reality, this is limited to that particular sphere with which it
is _not_ sufficiently acquainted--a sphere, in fact, from the real
knowledge of which it disdainfully defends itself. It misjudges, in
some cases, the sphere which it despises, the sphere of the common
vulgar man and the low people: on the other hand, due weight should be
given to the consideration that in any case the mood of contempt, of
disdain, of superciliousness, even on the supposition that it _falsely_
portrays the object of its contempt, will always be far removed from
that degree of falsity which will always characterise the attacks--in
effigy, of course--of the vindictive hatred and revengefulness of
the weak in onslaughts on their enemies. In point of fact, there is
in contempt too strong an admixture of nonchalance, of casualness,
of boredom, of impatience, even of personal exultation, for it to be
capable of distorting its victim into a real caricature or a real
monstrosity. Attention again should be paid to the almost benevolent
_nuances_ which, for instance, the Greek nobility imports into all
the words by which it distinguishes the common people from itself;
note how continuously a kind of pity, care, and consideration imparts
its honeyed _flavour_, until at last almost all the words which are
applied to the vulgar man survive finally as expressions for "unhappy,"
"worthy of pity" (compare δειλο, δείλαιος, πονηρός, μοχθηρός]; the
latter two names really denoting the vulgar man as labour-slave
and beast of burden)--and how, conversely, "bad," "low," "unhappy"
have never ceased to ring in the Greek ear with a tone in which
"unhappy" is the predominant note: this is a heritage of the old noble
aristocratic morality, which remains true to itself even in contempt
(let philologists remember the sense in which ὀιζυρός, ἄνολβος, τλήμων,
δυστυχεῑν, ξυμφορά used to be employed). The "well-born" simply
_felt_ themselves the "happy"; they did not have to manufacture their
happiness artificially through looking at their enemies, or in cases
to talk and _lie themselves_ into happiness (as is the custom with all
resentful men); and similarly, complete men as they were, exuberant
with strength, and consequently _necessarily_ energetic, they were too
wise to dissociate happiness from action--activity becomes in their
minds necessarily counted as happiness (that is the etymology of εὖ
πρἆττειν)--all in sharp contrast to the "happiness" of the weak and
the oppressed, with their festering venom and malignity, among whom
happiness appears essentially as a narcotic, a deadening, a quietude,
a peace, a "Sabbath," an enervation of the mind and relaxation
of the limbs,--in short, a purely _passive_ phenomenon. While the
aristocratic man lived in confidence and openness with himself
(gennaios, "noble-born," emphasises the nuance "sincere," and perhaps
also "naïf"), the resentful man, on the other hand, is neither sincere
nor naïf, nor honest and candid with himself. His soul _squints_; his
mind loves hidden crannies, tortuous paths and back-doors, everything
secret appeals to him as _his_ world, _his_ safety, _his_ balm; he is
past master in silence, in not forgetting, in waiting, in provisional
self-depreciation and self-abasement. A race of such _resentful_ men
will of necessity eventually prove more _prudent_ than any aristocratic
race, it will honour prudence on quite a distinct scale, as, in fact, a
paramount condition of existence, while prudence among aristocratic men
is apt to be tinged with a delicate flavour of luxury and refinement;
so among them it plays nothing like so integral a part as that complete
certainty of function of the governing _unconscious_ instincts, or
as indeed a certain lack of prudence, such as a vehement and valiant
charge, whether against danger or the enemy, or as those ecstatic
bursts of rage, love, reverence, gratitude, by which at all times
noble souls have recognised each other. When the resentment of the
aristocratic man manifests itself, it fulfils and exhausts itself in
an immediate reaction, and consequently instills no _venom_: on the
other hand, it never manifests itself at all in countless instances,
when in the case of the feeble and weak it would be inevitable. An
inability to take seriously for any length of time their enemies,
their disasters, their _misdeeds_--that is the sign of the full strong
natures who possess a superfluity of moulding plastic force, that
heals completely and produces forgetfulness: a good example of this in
the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for any insults and
meannesses which were practised on him, and who was only incapable
of forgiving because he forgot. Such a man indeed shakes off with a
shrug many a worm which would have buried itself in another; it is
only in characters like these that we see the possibility (supposing,
of course, that there is such a possibility in the world) of the real
"_love_ of one's enemies." What respect for his enemies is found,
forsooth, in an aristocratic man--and such a reverence is already
a bridge to love! He insists on having his enemy to himself as his
distinction. He tolerates no other enemy but a man in whose character
there is nothing to despise and much to honour! On the other hand,
imagine the "enemy" as the resentful man conceives him--and it is here
exactly that we see his work, his creativeness; he has conceived "the
evil enemy," the "evil one," and indeed that is the root idea from
which he now evolves as a contrasting and corresponding figure a "good
one," himself--his very self!
