The pathos of nobility and distance,... the chronic and despotic
_esprit de corps_ and fundamental instinct of a higher dominant race
coming into association with a meaner race, an "under race," this is
the origin of the antitheses of good and bad. 20
The knightly-aristocratic "values" are based on a careful cult of the
physical, on a flowering, rich, and even effervescing healthiness,
that goes considerably beyond what is necessary for maintaining life,
on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the tourney--on everything,
in fact, which is contained in strong, free, and joyous action. The
priestly aristocratic mode of valuation is--we have seen--based on
other hypotheses: it is bad enough for this class when it is a question
of war! Yet the priests are, as is notorious, _the worst enemies_--why?
Because they are the weakest. 29
The slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an
external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology,
it requires objective stimuli to be of action at all--its action is
fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when we come to the
aristocrat's system of values: it acts and grows spontaneously, it
merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful and
exultant "yes" to its own self.... 35
The aristocratic man conceives the root idea "good" spontaneously and
straight away, that is to say, out of himself, and from that material
then creates for himself a concept of "bad"! This "bad" of aristocratic
origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred--the
former an imitation, an "extra," an additional nuance; the latter, on
the other hand, the original, the beginning, the essential act in the
conception of a slave-morality--these two words "bad" and "evil," how
great a difference do they mark in spite of the fact that they have an
identical contrary in the idea "good." 39
It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic
races the beast of prey; the magnificent _blonde brute,_ avidly
rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from
time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the
wilderness--the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the
Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need.
It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea "Barbarian" on all
the tracks in which they have marched; nay, a consciousness of this
very barbarianism, and even a pride in it, manifests itself even in
their highest civilisation. 40
What produces to-day our repulsion towards "man"?--for we _suffer_
from "man," there is no doubt about it. It is not fear; it is rather
that we have nothing more to fear from men; it is that the worm "man"
is in the foreground and pullulates; it is that the "tame man," the
wretched mediocre and unedifying creature, has learnt to consider
himself a goal and a pinnacle, an inner meaning, an historic principle,
a "higher man." ... 42-43
In the dwarfing and levelling of the European man lurks _our_ greatest
peril, for it is this outlook which fatigues--we see to-day nothing
which wishes to be greater, we surmise that the process is always
still backwards, still backwards towards something more attenuated,
more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable, more mediocre, more
indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian. 44
To require of strength that it should _not_ express itself as strength,
that it should not be a wish to overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish
to become master, a thirst for enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is
just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself
as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of movement,
will, action. 45
The impotence which requites not, is turned to "goodness," craven
baseness to meekness, submission to those whom one hates, to obedience
(namely, obedience to one of whom they say that he ordered this
submission--they call him God). The inoffensive character of the weak,
the very cowardice in which he is rich, his standing at the door, his
forced necessity of waiting, gain here fine names, such as "patience,"
which is also called "virtue"; not being able to avenge one's self, is
called not wishing to avenge one's self, perhaps even forgiveness. 48
They are miserable, there is no doubt about it, all these whisperers
and counterfeiters in the corners, although they try to get warm by
crouching close to each other, but they tell me that their misery is
a favour and distinction given to them by God, just as one beats the
dogs one likes best; that perhaps this misery is also a preparation, a
probation, a training; that perhaps it is still more something which
will one day be compensated and paid back with a tremendous interest in
gold, nay in happiness. This they call "Blessedness." 45-49
The two _opposing values_ "good and bad," "good and evil," have fought
a dreadful, thousand-year fight in the world, and though indubitably
the second value has been for a long time in the preponderance, there
are not wanting places where the fortune of the fight is still
undecisive. It can almost be said that in the meanwhile the fight
reaches a higher and higher level, and that in the meanwhile it has
become more and more intense, and always more and more psychological;
so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the _higher
nature,_ of the more psychological nature, than to be in that sense
self-contradictory, and to be actually still a battle-ground for those
two opposites. The symbol of this fight, written in a writing which
has remained worthy of perusal throughout the course of history up to
the present time, is called "Rome against Judæa, Judæa against Rome."
Hitherto there has been no greater event than _that_ fight, the putting
of _that_ question, _that_ deadly antagonism. Rome found in the Jew
the incarnation of the unnatural, as though it were its diametrically
opposed monstrosity, and in Rome the Jew was held to be _convicted of
hatred_ of the whole human race: and rightly so, in so far as it is
right to link the well-being and the future of the human race to the
unconditional mastery of the aristocratic values, of the Roman values.
