THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
A POLEMIC
BY
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
TRANSLATED BY
HORACE B. SAMUEL, M.A.
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES (FRAGMENT)
T. N. FOULIS
13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
1913
EDITOR'S NOTE.
In 1887, with the view of amplifying and completing certain new
doctrines which he had merely sketched in _Beyond Good and Evil_
(see especially aphorism 260), Nietzsche published _The Genealogy of
Morals_. This work is perhaps the least aphoristic, in form, of all
Nietzsche's productions. For analytical power, more especially in those
parts where Nietzsche examines the ascetic ideal, _The Genealogy of
Morals_ is unequalled by any other of his works; and, in the light
which it throws upon the attitude of the ecclesiast to the man of
resentment and misfortune, it is one of the most valuable contributions
to sacerdotal psychology.
CONTENTS.
FIRST ESSAY. "GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"
SECOND ESSAY. "GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE
THIRD ESSAY. WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS?
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. Translated by J. M. Kennedy
PREFACE.
1.
We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own
good reason. We have never searched for ourselves--how should it then
come to pass, that we should ever _find_ ourselves? Rightly has it been
said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." _Our_
treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to
those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight,
and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts
only for one thing--to bring something "home to the hive!"
As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is
concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or
sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I
fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not
there, and certainly not our ear. Rather like one who, delighting
in a divine distraction, or sunken in the seas of his own soul, in
whose ear the clock has just thundered with all its force its twelve
strokes of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, "What has in
point of fact just struck?" so do we at times rub afterwards, as it
were, our puzzled ears, and ask in complete astonishment and complete
embarrassment, "Through what have we in point of fact just lived?"
further, "Who are we in point of fact?" and count, _after they have
struck_, as I have explained, all the twelve throbbing beats of the
clock of our experience, of our life, of our being--ah!--and count
wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves,
we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken,
for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, "Each one is the
farthest away from himself"--as far as ourselves are concerned we are
not "knowers."
2.
My thoughts concerning the _genealogy_ of our moral prejudices--for
they constitute the issue in this polemic--have their first, bald,
and provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms entitled
_Human, all-too-Human, a Book for Free Minds_, the writing of which
was begun in Sorrento, during a winter which allowed me to gaze over
the broad and dangerous territory through which my mind had up to that
time wandered. This took place in the winter of 1876-77; the thoughts
themselves are older. They were in their substance already the same
thoughts which I take up again in the following treatises:--we hope
that they have derived benefit from the long interval, that they have
grown riper, clearer, stronger, more complete. The fact, however,
that I still cling to them even now, that in the meanwhile they have
always held faster by each other, have, in fact, grown out of their
original shape and into each other, all this strengthens in my mind the
joyous confidence that they must have been originally neither separate
disconnected capricious nor sporadic phenomena, but have sprung from
a common root, from a fundamental "_fiat_" of knowledge, whose empire
reached to the soul's depth, and that ever grew more definite in its
voice, and more definite in its demands. That is the only state of
affairs that is proper in the case of a philosopher.
We have no right to be "_disconnected_"; we must neither err
"disconnectedly" nor strike the truth "disconnectedly." Rather with
the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our thoughts,
our values, our Yes's and No's and If's and Whether's, grow connected
and interrelated, mutual witnesses of _one_ will, _one_ health, _one_
kingdom, _one_ sun--as to whether they are to _your_ taste, these
fruits of ours?--But what matters that to the trees? What matters that
to us, us the philosophers?
3.
Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself, which I confess
reluctantly,--it concerns indeed _morality_,--a scrupulosity, which
manifests itself in my life at such an early period, with so much
spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and so keen an opposition
to environment, epoch, precedent, and ancestry that I should have
been almost entitled to style it my "_â priori_"--my curiosity and my
suspicion felt themselves betimes bound to halt at the question, of
what in point of actual fact was the _origin_ of our "Good" and of
our "Evil." Indeed, at the boyish age of thirteen the problem of the
origin of Evil already haunted me: at an age "when games and God divide
one's heart," I devoted to that problem my first childish attempt
at the literary game, my first philosophic essay--and as regards my
infantile solution of the problem, well, I gave quite properly the
honour to God, and made him the _father_ of evil. Did my own "_â
priori_" demand that precise solution from me? that new, immoral, or
at least "amoral" "_â priori_" and that "categorical imperative" which
was its voice (but oh! how hostile to the Kantian article, and how
pregnant with problems!), to which since then I have given more and
more attention, and indeed what is more than attention. Fortunately
I soon learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and
I gave up looking for a _supernatural_ origin of evil. A certain
amount of historical and philological education, to say nothing of
an innate faculty of psychological discrimination _par excellence_
succeeded in transforming almost immediately my original problem into
the following one:--Under what conditions did Man invent for himself
those judgments of values, "Good" and "Evil"? _And what intrinsic value
do they possess in themselves?_ Have they up to the present hindered
or advanced human well-being? Are they a symptom of the distress,
impoverishment, and degeneration of Human Life? Or, conversely, is
it in them that is manifested the fulness, the strength, and the
will of Life, its courage, its self-confidence, its future? On this
point I found and hazarded in my mind the most diverse answers, I
established distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I became a
specialist in my problem, and from my answers grew new questions, new
investigations, new conjectures, new probabilities; until at last I had
a land of my own and a soil of my own, a whole secret world growing and
flowering, like hidden gardens of whose existence no one could have an
inkling--oh, how happy are we, we finders of knowledge, provided that
we know how to keep silent sufficiently long.
4.
My first impulse to publish some of my hypotheses concerning the origin
of morality I owe to a clear, well-written, and even precocious little
book, in which a perverse and vicious kind of moral philosophy (your
real English kind) was definitely presented to me for the first time;
and this attracted me--with that magnetic attraction, inherent in that
which is diametrically opposed and antithetical to one's own ideas.
The title of the book was _The Origin of the Moral Emotions_; its
author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its appearance, 1877. I may almost
say that I have never read anything in which every single dogma and
conclusion has called forth from me so emphatic a negation as did that
book; albeit a negation tainted by either pique or intolerance. I
referred accordingly both in season and out of season in the previous
works, at which I was then working, to the arguments of that book, not
to refute them--for what have I got to do with mere refutations but
substituting, as is natural to a positive mind, for an improbable
theory one which is more probable, and occasionally no doubt, for one
philosophic error, another. In that early period I gave, as I have
said, the first public expression to those theories of origin to which
these essays are devoted, but with a clumsiness which I was the last
to conceal from myself, for I was as yet cramped, being still without
a special language for these special subjects, still frequently liable
to relapse and to vacillation. To go into details, compare what I say
in _Human, all-too-Human_, part i., about the parallel early history
of Good and Evil, Aph. 45 (namely, their origin from the castes of the
aristocrats and the slaves); similarly, Aph. 136 et seq., concerning
the birth and value of ascetic morality; similarly, Aphs. 96, 99,
vol. ii., Aph. 89, concerning the Morality of Custom, that far older
and more original kind of morality which is _toto cœlo_ different
from the altruistic ethics (in which Dr. Rée, like all the English
moral philosophers, sees the ethical "Thing-in-itself"); finally,
Aph. 92. Similarly, Aph. 26 in _Human, all-too-Human_, part ii., and
Aph. 112, the _Dawn of Day_, concerning the origin of Justice as a
balance between persons of approximately equal power (equilibrium as
the hypothesis of all contract, consequently of all law); similarly,
concerning the origin of Punishment, _Human, all-too-Human_, part
ii., Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which the deterrent object is neither
essential nor original (as Dr. Rée thinks:--rather is it that this
object is only imported, under certain definite conditions, and always
as something extra and additional).
5.
In reality I had set my heart at that time on something much more
important than the nature of the theories of myself or others
concerning the origin of morality (or, more precisely, the real
function from my view of these theories was to point an end to which
they were one among many means). The issue for me was the value
of morality, and on that subject I had to place myself in a state
of abstraction, in which I was almost alone with my great teacher
Schopenhauer, to whom that book, with all its passion and inherent
contradiction (for that book also was a polemic), turned for present
help as though he were still alive. The issue was, strangely enough,
the value of the "un-egoistic" instincts, the instincts of pity,
self-denial, and self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had so persistently
painted in golden colours, deified and etherealised, that eventually
they appeared to him, as it were, high and dry, as "intrinsic values
in themselves," on the strength of which he uttered both to Life
and to himself his own negation. But against _these very_ instincts
there voiced itself in my soul a more and more fundamental mistrust, a
scepticism that dug ever deeper and deeper: and in this very instinct
I saw the _great_ danger of mankind, its most sublime temptation and
seduction--seduction to what? to nothingness?--in these very instincts
I saw the beginning of the end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes
backwards, the will turning _against_ Life, the last illness announcing
itself with its own mincing melancholy: I realised that the morality
of pity which spread wider and wider, and whose grip infected even
philosophers with its disease, was the most sinister symptom of our
modern European civilisation; I realised that it was the route along
which that civilisation slid on its way to--a new Buddhism?--a European
Buddhism?--_Nihilism_? This exaggerated estimation in which modern
philosophers have held pity, is quite a new phenomenon: up to that time
philosophers were absolutely unanimous as to the worthlessness of pity.
