The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I. The Character

1.

[ 1 ] Friedrich Nietzsche characterizes himself as a solemn brooder and puzzle lover, as an unconventional personality. Those who go their own way, as he does, "meet no one: that is what 'their own way' entails. No one comes to help him; he has to deal with everything that happens to him from danger, chance, malice and bad weather alone," he says in the preface to the second edition of his "Dawn". But it is appealing to follow him into his solitude. I would like to say the words he spoke about his relationship to Schopenhauer about mine to Nietzsche: "I am one of those readers of Nietzsche who, after reading the first page of his work, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word he has ever said. My trust in him was immediate ... I understood him as if he had written for me: to express myself intelligibly, but immodestly and foolishly." One can speak like this and be far from professing to be a "believer" in Nietzsche's world view. No further, however, than Nietzsche was from wishing for such "believers". After all, he puts the words into the mouth of his "Zarathustra":

[ 2 ] "You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what lies in Zarathustra! You are my believers: but what lies in all believers!"

[ 3 ] You had not yet sought yourselves: then you found me. So do all believers; therefore it is so little with all faith. Now I bid you lose me and find me; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you."

[ 4 ] Nietzsche is not a messiah and founder of a religion; he can therefore well wish for friends of his opinions; but he cannot want confessors of his teachings who give up their own selves in order to find his own.

[ 5 ] In Nietzsche's personality there are instincts to which entire circles of his contemporaries' ideas are repugnant. He turns away from the most important cultural ideas of those in whose midst he has developed with an instinctive aversion; not in the way one rejects an assertion in which one has discovered a logical contradiction, but in the way one turns away from a color that causes pain to the eye. The aversion comes from the immediate feeling; conscious reflection is not even considered at first. What other people feel when the thoughts of guilt, remorse, sin, the afterlife, ideal, bliss, fatherland pass through their minds has an unpleasant effect on Nietzsche. The instinctive nature of his aversion to these ideas also distinguishes Nietzsche from the so-called "free spirits" of the present day. These know all the intellectual objections to the "old delusions"; but how rare it is to find someone who can say of himself: his instincts are no longer attached to them! It is precisely the instincts that play evil tricks on the free spirits of the present. Thought takes on a character that is independent of traditional ideas, but the instincts cannot adapt to this changed character of the mind. These "free spirits" put some concept of modern science in the place of an older idea; but they speak of it in such a way that one recognizes: the mind goes a different way than the instincts. The intellect seeks in the substance, in the force, in the natural law the origin of phenomena; but the instincts tempt us to feel towards these beings what others feel towards their personal God. Spirits of this kind defend themselves against the reproach of denying God; but they do so not because their conception of the world leads them to something that agrees with any idea of God, but because they have inherited from their ancestors the quality of feeling an instinctive horror at the word "denier of God". Great natural scientists emphasize that they do not associate the ideas of: God, immortality do not want to banish them, but only to reshape them in line with modern science. Their instincts have simply lagged behind their intellect.

[ 6 ] A large number of these "free spirits" hold the view that the will of man is unfree. They say that man must act in a particular case in accordance with his character and the circumstances affecting him. But look around at these opponents of the view of "free will" and you will find that the instincts of these "free spirits" turn away from the perpetrator of an "evil" deed with the same disgust as the instincts of others who believe that "free will" can turn to good or evil at will.

[ 7 ] The contradiction between reason and instinct is the hallmark of our "modern minds". Even in the freest thinkers of the present day, the instincts planted by Christian orthodoxy are still alive. Precisely the opposite instincts are at work in Nietzsche's nature. He does not even need to think about whether there are reasons against the assumption of a personal ruler of the world. His instinct is too proud to bow to such a one; therefore he rejects such an idea. He speaks to his Zarathustra: "But that I may fully reveal my heart to you, friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god! So there are no gods." To pronounce himself or someone else "guilty" for an act committed is something that nothing inside him urges him to do. In order to find such a "guilty" inadmissible, he does not need a theory of "free" or "unfree" will.

