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ETHICS Human beings fell into two types: ‘ascending’ people and ‘descending’ people, that is to say, people who represented the upward and downward track of human evolution It was not always easy to tell which was which—only Nietzsche himself had a perfect nose to discriminate between the two—but once detected, the descending creatures had to make way for the well-constituted, taking away from them as little space, energy, and sunshine as possible (WP 373) However, it is not just Christian morality that must be overturned We must go beyond the opposition between good and evil that is the feature of any slave morality It is not only Christians, for instance, who regard truth as a fundamental value But we should not, Nietzsche argues, object to judgements just because they are false The question is rather to what extent the judgement promotes life, preserves life, preserves the species, perhaps even enhances the species We are in principle inclined to claim that judgements that are most false—including synthetic a priori judgements—are the ones most indispensable to us Human beings could not live without accepting logical fictions To give up false judgements would be to give up life, to deny life Recognizing untruth as a condition of life? What a dangerous rejection of traditional values! A philosophy that dares to this has already placed itself beyond good and evil (BGE 7) Truth is that kind of error without which a particular living being could not survive Life is the supreme value by which all others are to be judged ‘Whenever we speak of values’, Nietzsche wrote, ‘we speak under the inspiration of life and from the perspective of life Life itself forces us to establish values; it is life that does the evaluation by means of us whenever we posit values’ (TI 24) Human life is the highest form of life that has so far emerged, but in the contemporary world it has sunk to the level of some of the forms that preceded it We must affirm life and bring it to a new level, a synthesis transcending the thesis and antithesis of master and slave, the Superman (Ubermensch) The proclamation of the Superman is the prophetic message of Nietzsche’s oracular spokesman Zarathustra The Superman will be the highest form of life, the ultimate affirmation of the will to live But our will to live must not be, like Schopenhauer’s, one that favours the weak; it must be a will to power The will to power is the secret of all life; every living thing seeks to discharge its force, to give full scope to its ability Pleasure is merely the consciousness of power’s exercise Knowledge—to 239
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