6.
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have
drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in
my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral
accusation against humanity. It is used—and I wish to emphasize the fact
again—without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the
rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters
where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward “virtue”
and “godliness.” As you probably surmise, I understand
rottenness in the sense of décadence: my argument is that all the
values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are
décadence-values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses
its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious
to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of
humanity”—and it is possible that I'll have to write it—would
almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an
instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for
power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My
contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of
this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now
prevail under the holiest names.
