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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

On the Genealogy of Morality

EDITED BY

KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON Department of Philosophy,

University of Warwick

TRANSLATED BY

CAROL DIETHE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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2006

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Contents

Acknowledgements and a note on the text page viii

A note on the revised edition ix

Introduction: on Nietzsche’s critique of morality xiii

Chronology xxx

Further reading xxxiii

Biographical synopses xxxvii

On the Genealogy of Morality !

Supplementary material to On the Genealogy of Morality !"!

‘The Greek State’ !#$

‘Homer’s Contest’ !%$

Index of names !&'

Index of subjects !&%

vii

ON THE GENEALOGY

OF MORALITY

A Polemic

Preface

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We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves, – so how are we ever supposed to find our- selves? How right is the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’;1 our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing – to ‘bring some- thing home’. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experi- ences’, – who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time? I fear we have never really been ‘with it’ in such matters: our heart is simply not in it – and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders ‘What hour struck?’, sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, ‘What did we actually experience then?’ or even, ‘Who are we, in fact?’ and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being – oh! and lose count . . . We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto2

‘everyone is furthest from himself ’ applies to us for ever, – we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves . . .

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11 Gospel according to Matthew #.$!. 12 ‘Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste’ is a reversal of the common German saying, ‘Jeder ist

sich selbst der Nächste’ ‘Everyone is closest to himself ’ i.e. ‘Charity begins at home’, cf. also Terence, Andria IV. !.!$.

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– My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits,3 which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dan- gerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of "#$%–$; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect! The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun. – Do you like the taste of our fruit? – But of what concern is that to the trees? And of what concern is it to us philosophers? . . .

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With a characteristic scepticism to which I confess only reluctantly – it relates to morality and to all that hitherto on earth has been celebrated as morality –, a scepticism which sprang up in my life so early, so unbid- den, so unstoppably, and which was in such conflict with my surround- ings, age, precedents and lineage that I would almost be justified in calling it my ‘a priori’, – eventually my curiosity and suspicion were bound to fix on the question of what origin our terms good and evil actually have. Indeed, as a thirteen-year-old boy, I was preoccupied with the problem of the origin of evil: at an age when one’s heart was ‘half-filled with childish

On the Genealogy of Morality

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3 Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, "(#%).

games, half-filled with God’,4 I dedicated my first literary childish game, my first philosophical essay, to this problem – and as regards my ‘solution’ to the problem at that time, I quite properly gave God credit for it and made him the father of evil. Did my ‘a priori’ want this of me? That new, immoral, or at least immoralistic ‘a priori’: and the oh-so-anti-Kantian, so enigmatic ‘categorical imperative’5 which spoke from it and to which I have, in the meantime, increasingly lent an ear, and not just an ear? . . . Fortunately I learnt, in time, to separate theological from moral prejudice and I no longer searched for the origin of evil beyond the world. Some training in history and philology, together with my innate fastidiousness with regard to all psychological problems, soon transformed my problem into another: under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil? and what value do they themselves have? Have they up to now obstructed or promoted human flourishing? Are they a sign of dis- tress, poverty and the degeneration of life? Or, on the contrary, do they reveal the fullness, strength and will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future? To these questions I found and ventured all kinds of answers of my own, I distinguished between epochs, peoples, grades of rank between individuals, I focused my inquiry, and out of the answers there developed new questions, investigations, conjectures, probabilities until I had my own territory, my own soil, a whole silently growing and blossoming world, secret gardens, as it were, the existence of which nobody must be allowed to suspect . . . Oh! how happy we are, we knowers, provided we can keep quiet for long enough! . . .

!

I was given the initial stimulation to publish something about my hypotheses on the origin of morality by a clear, honest and clever, even too-clever little book, in which I first directly encountered the back-to- front and perverse kind of genealogical hypotheses, actually the English kind, which drew me to it – with that power of attraction which every- thing contradictory and antithetical has. The title of the little book was

Preface

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14 Goethe, Faust #. $%&#f. 15 Immanuel Kant gives a number of different formulations of what he takes to be the basic

principle of morality in his two major works on ethics, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (#%&") and the Critique of Practical Reason (#%&&). The first formulation of the ‘categorical imperative’ in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals reads: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’ (Groundwork, section #).

The Origin of the Moral Sensations; its author was Dr Paul Rée; the year of its publication !"##. I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I said ‘no’, sentence by sentence and deduction by deduction, as I did to this book: but completely without annoyance and impatience. In the work already mentioned which I was working on at the time, I referred to pas- sages from this book more or less at random, not in order to refute them – what business is it of mine to refute! – but, as befits a positive mind, to replace the improbable with the more probable and in some circum- stances to replace one error with another. As I said, I was, at the time, bringing to the light of day those hypotheses on descent to which these essays are devoted, clumsily, as I am the first to admit, and still inhibited because I still lacked my own vocabulary for these special topics, and with a good deal of relapse and vacillation. In particular, compare what I say about the dual prehistory of good and evil in Human, All Too Human, section $% (namely in the sphere of nobles and slaves); likewise section !&' on the value and descent of ascetic morality; likewise sections (' and (( and volume II, section "( on the ‘Morality of Custom’, that much older and more primitive kind of morality which is toto coelo6 removed from altruistic evaluation (which Dr Rée, like all English genealogists, sees as the moral method of valuation as such); likewise section (), The Wanderer, section )', and Daybreak, section !!), on the descent of justice as a balance between two roughly equal powers (equilibrium as the pre- condition for all contracts and consequently for all law); likewise The Wanderer, sections )) and && on the descent of punishment, the deterrent [terroristisch] purpose of which is neither essential nor inherent (as Dr Rée thinks: – instead it is introduced in particular circumstances and is always incidental and added on).7

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Actually, just then I was preoccupied with something much more important than the nature of hypotheses, mine or anybody else’s, on the origin of morality (or, to be more exact: the latter concerned me only for one end, to which it is one of many means). For me it was a question of the value of morality, – and here I had to confront my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that book of mine spoke as though he were still

On the Genealogy of Morality

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16 ‘completely, utterly’. 17 All the passages Nietzsche mentions here are to be found below in the supplementary

material of this edition.

present, with its passion and its hidden contradiction (– it, too, being a ‘polemic’). I dealt especially with the value of the ‘unegoistic’, the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer8

had for so long gilded, deified and transcendentalized until he was finally left with them as those ‘values as such’ on the basis of which he said ‘no’ to life and to himself as well. But against these very instincts I gave vent to an increasingly deep mistrust, a scepticism which dug deeper and deeper! Precisely here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction – temptation to what? to nothingness? – pre- cisely here I saw the beginning of the end, standstill, mankind looking back wearily, turning its will against life, and the onset of the final sick- ness becoming gently, sadly manifest: I understood the morality of com- passion, casting around ever wider to catch even philosophers and make them ill, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture which has itself become uncanny, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a new Euro-Buddhism? to – nihilism? . . . This predilection for and over- valuation of compassion that modern philosophers show is, in fact, some- thing new: up till now, philosophers were agreed as to the worthlessness of compassion. I need only mention Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant, four minds as different from one another as it is possible to be, but united on one point: their low opinion of compassion. –

!

