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Title: The Genealogy of Morals
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Date: 1887
Language: en
Topics: not anarchist, nihilism
Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52319
Notes: Edited by Oscar Levy, translated by Horace B. Samuel & J. M. Kennedy

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Genealogy of Morals

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

A POLEMIC

BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

**CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

FIRST ESSAY. “GOOD AND EVIL,” “GOOD AND BAD.”

SECOND ESSAY. “GUILT,” “BAD CONSCIENCE,” AND THE LIKE.

THIRD ESSAY.

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES.

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.

PREFACE.

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.”

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?

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

When the aristocratic morality goes astray and commits sacrilege on

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 (γενναῐος, “nobleε-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!

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.

In the faith in what? In the love for what? In the hope of what? These

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.

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.

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.

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”!

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.

Have these current genealogists of morals ever allowed themselves to

have even the vaguest notion, for instance, that the cardinal moral idea

of “ought”[2] originates from the very material idea of “owe”? Or that

punishment developed as a retaliation absolutely independently of any

preliminary hypothesis of the freedom or determination of the will?—And

this to such an extent, that a high degree of civilisation was always

first necessary for the animal man to begin to make those much more

primitive distinctions of “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,”

“responsible,” and their contraries, and apply them in the assessing of

punishment. That idea—“the wrong-doer deserves punishment because he

might have acted otherwise,” in spite of the fact that it is nowadays so

cheap, obvious, natural, and inevitable, and that it has had to serve as

an illustration of the way in which the sentiment of justice appeared on

earth, is in point of fact an exceedingly late, and even refined form of

human judgment and inference; the placing of this idea back at the

beginning of the world is simply a clumsy violation of the principles of

primitive psychology. Throughout the longest period of human history

punishment was never based on the responsibility of the evil-doer for

his action, and was consequently not based on the hypothesis that only

the guilty should be punished;—on the contrary, punishment was inflicted

in those days for the same reason that parents punish their children

even nowadays, out of anger at an injury that they have suffered, an

anger which vents itself mechanically on the author of the injury—but

this anger is kept in bounds and modified through the idea that every

injury has somewhere or other its equivalent price, and can really be

paid off, even though it be by means of pain to the author. Whence is it

that this ancient deep-rooted and now perhaps ineradicable idea has

drawn its strength, this idea of an equivalency between injury and pain?

I have already revealed its origin, in the contractual relationship

between creditor and ower, that is as old as the existence of legal

rights at all, and in its turn points back to the primary forms of

purchase, sale, barter, and trade.

The realisation of these contractual relations excites, of course (as

would be already expected from our previous observations), a great deal

of suspicion and opposition towards the primitive society which made or

sanctioned them. In this society promises will be made; in this society

the object is to provide the promiser with a memory; in this society, so

may we suspect, there will be full scope for hardness, cruelty, and

pain: the “ower,” in order to induce credit in his promise of repayment,

in order to give a guarantee of the earnestness and sanctity of his

promise, in order to drill into his own conscience the duty, the solemn

duty, of repayment, will, by virtue of a contract with his creditor to

meet the contingency of his not paying, pledge something that he still

possesses, something that he still has in his power, for instance, his

life or his wife, or his freedom or his body (or under certain religious

conditions even his salvation, his soul’s welfare, even his peace in the

grave; so in Egypt, where the corpse of the ower found even in the grave

no rest from the creditor—of course, from the Egyptian standpoint, this

peace was a matter of particular importance). But especially has the

creditor the power of inflicting on the body of the ower all kinds of

pain and torture—the power, for instance, of cutting off from it an

amount that appeared proportionate to the greatness of the debt;—this

point of view resulted in the universal prevalence at an early date of

precise schemes of valuation, frequently horrible in the minuteness and

meticulosity of their application, legally sanctioned schemes of

valuation for individual limbs and parts of the body. I consider it as

already a progress, as a proof of a freer, less petty, and more Roman

conception of law, when the Roman Code of the Twelve Tables decreed that

it was immaterial how much or how little the creditors in such a

contingency cut off, “si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto.” Let us

make the logic of the whole of this equalisation process clear; it is

strange enough. The equivalence consists in this: instead of an

advantage directly compensatory of his injury (that is, instead of an

equalisation in money, lands, or some kind of chattel), the creditor is

granted by way of repayment and compensation a certain sensation of

satisfaction—the satisfaction of being able to vent, without any

trouble, his power on one who is powerless, the delight “de faire le mal

pour le plaisir de le faire,” the joy in sheer violence: and this joy

will be relished in proportion to the lowness and humbleness of the

creditor in the social scale, and is quite apt to have the effect of the

most delicious dainty, and even seem the foretaste of a higher social

position. Thanks to the punishment of the “ower,” the creditor

participates in the rights of the masters. At last he too, for once in a

way, attains the edifying consciousness of being able to despise and

ill-treat a creature—as an “inferior”—or at any rate of seeing him being

despised and ill-treated, in case the actual power of punishment, the

administration of punishment, has already become transferred to the

“authorities.” The compensation consequently consists in a claim on

cruelty and a right to draw thereon.

It is then in this sphere of the law of contract that we find the cradle

of the whole moral world of the ideas of “guilt,” “conscience,” “duty,”

the “sacredness of duty,”—their commencement, like the commencement of

all great things in the world, is thoroughly and continuously saturated

with blood. And should we not add that this world has never really lost

a certain savour of blood and torture (not even in old Kant; the

categorical imperative reeks of cruelty). It was in this sphere likewise

that there first became formed that sinister and perhaps now

indissoluble association of the ideas of “guilt” and “suffering.” To put

the question yet again, why can suffering be a compensation for

“owing”?—Because the infliction of suffering produces the highest degree

of happiness, because the injured party will get in exchange for his

loss (including his vexation at his loss) an extraordinary

counter-pleasure: the infliction of suffering—a real feast, something

that, as I have said, was all the more appreciated the greater the

paradox created by the rank and social status of the creditor. These

observations are purely conjectural; for, apart from the painful nature

of the task, it is hard to plumb such profound depths: the clumsy

introduction of the idea of “revenge” as a connecting-link simply hides

and obscures the view instead of rendering it clearer (revenge itself

simply leads back again to the identical problem—“How can the infliction

of suffering be a satisfaction?”). In my opinion it is repugnant to the

delicacy, and still more to the hypocrisy of tame domestic animals (that

is, modern men; that is, ourselves), to realise with all their energy

the extent to which cruelty constituted the great joy and delight of

ancient man, was an ingredient which seasoned nearly all his pleasures,

and conversely the extent of the naïveté and innocence with which he

manifested his need for cruelty, when he actually made as a matter of

principle “disinterested malice” (or, to use Spinoza’s expression, the

sympathia malevolens) into a normal characteristic of man—as

consequently something to which the conscience says a hearty yes. The

more profound observer has perhaps already had sufficient opportunity

for noticing this most ancient and radical joy and delight of mankind;

in Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 188 (and even earlier, in The Dawn of Day,

Aphs. 18, 77, 113), I have cautiously indicated the continually growing

spiritualisation and “deification” of cruelty, which pervades the whole

history of the higher civilisation (and in the larger sense even

constitutes it). At any rate the time is not so long past when it was

impossible to conceive of royal weddings and national festivals on a

grand scale, without executions, tortures, or perhaps an auto-da-fé”, or

similarly to conceive of an aristocratic household, without a creature

to serve as a butt for the cruel and malicious baiting of the inmates.

(The reader will perhaps remember Don Quixote at the court of the

Duchess: we read nowadays the whole of Don Quixote with a bitter taste

in the mouth, almost with a sensation of torture, a fact which would

appear very strange and very incomprehensible to the author and his

contemporaries—they read it with the best conscience in the world as the

gayest of books; they almost died with laughing at it.) The sight of

suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one more

good—this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental maxim, old,

powerful, and “human, all-too-human”; one, moreover, to which perhaps

even the apes as well would subscribe: for it is said that in inventing

bizarre cruelties they are giving abundant proof of their future

humanity, to which, as it were, they are playing the prelude. Without

cruelty, no feast: so teaches the oldest and longest history of man—and

in punishment too is there so much of the festive.

Entertaining, as I do, these thoughts, I am, let me say in parenthesis,

fundamentally opposed to helping our pessimists to new water for the

discordant and groaning mills of their disgust with life; on the

contrary, it should be shown specifically that, at the time when mankind

was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life in the world was brighter than

it is nowadays when there are pessimists. The darkening of the heavens

over man has always increased in proportion to the growth of man’s shame

before man. The tired pessimistic outlook, the mistrust of the riddle of

life, the icy negation of disgusted ennui, all those are not the signs

of the most evil age of the human race: much rather do they come first

to the light of day, as the swamp-flowers, which they are, when the

swamp to which they belong, comes into existence—I mean the diseased

refinement and moralisation, thanks to which the “animal man” has at

last learnt to be ashamed of all his instincts. On the road to angelhood

(not to use in this context a harder word) man has developed that

dyspeptic stomach and coated tongue, which have made not only the joy

and innocence of the animal repulsive to him, but also life itself:—so

that sometimes he stands with stopped nostrils before his own self, and,

like Pope Innocent the Third, makes a black list of his own horrors

(“unclean generation, loathsome nutrition when in the maternal body,

badness of the matter out of which man develops, awful stench, secretion

of saliva, urine, and excrement”). Nowadays, when suffering is always

trotted out as the first argument against existence, as its most

sinister query, it is well to remember the times when men judged on

converse principles because they could not dispense with the infliction

of suffering, and saw therein a magic of the first order, a veritable

bait of seduction to life.

Perhaps in those days (this is to solace the weaklings) pain did not

hurt so much as it does nowadays: any physician who has treated negroes

(granted that these are taken as representative of the prehistoric man)

suffering from severe internal inflammations which would bring a

European, even though he had the soundest constitution, almost to

despair, would be in a position to come to this conclusion. Pain has not

the same effect with negroes. (The curve of human sensibilities to pain

seems indeed to sink in an extraordinary and almost sudden fashion, as

soon as one has passed the upper ten thousand or ten millions of

over-civilised humanity, and I personally have no doubt that, by

comparison with one painful night passed by one single hysterical chit

of a cultured woman, the suffering of all the animals taken together who

have been put to the question of the knife, so as to give scientific

answers, are simply negligible.) We may perhaps be allowed to admit the

possibility of the craving for cruelty not necessarily having become

really extinct: it only requires, in view of the fact that pain hurts

more nowadays, a certain sublimation and subtilisation, it must

especially be translated to the imaginative and psychic plane, and be

adorned with such smug euphemisms, that even the most fastidious and

hypocritical conscience could never grow suspicious of their real nature

(“Tragic pity” is one of these euphemisms: another is “les nostalgies de

la croix”). What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is

not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering; such a

senselessness, however, existed neither in Christianity, which

interpreted suffering into a whole mysterious salvation-apparatus, nor

in the beliefs of the naive ancient man, who only knew how to find a

meaning in suffering from the standpoint of the spectator, or the

inflictor of the suffering. In order to get the secret, undiscovered,

and unwitnessed suffering out of the world it was almost compulsory to

invent gods and a hierarchy of intermediate beings, in short, something

which wanders even among secret places, sees even in the dark, and makes

a point of never missing an interesting and painful spectacle. It was

with the help of such inventions that life got to learn the tour de

force, which has become part of its stock-in-trade, the tour de force of

self-justification, of the justification of evil; nowadays this would

perhaps require other auxiliary devices (for instance, life as a riddle,

life as a problem of knowledge). “Every evil is justified in the sight

of which a god finds edification,” so rang the logic of primitive

sentiment—and, indeed, was it only of primitive? The gods conceived as

friends of spectacles of cruelty—oh how far does this primeval

conception extend even nowadays into our European civilisation! One

would perhaps like in this context to consult Luther and Calvin. It is

at any rate certain that even the Greeks knew no more piquant seasoning

for the happiness of their gods than the joys of cruelty. What, do you

think, was the mood with which Homer makes his gods look down upon the

fates of men? What final meaning have at bottom the Trojan War and

similar tragic horrors? It is impossible to entertain any doubt on the

point: they were intended as festival games for the gods, and, in so far

as the poet is of a more godlike breed than other men, as festival games

also for the poets. It was in just this spirit and no other, that at a

later date the moral philosophers of Greece conceived the eyes of God as

still looking down on the moral struggle, the heroism, and the

self-torture of the virtuous; the Heracles of duty was on a stage, and

was conscious of the fact; virtue without witnesses was something quite

unthinkable for this nation of actors. Must not that philosophic

invention, so audacious and so fatal, which was then absolutely new to

Europe, the invention of “free will,” of the absolute spontaneity of man

in good and evil, simply have been made for the specific purpose of

justifying the idea, that the interest of the gods in humanity and human

virtue was inexhaustible?

There would never on the stage of this free-will world be a dearth of

really new, really novel and exciting situations, plots, catastrophes. A

world thought out on completely deterministic lines would be easily

guessed by the gods, and would consequently soon bore them—sufficient

reason for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to ascribe

to their gods such a deterministic world. The whole of ancient humanity

is full of delicate consideration for the spectator, being as it is a

world of thorough publicity and theatricality, which could not conceive

of happiness without spectacles and festivals.—And, as has already been

said, even in great punishment there is so much which is festive.

The feeling of “ought,” of personal obligation (to take up again the

train of our inquiry), has had, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and

most original personal relationship that there is, the relationship

between buyer and seller, creditor and ower: here it was that individual

confronted individual, and that individual matched himself against

individual. There has not yet been found a grade of civilisation so low,

as not to manifest some trace of this relationship. Making prices,

assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging—all this

preoccupied the primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a

certain sense it constituted thinking itself: it was here that was

trained the oldest form of sagacity, it was here in this sphere that we

can perhaps trace the first commencement of man’s pride, of his feeling

of superiority over other animals. Perhaps our word “Mensch” (manas)

still expresses just something of this self-pride: man denoted himself

as the being who measures values, who values and measures, as the

“assessing” animal par excellence. Sale and purchase, together with

their psychological concomitants, are older than the origins of any form

of social organisation and union: it is rather from the most rudimentary

form of individual right that the budding consciousness of exchange,

commerce, debt, right, obligation, compensation was first transferred to

the rudest and most elementary of the social complexes (in their

relation to similar complexes), the habit of comparing force with force,

together with that of measuring, of calculating. His eye was now

focussed to this perspective; and with that ponderous consistency

characteristic of ancient thought, which, though set in motion with

difficulty, yet proceeds inflexibly along the line on which it has

started, man soon arrived at the great generalisation, “everything has

its price, all can be paid for,” the oldest and most naive moral canon

of justice, the beginning of all “kindness,” of all “equity,” of all

“goodwill,” of all “objectivity” in the world. Justice in this initial

phase is the goodwill among people of about equal power to come to terms

with each other, to come to an understanding again by means of a

settlement, and with regard to the less powerful, to compel them to

agree among themselves to a settlement.

Measured always by the standard of antiquity (this antiquity, moreover,

is present or again possible at all periods), the community stands to

its members in that important and radical relationship of creditor to

his “owers.” Man lives in a community, man enjoys the advantages of a

community (and what advantages! we occasionally underestimate them

nowadays), man lives protected, spared, in peace and trust, secure from

certain injuries and enmities, to which the man outside the community,

the “peaceless” man, is exposed,—a German understands the original

meaning of “Elend” (êlend),—secure because he has entered into pledges

and obligations to the community in respect of these very injuries and

enmities. What happens when this is not the case? The community, the

defrauded creditor, will get itself paid, as well as it can, one can

reckon on that. In this case the question of the direct damage done by

the offender is quite subsidiary: quite apart from this the criminal[3]

is above all a breaker, a breaker of word and covenant to the whole, as

regards all the advantages and amenities of the communal life in which

up to that time he had participated. The criminal is an “ower” who not

only fails to repay the advances and advantages that have been given to

him, but even sets out to attack his creditor: consequently he is in the

future not only, as is fair, deprived of all these advantages and

amenities—he is in addition reminded of the importance of those

advantages. The wrath of the injured creditor, of the community, puts

him back in the wild and outlawed status from which he was previously

protected: the community repudiates him—and now every kind of enmity can

vent itself on him. Punishment is in this stage of civilisation simply

the copy, the mimic, of the normal treatment of the hated, disdained,

and conquered enemy, who is not only deprived of every right and

protection but of every mercy; so we have the martial law and triumphant

festival of the væ victis! in all its mercilessness and cruelty. This

shows why war itself (counting the sacrificial cult of war) has produced

all the forms under which punishment has manifested itself in history.

10.

As it grows more powerful, the community tends to take the offences of

the individual less seriously, because they are now regarded as being

much less revolutionary and dangerous to the corporate existence: the

evil-doer is no more outlawed and put outside the pale, the common wrath

can no longer vent itself upon him with its old licence,—on the

contrary, from this very time it is against this wrath, and particularly

against the wrath of those directly injured, that the evil-doer is

carefully shielded and protected by the community. As, in fact, the

penal law develops, the following characteristics become more and more

clearly marked: compromise with the wrath of those directly affected by

the misdeed; a consequent endeavour to localise the matter and to

prevent a further, or indeed a general spread of the disturbance;

attempts to find equivalents and to settle the whole matter

(compositio); above all, the will, which manifests itself with

increasing definiteness, to treat every offence as in a certain degree

capable of being paid off, and consequently, at any rate up to a certain

point, to isolate the offender from his act. As the power and the

self-consciousness of a community increases, so proportionately does the

penal law become mitigated; conversely every weakening and jeopardising

of the community revives the harshest forms of that law. The creditor

has always grown more humane proportionately as he has grown more rich;

finally the amount of injury he can endure without really suffering

becomes the criterion of his wealth. It is possible to conceive of a

society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power as to

indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting its wrong-doers go

scot-free.—“What do my parasites matter to me?” might society say. “Let

them live and flourish! I am strong enough for it.”—The justice which

began with the maxim, “Everything can be paid off, everything must be

paid off,” ends with connivance at the escape of those who cannot pay to

escape—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying

itself.—The self-destruction of Justice! we know the pretty name it

calls itself—Grace! it remains, as is obvious, the privilege of the

strongest, better still, their super-law.

11.

A deprecatory word here against the attempts, that have lately been

made, to find the origin of justice on quite another basis—namely, on

that of resentment. Let me whisper a word in the ear of the

psychologists, if they would fain study revenge itself at close

quarters: this plant blooms its prettiest at present among Anarchists

and anti-Semites, a hidden flower, as it has ever been, like the violet,

though, forsooth, with another perfume. And as like must necessarily

emanate from like, it will not be a matter for surprise that it is just

in such circles that we see the birth of endeavours (it is their old

birthplace—compare above, First Essay, paragraph 14), to sanctify

revenge under the name of justice (as though Justice were at bottom

merely a development of the consciousness of injury), and thus with the

rehabilitation of revenge to reinstate generally and collectively all

the reactive emotions. I object to this last point least of all. It even

seems meritorious when regarded from the standpoint of the whole problem

of biology (from which standpoint the value of these emotions has up to

the present been underestimated). And that to which I alone call

attention, is the circumstance that it is the spirit of revenge itself,

from which develops this new nuance of scientific equity (for the

benefit of hate, envy, mistrust, jealousy, suspicion, rancour, revenge).

This scientific “equity” stops immediately and makes way for the accents

of deadly enmity and prejudice, so soon as another group of emotions

comes on the scene, which in my opinion are of a much higher biological

value than these reactions, and consequently have a paramount claim to

the valuation and appreciation of science: I mean the really active

emotions, such as personal and material ambition, and so forth. (E.

Dühring, Value of Life; Course of Philosophy, and passim.) So much

against this tendency in general: but as for the particular maxim of

Dühring’s, that the home of Justice is to be found in the sphere of the

reactive feelings, our love of truth compels us drastically to invert

his own proposition and to oppose to him this other maxim: the last

sphere conquered by the spirit of justice is the sphere of the feeling

of reaction! When it really comes about that the just man remains just

even as regards his injurer (and not merely cold, moderate, reserved,

indifferent: being just is always a positive state); when, in spite of

the strong provocation of personal insult, contempt, and calumny, the

lofty and clear objectivity of the just and judging eye (whose glance is

as profound as it is gentle) is untroubled, why then we have a piece of

perfection, a past master of the world—something, in fact, which it

would not be wise to expect, and which should not at any rate be too

easily believed. Speaking generally, there is no doubt but that even the

justest individual only requires a little dose of hostility, malice, or

innuendo to drive the blood into his brain and the fairness from it. The

active man, the attacking, aggressive man is always a hundred degrees

nearer to justice than the man who merely reacts; he certainly has no

need to adopt the tactics, necessary in the case of the reacting man, of

making false and biassed valuations of his object. It is, in point of

fact, for this reason that the aggressive man has at all times enjoyed

the stronger, bolder, more aristocratic, and also freer outlook, the

better conscience. On the other hand, we already surmise who it really

is that has on his conscience the invention of the “bad conscience,”—the

resentful man! Finally, let man look at himself in history. In what

sphere up to the present has the whole administration of law, the actual

need of law, found its earthly home? Perchance in the sphere of the

reacting man? Not for a minute: rather in that of the active, strong,

spontaneous, aggressive man? I deliberately defy the above-mentioned

agitator (who himself makes this self-confession, “the creed of revenge

has run through all my works and endeavours like the red thread of

Justice”), and say, that judged historically law in the world represents

the very war against the reactive feelings, the very war waged on those

feelings by the powers of activity and aggression, which devote some of

their strength to damming and keeping within bounds this effervescence

of hysterical reactivity, and to forcing it to some compromise.

