310 Nietzsche
"problems of hysterics" (6,22; CTF§ 5) take a creative turn. Faith may
no longer be in evidence, but there is a will to faith. When instincts
grow flabby, there is a will to a healthy instinct. Because things in life no
longer really work out, because the flow of what is self-evident grinds
to a halt, and because light things have become so weighty, the ominous
"will to .. ." becomes the prefix for all kinds of things. The wonderful
self-concealment of earlier epochs, when thinking, belief, and feeling
had different polarities, is no longer there. Thinking disappears into
thoughts, feeling into things that are felt, will into what is wanted, and
belief into what is believed. A fury of disappearing bewitches and cap-
tures the actor in his act. Now the stage is revolving, the actor is emerg-
ing from his creation, placing himself in front of it, and declaring:
Look, I did this, this is where I felt and believed, and this is where my
"will to ..." did its job. Decadence is more the pleasure in pleasure than
pleasure itself, and more suffering about suffering than actual suffering.
Decadence is religion and metaphysics that blinks. If this is how deca-
dence works, and its characteristic formula is "will to ...," what should
we conclude about Nietzsche's formula of the "will to power"? Is it
perhaps also just a "problem of hysterics"?
The "monstrous aspect" that Nietzsche associated with his philoso-
phy is therefore the revolution in morality triggered by the "death of
God" and the "revaluation of values," for which he employed
extremely caustic language in his last writings. At the end of Ecce Homo,
for example, he bundled all of his objections to Christian morality into
one big reproach, "that we seek the evil principle ... in our deepest
requirement to flourish, in strict selfishness and, conversely, we deem the
higher value—what am I saying?—value per se to reside in the typical
insignia of decline and conflict of instincts, in 'selflessness,' in the loss
of gravity, in 'depersonalization' and 'charity.'... The morality that
would remove man from himself is the morality of decline par excel-
lence" (6,372; EH "Why I Am a Destiny" § 7). Hence a "revaluation"
would give out moral bonuses for the "proud and successful," and par-
ticularly for the "person who says yes" (6,374; EH "Why 1 Am a