This problem of the value of compassion and of the morality of com- passion (– I am opposed to the disgraceful modern softness of feeling –) seems at first to be only an isolated phenomenon, a lone question mark; but whoever pauses over the question and learns to ask, will find what I found: – that a vast new panorama opens up for him, a possibility makes him giddy, mistrust, suspicion and fear of every kind spring up, belief in morality, all morality, wavers, – finally, a new demand becomes articulate. So let us give voice to this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined – and so we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed and changed (morality as result, as symptom, as mask, as tartuffery, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause,

Preface

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18 In his ‘Über die Grundlagen der Moral’ (#$%&) Schopenhauer claimed that compassion was the basis of morality.

remedy, stimulant, inhibition, poison), since we have neither had this knowledge up till now nor even desired it. People have taken the value of these ‘values’ as given, as factual, as beyond all questioning; up till now, nobody has had the remotest doubt or hesitation in placing higher value on ‘the good man’ than on ‘the evil’, higher value in the sense of advance- ment, benefit and prosperity for man in general (and this includes man’s future). What if the opposite were true? What if a regressive trait lurked in ‘the good man’, likewise a danger, an enticement, a poison, a narcotic, so that the present lived at the expense of the future? Perhaps in more comfort and less danger, but also in a smaller-minded, meaner manner? . . . So that morality itself were to blame if man, as species, never reached his highest potential power and splendour? So that morality itself was the danger of dangers? . . .

!

Suffice it to say that since this revelation, I had reason to look around for scholarly, bold, hardworking colleagues (I am still looking). The vast, distant and hidden land of morality – of morality as it really existed and was really lived – has to be journeyed through with quite new questions and as it were with new eyes: and surely that means virtually discovering this land for the first time? . . . If, on my travels, I thought about the above-mentioned Dr Rée, amongst others, this was because I was certain that, judging from the questions he raised, he himself would have to adopt a more sensible method if he wanted to find the answers. Was I mistaken? At any rate, I wanted to focus this sharp, unbiased eye in a better direc- tion, the direction of a real history of morality, and to warn him, while there was still time, against such English hypothesis-mongering into the blue. It is quite clear which colour is a hundred times more important for a genealogist than blue: namely grey, which is to say, that which can be documented, which can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short, the whole, long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of man’s moral past! This was unknown to Dr Rée; but he had read Darwin: – and so, in his hypotheses, the Darwinian beast and the ultra-modern, humble moral weakling who ‘no longer bites’ politely shake hands in a way that is at least entertaining, the latter with an expression of a certain good- humoured and cultivated indolence on his face, in which even a grain of pessimism and fatigue mingle: as if it were really not worth taking all these things – the problems of morality – so seriously. Now I, on the

On the Genealogy of Morality

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contrary, think there is nothing which more rewards being taken seriously; the reward being, for example, the possibility of one day being allowed to take them cheerfully. That cheerfulness, in fact, or to put it into my par- lance, that gay science – is a reward: a reward for a long, brave, diligent, subterranean seriousness for which, admittedly, not everyone is suited. The day we can say, with conviction: ‘Forwards! even our old morality would make a comedy!’ we shall have discovered a new twist and possible outcome for the Dionysian drama of the ‘fate of the soul’ –: and he’ll make good use of it, we can bet, he, the grand old eternal writer of the comedy of our existence! . . .

!

– If anyone finds this script incomprehensible and hard on the ears, I do not think the fault necessarily lies with me. It is clear enough, assum- ing, as I do, that people have first read my earlier works without sparing themselves some effort: because they really are not easy to approach. With regard to my Zarathustra, for example, I do not acknowledge anyone as an expert on it if he has not, at some time, been both profoundly wounded and profoundly delighted by it, for only then may he enjoy the privilege of sharing, with due reverence, the halcyon element from which the book was born and its sunny brightness, spaciousness, breadth and certainty. In other cases, the aphoristic form causes difficulty: this is because this form is not taken seriously enough these days. An aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been ‘deciphered’ just because it has been read out; on the contrary, this is just the beginning of its proper interpretation, and for this, an art of interpretation is needed. In the third essay of this book I have given an example of what I mean by ‘interpretation’ in such a case: – this treatise is a commentary on the aphorism that precedes it. I admit that you need one thing above all in order to practise the requisite art of reading, a thing which today people have been so good at forget- ting – and so it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ –, you almost need to be a cow for this one thing and certainly not a ‘modern man’: it is rumination . . .

Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine July "!!#.

Preface

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First essay: ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’

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– These English psychologists, who have to be thanked for having made the only attempts so far to write a history of the emergence of morality, – provide us with a small riddle in the form of themselves; in fact, I admit that as living riddles they have a significant advantage over their books – they are actually interesting! These English psychologists – just what do they want? You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world to the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our develop- ment where man’s intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and random coupling and mechanism of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid) – what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time? Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle humans, which it might well not admit to itself? Or perhaps a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green? Or a certain subterranean animosity and rancune towards Christianity (and Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of consciousness? Or even a lewd taste for the strange, for the painful paradox, for the dubious and nonsensical in life? Or finally – a bit of everything, a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and need for pepper? . . . But people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp. I am resistant to hearing this and, indeed, I do

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not believe it; and if it is permissible to wish where it is impossible to know, I sincerely hope that the reverse is true, – that these analysts holding a microscope to the soul are actually brave, generous and proud animals, who know how to control their own pleasure and pain and have been taught to sacrifice desirability to truth, every truth, even a plain, bitter, ugly, foul, unchristian, immoral truth . . . Because there are such truths. –

!

