Dawn
Thoughts About Morality as a Prejudice
1
With this book my campaign against morality begins. Not that it smells in the least of powder: you will smell far different and much lovelier scents in it, assuming your nostrils have some sensitivity. Neither big nor small guns: if the effect of the book is negative, its means are anything but that—these means from which the effect issues like an inference, not like a cannon shot. If one takes leave of the book with a cautious reserve about everything that has so far attained honor and even worship under the name of morality, this in no way contradicts the fact that the whole book contains no negative word, no attack, no spite—that it lies in the sun, round, happy, like some sea animal basking among rocks.
Ultimately, I myself was this sea animal: almost every sentence in this book was first thought, caught among that jumble of rocks near Genoa where I was alone and still had secrets with the sea. Even now, whenever I accidentally touch this book, almost every sentence turns for me into a net that again brings up from the depths something incomparable: its entire skin trembles with tender thrills of memory. The art that distinguishes it is not inconsiderable when it comes to fixing to some extent things that easily flit by, noiselessly—moments I call divine lizards—but not with the cruelty of that young Greek god who simply speared the poor little lizard, though, to be sure, with something pointed—a pen.
“There are so many dawns that have not yet glowed”—this Indian inscription marks the opening of this book. Where does its author seek that new morning, that as yet undiscovered tender red that marks the beginning of another day—ah, a whole series, a whole world of new days? In a revaluation of all values, in a liberation from all moral values, in saying Yes to and having confidence in all that has hitherto been forbidden, despised, and damned. This Yes-saying book pours out its light, its love, its tenderness upon ever so many wicked things; it gives back to them their “soul,” a good conscience, the lofty right and privilege of existence. Morality is not attacked, it is merely no longer in the picture.
This book closes with an “Or?”—it is the only book that closes with an “Or?”
2
My task of preparing a moment of the highest self-examination for humanity, a great noon when it looks back and far forward, when it emerges from the dominion of accidents and priests and for the first time poses, as a whole, the question of Why? and For What?—this task follows of necessity from the insight that humanity is not all by itself on the right way, that it is by no means governed divinely, that, on the contrary, it has been precisely among its holiest value concepts that the instinct of denial, corruption, and decadence has ruled seductively. The question concerning the origin of moral values is for me a question of the very first rank because it is crucial for the future of humanity. The demand that we should believe that everything is really in the best of hands, that a book, the Bible, offers us definitive assurances about the divine governance and wisdom in the destiny of man, is—translated back into reality—the will to suppress the truth about the pitiable opposite of all this; namely, that humanity has so far been in the worst of hands and that it has been governed by the underprivileged, the craftily vengeful, the so-called “saints,” these slanderers of the world and violators of man.
The decisive symptom that shows how the priest (including those crypto-priests, the philosophers) has become master quite generally and not only within a certain religious community, and that the morality of decadence, the will to the end has become accepted as morality itself, is the fact that what is unegoistic is everywhere assigned absolute value while what is egoistic is met with hostility. Whoever is at odds with me about that is to my mind infected.—But all the world is at odds with me.
For a physiologist such a juxtaposition of values simply leaves no doubt. When the least organ in an organism fails, however slightly, to enforce with complete assurance its self-preservation, its “egoism,” restitution of its energies—the whole degenerates. The physiologist demands excision of the degenerating part; he denies all solidarity with what degenerates; he is worlds removed from pity for it. But the priest desires precisely the degeneration of the whole, of humanity: for that reason, he conserves what degenerates—at this price he rules.
When seriousness is deflected from the self-preservation and the enhancement of the strength of the body—that is, of life—when anemia is construed as an ideal, and contempt for the body as “salvation of the soul”—what else is this if not a recipe for decadence?
The loss of the center of gravity, resistance to the natural instincts—in one word, “selflessness”—that is what was hitherto called morality.—With the Dawn I first took up the fight against the morality that would unself man.1
1Die Entselbstungs-Moral: Entselbstung is Nietzsche’s coinage; “unself” is inspired by Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me.”