11
The method of this man is quite contrary to that of the aristocratic
man, who 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." But the idea "good" is
not the same: much rather let the question be asked, "Who is really
evil according to the meaning of the morality of resentment?" In
all sternness let it be answered thus:--_just_ the good man of the
other morality, just the aristocrat, the powerful one, the one who
rules, but who is distorted by the venomous eye of resentfulness,
into a new colour, a new signification, a new appearance. This
particular point we would be the last to deny: the man who learnt to
know those "good" ones only as enemies, learnt at the same time not
to know them only as "_evil enemies_" and the same men who _inter
pares_ were kept so rigorously in bounds through convention, respect,
custom, and gratitude, though much more through mutual vigilance
and jealousy _inter pares_, these men who in their relations with
each other find so many new ways of manifesting consideration,
self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship, these men
are in reference to what is outside their circle (where the foreign
element, a _foreign_ country, begins), not much better than beasts
of prey, which have been let loose. They enjoy there freedom from
all social control, they feel that in the wilderness they can give
vent with impunity to that tension which is produced by enclosure and
imprisonment in the peace of society, they _revert_ to the innocence
of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who perhaps
come from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with
bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student's
prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an
ample theme to sing and celebrate. 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
(for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in that celebrated
funeral oration, "Our audacity has forced a way over every land and
sea, rearing everywhere imperishable memorials of itself for _good_
and for _evil_"). This audacity of aristocratic races, mad, absurd,
and spasmodic as may be its expression; the incalculable and fantastic
nature of their enterprises,Pericles sets in special relief and
glory the ᾽ραθυμία of the Athenians, their nonchalance and contempt for
safety, body, life, and comfort, their awful joy and intense delight
in all destruction, in all the ecstasies of victory and cruelty,--all
these features become crystallised, for those who suffered thereby
in the picture of the "barbarian," of the "evil enemy," perhaps of
the "Goth" and of the "Vandal." The profound, icy mistrust which
the German provokes, as soon as he arrives at power,--even at the
present time,--is always still an aftermath of that inextinguishable
horror with which for whole centuries Europe has regarded the wrath
of the blonde Teuton beast (although between the old Germans and
ourselves there exists scarcely a psychological, let alone a physical,
relationship). I have once called attention to the embarrassment of
Hesiod, when he conceived the series of social ages, and endeavoured
to express them in gold, silver, and bronze. He could only dispose
of the contradiction, with which he was confronted, by the Homeric
world, an age magnificent indeed, but at the same time so awful and
so violent, by making two ages out of one, which he henceforth placed
one behind each other--first, the age of the heroes and demigods, as
that world had remained in the memories of the aristocratic families,
who found therein their own ancestors; secondly, the bronze age, as
that corresponding age appeared to the descendants of the oppressed,
spoiled, ill-treated, exiled, enslaved; namely, as an age of bronze,
as I have said, hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without
conscience, crushing everything, and bespattering everything with
blood. Granted the truth of the theory now believed to be true, that
the very _essence of all civilisation_ is to _train_ out of man, the
beast of prey, a tame and civilised animal, a domesticated animal,
it follows indubitably that we must regard as the real _tools of
civilisation_ all those instincts of reaction and resentment, by the
help of which the aristocratic races, together with their ideals,
were finally degraded and overpowered; though that has not yet come
to be synonymous with saying that the bearers of those tools also
_represented_ the civilisation. It is rather the contrary that is
not only probable--nay, it is _palpable_ to-day; these bearers of
vindictive instincts that have to be bottled up, these descendants of
all European and non-European slavery, especially of the pre-Aryan
population--these people, I say, represent the _decline_ of humanity!