So you have to respect the good spirits which preside in these histori- ans of morality! But it is unfortunately a fact that historical spirit itself is lacking in them, they have been left in the lurch by all the good spirits of history itself ! As is now established philosophical practice, they all think in a way that is essentially unhistorical; this can’t be doubted. The idiocy of their moral genealogy is revealed at the outset when it is a question of conveying the descent of the concept and judgment of ‘good’. ‘Originally’ – they decree – ‘unegoistic acts were praised and called good by their recipients, in other words, by the people to whom they were useful; later, everyone forgot the origin of the praise and because such acts had always been habitually praised as good, people also began to experi- ence them as good – as if they were something good as such’. We can see at once: this first deduction contains all the typical traits of idiosyncratic English psychologists, – we have ‘usefulness’, ‘forgetting’, ‘habit’ and finally ‘error’, all as the basis of a respect for values of which the higher man has hitherto been proud, as though it were a sort of general privilege of mankind. This pride must be humbled, this valuation devalued: has that been achieved? . . . Now for me, it is obvious that the real breeding- ground for the concept ‘good’ has been sought and located in the wrong place by this theory: the judgment ‘good’ does not emanate from those to whom goodness is shown! Instead it has been ‘the good’ themselves, meaning the noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean first- rate, in contrast to everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names: usefulness was none of their concern! The standpoint of usefulness is as alien and inappropriate as it can be to such a heated eruption of the highest rank-ordering and rank- defining value judgments: this is the point where feeling reaches the opposite of the low temperatures needed for any calculation of prudence

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First essay

or reckoning of usefulness, – and not just for once, for one exceptional moment, but permanently. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I said, the continuing and predominant feeling of complete and fundamental superiority of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to those ‘below’ – that is the origin of the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’. (The seigneurial privilege of giving names even allows us to conceive of the origin of language itself as a manifestation of the power of the rulers: they say ‘this is so and so’, they set their seal on everything and every occur- rence with a sound and thereby take possession of it, as it were). It is because of this origin that from the outset, the word ‘good’ is absolutely not necessarily attached to ‘unegoistic’ actions: as the superstition of these moral genealogists would have it. On the contrary, it is only with a decline of aristocratic value judgments that this whole antithesis between ‘egois- tic’ and ‘unegoistic’ forces itself more and more on man’s conscience, – it is, to use my language, the herd instinct which, with that, finally gets its word in (and makes words). And even then it takes long enough for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant for the valuation of moral values to become enmeshed and embedded in the antithesis (as is the case in con- temporary Europe, for example: the prejudice which takes ‘moral’, ‘unegoistic’ and ‘désintéressé as equivalent terms already rules with the power of a ‘fixed idea’ and mental illness).

!

But secondly: quite apart from the fact that that hypothesis about the descent of the value judgment ‘good’ is historically untenable, it also suffers from an inner psychological contradiction. The usefulness of une- goistic behaviour is supposed to be the origin of the esteem in which it is held, and this origin is supposed to have been forgotten: – but how was such forgetting possible? Did the usefulness of such behaviour suddenly cease at some point? The opposite is the case: it is that this usefulness has been a permanent part of our everyday experience, something, then, that has been constantly stressed anew; consequently, instead of fading from con- sciousness, instead of becoming forgettable, it must have impressed itself on consciousness with ever greater clarity. How much more sensible is the opposite theory (that doesn’t make it any more true –), which is held, for example, by Herbert Spencer: he judges the concept ‘good’ as essentially the same as ‘useful’, ‘practical’, so that in their judgments ‘good’ and ‘bad’, people sum up and sanction their unforgotten, unforgettable experiences of

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On the Genealogy of Morality

what is useful-practical, harmful-impractical. According to this theory, good is what has always shown itself to be useful: so it can claim validity as ‘valuable in the highest degree’, as ‘valuable as such’. This route towards an explanation is wrong, as I said, but at least the explanation in itself is rational and psychologically tenable.

!

– I was given a pointer in the right direction by the question as to what the terms for ‘good’, as used in different languages, mean from the etymo- logical point of view: then I found that they all led me back to the same con- ceptual transformation, – that everywhere, ‘noble’, ‘aristocratic’ in social terms9 is the basic concept from which, necessarily, ‘good’ in the sense of ‘spiritually noble’, ‘aristocratic’, of ‘spiritually highminded’, ‘spiritually privileged’ developed: a development that always runs parallel with that other one which ultimately transfers ‘common’, ‘plebeian’, ‘low’ into the concept ‘bad’. The best example for the latter is the German word ‘schlecht’ (bad) itself: which is identical with ‘schlicht’ (plain, simple) – compare ‘schlechtweg’ (plainly), ‘schlechterdings’ (simply) – and originally referred to the simple, the common man with no derogatory implication, but simply in contrast to the nobility. Round about the time of the Thirty Years War, late enough, then, this meaning shifted into its current usage. – To me, this seems an essential insight into moral genealogy; that it has been discovered so late is due to the obstructing influence which the democratic bias within the modern world exercises over all questions of descent. And this is the case in the apparently most objective of fields, natural science and physiol- ogy, as I shall just mention here. The havoc this prejudice can wreak, once it is unbridled to the point of hatred, particularly for morality and history, can be seen in the famous case of Buckle; the plebeianism of the modern spirit, which began in England, broke out there once again on its native soil as violently as a volcano of mud, and with that salted, overloud, vulgar loquacity with which all volcanoes have spoken up till now. –

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With regard to our problem, which can justifiably be called a quiet problem and fastidiously addresses itself to only a few ears, it is of no little