[ 8 ] The patriotic sentiments of his fellow Germans are also contrary to Nietzsche's instincts. He cannot make his feelings and thoughts dependent on the thought circles of the people within which he was born and educated, nor on the time in which he lives. "It is so small-town," he says in his essay "Schopenhauer as Educator", "to commit oneself to views that are no longer binding a few hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk lines that someone paints before our eyes to fool our fearfulness. I want to make an attempt to reach freedom, says the young soul; and it should prevent it from doing so that two nations happen to hate and fight each other, or that a sea lies between two continents, or that a religion is taught all around it that did not exist a few thousand years ago." The feelings of the Germans during the war in 1870 found so little resonance in his soul that, "while the thunder of the Battle of Wörth was rolling over Europe", he sat in a corner of the Alps, "very brooding and puzzled, consequently very sorrowful and unconcerned at the same time", and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks. And when, a few weeks later, he found himself "under the walls of Metz", he had "still not got rid of the question marks" that he had placed on life and "Greek art". (Cf. "Attempt at self-criticism" in the second edition of his "Birth of Tragedy"). When the war was over, he was so out of tune with the enthusiasm of his German contemporaries about the victory that he spoke of the "bad and dangerous consequences" of the victorious battle in his 1873 essay on David Strauss. He even presented it as a delusion that German culture had also triumphed in this battle, and he called this delusion dangerous because, if it becomes dominant within the German people, there is a danger of turning the victory "into a complete defeat: into the defeat, even extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the 'German Reich'." This is Nietzsche's attitude at a time when all of Europe is full of national enthusiasm. It is the attitude of an outmoded personality, a fighter against his time. Apart from the above, many other things could be mentioned that are different in Nietzsche's emotional and imaginative life from that of his contemporaries.

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[ 9 ] Nietzsche is not a "thinker" in the usual sense of the word. For the questionable and profound questions that he has to ask of the world and of life, mere thinking is not enough. All the powers of human nature must be unleashed for these questions; thinking contemplation alone is not up to them. Nietzsche has no confidence in merely thought out reasons for an opinion. "There is a distrust in me against dialectics, even against reasons," he wrote to Georg Brandes on December z, 1887. (Cf. his "Menschen und Werke", p. 212.) If anyone asks him for the reasons for his views, he has "Zarathustra's" answer ready for them: "You ask why? I am not one of those who may be asked why." It is not whether a view can be logically proven that is decisive for him, but whether it affects all the forces of the human personality in such a way that it has value for life. He only accepts an idea if he finds it suitable for contributing to the development of life. His wish is to see people as healthy as possible, as powerful as possible, as creative as possible. Truth, beauty, all ideals only have value and only concern man insofar as they promote life.

[ 10 ] The question of the value of truth appears in several of Nietzsche's writings. It is posed in its most audacious form in his book "Beyond Good and Evil". "The will to truth, which will still seduce us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers have spoken with reverence up to now: what questions has this will to truth already presented to us! What strange, terrible, questionable questions! This is already a long story - and yet it seems that it has barely just begun. What wonder if we finally become suspicious, lose patience, turn around impatiently? That we learn to ask questions from this sphinx? Who is actually asking us questions here? What in us actually wants 'to the truth'? - In fact, we stopped long before the question of the cause of this will - until we finally came to a complete standstill before an even more profound question. We asked about the value of this will. Assuming we want truth: why not rather untruth?"

[ 11 ] This is a thought of almost unsurpassable audacity. If one places next to it what another bold "ponderer and puzzle lover", Johann Gottlieb Fichte, says about the pursuit of truth, one can only see how deeply Nietzsche draws his ideas from the essence of human nature. "I am called" - says Fichte - "to bear witness to the truth; nothing lies in my life and my destiny; infinitely much lies in the effects of my life. I am a priest of the truth; I am in its pay; I have committed myself to do and dare and suffer everything for it." (Fichte, Lectures "On the Destiny of the Scholar", fourth lecture. These words express the relationship in which the noblest spirits of Western modern culture place themselves to truth. Compared to Nietzsche's statement, they appear superficial. One can object to them: Is it not possible that untruth has more valuable effects on life than truth? Is it impossible that truth is harmful to life? Did Fichte ask himself these questions? Have others who have "borne witness to the truth" done so?

