womb of ideal and imaginative results, a bringer forth of a fullness of new strange affirmations and beauties. It may be, he adds, that it first created beauty in general—"for what would 'beautiful' mean, if contradiction had not first been sensibly felt, if the ugly had not first said to itself, 'I am ugly'?" At least, after this hint, he thinks that the enigma becomes less enigmatical how far an ideal, a beauty may be intimated in contradictory conceptions such as self-lessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice—one thing being henceforth plain, namely, of what sort the pleasure is from the start which the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person experiences: it is a pleasure belonging to cruelty.[1] This line of reflection is developed but a very little way, and Nietzsche is far from reaching a balanced view on the general subject. But we may say with assurance that he was not without appreciation for ascetic ideals, and recognized a place for them in the world, even if he did not personally share them.[2] Moreover, he had no repugnance to bad conscience in itself; he wished rather, as we have already seen, to create it in a new form, to give it to persons quite innocent of it at the present time, namely, to those who, disloyal to this world, cultivate other-world aspirations, anti-natural ideas—to Christians (of the historic type), to followers of Schopenhauer.[3] He once said that for some a spasm of repentance may be the highest exercise of their humanity,[4] and he wanted the Christian world to have a taste—and more than a taste—of it. Whether he was strong enough to conquer in this fashion and breed bad conscience anew—for it is a question of strength and conquest—is one of the future's problems.
- ↑ Nietzsche makes a supplementary remark here: "So much toward tracing the origin of the 'unegoistic' as a moral value, and toward marking out the soil out of which this value has grown: first bad conscience, first the will for self-mistreatment furnishes the presupposition for the value of the unegoistic" (ibid., II, § 18). Nietzsche must use "unegoistic" here in a more special sense than that in which he recognized the significance and value of the unegoistic for social formations in general, as noted previously (pp. 216-7); and even the present remark does not deny the value of the unegoistic.
- ↑ See the discussion of ascetic ideals in Genealogy etc., III—the whole of the treatise is devoted to that subject. In a certain broad (not the Christian) sense, it may be a question whether Nietzsche did not share ascetic ideals.
- ↑ Cf. Genealogy etc., II, § 24.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 252.