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First essay

9 Nietzsche here uses a derivative of the word ‘Stand ’ (‘estate’).

interest to discover that, in these words and roots which denote ‘good’, we can often detect the main nuance which made the noble feel they were men of higher rank. True, in most cases they might give themselves names which simply show superiority of power (such as ‘the mighty’, ‘the masters’, ‘the commanders’) or the most visible sign of this superiority, such as ‘the rich’, ‘the propertied’ (that is the meaning of arya; and the equivalent in Iranian and Slavic). But the names also show a typical char- acter trait: and this is what concerns us here. For example, they call them- selves ‘the truthful’: led by the Greek aristocracy, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis.10 The word used specifically for this purpose, e0sqlov,11 means, according to its root, one who is, who has reality, who really exists and is true; then, with a subjective transforma- tion, it becomes the slogan and catch-phrase of the aristocracy and is completely assimilated with the sense of ‘aristocratic’, in contrast to the deceitful common man, as taken and shown by Theognis, – until, finally, with the decline of the aristocracy, the word remains as a term for spiri- tual noblesse, and, as it were, ripens and sweetens. Cowardice is underlined in the word xaxo/v,12 as in deilo/v13 (the plebeian in contrast to the a0gaqo/v): perhaps this gives a clue as to where we should look for the ety- mological derivation of the ambiguous term a0gaqo/v.14 In the Latin word malus15 (to which I juxtapose me/lav)16 the common man could be char- acterized as the dark-skinned and especially the dark-haired man (‘hic niger est –’),17 as the pre-Aryan occupant of Italian soil who could most easily be distinguished from the blond race which had become dominant, namely the Aryan conquering race, by its colour; at any rate, I have found exactly the same with Gaelic peoples, – fin (for example in Fin-gal), the word designating the aristocracy and finally the good, noble, pure, was originally a blond person in contrast to the dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants. By the way, the Celts were a completely blond race; it is wrong to connect those traces of an essentially dark-haired population, which can be seen on carefully prepared ethnological maps in Germany,

On the Genealogy of Morality

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10 Cf. esp. !. #$–%& (ed. Diehl). 11 This word seems originally to have meant ‘genuine, real’, it later becomes one of the most

commonly used words for ‘noble’. 12 (Greek) ‘weak, ugly, cowardly, worthless’. 13 (Greek) ‘cowardly (and thus despicable)’. 14 (Greek) ‘capable, useful, good’. 15 ‘bad, evil’. 16 (Greek) ‘dark, black’. 17 ‘That man is a dangerous character’, literally ‘He is black’ (Horace, Satires I. &#).

with any Celtic descent and mixing of blood in such a connection, as Virchow does: it is more a case of the pre-Aryan population of Germany emerging at these points. (The same holds good for virtually the whole of Europe: to all intents and purposes the subject race has ended up by regaining the upper hand in skin colour, shortness of forehead and perhaps even in intellectual and social instincts: who can give any guar- antee that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that predilection for the ‘commune’, the most primitive form of social structure which is common to all Europe’s socialists, are not in essence a huge throw-back – and that the conquering master race, that of the Aryans, is not physiologically being defeated as well? . . .) I think I can interpret the Latin bonus18 as ‘the “warrior” ’: providing I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older duonus (compare bellum19 = duellum = duen- lum, which seems to me to contain that duonus). Therefore bonus as a man of war, of division (duo), as warrior: one can see what made up a man’s ‘goodness’ in ancient Rome. Take our German ‘gut’: does it not mean ‘the godlike man’, the man ‘of godlike race’? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble), name of the Goths? The grounds for this sup- position will not be gone into here. –

!

If the highest caste is at the same time the clerical caste and therefore chooses a title for its overall description which calls its priestly function to mind, this does not yet constitute an exception to the rule that the concept of political superiority always resolves itself into the concept of psychological superiority (although this may be the occasion giving rise to exceptions). This is an example of the first juxtaposition of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ as signs of different estates; and later ‘good’ and ‘bad’ develop in a direction which no longer refers to social standing. In addition, people should be wary of taking these terms ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ too seri- ously, too far or even symbolically: all ancient man’s concepts were orig- inally understood – to a degree we can scarcely imagine – as crude, coarse, detached, narrow, direct and in particular unsymbolic. From the outset the ‘pure man’ was just a man who washed, avoided certain foods which cause skin complaints, did not sleep with the filthy women from

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18 ‘good’. 19 Both ‘bellum’ and ‘duellum’ mean ‘war’ (Latin).

the lower orders and had a horror of blood, – nothing more, not much more! And yet the very nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy shows how contradictory valuations could become dangerously inter- nalized and sharpened, precisely in such an aristocracy at an early stage; and in fact clefts were finally driven between man and man which even an Achilles of free-thinking would shudder to cross. From the very beginning there has been something unhealthy about these priestly aris- tocracies and in the customs dominant there, which are turned away from action and are partly brooding and partly emotionally explosive, resulting in the almost inevitable bowel complaints and neurasthenia which have plagued the clergy down the ages; but as for the remedy they themselves found for their sickness, – surely one must say that its after- effects have shown it to be a hundred times more dangerous than the disease it was meant to cure? People are still ill from the after-effects of these priestly quack-cures! For example, think of certain diets (avoid- ance of meat), of fasting, sexual abstinence, the flight ‘into the desert’ (Weir-Mitchell’s bed-rest, admittedly without the subsequent overfeed- ing and weight-gain that constitute the most effective antidote to all hys- teria brought on by the ascetic ideal): think, too, of the whole metaphysics of the clergy, which is antagonistic towards the senses, making men lazy and refined, think, too, of their Fakir-like and Brahmin-like self-hypnotizing – Brahminism as crystal ball and fixed idea – and the final, all-too-comprehensible general disenchantment with its radical cure, nothingness (or God: – the yearning for a unio mystica with God is the Buddhist yearning for nothingness, Nirvâna – and no more!) Priests make everything more dangerous, not just medica- ments and healing arts but pride, revenge, acumen, debauchery, love, lust for power, virtue, sickness; – in any case, with some justification one could add that man first became an interesting animal on the foundation of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priest, and that the human soul became deep in the higher sense and turned evil for the first time – and of course, these are the two basic forms of man’s super- iority, hitherto, over other animals! . . .

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– You will have already guessed how easy it was for the priestly method of valuation to split off from the chivalric-aristocratic method and then to develop further into the opposite of the latter; this receives a special

On the Genealogy of Morality

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impetus when the priestly caste and warrior caste confront one another in jealousy and cannot agree on the prize of war. The chivalric-aristocratic value judgments are based on a powerful physicality, a blossoming, rich, even effervescent good health that includes the things needed to maintain it, war, adventure, hunting, dancing, jousting and everything else that con- tains strong, free, happy action. The priestly-aristocratic method of valua- tion – as we have seen – has different criteria: woe betide it when it comes to war! As we know, priests make the most evil enemies – but why? Because they are the most powerless. Out of this powerlessness, their hate swells into something huge and uncanny to a most intellectual and poisonous level. The greatest haters in world history, and the most intelligent [die geistreichsten Hasser], have always been priests: – nobody else’s intelligence [Geist] stands a chance against the intelligence [Geist] of priestly revenge.20

The history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect [Geist] of the powerless injected into it: – let us take the best example straight away. Nothing that has been done on earth against ‘the noble’, ‘the mighty’, ‘the masters’ and ‘the rulers’, is worth mentioning compared with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people, which in the last resort was able to gain satisfaction from its enemies and conquerors only through a radical revaluation of their values, that is, through an act of the most deliberate revenge [durch einen Akt der geistigsten Rache]. Only this was fitting for a priestly people with the most entrenched priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured, with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a rever- sal and held it in the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying: ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’ . . . We know who became heir to this Jewish revaluation . . . With regard to the huge and incalculably disastrous initiative taken by the Jews with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the words I wrote on another occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, section !"#)21 – namely,

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20 The German term Geist and its derivatives, are generally rendered by ‘spirit’ and its deriv- atives, but can also, as in this sentence, be translated as ‘intelligence’ and, as elsewhere, ‘mind’, ‘intellectual’, etc.

