Nietzsche calls it a naturalistic view; by this he means that there are no "oughts" or "ought nots" transcending life, but that life itself is the ultimate standard, and that "ought" and "ought not" are fixed by the demands of life[1]—in the last resort, the demands of the highest life. He also has in mind the fact that we are bodies, a certain type of physiological organization, something far more and deeper than our momentary thoughts and feelings, or, for that matter, the whole reign of our conscious life, c and that it is this perduring substratum, the same whether we are awake or asleep, the same more or less in father and son, this actual line of physiological descent, out of which the higher men of the future are to spring—in other words, that we carry in our loins now the superman, that he is no angel from other spheres or bodiless phantasm like the Greek Gods.[2] This is the meaning of the value which Nietzsche gives to the earth, of which we hear so much in Zarathustra. Stay true to the earth, he exclaims, and lead the virtue that has flown away from the earth back to it, back to body and life.[3] Deserting life and wallowing in the thought of some other sort of existence is the supreme disloyalty.[4] To spin the threads of our human life so that they ever become stronger—that is the task.[5] Let us now see how the supreme valuation brings still other detailed valuations in its wake.
First, we have a standard for measuring truth and goodness. These are valuable so far as they serve life, but they are not supreme over life. If there are truths that are unfavorable to life (and we have no guarantee that there may not be such and rather reason to think that there are some—unfavorable at least to the life of most), there is no absolute duty to know them. Some forms of goodness—for instance, the mass ideals of goodness taken absolutely—may work contrary to the highest forms of life, may paralyze the springs of great desires[6]—they are
- ↑ Twilight etc., v, § 4; cf. Will to Power, § 462.
- ↑ Cf. Werke XII, 362, § 688 (mankind must set its aim beyond itself, not, however, in a false world, but in its own continuation); cf. XIV, 263, § 10.
- ↑ Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 2. Zarathustra loves those who do not have to seek a reason beyond the stars for sacrifice (prologue, § 4).
- ↑ Cf. Zarathustra, prologue, § 3 (once crime against God was the greatest crime; now the most terrible thing is to sin against the earth).
- ↑ Will to Power, § 674.
- ↑ Ibid., § 244.