These "tools of civilisation" are a disgrace to humanity, and
constitute in reality more of an argument against civilisation, more
of a reason why civilisation should be suspected. One may be perfectly
justified in being always afraid of the blonde beast that lies at
the core of all aristocratic races, and in being on one's guard: but
who would not a hundred times prefer to be afraid, when one at the
same time admires, than to be immune from fear, at the cost of being
perpetually obsessed with the loathsome spectacle of the distorted, the
dwarfed, the stunted, the envenomed? And is that not our fate? 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"; yes, it is that he has a certain right so to consider himself,
in so far as he feels that in contrast to that excess of deformity,
disease, exhaustion, and effeteness whose odour is beginning to pollute
present-day Europe, he at any rate has achieved a relative success, he
at any rate still says "yes" to life.
12.
I cannot refrain at this juncture from uttering a sigh and one last
hope. What is it precisely which I find intolerable? That which I alone
cannot get rid of, which makes me choke and faint? Bad air! bad air!
That something misbegotten comes near me; that I must inhale the odour
of the entrails of a misbegotten soul!--That excepted, what can one
not endure in the way of need, privation, bad weather, sickness, toil,
solitude? In point of fact, one manages to get over everything, born
as one is to a burrowing and battling existence; one always returns
once again to the light, one always lives again one's golden hour of
victory--and then one stands as one was born, unbreakable, tense, ready
for something more difficult, for something more distant, like a bow
stretched but the tauter by every strain. But from time to time do ye
grant me--assuming that "beyond good and evil" there are goddesses who
can grant--one glimpse, grant me but one glimpse only, of something
perfect, fully realised, happy, mighty, triumphant, of something
that still gives cause for fear! A glimpse of a man that justifies
the existence of man, a glimpse of an incarnate human happiness that
realises and redeems, for the sake of which one may hold fast to _the
belief in man_! For the position is this: 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--man, there is no doubt about it, grows always "better"
--the destiny of Europe lies even in this--that in losing the fear of
man, we have also lost the hope in man, yea, the will to be man. The
sight of man now fatigues.--What is present-day Nihilism if it is not
_that_?--We are tired of _man_.
13.
But let us come back to it; the problem of another origin of the
_good_--of the good, as the resentful man has thought it out--demands
its solution. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge
against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the
great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs
say among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and he who is as
far removed from being a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite,
a lamb,--is he not good?" then there is nothing to cavil at in the
setting up of this ideal, though it may also be that the birds of prey
will regard it a little sneeringly, and perchance say to themselves,
"_We_ bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even like them:
nothing is tastier than a tender lamb." 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--rather it
is nothing else than just those very phenomena of moving, willing,
acting, and can only appear otherwise in the misleading errors of
language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become
petrified therein), which understands, and understands wrongly, all
working as conditioned by a worker, by a "subject." And just exactly
as the people separate the lightning from its flash, and interpret the
latter as a thing done, as the working of a subject which is called
lightning, so also does the popular morality separate strength from the
expression of strength, as though behind the strong man there existed
some indifferent neutral _substratum_, which enjoyed a _caprice and
option_ as to whether or not it should express strength. But there
is no such _substratum_, there is no "being" behind doing, working,
becoming; "the doer" is a mere appanage to the action. The action is
everything. In point of fact, the people duplicate the doing, when they
make the lightning lighten, that is a "doing-doing": they make the same
phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause.
The scientists fail to improve matters when they say, "Force moves,
force causes," and so on. Our whole science is still, in spite of all
its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of
language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious
changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such
a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself"). What wonder,
if the suppressed and stealthily simmering passions of revenge and
hatred exploit for their own advantage this belief, and indeed hold no
belief with a more steadfast enthusiasm than this--"that the strong
has the _option_ of being weak, and the bird of prey of being a lamb."