I need only mention Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant--four
minds as mutually different as is possible, but united on one point;
their contempt of pity.
6.
This problem of the value of pity and of the pity-morality (I am an
opponent of the modern infamous emasculation of our emotions) seems at
the first blush a mere isolated problem, a note of interrogation for
itself; he, however, who once halts at this problem, and learns how to
put questions, will experience what I experienced:--a new and immense
vista unfolds itself before him, a sense of potentiality seizes him
like a vertigo, every species of doubt, mistrust, and fear springs
up, the belief in morality, nay, in all morality, totters,--finally a
new demand voices itself. Let us speak out this _new demand_: we need
a _critique_ of moral values, _the value of these values_ is for the
first time to be called into question--and for this purpose a knowledge
is necessary of the conditions and circumstances out of which these
values grew, and under which they experienced their evolution and
their distortion (morality as a result, as a symptom, as a mask, as
Tartuffism, as disease, as a misunderstanding; but also morality as a
cause, as a remedy, as a stimulant, as a fetter, as a drug), especially
as such a knowledge has neither existed up to the present time nor is
even now generally desired. The value of these "values" was taken for
granted as an indisputable fact, which was beyond all question. No one
has, up to the present, exhibited the faintest doubt or hesitation in
judging the "good man" to be of a higher value than the "evil man," of
a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, utility,
and prosperity generally, not forgetting the future. What? Suppose the
converse were the truth! What? Suppose there lurked in the "good man"
a symptom of retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison,
a _narcotic_, by means of which the present _battened on the future_!
More comfortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite, but also
pettier, meaner! So that morality would really be saddled with the
guilt, if the _maximum potentiality of the power and splendour_ of the
human species were never to be attained? So that really morality would
be the danger of dangers?
7.
Enough, that after this vista had disclosed itself to me, I myself had
reason to search for learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am
doing it even to this very day). It means traversing with new clamorous
questions, and at the same time with new eyes, the immense, distant,
and completely unexplored land of morality--of a morality which has
actually existed and been actually lived! and is this not practically
equivalent to first _discovering_ that land? If, in this context, I
thought, amongst others, of the aforesaid Dr. Rée, I did so because I
had no doubt that from the very nature of his questions he would be
compelled to have recourse to a truer method, in order to obtain his
answers. Have I deceived myself on that score? I wished at all events
to give a better direction of vision to an eye of such keenness, and
such impartiality. I wished to direct him to the real _history of
morality_, and to warn him, while there was yet time, against a world
of English theories that culminated in _the blue vacuum of heaven_.
Other colours, of course, rise immediately to one's mind as being a
hundred times more potent than blue for a genealogy of morals:--for
instance, grey, by which I mean authentic facts capable of definite
proof and having actually existed, or, to put it shortly, the whole
of that long hieroglyphic script (which is so hard to decipher) about
the past history of human morals. This script was unknown to Dr. Rée;
but he had read Darwin:--and so in his philosophy the Darwinian beast
and that pink of modernity, the demure weakling and dilettante, who
"bites no longer," shake hands politely in a fashion that is at least
instructive, the latter exhibiting a certain facial expression of
refined and good-humoured indolence, tinged with a touch of pessimism
and exhaustion; as if it really did not pay to take all these things--I
mean moral problems--so seriously. I, on the other hand, think that
there are no subjects which pay better for being taken seriously; part
of this payment is, that perhaps eventually they admit of being taken
gaily. This gaiety indeed, or, to use my own language, this joyful
wisdom, is a payment; a payment for a protracted, brave, laborious, and
burrowing seriousness, which, it goes without saying, is the attribute
of but a few. But on that day on which we say from the fullness of our
hearts, "Forward! our old morality too is fit material for Comedy,"
we shall have discovered a new plot, and a new possibility for the
Dionysian drama entitled The Soul's Fate--and he will speedily utilise
it, one can wager safely, he, the great ancient eternal dramatist of
the comedy of our existence.
