter to the whole law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type.
I understand corruption (as I am sure you have guessed by now) in the sense of decadence: my claim is that all the values in which humanity has collected its highest desiderata are values of decadence.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers things that will harm it…
Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is decline.
You should not beautify Christianity or try to dress it up: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of person, it has banned all the basic instincts of this type, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself out of these instincts—the strong human being as reprehensible, as ‘depraved’.
Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, failed; it has made an ideal out of whatever contradicts the preservation instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous by teaching people to see the highest spiritual values as sinful, as deceptive, as temptations. The most lamentable example—the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity! —