21 See below, Supplementary material, p. !%#.

that the slaves’ revolt in morality begins with the Jews: a revolt which has two thousand years of history behind it and which has only been lost sight of because – it was victorious . . .

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– But you don’t understand that? You don’t have eyes for something that needed two millennia to achieve victory? . . . There is nothing sur- prising about that: all long things are difficult to see, to see round. But that is what happened: from the trunk of the tree of revenge and hatred, Jewish hatred – the deepest and most sublime, indeed a hatred which created ideals and changed values, the like of which has never been seen on earth – there grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime kind of love: – and what other trunk could it have grown out of? . . . But don’t make the mistake of thinking that it had grown forth as a denial of the thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! This love grew out of the hatred, as its crown, as the triumphant crown expanding ever wider in the purest brightness and radiance of the sun, the crown which, as it were, in the realm of light and height, was pursuing the aims of that hatred, victory, spoils, seduction with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were burrowing ever more thoroughly and greedily into every- thing that was deep and evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, as the embodiment of the gospel of love, this ‘redeemer’ bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, to sinners – was he not seduction in its most sinister and irresistible form, seduction and the circuitous route to just those very Jewish values and innovative ideals? Did Israel not reach the pinnacle of her sublime vengefulness via this very ‘redeemer’, this apparent opponent of and disperser of Israel? Is it not part of a secret black art of a truly grand politics of revenge, a far-sighted, subterranean revenge, slow to grip and calculating, that Israel had to denounce her actual instrument of revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail him to the cross so that ‘all the world’, namely all Israel’s enemies, could safely nibble at this bait? And could anyone, on the other hand, using all the ingenuity of his intel- lect, think up a more dangerous bait? Something to equal the enticing, intoxicating, benumbing, corrupting power of that symbol of the ‘holy cross’, to equal that horrible paradox of a ‘God on the Cross’, to equal that mystery of an unthinkable final act of extreme cruelty and self- crucifixion of God for the salvation of mankind? . . . At least it is certain

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that sub hoc signo22 Israel, with its revenge and revaluation of all former values, has triumphed repeatedly over all other ideals, all nobler ideals. – –

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– ‘But why do you talk about nobler ideals! Let’s bow to the facts: the people have won – or “the slaves”, the “plebeians”, “the herd”, or what- ever you want to call them – if the Jews made this come about, good for them! No people ever had a more world-historic mission. “The Masters” are deposed; the morality of the common people has triumphed. You might take this victory for blood-poisoning (it did mix the races up) – I do not deny it; but undoubtedly this intoxication has succeeded. The “sal- vation” of the human race (I mean, from “the Masters”) is well on course; everything is being made appreciably Jewish, Christian or plebeian (never mind the words!). The passage of this poison through the whole body of mankind seems unstoppable, even though its tempo and pace, from now on, might tend to be slower, softer, quieter, calmer – there is no hurry . . . With this in view, does the Church still have a necessary role, indeed, does it have a right to exist? Or could one do without it? Quaeritur.23 It seems that the Church rather slows down and blocks the passage of poison instead of accelerating it? Well, that might be what makes it useful . . . Certainly it is by now something crude and boorish, resistant to a more tender intelligence, to a truly modern taste. Should not the Church at least try to be more refined? . . . Nowadays it alienates, more than it seduces . . . Who amongst us would be a free-thinker if it were not for the Church? We loathe the Church, not its poison . . . Apart from the Church, we too love the poison . . .’ – This is the epilogue by a ‘free-thinker’ to my speech, an honest animal as he clearly shows himself to be, and moreover a democrat; he had listened to me up to that point, and could not stand listening to my silence. As a matter of fact, there is much for me to keep silent about at this point. –

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22 Eusebius of Caesarea reports that Constantine (later called ‘the Great’) once had a vision of a cross with the attached legend: ‘By this, conquer’ (‘tou/tw| ni/xa’) (De vita Constantini ".#$). This phrase was eventually transformed into the Latin: ‘In hoc signo vinces’ (‘In this sign you will conquer’). ‘Sub hoc signo’ (‘Under this sign’) is presumably to be under- stood as a variant of ‘In hoc signo’. In %& '"# Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, becoming the first Christian Emperor.

23 ‘That is the question’.

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The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a tri- umphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance – this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself – is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all, – its action is basically a reaction. The opposite is the case with the noble method of valuation: this acts and grows spontaneously, seeking out its opposite only so that it can say ‘yes’ to itself even more thankfully and exultantly, – its negative concept ‘low’, ‘common’, ‘bad’ is only a pale con- trast created after the event compared to its positive basic concept, satu- rated with life and passion, ‘we the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!’ When the noble method of valuation makes a mistake and sins against reality, this happens in relation to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently familiar, a true knowledge of which, indeed, it rigidly resists: in some circumstances, it misjudges the sphere it despises, that of the common man, the rabble; on the other hand, we should bear in mind that the distortion which results from the feeling of contempt, disdain and superciliousness, always assuming that the image of the despised person is distorted, remains far behind the distortion with which the entrenched hatred and revenge of the powerless man attacks his opponent – in effigy of course. Indeed, contempt has too much negligence, nonchalance, com- placency and impatience, even too much personal cheerfulness mixed into it, for it to be in a position to transform its object into a real carica- ture and monster. Nor should one fail to hear the almost kindly nuances which the Greek nobility, for example, places in all words that it uses to distinguish itself from the rabble; a sort of sympathy, consideration and indulgence incessantly permeates and sugars them, with the result that nearly all words referring to the common man remain as expressions for ‘unhappy’, ‘pitiable’ (compare deilo/v, dei/laiov, ponhro/v, moxqhro/v, the last two actually designating the common man as slave worker and beast of burden) – and on the other hand, ‘bad’, ‘low’ and ‘unhappy’ have never ceased to reverberate in the Greek ear in a tone in which ‘unhappy’