8.
If this writing be obscure to any individual, and jar on his ears, I
do not think that it is necessarily I who am to blame. It is clear
enough, on the hypothesis which I presuppose, namely, that the reader
has first read my previous writings and has not grudged them a certain
amount of trouble: it is not, indeed, a simple matter to get really at
their essence. Take, for instance, my _Zarathustra_; I allow no one
to pass muster as knowing that book, unless every single word therein
has at some time wrought in him a profound wound, and at some time
exercised on him a profound enchantment: then and not till then can he
enjoy the privilege of participating reverently in the halcyon element,
from which that work is born, in its sunny brilliance, its distance,
its spaciousness, its certainty. In other cases the aphoristic form
produces difficulty, but this is only because this form is treated
_too casually_. An aphorism properly coined and cast into its final
mould is far from being "deciphered" as soon as it has been read; on
the contrary, it is then that it first requires _to be expounded_--of
course for that purpose an art of exposition is necessary. The third
essay in this book provides an example of what is offered, of what in
such cases I call exposition: an aphorism is prefixed to that essay,
the essay itself is its commentary. Certainly one _quality_ which
nowadays has been best forgotten--and that is why it will take some
time yet for my writings to become readable--is essential in order
to practise reading as an art--a quality for the exercise of which it
is necessary to be a cow, and under no circumstances a modern man!--
rumination.
Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine, July 1887.
FIRST ESSAY. "GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD."
1.
Those English psychologists, who up to the present are the only
philosophers who are to be thanked for any endeavour to get as far
as a history of the origin of morality--these men, I say, offer us
in their own personalities no paltry problem;--they even have, if I
am to be quite frank about it, in their capacity of living riddles,
an advantage over their books--_they themselves are interesting!_
These English psychologists--what do they really mean? We always
find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing
to the front the _partie honteuse_ of our inner world, and looking
for the efficient, governing, and decisive principle in that precise
quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race would be
the most reluctant to find it (for example, in the _vis inertiæ_ of
habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and fortuitous mechanism
and association of ideas, or in some factor that is purely passive,
reflex, molecular, or fundamentally stupid)--what is the real motive
power which always impels these psychologists in precisely _this_
direction? Is it an instinct for human disparagement somewhat sinister,
vulgar, and malignant, or perhaps incomprehensible even to itself? or
perhaps a touch of pessimistic jealousy, the mistrust of disillusioned
idealists who have become gloomy, poisoned, and bitter? or a petty
subconscious enmity and rancour against Christianity (and Plato), that
has conceivably never crossed the threshold of consciousness? or just a
vicious taste for those elements of life which are bizarre, painfully
paradoxical, mystical, and illogical? or, as a final alternative, a
dash of each of these motives--a little vulgarity, a little gloominess,
a little anti-Christianity, a little craving for the necessary piquancy?
But I am told that it is simply a case of old frigid and tedious frogs
crawling and hopping around men and inside men, as if they were as
thoroughly at home there, as they would be in a _swamp_.
I am opposed to this statement, nay, I do not believe it; and if, in
the impossibility of knowledge, one is permitted to wish, so do I wish
from my heart that just the converse metaphor should apply, and that
these analysts with their psychological microscopes should be, at
bottom, brave, proud, and magnanimous animals who know how to bridle
both their hearts and their smarts, and have specifically trained
themselves to sacrifice what is desirable to what is true, any truth
in fact, even the simple, bitter, ugly, repulsive, unchristian, and
immoral truths--for there are truths of that description.
2.
All honour, then, to the noble spirits who would fain dominate these
historians of morality. But it is certainly a pity that they lack the
_historical sense_ itself, that they themselves are quite deserted
by all the beneficent spirits of history. The whole train of their
thought runs, as was always the way of old-fashioned philosophers, on
thoroughly unhistorical lines: there is no doubt on this point. The
crass ineptitude of their genealogy of morals is immediately apparent
when the question arises of ascertaining the origin of the idea and
judgment of "good." "Man had originally," so speaks their decree,
"praised and called 'good' altruistic acts from the standpoint of
those on whom they were conferred, that is, those to whom they were
_useful_; subsequently the origin of this praise was _forgotten_, and
altruistic acts, simply because, as a sheer matter of habit, they were
praised as good, came also to be felt as good--as though they contained
in themselves some intrinsic goodness." The thing is obvious:--this
initial derivation contains already all the typical and idiosyncratic
traits of the English psychologists--we have "utility," "forgetting,"
"habit," and finally "error," the whole assemblage forming the basis
of a system of values, on which the higher man has up to the present
prided himself as though it were a kind of privilege of man in general.