Everywhere where justice is practised and justice is maintained, it is

to be observed that the stronger power, when confronted with the weaker

powers which are inferior to it (whether they be groups, or

individuals), searches for weapons to put an end to the senseless fury

of resentment, while it carries on its object, partly by taking the

victim of resentment out of the clutches of revenge, partly by

substituting for revenge a campaign of its own against the enemies of

peace and order, partly by finding, suggesting, and occasionally

enforcing settlements, partly by standardising certain equivalents for

injuries, to which equivalents the element of resentment is henceforth

finally referred. The most drastic measure, however, taken and

effectuated by the supreme power, to combat the preponderance of the

feelings of spite and vindictiveness—it takes this measure as soon as it

is at all strong enough to do so—is the foundation of law, the

imperative declaration of what in its eyes is to be regarded as just and

lawful, and what unjust and unlawful: and while, after the foundation of

law, the supreme power treats the aggressive and arbitrary acts of

individuals, or of whole groups, as a violation of law, and a revolt

against itself, it distracts the feelings of its subjects from the

immediate injury inflicted by such a violation, and thus eventually

attains the very opposite result to that always desired by revenge,

which sees and recognises nothing but the standpoint of the injured

party. From henceforth the eye becomes trained to a more and more

impersonal valuation of the deed, even the eye of the injured party

himself (though this is in the final stage of all, as has been

previously remarked)—on this principle “right” and “wrong” first

manifest themselves after the foundation of law (and not, as Dühring

maintains, only after the act of violation). To talk of intrinsic right

and intrinsic wrong is absolutely non-sensical; intrinsically, an

injury, an oppression, an exploitation, an annihilation can be nothing

wrong, inasmuch as life is essentially (that is, in its cardinal

functions) something which functions by injuring, oppressing,

exploiting, and annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without

such a character. It is necessary to make an even more serious

confession:—viewed from the most advanced biological standpoint,

conditions of legality can be only exceptional conditions, in that they

are partial restrictions of the real life-will, which makes for power,

and in that they are subordinated to the life-will’s general end as

particular means, that is, as means to create larger units of strength.

A legal organisation, conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a

weapon in a fight of complexes of power, but as a weapon against

fighting, generally something after the style of Dühring’s communistic

model of treating every will as equal with every other will, would be a

principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of man, an outrage

on the future of man, a symptom of fatigue, a secret cut to

Nothingness.—

12.

A word more on the origin and end of punishment—two problems which are

or ought to be kept distinct, but which unfortunately are usually lumped

into one. And what tactics have our moral genealogists employed up to

the present in these cases? Their inveterate naïveté. They find out some

“end” in the punishment, for instance, revenge and deterrence, and then

in all their innocence set this end at the beginning, as the causa

fiendi of the punishment, and—they have done the trick. But the patching

up of a history of the origin of law is the last use to which the “End

in Law”[4] ought to be put. Perhaps there is no more pregnant principle

for any kind of history than the following, which, difficult though it

is to master, should none the less be mastered in every detail.—The

origin of the existence of a thing and its final utility, its practical

application and incorporation in a system of ends, are toto cœlo opposed

to each other—everything, anything, which exists and which prevails

anywhere, will always be put to new purposes by a force superior to

itself, will be commandeered afresh, will be turned and transformed to

new uses; all “happening” in the organic world consists of overpowering

and dominating, and again all overpowering and domination is a new

interpretation and adjustment, which must necessarily obscure or

absolutely extinguish the subsisting “meaning” and “end.” The most

perfect comprehension of the utility of any physiological organ (or also

of a legal institution, social custom, political habit, form in art or

in religious worship) does not for a minute imply any simultaneous

comprehension of its origin: this may seem uncomfortable and unpalatable

to the older men,—for it has been the immemorial belief that

understanding the final cause or the utility of a thing, a form, an

institution, means also understanding the reason for its origin: to give

an example of this logic, the eye was made to see, the hand was made to

grasp. So even punishment was conceived as invented with a view to

punishing. But all ends and all utilities are only signs that a Will to

Power has mastered a less powerful force, has impressed thereon out of

its own self the meaning of a function; and the whole history of a

“Thing,” an organ, a custom, can on the same principle be regarded as a

continuous “sign-chain” of perpetually new interpretations and

adjustments, whose causes, so far from needing to have even a mutual

connection, sometimes follow and alternate with each other absolutely

haphazard. Similarly, the evolution of a “thing,” of a custom, is

anything but its progressus to an end, still less a logical and direct

progressus attained with the minimum expenditure of energy and cost: it

is rather the succession of processes of subjugation, more or less

profound, more or less mutually independent, which operate on the thing

itself; it is, further, the resistance which in each case invariably

displayed this subjugation, the Protean wriggles by way of defence and

reaction, and, further, the results of successful counter-efforts. The

form is fluid, but the meaning is even more so—even inside every

individual organism the case is the same: with every genuine growth of

the whole, the “function” of the individual organs becomes shifted,—in

certain cases a partial perishing of these organs, a diminution of their

numbers (for instance, through annihilation of the connecting members),

can be a symptom of growing strength and perfection. What I mean is

this: even partial loss of utility, decay, and degeneration, loss of

function and purpose, in a word, death, appertain to the conditions of

the genuine progressus; which always appears in the shape of a will and

way to greater power, and is always realised at the expense of

innumerable smaller powers. The magnitude of a “progress” is gauged by

the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires: humanity as a mass

sacrificed to the prosperity of the one stronger species of Man—that

would be a progress. I emphasise all the more this cardinal

characteristic of the historic method, for the reason that in its

essence it runs counter to predominant instincts and prevailing taste,

which much prefer to put up with absolute casualness, even with the

mechanical senselessness of all phenomena, than with the theory of a

power-will, in exhaustive play throughout all phenomena. The democratic

idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and wishes to rule, the

modern misarchism (to coin a bad word for a bad thing), has gradually

but so thoroughly transformed itself into the guise of intellectualism,

the most abstract intellectualism, that even nowadays it penetrates and

has the right to penetrate step by step into the most exact and

apparently the most objective sciences: this tendency has, in fact, in

my view already dominated the whole of physiology and biology, and to

their detriment, as is obvious, in so far as it has spirited away a

radical idea, the idea of true activity. The tyranny of this

idiosyncrasy, however, results in the theory of “adaptation” being

pushed forward into the van of the argument, exploited; adaptation—that

means to say, a second-class activity, a mere capacity for “reacting”;

in fact, life itself has been defined (by Herbert Spencer) as an

increasingly effective internal adaptation to external circumstances.

This definition, however, fails to realise the real essence of life, its

will to power. It fails to appreciate the paramount superiority enjoyed

by those plastic forces of spontaneity, aggression, and encroachment

with their new interpretations and tendencies, to the operation of which

adaptation is only a natural corollary: consequently the sovereign

office of the highest functionaries in the organism itself (among which

the life-will appears as an active and formative principle) is

repudiated. One remembers Huxley’s reproach to Spencer of his

“administrative Nihilism”: but it is a case of something much more than

“administration.”

13.

To return to our subject, namely punishment, we must make consequently a

double distinction: first, the relatively permanent element, the custom,

the act, the “drama,” a certain rigid sequence of methods of procedure;

on the other hand, the fluid element, the meaning, the end, the

expectation which is attached to the operation of such procedure. At

this point we immediately assume, per analogiam (in accordance with the

theory of the historic method, which we have elaborated above), that the

procedure itself is something older and earlier than its utilisation in

punishment, that this utilisation was introduced and interpreted into

the procedure (which had existed for a long time, but whose employment

had another meaning), in short, that the case is different from that

hitherto supposed by our naïf genealogists of morals and of law, who

thought that the procedure was invented for the purpose of punishment,

in the same way that the hand had been previously thought to have been

invented for the purpose of grasping. With regard to the other element

in punishment, its fluid element, its meaning, the idea of punishment in

a very late stage of civilisation (for instance, contemporary Europe) is

not content with manifesting merely one meaning, but manifests a whole

synthesis “of meanings.” The past general history of punishment, the

history of its employment for the most diverse ends, crystallises

eventually into a kind of unity, which is difficult to analyse into its

parts, and which, it is necessary to emphasise, absolutely defies

definition. (It is nowadays impossible to say definitely the precise

reason for punishment: all ideas, in which a whole process is

promiscuously comprehended, elude definition; it is only that which has

no history, which can be defined.) At an earlier stage, on the contrary,

that synthesis of meanings appears much less rigid and much more

elastic; we can realise how in each individual case the elements of the

synthesis change their value and their position, so that now one element

and now another stands out and predominates over the others, nay, in

certain cases one element (perhaps the end of deterrence) seems to

eliminate all the rest. At any rate, so as to give some idea of the

uncertain, supplementary, and accidental nature of the meaning of

punishment and of the manner in which one identical procedure can be

employed and adapted for the most diametrically opposed objects, I will

at this point give a scheme that has suggested itself to me, a scheme

itself based on comparatively small and accidental material.—Punishment,

as rendering the criminal harmless and incapable of further

injury.—Punishment, as compensation for the injury sustained by the

injured party, in any form whatsoever (including the form of sentimental

compensation).—Punishment, as an isolation of that which disturbs the

equilibrium, so as to prevent the further spreading of the

disturbance.—Punishment as a means of inspiring fear of those who

determine and execute the punishment.—Punishment as a kind of

compensation for advantages which the wrong-doer has up to that time

enjoyed (for example, when he is utilised as a slave in the

mines).—Punishment, as the elimination of an element of decay (sometimes

of a whole branch, as according to the Chinese laws, consequently as a

means to the purification of the race, or the preservation of a social

type).—-Punishment as a festival, as the violent oppression and

humiliation of an enemy that has at last been subdued.—Punishment as a

mnemonic, whether for him who suffers the punishment—the so-called

“correction,” or for the witnesses of its administration. Punishment, as

the payment of a fee stipulated for by the power which protects the

evil-doer from the excesses of revenge.—Punishment, as a compromise with

the natural phenomenon of revenge, in so far as revenge is still

maintained and claimed as a privilege by the stronger races.—Punishment

as a declaration and measure of war against an enemy of peace, of law,

of order, of authority, who is fought by society with the weapons which

war provides, as a spirit dangerous to the community, as a breaker of

the contract on which the community is based, as a rebel, a traitor, and

a breaker of the peace.

14.

This list is certainly not complete; it is obvious that punishment is

overloaded with utilities of all kinds. This makes it all the more

permissible to eliminate one supposed utility, which passes, at any rate

in the popular mind, for its most essential utility, and which is just

what even now provides the strongest support for that faith in

punishment which is nowadays for many reasons tottering. Punishment is

supposed to have the value of exciting in the guilty the consciousness

of guilt; in punishment is sought the proper instrumentum of that

psychic reaction which becomes known as a “bad conscience,” “remorse.”

But this theory is even, from the point of view of the present, a

violation of reality and psychology: and how much more so is the case

when we have to deal with the longest period of man’s history, his

primitive history! Genuine remorse is certainly extremely rare among

wrong-doers and the victims of punishment; prisons and houses of

correction are not the soil on which this worm of remorse pullulates for

choice—this is the unanimous opinion of all conscientious observers, who

in many cases arrive at such a judgment with enough reluctance and

against their own personal wishes. Speaking generally, punishment

hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the

consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.

When it happens that it breaks the man’s energy and brings about a

piteous prostration and abjectness, such a result is certainly even less

salutary than the average effect of punishment, which is characterised

by a harsh and sinister doggedness. The thought of those prehistoric

millennia brings us to the unhesitating conclusion, that it was simply

through punishment that the evolution of the consciousness of guilt was

most forcibly retarded—at any rate in the victims of the punishing

power. In particular, let us not underestimate the extent to which, by

the very sight of the judicial and executive procedure, the wrong-doer

is himself prevented from feeling that his deed, the character of his

act, is intrinsically reprehensible: for he sees clearly the same kind

of acts practised in the service of justice, and then called good, and

practised with a good conscience; acts such as espionage, trickery,

bribery, trapping, the whole intriguing and insidious art of the

policeman and the informer—the whole system, in fact, manifested in the

different kinds of punishment (a system not excused by passion, but

based on principle), of robbing, oppressing, insulting, imprisoning,

racking, murdering.—All this he sees treated by his judges, not as acts

meriting censure and condemnation in themselves, but only in a

particular context and application. It was not on this soil that grew

the “bad conscience,” that most sinister and interesting plant of our

earthly vegetation— in point of fact, throughout a most lengthy period,

no suggestion of having to do with a “guilty man” manifested itself in

the consciousness of the man who judged and punished. One had merely to

deal with an author of an injury, an irresponsible piece of fate. And

the man himself, on whom the punishment subsequently fell like a piece

of fate, was occasioned no more of an “inner pain” than would be

occasioned by the sudden approach of some uncalculated event, some

terrible natural catastrophe, a rushing, crushing avalanche against

which there is no resistance.

15.

This truth came insidiously enough to the consciousness of Spinoza (to

the disgust of his commentators, who (like Kuno Fischer, for instance)

give themselves no end of trouble to misunderstand him on this point),

when one afternoon (as he sat raking up who knows what memory) he

indulged in the question of what was really left for him personally of

the celebrated morsus conscientiæ—Spinoza, who had relegated “good and

evil” to the sphere of human imagination, and indignantly defended the

honour of his “free” God against those blasphemers who affirmed that God

did everything sub ratione boni (“but this was tantamount to

subordinating God to fate, and would really be the greatest of all

absurdities”). For Spinoza the world had returned again to that

innocence in which it lay before the discovery of the bad conscience:

what, then, had happened to the morsus conscientiæ? “The antithesis of

gaudium,” said he at last to himself,—“A sadness accompanied by the

recollection of a past event which has turned out contrary to all

expectation” (Eth. III., Propos. XVIII. Schol. i. ii.). Evil-doers have

throughout thousands of years felt when overtaken by punishment exactly

like Spinoza, on the subject of their “offence”: “here is something

which went wrong contrary to my anticipation,” not “I ought not to have

done this.”—They submitted themselves to punishment, just as one submits

one’s self to a disease, to a misfortune, or to death, with that

stubborn and resigned fatalism which gives the Russians, for instance,

even nowadays, the advantage over us Westerners, in the handling of

life. If at that period there was a critique of action, the criterion

was prudence: the real effect of punishment is unquestionably chiefly to

be found in a sharpening of the sense of prudence, in a lengthening of

the memory, in a will to adopt more of a policy of caution, suspicion,

and secrecy; in the recognition that there are many things which are

unquestionably beyond one’s capacity; in a kind of improvement in

self-criticism. The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in

man and beast, are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of

cunning, the mastery of the desires: so it is that punishment tames man,

but does not make him “better”—it would be more correct even to go so

far as to assert the contrary (“Injury makes a man cunning,” says a

popular proverb: so far as it makes him cunning, it makes him also bad.

Fortunately, it often enough makes him stupid).

16.

At this juncture I cannot avoid trying to give a tentative and

provisional expression to my own hypothesis concerning the origin of the

bad conscience: it is difficult to make it fully appreciated, and it

requires continuous meditation, attention, and digestion. I regard the

bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound to contract

under the stress of the most radical change which he has ever

experienced—that change, when he found himself finally imprisoned within

the pale of society and of peace.

Just like the plight of the water-animals, when they were compelled

either to become land-animals or to perish, so was the plight of these

half-animals, perfectly adapted as they were to the savage life of war,

prowling, and adventure—suddenly all their instincts were rendered

worthless and “switched off.” Henceforward they had to walk on their

feet—“carry themselves,” whereas heretofore they had been carried by the

water: a terrible heaviness oppressed them. They found themselves clumsy

in obeying the simplest directions, confronted with this new and unknown

world they had no longer their old guides—the regulative instincts that

had led them unconsciously to safety—they were reduced, were those

unhappy creatures, to thinking, inferring, calculating, putting together

causes and results, reduced to that poorest and most erratic organ of

theirs, their “consciousness.” I do not believe there was ever in the

world such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort—further, those

old instincts had not immediately ceased their demands! Only it was

difficult and rarely possible to gratify them: speaking broadly, they

were compelled to satisfy themselves by new and, as it were,

hole-and-corner methods. All instincts which do not find a vent without,

turn inwards—this is what I mean by the growing “internalisation” of

man: consequently we have the first growth in man, of what subsequently

was called his soul. The whole inner world, originally as thin as if it

had been stretched between two layers of skin, burst apart and expanded

proportionately, and obtained depth, breadth, and height, when man’s

external outlet became obstructed. These terrible bulwarks, with which

the social organisation protected itself against the old instincts of

freedom (punishments belong pre-eminently to these bulwarks), brought it

about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man became turned

backwards against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the delight in

persecution, in surprises, change, destruction—the turning all these

instincts against their own possessors: this is the origin of the “bad

conscience.” It was man, who, lacking external enemies and obstacles,

and imprisoned as he was in the oppressive narrowness and monotony of

custom, in his own impatience lacerated, persecuted, gnawed, frightened,

and ill-treated himself; it was this animal in the hands of the tamer,

which beat itself against the bars of its cage; it was this being who,

pining and yearning for that desert home of which it had been deprived,

was compelled to create out of its own self, an adventure, a

torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert—it was this fool, this

homesick and desperate prisoner—who invented the “bad conscience.” But

thereby he introduced that most grave and sinister illness, from which

mankind has not yet recovered, the suffering of man from the disease

called man, as the result of a violent breaking from his animal past,

the result, as it were, of a spasmodic plunge into a new environment and

new conditions of existence, the result of a declaration of war against

the old instincts, which up to that time had been the staple of his

power, his joy, his formidableness. Let us immediately add that this

fact of an animal ego turning against itself, taking part against

itself, produced in the world so novel, profound, unheard-of,

problematic, inconsistent, and pregnant a phenomenon, that the aspect of

the world was radically altered thereby. In sooth, only divine

spectators could have appreciated the drama that then began, and whose

end baffles conjecture as yet—a drama too subtle, too wonderful, too

paradoxical to warrant its undergoing a non-sensical and unheeded

performance on some random grotesque planet! Henceforth man is to be

counted as one of the most unexpected and sensational lucky shots in the

game of the “big baby” of Heracleitus, whether he be called Zeus or

Chance—he awakens on his behalf the interest, excitement, hope, almost

the confidence, of his being the harbinger and forerunner of something,

of man being no end, but only a stage, an interlude, a bridge, a great

promise.

17.

It is primarily involved in this hypothesis of the origin of the bad

conscience, that that alteration was no gradual and no voluntary

alteration, and that it did not manifest itself as an organic adaptation

to new conditions, but as a break, a jump, a necessity, an inevitable

fate, against which there was no resistance and never a spark of

resentment. And secondarily, that the fitting of a hitherto unchecked

and amorphous population into a fixed form, starting as it had done in

an act of violence, could only be accomplished by acts of violence and

nothing else—that the oldest “State” appeared consequently as a ghastly

tyranny, a grinding ruthless piece of machinery, which went on working,

till this raw material of a semi-animal populace was not only thoroughly

kneaded and elastic, but also moulded. I used the word “State”: my

meaning is self-evident, namely, a herd of blonde beasts of prey, a race

of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organisation and

all its organising power pounces with its terrible claws on a

population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet

formless, as yet nomad. Such is the origin of the “State.” That

fantastic theory that makes it begin with a contract is, I think,

disposed of. He who can command, he who is a master by “nature,” he who

comes on the scene forceful in deed and gesture—what has he to do with

contracts? Such beings defy calculation, they come like fate, without

cause, reason, notice, excuse, they are there like the lightning is

there, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different,” to be

personally even hated. Their work is an instinctive creating and

impressing of forms, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists

that there are:—their appearance produces instantaneously a scheme of

sovereignty which is live, in which the functions are partitioned and

apportioned, in which above all no part is received or finds a place,

until pregnant with a “meaning” in regard to the whole. They are

ignorant of the meaning of guilt, responsibility, consideration, are

these born organisers; in them predominates that terrible artist-egoism,

that gleams like brass, and that knows itself justified to all eternity,

in its work, even as a mother in her child. It is not in them that there

grew the bad conscience, that is elementary—but it would not have grown

without them, repulsive growth as it was, it would be missing, had not a

tremendous quantity of freedom been expelled from the world by the

stress of their hammer-strokes, their artist violence, or been at any

rate made invisible and, as it were, latent. This instinct of freedom

forced into being latent—it is already clear—this instinct of freedom

forced back, trodden back, imprisoned within itself, and finally only

able to find vent and relief in itself; this, only this, is the

beginning of the “bad conscience.”

18.

Beware of thinking lightly of this phenomenon, by reason of its initial

painful ugliness. At bottom it is the same active force which is at work

on a more grandiose scale in those potent artists and organisers, and

builds states, which here, internally, on a smaller and pettier scale

and with a retrogressive tendency, makes itself a bad science in the

“labyrinth of the breast,” to use Goethe’s phrase, and which builds

negative ideals; it is, I repeat, that identical instinct of freedom (to

use my own language, the will to power): only the material, on which

this force with all its constructive and tyrannous nature is let loose,

is here man himself, his whole old animal self—and not as in the case of

that more grandiose and sensational phenomenon, the other man, other

men. This secret self-tyranny, this cruelty of the artist, this delight

in giving a form to one’s self as a piece of difficult, refractory, and

suffering material, in burning in a will, a critique, a contradiction, a

contempt, a negation; this sinister and ghastly labour of love on the

part of a soul, whose will is cloven in two within itself, which makes

itself suffer from delight in the infliction of suffering; this wholly

active bad conscience has finally (as one already anticipates)—true

fountainhead as it is of idealism and imagination—produced an abundance

of novel and amazing beauty and affirmation, and perhaps has really been

the first to give birth to beauty at all. What would beauty be,

forsooth, if its contradiction had not first been presented to

consciousness, if the ugly had not first said to itself, “I am ugly”? At

any rate, after this hint the problem of how far idealism and beauty can

be traced in such opposite ideas as “selflessness,” self-denial,

self-sacrifice, becomes less problematical; and indubitably in future we

shall certainly know the real and original character of the delight

experienced by the self-less, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing:

this delight is a phase of cruelty.—So much provisionally for the origin

of “altruism” as a moral value, and the marking out the ground from

which this value has grown: it is only the bad conscience, only the will

for self-abuse, that provides the necessary conditions for the existence

of altruism as a value.

19.

Undoubtedly the bad conscience is an illness, but an illness like

pregnancy is an illness. If we search out the conditions under which

this illness reaches its most terrible and sublime zenith, we shall see

what really first brought about its entry into the world. But to do this

we must take a long breath, and we must first of all go back once again

to an earlier point of view. The relation at civil law of the ower to

his creditor (which has already been discussed in detail), has been

interpreted once again (and indeed in a manner which historically is

exceedingly remarkable and suspicious) into a relationship, which is

perhaps more incomprehensible to us moderns than to any other era; that

is, into the relationship of the existing generation to its ancestors.

