THE ANTICHRIST
By
Friedrich Nietzsche
Translation: H.L. Mencken
Preface
We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from the "
spirit," from the "
God-head"; we have dropped him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit which would assert it
self even here: that man is the great second thought in the process of organic
evolution. He is, in truth, anything but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at similar stages of development... And even when we say that we say a bit too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most interesting!--As regards the lower animals, it was
Descartes who first had the really
admirable daring to
describe them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as
Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free will"; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer
describes anything that we can understand. The old word "will" now connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious stimuli--the will no longer "acts," or "moves." . . . Formerly it was thought that man's consciousness, his "
spirit," offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil--then only the important part of him, the "pure
spirit," would remain. Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or "the
spirit," appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force un necessarily--we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously. The "pure
spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal shell," and the rest is miscalculation--that is all!...