predominates: this is a legacy of the old, nobler, aristocratic method of valuation that does not deny itself even in contempt (– philologists will remember the sense in which oi+zurov,24 a1nolbov,25 tlh/mwn,26

duvtuxe~in,27 cumfora/28 are used). The ‘well-born’ felt they were ‘the happy’; they did not need first of all to construct their happiness artifi- cially by looking at their enemies, or in some cases by talking themselves into it, lying themselves into it (as all men of ressentiment are wont to do); and also, as complete men bursting with strength and therefore necessar- ily active, they knew they must not separate happiness from action, – being active is by necessity counted as part of happiness (this is the ety- mological derivation of en’pra/ttein)29 – all very much the opposite of ‘happiness’ at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, and those rankled with poisonous and hostile feelings, for whom it manifests itself as essen- tially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, ‘sabbath’, relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs, in short as something passive. While the noble man is confident and frank with himself (gennaîov, ‘of noble birth’, underlines the nuance ‘upright’ and probably ‘naïve’ as well), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors, everything secretive appeals to him as being his world, his security, his comfort; he knows all about keeping quiet, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily humbling and abasing himself. A race of such men of ressentiment will inevitably end up cleverer than any noble race, and will respect cleverness to a quite different degree as well: namely, as a condi- tion of existence of the first rank, whilst the cleverness of noble men can easily have a subtle aftertaste of luxury and refinement about it: – pre- cisely because in this area, it is nowhere near as important as the complete certainty of function of the governing unconscious instincts, nor indeed as important as a certain lack of cleverness, such as a daring charge at danger or at the enemy, or those frenzied sudden fits of anger, love, rev- erence, gratitude and revenge by which noble souls down the ages have

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24 ‘Oi’ is an interjection expressive of pain. A person whose life gives ample occasion for the use of this interjection is ‘oizuros’.

25 ‘not prosperous, unfortunate’. 26 ‘tlēnai’ = to bear, endure, suffer. A person who must endure things is ‘tlemon’. 27 ‘to have bad luck’. 28 ‘accident, misfortune’. 29 This expression (eu prattein) has something like the ambiguity of the English ‘do well’ =

‘engage in some activity successfully’ or ‘fare well’. There is no expression in common use in German with a parallel ambiguity.

recognized one another. When ressentiment does occur in the noble man himself, it is consumed and exhausted in an immediate reaction, and therefore it does not poison, on the other hand, it does not occur at all in countless cases where it is unavoidable for all who are weak and power- less. To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his mis- deeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no recall for the insults and slights directed at him and who could not forgive, simply because he – forgot.) A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man; actual ‘love of your enemies’ is also possible here and here alone – assuming it is possible at all on earth.30 How much respect a noble man has for his enemies! – and a respect of that sort is a bridge to love . . . For he insists on having his enemy to himself, as a mark of distinction, indeed he will tolerate as enemies none other than such as have nothing to be despised and a great deal to be honoured! Against this, imagine ‘the enemy’ as conceived of by the man of ressentiment – and here we have his deed, his creation: he has conceived of the ‘evil enemy’, ‘the evil one’ as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the ‘good one’ – himself ! . . .

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Exactly the opposite is true of the noble one who conceives of the basic idea ‘good’ by himself, in advance and spontaneously, and only then creates a notion of ‘bad’! This ‘bad’ of noble origin and that ‘evil’ from the cauldron of unassuaged hatred – the first is an afterthought, an aside, a complementary colour, whilst the other is the original, the beginning, the actual deed in the conception of slave morality – how different are the two words ‘bad’ and ‘evil’, although both seem to be the opposite for the same concept, ‘good’! But it is not the same concept ‘good’; on the contrary, one should ask who is actually evil in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The stern reply is: precisely the ‘good’ person of the other morality, the noble, powerful, dominating one, but re-touched, re-interpreted and reviewed through the poisonous eye of ressentiment. Here there is one point we would be the last to deny: anyone who came to know these ‘good

On the Genealogy of Morality

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30 Gospel according to Matthew #.$%–$.

men’ as enemies came to know nothing but ‘evil enemies’, and the same people who are so strongly held in check by custom, respect, habit, grati- tude and even more through spying on one another and through peer- group jealousy, who, on the other hand, behave towards one another by showing such resourcefulness in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship, – they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey in the world outside where the strange, the foreign, begin. There they enjoy freedom from every social constraint, in the wilderness they compensate for the tension which is caused by being closed in and fenced in by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who perhaps go away having committed a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student’s prank, convinced that poets will now have some- thing to sing about and celebrate for quite some time. At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: – Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings – in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of ‘barbarian’ in their traces wher- ever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it (for example, when Pericles, in that famous funeral oration, tells his Athenians: ‘Our daring has forced a path to every land and sea, erecting timeless memorials to itself every- where for good and ill’).31 This ‘daring’ of the noble races, mad, absurd and sudden in the way it manifests itself, the unpredictability and even the improbability of their undertakings – Pericles singles out the r9aqnmi/a of the Athenians for praise – their unconcern and scorn for safety, body, life, comfort, their shocking cheerfulness and depth of delight in all destruc- tion, in all the debauches of victory and cruelty – all this, for those who suffered under it, was summed up in the image of the ‘barbarian’, the ‘evil enemy’, perhaps the ‘Goth’ or the ‘Vandal’. The deep and icy mistrust that the German arouses as soon as he comes to power, which we see again even today – is still the aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries (although between the old Germanic peoples and us Germans there is

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31 Thucydides II. "#ff.