Within the original tribal association—we are talking of primitive

times—each living generation recognises a legal obligation towards the

earlier generation, and particularly towards the earliest, which founded

the family (and this is something much more than a mere sentimental

obligation, the existence of which, during the longest period of man’s

history, is by no means indisputable). There prevails in them the

conviction that it is only thanks to sacrifices and efforts of their

ancestors, that the race persists at all—and that this has to be paid

back to them by sacrifices and services. Thus is recognised the owing of

a debt, which accumulates continually by reason of these ancestors never

ceasing in their subsequent life as potent spirits to secure by their

power new privileges and advantages to the race. Gratis, perchance? But

there is no gratis for that raw and “mean-souled” age. What return can

be made?—Sacrifice (at first, nourishment, in its crudest sense),

festivals, temples, tributes of veneration, above all, obedience—since

all customs are, quâ works of the ancestors, equally their precepts and

commands—are the ancestors ever given enough? This suspicion remains and

grows: from time to time it extorts a great wholesale ransom, something

monstrous in the way of repayment of the creditor (the notorious

sacrifice of the first-born, for example, blood, human blood in any

case). The fear of ancestors and their power, the consciousness of owing

debts to them, necessarily increases, according to this kind of logic,

in the exact proportion that the race itself increases, that the race

itself becomes more victorious, more independent, more honoured, more

feared. This, and not the contrary, is the fact. Each step towards race

decay, all disastrous events, all symptoms of degeneration, of

approaching disintegration, always diminish the fear of the founders’

spirit, and whittle away the idea of his sagacity, providence, and

potent presence. Conceive this crude kind of logic carried to its

climax: it follows that the ancestors of the most powerful races must,

through the growing fear that they exercise on the imaginations, grow

themselves into monstrous dimensions, and become relegated to the gloom

of a divine mystery that transcends imagination—the ancestor becomes at

last necessarily transfigured into a god. Perhaps this is the very

origin of the gods, that is, an origin from fear! And those who feel

bound to add, “but from piety also,” will have difficulty in maintaining

this theory, with regard to the primeval and longest period of the human

race. And of course this is even more the case as regards the middle

period, the formative period of the aristocratic races—the aristocratic

races which have given back with interest to their founders, the

ancestors (heroes, gods), all those qualities which in the meanwhile

have appeared in themselves, that is, the aristocratic qualities. We

will later on glance again at the ennobling and promotion of the gods

(which of course is totally distinct from their “sanctification”): let

us now provisionally follow to its end the course of the whole of this

development of the consciousness of “owing.”

20.

According to the teaching of history, the consciousness of owing debts

to the deity by no means came to an end with the decay of the clan

organisation of society; just as mankind has inherited the ideas of

“good” and “bad” from the race-nobility (together with its fundamental

tendency towards establishing social distinctions), so with the heritage

of the racial and tribal gods it has also inherited the incubus of debts

as yet unpaid and the desire to discharge them. The transition is

effected by those large populations of slaves and bondsmen, who, whether

through compulsion or through submission and “mimicry,” have

accommodated themselves to the religion of their masters; through this

channel these inherited tendencies inundate the world. The feeling of

owing a debt to the deity has grown continuously for several centuries,

always in the same proportion in which the idea of God and the

consciousness of God have grown and become exalted among mankind. (The

whole history of ethnic fights, victories, reconciliations,

amalgamations, everything, in fact, which precedes the eventual classing

of all the social elements in each great race-synthesis, are mirrored in

the hotch-potch genealogy of their gods, in the legends of their fights,

victories, and reconciliations. Progress towards universal empires

invariably means progress towards universal deities; despotism, with its

subjugation of the independent nobility, always paves the way for some

system or other of monotheism.) The appearance of the Christian god, as

the record god up to this time, has for that very reason brought equally

into the world the record amount of guilt consciousness. Granted that we

have gradually started on the reverse movement, there is no little

probability in the deduction, based on the continuous decay in the

belief in the Christian god, to the effect that there also already

exists a considerable decay in the human consciousness of owing (ought);

in fact, we cannot shut our eyes to the prospect of the complete and

eventual triumph of atheism freeing mankind from all this feeling of

obligation to their origin, their causa prima. Atheism and a kind of

second innocence complement and supplement each other.

21.

So much for my rough and preliminary sketch of the interrelation of the

ideas “ought” (owe) and “duty” with the postulates of religion. I have

intentionally shelved up to the present the actual moralisation of these

ideas (their being pushed back into the conscience, or more precisely

the interweaving of the bad conscience with the idea of God), and at the

end of the last paragraph used language to the effect that this

moralisation did not exist, and that consequently these ideas had

necessarily come to an end, by reason of what had happened to their

hypothesis, the credence in our “creditor,” in God. The actual facts

differ terribly from this theory. It is with the moralisation of the

ideas “ought” and “duty,” and with their being pushed back into the bad

conscience, that comes the first actual attempt to reverse the direction

of the development we have just described, or at any rate to arrest its

evolution; it is just at this juncture that the very hope of an eventual

redemption has to put itself once for all into the prison of pessimism,

it is at this juncture that the eye has to recoil and rebound in despair

from off an adamantine impossibility, it is at this juncture that the

ideas “guilt” and “duty” have to turn backwards—turn backwards against

whom? There is no doubt about it; primarily against the “ower,” in whom

the bad conscience now establishes itself, eats, extends, and grows like

a polypus throughout its length and breadth, all with such virulence,

that at last, with the impossibility of paying the debt, there becomes

conceived the idea of the impossibility of paying the penalty, the

thought of its inexpiability (the idea of “eternal punishment”)—finally,

too, it turns against the “creditor,” whether found in the causa prima

of man, the origin of the human race, its sire, who henceforth becomes

burdened with a curse (“Adam,” “original sin,” “determination of the

will”), or in Nature from whose womb man springs, and on whom the

responsibility for the principle of evil is now cast (“Diabolisation of

Nature”), or in existence generally, on this logic an absolute white

elephant, with which mankind is landed (the Nihilistic flight from life,

the demand for Nothingness, or for the opposite of existence, for some

other existence, Buddhism and the like)—till suddenly we stand before

that paradoxical and awful expedient, through which a tortured humanity

has found a temporary alleviation, that stroke of genius called

Christianity:—God personally immolating himself for the debt of man, God

paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh, God as the

one being who can deliver man from what man had become unable to deliver

himself—the creditor playing scapegoat for his debtor, from love (can

you believe it?), from love of his debtor!...

22.

The reader will already have conjectured what took place on the stage

and behind the scenes of this drama. That will for self-torture, that

inverted cruelty of the animal man, who, turned subjective and scared

into introspection (encaged as he was in “the State,” as part of his

taming process), invented the bad conscience so as to hurt himself,

after the natural outlet for this will to hurt, became blocked—in other

words, this man of the bad conscience exploited the religious hypothesis

so as to carry his martyrdom to the ghastliest pitch of agonised

intensity. Owing something to God: this thought becomes his instrument

of torture. He apprehends in God the most extreme antitheses that he can

find to his own characteristic and ineradicable animal instincts, he

himself gives a new interpretation to these animal instincts as being

against what he “owes” to God (as enmity, rebellion, and revolt against

the “Lord,” the “Father,” the “Sire,” the “Beginning of the world”), he

places himself between the horns of the dilemma, “God” and “Devil.”

Every negation which he is inclined to utter to himself, to the nature,

naturalness, and reality of his being, he whips into an ejaculation of

“yes,” uttering it as something existing, living, efficient, as being

God, as the holiness of God, the judgment of God, as the hangmanship of

God, as transcendence, as eternity, as unending torment, as hell, as

infinity of punishment and guilt. This is a kind of madness of the will

in the sphere of psychological cruelty which is absolutely

unparalleled:—man’s will to find himself guilty and blameworthy to the

point of inexpiability, his will to think of himself as punished,

without the punishment ever being able to balance the guilt, his will to

infect and to poison the fundamental basis of the universe with the

problem of punishment and guilt, in order to cut off once and for all

any escape out of this labyrinth of “fixed ideas,” his will for rearing

an ideal—that of the “holy God”—face to face with which he can have

tangible proof of his own un-worthiness. Alas for this mad melancholy

beast man! What phantasies invade it, what paroxysms of perversity,

hysterical senselessness, and mental bestiality break out immediately,

at the very slightest check on its being the beast of action. All this

is excessively interesting, but at the same time tainted with a black,

gloomy, enervating melancholy, so that a forcible veto must be invoked

against looking too long into these abysses. Here is disease,

undubitably, the most ghastly disease that has as yet played havoc among

men: and he who can still hear (but man turns now deaf ears to such

sounds), how in this night of torment and nonsense there has rung out

the cry of love, the cry of the most passionate ecstasy, of redemption

in love, he turns away gripped by an invincible horror—in man there is

so much that is ghastly—too long has the world been a mad-house.

23.

Let this suffice once for all concerning the origin of the “holy God.”

The fact that in itself the conception of gods is not bound to lead

necessarily to this degradation of the imagination (a temporary

representation of whose vagaries we felt bound give), the fact that

there exist nobler methods of utilising the invention of gods than in

this self-crucifixion and self-degradation of man, in which the last two

thousand years of Europe have been past masters—these facts can

fortunately be still perceived from every glance that we cast at the

Grecian gods, these mirrors of noble and grandiose men, in which the

animal in man felt itself deified, and did not devour itself in

subjective frenzy. These Greeks long utilised their gods as simple

buffers against the “bad conscience”—so that they could continue to

enjoy their freedom of soul: this, of course, is diametrically opposed

to Christianity’s theory of its god. They went very far on this

principle, did these splendid and lion-hearted children; and there is no

lesser authority than that of the Homeric Zeus for making them realise

occasionally that they are taking life too casually. “Wonderful,” says

he on one occasion—it has to do with the case of Ægistheus, a very bad

case indeed—

“Wonderful how they grumble, the mortals against the immortals,

Only from us, they presume, comes evil, but in their folly,

Fashion they, spite of fate, the doom of their own disaster.”

Yet the reader will note and observe that this Olympian spectator and

judge is far from being angry with them and thinking evil of them on

this score. “How foolish they are,” so thinks he of the misdeeds of

mortals—and “folly,” “imprudence,” “a little brain disturbance,” and

nothing more, are what the Greeks, even of the strongest, bravest

period, have admitted to be the ground of much that is evil and

fatal.—Folly, not sin, do you understand?... But even this brain

disturbance was a problem—“Come, how is it even possible? How could it

have really got in brains like ours, the brains of men of aristocratic

ancestry, of men of fortune, of men of good natural endowments, of men

of the best society, of men of nobility and virtue?” This was the

question that for century on century the aristocratic Greek put to

himself when confronted with every (to him incomprehensible) outrage and

sacrilege with which one of his peers had polluted himself. “It must be

that a god had infatuated him,” he would say at last, nodding his

head.—This solution is typical of the Greeks, ... accordingly the gods

in those times subserved the functions of justifying man to a certain

extent even in evil—in those days they took upon themselves not the

punishment, but, what is more noble, the guilt.

24.

I conclude with three queries, as you will see. “Is an ideal actually

set up here, or is one pulled down?” I am perhaps asked.... But have ye

sufficiently asked yourselves how dear a payment has the setting up of

every ideal in the world exacted? To achieve that consummation how much

truth must always be traduced and misunderstood, how many lies must be

sanctified, how much conscience has got to be disturbed, how many pounds

of “God” have got to be sacrificed every time? To enable a sanctuary to

be set up a sanctuary has got to be destroyed: that is a law—show me an

instance where it has not been fulfilled!... We modern men, we inherit

the immemorial tradition of vivisecting the conscience, and practising

cruelty to our animal selves. That is the sphere of our most protracted

training, perhaps of our artistic prowess, at any rate of our

dilettantism and our perverted taste. Man has for too long regarded his

natural proclivities with an “evil eye,” so that eventually they have

become in his system affiliated to a bad conscience. A converse

endeavour would be intrinsically feasible—but who is strong enough to

attempt it?—namely, to affiliate to the “bad conscience” all those

unnatural proclivities, all those transcendental aspirations, contrary

to sense, instinct, nature, and animalism—in short, all past and present

ideals, which are all ideals opposed to life, and traducing the world.

To whom is one to turn nowadays with such hopes and pretensions?—It is

just the good men that we should thus bring about our ears; and in

addition, as stands to reason, the indolent, the hedgers, the vain, the

hysterical, the tired.... What is more offensive or more thoroughly

calculated to alienate, than giving any hint of the exalted severity

with which we treat ourselves? And again how conciliatory, how full of

love does all the world show itself towards us so soon as we do as all

the world docs, and “let ourselves go” like all the world. For such a

consummation we need spirits of different calibre than seems really

feasible in this age; spirits rendered potent through wars and

victories, to whom conquest, adventure, danger, even pain, have become a

need; for such a consummation we need habituation to sharp, rare air, to

winter wanderings, to literal and metaphorical ice and mountains; we

even need a kind of sublime malice, a supreme and most self-conscious

insolence of knowledge, which is the appanage of great health; we need

(to summarise the awful truth) just this great health!

Is this even feasible to-day?... But some day, in a stronger age than

this rotting and introspective present, must he in sooth come to us,

even the redeemer of great love and scorn, the creative spirit,

rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again away from every

transcendental plane and dimension, he whose solitude is misunderstanded

(sic) of the people, as though it were a flight from reality;—while

actually it is only his diving, burrowing, and penetrating into reality,

so that when he comes again to the light he can at once bring about by

these means the redemption of this reality; its redemption from the

curse which the old ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who

in this wise will redeem us from the old ideal, as he will from that

ideal’s necessary corollary of great nausea, will to nothingness, and

Nihilism; this tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, which renders

the will again free, who gives back to the world its goal and to man his

hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of

Nothingness—he must one day come.

25.

But what am I talking of? Enough! Enough? At this juncture I have only

one proper course, silence: otherwise tresspass on a domain open alone

to one who is younger than I, one stronger, more “future” than I—open

alone to Zarathustra, Zarathustra the godless.

THIRD ESSAY.

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS?

“Careless, mocking, forceful—so does wisdom wish us: she is a woman, and

never loves any one but a warrior.”

Thus Spake Zarathustra.

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too much;

in philosophers and scholars, a kind of “flair” and instinct for the

conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women, at

best an additional seductive fascination, a little morbidezza on a fine

piece of flesh, the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in physiological

failures and whiners (in the majority of mortals), an attempt to pose as

“too good” for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief weapon

in the battle with lingering pain and ennui; in priests, the actual

priestly faith, their best engine of power, and also the supreme

authority for power; in saints, finally a pretext for hibernation, their

novissima gloriæ cupido, their peace in nothingness (“God”), their form

of madness.

But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man,

lies expressed the fundamental feature of man’s will, his horror vacui:

he needs a goal—and he will sooner will nothingness than not will at

all.—Am I not understood?—Have I not been understood?—“Certainly not,

sir?”—Well, let us begin at the beginning.

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? Or, to take an individual case in

regard to which I have often been consulted, what is the meaning, for

example, of an artist like Richard Wagner paying homage to chastity in

his old age? He had always done so, of course, in a certain sense, but

it was not till quite the end, that he did so in an ascetic sense. What

is the meaning of this “change of attitude,” this radical revolution in

his attitude—for that was what it was? Wagner veered thereby straight

round into his own opposite. What is the meaning of an artist veering

round into his own opposite? At this point (granted that we do not mind

stopping a little over this question), we immediately call to mind the

best, strongest, gayest, and boldest period, that there perhaps ever was

in Wagner’s life: that was the period, when he was genuinely and deeply

occupied with the idea of “Luther’s Wedding.” Who knows what chance is

responsible for our now having the Meistersingers instead of this

wedding music? And how much in the latter is perhaps just an echo of the

former? But there is no doubt but that the theme would have dealt with

the praise of chastity. And certainly it would also have dealt with the

praise of sensuality, and even so, it would seem quite in order, and

even so, it would have been equally Wagnerian. For there is no necessary

antithesis between chastity and sensuality: every good marriage, every

authentic heart-felt love transcends this antithesis. Wagner would, it

seems to me, have done well to have brought this pleasing reality home

once again to his Germans, by means of a bold and graceful “Luther

Comedy,” for there were and are among the Germans many revilers of

sensuality; and perhaps Luther’s greatest merit lies just in the fact of

his having had the courage of his sensuality (it used to be called,

prettily enough, “evangelistic freedom “). But even in those cases where

that antithesis between chastity and sensuality does exist, there has

fortunately been for some time no necessity for it to be in any way a

tragic antithesis. This should, at any rate, be the case with all beings

who are sound in mind and body, who are far from reckoning their

delicate balance between “animal” and “angel,” as being on the face of

it one of the principles opposed to existence—the most subtle and

brilliant spirits, such as Goethe, such as Hafiz, have even seen in this

a further charm of life. Such “conflicts” actually allure one to life.

On the other hand, it is only too clear that when once these ruined

swine are reduced to worshipping chastity—and there are such swine—they

only see and worship in it the antithesis to themselves, the antithesis

to ruined swine. Oh what a tragic grunting and eagerness! You can just

think of it—they worship that painful and superfluous contrast, which

Richard Wagner in his latter days undoubtedly wished to set to music,

and to place on the stage! “For what purpose, forsooth?” as we may

reasonably ask. What did the swine matter to him; what do they matter to

us?

At this point it is impossible to beg the further question of what he

really had to do with that manly (ah, so unmanly) country bumpkin, that

poor devil and natural, Parsifal, whom he eventually made a Catholic by

such fraudulent devices. What? Was this Parsifal really meant seriously?

One might be tempted to suppose the contrary, even to wish it—that the

Wagnerian Parsifal was meant joyously, like a concluding play of a

trilogy or satyric drama, in which Wagner the tragedian wished to take

farewell of us, of himself, above all of tragedy, and to do so in a

manner that should be quite fitting and worthy, that is, with an excess

of the most extreme and flippant parody of the tragic itself, of the

ghastly earthly seriousness and earthly woe of old—a parody of that most

crude phase in the unnaturalness of the ascetic ideal, that had at

length been overcome. That, as I have said, would have been quite worthy

of a great tragedian; who like every artist first attains the supreme

pinnacle of his greatness when he can look down into himself and his

art, when he can laugh at himself. Is Wagner’s Parsifal his secret laugh

of superiority over himself, the triumph of that supreme artistic

freedom and artistic transcendency which he has at length attained. We

might, I repeat, wish it were so, for what can Parsifal, taken

seriously, amount to? Is it really necessary to see in it (according to

an expression once used against me) the product of an insane hate of

knowledge, mind, and flesh? A curse on flesh and spirit in one breath of

hate? An apostasy and reversion to the morbid Christian and obscurantist

ideals? And finally a self-negation and self-elimination on the part of

an artist, who till then had devoted all the strength of his will to the

contrary, namely, the highest artistic expression of soul and body. And

not only of his art; of his life as well. Just remember with what

enthusiasm Wagner followed in the footsteps of Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s

motto of “healthy sensuality” rang in the ears of Wagner during the

thirties and forties of the century, as it did in the ears of many

Germans (they dubbed themselves “Young Germans”), like the word of

redemption. Did he eventually change his mind on the subject? For it

seems at any rate that he eventually wished to change his teaching on

that subject ... and not only is that the case with the Parsifal

trumpets on the stage: in the melancholy, cramped, and embarrassed

lucubrations of his later years, there are a hundred places in which

there are manifestations of a secret wish and will, a despondent,

uncertain, unavowed will to preach actual retrogression, conversion,

Christianity, mediævalism, and to say to his disciples, “All is vanity!

Seek salvation elsewhere!” Even the “blood of the Redeemer” is once

invoked.

Let me speak out my mind in a case like this, which has many painful

elements—and it is a typical case: it is certainly best to separate an

artist from his work so completely that he cannot be taken as seriously

as his work. He is after all merely the presupposition of his work, the

womb, the soil, in certain cases the dung and manure, on which and out

of which it grows—and consequently, in most cases, something that must

be forgotten if the work itself is to be enjoyed. The insight into the

origin of a work is a matter for psychologists and vivisectors, but

never either in the present or the future for the æsthetes, the artists.

The author and creator of Parsifal was as little spared the necessity of

sinking and living himself into the terrible depths and foundations of

mediæval soul-contrasts, the necessity of a malignant abstraction from

all intellectual elevation, severity, and discipline, the necessity of a

kind of mental perversity (if the reader will pardon me such a word), as

little as a pregnant woman is spared the horrors and marvels of

pregnancy, which, as I have said, must be forgotten if the child is to

be enjoyed. We must guard ourselves against the confusion, into which an

artist himself would fall only too easily (to employ the English

terminology) out of psychological “contiguity”; as though the artist

himself actually were the object which he is able to represent, imagine,

and express. In point of fact, the position is that even if he conceived

he were such an object, he would certainly not represent, conceive,

express it. Homer would not have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a

Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust. A

complete and perfect artist is to all eternity separated from the

“real,” from the actual; on the other hand, it will be appreciated that

he can at times get tired to the point of despair of this eternal

“unreality” and falseness of his innermost being—and that he then

sometimes attempts to trespass on to the most forbidden ground, on

reality, and attempts to have real existence. With what success? The

success will be guessed—it is the typical velleity of the artist; the

same velleity to which Wagner fell a victim in his old age, and for

which he had to pay so dearly and so fatally (he lost thereby his most

valuable friends). But after all, quite apart from this velleity, who

would not wish emphatically for Wagner’s own sake that he had taken

farewell of us and of his art in a different manner, not with a

Parsifal, but in more victorious, more self-confident, more Wagnerian

style—a style less misleading, a style less ambiguous with regard to his

whole meaning, less Schopenhauerian, less Nihilistic?...

What, then, is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the case of an artist

we are getting to understand their meaning: Nothing at all ... or so

much that it is as good as nothing at all. Indeed, what is the use of

them? Our artists have for a long time past not taken up a sufficiently

independent attitude, either in the world or against it, to warrant

their valuations and the changes in these valuations exciting interest.

At all times they have played the valet of some morality, philosophy, or

religion, quite apart from the fact that unfortunately they have often

enough been the inordinately supple courtiers of their clients and

patrons, and the inquisitive toadies of the powers that are existing, or

even of the new powers to come. To put it at the lowest, they always

need a rampart, a support, an already constituted authority: artists

never stand by themselves, standing alone is opposed to their deepest

instincts. So, for example, did Richard Wagner take, “when the time had

come,” the philosopher Schopenhauer for his covering man in front, for

his rampart. Who would consider it even thinkable, that he would have

had the courage for an ascetic ideal, without the support afforded him

by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, without the authority of

Schopenhauer, which dominated Europe in the seventies? (This is without

consideration of the question whether an artist without the milk[5] of

an orthodoxy would have been possible at all.) This brings us to the

more serious question: What is the meaning of a real philosopher paying

homage to the ascetic ideal, a really self-dependent intellect like

Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a glance of bronze, who has the

courage to be himself, who knows how to stand alone without first

waiting for men who cover him in front, and the nods of his superiors?

