weaklings!--they also, forsooth, wish to be the strong some time; there
is no doubt about it, some time _their_ kingdom also must come--"the
kingdom of God" is their name for it, as has been mentioned: they are
so meek in everything! Yet in order to experience _that_ kingdom it
is necessary to live long, to live beyond death,--yes, _eternal_ life
is necessary so that one can make up for ever for that earthly life
"in faith," "in love," "in hope." Make up for what? Make up by what?
Dante, as it seems to me, made a crass mistake when with awe-inspiring
ingenuity he placed that inscription over the gate of his hell, "Me too
made eternal love": at any rate the following inscription would have
a much better right to stand over the gate of the Christian Paradise
and its "eternal blessedness"--"Me too made eternal hate"--granted
of course that a truth may rightly stand over the gate to a lie! For
what is the blessedness of that Paradise? Possibly we could quickly
surmise it; but it is better that it should be explicitly attested by
an authority who in such matters is not to be disparaged, Thomas of
Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. "_Beati in regno celesti_" says
he, as gently as a lamb, "_videbunt pœnas damnatorum, ut beatitudo
illis magis complaceat_." Or if we wish to hear a stronger tone, a word
from the mouth of a triumphant father of the Church, who warned his
disciples against the cruel ecstasies of the public spectacles--But
why? Faith offers us much more,--says he, _de Spectac._, c. 29
ss.,--something much stronger; thanks to the redemption, joys of quite
another kind stand at our disposal; instead of athletes we have our
martyrs; we wish for blood, well, we have the blood of Christ--but
what then awaits us on the day of his return, of his triumph. And
then does he proceed, does this enraptured visionary: "_at enim
supersunt alia spectacula, ille ultimas et perpetuus judicii dies, ille
nationibus insperatus, ille derisus, cum tanta sæculi vetustas et tot
ejus nativitates uno igne haurientur. Quæ tunc spectaculi latitudo!
Quid admirer! quid rideam! Ubigaudeam! Ubi exultem, spectans tot et
tantos reges, qui in cœlum recepti nuntiabantur, cum ipso Jove et ipsis
suis testibus in imis tenebris congemescentes! Item præsides_" (the
provincial governors) "_persecutores dominici nominis sævioribus quam
ipsi flammis sævierunt insultantibus contra Christianos liquescentes!
Quos præterea sapientes illos philosophos coram discipulis suis una
conflagrantibus erubescentes, quibus nihil ad deum pertinere suadebant,
quibus animas aut nullas aut non in pristina corpora redituras
affirmabant! Etiam poetas non ad Rhadamanti nec ad Minois, sed ad
inopinati Christi tribunal palpitantes! Tunc magis tragœdi audiendi,
magis scilicet vocales_" (with louder tones and more violent shrieks)
"_in sua propria calamitate; tunc histriones cognoscendi, solutiores
multo per ignem; tunc spectandus auriga in flammea rota totus rubens,
tunc xystici contemplandi non in gymnasiis, sed in igne jaculati, nisi
quod ne tunc quidem illos velim vivos, ut qui malim ad eos potius
conspectum insatiabilem conferre, qui in dominum scevierunt. Hic est
ille, dicam fabri aut quæstuariæ filius_" (as is shown by the whole of
the following, and in particular by this well-known description of the
mother of Jesus from the Talmud, Tertullian is henceforth referring to
the Jews), "_sabbati destructor, Samarites et dæmonium habens. Hic est
quem a Juda redemistis, hic est ille arundine et colaphis diverberatus,
sputamentis de decoratus, felle et acete potatus. Hic est, quem
clam discentes subripuerunt, ut resurrexisse dicatur vel hortulanus
detraxit, ne lactucæ suæ frequentia commeantium laderentur. Ut talia
species, ut talibus exultes, quis tibi prætor aut consul aut sacerdos
de sua liberalitate prastabit? Et tamen hæc jam habemus quodammodo per
fidem spiritu imaginante repræsentata. Ceterum qualia illa sunt, quæ
nec oculus vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascenderunt?_" (I
Cor. ii. 9.) "_Credo circo et utraque cavea_" (first and fourth row,
or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stage) "_et omni
studio gratiora._" _Per fidem_: so stands it written.
16.
Let us come to a conclusion. 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 battleground
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.
