"Nietzsche, Friedrich - The Antichrist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm)

of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it
has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are
intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual
values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most
lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his
intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually
destroyed by Christianity!--
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 decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind
now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-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
decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.
7.
Christianity is called the religion of pity.-- Pity stands in opposition
to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of
aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through
pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a
thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain
circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living
energy--a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause
(--the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it;
there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the
effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its
character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity
thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural
selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on
the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining
life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a
gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue
(--in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness--); going
still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation
of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from
the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose
shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this:
that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial--pity is