Let us now consider at once the remarkable attitude of Schopenhauer

towards art, an attitude which has even a fascination for certain types.

For that is obviously the reason why Richard Wagner all at once went

over to Schopenhauer (persuaded thereto, as one knows, by a poet,

Herwegh), went over so completely that there ensued the cleavage of a

complete theoretic contradiction between his earlier and his later

æsthetic faiths—the earlier, for example, being expressed in Opera and

Drama, the later in the writings which he published from 1870 onwards.

In particular, Wagner from that time onwards (and this is the volte-face

which alienates us the most) had no scruples about changing his judgment

concerning the value and position of music itself. What did he care if

up to that time he had made of music a means, a medium, a “woman,” that

in order to thrive needed an end, a man—that is, the drama? He suddenly

realised that more could be effected by the novelty of the

Schopenhauerian theory in majorem musicæ gloriam—that is to say, by

means of the sovereignty of music, as Schopenhauer understood it; music

abstracted from and opposed to all the other arts, music as the

independent art-in-itself, not like the other arts, affording

reflections of the phenomenal world, but rather the language of the will

itself, speaking straight out of the “abyss” as its most personal,

original, and direct manifestation. This extraordinary rise in the value

of music (a rise which seemed to grow out of the Schopenhauerian

philosophy) was at once accompanied by an unprecedented rise in the

estimation in which the musician himself was held: he became now an

oracle, a priest, nay, more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece for the

“intrinsic essence of things,” a telephone from the other world—from

henceforward he talked not only music, did this ventriloquist of God, he

talked metaphysic; what wonder that one day he eventually talked ascetic

ideals.

Schopenhauer has made use of the Kantian treatment of the æsthetic

problem—though he certainly did not regard it with the Kantian eyes.

Kant thought that he showed honour to art when he favoured and placed in

the foreground those of the predicates of the beautiful, which

constitute the honour of knowledge: impersonality and universality. This

is not the place to discuss whether this was not a complete mistake; all

that I wish to emphasise is that Kant, just like other philosophers,

instead of envisaging the æsthetic problem from the standpoint of the

experiences of the artist (the creator), has only considered art and

beauty from the standpoint of the spectator, and has thereby

imperceptibly imported the spectator himself into the idea of the

“beautiful”! But if only the philosophers of the beautiful had

sufficient knowledge of this “spectator”!—Knowledge of him as a great

fact of personality, as a great experience, as a wealth of strong and

most individual events, desires, surprises, and raptures in the sphere

of beauty! But, as I feared, the contrary was always the case. And so we

get from our philosophers, from the very beginning, definitions on which

the lack of a subtler personal experience squats like a fat worm of

crass error, as it does on Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful.

“That is beautiful,” says Kant, “which pleases without interesting.”

Without interesting! Compare this definition with this other one, made

by a real “spectator” and “artist”—by Stendhal, who once called the

beautiful une promesse de bonheur. Here, at any rate, the one point

which Kant makes prominent in the æsthetic position is repudiated and

eliminated—le désintéressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? When,

forsooth, our æsthetes never get tired of throwing into the scales in

Kant’s favour the fact that under the magic of beauty men can look at

even naked female statues “without interest,” we can certainly laugh a

little at their expense:—in regard to this ticklish point the

experiences of artists are more “interesting,” and at any rate Pygmalion

was not necessarily an “unæsthetic man.” Let us think all the better of

the innocence of our æsthetes, reflected as it is in such arguments; let

us, for instance, count to Kant’s honour the country-parson naïveté of

his doctrine concerning the peculiar character of the sense of touch!

And here we come back to Schopenhauer, who stood in much closer

neighbourhood to the arts than did Kant, and yet never escaped outside

the pale of the Kantian definition; how was that? The circumstance is

marvellous enough: he interprets the expression, “without interest,” in

the most personal fashion, out of an experience which must in his case

have been part and parcel of his regular routine. On few subjects does

Schopenhauer speak with such certainty as on the working of æsthetic

contemplation: he says of it that it simply counteracts sexual interest,

like lupulin and camphor; he never gets tired of glorifying this escape

from the “Life-will” as the great advantage and utility of the æsthetic

state. In fact, one is tempted to ask if his fundamental conception of

Will and Idea, the thought that there can only exist freedom from the

“will” by means of “idea,” did not originate in a generalisation from

this sexual experience. (In all questions concerning the Schopenhauerian

philosophy, one should, by the bye, never lose sight of the

consideration that it is the conception of a youth of twenty-six, so

that it participates not only in what is peculiar to Schopenhauer’s

life, but in what is peculiar to that special period of his life.) Let

us listen, for instance, to one of the most expressive among the

countless passages which he has written in honour of the æsthetic state

(World as Will and Idea, i. 231); let us listen to the tone, the

suffering, the happiness, the gratitude, with which such words are

uttered: “This is the painless state which Epicurus praised as the

highest good and as the state of the gods; we are during that moment

freed from the vile pressure of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of

the will’s hard labour, the wheel of Ixion stands still.” What vehemence

of language! What images of anguish and protracted revulsion! How almost

pathological is that temporal antithesis between “that moment” and

everything else, the “wheel of Ixion,” “the hard labour of the will,”

“the vile pressure of the will.” But granted that Schopenhauer was a

hundred times right for himself personally, how does that help our

insight into the nature of the beautiful? Schopenhauer has described one

effect of the beautiful,—the calming of the will,—but is this effect

really normal? As has been mentioned, Stendhal, an equally sensual but

more happily constituted nature than Schopenhauer, gives prominence to

another effect of the “beautiful.” “The beautiful promises happiness.”

To him it is just the excitement of the “will” (the “interest”) by the

beauty that seems the essential fact. And does not Schopenhauer

ultimately lay himself open to the objection, that he is quite wrong in

regarding himself as a Kantian on this point, that he has absolutely

failed to understand in a Kantian sense the Kantian definition of the

beautiful—;that the beautiful pleased him as well by means of an

interest, by means, in fact, of the strongest and most personal interest

of all, that: of the victim of torture who escapes from his torture?—And

to come back again to our first question, “What is the meaning of a

philosopher paying homage to ascetic ideals?” We get now, at any rate, a

first hint; he wishes to escape from a torture.

Let us beware of making dismal faces at the word “torture”—there is

certainly in this case enough to deduct, enough to discount—there is

even something to laugh at. For we must certainly not underestimate the

fact that Schopenhauer, who in practice treated sexuality as a personal

enemy (including its tool, woman, that “instrumentum diaboli”), needed

enemies to keep him in a good humour; that he loved grim, bitter,

blackish-green words; that he raged for the sake of raging, out of

passion; that he would have grown ill, would have become a pessimist

(for he was not a pessimist, however much he wished to be), without his

enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality, and the whole “will for

existence” “keeping on.” Without them Schopenhauer would not have “kept

on,” that is a safe wager; he would have run away: but his enemies held

him fast, his enemies always enticed him back again to existence, his

wrath was just as theirs’ was to the ancient Cynics, his balm, his

recreation, his recompense, his remedium against disgust, his happiness.

So much with regard to what is most personal in the case of

Schopenhauer; on the other hand, there is still much which is typical in

him—and only now we come back to our problem. It is an accepted and

indisputable fact, so long as there are philosophers in the world and

wherever philosophers have existed (from India to England, to take the

opposite poles of philosophic ability), that there exists a real

irritation and rancour on the part of philosophers towards sensuality.

Schopenhauer is merely the most eloquent, and if one has the ear for it,

also the most fascinating and enchanting outburst. There similarly

exists a real philosophic bias and affection for the whole ascetic

ideal; there should be no illusions on this score. Both these feelings,

as has been said, belong to the type; if a philosopher lacks both of

them, then he is—you may be certain of it—never anything but a “pseudo.”

What does this mean? For this state of affairs must first be,

interpreted: in itself it stands there stupid, to all eternity, like any

“Thing-in-itself.” Every animal, including la bête philosophe, strives

instinctively after an optimum of favourable conditions, under which he

can let his whole strength have play, and achieves his maximum

consciousness of power; with equal instinctiveness, and with a fine

perceptive flair which is superior to any reason, every animal shudders

mortally at every kind of disturbance and hindrance which obstructs or

could obstruct his way to that optimum (it is not his way to happiness

of which I am talking, but his way to power, to action, the most

powerful action, and in point of fact in many cases his way to

unhappiness). Similarly, the philosopher shudders mortally at marriage,

together with all that could persuade him to it—marriage as a fatal

hindrance on the way to the optimum. Up to the present what great

philosophers have been married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza,

Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not married, and, further, one

cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy,

that is my rule; as for that exception of a Socrates—the malicious

Socrates married himself, it seems, ironice, just to prove this very

rule. Every philosopher would say, as Buddha said, when the birth of a

son was announced to him: “Râhoula has been born to me, a fetter has

been forged for me” (Râhoula means here “a little demon”); there must

come an hour of reflection to every “free spirit” (granted that he has

had previously an hour of thoughtlessness), just as one came once to the

same Buddha: “Narrowly cramped,” he reflected, “is life in the house; it

is a place of uncleanness; freedom is found in leaving the house.”

Because he thought like this, he left the house. So many bridges to

independence are shown in the ascetic idea], that the philosopher cannot

refrain from exultation and clapping of hands when he hears the history

of all those resolute ones, who on one day uttered a nay to all

servitude and went into some desert; even granting that they were only

strong asses, and the absolute opposite of strong minds. What, then,

does the ascetic ideal mean in a philosopher? This is my answer—it will

have been guessed long ago: when he sees this ideal the philosopher

smiles because he sees therein an optimum of the conditions of the

highest and boldest intellectuality; he does not thereby deny

“existence,” he rather affirms thereby his existence and only his

existence, and this perhaps to the point of not being far off the

blasphemous wish, pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus,

fiam!

These philosophers, you see, are by no means uncorrupted witnesses and

judges of the value of the ascetic ideal. They think of themselves —what

is the “saint” to them? They think of that which to them personally is

most indispensable; of freedom from compulsion, disturbance, noise:

freedom from business, duties, cares; of clear head; of the dance,

spring, and flight of thoughts; of good air—rare, clear, free, dry, as

is the air on the heights, in which every animal creature becomes more

intellectual and gains wings; they think of peace in every cellar; all

the hounds neatly chained; no baying of enmity and uncouth rancour; no

remorse of wounded ambition; quiet and submissive internal organs, busy

as mills, but unnoticed; the heart alien, transcendent, future,

posthumous—to summarise, they mean by the ascetic ideal the joyous

asceticism of a deified and newly fledged animal, sweeping over life

rather than resting. We know what are the three great catch-words of the

ascetic ideal: poverty, humility, chastity; and now just look closely at

the life of all the great fruitful inventive spirits—you will always

find again and again these three qualities up to a certain extent. Not

for a minute, as is self-evident, as though, perchance, they were part

of their virtues—what has this type of man to do with virtues?—but as

the most essential and natural conditions of their best existence, their

finest fruitfulness. In this connection it is quite possible that their

predominant intellectualism had first to curb an unruly and irritable

pride, or an insolent sensualism, or that it had all its work cut out to

maintain its wish for the “desert” against perhaps an inclination to

luxury and dilettantism, or similarly against an extravagant liberality

of heart and hand. But their intellect did effect all this, simply

because it was the dominant instinct, which carried through its orders

in the case of all the other instincts. It effects it still; if it

ceased to do so, it would simply not be dominant. But there is not one

iota of “virtue” in all this. Further, the desert, of which I just

spoke, in which the strong, independent, and well-equipped spirits

retreat into their hermitage—oh, how different is it from the cultured

classes’ dream of a desert! In certain cases, in fact, the cultured

classes themselves are the desert. And it is certain that all the actors

of the intellect would not endure this desert for a minute. It is

nothing like romantic and Syrian enough for them, nothing like enough of

a stage desert! Here as well there are plenty of asses, but at this

point the resemblance ceases. But a desert nowadays is something like

this—perhaps a deliberate obscurity; a getting-out-of the way of one’s

self; a fear of noise, admiration, papers, influence; a little office, a

daily task, something that hides rather than brings to light; sometimes

associating with harmless, cheerful beasts and fowls, the sight of which

refreshes; a mountain for company, but not a dead one, one with eyes

(that is, with lakes); in certain cases even a room in a crowded hotel

where one can reckon on not being recognised, and on being able to talk

with impunity to every one: here is the desert—oh, it is lonely enough,

believe me! I grant that when Heracleitus retreated to the courts and

cloisters of the colossal temple of Artemis, that “wilderness” was

worthier; why do we lack such temples? (perchance we do not lack them: I

just think of my splendid study in the Piazza di San Marco, in spring,

of course, and in the morning, between ten and twelve). But that which

Heracleitus shunned is still just what we too avoid nowadays: the noise

and democratic babble of the Ephesians, their politics, their news from

the “empire” (I mean, of course, Persia), their market-trade in “the

things of to-day “—for there is one thing from which we philosophers

especially need a rest—from the things of “to-day.” We honour the

silent, the cold, the noble, the far, the past, everything, in fact, at

the sight of which the soul is not bound to brace itself up and defend

itself—something with which one can speak without speaking aloud. Just

listen now to the tone a spirit has when it speaks; every spirit has its

own tone and loves its own tone. That thing yonder, for instance, is

bound to be an agitator, that is, a hollow head, a hollow mug: whatever

may go into him, everything comes back from him dull and thick, heavy

with the echo of the great void. That spirit yonder nearly always speaks

hoarse: has he, perchance, thought himself hoarse? It may be so—ask the

physiologists—but he who thinks in words, thinks as a speaker and not as

a thinker (it shows that he does not think of objects or think

objectively, but only of his relations with objects—that, in point of

fact, he only thinks of himself and his audience). This third one speaks

aggressively, he comes too near our body, his breath blows on us—we shut

our mouth involuntarily, although he speaks to us through a book: the

tone of his style supplies the reason—he has no time, he has small faith

in himself, he finds expression now or never. But a spirit who is sure

of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited,

A philosopher is recognised by the fact that he shuns three brilliant

and noisy things—fame, princes, and women: which is not to say that they

do not come to him. He shuns every glaring light: therefore he shuns his

time and its “daylight.” Therein he is as a shadow; the deeper sinks the

sun, the greater grows the shadow. As for his humility, he endures, as

he endures darkness, a certain dependence and obscurity: further, he is

afraid of the shock of lightning, he shudders at the insecurity of a

tree which is too isolated and too exposed, on which every storm vents

its temper, every temper its storm. His “maternal” instinct, his secret

love for that which grows in him, guides him into states where he is

relieved from the necessity of taking care of himself, in the same way

in which the “mother” instinct in woman has thoroughly maintained up to

the present woman’s dependent position. After all, they demand little

enough, do these philosophers, their favourite motto is, “He who

possesses is possessed.” All this is not, as I must say again and again,

to be attributed to a virtue, to a meritorious wish for moderation and

simplicity; but because their supreme lord so demands of them, demands

wisely and inexorably; their lord who is eager only for one thing, for

which alone he musters, and for which alone he hoards everything—time,

strength, love, interest. This kind of man likes not to be disturbed by

enmity, he likes not to be disturbed by friendship, it is a type which

forgets or despises easily. It strikes him as bad form to play the

martyr, “to suffer for truth”—he leaves all that to the ambitious and to

the stage-heroes of the intellect, and to all those, in fact, who have

time enough for such luxuries (they themselves, the philosophers, have

something to do for truth). They make a sparing use of big words; they

are said to be adverse to the word “truth” itself: it has a “high

falutin’” ring. Finally, as far as the chastity of philosophers is

concerned, the fruitfulness of this type of mind is manifestly in

another sphere than that of children; perchance in some other sphere,

too, they have the survival of their name, their little immortality

(philosophers in ancient India would express themselves with still

greater boldness: “Of what use is posterity to him whose soul is the

world?”). In this attitude there is not a trace of chastity, by reason

of any ascetic scruple or hatred of the flesh, any more than it is

chastity for an athlete or a jockey to abstain from women; it is rather

the will of the dominant instinct, at any rate, during the period of

their advanced philosophic pregnancy. Every artist knows the harm done

by sexual intercourse on occasions of great mental strain and

preparation; as far as the strongest artists and those with the surest

instincts are concerned, this is not necessarily a case of

experience—hard experience—but it is simply their “maternal” instinct

which, in order to benefit the growing work, disposes recklessly (beyond

all its normal stocks and supplies) of the vigour of its animal life;

the greater power then absorbs the lesser. Let us now apply this

interpretation to gauge correctly the case of Schopenhauer, which we

have already mentioned: in his case, the sight of the beautiful acted

manifestly like a resolving irritant on the chief power of his nature

(the power of contemplation and of intense penetration); so that this

strength exploded and became suddenly master of his consciousness. But

this by no means excludes the possibility of that particular sweetness

and fulness, which is peculiar to the æsthetic state, springing directly

from the ingredient of sensuality (just as that “idealism” which is

peculiar to girls at puberty originates in the same source)—it may be,

consequently, that sensuality is not removed by the approach of the

æsthetic state, as Schopenhauer believed, but merely becomes

transfigured, and ceases to enter into the consciousness as sexual

excitement. (I shall return once again to this point in connection with

the more delicate problems of the physiology of the æsthetic, a subject

which up to the present has been singularly untouched and unelucidated.)

A certain asceticism, a grimly gay whole-hearted renunciation, is, as we

have seen, one of the most favourable conditions for the highest

intellectualism, and, consequently, for the most natural corollaries of

such intellectualism: we shall therefore be proof against any surprise

at the philosophers in particular always treating the ascetic ideal with

a certain amount of predilection. A serious historical investigation

shows the bond between the ascetic ideal and philosophy to be still much

tighter and still much stronger. It may be said that it was only in the

leading strings of this ideal that philosophy really learnt to make its

first steps and baby paces—alas how clumsily, alas how crossly, alas how

ready to tumble down and lie on its stomach was this shy little darling

of a brat with its bandy legs! The early history of philosophy is like

that of all good things;—for a long time they had not the courage to be

themselves, they kept always looking round to see if no one would come

to their help; further, they were afraid of all who looked at them. Just

enumerate in order the particular tendencies and virtues of the

philosopher—his tendency to doubt, his tendency to deny, his tendency to

wait (to be “ephectic”), his tendency to analyse, search, explore, dare,

his tendency to compare and to equalise, his will to be neutral and

objective, his will for everything which is “sine ira et studio”:—has it

yet been realised that for quite a lengthy period these tendencies went

counter to the first claims of morality and conscience? (To say nothing

at all of Reason, which even Luther chose to call Frau Klüglin,[6] the

sly whore.) Has it been yet appreciated that a philosopher, in the event

of his arriving at self-consciousness, must needs feel himself an

incarnate “nitimur in vetitum”—and consequently guard himself against

“his own sensations,” against self-consciousness? It is, I repeat, just

the same with all good things, on which we now pride ourselves; even

judged by the standard of the ancient Greeks, our whole modern life, in

so far as it is not weakness, but power and the consciousness of power,

appears pure “Hybris” and godlessness: for the things which are the very

reverse of those which we honour to-day, have had for a long time

conscience on their side, and God as their guardian. “Hybris” is our

whole attitude to nature nowadays, our violation of nature with the help

of machinery, and all the unscrupulous ingenuity of our scientists and

engineers. “Hybris” is our attitude to God, that is, to some alleged

teleological and ethical spider behind the meshes of the great trap of

the causal web. Like Charles the Bold in his war with Louis the

Eleventh, we may say, “je combats l’universelle araignée”; “Hybris” is

our attitude to ourselves—for we experiment with ourselves in a way that

we would not allow with any animal, and with pleasure and curiosity open

our soul in our living body: what matters now to us the “salvation” of

the soul? We heal ourselves afterwards: being ill is instructive, we

doubt it not, even more instructive than being well—inoculators of

disease seem to us to-day even more necessary than any medicine-men and

“saviours.” There is no doubt we do violence to ourselves nowadays, we

crackers of the soul’s kernel, we incarnate riddles, who are ever asking

riddles, as though life were naught else than the cracking of a nut; and

even thereby must we necessarily become day by day more and more worthy

to be asked questions and worthy to ask them, even thereby do we

perchance also become worthier to—live?

... All good things were once bad things; from every original sin has

grown an original virtue. Marriage, for example, seemed for a long time

a sin against the rights of the community; a man formerly paid a fine

for the insolence of claiming one woman to himself (to this phase

belongs, for instance, the jus primæ noctis, to-day still in Cambodia

the privilege of the priest, that guardian of the “good old customs”).

The soft, benevolent, yielding, sympathetic feelings—eventually valued

so highly that they almost became “intrinsic values,” were for a very

long time actually despised by their possessors: gentleness was then a

subject for shame, just as hardness is now (compare Beyond Good and

Evil, Aph. 260). The submission to law: oh, with what qualms of

conscience was it that the noble races throughout the world renounced

the vendetta and gave the law power over themselves! Law was long a

vetitum, a blasphemy, an innovation; it was introduced with force, like

a force, to which men only submitted with a sense of personal shame.

Every tiny step forward in the world was formerly made at the cost of

mental and physical torture. Nowadays the whole of this point of

view—“that not only stepping forward, nay, stepping at all, movement,

change, all needed their countless martyrs,” rings in our ears quite

strangely. I have put it forward in the Dawn of Day, Aph. 18. “Nothing

is purchased more dearly,” says the same book a little later, “than the

modicum of human reason and freedom which is now our pride. But that

pride is the reason why it is now almost impossible for us to feel in

sympathy with those immense periods of the ‘Morality of Custom,’ which

lie at the beginning of the ‘world’s history,’ constituting as they do

the real decisive historical principle which has fixed the character of

humanity; those periods, I repeat, when throughout the world suffering

passed for virtue, cruelty for virtue, deceit for virtue, revenge for

virtue, repudiation of the reason for virtue; and when, conversely,

well-being passed current for danger, the desire for knowledge for

danger, pity for danger, peace for danger, being pitied for shame, work

for shame, madness for divinity, and change for immorality and incarnate

corruption!”

10.

There is in the same book, Aph. 12, an explanation of the burden of

unpopularity under which the earliest race of contemplative men had to

live—despised almost as widely as they were first feared! Contemplation

first appeared on earth in a disguised shape, in an ambiguous form, with

an evil heart and often with an uneasy head: there is no doubt about it.