Thereby do they win for themselves the right of attributing to the
birds of prey the _responsibility_ for being birds of prey: when the
oppressed, down-trodden, and overpowered say to themselves with the
vindictive guile of weakness, "Let us be otherwise than the evil,
namely, good! and good is every one who does not oppress, who hurts
no one, who does not attack, who does not pay back, who hands over
revenge to God, who holds himself, as we do, in hiding; who goes out
of the way of evil, and demands, in short, little from life; like
ourselves the patient, the meek, the just,"--yet all this, in its cold
and unprejudiced interpretation, means nothing more than "once for
all, the weak are weak; it is good to do _nothing for which we are not
strong enough_"; but this dismal state of affairs, this prudence of the
lowest order, which even insects possess (which in a great danger are
fain to sham death so as to avoid doing "too much"), has, thanks to
the counterfeiting and self-deception of weakness, come to masquerade
in the pomp of an ascetic, mute, and expectant virtue, just as though
the _very_ weakness of the weak--that is, forsooth, its _being_, its
working, its whole unique inevitable inseparable reality--were a
voluntary result, something wished, chosen, a deed, an act of _merit_.
This kind of man finds the belief in a neutral, free-choosing "subject"
_necessary_ from an instinct of self-preservation, of self-assertion,
in which every lie is fain to sanctify itself. The subject (or, to
use popular language, the _soul_) has perhaps proved itself the best
dogma in the world simply because it rendered possible to the horde
of mortal, weak, and oppressed individuals of every kind, that most
sublime specimen of self-deception, the interpretation of weakness as
freedom, of being this, or being that, as _merit_.
14.
Will any one look a little into--right into--the mystery of how _ideals
are manufactured_ in this world? Who has the courage to do it? Come!
Here we have a vista opened into these grimy workshops. Wait just a
moment, dear Mr. Inquisitive and Foolhardy; your eye must first grow
accustomed to this false changing light--Yes! Enough! Now speak! What
is happening below down yonder? Speak out that what you see, man of the
most dangerous curiosity--for now _I_ am the listener.
"I see nothing, I hear the more. It is a cautious, spiteful, gentle
whispering and muttering together in all the corners and crannies. It
seems to me that they are lying; a sugary softness adheres to every
sound. Weakness is turned to _merit_, there is no doubt about it--it is
just as you say."
Further!
"And 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 (for
_they_ know not what they do--we alone know what _they_ do). They also
talk of the 'love of their enemies' and sweat thereby."
Further!
"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.'"
Further!
"They are now giving me to understand, that not only are they better
men than the mighty, the lords of the earth, whose spittle they have
got to lick (not out of fear, not at all out of fear! But because
God ordains that one should honour all authority)--not only are they
better men, but that they also have a 'better time,' at any rate,
will one day have a 'better time.' But enough! Enough! I can endure
it no longer. Bad air! Bad air! These workshops _where ideals are
manufactured_--verily they reek with the crassest lies."
Nay. Just one minute! You are saying nothing about the masterpieces
of these virtuosos of black magic, who can produce whiteness, milk,
and innocence out of any black you like: have you not noticed what a
pitch of refinement is attained by their _chef d'œuvre_, their most
audacious, subtle, ingenious, and lying artist-trick? Take care! These
cellar-beasts, full of revenge and hate--what do they make, forsooth,
out of their revenge and hate? Do you hear these words? Would you
suspect, if you trusted only their words, that you are among men of
resentment and nothing else?
"I understand, I prick my ears up again (ah! ah! ah! and I hold my
nose). Now do I hear for the first time that which they have said so
often: 'We good, _we are the righteous_'--what they demand they call
not revenge but 'the triumph of _righteousness_'; what they hate is
not their enemy, no, they hate 'unrighteousness,' 'godlessness'; what
they believe in and hope is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication
of sweet revenge (--"sweeter than honey," did Homer call it?), but the
victory of God, of the _righteous_ _God_ over the 'godless'; what is
left for them to love in this world is not _their_ brothers in hate,
but their 'brothers in love,' as they say, all the good and righteous
on the earth."
And how do they name that which serves them as a solace against all
the troubles of life--their phantasmagoria of their anticipated future
blessedness?
"How? Do I hear right? They call it 'the last judgment,' the advent of
their kingdom, 'the kingdom of God'--but _in the meanwhile_ they live
'in faith,' 'in love,' 'in hope.'"
Enough! Enough!
15.