[ 12 ] Nietzsche, however, asks these questions. And he believes that he can only come to terms with them if he does not treat the striving for truth as a mere intellectual matter, but rather searches for the instincts that generate this striving. For it could well be that these instincts only use the truth as a means to achieve something higher than the truth. Nietzsche, after having "looked long enough between the lines and at the fingers" of philosophers, finds that "most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided by his instincts and forced into certain paths." Philosophers believe that the ultimate driving force behind their actions is the pursuit of truth. They believe this because they are unable to see to the bottom of human nature. In reality, the pursuit of truth is driven by the will to power. With the help of truth, the power and fullness of life of the personality should be increased. The conscious thinking of the philosopher is of the opinion that the knowledge of truth is an ultimate goal; the unconscious instinct that drives thinking strives to promote life. For this instinct, "the falsity of a judgment is not yet an objection to a judgment"; for it, the only question to be considered is "how far it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding" ("Beyond Good and Evil", § 3 and 4).

[ 13 ] “‘Will to truth’: is that what you call it, you wisest, what drives you and makes you ardent?

[ 14 ] Will to the conceivability of all that exists: thus I call your will!

[ 15 ] You first want to make conceivable everything that exists: for you doubt with good suspicion whether it is already conceivable.

[ 16 ] But it shall submit and bend to you! That is your will. It shall become smooth and subject to the spirit, as its mirror and reflection.

[ 17 ] This is your whole will, ye wisest, as a will to power ...” ("Zarathustra", part 2, "On overcoming oneself".)

[ 18 ] Truth should make the world subject to the spirit and thereby serve life. It only has value as a condition of life. - But can we not go further and ask: what is life itself worth? Nietzsche considers such a question impossible. He accepts the fact that all living things want to live as powerfully, as richly as possible, as a fact about which he does not ponder any further. The instincts of life do not ask about the value of life. They only ask: what means exist to increase the power of their bearer. "Judgments, value judgments about life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they only have value as symptoms, they only come into consideration as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must certainly stretch out one's fingers and try to grasp the astonishing subtlety that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by a living person, because such a person is a party, even an object of dispute, and not a judge; not by a dead person, for another reason. - To see a problem in the value of life on the part of a philosopher remains in this way even an objection against him, a question mark on his wisdom, an unwisdom." -("Götzen-Dämmerung", "Das Problem des Sokrates".) The question of the value of life exists only for a poorly developed, sick personality. He who is developed on all sides lives without asking how much his life is worth.

[ 19 ] Because Nietzsche holds the views described, he attaches little importance to logical reasons for a judgment. What matters to him is not whether the judgment can be proven logically, but how well one can live under its influence. Not only the mind, but the whole personality of man should be satisfied. The best thoughts are those that bring all the forces of human nature into a movement appropriate to them.

[ 20 ] Only thoughts of this kind are of interest to Nietzsche. He is not a philosophical mind, but a "honey-gatherer of the spirit" who seeks out the "beehives" of knowledge and tries to bring home what is pious to life.

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[ 21 ] In Nietzsche's personality, those instincts are predominant that make man a commanding, imperious being. He likes everything that expresses power; he dislikes everything that betrays weakness. He only feels happy as long as he is in living conditions that increase his strength. He loves obstacles and resistance to his activity because he becomes aware of his power when he overcomes them. He seeks out the most arduous paths that man can take. A basic trait of his character is expressed in the saying he put on the title page of the second edition of his "Fröhliche Wissenschaft":

"I live in my own house,
Have never imitated anyone
And - laughed at every master,
Who did not laugh at himself."

[ 22 ] Nietzsche perceives any kind of subordination to a foreign power as weakness. And he thinks differently about what a "foreign power" is than some people who describe themselves as an "independent, free spirit". Nietzsche sees it as a weakness when people submit to so-called "eternal, iron" laws of reason in their thoughts and actions. What the all-round developed personality does is not dictated to it by any moral science, but solely by the impulses of its own self. Man is already weak the moment he searches for laws and rules according to which he should think and act. The strong determines the nature of his thoughts and actions from his own being.