What, conversely, did the Jews feel against Rome? One can surmise it
from a thousand symptoms, but it is sufficient to carry one's mind
back to the Johannian Apocalypse, that most obscene of all the written
outbursts, which has revenge on its conscience. 53-54
_Beyond Good and Evil_--at any rate that is not the same as "Beyond
Good and Bad." 57
The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of _responsibility,_
the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and
over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become
an instinct, a dominating instinct--what name will he give to it, to
this dominating instinct if he needs to have a word for it? But there
is no doubt about it--the sovereign man calls it his _conscience._ 65
Have these current genealogists of morals ever allowed themselves to
have even the vaguest notion, for instance, that the cardinal moral
idea of "ought" originates from the very material idea of "owe"? Or
that punishment developed as a _retaliation_ absolutely independently
of any preliminary hypothesis of the freedom or determination of the
will?--And this to such an extent, that a _high_ degree of civilisation
was always first necessary for the animal man to begin to make those
much more primitive distinctions of "intentional," "negligent,"
"accidental," "responsible," and their contraries, and apply them
in the assessing of punishment. That idea--"the wrong-doer deserves
punishment _because_ he might have acted otherwise," in spite of the
fact that it is nowadays so cheap, obvious, natural, and inevitable,
and that it has had to serve as an illustration of the way in which
the sentiment of justice appeared on earth is in point of fact
an exceedingly late, and even refined form of human judgment and
inference; the placing of this idea back at the beginning of the world
is simply a clumsy violation of the principles of primitive psychology.
69
The sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does
one more good--this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental
maxim, old, powerful, and "human, all-too-human"; one, moreover, to
which perhaps even the apes as well would subscribe: for it is said
that in inventing bizarre cruelties they are giving abundant proof
of their future humanity, to which, as it were, they are playing
the prelude. Without cruelty, no feast: so teaches the oldest and
longest history of man--and in punishment too is there so much of the
_festive._ 75
The darkening of the heavens over man has always increased in
proportion to the growth of man's shame _before man._The tired
pessimistic outlook, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy
negation of disgusted ennui, all those are not the signs of the _most
evil_ age of the human race: much rather do they come first to the
light of day, as the swamp-flowers, which they are, when the swamp to
which they belong comes into existence--I mean the diseased refinement
and moralisation, thanks to which the "animal man" has at last learnt
to be ashamed of all his instincts. 75
The curve of human sensibilities to pain seems indeed to sink in an
extraordinary and almost sudden fashion, as soon as one has passed the
upper ten thousand or ten millions of over-civilised humanity, and I
personally have no doubt that, by comparison with one painful night
passed by one single hysterical chit of a cultured woman, the suffering
of all the animals taken together who have been put to the question of
the knife, so as to give scientific answers, are simply negligible.
76-77
Man ... arrived at the great generalisation "everything has its price,
_all_ can be paid for," the oldest and most naïve moral canon of
_justice_ the beginning of all "kindness," of all "equity," of all
"goodwill," of all "objectivity" in the world. 80
The self-destruction of Justice! we know the pretty name it calls
itself--_Grace!_ it remains, as is obvious, the privilege of the
strongest, better still, their super-law. 83-84
The aggressive man has at all times enjoyed the stronger, bolder, more
aristocratic, and also _freer_ outlook, the _better_ conscience. On
the other hand, we already surmise who it really is that has on his
conscience the invention of the "bad conscience,"--the resentful man! 86
To talk of intrinsic right and intrinsic wrong is absolutely
nonsensical; intrinsically, an injury, an oppression, an exploitation,
an annihilation can be nothing wrong, inasmuch as life is _essentially_
(that is, in its cardinal functions) something which functions by
injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and annihilating, and is absolutely
inconceivable without such a character. 88
Evildoers have throughout thousands of years felt when overtaken by
punishment _exactly like Spinoza,_ on the subject of their "offence":
"here is something which went wrong contrary to my anticipation,
_not_ I ought not to have done this."--They submitted themselves
to punishment, just as one submits one's self to a disease, to a
misfortune, or to death, with that stubborn and resigned fatalism which
gives the Russians, for instance, even nowadays, the advantage over
us Westerners, in the handling of life. If at that period there was
a critique of action, the criterion was prudence: the real _effect_
of punishment is unquestionably chiefly to be found in a sharpening
of the sense of prudence, in a lengthening of the memory, in a will
to adopt more of a policy of caution, suspicion, and secrecy; in the
recognition that there are many things which are unquestionably beyond
one's capacity; in a kind of improvement in self-criticism. The broad
effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the
increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery
of the desires: so it is that punishment _tames_ man, but does not make
him "better"--it would be more correct even to go so far as to assert
the contrary. 99
All instincts which do not find a vent without, _turn inwards_--this is
what I mean by the growing "internalisation" of man: consequently we
have the first growth in man, of what subsequently was called his soul.