(One should also appraise at its full value the profound logic of the
Christian instinct, when over this very book of hate it wrote the name
of the Disciple of Love, that self-same disciple to whom it attributed
that impassioned and ecstatic Gospel--therein lurks a portion of
truth, however much literary forging may have been necessary for
this purpose.) The Romans were the strong and aristocratic; a nation
stronger and more aristocratic has never existed in the world, has
never even been dreamed of; every relic of them, every inscription
enraptures, granted that one can divine _what_ it is that writes the
inscription. The Jews, conversely, were that priestly nation of
resentment par excellence, possessed by a unique genius for popular
morals: just compare with the Jews the nations with analogous gifts,
such as the Chinese or the Germans, so as to realise afterwards what is
first rate, and what is fifth rate.
Which of them has been provisionally victorious, Rome or Judæa? but
there is not a shadow of doubt; just consider to whom in Rome itself
nowadays you bow down, as though before the quintessence of all the
highest values--and not only in Rome, but almost over half the world,
everywhere where man has been tamed or is about to be tamed--to _three
Jews_, as we know, and _one Jewess_ (to Jesus of Nazareth, to Peter
the fisher, to Paul the tent-maker, and to the mother of the aforesaid
Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome is undoubtedly
defeated. At any rate there took place in the Renaissance a brilliantly
sinister revival of the classical ideal, of the aristocratic valuation
of all things: Rome herself, like a man waking up from a trance,
stirred beneath the burden of the new Judaised Rome that had been built
over her, which presented the appearance of an œcumenical synagogue
and was called the "Church": but immediately Judæa triumphed again,
thanks to that fundamentally popular (German and English) movement
of revenge, which is called the Reformation, and taking also into
account its inevitable corollary, the restoration of the Church--the
restoration also of the ancient graveyard peace of classical Rome.
Judæa proved yet once more victorious over the classical ideal in the
French Revolution, and in a sense which was even more crucial and even
more profound: the last political aristocracy that existed in Europe,
that of the _French_ seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, broke into
pieces beneath the instincts of a resentful populace--never had the
world heard a greater jubilation, a more uproarious enthusiasm: indeed,
there took place in the midst of it the most monstrous and unexpected
phenomenon; the ancient ideal _itself_ swept before the eyes and
conscience of humanity with all its life and with unheard-of splendour,
and in opposition to resentment's lying war-cry of _the prerogative
of the most_, in opposition to the will to lowliness, abasement, and
equalisation, the will to a retrogression and twilight of humanity,
there rang out once again, stronger, simpler, more penetrating than
ever, the terrible and enchanting counter-warcry of _the prerogative of
the few_! Like a final signpost to other ways, there appeared Napoleon,
the most unique and violent anachronism that ever existed, and in him
the incarnate problem _of the aristocratic ideal in itself_--consider
well what a problem it is:--Napoleon, that synthesis of Monster and
Superman.
17.
Was it therewith over? Was that greatest of all antitheses of ideals
thereby relegated _ad acta_ for all time? Or only postponed, postponed
for a long time? May there not take place at some time or other a
much more awful, much more carefully prepared flaring up of the old
conflagration? Further! Should not one wish _that_ consummation with
all one's strength?--will it one's self? demand it one's self? He who
at this juncture begins, like my readers, to reflect, to think further,
will have difficulty in coming quickly to a conclusion,--ground enough
for me to come myself to a conclusion, taking it for granted that for
some time past what I mean has been sufficiently clear, what I exactly
_mean_ by that dangerous motto which is inscribed on the body of my
last book: _Beyond Good and Evil_--at any rate that is not the same as
"Beyond Good and Bad."
Note.--I avail myself of the opportunity offered by this treatise to
express, openly and formally, a wish which up to the present has only
been expressed in occasional conversations with scholars, namely,
that some Faculty of philosophy should, by means of a series of prize
essays, gain the glory of having promoted the further study of the
_history of morals_--perhaps this book may serve to give forcible
impetus in such a direction. With regard to a possibility of this
character, the following question deserves consideration. It merits
quite as much the attention of philologists and historians as of actual
professional philosophers.
"_What indication of the history of the evolution of the moral ideas is
afforded by philology, and especially by etymological investigation?_"
On the other hand, it is of course equally necessary to induce
physiologists and doctors to be interested in these problems (_of the
value of the valuations_ which have prevailed up to the present): in
this connection the professional philosophers may be trusted to act
as the spokesmen and intermediaries in these particular instances,
after, of course, they have quite succeeded in transforming the
relationship between philosophy and physiology and medicine, which
is originally one of coldness and suspicion, into the most friendly
and fruitful reciprocity. In point of fact, all tables of values,
all the "thou shalts" known to history and ethnology, need primarily
a _physiological_, at any rate in preference to a psychological,
elucidation and interpretation; all equally require a critique from
medical science. The question, "What is the _value_ of this or that
table of 'values' and morality?" will be asked from the most varied
standpoints. For instance, the question of "valuable _for what_" can
never be analysed with sufficient nicety. That, for instance, which
would evidently have value with regard to promoting in a race the
greatest possible powers of endurance (or with regard to increasing its
adaptability to a specific climate, or with regard to the preservation
of the greatest number) would have nothing like the same value, if it
were a question of evolving a stronger species. In gauging values,
the good of the majority and the good of the minority are opposed
standpoints: we leave it to the naïveté of English biologists to regard
the former standpoint as _intrinsically_ superior. _All_ the sciences
have now to pave the way for the future task of the philosopher; this
task being understood to mean, that he must solve the problem of
_value_, that he has to fix the _hierarchy of values_.