This pride _must_ be brought low, this system of values _must_ lose its
values: is that attained?
Now the first argument that comes ready to my hand is that the real
homestead of the concept "good" is sought and located in the wrong
place: the judgment "good" did not originate among those to whom
goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves,
that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the
high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that
their actions were good, that is to say of the first order, in
contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and
the plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first
arrogated the right to create values for their own profit, and to
coin the names of such values: what had they to do with utility? The
standpoint of utility is as alien and as inapplicable as it could
possibly be, when we have to deal with so volcanic an effervescence of
supreme values, creating and demarcating as they do a hierarchy within
themselves: it is at this juncture that one arrives at an appreciation
of the contrast to that tepid temperature, which is the presupposition
on which every combination of worldly wisdom and every calculation of
practical expediency is always based--and not for one occasional, not
for one exceptional instance, but chronically. The pathos of nobility
and distance, as I have said, 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 antithesis of good and bad.
(The masters' right of giving names goes so far that it is permissible
to look upon language itself as the expression of the power of the
masters: they say "this _is_ that, and that," they seal finally every
object and every event with a sound, and thereby at the same time take
possession of it.) It is because of this origin that the word "good"
is far from having any necessary connection with altruistic acts, in
accordance with the superstitious belief of these moral philosophers.
On the contrary, it is on the occasion of the _decay_ of aristocratic
values, that the antitheses between "egoistic" and "altruistic"
presses more and more heavily on the human conscience--it is, to use
my own language, the _herd instinct_ which finds in this antithesis an
expression in many ways. And even then it takes a considerable time
for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant, for the valuation
to be inextricably dependent on this antithesis (as is the case in
contemporary Europe); for to-day that prejudice is predominant, which,
acting even now with all the intensity of an obsession and brain
disease, holds that "moral," "altruistic," and "_désintéressé_" are
concepts of equal value.
3.
In the second place, quite apart from the fact that this hypothesis as
to the genesis of the value "good" cannot be historically upheld, it
suffers from an inherent psychological contradiction. The utility of
altruistic conduct has presumably been the origin of its being praised,
and this origin has become _forgotten_:--But in what conceivable way is
this forgetting _possible_! Has perchance the utility of such conduct
ceased at some given moment? The contrary is the case. This utility has
rather been experienced every day at all times, and is consequently
a feature that obtains a new and regular emphasis with every fresh
day; it follows that, so far from vanishing from the consciousness, so
far indeed from being forgotten, it must necessarily become impressed
on the consciousness with ever-increasing distinctness. How much
more logical is that contrary theory (it is not the truer for that)
which is represented, for instance, by Herbert Spencer, who places
the concept "good" as essentially similar to the concept "useful,"
"purposive," so that in the judgments "good" and "bad" mankind is
simply summarising and investing with a sanction its _unforgotten_ and
_unforgettable_ experiences concerning the "useful-purposive" and the
"mischievous-non-purposive." According to this theory, "good" is the
attribute of that which has previously shown itself useful; and so
is able to claim to be considered "valuable in the highest degree,"
"valuable in itself." This method of explanation is also, as I have
said, wrong, but at any rate the explanation itself is coherent, and
psychologically tenable.
4.
The guide-post which first put me on the right track was this
question--what is the true etymological significance of the various
symbols for the idea "good" which have been coined in the various
languages? I then found that they all led back to _the same evolution
of the same idea_--that everywhere "aristocrat," "noble" (in the
social sense), is the root idea, out of which have necessarily
developed "good" in the sense of "with aristocratic soul," "noble,"
in the sense of "with a soul of high calibre," "with a privileged
soul"--a development which invariably runs parallel with that other
evolution by which "vulgar," "plebeian," "low," are made to change
finally into "bad." The most eloquent proof of this last contention
is the German word "_schlecht_" itself: this word is identical with
"_schlicht_"--(compare "_schlechtweg_" and "_schlechterdings_")--which,
originally and as yet without any sinister innuendo, simply denoted
the plebeian man in contrast to the aristocratic man. It is at the
sufficiently late period of the Thirty Years' War that this sense
becomes changed to the sense now current. From the standpoint of
the Genealogy of Morals this discovery seems to be substantial: the
lateness of it is to be attributed to the retarding influence exercised
in the modern world by democratic prejudice in the sphere of all
questions of origin. This extends, as will shortly be shown, even to
the province of natural science and physiology, which, _prima facie_
is the most objective. The extent of the mischief which is caused by
this prejudice (once it is free of all trammels except those of its own
malice), particularly to Ethics and History, is shown by the notorious
case of Buckle: it was in Buckle that that _plebeianism_ of the modern
spirit, which is of English origin, broke out once again from its
malignant soil with all the violence of a slimy volcano, and with that
salted, rampant, and vulgar eloquence with which up to the present time
all volcanoes have spoken.
