What is good? Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to
power, power itself, in man.What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness? The feeling that power increases--that resistance
is overcome.
The effect of this argument is an overthrowing of moralism. In Western thought, especially Judeo-Christian thought, Good had come to mean a closeness with God, which resulted in acts of self-sacrifice, of viewing others as more important than yourself. But not in Nietzsche's post-Christian view. This is an argument that reminds the reader of Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'
What is good for all of us is that we increase in strength through competition and through the enforcement of our will. That is happiness, to succeed in your ambitions because you were strong enough to defeat the opposition.
We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to
the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest
instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of
evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as
the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men."
This is the core of Nietzsche's 'Antichristian' message, that Christianity as a system has done nothing but afflict the naturally authoritative and set in command those who aren't naturally fit for power. Nietzsche portrays Christianity as a vulgar religion, that is, a religion intended for the common people, who are often weak and don't deserve the kind of promise that Christianity offers them through its worldview.
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.
This is a component argument to his core attack of Christianity. Because Christianity depends on what it calls charity, what Nietzsche calls pity, it depends on empathy, being able to truly appreciate the sufferings of others. Nietzsche argues that this is religious garbage and essentially amounts to teaching lions to feel bad for sheep, to quote another of his works. The effect is that there is now a need for a new modus operandi. If not pity, then what? And Nietzsche says power, according to the natural progression of animal life through evolution.
The Christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the
god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit--is one of the most
corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably
touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type.
This quote may not need much explaining. It serves to indicate Nietzsche's distaste for Christianity as a religion. If you could ask him, he might say that as far as religions go, this one is embarrassingly weak. It's indulgent, to Nietzsche. In the next section, he goes to far as to cast shame on the strong Northern European peoples who should have been strong enough to defeat the Christians.
The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;--but
even here Jewish priest-craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel
ceased to be of any value: out with it!
This is a wonderful example of the issue of pragmatism in Nietzsche's worldview. It represents an argument that according to the proper view of nature and morality, the entire question of the Jewish people could be ignored, since its only application is to produce Judeo-Christian perceptions about what God would hypothetically expect from people. This is similar to what the logical positivists would do almost 65 years later, notably in Ayer's' writings, arguing that the arguments of religion are fundamentally unnecessary.