[ 23 ] Nietzsche expresses this view most harshly in sentences for the sake of which petty thinkers have described him as a dangerous spirit: "When the Christian crusaders encountered in the Orient that invincible order of assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest grades lived in an obedience such as no monastic order has equaled, they also received by some means a hint of that symbol and notch word which was reserved only for the highest grades, as their secretum: 'Nothing is true, everything is permitted'. ^{1Highlighted by the author} Well, that was freedom of the mind, thereby denouncing the truth itself" ... ("Genealogy of Morals", 3rd treatise, § 24.) That these sentences express the feelings of a noble, a master nature, which does not want to let the permission to live freely, according to its own laws, be withered by any consideration of eternal truths and regulations of morality, is not felt by those people who, according to their nature, are suited to submissiveness. A personality such as Nietzsche's does not tolerate those tyrants who appear in the form of abstract moral commandments. I decide how I want to think, how I want to act, says such a nature.

[ 24 ] There are people who derive their right to call themselves "freethinkers" from the fact that in their thoughts and actions they do not subject themselves to such laws that originate from other people, but only to the "eternal laws of reason", the "irrefutable concepts of duty" or the "will of God". Nietzsche does not regard such people as truly strong personalities. For they too do not think and act according to their own nature, but according to the commands of a higher authority. Whether the slave follows the arbitrariness of his master, the religious the revealed truths of a god or the philosopher the sayings of reason, this does not change the fact that they are all obeyers. What commands does not matter; what is decisive is that commands are given at all, that man does not give himself the direction for his actions, but is of the opinion that there is a power that marks out this direction for him.

[ 25 ] The strong, truly free person does not want to receive the truth - he wants to create it; he does not want to be "allowed" to do anything, he does not want to obey. "But the real philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say: 'this is how it should be!'; they first determine the 'where to' and 'what for' of man and in doing so have at their disposal the preliminary work of all philosophical workers, all overcomers of the past - they reach for the future with a creative hand, and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them. Their 'cognition' is creation, their creation is legislation, their will to truth is - will to power. - Are there such philosophers today? Have there ever been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?" ("Beyond Good and Evil", §211.)

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[ 26 ] Nietzsche sees a particular sign of human weakness in any kind of belief in an afterlife, in a world other than the one in which man lives. In his view, one can do no greater harm to life than if one arranges one's life in this world with a view to another life in the hereafter. One cannot indulge in any greater aberration than to assume that behind the phenomena of this world there are beings that are inaccessible to human cognition and that are to be regarded as the actual primordial ground, as the determining factor of all existence. Such an assumption spoils one's enjoyment of this world. It is degraded to a mere reflection of something inaccessible. We declare the world we know, the world that is real for us alone, to be a vain dream and attribute the true reality to a dreamed-up, imaginary other world. The human senses are declared to be deceivers that provide us with illusory images instead of realities.

[ 27 ] Such a view can only come from weakness. For the strong man, who is firmly rooted in reality, who takes pleasure in life, will not entertain the idea of inventing another reality. He is occupied with this world and needs no other. But the suffering, the sick, those who are dissatisfied with this life, take refuge in the hereafter. What this world has deprived them of, the hereafter should offer them. The strong, the healthy, who has developed and capable senses to seek out the reasons of this world within it, needs no otherworldly reasons and entities to explain the phenomena within which he lives. The weak, who perceives reality with crippled eyes and ears, needs causes behind the phenomena.

[ 28 ] The belief in the hereafter is born out of suffering and sick longing. All assumptions of "things in themselves" have grown out of the inability to see through the real world.

[ 29 ] All those who have reason to deny the real life say Yes to a fictionalized one. Nietzsche wants to be a jasager in the face of reality. He wants to explore this world in all directions, he wants to drill into the depths of existence; he wants to know nothing of another life. Even suffering cannot cause him to say no to life; for suffering is also a means of knowledge for him. "Not unlike what a traveler does when he resolves to wake up at a certain hour and then calmly abandons himself to sleep, we philosophers, if we fall ill, temporarily surrender ourselves body and soul to illness - we close our eyes, as it were, before us. And as he knows that something is not asleep, something is counting the hours and will awaken him, so we know that the decisive moment will find us awake, - that something will then spring forth and catch the mind in the act, I mean in weakness or conversion or surrender or hardening or darkening, and whatever all the morbid states of mind are called which in healthy days have the pride of mind against them.... After such self-questioning, self-testing, one learns to look with a finer eye at everything that has been philosophized about so far..." Preface to the second edition of "Fröhliche Wissenschaft")