5.
With regard to our problem, which can justly be called an intimate
problem, and which elects to appeal to only a limited number of ears:
it is of no small interest to ascertain that in those words and roots
which denote "good" we catch glimpses of that arch-trait, on the
strength of which the aristocrats feel themselves to be beings of
a higher order than their fellows. Indeed, they call themselves in
perhaps the most frequent instances simply after their superiority
in power (_e.g._ "the powerful," "the lords," "the commanders"), or
after the most obvious sign of their superiority, as for example
"the rich," "the possessors" (that is the meaning of _arya_; and the
Iranian and Slav languages correspond). But they also call themselves
after some _characteristic idiosyncrasy_; and this is the case which
now concerns us. They name themselves, for instance, "the truthful":
this is first done by the Greek nobility whose mouthpiece is found in
Theognis, the Megarian poet. The word ἐσθλος, which is coined for the
purpose, signifies etymologically "one who _is_," who has reality, who
is real, who is true; and then with a subjective twist, the "true,"
as the "truthful": at this stage in the evolution of the idea, it
becomes the motto and party cry of the nobility, and quite completes
the transition to the meaning "noble," so as to place outside the pale
the lying, vulgar man, as Theognis conceives and portrays him--till
finally the word after the decay of the nobility is left to delineate
psychological _noblesse_, and becomes as it were ripe and mellow. In
the word κακός as in δειλός (the plebeian in contrast to the ἀγαθός)
the cowardice is emphasised. This affords perhaps an inkling on what
lines the etymological origin of the very ambiguous ἀγαθός is to be
investigated. In the Latin _malus_ (which I place side by side with
μέλας) the vulgar man can be distinguished as the dark-coloured, and
above all as the black-haired ("_hic niger est_"), as the pre-Aryan
inhabitants of the Italian soil, whose complexion formed the clearest
feature of distinction from the dominant blondes, namely, the Aryan
conquering race:--at any rate Gaelic has afforded me the exact
analogue--_Fin_ (for instance, in the name Fin-Gal), the distinctive
word of the nobility, finally--good, noble, clean, but originally the
blonde-haired man in contrast to the dark black-haired aboriginals. The
Celts, if I may make a parenthetic statement, were throughout a blonde
race; and it is wrong to connect, as Virchow still connects, those
traces of an essentially dark-haired population which are to be seen
on the more elaborate ethnographical maps of Germany with any Celtic
ancestry or with any admixture of Celtic blood: in this context it is
rather the _pre-Aryan_ population of Germany which surges up to these
districts. (The same is true substantially of the whole of Europe: in
point of fact, the subject race has finally again obtained the upper
hand, in complexion and the shortness of the skull, and perhaps in
the intellectual and social qualities. Who can guarantee that modern
democracy, still more modern anarchy, and indeed that tendency to the
"Commune," the most primitive form of society, which is now common to
all the Socialists in Europe, does not in its real essence signify a
monstrous reversion--and that the conquering and _master_ race--the
Aryan race, is not also becoming inferior physiologically?) I believe
that I can explain the Latin _bonus_ as the "warrior": my hypothesis
is that I am right in deriving _bonus_ from an older _duonus_ (compare
_bellum_ = _duellum_ = _duen-lum_, in which the word _duonus_ appears
to me to be contained). Bonus accordingly as the man of discord, of
variance, "entzweiung" (_duo_), as the warrior: one sees what in
ancient Rome "the good" meant for a man. Must not our actual German
word _gut_ mean "_the godlike_, the man of godlike race"? and be
identical with the national name (originally the nobles' name) of the
_Goths_?
The grounds for this supposition do not appertain to this work.
6.
