The Finale in Turin 311Destiny" § 8). The "selection" should proceed in a way that allows this
type of person to prevail against the "support of all that is weak, sick,
deficient, suffering from itself" (6,374).
In both Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, Nietzsche evaluated a
book he had discovered in Turin, namely the Laws of Manu, edited and
translated from the ancient Sanskrit by Louis Jacolliot This book was
alleged to be a moral code of the caste system based on the Vedas.
Nietzsche was captivated by the chilling consistency with which this cor-
pus of laws divided society into mutually exclusive social milieus accord-
ing to an ominous requirement of purity. He regarded the fact that
members of the various castes could not interact with one another as a
clever biopolitics of breeding that would prevent degeneration. He con-
cluded his discussion of the Laws of Manu in the Twilight of the Idols with
the following comment: "we may declare it as the highest principle that
in order to make morality, we need to have the unconditional will to its
opposite. This is the great, uncanny problem, which I have been pursu-
ing for the longest time" (6,102; 77" Improvers' of Mankind" § 5).
Nietzsche's role-playing and masques are here enhanced by a further
variant: he tries to adopt the smile of the augurs, who create morality in
lieu of embodying it, who instill beliefs but do not believe. The augurs,
these priests of cunning, are clever enough to manage without convic-
tions. They smile to one another in the secret accord of those who
deceive without being deceived themselves. Nietzsche may well have
pictured the Übermenschen recognizing one another by their augurlike
smiles.
His letters from Nice, where he was spending the winter before mov-
ing to Turin, were testimony to his fluctuations between depression and
euphoria. On January 6, 1888, he wrote to Peter Gast: "And finally, I
should not fail to mention that this recent period has been rich in sweep-
ing insights and inspirations for me, and that I have summoned up my
courage to undertake the 'unimaginable' and commit to writing the
philosophical sensibility that distinguishes me right down to its last con-
clusion" (Β 8,226). One week later, on January 15, he wrote to Gast