is a part of the normal working of the world, malevolent as well as benevolent impulses belong of necessity to its inner machinery. One who is pious to the past and one who is sincerely impious alike have their place.[1] Destroying a part of becoming, endangering people and their views, or even putting an end to them, as necessary from any high point of view as being useful to them and building them up, destroying values and standards of value too, destroying moralities, religions—such is the logic of the development of things, to Nietzsche's mind.[2] A perfect adjustment of everything to everything else and to itself (as is suggested by Spencer) is an erroneous ideal—it would involve the deepest impoverishment of existence.[3] As it is, adjustment may go too far, groups last too long, the social virtues be too supreme—the harm of the virtues, Nietzsche ironically remarks, is something that has not yet been pointed out![4] But the evil dispositions are well-lodged in the world, and he takes comfort in the fact.[5]
So far does he go in this direction that he uses language at times almost like that of a theodicy. Good and evil seem to him obverse sides of the strong force that keeps the world moving and alive; they go together—the root of both (save where "good" really spells "weak") being strength[6]c If, as is urged by those who investigate morality from a physiologico-historical standpoint, the survival of the moral instincts proves that they are useful for the preservation of the species, by the same token the survival of the unmoral instincts proves their utility—only that the will in their case is not simply a will for preservation, but for advance, for something more.[7] Nothing that exists ought to be suppressed, nothing is superfluous.[8] He even speaks of a new justice to evil and evil men. "Also the evil man (der Böse), also the unhappy man, also the man who is an exception shall have his philosophy, his good right, his
- ↑ Mixed Opinions, etc., § 93.
- ↑ Cf. Werke, XIII, 221, § 527; XIV, 350, § 208; Joyful Science, § 4; Ecce Homo, IV, § 2.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 86, § 170; cf. Joyful Science, § 1.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 93, §§ 186-7.
- ↑ Ibid., XIII, 147, § 343; cf. Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 5; Will to Power, § 747; Werke, XII, 134, § 260.
- ↑ Werke, XIII, 147, § 344.
- ↑ Ibid., XIII, 141-2, § 329.
- ↑ Ecce Homo, III, i, § 2.