Above all, there is no exception (though there are opportunities for
exceptions) to this rule, that the idea of political superiority
always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority, in
those cases where the highest caste is at the same time the _priestly_
caste, and in accordance with its general characteristics confers on
itself the privilege of a title which alludes specifically to its
priestly function. It is in these cases, for instance, that "clean" and
"unclean" confront each other for the first time as badges of class
distinction; here again there develops a "good" and a "bad," in a sense
which has ceased to be merely social. Moreover, care should be taken
not to take these ideas of "clean" and "unclean" too seriously, too
broadly, or too symbolically: all the ideas of ancient man have, on
the contrary, got to be understood in their initial stages, in a sense
which is, to an almost inconceivable extent, crude, coarse, physical,
and narrow, and above all essentially unsymbolical. The "clean man" is
originally only a man who washes himself, who abstains from certain
foods which are conducive to skin diseases, who does not sleep with
the unclean women of the lower classes, who has a horror of blood--not
more, not much more! On the other hand, the very nature of a priestly
aristocracy shows the reasons why just at such an early juncture
there should ensue a really dangerous sharpening and intensification
of opposed values: it is, in fact, through these opposed values that
gulfs are cleft in the social plane, which a veritable Achilles of
free thought would shudder to cross. There is from the outset a
certain _diseased taint_ in such sacerdotal aristocracies, and in the
habits which prevail in such societies--habits which, _averse_ as they
are to action, constitute a compound of introspection and explosive
emotionalism, as a result of which there appears that introspective
morbidity and neurasthenia, which adheres almost inevitably to all
priests at all times: with regard, however, to the remedy which they
themselves have invented for this disease--the philosopher has no
option but to state, that it has proved itself in its effects a hundred
times more dangerous than the disease, from which it should have been
the deliverer. Humanity itself is still diseased from the effects of
the naïvetés of this priestly cure. Take, for instance, certain kinds
of diet (abstention from flesh), fasts, sexual continence, flight
into the wilderness (a kind of Weir-Mitchell isolation, though of
course without that system of excessive feeding and fattening which
is the most efficient antidote to all the hysteria of the ascetic
ideal); consider too the whole metaphysic of the priests, with its
war on the senses, its enervation, its hair-splitting; consider its
self-hypnotism on the fakir and Brahman principles (it uses Brahman as
a glass disc and obsession), and that climax which we can understand
only too well of an unusual satiety with its panacea of _nothingness_
(or God:--the demand for a _unio mystica_ with God is the demand of the
Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvana--and nothing else!). In sacerdotal
societies _every_ element is on a more dangerous scale, not merely
cures and remedies, but also pride, revenge, cunning, exaltation, love,
ambition, virtue, morbidity:--further, it can fairly be stated that it
is on the soil of this _essentially dangerous_ form of human society,
the sacerdotal form, that man really becomes for the first time an
_interesting animal_, that it is in this form that the soul of man has
in a higher sense attained _depths_ and become _evil_--and those are
the two fundamental forms of the superiority which up to the present
man has exhibited over every other animal.
7.
The reader will have already surmised with what ease the priestly mode
of valuation can branch off from the knightly aristocratic mode, and
then develop into the very antithesis of the latter: special impetus
is given to this opposition, by every occasion when the castes of the
priests and warriors confront each other with mutual jealousy and
cannot agree over the prize. 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. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into a monstrous
and sinister shape, a shape which is most crafty and most poisonous.
The really great haters in the history of the world have always been
priests, who are also the cleverest haters--in comparison with the
cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness is
practically negligible. Human history would be too fatuous for anything
were it not for the cleverness imported into it by the weak--take at
once the most important instance. All the world's efforts against the
"aristocrats," the "mighty," the "masters," the "holders of power,"
are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against
those classes by _the Jews_--the Jews, that priestly nation which
eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on
its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of
values, which was at the same time an act of the _cleverest revenge_.
Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation
of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews
who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic
= beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying
logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with
the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this
contrary equation, namely, "the wretched are alone the good; the poor,
the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the
sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones
who are blessed, for them alone is salvation--but you, on the other
hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity the
evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally
also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!" We know who
it was who reaped the heritage of this Jewish transvaluation. In the
context of the monstrous and inordinately fateful initiative which
the Jews have exhibited in connection with this most fundamental of
all declarations of war, I remember the passage which came to my pen
on another occasion (_Beyond Good and Evil_, Aph. 195)--that it was,
in fact, with the Jews that the _revolt of the slaves_ begins in the
sphere _of morals_; that revolt which has behind it a history of two
millennia, and which at the present day has only moved out of our
sight, because it--has achieved victory.
