The
morality of breeding and the
morality of taming are, in
the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may
proclaim it as the supreme principle that, to make
morality,
one must have the
unconditional will to its opposite. This
is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing
the longest: the
psychology of the "improvers" of
mankind.
A small, and at bottom modest, fact -- that of the so-called
pia fraus -- offered me the first approach to this problem:
the
pia fraus, the heirloom of all
philosophers and
priests
who "improved"
mankind. Neither
Manu nor
Plato nor
Confucius
nor the
Jewish and
Christian teachers have ever doubted
their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very
different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say:
all the means by which one has so far attempted to make
mankind moral were through and through
immoral.
# # #
from The Twilight of the Idols (1888) by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by H.L. Mencken, who took this gibberish seriously.
Previous |
Start Over