On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.23) Friedrich Nietzsche

The ascetic ideal has not only ruined health and taste; its has also ruined a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth something as well—I’ll be careful not to mention everything (when would I come to the end!). I’m not going to reveal what this ideal has brought about. I would much rather confine myself to what it means, what it allows us to surmise, what lies hidden behind, under, and in it, what it provisionally and indistinctly expresses, overloaded with question marks and misunderstandings. And only with this purpose in mind, I cannot spare my readers a glimpse into the monstrosity of its effects, as well as its disastrous consequences, in order, that is, to prepare them for the ultimate and most terrifying aspects which the question of the meaning of this ideal has for me. Just what does the power of this ideal mean, the monstrous nature of this power? Why was it given room to grow to this extent? Why was there not a more effective resistance? The ascetic ideal is the expression of a will. Where is the opposing will, in which an opposing ideal finds its expression? The ascetic ideal has a goal—a goal which is universal enough that all other interests in human existence, measured against it, seem small and narrow. It interprets times, people, and humanity unsparingly with this goal in mind. It permits no other interpretation. No other goal counts. It rejects, denies, affirms, and confirms only through its own interpretative meaning (—and has there ever been a system of interpretation more thoroughly thought through?); it does not submit to any power; by contrast, it believes in its privileged position in relation to all power, in its absolutely higher ranking with respect to every power—it believes that there is no power on earth which does not have to derive its meaning first from it, a right to exist, a value, as a tool in its own work, as a way and a means to its own goal, to a single goal. . . Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? Why is this counterpart missing? . . . Where is the other “single goal”? But people tell me that counterpart is not missing, claiming it has not only fought a long and successful war with that ideal, but has already mastered that ideal on all major points: all our modern science is a testament to that—this modern science, which, as a true philosophy of reality, evidently believes only in itself, evidently possesses courage and will in itself, and has got along up to this point well enough without God, a world beyond, and virtues which deny. However, I’m not impressed at all with such a fuss and chattering from agitators: these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians. One can hear well enough that their notes do not sound out of the depths. The abyss of scientific conscience does not speak through them—for today the scientific conscience is an abyss —the phrase “science” in such trumpeting mouths is mere fornication, an abuse, an indecency. The truth is precisely the opposite of what is claimed here: science nowadays has simply no faith in itself, to say nothing of an ideal above it—and where it consists at all of passion, love, ardour, suffering, that doesn’t make it the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its newest and most pre-eminent form. Does that sound strange to you? . . .There are indeed a sufficient number of upright and modest working people among scholars nowadays, happy in their little corners, and because their work satisfies them, they make noises from time to time, demanding, with some presumption, that people today should in general be happy, particularly with science—there are so many useful things to do precisely there. I don’t deny that. The last thing I want to do is to ruin the pleasure these honest labourers take in the tasks they perform. For I’m happy about their work. But the fact that people are working rigorously in science these days and that there are satisfied workers is simply no proof that science today, as a totality, has a goal, a will, an ideal, a passion in a great faith. As I’ve said, the opposite is the case: where science is not the most recently appearing form of the ascetic ideal—and then it’s a matter of cases too rare, noble, and exceptional to be capable of countering the general judgment—science today is a hiding place for all kinds of unhappiness, disbelief, gnawing worms, despectio sui [self-contempt], bad conscience—it is the anxiety of the very absence of ideals, suffering from the lack of a great love, the dissatisfaction with a condition of involuntary modest content. O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal! The efficiency of our best scholars, their mindless diligence, their heads smoking day and night, the very mastery of their handiwork—how often has all that really derived its meaning from the fact that they don’t permit some things to become visible to them any more! Science as a means of putting themselves to sleep. Are you acquainted with that? . . . People wound scholars to the bone—everyone who associates with them experiences this—sometimes with a harmless word. We make our scholarly friends angry with us when we intend to honour them. We drive them wild, merely because we were too coarse to figure out the people we are truly dealing with, suffering people, who don’t wish to admit to themselves what they are, narcotised and mindless people, who fear only one thing—coming to consciousness.