8.
But you understand this not? You have no eyes for a force which
has taken two thousand years to achieve victory?--There is nothing
wonderful in this: all _lengthy_ processes are hard to see and to
realise. But _this_ is what took place: from the trunk of that tree
of revenge and hate, Jewish hate,--that most profound and sublime
hate, which creates ideals and changes old values to new creations,
the like of which has never been on earth,--there grew a phenomenon
which was equally incomparable, _a new love_, the most profound and
sublime of all kinds of love;--and from what other trunk could it have
grown? But beware of supposing that this love has soared on its upward
growth, as in any way a real negation of that thirst for revenge, as
an antithesis to the Jewish hate! No, the contrary is the truth! This
love grew out of that hate, as its crown, as its triumphant crown,
circling wider and wider amid the clarity and fulness of the sun, and
pursuing in the very kingdom of light and height its goal of hatred,
its victory, its spoil, its strategy, with the same intensity with
which the roots of that tree of hate sank into everything which was
deep and evil with increasing stability and increasing desire. This
Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this "Redeemer"
bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinful--was
he not really temptation in its most sinister and irresistible form,
temptation to take the tortuous path to those very _Jewish_ values and
those very Jewish ideals? Has not Israel really obtained the final goal
of its sublime revenge, by the tortuous paths of this "Redeemer," for
all that he might pose as Israel's adversary and Israel's destroyer? Is
it not due to the black magic of a really _great_ policy of revenge,
of a far-seeing, burrowing revenge, both acting and calculating with
slowness, that Israel himself must repudiate before all the world the
actual instrument of his own revenge and nail it to the cross, so
that all the world--that is, all the enemies of Israel--could nibble
without suspicion at this very bait? Could, moreover, any human mind
with all its elaborate ingenuity invent a bait that was more truly
_dangerous_? Anything that was even equivalent in the power of its
seductive, intoxicating, defiling, and corrupting influence to that
symbol of the holy cross, to that awful paradox of a "god on the
cross," to that mystery of the unthinkable, supreme, and utter horror
of the self-crucifixion of a god for the _salvation of man_? It is
at least certain that _sub hoc signo_ Israel, with its revenge and
transvaluation of all values, has up to the present always triumphed
again over all other ideals, over all more aristocratic ideals.
9.
"But why do you talk of nobler ideals? Let us submit to the facts;
that the people have triumphed--or the slaves, or the populace, or the
herd, or whatever name you care to give them--if this has happened
through the Jews, so be it! In that case no nation ever had a greater
mission in the world's history. The 'masters' have been done away
with; the morality of the vulgar man has triumphed. This triumph may
also be called a blood-poisoning (it has mutually fused the races)--I
do not dispute it; but there is no doubt but that this intoxication
has succeeded. The 'redemption' of the human race (that is, from the
masters) is progressing swimmingly; everything is obviously becoming
Judaised, or Christianised, or vulgarised (what is there in the
words?). It seems impossible to stop the course of this poisoning
through the whole body politic of mankind--but its _tempo_ and pace
may from the present time be slower, more delicate, quieter, more
discreet--there is time enough. In view of this context has the Church
nowadays any necessary purpose? has it, in fact, a right to live? Or
could man get on without it? _Quæritur_. It seems that it fetters and
retards this tendency, instead of accelerating it. Well, even that
might be its utility. The Church certainly is a crude and boorish
institution, that is repugnant to an intelligence with any pretence at
delicacy, to a really modern taste. Should it not at any rate learn to
be somewhat more subtle? It alienates nowadays, more than it allures.
Which of us would, forsooth, be a freethinker if there were no Church?
It is the Church which repels us, not its poison--apart from the Church
we like the poison." This is the epilogue of a freethinker to my
discourse, of an honourable animal (as he has given abundant proof),
and a democrat to boot; he had up to that time listened to me, and
could not endure my silence, but for me, indeed, with regard to this
topic there is much on which to be silent.
10.
The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of
_resentment_ becoming creative and giving birth to values--a resentment
experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet
of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary
revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant
affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the
very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and
"not itself": and this "no" is its creative deed. This volte-face of
the valuing standpoint--this _inevitable_ gravitation to the objective
instead of back to the subjective--is typical of "resentment": 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 capable 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;--its negative conception, "low,"
"vulgar," "bad," is merely a pale late-born foil in comparison with its
positive and fundamental conception (saturated as it is with life and
passion), of "we aristocrats, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy
ones."