The inactive, brooding, unwarlike element in the instincts of

contemplative men long invested them with a cloud of suspicion: the only

way to combat this was to excite a definite fear. And the old Brahmans,

for example, knew to a nicety how to do this! The oldest philosophers

were well versed in giving to their very existence and appearance,

meaning, firmness, background, by reason whereof men learnt to fear

them; considered more precisely, they did this from an even more

fundamental need, the need of inspiring in themselves fear and

self-reverence. For they found even in their own souls all the

valuations turned against themselves; they had to fight down every kind

of suspicion and antagonism against “the philosophic element in

themselves.” Being men of a terrible age, they did this with terrible

means: cruelty to themselves, ingenious self-mortification—this was the

chief method of these ambitious hermits and intellectual

revolutionaries, who were obliged to force down the gods and the

traditions of their own soul, so as to enable themselves to believe in

their own revolution. I remember the famous story of the King

Vicvamitra, who, as the result of a thousand years of self-martyrdom,

reached such a consciousness of power and such a confidence in himself

that he undertook to build a new heaven: the sinister symbol of the

oldest and newest history of philosophy in the whole world. Every one

who has ever built anywhere a “new heaven” first found the power thereto

in his own hell.... Let us compress the facts into a short formula. The

philosophic spirit had, in order to be possible to any extent at all, to

masquerade and disguise itself as one of the previously fixed types of

the contemplative man, to disguise itself as priest, wizard, soothsayer,

as a religious man generally: the ascetic ideal has for a long time

served the philosopher as a superficial form, as a condition which

enabled him to exist.... To be able to be a philosopher he had to

exemplify the ideal; to exemplify it, he was bound to believe in it. The

peculiarly etherealised abstraction of philosophers, with their negation

of the world, their enmity to life, their disbelief in the senses, which

has been maintained up to the most recent time, and has almost thereby

come to be accepted as the ideal philosophic attitude—this abstraction

is the result of those enforced conditions under which philosophy came

into existence, and continued to exist; inasmuch as for quite a very

long time philosophy would have been absolutely impossible in the world

without an ascetic cloak and dress, without an ascetic

self-misunderstanding. Expressed plainly and palpably, the ascetic

priest has taken the repulsive and sinister form of the caterpillar,

beneath which and behind which alone philosophy could live and slink

about....

Has all that really changed? Has that flamboyant and dangerous winged

creature, that “spirit” which that caterpillar concealed within itself,

has it, I say, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, lighter world, really and

finally flung off its hood and escaped into the light? Can we to-day

point to enough pride, enough daring, enough courage, enough

self-confidence, enough mental will, enough will for responsibility,

enough freedom of the will, to enable the philosopher to be now in the

world really—possible?

11.

And now, after we have caught sight of the ascetic priest, let us tackle

our problem. What is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? It now first

becomes serious—vitally serious. We are now confronted with the real

representatives of the serious. “What is the meaning of all

seriousness?” This even more radical question is perchance already on

the tip of our tongue: a question, fairly, for physiologists, but which

we for the time being skip. In that ideal the ascetic priest finds not

only his faith, but also his will, his power, his interest. His right to

existence stands and falls with that ideal. What wonder that we here run

up against a terrible opponent (on the supposition, of course, that we

are the opponents of that ideal), an opponent fighting for his life

against those who repudiate that ideal!... On the other hand, it is from

the outset improbable that such a biased attitude towards our problem

will do him any particular good; the ascetic priest himself will

scarcely prove the happiest champion of his own ideal (on the same

principle on which a woman usually fails when she wishes to champion

“woman”)—let alone proving the most objective critic and judge of the

controversy now raised. We shall therefore—so much is already

obvious—rather have actually to help him to defend himself properly

against ourselves, than we shall have to fear being too well beaten by

him. The idea, which is the subject of this dispute, is the value of our

life from the standpoint of the ascetic priests: this life, then

(together with the whole of which it is a part, “Nature,” “the world,”

the whole sphere of becoming and passing away), is placed by them in

relation to an existence of quite another character, which it excludes

and to which it is opposed, unless it deny its own self: in this case,

the case of an ascetic life, life is taken as a bridge to another

existence. The ascetic treats life as a maze, in which one must walk

backwards till one comes to the place where it starts; or he treats it

as an error which one may, nay must, refute by action: for he demands

that he should be followed; he enforces, where he can, his valuation of

existence. What does this mean? Such a monstrous valuation is not an

exceptional case, or a curiosity recorded in human history: it is one of

the most general and persistent facts that there are. The reading from

the vantage of a distant star of the capital letters of our earthly

life, would perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the

especially ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant, and

repulsive creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves,

of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible

out of pleasure in hurting—presumably their one and only pleasure. Let

us consider how regularly, how universally, how practically at every

single period the ascetic priest puts in his appearance: he belongs to

no particular race; he thrives everywhere; he grows out of all classes.

Not that he perhaps bred this valuation by heredity and propagated

it—the contrary is the case. It must be a necessity of the first order

which makes this species, hostile, as it is, to life, always grow again

and always thrive again.—Life itself must certainly have an interest in

the continuance of such a type of self-contradiction. For an ascetic

life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without parallel,

the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be

master, not over some element in life, but over life itself, over life’s

deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an attempt made to

utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does the green eye of

jealousy turn even against physiological well-being, especially against

the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy; while a sense of

pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in decay, in pain, in

misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment, in the exercising,

flagellation, and sacrifice of the self. All this is in the highest

degree paradoxical: we are here confronted with a rift that wills itself

to be a rift, which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even

becomes more and more certain of itself, more and more triumphant, in

proportion as its own presupposition, physiological vitality, decreases.

“The triumph just in the supreme agony:” under this extravagant emblem

did the ascetic ideal fight from of old; in this mystery of seduction,

in this picture of rapture and torture, it recognised its brightest

light, its salvation, its final victory. Crux, nux, lux—it has all these

three in one.

12.

Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness

is induced to philosophise; on what will it vent its pet caprice? On

that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true, to be

real; it will look for error in those very places where the life

instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for

instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy,

reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity,

the whole logical contrast of “Subject” and “Object”—errors, nothing but

errors! To renounce the belief in one’s own ego, to deny to one’s self

one’s own “reality”—what a triumph! and here already we have a much

higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a triumph over the senses,

over the palpable, but an infliction of violence and cruelty on reason;

and this ecstasy culminates in the ascetic self-contempt, the ascetic

scorn of one’s own reason making this decree: there is a domain of truth

and of life, but reason is specially excluded therefrom.... By the bye,

even in the Kantian idea of “the intellegible character of things” there

remains a trace of that schism, so dear to the heart of the ascetic,

that schism which likes to turn reason against reason; in fact,

“intelligible character” means in Kant a kind of quality in things of

which the intellect comprehends this much, that for it, the intellect,

it is absolutely incomprehensible. After all, let us, in our character

of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the

ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long

raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same

way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another

vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its

eternal “Objectivity”—objectivity being understood not as “contemplation

without interest” (for that is inconceivable and non-sensical), but as

the ability to have the pros and cons in one’s power and to switch them

on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of

knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional

interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues,

henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of

dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a “pure, will-less, painless,

timeless subject of knowledge”; let us guard ourselves from the

tentacles of such contradictory ideas as “pure reason,” “absolute

spirituality,” “knowledge-in-itself”:—in these theories an eye that

cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has

no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting

functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of

which “abstract” seeing first became seeing something; in these theories

consequently the absurd and the non-sensical is always demanded of the

eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a “knowing” from a

perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more

eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will

be our “idea” of that thing, our “objectivity.” But the elimination of

the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry,

granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual

castration?

13.

But let us turn back. Such a self-contradiction, as apparently manifests

itself among the ascetics, “Life turned against Life,” is—this much is

absolutely obvious—from the physiological and not now from the

psychological standpoint, simply nonsense. It can only be an apparent

contradiction; it must be a kind of provisional expression, an

explanation, a formula, an adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding

of something, whose real nature could not be understood for a long time,

and whose real essence could not be described; a mere word jammed into

an old gap of human knowledge. To put briefly the facts against its

being real: the ascetic ideal springs from the prophylactic and

self-preservative instincts which mark a decadent life, which seeks by

every means in its power to maintain its position and fight for its

existence; it points to a partial physiological depression and

exhaustion, against which the most profound and intact life-instincts

fight ceaselessly with new weapons and discoveries. The ascetic ideal is

such a weapon: its position is consequently exactly the reverse of that

which the worshippers of the ideal imagine—life struggles in it and

through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge

for the preservation of life. An important fact is brought out in the

extent to which, as history teaches, this ideal could rule and exercise

power over man, especially in all those places where the civilisation

and taming of man was completed: that fact is, the diseased state of man

up to the present, at any rate, of the man who has been tamed, the

physiological struggle of man with death (more precisely, with the

disgust with life, with exhaustion, with the wish for the “end”). The

ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of another kind,

an existence on another plane,—he is, in fact, the highest point of this

wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the very power of this

wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it is just that which

makes him into a tool that must labour to create more favourable

conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the human plane—it is

with this very power that he keeps the whole herd of failures,

distortions, abortions, unfortunates, sufferers from themselves of every

kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman goes instinctively on

in front. You understand me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent

enemy of life, this denier—he actually belongs to the really great

conservative and affirmative forces of life.... What does it come from,

this diseased state? For man is more diseased, more uncertain, more

changeable, more unstable than any other animal, there is no doubt of

it—he is the diseased animal: what does it spring from? Certainly he has

also dared, innovated, braved more, challenged fate more than all the

other animals put together; he, the great experimenter with himself, the

unsatisfied, the insatiate, who struggles for the supreme mastery with

beast, Nature, and gods, he, the as yet ever uncompelled, the ever

future, who finds no more any rest from his own aggressive strength,

goaded inexorably on by the spur of the future dug into the flesh of the

present:—how should not so brave and rich an animal also be the most

endangered, the animal with the longest and deepest sickness among all

sick animals?... Man is sick of it, oft enough there are whole epidemics

of this satiety (as about 1348, the time of the Dance of Death): but

even this very nausea, this tiredness, this disgust with himself, all

this is discharged from him with such force that it is immediately made

into a new fetter. His “nay,” which he utters to life, brings to light

as though by magic an abundance of graceful “yeas”; even when he wounds

himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction, it is

subsequently the wound itself that forces him to live.

14.

The more normal is this sickliness in man—and we cannot dispute this

normality—the higher honour should be paid to the rare cases of

psychical and physical powerfulness, the windfalls of humanity, and the

more strictly should the sound be guarded from that worst of air, the

air of the sick-room. Is that done? The sick are the greatest danger for

the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong,

but from the weakest. Is that known? Broadly considered, it is not for a

minute the fear of man, whose diminution should be wished for; for this

fear forces the strong to be strong, to be at times terrible—it

preserves in its integrity the sound type of man. What is to be feared,

what does work with a fatality found in no other fate, is not the great

fear of, but the great nausea with, man; and equally so the great pity

for man. Supposing that both these things were one day to espouse each

other, then inevitably the maximum of monstrousness would immediately

come into the world—the “last will” of man, his will for nothingness,

Nihilism. And, in sooth, the way is well paved thereto. He who not only

has his nose to smell with, but also has eyes and ears, he sniffs almost

wherever he goes to-day an air something like that of a mad-house, the

air of a hospital—I am speaking, as stands to reason, of the cultured

areas of mankind, of every kind of “Europe” that there is in fact in the

world. The sick are the great danger of man, not the evil, not the

“beasts of prey.” They who are from the outset botched, oppressed,

broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the

life beneath the feet of man, who instil the most dangerous venom and

scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. Where shall we

escape from it, from that covert look (from which we carry away a deep

sadness), from that averted look of him who is misborn from the

beginning, that look which betrays what such a man says to himself—that

look which is a groan?” Would that I were something else,” so groans

this look, “but there is no hope. I am what I am: how could I get away

from myself? And, verily—I am sick of myself!” On such a soil of

self-contempt, a veritable swamp soil, grows that weed, that poisonous

growth, and all so tiny, so hidden, so ignoble, so sugary. Here teem the

worms of revenge and vindictiveness; here the air reeks of things secret

and unmentionable; here is ever spun the net of the most malignant

conspiracy—the conspiracy of the sufferers against the sound and the

victorious; here is the sight of the victorious hated. And what lying so

as not to acknowledge this hate as hate! What a show of big words and

attitudes, what an art of “righteous” calumniation! These abortions!

what a noble eloquence gushes from their lips! What an amount of sugary,

slimy, humble submission oozes in their eyes! What do they really want?

At any rate to represent righteousness ness, love, wisdom, superiority,

that is the ambition of these “lowest ones,” these sick ones! And how

clever does such an ambition make them! You cannot, in fact, but admire

the counterfeiter dexterity with which the stamp of virtue, even the

ring, the golden ring of virtue, is here imitated. They have taken a

lease of virtue absolutely for themselves, have these weaklings and

wretched invalids, there is no doubt of it; “We alone are the good, the

righteous,” so do they speak, “we alone are the homines bonæ

voluntatis.” They stalk about in our midst as living reproaches, as

warnings to us—as though health, fitness, strength, pride, the sensation

of power, were really vicious things in themselves, for which one would

have some day to do penance, bitter penance. Oh, how they themselves are

ready in their hearts to exact penance, how they thirst after being

hangmen!

Among them is an abundance of revengeful ones disguised as judges, who

ever mouth the word righteousness like a venomous spittle—with mouth, I

say, always pursed, always ready to spit at everything, which does not

wear a discontented look, but is of good cheer as it goes on its way.

Among them, again, is that most loathsome species of the vain, the lying

abortions, who make a point of representing “beautiful souls,” and

perchance of bringing to the market as “purity of heart” their distorted

sensualism swathed in verses and other bandages; the species of

“self-comforters” and masturbators of their own souls. The sick man’s

will to represent some form or other of superiority, his instinct for

crooked paths, which lead to a tyranny over the healthy—where can it not

be found, this will to power of the very weakest? The sick woman

especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing,

tyrannising. The sick woman, moreover, spares nothing living, nothing

dead; she grubs up again the most buried things (the Bogos say, “Woman

is a hyena”). Look into the background of every family, of every body,

of every community: everywhere the fight of the sick against the

healthy—a silent fight for the most part with minute poisoned powders,

with pin-pricks, with spiteful grimaces of patience, but also at times

with that diseased pharisaism of pure pantomime, which plays for choice

the rôle of “righteous indignation.” Right into the hallowed chambers of

knowledge can it make itself heard, can this hoarse yelping of sick

hounds, this rabid lying and frenzy of such “noble” Pharisees (I remind

readers, who have ears, once more of that Berlin apostle of revenge,

Eugen Dühring, who makes the most disreputable and revolting use in all

present-day Germany of moral refuse; Dühring, the paramount moral

blusterer that there is to-day, even among his own kidney, the

Anti-Semites). They are all men of resentment, are these physiological

distortions and worm-riddled objects, a whole quivering kingdom of

burrowing revenge, indefatigable and insatiable in its outbursts against

the happy, and equally so in disguises for revenge, in pretexts for

revenge: when will they really reach their final, fondest, most sublime

triumph of revenge? At that time, doubtless, when they succeed in

pushing their own misery, in fact, all misery, into the consciousness of

the happy; so that the latter begin one day to be ashamed of their

happiness, and perchance say to themselves when they meet, “It is a

shame to be happy! there is too much misery!” ... But there could not

possibly be a greater and more fatal misunderstanding than that of the

happy, the fit, the strong in body and soul, beginning in this way to

doubt their right to happiness. Away with this “perverse world”! Away

with this shameful soddenness of sentiment! Preventing the sick making

the healthy sick—for that is what such a soddenness comes to—this ought

to be our supreme object in the world—but for this it is above all

essential that the healthy should remain separated from the sick, that

they should even guard themselves from the look of the sick, that they

should not even associate with the sick. Or may it, perchance, be their

mission to be nurses or doctors? But they could not mistake and disown

their mission more grossly—the higher must not degrade itself to be the

tool of the lower, the pathos of distance must to all eternity keep

their missions also separate. The right of the happy to existence, the

right of bells with a full tone over the discordant cracked bells, is

verily a thousand times greater: they alone are the sureties of the

future, they alone are bound to man’s future. What they can, what they

must do, that can the sick never do, should never do! but if they are to

be enabled to do what only they must do, how can they possibly be free

to play the doctor, the comforter, the “Saviour” of the sick?... And

therefore good air! good air! and away, at any rate, from the

neighbourhood of all the madhouses and hospitals of civilisation! And

therefore good company, our own company, or solitude, if it must be so!

but away, at any rate, from the evil fumes of internal corruption and

the secret worm-eaten state of the sick! that, forsooth, my friends, we

may defend ourselves, at any rate for still a time, against the two

worst plagues that could have been reserved for us—against the great

nausea with man! against the great pity for man!

15.

If you have understood in all their depths—and I demand that you should

grasp them profoundly and understand them profoundly—the reasons for the

impossibility of its being the business of the healthy to nurse the

sick, to make the sick healthy, it follows that you have grasped this

further necessity—the necessity of doctors and nurses who themselves are

sick. And now we have and hold with both our hands the essence of the

ascetic priest. The ascetic priest must be accepted by us as the

predestined saviour, herdsman, and champion of the sick herd: thereby do

we first understand his awful historic mission. The lordship over

sufferers is his kingdom, to that points his instinct, in that he finds

his own special art, his master-skill, his kind of happiness. He must

himself be sick, he must be kith and kin to the sick and the abortions

so as to understand them, so as to arrive at an understanding with them;

but he must also be strong, even more master of himself than of others,

impregnable, forsooth, in his will for power, so as to acquire the trust

and the awe of the weak, so that he can be their hold, bulwark, prop,

compulsion, overseer, tyrant, god. He has to protect them, protect his

herds—against whom? Against the healthy, doubtless also against the envy

towards the healthy. He must be the natural adversary and scorner of

every rough, stormy, reinless, hard, violently-predatory health and

power. The priest is the first form of the more delicate animal that

scorns more easily than it hates. He will not be spared the waging of

war with the beasts of prey, a war of guile (of “spirit”) rather than of

force, as is self-evident—he will in certain cases find it necessary to

conjure up out of himself, or at any rate to represent practically a new

type of the beast of prey—a new animal monstrosity in which the polar

bear, the supple, cold, crouching panther, and, not least important, the

fox, are joined together in a trinity as fascinating as it is fearsome.

If necessity exacts it, then will he come on the scene with bearish

seriousness, venerable, wise, cold, full of treacherous superiority, as

the herald and mouthpiece of mysterious powers, sometimes going among

even the other kind of beasts of prey, determined as he is to sow on

their soil, wherever he can, suffering, discord, self-contradiction, and

only too sure of his art, always to be lord of sufferers at all times.

He brings with him, doubtless, salve and balsam; but before he can play

the physician he must first wound; so, while he soothes the pain which

the wound makes, he at the same time poisons the wound. Well versed is

he in this above all things, is this wizard and wild beast tamer, in

whose vicinity everything healthy must needs become ill, and everything

ill must needs become tame. He protects, in sooth, his sick herd well

enough, does this strange herdsman; he protects them also against

themselves, against the sparks (even in the centre of the herd) of

wickedness, knavery, malice, and all the other ills that the plaguey and

the sick are heir to; he fights with cunning, hardness, and stealth

against anarchy and against the ever imminent break-up inside the herd,

where resentment, that most dangerous blasting-stuff and explosive, ever

accumulates and accumulates. Getting rid of this blasting-stuff in such

a way that it does not blow up the herd and the herdsman, that is his

real feat, his supreme utility; if you wish to comprise in the shortest

formula the value of the priestly life, it would be correct to say the

priest is the diverter of the course of resentment. Every sufferer, in

fact, searches instinctively for a cause of his suffering; to put it

more exactly, a doer,—to put it still more precisely, a sentient

responsible doer,—in brief, something living, on which, either actually

or in effigie, he can on any pretext vent his emotions. For the venting

of emotions is the sufferer’s greatest attempt at alleviation, that is

to say, stupefaction, his mechanically desired narcotic against pain of

any kind. It is in this phenomenon alone that is found, according to my

judgment, the real physiological cause of resentment, revenge, and their

family is to be found—that is, in a demand for the deadening of pain

through emotion: this cause is generally, but in my view very

erroneously, looked for in the defensive parry of a bare protective

principle of reaction, of a “reflex movement” in the case of any sudden

hurt and danger, after the manner that a decapitated frog still moves in

order to get away from a corrosive acid. But the difference is

fundamental. In one case the object is to prevent being hurt any more;

in the other case the object is to deaden a racking, insidious, nearly

unbearable pain by a more violent emotion of any kind whatsoever, and at

any rate for the time being to drive it out of the consciousness—for

this purpose an emotion is needed, as wild an emotion as possible, and

to excite that emotion some excuse or other is needed. “It must be

somebody’s fault that I feel bad”—this kind of reasoning is peculiar to

all invalids, and is but the more pronounced, the more ignorant they

remain of the real cause of their feeling bad, the physiological cause

(the cause may lie in a disease of the nervus sympathicus, or in an

excessive secretion of bile, or in a want of sulphate and phosphate of

potash in the blood, or in pressure in the bowels which stops the

circulation of the blood, or in degeneration of the ovaries, and so

forth). Ail sufferers have an awful resourcefulness and ingenuity in

finding excuses for painful emotions; they even enjoy their jealousy,

their broodings over base actions and apparent injuries, they burrow

through the intestines of their past and present in their search for

obscure mysteries, wherein they will be at liberty to wallow in a

torturing suspicion and get drunk on the venom of their own malice—they

tear open the oldest wounds, they make themselves bleed from the scars

which have long been healed, they make evil-doers out of friends, wife,

child, and everything which is nearest to them. “I suffer: it must be

somebody’s fault”—so thinks every sick sheep. But his herdsman, the

ascetic priest, says to him, “Quite so, my sheep, it must be the fault

of some one; but thou thyself art that some one, it is all the fault of

thyself alone—it is the fault of thyself alone against thyself”: that is

bold enough, false enough, but one thing is at least attained; thereby,

as I have said, the course of resentment is—diverted.

16.