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[ 30 ] This life- and reality-friendly sense of Nietzsche is also evident in his views on people and their mutual relationships. In this area, Nietzsche is a complete individualist. For him, every person is a world apart, a unique entity. No coincidence, no matter how strange, can shake together the strangely colorful diversity that is united into a "unity" and confronts us as a particular person a second time in the same way. ("Schopenhauer als Erzieher", i.) Very few people, however, are inclined to unfold their peculiarities, which only exist once. They are afraid of the loneliness into which they are thereby forced. It is more comfortable and less dangerous to live in the same way as one's fellow men; one then always finds company. Those who settle down in their own way are not understood by others and find no comrades. For Nietzsche, solitude has a special appeal. He loves to seek out the secrets of his own inner self. He flees the community of people. His trains of thought are mostly attempts to drill for treasures that lie hidden deep within his personality. He spurns the light that others offer him; he does not want to breathe the air that is breathed where the "commonality of people", the "rule of man" lives. He instinctively strives for his "castle and secrecy, where he is redeemed from the crowd, the many, the vast majority". ("Beyond Good and Evil", § 26.) In his "Happy Science" he complains that it is difficult for him to "digest" his fellow human beings; and in "Beyond Good and Evil" (§ 282) he reveals that he usually suffered dangerous indigestion when he sat down at tables where the fare of the "generally human" was enjoyed. People must not get too close to Nietzsche if he is to endure them.

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[ 31 ] Nietzsche declares a thought, a judgment to be valid in the form to which the free instincts of life give their consent. He does not allow any logical doubt to deprive him of views that life decides in favor of. This gives his thinking a secure, free trait. It is not swayed by concerns such as whether an assertion is also "objectively" true, whether it does not exceed the limits of human cognition and so on. Once Nietzsche has recognized the value of a judgement for life, he no longer asks for a further "objective" meaning and validity of the same. And he is not concerned about the limits of cognition. He is of the opinion that healthy thinking creates what it can create and is not tormented by the useless question: what can I not?

[ 32 ] Whoever wants to determine the value of a judgment according to the degree to which it promotes life can, of course, only determine this degree through his own personal life instincts and life instincts. He can never want to say more than: in relation to my life instincts, I consider this particular judgment to be a valuable one. And Nietzsche never wants to say anything else when he expresses an opinion. It is precisely this relationship to his world of thought that has such a beneficial effect on the liberal-minded reader. It gives Nietzsche's writings the character of unpretentious, modest nobility. How repulsive and immodest it sounds when other thinkers believe that their person is the organ through which eternal, irrefutable truths are proclaimed to the world. One can find sentences in Nietzsche's works that express a strong self-confidence, for example: "I have given mankind the deepest book it possesses, my Zarathustra: I give it the most independent one for a short time." - ("Götzen-Dämmerung", "Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemäßen", §51.) But what does this say from his mouth? I have dared to write a book whose contents are drawn more deeply from the nature of a personality than is usually the case with similar books; and I shall deliver a book that is more independent of any foreign judgment than other philosophical writings; for I shall merely speak about the most important things as my personal instincts relate to them. This is noble modesty. Of course, it goes against the taste of those whose mendacious humility says: I am nothing, my work is everything; I bring nothing of personal feeling into my books, but I merely express what pure reason tells me to express. Such people want to deny their person in order to be able to claim that their utterances are those of a higher spirit. Nietzsche considers his thoughts to be products of his person and nothing more.

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[ 33 ] The specialist philosophers may smile at Nietzsche or offer their opinions on the "dangers" of his "world view". Some of these minds, who are nothing but personified textbooks of logic, naturally cannot praise Nietzsche's work, which springs from the most powerful, most direct impulses of life.

[ 34 ] Nietzsche, with his bold leaps of thought, at any rate encounters deeper secrets of human nature than many a logical thinker with his cautious crawling. What use is all logic if it only catches worthless content with its networks of concepts? When valuable thoughts are communicated to us, we rejoice in them, even if they are not linked with logical threads. The salvation of life depends not only on logic, but also on the generation of thought. Our professional philosophy is currently unfruitful enough, and it could very well use the stimulation of the thoughts of a courageous, bold writer such as Nietzsche. The developmental power of this specialist philosophy is paralyzed by the influence that Kantian thought has had on it. It has lost all originality and courage through this influence. Kant adopted the concept of truths derived from "pure reason" from the school philosophy of his time. He tried to show that through such truth we can know nothing of things that lie beyond our experience, of "things in themselves". For a century now, immeasurable ingenuity has been expended to think this Kantian thought through from all sides. However, the products of this ingenuity are often meagre and trivial. If one were to translate the banalities of many a contemporary philosophical book from school formulas into healthy language, such content would look poor enough in comparison with some of Nietzsche's short aphorisms. With regard to contemporary philosophy, the latter could proudly say with a certain right: "My ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else says more in a book ... "