scarcely an idea in common, let alone a blood relationship). I once remarked on Hesiod’s dilemma32 when he thought up the series of cultural eras and tried to express them in gold, silver and iron: he could find no other solution to the contradiction presented to him by the magnificent but at the same time so shockingly violent world of Homer than to make two eras out of one, which he now placed one behind the other – first the era of heroes and demigods from Troy and Thebes, as that world retained in the memory of the noble races, who had their own ancestry in it; then the iron era, as that same world appeared to the descendants of the down- trodden, robbed, ill-treated, and those carried off and sold: as an era of iron, hard, as I said, cold, cruel, lacking feeling and conscience, crushing everything and coating it with blood. Assuming that what is at any rate believed as ‘truth’ were indeed true, that it is the meaning of all culture to breed a tame and civilized animal, a household pet, out of the beast of prey ‘man’, then one would undoubtedly have to view all instinctive reaction and instinctive ressentiment, by means of which the noble races and their ideals were finally wrecked and overpowered, as the actual instruments of culture; which, however, is not to say that the bearers of these instincts were themselves representatives of the culture. Instead, the opposite would be not only probable – no! it is visible today! These bearers of oppressive, vin- dictive instincts, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan population – represent the decline of mankind! These ‘instruments of culture’ are a disgrace to man, more a grounds for suspicion of, or an argument against, ‘culture’ in general! We may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the blond beast at the centre of every noble race and remain on our guard: but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned? And is that not our fate? What constitutes our aversion to ‘man’ today? – for we suffer from man, no doubt about that. – Not fear; rather, the fact that we have nothing to fear from man; that ‘man’ is first and foremost a teeming mass of worms; that the ‘tame man’, who is incurably mediocre and unedifying, has already learnt to view himself as the aim and pinnacle, the meaning of history, the ‘higher man’; – yes, the fact that he has a certain right to feel like that in so far as he feels distanced from the superabundance of failed,

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32 Hesiod, Works & Days #"$ff.; cf. also Daybreak, section #%&, and ‘Homer’s Contest’ (see below, Supplementary material, pp. #'"–%#).

sickly, tired and exhausted people of whom today’s Europe is beginning to reek, and in so far as he is at least relatively successful, at least still capable of living, at least saying ‘yes’ to life . . .

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– At this juncture I cannot suppress a sigh and one last hope. What do I find absolutely intolerable? Something which I just cannot cope alone with and which suffocates me and makes me feel faint? Bad air! Bad air! That something failed comes near me, that I have to smell the bowels of a failed soul! . . . Apart from that, what cannot be borne in the way of need, depri- vation, bad weather, disease, toil, solitude? Basically we can cope with everything else, born as we are to an underground and battling existence; again and again we keep coming up to the light, again and again we expe- rience our golden hour of victory, – and then there we stand, the way we were born, unbreakable, tense, ready for new, more difficult and distant things, like a bow that is merely stretched tauter by affliction. – But from time to time grant me – assuming that there are divine benefactresses beyond good and evil – a glimpse, grant me just one glimpse of something perfect, completely finished, happy, powerful, triumphant, that still leaves something to fear! A glimpse of a man who justifies man himself, a stroke of luck, an instance of a man who makes up for and redeems man, and enables us to retain our faith in mankind! . . . For the matter stands like so: the stunting and levelling of European man conceals our greatest danger, because the sight of this makes us tired . . . Today we see nothing that wants to expand, we suspect that things will just continue to decline, getting thinner, better-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian – no doubt about it, man is getting ‘better’ all the time . . . Right here is where the destiny of Europe lies – in losing our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our respect for him, our hope in him and even our will to be man. The sight of man now makes us tired – what is nihilism today if it is not that?. . . We are tired of man . . .

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– But let us return: the problem of the other origin of ‘good’, of good as thought up by the man of ressentiment, demands its solution. – There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large

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birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, – is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’ – It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a desire to overthrow, crush, become master, to be a thirst for enemies, resistance and triumphs, as it is to ask weakness to express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a ‘subject’, can make it appear otherwise. And just as the common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called lightning, popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as though there were an indifferent substra- tum behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an after- thought, – the doing is everything. Basically, the common people double a deed; when they see lightning, they make a doing-a-deed out of it: they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect. The scientists do no better when they say ‘force moves, force causes’ and such like, – all our science, in spite of its coolness and freedom from emotion, still stands exposed to the seduction of language and has not rid itself of the changelings foisted upon it, the ‘subjects’ (the atom is, for example, just such a changeling, likewise the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself ’): no wonder, then, if the entrenched, secretly smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred put this belief to their own use and, in fact, do not defend any belief more passionately than that the strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs: – in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey . . . When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the violated say to each other with the vindictive cunning of powerlessness: ‘Let us be different from evil people, let us be good! And a good person is anyone who does not rape, does not harm anyone, who does not attack, does not retaliate, who leaves the taking of

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revenge to God, who keeps hidden as we do, avoids all evil and asks little from life in general, like us who are patient, humble and upright’ – this means, if heard coolly and impartially, nothing more than: ‘We weak people are just weak; it is good to do nothing for which we are not strong enough’ – but this grim state of affairs, this cleverness of the lowest rank which even insects possess (which play dead, in order not to ‘do too much’ when in great danger), has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self- deception of powerlessness, clothed itself in the finery of self-denying, quiet, patient virtue, as though the weakness of the weak were itself – I mean its essence, its effect, its whole unique, unavoidable, irredeemable reality – a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment. This type of man needs to believe in an unbiased ‘subject’ with freedom of choice, because he has an instinct of self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified. The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially say, the soul) has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated that sublime self- deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their par- ticular mode of existence as an accomplishment.

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– Would anyone like to have a little look down into the secret of how ideals are fabricated on this earth? Who has enough pluck? . . . Come on! Here we have a clear glimpse into this dark workshop. Just wait one moment, Mr Nosy Daredevil: your eyes will have to become used to this false, shimmering light . . . There! That’s enough! Now you can speak! What’s happening down there? Tell me what you see, you with your most dangerous curiosity – now I am the one who’s listening. –

– ‘I cannot see anything but I can hear all the better. There is a guarded, malicious little rumour-mongering and whispering from every nook and cranny. I think people are telling lies; a sugary mildness clings to every sound. Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment, no doubt about it – it’s just as you said.’ –

– Go on! – ‘and impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into “good-

ness”; timid baseness is being turned into “humility”; submission to people one hates is being turned into “obedience” (actually towards someone who, they say, orders this submission – they call him God). The

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inoffensiveness of the weakling, the very cowardice with which he is richly endowed, his standing-by-the-door, his inevitable position of having to wait, are all given good names such as “patience”, also known as the virtue; not-being-able-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, it might even be forgiveness (“for they know not what they do – but we know what they are doing!”).33 They are also talking about “loving your enemies” – and sweating while they do it.’

– Go on! – ‘They are miserable, without a doubt, all these rumour-mongers and

clandestine forgers, even if they do crouch close together for warmth – but they tell me that their misery means they are God’s chosen and select, after all, people beat the dogs they love best; perhaps this misery is just a preparation, a test, a training, it might be even more than that – some- thing that will one day be balanced up and paid back with enormous inter- est in gold, no! in happiness. They call that “bliss”.’