SECOND ESSAY. "GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE.
1.
The breeding of an animal that _can promise_--is not this just that
very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is
not this the very problem of man? The fact that this problem has been
to a great extent solved, must appear all the more phenomenal to one
who can estimate at its full value that force of _forgetfulness_ which
works in opposition to it. Forgetfulness is no mere _vis inertiæ_,
as the superficial believe, rather is it a power of obstruction,
active and, in the strictest sense of the word, positive--a power
responsible for the fact that what we have lived, experienced, taken
into ourselves, no more enters into consciousness during the process
of digestion (it might be called psychic absorption) than all the
whole manifold process by which our physical nutrition, the so-called
"incorporation," is carried on. The temporary shutting of the doors
and windows of consciousness, the relief from the clamant alarums and
excursions, with which our subconscious world of servant organs works
in mutual co-operation and antagonism; a little quietude, a little
_tabula rasa_ of the consciousness, so as to make room again for the
new, and above all for the more noble functions and functionaries, room
for government, foresight, predetermination (for our organism is on an
oligarchic model)--this is the utility, as I have said, of the active
forgetfulness, which is a very sentinel and nurse of psychic order,
repose, etiquette; and this shows at once why it is that there can
exist no happiness, no gladness, no hope, no pride, no real _present_,
without forgetfulness. The man in whom this preventative apparatus is
damaged and discarded, is to be compared to a dyspeptic, and it is
something more than a comparison--he can "get rid of" nothing. But
this very animal who finds it necessary to be forgetful, in whom, in
fact, forgetfulness represents a force and a form of _robust_ health,
has reared for himself an opposition-power, a memory, with whose help
forgetfulness is, in certain instances, kept in check--in the cases,
namely, where promises have to be made;--so that it is by no means
a mere passive inability to get rid of a once indented impression,
not merely the indigestion occasioned by a once pledged word, which
one cannot dispose of, but an _active_ refusal to get rid of it, a
continuing and a wish to continue what has once been willed, an actual
_memory of the will_; so that between the original "I will," "I shall
do," and the actual discharge of the will, its act, we can easily
interpose a world of new strange phenomena, circumstances, veritable
volitions, without the snapping of this long chain of the will. But
what is the underlying hypothesis of all this? How thoroughly, in order
to be able to regulate the future in this way, must man have first
learnt to distinguish between necessitated and accidental phenomena, to
think causally, to see the distant as present and to anticipate it, to
fix with certainty what is the end, and what is the means to that end;
above all, to reckon, to have power to calculate--how thoroughly must
man have first become _calculable, disciplined, necessitated_ even for
himself and his own conception of himself, that, like a man entering
into a promise, he could guarantee himself _as a future_.
2.
This is simply the long history of the origin of _responsibility_.
That task of breeding an animal which can make promises, includes, as
we have already grasped, as its condition and preliminary, the more
immediate task of first _making_ man to a certain extent, necessitated,
uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently calculable. The
immense work of what I have called, "morality of custom"[1] (cp. _Dawn
of Day_, Aphs. 9, 14, and 16), the actual work of man on himself during
the longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work,
finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of all its innate
hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy) in this fact: man, with
the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-waistcoats,
was _made_ genuinely calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at
the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally
matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally
bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as
the ripest fruit on its tree the _sovereign individual_, that resembles
only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the
autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are
mutually-exclusive terms),--in short, the man of the personal, long,
and independent will, _competent to promise_, and we find in him a
proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of _what_ has been at
last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of
power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this
man who has grown to freedom, who is really _competent_ to promise,
this lord of the _free_ will, this sovereign--how is it possible for
him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable
of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great
is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes--he "deserves"
all three--not to know that with this mastery over himself he is
necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature,
over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters?