You can see now what the remedial instinct of life has at least tried to

effect, according to my conception, through the ascetic priest, and the

purpose for which he had to employ a temporary tyranny of such

paradoxical and anomalous ideas as “guilt,” “sin,” “sinfulness,”

“corruption,” “damnation.” What was done was to make the sick harmless

up to a certain point, to destroy the incurable by means of themselves,

to turn the milder cases severely on to themselves, to give their

resentment a backward direction (“man needs but one thing”), and to

exploit similarly the bad instincts of all sufferers with a view to

self-discipline, self-surveillance, self-mastery. It is obvious that

there can be no question at all in the case of a “medication” of this

kind, a mere emotional medication, of any real healing of the sick in

the physiological sense; it cannot even for a moment be asserted that in

this connection the instinct of life has taken healing as its goal and

purpose. On the one hand, a kind of congestion and organisation of the

sick (the word “Church” is the most popular name for it): on the other,

a kind of provisional safeguarding of the comparatively healthy, the

more perfect specimens, the cleavage of a rift between healthy and

sick—for a long time that was all! and it was much! it was very much!

I am proceeding, as you see, in this essay, from an hypothesis which, as

far as such readers as I want are concerned, does not require to be

proved; the hypothesis that “sinfulness” in man is not an actual fact,

but rather merely the interpretation of a fact, of a physiological

discomfort,—a discomfort seen through a moral religious perspective

which is no longer binding upon us. The fact, therefore, that any one

feels “guilty,” “sinful,” is certainly not yet any proof that he is

right in feeling so, any more than any one is healthy simply because he

feels healthy. Remember the celebrated witch-ordeals: in those days the

most acute and humane judges had no doubt but that in these cases they

were confronted with guilt,—the “witches” themselves had no doubt on the

point,—and yet the guilt was lacking. Let me elaborate this hypothesis:

I do not for a minute accept the very “pain in the soul” as a real fact,

but only as an explanation (a casual explanation) of facts that could

not hitherto be precisely formulated; I regard it therefore as something

as yet absolutely in the air and devoid of scientific cogency—just a

nice fat word in the place of a lean note of interrogation. When any one

fails to get rid of his “pain in the soul,” the cause is, speaking

crudely, to be found not in his “soul” but more probably in his stomach

(speaking crudely, I repeat, but by no means wishing thereby that you

should listen to me or understand me in a crude spirit). A strong and

well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all

included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough

morsels to swallow. If he fails to “relieve himself” of an experience,

this kind of indigestion is quite as much physiological as the other

indigestion—and indeed, in more ways than one, simply one of the results

of the other. You can adopt such a theory, and yet entre nous be

nevertheless the strongest opponent of all materialism.

17.

But is he really a physician, this ascetic priest? We already understand

why we are scarcely allowed to call him a physician, however much he

likes to feel a “saviour” and let himself be worshipped as a saviour.[7]

It is only the actual suffering, the discomfort of the sufferer, which

he combats, not its cause, not the actual state of sickness—this needs

must constitute our most radical objection to priestly medication. But

just once put yourself into that point of view, of which the priests

have a monopoly, you will find it hard to exhaust your amazement, at

what from that standpoint he has completely seen, sought, and found. The

mitigation of suffering, every kind of “consoling”—all this manifests

itself as his very genius: with what ingenuity has he interpreted his

mission of consoler, with what aplomb and audacity has he chosen weapons

necessary for the part. Christianity in particular should be dubbed a

great treasure-chamber of ingenious consolations,—such a store of

refreshing, soothing, deadening drugs has it accumulated within itself;

so many of the most dangerous and daring expedients has it hazarded;

with such subtlety, refinement, Oriental refinement, has it divined what

emotional stimulants can conquer, at any rate for a time, the deep

depression, the leaden fatigue, the black melancholy of physiological

cripples—for, speaking generally, all religions are mainly concerned

with fighting a certain fatigue and heaviness that has infected

everything. You can regard it as prima facie probable that in certain

places in the world there was almost bound to prevail from time to time

among large masses of the population a sense of physiological

depression, which, however, owing to their lack of physiological

knowledge, did not appear to their consciousness as such, so that

consequently its “cause” and its cure can only be sought and essayed in

the science of moral psychology (this, in fact, is my most general

formula for what is generally called a “religion”). Such a feeling of

depression can have the most diverse origins; it may be the result of

the crossing of too heterogeneous races (or of classes—genealogical and

racial differences are also brought out in the classes: the European

“Weltschmerz,” the “Pessimism” of the nineteenth century, is really the

result of an absurd and sudden class-mixture); it may be brought about

by a mistaken emigration—a race falling into a climate for which its

power of adaptation is insufficient (the case of the Indians in India);

it may be the effect of old age and fatigue (the Parisian pessimism from

1850 onwards); it may be a wrong diet (the alcoholism of the Middle

Ages, the nonsense of vegetarianism—which, however, have in their favour

the authority of Sir Christopher in Shakespeare); it may be

blood-deterioration, malaria, syphilis, and the like (German depression

after the Thirty Years’ War, which infected half Germany with evil

diseases, and thereby paved the way for German servility, for German

pusillanimity). In such a case there is invariably recourse to a war on

a grand scale with the feeling of depression; let us inform ourselves

briefly on its most important practices and phases (I leave on one side,

as stands to reason, the actual philosophic war against the feeling of

depression which is usually simultaneous—it is interesting enough, but

too absurd, too practically negligible, too full of cobwebs, too much of

a hole-and-corner affair, especially when pain is proved to be a

mistake, on the naïf hypothesis that pain must needs vanish when the

mistake underlying it is recognised—but behold! it does anything but

vanish ...). That dominant depression is primarily fought by weapons

which reduce the consciousness of life itself to the lowest degree.

Wherever possible, no more wishes, no more wants; shun everything which

produces emotion, which produces “blood” (eating no salt, the fakir

hygiene); no love; no hate; equanimity; no revenge; no getting rich; no

work; begging; as far as possible, no woman, or as little woman as

possible; as far as the intellect is concerned, Pascal’s principle, “il

faut s’abêtir.” To put the result in ethical and psychological language,

“self-annihilation,” “sanctification”; to put it in physiological

language, “hypnotism”—the attempt to find some approximate human

equivalent for what hibernation is for certain animals, for what

æstivation is for many tropical plants, a minimum of assimilation and

metabolism in which life just manages to subsist without really coming

into the consciousness. An amazing amount of human energy has been

devoted to this object—perhaps uselessly? There cannot be the slightest

doubt but that such sportsmen of “saintliness,” in whom at times nearly

every nation has abounded, have really found a genuine relief from that

which they have combated with such a rigorous training—in countless

cases they really escaped by the help of their system of hypnotism away

from deep physiological depression; their method is consequently counted

among the most universal ethnological facts. Similarly it is improper to

consider such a plan for starving the physical element and the desires,

as in itself a symptom of insanity (as a clumsy species of

roast-beef-eating “freethinkers” and Sir Christophers are fain to do);

all the more certain is it that their method can and does pave the way

to all kinds of mental disturbances, for instance, “inner lights” (as

far as the case of the Hesychasts of Mount Athos), auditory and visual

hallucinations, voluptuous ecstasies and effervescences of sensualism

(the history of St. Theresa). The explanation of such events given by

the victims is always the acme of fanatical falsehood; this is

self-evident. Note well, however, the tone of implicit gratitude that

rings in the very will for an explanation of such a character. The

supreme state, salvation itself, that final goal of universal hypnosis

and peace, is always regarded by them as the mystery of mysteries, which

even the most supreme symbols are inadequate to express; it is regarded

as an entry and homecoming to the essence of things, as a liberation

from all illusions, as “knowledge,” as “truth,” as “being” as an escape

from every end, every wish, every action, as something even beyond Good

and Evil.

“Good and Evil,” quoth the Buddhists, “both are fetters. The perfect man

is master of them both.”

“The done and the undone,” quoth the disciple of the Vedânta, “do him no

hurt; the good and the evil he shakes from off him, sage that he is; his

kingdom suffers no more from any act; good and evil, he goes beyond them

both.”—An absolutely Indian conception, as much Brahmanist as Buddhist.

Neither in the Indian nor in the Christian doctrine is this “Redemption”

regarded as attainable by means of virtue and moral improvement, however

high they may place the value of the hypnotic efficiency of virtue: keep

clear on this point—indeed it simply corresponds with the facts. The

fact that they remained true on this point is perhaps to be regarded as

the best specimen of realism in the three great religions, absolutely

soaked as they are with morality, with this one exception. “For those

who know, there is no duty.” “Redemption is not attained by the

acquisition of virtues; for redemption consists in being one with

Brahman, who is incapable of acquiring any perfection; and equally

little does it consist in the giving up of faults, for the Brahman,

unity with whom is what constitutes redemption, is eternally pure”

(these passages are from the Commentaries of the Cankara, quoted from

the first real European expert of the Indian philosophy, my friend Paul

Deussen). We wish, therefore, to pay honour to the idea of “redemption”

in the great religions, but it is somewhat hard to remain serious in

view of the appreciation meted out to the deep sleep by these exhausted

pessimists who are too tired even to dream—to the deep sleep considered,

that is, as already a fusing into Brahman, as the attainment of the unio

mystica with God. “When he has completely gone to sleep,” says on this

point the oldest and most venerable “script,” “and come to perfect rest,

so that he sees no more any vision, then, oh dear one, is he united with

Being, he has entered into his own self—encircled by the Self with its

absolute knowledge, he has no more any consciousness of that which is

without or of that which is within. Day and night cross not these

bridges, nor age, nor death, nor suffering, nor good deeds, nor evil

deeds.” “In deep sleep,” say similarly the believers in this deepest of

the three great religions, “does the soul lift itself from out this body

of ours, enters the supreme light and stands out therein in its true

shape: therein is it the supreme spirit itself, which travels about,

while it jests and plays and enjoys itself, whether with women, or

chariots, or friends; there do its thoughts turn no more back to this

appanage of a body, to which the ‘prana’ (the vital breath) is harnessed

like a beast of burden to the cart.” None the less we will take care to

realise (as we did when discussing “redemption”) that in spite of all

its pomps of Oriental extravagance this simply expresses the same

criticism on life as did the clear, cold, Greekly cold, but yet

suffering Epicurus. The hypnotic sensation of nothingness, the peace of

deepest sleep, anæsthesia in short––that is what passes with the

sufferers and the absolutely depressed for, forsooth, their supreme

good, their value of values; that is what must be treasured by them as

something positive, be felt by them as the essence of the Positive

(according to the same logic of the feelings, nothingness is in all

pessimistic religions called God).

18.

Such a hypnotic deadening of sensibility and susceptibility to pain,

which presupposes somewhat rare powers, especially courage, contempt of

opinion, intellectual stoicism, is less frequent than another and

certainly easier training which is tried against states of depression. I

mean mechanical activity. It is indisputable that a suffering existence

can be thereby considerably alleviated. This fact is called to-day by

the somewhat ignoble title of the “Blessing of work.” The alleviation

consists in the attention of the sufferer being absolutely diverted from

suffering, in the incessant monopoly of the consciousness by action, so

that consequently there is little room left for suffering––for narrow is

it, this chamber of human consciousness! Mechanical activity and its

corollaries, such as absolute regularity, punctilious unreasoning

obedience, the chronic routine of life, the complete occupation of time,

a certain liberty to be impersonal, nay, a training in “impersonality,”

self-forgetfulness, “incuria sui”––with what thoroughness and expert

subtlety have all these methods been exploited by the ascetic priest in

his war with pain!

When he has to tackle sufferers of the lower orders, slaves, or

prisoners (or women, who for the most part are a compound of

labour-slave and prisoner), all he has to do is to juggle a little with

the names, and to rechristen, so as to make them see henceforth a

benefit, a comparative happiness, in objects which they hated—the

slave’s discontent with his lot was at any rate not invented by the

priests. An even more popular means of fighting depression is the

ordaining of a little joy, which is easily accessible and can be made

into a rule; this medication is frequently used in conjunction with the

former ones. The most frequent form in which joy is prescribed as a cure

is the joy in producing joy (such as doing good, giving presents,

alleviating, helping, exhorting, comforting, praising, treating with

distinction); together with the prescription of “love your neighbour.”

The ascetic priest prescribes, though in the most cautious doses, what

is practically a stimulation of the strongest and most life-assertive

impulse—the Will for Power. The happiness involved in the “smallest

superiority” which is the concomitant of all benefiting, helping,

extolling, making one’s self useful, is the most ample consolation, of

which, if they are well-advised, physiological distortions avail

themselves: in other cases they hurt each other, and naturally in

obedience to the same radical instinct. An investigation of the origin

of Christianity in the Roman world shows that co-operative unions for

poverty, sickness, and burial sprang up in the lowest stratum of

contemporary society, amid which the chief antidote against depression,

the little joy experienced in mutual benefits, was deliberately

fostered. Perchance this was then a novelty, a real discovery? This

conjuring up of the will for co-operation, for family organisation, for

communal life, for “Cœnacula” necessarily brought the Will for Power,

which had been already infinitesimally stimulated, to a new and much

fuller manifestation. The herd organisation is a genuine advance and

triumph in the fight with depression. With the growth of the community

there matures even to individuals a new interest, which often enough

takes him out of the more personal element in his discontent, his

aversion to himself, the “despectus sui” of Geulincx. All sick and

diseased people strive instinctively after a herd-organisation, out of a

desire to shake off their sense of oppressive discomfort and weakness;

the ascetic priest divines this instinct and promotes it; wherever a

herd exists it is the instinct of weakness which has wished for the

herd, and the cleverness of the priests which has organised it, for,

mark this: by an equally natural necessity the strong strive as much for

isolation as the weak for union: when the former bind themselves it is

only with a view to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of

their Will for Power, much against the wishes of their individual

consciences; the latter, on the contrary, range themselves together with

positive delight in such a muster—their instincts are as much gratified

thereby as the instincts of the “born master” (that is, the solitary

beast-of-prey species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by

organisation. There is always lurking beneath every oligarchy—such is

the universal lesson of history—the desire for tyranny. Every oligarchy

is continually quivering with the tension of the effort required by each

individual to keep mastering this desire. (Such, e.g., was the Greek;

Plato shows it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his

contemporaries—and himself.)

19.

The methods employed by the ascetic priest, which we have already learnt

to know—stifling of all vitality, mechanical energy, the little joy, and

especially the method of “love your neighbour” herd-organisation, the

awaking of the communal consciousness of power, to such a pitch that the

individual’s disgust with himself becomes eclipsed by his delight in the

thriving of the community—these are, according to modern standards, the

“innocent” methods employed in the fight with depression; let us turn

now to the more interesting topic of the “guilty” methods. The guilty

methods spell one thing: to produce emotional excess—which is used as

the most efficacious anæsthetic against their depressing state of

protracted pain; this is why priestly ingenuity has proved quite

inexhaustible in thinking out this one question: “By what means can you

produce an emotional excess?” This sounds harsh: it is manifest that it

would sound nicer and would grate on one’s ears less, if I were to say,

forsooth: “The ascetic priest made use at all times of the enthusiasm

contained in all strong emotions.” But what is the good of still

soothing the delicate ears of our modern effeminates? What is the good

on our side of budging one single inch before their verbal

Pecksniffianism. For us psychologists to do that would be at once

practical Pecksniffianism, apart from the fact of its nauseating us. The

good taste (others might say, the righteousness) of a psychologist

nowadays consists, if at all, in combating the shamefully moralised

language with which all modern judgments on men and things are smeared.

For, do not deceive yourself: what constitutes the chief characteristic

of modern souls and of modern books is not the lying, but the innocence

which is part and parcel of their intellectual dishonesty. The

inevitable running up against this “innocence” everywhere constitutes

the most distasteful feature of the somewhat dangerous business which a

modern psychologist has to undertake: it is a part of our great

danger—it is a road which perhaps leads us straight to the great

nausea—I know quite well the purpose which all modern books will and can

serve (granted that they last, which I am not afraid of, and granted

equally that there is to be at some future day a generation with a more

rigid, more severe, and healthier taste)—the function which all

modernity generally will serve with posterity: that of an emetic,—and

this by reason of its moral sugariness and falsity, its ingrained

feminism, which it is pleased to call “Idealism,” and at any rate

believes to be idealism. Our cultured men of to-day, our “good” men, do

not lie—that is true; but it does not redound to their honour! The real

lie, the genuine, determined, “honest” lie (on whose value you can

listen to Plato) would prove too tough and strong an article for them by

a long way; it would be asking them to do what people have been

forbidden to ask them to do, to open their eyes to their own selves, and

to learn to distinguish between “true” and “false” in their own selves.

The dishonest lie alone suits them: everything which feels a good man is

perfectly incapable of any other attitude to anything than that of a

dishonourable liar, an absolute liar, but none the less an innocent

liar, a blue-eyed liar, a virtuous liar. These “good men,” they are all

now tainted with morality through and through, and as far as honour is

concerned they are disgraced and corrupted for all eternity. Which of

them could stand a further truth “about man”? or, put more tangibly,

which of them could put up with a true biography? One or two instances:

Lord Byron composed a most personal autobiography, but Thomas Moore was

“too good” for it; he burnt his friend’s papers. Dr. Gwinner,

Schopenhauer’s executor, is said to have done the same; for Schopenhauer

as well wrote much about himself, and perhaps also against himself: (εἰς

ἑαντόν). The virtuous American Thayer, Beethoven’s biographer, suddenly

stopped his work: he had come to a certain point in that honourable and

simple life, and could stand it no longer. Moral: What sensible man

nowadays writes one honest word about himself? He must already belong to

the Order of Holy Foolhardiness. We are promised an autobiography of

Richard Wagner; who doubts but that it would be a clever autobiography?

Think, forsooth, of the grotesque horror which the Catholic priest

Janssen aroused in Germany with his inconceivably square and harmless

pictures of the German Reformation; what wouldn’t people do if some real

psychologist were to tell us about a genuine Luther, tell us, not with

the moralist simplicity of a country priest or the sweet and cautious

modesty of a Protestant historian, but say with the fearlessness of a

Taine, that springs from force of character and not from a prudent

toleration of force. (The Germans, by the bye, have already produced the

classic specimen of this toleration—they may well be allowed to reckon

him as one of their own, in Leopold Ranke, that born classical advocate

of every causa fortior, that cleverest of all the clever opportunists.)

20.

But you will soon understand me.—Putting it shortly, there is reason

enough, is there not, for us psychologists nowadays never getting from a

certain mistrust of out own selves? Probably even we ourselves are still

“too good” for our work, probably, whatever contempt we feel for this

popular craze for morality, we ourselves are perhaps none the less its

victims, prey, and slaves; probably it infects even us. Of what was that

diplomat warning us, when he said to his colleagues: “Let us especially

mistrust our first impulses, gentlemen! they are almost always good”? So

should nowadays every psychologist talk to his colleagues. And thus we

get back to our problem, which in point of fact does require from us a

certain severity, a certain mistrust especially against “first

impulses.” The ascetic ideal in the service of projected emotional

excess:—he who remembers the previous essay will already partially

anticipate the essential meaning compressed into these above ten words.

The thorough unswitching of the human soul, the plunging of it into

terror, frost, ardour, rapture, so as to free it, as through some

lightning shock, from all the smallness and pettiness of unhappiness,

depression, and discomfort: what ways lead to this goal? And which of

these ways does so most safely?... At bottom all great emotions have

this power, provided that they find a sudden outlet—emotions such as

rage, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and, in

sooth, the ascetic priest has had no scruples in taking into his service

the whole pack of hounds that rage in the human kennel, unleashing now

these and now those, with the same constant object of waking man out of

his protracted melancholy, of chasing away, at any rate for a time, his

dull pain, his shrinking misery, but always under the sanction of a

religious interpretation and justification. This emotional excess has

subsequently to be paid for, this is self-evident—it makes the ill more

ill—and therefore this kind of remedy for pain is according to modern

standards a “guilty” kind.

The dictates of fairness, however, require that we should all the more

emphasise the fact that this remedy is applied with a good conscience,

that the ascetic priest has prescribed it in the most implicit belief in

its utility and indispensability;—often enough almost collapsing in the

presence of the pain which he created;—that we should similarly

emphasise the fact that the violent physiological revenges of such

excesses, even perhaps the mental disturbances, are not absolutely

inconsistent with the general tenor of this kind of remedy; this remedy,

which, as we have shown previously, is not for the purpose of healing

diseases, but of fighting the unhappiness of that depression, the

alleviation and deadening of which was its object. The object was

consequently achieved. The keynote by which the ascetic priest was

enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the

fibres of the human soul—was, as every one knows, the exploitation of

the feeling of “guilt.” I have already indicated in the previous essay

the origin of this feeling—as a piece of animal psychology and nothing

else: we were thus confronted with the feeling of “guilt,” in its crude

state, as it were. It was first in the hands of the priest, real artist

that he was in the feeling of guilt, that it took shape—oh, what a

shape! “Sin”—for that is the name of the new priestly version of the

animal “bad-conscience” (the inverted cruelty)—has up to the present

been the greatest event in the history of the diseased soul: in “sin” we

find the most perilous and fatal masterpiece of religious

interpretation. Imagine man, suffering from himself, some way or other

but at any rate physiologically, perhaps like an animal shut up in a

cage, not clear as to the why and the wherefore! imagine him in his

desire for reasons—reasons bring relief—in his desire again for

remedies, narcotics at last, consulting one, who knows even the

occult—and see, lo and behold, he gets a hint from his wizard, the

ascetic priest, his first hint on the “cause” of his trouble: he must

search for it in himself, in his guiltiness, in a piece of the past, he

must understand his very suffering as a state of punishment. He has

heard, he has understood, has the unfortunate: he is now in the plight

of a hen round which a line has been drawn. He never gets out of the

circle of lines. The sick man has been turned into “the sinner”—and now

for a few thousand years we never get away from the sight of this new

invalid, of “a sinner”—shall we ever get away from it?—wherever we just

look, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of the sinner always moving in one

direction (in the direction of guilt, the only cause of suffering);

everywhere the evil conscience, this “greuliche thier,”[8] to use

Luther’s language; everywhere rumination over the past, a distorted view

of action, the gaze of the “green-eyed monster” turned on all action;

everywhere the wilful misunderstanding of suffering, its transvaluation

into feelings of guilt, fear of retribution; everywhere the scourge, the

hairy shirt, the starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner

breaking himself on the ghastly wheel of a restless and morbidly eager

conscience; everywhere mute pain, extreme fear, the agony of a tortured

heart, the spasms of an unknown happiness, the shriek for “redemption.”

