you cannot create a God, Zarathustra says, stop talking of one.[1] That is, the morality of Nietzsche is a semi-religious morality. To this extent, he belongs in a different category from Utilitarians and others, who, taking men as they are, simply think of a way in which they may get along pleasantly and profitably together.[2] He rather belongs to the company of those, or of One, who said, "be ye perfect," and set up as the standard the infinite perfection of God. a "Let the future and the furthest be the motive of thy today." "Do I counsel you to love your neighbor, the one nearest you? I counsel you rather to flee the nearest and love the furthest human being."[3] In such sayings the spirit of the man and the final principle of his morality come to light. Man [as he exists] is something to be surpassed:[4] that is his starting-point. It is not a proposition that can be proven, nothing that can be deduced, nothing that can be scientifically established; naïvetés of that sort he leaves to others: it is simply his choice, the outcome of his ruling impulse, which is to see the great, the transcendent in the world, so far as the conditions of existence allow. b If we do not make such a preliminary choice with him, his practical prescriptions will have little meaning to us.
In a sense, the aim might be called cosmical, i.e., the world is apparently thought of as pressing to a higher realization of its potencies through us in this way. Nietzsche says, "We are buds on one tree—what do we know of what can come out of us in the interests of the tree! … No. Beyond 'me' and 'thee'! To feel cosmically!"[5]
I have spoken of Nietzsche's instinct for the perfect—how
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, ii. Still further, "God is a conjecture; but what I wish is that your conjecturing should go no further than your creative will." Again, "He who does not find the great in God any more finds it in general no more—he must either deny or create it" (Werke, XII, 329, § 536).
- ↑ Such a view, ever asking how man can maintain himself best, longest, most agreeably, is what makes men of today small and common (Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 3).
- ↑ Zarathustra, I, xvi.
- ↑ Ibid., prelude, § 3. Cf. IV, xiii, § 3 ("it is the superman whom I have at heart—he is my first and only, and not man.… Oh, my brothers, what I can love in man is that he is a transition, a passing away"); also, I, x ("let your love to life be love to your highest hope; and let your highest hope be your highest thought of life").
- ↑ Werke, XII, 128-9, § 248.