The whole inner world, originally as thin as if it had been stretched
between two layers of skin, burst apart and expanded proportionately,
and obtained depth, breadth, and height, when man's external outlet
became _obstructed._ These terrible bulwarks, with which the social
organisation protected itself against the old instincts of freedom
(punishments belong pre-eminently to these bulwarks), brought it
about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man became
turned backwards _against man himself._ Enmity, cruelty, the delight
in persecution, in surprises, change, destruction--the turning all
these instincts against their own possessors: this is the origin of
the "bad conscience." It was man, who, lacking external enemies and
obstacles, and imprisoned as he was in the oppressive narrowness and
monotony of custom, in his own impatience lacerated, persecuted,
gnawed, frightened, and ill-treated himself; it was this animal in the
hands of the tamer, which beat itself against the bars of its cage; it
was this being who, pining and yearning for that desert home of which
it had been deprived, was compelled to create out of its own self, an
adventure, a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert--it was
this fool, this homesick and desperate prisoner--who invented the "bad
conscience." 100-101
A herd of blonde beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters,
which with all its warlike organisation and all its organising power
pounces with its terrible claws on a population, in numbers possibly
tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is
the origin of the "State." That fantastic theory that makes it
begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command,
he who is a master by "nature," he who comes on the scene forceful
in deed and gesture--what has he to do with contracts? Such beings
defy calculation, they come like fate, without cause, reason, notice,
excuse, they are there like the lightning is there, too terrible, too
sudden, too convincing, too "different," to be personally even hated.
Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of forms, they are
the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are.... 103
It is only the bad conscience, only the will for self-abuse, that
provides the necessary conditions for the existence of altruism as a
_value._ 105
The feeling of owing a debt to the deity has grown continuously for
several centuries, always in the same proportion in which the idea
of God and the consciousness of God have grown and become exalted
among mankind. (The whole history of ethnic fights, victories,
reconciliations, amalgamations, everything, in fact, which precedes
the eventual classing of all the social elements in each great race
synthesis, are mirrored in the hotch-potch genealogy of their gods, in
the legends of their fights, victories, and reconciliations, Progress
towards universal empires invariably means progress towards universal
deities; despotism, with its subjugation of the independent nobility,
always paves the way for some system or other of monotheism.) The
appearance of the Christian god, as the record god up to this time, has
for that very reason brought equally into the world the record amount
of guilt consciousness. 109
This is a kind of madness of the will in the sphere of psychological
cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled:--man's _will_ to find
himself guilty and blameworthy to the point of inexpiability, his
_will_ to think of himself as punished, without the punishment ever
being able to balance the guilt, his _will_ to infect and to poison
the fundamental basis of the universe with the problem of punishment
and guilt, in order to cut off once and for all any escape out of this
labyrinth of "fixed ideas," his will for rearing an ideal--that of the
"holy God"--face to face with which he can have tangible proof of his
own unworthiness. Alas for this mad melancholy beast man! 112-113
What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too
much; in philosophers and scholars, a kind of "flair" and instinct for
the conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women,
at best an _additional_ seductive fascination, a little _morbidezza_
on a fine piece of flesh, the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in
physiological failures and whiners (in the _majority_ of mortals),
an attempt to pose as "too good" for this world, a holy form of
debauchery, their chief weapon, in the battle with lingering pain and
ennui; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best engine of
power, and also the supreme authority for power; in saints, finally a
pretext for hibernation, their _novissima gloria cupido,_ their peace
in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness. 121
All good things were once bad things; from every original sin has grown
an original virtue. Marriage, for example, seemed for a long time a sin
against the rights of the community; a man formerly paid a fine for the
insolence of claiming one woman to himself. 144-145
The soft, benevolent yielding, sympathetic feelings--eventually valued
so highly that they almost become "intrinsic values," were for a very
long time actually despised by their possessors; gentleness was then a
subject for shame, just as hardness is now. 145
_The ascetic ideal springs from the prophylactic and self-preservative
instincts which mark a decadent life,_ which seeks by every means in
its power to maintain its position and fight for its existence; it
points to a partial physiological depression and exhaustion, against
which the most profound and intact life-instincts fight ceaselessly
with new weapons and discoveries. The ascetic ideal is such a weapon:
its position is consequently exactly the reverse of that which the
worshippers of the ideal imagine--life struggles in it and through it
with death and _against_ death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge for the
_preservation_ of life. 154
The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of another
kind, an existence on another plane,--he is, in fact, the highest
point of this wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the
very _power_ of this wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it
is just that which makes him into a tool that must labour to create
more favourable conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the
human plane--it is with this very _power_ that he keeps the whole herd
of failures, distortions, abortions, unfortunates, _sufferers from
themselves_ of every kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman
goes instinctively on in front. 154-155
The _sick_ are the great danger of man, _not_ the evil, _not_ the
"beasts of prey." They who are from the outset botched, oppressed,
broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the
life beneath the feet of man, who instil the most dangerous venom and
scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. 157
Preventing the sick making the healthy sick ... this ought to be our
supreme object in the world--but for this it is above all essential
that the healthy should remain _separated_ from the sick, that they
should even guard themselves from the look of the sick, that they
should not even associate with the sick. Or may it, perchance, be their
mission to be nurses or doctors? But they could not mistake or disown
_their_ mission more grossly--the higher _must_ not degrade itself to
be the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance must to all eternity
keep their missions also separate. The right of the happy to existence,
the right of bells with a full tone over the discordant cracked bells,
is verily a thousand times greater: they alone are the _sureties_ of
the future, they alone are _bound_ to man's future. 160-161
The ascetic priest must be accepted by us as the predestined saviour,
herdsman, and champion of the sick herd: thereby do we first understand
his awful historic mission. 162
"I suffer: it must be somebody's fault"--so thinks every sick sheep.