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[ 35 ] Just as Nietzsche wants to give nothing in his own opinions but a product of his personal instincts and drives, so also foreign opinions are nothing more to him than symptoms from which he deduces the instincts prevailing in individual men or whole peoples, races and so on. He does not bother himself with discussions or refutations of other people's opinions. But he seeks out the instincts that express themselves in these opinions. He seeks to recognize the characters of personalities or peoples from their opinions. Whether an opinion points to the prevalence of instincts for health, bravery, nobility, joie de vivre, or whether it springs from unhealthy, slavish, tired, anti-life instincts, that is what interests him. He is indifferent to truths per se; he is concerned with how people form their truths according to their instincts and how they use them to further their goals in life. He wants to seek out the natural causes of human opinions.

[ 36 ] However, Nietzsche's endeavor is not in the spirit of those idealists who grant truth an independent value, who want to give it a "pure, higher origin" than that of instincts. He explains human views as the result of natural forces, just as the natural scientist explains the eye's mechanism from the interaction of natural causes. He recognizes no more an explanation of the spiritual development of mankind from special moral purposes, ideals, from a moral world order, than the natural scientist of the present day recognizes the explanation that nature built the eye in a certain way because it had the purpose of creating an organ for the organism to see. Nietzsche sees in every ideal only the expression of an instinct that seeks its satisfaction in a certain way, just as the modern naturalist sees in the purposeful arrangement of an organ the result of organic laws of formation. If there are still naturalists and philosophers today who reject any creation of nature according to purpose, but stop short of moral idealism and see in history the realization of a divine will, an ideal order of things, then this is an instinctive half-measure. Such persons lack the right view for the judgment of spiritual processes, whereas they show it in the observation of natural processes. If a person believes that he is striving for an ideal that does not originate from reality, he only believes this because he does not know the instinct from which this ideal arises.

[ 37 ] Nietzsche is an anti-idealist in the sense that the modern naturalist is an opponent of the assumption of purposes that nature should realize. He speaks just as little of moral purposes as the natural scientist speaks of natural purposes. Nietzsche does not consider it wiser to say that man should realize a moral ideal than to declare that the bull has horns so that it can thrust. He regards both statements as the product of an explanation of the world that speaks of "divine providence", "wise omnipotence", instead of natural effects.

[ 38 ] This explanation of the world is an obstacle to all sound thinking; it creates a fictitious, ideal fog that prevents natural vision, which is directed towards the observation of reality, from seeing through world processes; it finally completely dulls all sense of reality.

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[ 39 ] When Nietzsche engages in an intellectual battle, he does not want to refute foreign opinions as such, but he does so because these opinions point to harmful, anti-natural instincts that he wants to combat. His intention is similar to that of someone who fights a harmful natural effect or destroys a dangerous natural being. He is not relying on the "convincing" power of truth, but on the fact that he will defeat his opponent if he has the unhealthy, harmful instincts and he has the healthy, life-enhancing ones. He seeks no further justification for such a battle if his instincts perceive those of his opponent as harmful. He does not believe he has to fight as a representative of some idea, but fights because his instincts drive him to do so. Although this is no different in any spiritual struggle, the fighters are usually just as unaware of the real driving forces as the philosophers are of their "will to power" or the supporters of the moral world order of the natural causes of their moral ideals. They believe that only opinion fights against opinion and cloak their real motives in conceptual cloaks. They do not even name the instincts of their opponents, which they find unsympathetic; indeed, they may not even be aware of them. In short, the forces that are actually hostile to each other do not emerge openly. Nietzsche ruthlessly names the instincts of the opponent that are repugnant to him, and he also names the instincts that he sets against them. Whoever wants to call this cynism may do so. But he should not overlook the fact that in all human activity there has never been anything other than such cynicism, and that all idealistic delusions are blown by this cynicism.