In point of fact, thanks to this system of procedure, the old

depression, dullness, and fatigue were absolutely conquered, life itself

became very interesting again, awake, eternally awake, sleepless,

glowing, burnt away, exhausted and yet not tired—such was the figure cut

by man, “the sinner,” who was initiated into these mysteries. This grand

old wizard of an ascetic priest fighting with depression—he had clearly

triumphed, his kingdom had come: men no longer grumbled at pain, men

panted after pain: “More pain! More pain!” So for centuries on end

shrieked the demand of his acolytes and initiates. Every emotional

excess which hurt; everything which broke, overthrew, crushed,

transported, ravished; the mystery of torture-chambers, the ingenuity of

hell itself—all this was now discovered, divined, exploited, all this

was at the service of the wizard, all this served to promote the triumph

of his ideal, the ascetic ideal. “My kingdom is not of this world,”

quoth he, both at the beginning and at the end: had he still the right

to talk like that?—Goethe has maintained that there are only thirty-six

tragic situations: we would infer from that, did we not know otherwise,

that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He—knows more.

21.

So far as all this kind of priestly medicine-mongering, the “guilty”

kind, is concerned, every word of criticism is superfluous. As for the

suggestion that emotional excess of the type, which in these cases the

ascetic priest is fain to order to his sick patients (under the most

sacred euphemism, as is obvious, and equally impregnated with the

sanctity of his purpose), has ever really been of use to any sick man,

who, forsooth, would feel inclined to maintain a proposition of that

character? At any rate, some understanding should be come to as to the

expression “be of use.” If you only wish to express that such a system

of treatment has reformed man, I do not gainsay it: I merely add that

“reformed” conveys to my mind as much as “tamed,” “weakened,”

“discouraged,” “refined,” “daintified,” “emasculated” (and thus it means

almost as much as injured). But when you have to deal principally with

sick, depressed, and oppressed creatures, such a system, even granted

that it makes the ill “better,” under any circumstances also makes them

more ill: ask the mad-doctors the invariable result of a methodical

application of penance-torture, contrition, and salvation ecstasies.

Similarly ask history. In every body politic where the ascetic priest

has established this treatment of the sick, disease has on every

occasion spread with sinister speed throughout its length and breadth.

What was always the “result”? A shattered nervous system, in addition to

the existing malady, and this in the greatest as in the smallest, in the

individuals as in masses. We find, in consequence of the penance and

redemption-training, awful epileptic epidemics, the greatest known to

history, such as the St. Vitus and St. John dances of the Middle Ages;

we find, as another phase of its after-effect, frightful mutilations and

chronic depressions, by means of which the temperament of a nation or a

city (Geneva, Bale) is turned once for all into its opposite;—this

training, again, is responsible for the witch-hysteria, a phenomenon

analogous to somnambulism (eight great epidemic outbursts of this only

between 1564 and 1605);—we find similarly in its train those delirious

death-cravings of large masses, whose awful “shriek,” “evviva la morte!”

was heard over the whole of Europe, now interrupted by voluptuous

variations and anon by a rage for destruction, just as the same

emotional sequence with the same intermittencies and sudden changes is

now universally observed in every case where the ascetic doctrine of sin

scores once more a great success (religious neurosis appears as a

manifestation of the devil, there is no doubt of it. What is it?

Quæritur). Speaking generally, the ascetic ideal and its sublime-moral

cult, this most ingenious, reckless, and perilous systematisation of all

methods of emotional excess, is writ large in a dreadful and

unforgettable fashion on the whole history of man, and unfortunately not

only on history. I was scarcely able to put forward any other element

which attacked the health and race efficiency of Europeans with more

destructive power than did this ideal; it can be dubbed,without

exaggeration, the real fatality in the history of the health of the

European man. At the most you can merely draw a comparison with the

specifically German influence: I mean the alcohol poisoning of Europe,

which up to the present has kept pace exactly with the political and

racial pre–dominance of the Germans (where they inoculated their blood,

there too did they inoculate their vice). Third in the series comes

syphilis—magno sed proximo intervallo.

22.

The ascetic priest has, wherever he has obtained the mastery, corrupted

the health of the soul, he has consequently also corrupted taste in

artibus et litteris—he corrupts it still. “Consequently?” I hope I shall

be granted this “consequently “; at any rate, I am not going to prove it

first. One solitary indication, it concerns the arch-book of Christian

literature, their real model, their “book-in-itself.” In the very midst

of the Græco-Roman splendour, which was also a splendour of books, face

to face with an ancient world of writings which had not yet fallen into

decay and ruin, at a time when certain books were still to be read, to

possess which we would give nowadays half our literature in exchange, at

that time the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators (they are

generally called Fathers of the Church) dared to declare: “We too have

our classical literature, we do not need that of the Greeks”—and

meanwhile they proudly pointed to their books of legends, their letters

of apostles, and their apologetic tractlets, just in the same way that

to-day the English “Salvation Army” wages its fight against Shakespeare

and other “heathens” with an analogous literature. You already guess it,

I do not like the “New Testament”; it almost upsets me that I stand so

isolated in my taste so far as concerns this valued, this over-valued

Scripture; the taste of two thousand years is against me; but what boots

it! “Here I stand! I cannot help myself”[9]—I have the courage of my bad

taste. The Old Testament—yes, that is something quite different, all

honour to the Old Testament! I find therein great men, an heroic

landscape, and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the

incomparable naïveté of the strong heart; further still, I find a

people. In the New, on the contrary, just a hostel of petty sects, pure

rococo of the soul, twisting angles and fancy touches, nothing but

conventicle air, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic sweetness

which appertains to the epoch (and the Roman province) and is less

Jewish than Hellenistic. Meekness and braggadocio cheek by jowl; an

emotional garrulousness that almost deafens; passionate hysteria, but no

passion; painful pantomime; here manifestly every one lacked good

breeding. How dare any one make so much fuss about their little failings

as do these pious little fellows! No one cares a straw about it—let

alone God. Finally they actually wish to have “the crown of eternal

life,” do all these little provincials! In return for what, in sooth?

For what end? It is impossible to carry insolence any further. An

immortal Peter! who could stand him! They have an ambition which makes

one laugh: the thing dishes up cut and dried his most personal life, his

melancholies, and common-or-garden troubles, as though the Universe

itself were under an obligation to bother itself about them, for it

never gets tired of wrapping up God Himself in the petty misery in which

its troubles are involved. And how about the atrocious form of this

chronic hobnobbing with God? This Jewish, and not merely Jewish,

slobbering and clawing importunacy towards God!—There exist little

despised “heathen nations” in East Asia, from whom these first

Christians could have learnt something worth learning, a little tact in

worshiping; these nations do not allow themselves to say aloud the name

of their God. This seems to me delicate enough, it is certain that it is

too delicate, and not only for primitive Christians; to take a contrast,

just recollect Luther, the most “eloquent” and insolent peasant whom

Germany has had, think of the Lutherian tone, in which he felt quite the

most in his element during his tête-à-têtes with God. Luther’s

opposition to the mediæval saints of the Church (in particular, against

“that devil’s hog, the Pope”), was, there is no doubt, at bottom the

opposition of a boor, who was offended at the good etiquette of the

Church, that worship-etiquette of the sacerdotal code, which only admits

to the holy of holies the initiated and the silent, and shuts the door

against the boors. These definitely were not to be allowed a hearing in

this planet—but Luther the peasant simply wished it otherwise; as it

was, it was not German enough for him. He personally wished himself to

talk direct, to talk personally, to talk “straight from the shoulder”

with his God. Well, he’s done it. The ascetic ideal, you will guess, was

at no time and in no place, a school of good taste, still less of good

manners—at the best it was a school for sacerdotal manners: that is, it

contains in itself something which was a deadly enemy to all good

manners. Lack of measure, opposition to measure, it is itself a “non

plus ultra.”

23.

The ascetic ideal has corrupted not only health and taste, there are

also third, fourth, fifth, and sixth things which it has corrupted—I

shall take care not to go through the catalogue (when should I get to

the end?). I have here to expose not what this ideal effected; but

rather only what it means, on what it is based, what lies lurking behind

it and under it, that of which it is the provisional expression, an

obscure expression bristling with queries and misunderstandings. And

with this object only in view I presumed “not to spare” my readers a

glance at the awfulness of its results, a glance at its fatal results; I

did this to prepare them for the final and most awful aspect presented

to me by the question of the significance of that ideal. What is the

significance of the power of that ideal, the monstrousness of its power?

Why is it given such an amount of scope? Why is not a better resistance

offered against it? The ascetic ideal expresses one will: where is the

opposition will, in which an opposition ideal expresses itself? The

ascetic ideal has an aim— this goal is, putting it generally, that all

the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard,

appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference

to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it

repudiates, denies, affirms, confirms, only in the sense of its own

interpretation (and was there ever a more thoroughly elaborated system

of interpretation?); it subjects itself to no power, rather does it

believe in its own precedence over every power—it believes that nothing

powerful exists in the world that has not first got to receive from “it”

a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as being an instrument in its

work, a way and means to its end, to one end. Where is the counterpart

of this complete system of will, end, and interpretation? Why is the

counterpart lacking? Where is the other “one aim”? But I am told it is

not lacking, that not only has it fought a long and fortunate fight with

that ideal, but that further it has already won the mastery over that

ideal in all essentials: let our whole modern science attest this—that

modern science, which, like the genuine reality-philosophy which it is,

manifestly believes in itself alone, manifestly has the courage to be

itself, the will to be itself, and has got on well enough without God,

another world, and negative virtues.

With all their noisy agitator-babble, however, they effect nothing with

me; these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices do not

come from the deeps with sufficient audibility, they are not the

mouthpiece for the abyss of scientific knowledge—for to-day scientific

knowledge is an abyss—the word “science,” in such trumpeter-mouths, is a

prostitution, an abuse, an impertinence. The truth is just the opposite

from what is maintained in the ascetic theory. Science has to-day

absolutely no belief in itself, let alone in an ideal superior to

itself, and wherever science still consists of passion, love, ardour,

suffering, it is not the opposition to that ascetic ideal, but rather

the incarnation of its latest and noblest form. Does that ring strange?

There are enough brave and decent working people, even among the learned

men of to-day, who like their little corner, and who, just because they

are pleased so to do, become at times indecently loud with their demand,

that people to-day should be quite content, especially in science—for in

science there is so much useful work to do. I do not deny it—there is

nothing I should like less than to spoil the delight of these honest

workers in their handiwork; for I rejoice in their work. But the fact of

science requiring hard work, the fact of its having contented workers,

is absolutely no proof of science as a whole having to-day one end, one

will, one ideal, one passion for a great faith; the contrary, as I have

said, is the case. When science is not the latest manifestation of the

ascetic ideal—but these are cases of such rarity, selectness, and

exquisiteness, as to preclude the general judgment being affected

thereby—science is a hiding-place for every kind of cowardice,

disbelief, remorse, despectio sui, bad conscience—it is the very anxiety

that springs from having no ideal, the suffering from the lack of a

great love, the discontent with an enforced moderation. Oh, what does

all science not cover to-day? How much, at any rate, does it not try to

cover? The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry,

their burning the candle of their brain at both ends—their very mastery

in their handiwork—how often is the real meaning of all that to prevent

themselves continuing to see a certain thing? Science as a

self-anæsthetic: do you know that? You wound them—every one who consorts

with scholars experiences this—you wound them sometimes to the quick

through just a harmless word; when you think you are paying them a

compliment you embitter them beyond all bounds, simply because you

didn’t have the finesse to infer the real kind of customers you had to

tackle, the sufferer kind (who won’t own up even to themselves what they

really are), the dazed and unconscious kind who have only one

fear—coming to consciousness.

24.

And now look at the other side, at those rare cases, of which I spoke,

the most supreme idealists to be found nowadays among philosophers and

scholars. Have we, perchance, found in them the sought-for opponents of

the ascetic ideal, its anti-idealists? In fact, they believe themselves

to be such, these “unbelievers” (for they are all of them that): it

seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea of being

opponents of this ideal, so earnest are they on this subject, so

passionate in word and gesture;—but does it follow that what they

believe must necessarily be true? We “knowers” have grown by degrees

suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion has step by step

habituated us to draw just the opposite conclusions to what people have

drawn before; that is to say, wherever the strength of a belief is

particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of

proving what is believed, the conclusion of its actual improbability. We

do not again deny that “faith produces salvation”: for that very reason

we do deny that faith proves anything,—a strong faith, which produces

happiness, causes suspicion of the object of that faith, it does not

establish its “truth,” it does establish a certain probability

of—illusion. What is now the position in these cases? These solitaries

and deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their claim to

intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic spirits,

who constitute the glory of our time; all these pale atheists,

anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, “ephectics,”

and “hectics” of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the latter,

both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists of

knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience dwells and

is alive—in point of fact they believe themselves as far away as

possible from the ascetic ideal, do these “free, very free spirits”: and

yet, if I may reveal what they themselves cannot see—for they stand too

near themselves: this ideal is simply their ideal, they represent it

nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves are its most

spiritualised product, its most advanced picket of skirmishers and

scouts, its most insidious delicate and elusive form of seduction.—If I

am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will be one with this

sentence: for some time past there have been no free spirits; for they

still believe in truth. When the Christian Crusaders in the East came

into collision with that invincible order of assassins, that order of

free spirits par excellence, whose lowest grade lives in a state of

discipline such as no order of monks has ever attained, then in some way

or other they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and tally-word,

that was reserved for the highest grade alone as their secretum,

“Nothing is true, everything is allowed,”—in sooth, that was freedom of

thought, thereby was taking leave of the very belief in truth. Has

indeed any European, any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into

this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know from

experience the Minotauros of this den.—I doubt it—nay, I know otherwise.

Nothing is more really alien to these “mono-fanatics,” these so-called

“free spirits,” than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no

respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their

belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this perhaps too much from

experience at close quarters—that dignified philosophic abstinence to

which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the

intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does

affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the

factum brutum, that fatalism in “petits faits” (ce petit faitalism, as I

call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral

superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally

(that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing,

inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of

interpretation)—all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism

of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses

(it is at bottom only a modus of that repudiation.) But what forces it

into that unqualified will for truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal

itself, even though it take the form of its unconscious

imperatives,—make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a

metaphysical value, an intrinsic value of truth, of a character which is

only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with

that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its

“hypotheses,” the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical:

a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain

thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right to

existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject—he, for

example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy “upon a

strictly scientific basis”—has first got to “turn up-side-down” not only

philosophy but also truth itself—the gravest insult which could possibly

be offered to two such respectable females!) Yes, there is no doubt

about it—and here I quote my Joyful Wisdom, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: “The

man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the

presupposition of the faith in science, asserts thereby a different

world from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he

asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not

similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, our world? The belief

on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a

metaphysical belief—even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of

metaphysics, we too take our fire from that conflagration which was

kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which

was also Plato’s belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is

divine.... But what if this belief becomes more and more incredible,

what if nothing proves itself to be divine, unless it be error,

blindness, lies—what if God, Himself proved Himself to be our oldest

lie?”—It is necessary to stop at this point and to consider the

situation carefully. Science itself now needs a justification (which is

not for a minute to say that there is such a justification). Turn in

this context to the most ancient and the most modern philosophers: they

all fail to realise the extent of the need of a justification on the

part of the Will for Truth—here is a gap in every philosophy—what is it

caused by? Because up to the present the ascetic ideal dominated all

philosophy, because Truth was fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme

Court of Appeal, because Truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you

understand this “allowed”? From the minute that the belief in the God of

the ascetic ideal is repudiated, there exists a new problem: the problem

of the value of truth. The Will for Truth needed a critique—let us

define by these words our own task—-the value of truth is tentatively to

be called in question.... (If this seems too laconically expressed, I

recommend the reader to peruse again that passage from the Joyful Wisdom

which bears the title, “How far we also are still pious,” Aph. 344, and

best of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as the Preface to

The Dawn of Day.)

25.

No! You can’t get round me with science, when I search for the natural

antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: “Where is the

opposed will in which the opponent ideal expresses itself?” Science is

not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this function; in every

department science needs an ideal value, a power which creates values,

and in whose service it can believe in itself —science itself never

creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is not in itself

antagonistic; speaking roughly, it rather represents the progressive

force in the inner evolution of that ideal. Tested more exactly, its

opposition and antagonism are concerned not with the ideal itself, but

only with that ideal’s outworks, its outer garb, its masquerade, with

its temporary hardening, stiffening, and dogmatising—it makes the life

in the ideal free once more, while it repudiates its superficial

elements. These two phenomena, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest

on the same basis––I have already made this clear––the basis, I say, oft

the same over-appreciation of truth (more accurately the same belief in

the impossibility of valuing and of criticising truth), and consequently

they are necessarily allies, so that, in the event of their being

attacked, they must always be attacked and called into question

together. A valuation of the ascetic ideal inevitably entails a

valuation of science as well; lose no time in seeing this clearly, and

be sharp to catch it! (Art, I am speaking provisionally, for I will

treat it on some other occasion in greater detail,––art, I repeat, in

which lying is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience

on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal

than is science: Plato’s instinct felt this––Plato, the greatest enemy

of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer,

that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the

whole–hearted “transcendental,” the great defamer of life; on the other,

its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An artistic subservience

to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute

artistic corruption that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of

the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an

artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the

same, basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life

is the presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of

the emotions, slackening of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for

instinct, seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that

most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling

life). Consider the periods in a nation in which the learned man comes

into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often of sunset, of

decay—the effervescing strength, the confidence in life, the confidence

in the future are no more. The preponderance of the mandarins never

signifies any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or

arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of

pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. (Science handled as

a problem! what is the meaning of science?—upon this point the Preface

to the Birth of Tragedy.) No! this “modern science”—mark you this

well—is at times the best ally for the ascetic ideal, and for the very

reason that it is the ally which is most unconscious, most automatic,

most secret, and most subterranean! They have been playing into each

other’s hands up to the present, have these “poor in spirit” and the

scientific opponents of that ideal (take care, by the bye, not to think

that these opponents are the antithesis of this ideal, that they are the

rich in spirit—that they are not; I have called them the hectic in

spirit). As for these celebrated victories of science; there is no doubt

that they are victories—but victories over what? There was not for a

single minute any victory among their list over the ascetic ideal,

rather was it made stronger, that is to say, more elusive, more

abstract, more insidious, from the fact that a wall, an outwork, that

had got built on to the main fortress and disfigured its appearance,

should from time to time be ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by

science. Does any one seriously suggest that the downfall of the

theological astronomy signified the downfall of that ideal?—Has,

perchance, man grown less in need of a transcendental solution of his

riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become

more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the

universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken

progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling

himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniquenesses

irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone—he has become

animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his

earlier belief was almost God (“child of God,” “demi-God”). Since

Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane—he rolls faster

and faster away from the centre—whither? into nothingness? into the

“thrilling sensation of his own nothingness”—Well! this would be the

straight way—to the old ideal?—All science (and by no means only

astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of

which Kant has made a remarkable confession, “it annihilates my own

importance”), all science, natural as much as unnatural—by unnatural I

mean the self-critique of reason—nowadays sets out to talk man out of

his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing

but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that

science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical

ataraxia, in preserving man’s contempt of himself, that state which it

took so much trouble to bring about, as man’s final and most serious

claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who

despises is always “one who has not forgotten how to appreciate”). But

does all this involve any real effort to counteract the ascetic ideal?

Is it really seriously suggested that Kant’s victory over the

theological dogmatism about “God,” “Soul,” “Freedom,” “Immortality,” has

damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be

the case for a long time past)?–– And in this connection it does not

concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such

consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of

transcendentalist is playing a winning game––they are emancipated from

the theologians; what luck!––he has revealed to them that secret art, by

which they can now pursue their “heart’s desire” on their own

responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly,

who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown

and the absolute mystery, if they now worship their very query as God?

(Xaver Doudan talks somewhere of the ravages which l’habitude d’admirer

l’inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l’inconnu has

produced––the ancients, he thinks, must have been exempt from those

ravages.) Supposing that everything, “known” to man, fails to satisfy

his desires, and on the contrary contradicts and horrifies them, what a

divine way out of all this to be able to look for the responsibility,

not in the “desiring” but in “knowing”!––“There is no knowledge.

Consequently––there is a God”; what a novel elegantia syllogismi! what a

triumph for the ascetic ideal!

26.

Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show in its demeanour

greater confidence in life, greater confidence in its ideals? Its

loftiest pretension is now to be a mirror; it repudiates all teleology;

it will have no more “proving”; it disdains to play the judge, and

thereby shows its good taste––it asserts as little as it denies, it

fixes, it “describes.” All this is to a high degree ascetic, but at the

same time it is to a much greater degree nihilistic; make no mistake

about this! You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but determined

gaze,––an eye that looks out as an isolated North Pole explorer looks

out (perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look back?)––there

is snow––here is life silenced, the last crows which caw here are called

“whither?” “Vanity,” “Nada”––here nothing more flourishes and grows, at

the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg and the “pity” of Tolstoi.

But as for that other school of historians, a perhaps still more

“modern” school, a voluptuous and lascivious school which ogles life and

the ascetic ideal with equal fervour, which uses the word “artist” as a

glove, and has nowadays established a “corner” for itself, in all the

praise given to contemplation; oh, what a thirst do these sweet

intellectuals excite even for ascetics and winter landscapes! Nay! The

devil take these “contemplative” folk! How much liefer would I wander

with those historical Nihilists through the gloomiest, grey, cold

mist!––nay, I shall not mind listening (supposing I have to choose) to

one who is completely unhistorical and anti-historical (a man, like

Dühring for instance, over whose periods a hitherto shy and unavowed

species of “beautiful souls” has grown intoxicated in contemporary

Germany, the species anarchistica within the educated proletariate). The

“contemplative” are a hundred times worse––I never knew anything which

produced such intense nausea as one of those “objective” chairs,[10] one

of those scented mannikins-about-town of history, a thing half-priest,

half-satyr (Renan parfum), which betrays by the high, shrill falsetto of

his applause what he lacks and where he lacks it, who betrays where in

this case the Fates have plied their ghastly shears, alas! in too

surgeon-like a fashion! This is distasteful to me, and irritates my

patience; let him keep patient at such sights who has nothing to lose

thereby,––such a sight enrages me, such spectators embitter me against

the “play,” even more than does the play itself (history itself, you

understand); Anacreontic moods imperceptibly come over me. This Nature,

who gave to the steer its horn, to the lion its χάσμ’ ὀδοντων, for what

purpose did Nature give me my foot?––To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not

merely to run away! To trample on all the worm-eaten “chairs,” the

cowardly contemplators, the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters

with ascetic ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All

reverence on my part to the ascetic ideal, in so far as it is

honourable! So long as it believes in itself and plays no pranks on us!