But his herdsman, the ascetic priest, says to him, "Quite so, my sheep,
it must be the fault of some one; but thou thyself art that some one,
it is all the fault of thyself alone--_it is the fault of thyself alone
against thyself":_ that is bold enough, false enough, but one thing is
at least attained; thereby, as I have said, the course of resentment
is--_diverted_. 165
All sick and diseased people strive instinctively after a
herd-organisation, out of a desire to shake off their sense of
oppressive discomfort and weakness; the ascetic priest divines this
instinct and promotes it; wherever a herd exists it is the instinct
of weakness which has wished for the herd, and the cleverness of the
priests which has organised it, for, mark this: by an equally natural
necessity the strong strive as much for _isolation_ as the weak for
_union:_ when the former bind themselves it is only with a view to an
aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of their Will for Power,
much against the wishes of their individual consciences; the latter,
on the contrary, range themselves together with positive _delight_ in
such a muster--their instincts are as much gratified thereby as the
instincts of the "born master" (that is the solitary beast-of-prey
species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by organisation.
176-177
The keynote by which the ascetic priest was enabled to get every kind
of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the fibres of the human
soul--was, as every one knows, the exploitation of the feeling of
_"guilt."_ 182
The ascetic ideal and its sublime moral cult, this most ingenious,
reckless, and perilous systématisation of all methods of emotional
excess, is writ large in a dreadful and unforgettable fashion on the
whole history of man, and unfortunately not only on history. I was
scarcely able to put forward any other element which attacked the
_health_ and race efficiency of Europeans with more destructive power
than did this ideal; it can be dubbed, without exaggeration, _the real
fatality_ in the history of the health of the European man. 186-187
The ascetic ideal has corrupted not only health and taste, there are
also third, fourth, fifth, and sixth things which it has corrupted--I
shall take care not to go through the catalogue (when should I get to
the end?). 190
The periods in a nation in which the learned man comes into prominence;
they are the periods of exhaustion, often of sunset, of decay--the
effervescing strength, the confidence of life, the confidence in the
future are no more. The preponderance of the mandarins never signifies
any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or arbitration
instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all
the other symptoms of declining life. 200
The ascetic ideal simply means this: that something _was lacking,_
that a tremendous _void_ encircled man--he did not know how to justify
himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself, he _suffered_ from the
problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in other ways, he was
in the main a _diseased_ animal; but his problem was not suffering
itself, but the lack of an answer to that crying question, "_To what
purpose_ do we suffer?" Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured
to suffering, does _not_ repudiate suffering in itself: he _wills_ it,
he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a
_purpose_ of suffering was the curse which till then lay spread over
humanity--_and the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning!_ It was up till
then the only meaning; but any meaning is better than no meaning;
the ascetic ideal was in that connection the _"faute de mieux" par
excellence_ that existed at that time. In that ideal suffering _found
an explanation;_ the tremendous gap seemed filled; the door to all
suicidal Nihilism was closed. The explanation--there is no doubt about
it--brought in its train new suffering, deeper, more penetrating, more
venomous, gnawing more brutally into life: it brought all suffering
under the perspective of _guilt;_ but in spite of all that--man was
_saved_ thereby, he had _a meaning,_ and from henceforth was no more
like a leaf in the wind, a shuttlecock, of chance, of nonsense, he
could now "will" something--absolutely immaterial to what end, to what
purpose, with that means he wished: _the will itself was saved._ It
is absolutely impossible to disguise _what_ in point of fact is made
clear by every complete will that has taken its direction from the
ascetic ideal: this hate of the human, and even more of the animal,
and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason
itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to get right
away from all illusion, change, growth, death, wishing and even
desiring--all this means--let us have the courage to grasp it--a will
for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most
fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains _a will!_--and
to say at the end that which I said at the beginning--man will wish
_Nothingness_ rather than not wish _at all._ 210-211