The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this
possession his _standard of value_: looking out from himself upon
the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he
honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind
themselves by promises),--that is, every one who promises like a
sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his
trusts but confers _honour_ by the very fact of trusting, who gives
his word as something that can be relied on, because he knows himself
strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of disasters, even in the
"teeth of fate,"--so with equal necessity will he have the heel of his
foot ready for the lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have
no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready for the liar,
who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is on his lips.
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_.
3.
His conscience?--One apprehends at once that the idea "conscience,"
which is here seen in its supreme manifestation, supreme in fact to
almost the point of strangeness, should already have behind it a long
history and evolution. The ability to guarantee one's self with all
due pride, and also at the same time to _say yes_ to one's self--that
is, as has been said, a ripe fruit, but also a _late_ fruit:--How long
must needs this fruit hang sour and bitter on the tree! And for an even
longer period there was not a glimpse of such a fruit to to be had--no
one had taken it on himself to promise it, although everything on the
tree was quite ready for it, and everything was maturing for that very
consummation. "How is a memory to be made for the man-animal? How is an
impression to be so deeply fixed upon this ephemeral understanding,
half dense, and half silly, upon this incarnate forgetfulness, that
it will be permanently present?" As one may imagine, this primeval
problem was not solved by exactly gentle answers and gentle means;
perhaps there is nothing more awful and more sinister in the early
history of man than his _system of mnemonics_. "Something is burnt in
so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops _hurting_
remains in his memory." This is an axiom of the oldest (unfortunately
also the longest) psychology in the world. It might even be said that
wherever solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colours are now
found in the life of the men and of nations of the world, there is some
_survival_ of that horror which was once the universal concomitant of
all promises, pledges, and obligations. The past, the past with all
its length, depth, and hardness, wafts to us its breath, and bubbles
up in us again, when we become "serious." When man thinks it necessary
to make for himself a memory, he never accomplishes it without blood,
tortures, and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures
(among them the sacrifice of the first-born), the most loathsome
mutilation (for instance, castration), the most cruel rituals of all
the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom systems
of cruelty)--all these things originate from that instinct which
found in pain its most potent mnemonic. In a certain sense the whole
of asceticism is to be ascribed to this: certain ideas have got to
be made inextinguishable, omnipresent, "fixed," with the object of
hypnotising the whole nervous and intellectual system through these
"fixed ideas"--and the ascetic methods and modes of life are the means
of freeing those ideas from the competition of all other ideas so as to
make them "unforgettable." The worse memory man had, the ghastlier the
signs presented by his customs; the severity of the penal laws affords
in particular a gauge of the extent of man's difficulty in conquering
forgetfulness, and in keeping a few primal postulates of social
intercourse ever present to the minds of those who were the slaves
of every momentary emotion and every momentary desire. We Germans do
certainly not regard ourselves as an especially cruel and hard-hearted
nation, still less as an especially casual and happy-go-lucky one;
but one has only to look at our old penal ordinances in order to
realise what a lot of trouble it takes in the world to evolve a
"nation of thinkers" (I mean: _the_ European nation which exhibits at
this very day the maximum of reliability, seriousness, bad taste, and
positiveness, which has on the strength of these qualities a right to
train every kind of European mandarin). These Germans employed terrible
means to make for themselves a memory, to enable them to master their
rooted plebeian instincts and the brutal crudity of those instincts:
think of the old German punishments, for instance, stoning (as far back
as the legend, the millstone falls on the head of the guilty man),
breaking on the wheel (the most original invention and speciality of
the German genius in the sphere of punishment), dart-throwing, tearing,
or trampling by horses ("quartering"), boiling the criminal in oil or
wine (still prevalent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the
highly popular flaying ("slicing into strips"), cutting the flesh out
of the breast; think also of the evil-doer being besmeared with honey,
and then exposed to the flies in a blazing sun. It was by the help of
such images and precedents that man eventually kept in his memory five
or six "I will nots" with regard to which he had already given his
_promise_, so as to be able to enjoy the advantages of society--and
verily with the help of this kind of memory man eventually attained
"reason"! Alas! reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all
these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection, all these
privileges and pageantries of humanity: how dear is the price that they
have exacted! How much blood and cruelty is the foundation of all "good
things"!
4.
But how is it that that other melancholy object, the consciousness of
sin, the whole "bad conscience," came into the world? And it is here
that we turn back to our genealogists of morals. For the second time
I say--or have I not said it yet?--that they are worth nothing. Just
their own five-spans-long limited modern experience; no knowledge of
the past, and no wish to know it; still less a historic instinct, a
power of "second sight" (which is what is really required in this
case)--and despite this to go in for the history of morals. It stands
to reason that this must needs produce results which are removed from
the truth by something more than a respectful distance.