But I like not all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiate ambition

to smell of the infinite, until eventually the infinite smells of bugs;

I like not the whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life;

I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves in wisdom and

look “objective”; I like not the agitators dressed up as heroes, who

hide their dummy-heads behind the stalking-horse of an ideal; I like not

the ambitious artists who would fain play the ascetic and the priest,

and are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns; I like not, again, these

newest speculators in idealism, the Anti-Semites, who nowadays roll

their eyes in the patent Christian-Aryan-man-of-honour fashion, and by

an abuse of moralist attitudes and agitation dodges, so cheap as to

exhaust any patience, strive to excite all the blockhead elements in the

populace (the invariable success of every kind of intellectual

charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs together with the almost

indisputable and already quite palpable desolation of the German mind,

whose cause I look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers, politics,

beer, and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition precedent of

this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the strong but narrow

principle, “Germany, Germany above everything,”[11] and finally the

paralysis agitans of “modern ideas”). Europe nowadays is, above all,

wealthy and ingenious in means of excitement; it apparently has no more

crying necessity than stimulantia and alcohol. Hence the enormous

counterfeiting of ideals, those most fiery spirits of the mind; hence

too the repulsive, evil-smelling, perjured, pseudo–alcoholic air

everywhere. I should like to know how many cargoes of imitation

idealism, of hero-costumes and high falutin’ clap-trap, how many casks

of sweetened pity liqueur (Firm: la religion de la souffrance), how many

crutches of righteous indignation for the help of these flat-footed

intellects, how many comedians of the Christian moral ideal would need

to-day to be exported from Europe, to enable its air to smell pure

again. It is obvious that, in regard to this over-production, a new

trade possibility lies open; it is obvious that there is a new business

to be done in little ideal idols and obedient “idealists”—don’t pass

over this tip! Who has sufficient courage? We have in our hands the

possibility of idealising the whole earth. But what am I talking about

courage? we only need one thing here—a hand, a free, a very free hand.

27.

Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the

modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our problem can

certainly do without them, the problem of meaning of the ascetic

ideal—what has it got to do with yesterday or to-day? those things shall

be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in another connection

(under the title “A Contribution to the History of European Nihilism,” I

refer for this to a work which I am preparing: The Will to Power, an

Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values). The only reason why I come

to allude to it here is this: the ascetic ideal has at times, even in

the most intellectual sphere, only one real kind of enemies and

damagers: these are the comedians of this ideal—for they awake mistrust.

Everywhere otherwise, where the mind is at work seriously, powerfully,

and without counterfeiting, it dispenses altogether now with an ideal

(the popular expression for this abstinence is “Atheism”)—with the

exception of the will for truth. But this will, this remnant of an

ideal, is, if you will believe me, that ideal itself in its severest and

cleverest formulation, esoteric through and through, stripped of all

outworks, and consequently not so much its remnant as its kernel.

Unqualified honest atheism (and its air only do we breathe, we, the most

intellectual men of this age) is not opposed to that ideal, to the

extent that it appears to be; it is rather one of the final phases of

its evolution, one of its syllogisms and pieces of inherent logic—it is

the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year training in truth,

which finally forbids itself the lie of the belief in God. (The same

course of development in India—quite independently, and consequently of

some demonstrative value—the same ideal driving to the same conclusion

the decisive point reached five hundred years before the European era,

or more precisely at the time of Buddha—it started in the Sankhyam

philosophy, and then this was popularised through Buddha, and made into

a religion.)

What, I put the question with all strictness, has really triumphed over

the Christian God? The answer stands in my Joyful Wisdom, Aph. 357: “the

Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was with

increasing seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian

conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience into

intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though it were

a proof of the goodness and guardianship of God; interpreting history in

honour of a divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral order of the

world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal experiences, as

pious men have for long enough explained them, as though every

arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented and sent out of

love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now done away with, all

this has the conscience against it, and is regarded by every subtler

conscience as disreputable, dishonourable, as lying, feminism, weakness,

cowardice—by means of this severity, if by means of anything at all, are

we, in sooth, good Europeans and heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest

self-mastery.”... All great things go to ruin by reason of themselves,

by reason of an act of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the

law of necessary “self-mastery” even in the essence of life—ever is the

law-giver finally exposed to the cry, “patere legem quam ipse tulisti”;

in thus wise did Christianity go to ruin as a dogma, through its own

morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as a

morality—we are standing on the threshold of this event. After Christian

truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, it finally draws

its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; this, however,

happens, when it puts the question, “what is the meaning of every will

for truth?” And here again do I touch on my problem, on our problem, my

unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friends): what sense has our

whole being, if it does not mean that in our own selves that will for

truth has come to its own consciousness as a problem?—--By reason of

this attainment of self-consciousness on the part of the will for truth,

morality from henceforward—there is no doubt about it—goes to pieces:

this is that great hundred-act play that is reserved for the next two

centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps

also the most hopeful of all plays.

28.

If you except the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man had no meaning. His

existence on earth contained no end; “What is the purpose of man at

all?” was a question without an answer; the will for man and the world

was lacking; behind every great human destiny rang as a refrain a still

greater “Vanity!” The ascetic ideal simply means this: that something

was lacking, that a tremendous void encircled man—he did not know how to

justify himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself, he suffered from

the problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in other ways, he was

in the main a diseased animal; but his problem was not suffering itself,

but the lack of an answer to that crying question, “To what purpose do

we suffer?” Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to

suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself: he wills it, he even

seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of

suffering. Not suffering, but the senselessness of suffering was the

curse which till then lay spread over humanity—and the ascetic ideal

gave it a meaning! It was up till then the only meaning; but any meaning

is better than no meaning; the ascetic ideal was in that connection the

“faute de mieux” par excellence that existed at that time. In that ideal

suffering found an explanation; the tremendous gap seemed filled; the

door to all suicidal Nihilism was closed. The explanation—there is no

doubt about it—brought in its train new suffering, deeper, more

penetrating, more venomous, gnawing more brutally into life: it brought

all suffering under the perspective of guilt; but in spite of all

that—man was saved thereby, he had a meaning, and from henceforth was no

more like a leaf in the wind, a shuttle-cock of chance, of nonsense, he

could now “will” something—absolutely immaterial to what end, to what

purpose, with what means he wished: the will itself was saved. It is

absolutely impossible to disguise what in point of fact is made clear by

every complete will that has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal:

this hate of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of

the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of

happiness and beauty, this desire to get right away from all illusion,

change, growth, death, wishing and even desiring—all this means—let us

have the courage to grasp it—a will for Nothingness, a will opposed to

life, a repudiation of the most fundamental conditions of life, but it

is and remains a will!—and to say at the end that which I said at the

beginning—man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all.

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES.

Translated by J. M. KENNEDY.

The following twenty-seven fragments were intended by Nietzsche to form

a supplement to Chapter VIII. of Beyond Good and Evil, dealing with

Peoples and Countries.

The Europeans now imagine themselves as representing, in the main, the

highest types of men on earth.

A characteristic of Europeans: inconsistency between word and deed; the

Oriental is true to himself in daily life. How the European has

established colonies is explained by his nature, which resembles that of

a beast of prey.

This inconsistency is explained by the fact that Christianity has

abandoned the class from which it sprang.

This is the difference between us and the Hellenes: their morals grew up

among the governing castes. Thucydides’ morals are the same as those

that exploded everywhere with Plato.

Attempts towards honesty at the Renaissance, for example: always for the

benefit of the arts. Michael Angelo’s conception of God as the “Tyrant

of the World” was an honest one.

I rate Michael Angelo higher than Raphael, because, through all the

Christian clouds and prejudices of his time, he saw the ideal of a

culture nobler than the Christo-Raphaelian: whilst Raphael truly and

modestly glorified only the values handed down to him, and did not carry

within himself any inquiring, yearning instincts. Michael Angelo, on the

other hand, saw and felt the problem of the law-giver of new values: the

problem of the conqueror made perfect, who first had to subdue the “hero

within himself,” the man exalted to his highest pedestal, master even of

his pity, who mercilessly shatters and annihilates everything that does

not bear his own stamp, shining in Olympian divinity. Michael Angelo was

naturally only at certain moments so high and so far beyond his age and

Christian Europe: for the most part he adopted a condescending attitude

towards the eternal feminine in Christianity; it would seem, indeed,

that in the end he broke down before her, and gave up the ideal of his

most inspired hours. It was an ideal which only a man in the strongest

and highest vigour of life could bear; but not a man advanced in years!

Indeed, he would have had to demolish Christianity with his ideal! But

he was not thinker and philosopher enough for that Perhaps Leonardo da

Vinci alone of those artists had a really super-Christian outlook. He

knows the East, the “land of dawn,” within himself as well as without

himself. There is something super-European and silent in him: a

characteristic of every one who has seen too wide a circle of things

good and bad.

How much we have learnt and learnt anew in fifty years! The whole

Romantic School with its belief in “the people” is refuted! No Homeric

poetry as “popular” poetry! No deification of the great powers of

Nature! No deduction from language-relationship to race-relationship! No

“intellectual contemplations” of the supernatural! No truth enshrouded

in religion!

The problem of truthfulness is quite a new one. I am astonished. From

this standpoint we regard such natures as Bismarck as culpable out of

carelessness, such as Richard Wagner out of want of modesty; we would

condemn Plato for his pia fraus, Kant for the derivation of his

Categorical Imperative, his own belief certainly not having come to him

from this source.

Finally, even doubt turns against itself: doubt in doubt. And the

question as to the value of truthfulness and its extent lies there.

What I observe with pleasure in the German is his Mephistophelian

nature; but, to tell the truth, one must have a higher conception of

Mephistopheles than Goethe had, who found it necessary to diminish his

Mephistopheles in order to magnify his “inner Faust.” The true German

Mephistopheles is much more dangerous, bold, wicked, and cunning, and

consequently more open-hearted: remember the nature of Frederick the

Great, or of that much greater Frederick, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick

II.

The real German Mephistopheles crosses the Alps, and believes that

everything there belongs to him. Then he recovers himself, like

Winckelmann, like Mozart. He looks upon Faust and Hamlet as caricatures,

invented to be laughed at, and upon Luther also. Goethe had his good

German moments, when he laughed inwardly at all these things. But then

he fell back again into his cloudy moods.

Perhaps the Germans have only grown up in a wrong climate! There is

something in them that might be Hellenic!—something that is awakened

when they are brought into touch with the South—Winckelmann, Goethe,

Mozart. We should not forget, however, that we are still young. Luther

is still our last event; our last book is still the Bible. The Germans

have never yet “moralised.” Also, the very food of the Germans was their

doom: its consequence, Philistinism.

The Germans are a dangerous people: they are experts at inventing

intoxicants. Gothic, rococo (according to Semper), the historical sense

and exoticism, Hegel, Richard Wagner—Leibniz, too (dangerous at the

present day)—(they even idealised the serving soul as the virtue of

scholars and soldiers, also as the simple mind). The Germans may well be

the most composite people on earth.

“The people of the Middle,” the inventors of porcelain, and of a kind of

Chinese breed of Privy Councillor.

The smallness and baseness of the German soul were not and are not

consequences of the system of small states; for it is well known that

the inhabitants of much smaller states were proud and independent: and

it is not a large state per se that makes souls freer and more manly.

The man whose soul obeys the slavish command: “Thou shalt and must

kneel!” in whose body there is an involuntary bowing and scraping to

titles, orders, gracious glances from above—well, such a man in an

“Empire” will only bow all the more deeply and lick the dust more

fervently in the presence of the greater sovereign than in the presence

of the lesser: this cannot be doubted. We can still see in the lower

classes of Italians that aristocratic self-sufficiency; manly discipline

and self-confidence still form a part of the long history of their

country: these are virtues which once manifested themselves before their

eyes. A poor Venetian gondolier makes a far better figure than a Privy

Councillor from Berlin, and is even a better man in the end—any one can

see this. Just ask the women.

Most artists, even some of the greatest (including the historians) have

up to the present belonged to the serving classes (whether they serve

people of high position or princes or women or “the masses”), not to

speak of their dependence upon the Church and upon moral law. Thus

Rubens portrayed the nobility of his age; but only according to their

vague conception of taste, not according to his own measure of beauty on

the whole, therefore, against his own taste. Van Dyck was nobler in this

respect: who in all those whom he painted added a certain amount of what

he himself most highly valued: he did not descend from himself, but

rather lifted up others to himself when he “rendered.”

The slavish humility of the artist to his public (as Sebastian Bach has

testified in undying and outrageous words in the dedication of his High

Mass) is perhaps more difficult to perceive in music; but it is all the

more deeply engrained. A hearing would be refused me if I endeavoured to

impart my views on this subject. Chopin possesses distinction, like Van

Dyck. The disposition of Beethoven is that of a proud peasant; of Haydn,

that of a proud servant. Mendelssohn, too, possesses distinction—like

Goethe, in the most natural way in the world.

10.

We could at any time have counted on the fingers of one hand those

German learned men who possessed wit: the remainder have understanding,

and a few of them, happily, that famous “childlike character” which

divines.... It is our privilege: with this “divination” German science

has discovered some things which we can hardly conceive of, and which,

after all, do not exist, perhaps. It is only the Jews among the Germans

who do not “divine” like them.

11.

As Frenchmen reflect the politeness and esprit of French society, so do

Germans reflect something of the deep, pensive earnestness of their

mystics and musicians, and also of their silly childishness. The Italian

exhibits a great deal of republican distinction and art, and can show

himself to be noble and proud without vanity.

12.

A larger number of the higher and better-endowed men will, I hope, have

in the end so much self-restraint as to be able to get rid of their bad

taste for affectation and sentimental darkness, and to turn against

Richard Wagner as much as against Schopenhauer. These two Germans are

leading us to ruin; they flatter our dangerous qualities. A stronger

future is prepared for us in Goethe, Beethoven, and Bismarck than in

these racial aberrations. We have had no philosophers yet.

13.

The peasant is the commonest type of noblesse, for he is dependent upon

himself most of all. Peasant blood is still the best blood in Germany

—for example, Luther, Niebuhr, Bismarck.

Bismarck a Slav. Let any one look upon the face of Germans. Everything

that had manly, exuberant blood in it went abroad. Over the smug

populace remaining, the slave-souled people, there came an improvement

from abroad, especially by a mixture of Slavonic blood.

The Brandenburg nobility and the Prussian nobility in general (and the

peasant of certain North German districts), comprise at present the most

manly natures in Germany.

That the manliest men shall rule: this is only the natural order of

things.

14.

The future of German culture rests with the sons of the Prussian

officers.

15.

There has always been a want of wit in Germany, and mediocre heads

attain there to the highest honours, because even they are rare. What is

most highly prized is diligence and perseverance and a certain

cold-blooded, critical outlook, and, for the sake of such qualities,

German scholarship and the German military system have become paramount

in Europe.

16.

Parliaments may be very useful to a strong and versatile statesman: he

has something there to rely upon (every such thing must, however, be

able to resist!)—upon which he can throw a great deal of responsibility.

On the whole, however, I could wish that the counting mania and the

superstitious belief in majorities were not established in Germany, as

with the Latin races, and that one could finally invent something new

even in politics! It is senseless and dangerous to let the custom of

universal suffrage—which is still but a short time under cultivation,

and could easily be uprooted—take a deeper root: whilst, of course, its

introduction was merely an expedient to steer clear of temporary

difficulties.

17.

Can any one interest himself in this German Empire? Where is the new

thought? Is it only a new combination of power? All the worse, if it

does not know its own mind. Peace and laisser aller are not types of

politics for which I have any respect. Ruling, and helping the highest

thoughts to victory—the only things that can make me interested in

Germany. England’s small-mindedness is the great danger now on earth. I

observe more inclination towards greatness in the feelings of the

Russian Nihilists than in those of the English Utilitarians. We require

an intergrowth of the German and Slav races, and we require, too, the

cleverest financiers, the Jews, for us to become masters of the world.

(a) The sense of reality.

(b) A giving-up of the English principle of the people’s right of

representation. We require the representation of the great interests.

mutual plan of action which shall not permit any English schemata to

obtain the mastery in Russia. No American future!

(d) A national system of politics is untenable, and embarrassment by

Christian views is a very great evil. In Europe all sensible people are

sceptics, whether they say so or not.

18.

I see over and beyond all these national wars, new “empires,” and

whatever else lies in the foreground. What I am concerned with—for I see

it preparing itself slowly and hesitatingly—is the United Europe. It was

the only real work, the one impulse in the souls, of all the

broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century—this preparation of a

new synthesis, and the tentative effort to anticipate the future of “the

European.” Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they

fall back again into the national narrowness of the “Fatherlanders”—then

they were once more “patriots.” I am thinking of men like Napoleon,

Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. Perhaps

Richard Wagner likewise belongs to their number, concerning whom, as a

successful type of German obscurity, nothing can be said without some

such “perhaps.”

But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new unity there

comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small States of Europe—I

refer to all our present kingdoms and “empires”—will in a short time

become economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled struggle

for the possession of local and international trade. Money is even now

compelling European nations to amalgamate into one Power. In order,

however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the

world with good prospects of victory (it is easy to perceive against

whom this battle will be waged), she must probably “come to an

understanding” with England. The English colonies are needed for this

struggle, just as much as modern Germany, to play her new rôle of broker

and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland. For no one

any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to continue to

act her old part for fifty years more; the impossibility of shutting out

homines novi from the government will ruin her, and her continual change

of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the carrying out of any

tasks which require to be spread out over a long period of time. A man

must to-day be a soldier first and foremost that he may not afterwards

lose his credit as a merchant. Enough; here, as in other matters, the

coming century will be found following in the footsteps of Napoleon—the

first man, and the man of greatest initiative and advanced views, of

modern times. For the tasks of the next century, the methods of popular

representation and parliaments are the most inappropriate imaginable.

19.

The condition of Europe in the next century will once again lead to the

breeding of manly virtues, because men will live in continual danger.

Universal military service is already the curious antidote which we

possess for the effeminacy of democratic ideas, and it has grown up out

of the struggle of the nations. (Nation—men who speak one language and

read the same newspapers. These men now call themselves “nations,” and

would far too readily trace their descent from the same source and

through the same history; which, however, even with the assistance of

the most malignant lying in the past, they have not succeeded in doing.)

20.

What quagmires and mendacity must there be about if it is possible, in

the modern European hotch-potch, to raise questions of “race”! (It being

premised that the origin of such writers is not in Horneo and Borneo.)

21.

Maxim: To associate with no man who takes any part in the mendacious

race swindle.

22.

With the freedom of travel now existing, groups of men of the same

kindred can join together and establish communal habits and customs. The

overcoming of “nations.”

23.

To make Europe a centre of culture, national stupidities should not make

us blind to the fact that in the higher regions there is already a

continuous reciprocal dependence. France and German philosophy. Richard

Wagner and Paris (1830–50). Goethe and Greece. All things are impelled

towards, a synthesis of the European past in the highest types of mind.

24.

Mankind has still much before it—how, generally speaking, could the

ideal be taken from the past? Perhaps merely in relation to the present,

which latter is possibly a lower region.

25.

This is our distrust, which recurs again and again; our care, which

never lets us sleep; our question, which no one listens to or wishes to

listen to; our Sphinx, near which there is more than one precipice: we

believe that the men of present-day Europe are deceived in regard to the

things which we love best, and a pitiless demon (no, not pitiless, only

indifferent and puerile)—plays with our hearts and their enthusiasm, as

it may perhaps have already played with everything that lived and loved;

I believe that everything which we Europeans of to-day are in the habit

of admiring as the values of all these respected things called

“humanity,” “mankind,” “sympathy,” “pity,” may be of some value as the

debilitation and moderating of certain powerful and dangerous primitive

impulses. Nevertheless, in the long run all these things are nothing

else than the belittlement of the entire type “man,” his mediocrisation,

if in such a desperate situation I may make use of such a desperate

expression. I think that the commedia umana for an epicurean

spectator-god must consist in this: that the Europeans, by virtue of

their growing morality, believe in all their innocence and vanity that

they are rising higher and higher, whereas the truth is that they are

sinking lower and lower—i.e. through the cultivation of all the virtues

which are useful to a herd, and through the repression of the other and

contrary virtues which give rise to a new, higher, stronger, masterful

race of men—the first-named virtues merely develop the herd-animal in

man and stabilitate the animal “man,” for until now man has been “the

animal as yet unstabilitated.”

26.

Genius and Epoch.—Heroism is no form of selfishness, for one is

shipwrecked by it.... The direction of power is often conditioned by the

state of the period in which the great man happens to be born; and this

fact brings about the superstition that he is the expression of his

time. But this same power could be applied in several different ways;

and between him and his time there is always this difference: that

public opinion always worships the herd instinct,—i.e. the instinct of

the weak,—while he, the strong man, rights for strong ideals.

27.

The fate now overhanging Europe is simply this: that it is exactly her

strongest sons that come rarely and late to the spring-time of their

existence; that, as a rule, when they are already in their early youth

they perish, saddened, disgusted, darkened in mind, just because they

have already, with the entire passion of their strength, drained to the

dregs the cup of disillusionment, which in our days means the cup of

knowledge, and they would not have been the strongest had they not also

been the most disillusionised. For that is the test of their power—they

must first of all rise out of the illness of their epoch to reach their

own health. A late spring-time is their mark of distinction; also, let

us add, late merriment, late folly, the late exuberance of joy! For this

is the danger of to-day: everything that we loved when we were young has

betrayed us. Our last love—the love which makes us acknowledge her, our

love for Truth—let us take care that she, too, does not betray us!

[1] An allusion to the celebrated monologue in William Tell.

[2] Mistress Sly.—Tr.

[3] In the German text “Heiland.” This has the double meaning of

“healer” and “saviour.”—H. B. S.

[4] “Horrible beast.”

[5] An allusion to the celebrated monologue in William Tell.

[6] Mistress Sly.—Tr.

[7] In the German text “Heiland.” This has the double meaning of

“healer” and “saviour.”—H. B. S.

[8] “Horrible beast.”

[9] “Here I stand! I cannot help myself. God help me! Amen”—were

Luther’s words before the Reichstag at Worms.—H. B. S.

[10] E.g. Lectureships.

[11] An allusion to the well-known patriotic song.—H. B. S.