– Go on! – ‘They are now informing me that not only are they better than the

powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority)34 – not only are they better, but they have a “better time”, or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies.’

– No! Wait a moment! You haven’t said anything yet about the master- pieces of those black magicians who can turn anything black into white- ness, milk and innocence: – haven’t you noticed their perfect raffinement, their boldest, subtlest, most ingenious and mendacious stunt? Pay atten- tion! These cellar rats full of revenge and hatred – what do they turn revenge and hatred into? Have you ever heard these words? Would you suspect, if you just went by what they said, that the men around you were nothing but men of ressentiment? . . .

– ‘I understand, I’ll open my ears once more (oh! oh! oh! and hold my nose). Now, at last, I can hear what they have been saying so often: “We good people – we are the just” – what they are demanding is not called ret- ribution, but “the triumph of justice”; what they hate is not their enemy, oh no! they hate “injustice”, “godlessness”; what they believe and hope for

On the Genealogy of Morality

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33 Gospel according to Luke !#.#$. 34 Romans %#.%.

is not the prospect of revenge, the delirium of sweet revenge (– Homer early on dubbed it “sweeter than honey”),35 but the victory of God, the just God, over the Godless; all that remains for them to love on earth are not their brothers in hate but their “brothers in love”,36 as they say, all good and just people on earth.’

– And what do they call that which serves as a consolation for all the sufferings of the world – their phantasmagoria of anticipated future bliss?

– ‘What? Do I hear correctly? They call it “the last judgment”, the coming of their kingdom, the “kingdom of God” – but in the meantime they live “in faith”, “in love”, “in hope”.’37

– Enough! Enough!

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Faith in what? Love of what? Hope for what? – These weaklings – in fact they, too, want to be the powerful one day, this is beyond doubt, one day their ‘kingdom’ will come too – ‘the kingdom of God’ simpliciter is their name for it, as I said: they are so humble about everything! Just to experience that, you need to live long, well beyond death, – yes, you need eternal life in order to be able to gain eternal recompense in ‘the kingdom of God’ for that life on earth ‘in faith’, ‘in love’, ‘in hope’. Recompense for what? Recompense through what? . . . It seems to me that Dante made a gross error when, with awe-inspiring naïvety he placed the inscription over the gateway to his hell: ‘Eternal love created me as well’:38 – at any rate, this inscription would have a better claim to stand over the gateway to Christian Paradise and its ‘eternal bliss’: ‘Eternal hate created me as well’ – assuming that a true statement can be placed above the gateway to a lie! For what is the bliss of this Paradise? . . . We might have guessed already; but it is better to be expressly shown it by no less an authority in such matters than Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. ‘Beati in regno coelesti’, he says as meekly as a lamb, ‘videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.’39 Or, if you want

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First essay

35 Iliad XVIII, !%&ff. 36 First Thessalonians !.'. 37 First Corinthians !'.!'; First Thessalonians !.'. 38 Dante, Inferno III. "–(. 39 The blessed in the heavenly kingdom will see the torment of the damned so that they may

even more thoroughly enjoy their blessedness. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Supplement to the Third Part, question XCVII, article i, ‘conclusio’. Some modern edi- tions do not contain this ‘conclusio’.

it even more forcefully, for example from the mouth of a triumphant Church Father40 who advised his Christians against the cruel volup- tuousness of the public spectacles – but why? ‘Faith offers us much more’ – he says, De Spectaculis. Chs. !"ff41 – ‘something much stronger; thanks to salvation, quite other joys are at our command; instead of athletes we have our martyrs; we want blood, well then, we have the blood of Christ . . . But think what awaits us on the day of his second coming, of his triumph!’ – and then the enraptured visionary goes on: ‘At enim super- sunt alia spectacula, ille ultimus et perpetuus judicii dies, ille nationibus insperatus, ille derisus, cum tanta saeculi vetustas et tot ejus nativitates uno igne haurientur. Quae tunc spectaculi latitudo! Quid admirer! Quid rideam! Ubi gaudeam! Ubi exultem, spectans tot et tantos reges, qui in coelum recepti nuntiabantur, cum ipso Jove et ipsis suis testibus in imis tenebris congemescentes! Item praesides (the Provincial Governors) per- secutores dominici nominis saevioribus quam ipsi flammis saevierunt insultantibus contra Christianos liquescentes! Quos praeterea 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 poëtàs non ad Rhadamanti nec ad Minois, sed ad inopinati Christi tribunal palpitantes! Tunc magis tragoedi audiendi, magis scilicet vocales (in better voice, screaming even louder) 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 desaevierunt. “Hic est ille, dicam, fabri aut quaestuariae filius (Tertullian refers to the Jews from now on, as is shown by what follows and in par- ticular by this well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talmud), sabbati destructor, Samarites et daemonium habens. Hic est, quem a Juda redemistis, hic est ille arundine et colaphis diverberatus, sputamentis dedecoratus, felle et aceto potatus. Hic est, quem clam dis- centes subripuerunt, ut resurrexisse dicatur vel hortulanus detraxit, ne lactucae suae frequentia commeantium laederentur.” Ut talia spectes, ut

On the Genealogy of Morality

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40 Tertullian. 41 In chapter XV of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon cites this same passage

and comments: ‘the Christians, who, in this world, found themselves oppressed by the power of the pagans, were sometimes seduced by resentment and spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph’.

talibus exultes, quis tibi praetor aut consul aut quaestor aut sacerdos de sua liberalitate praestabit? Et tamen haec jam habemus quodammodo per fidem spiritu imaginante repraesentata. Ceterum qualia illa sunt, quae nec oculus vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascenderunt? (!. Cor. ", #) Credo circo et utraque cavea (first and fourth rank or, according to others, the comic and tragic stages) et omni stadio gratiora.’42

(Per fidem:43 that is what is written.)

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Let us draw to a close. The two opposing values ‘good and bad’, ‘good and evil’ have fought a terrible battle for thousands of years on earth; and

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First essay

42 But there are yet other spectacles: that final and everlasting day of judgement, that day that was not expected and was even laughed at by the nations, when the whole old world and all it gave birth to are consumed in one fire. What an ample breadth of sights there will be then! At which one shall I gaze in wonder? At which shall I laugh? At which rejoice? At which exult, when I see so many great kings who were proclaimed to have been taken up into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness together with those who claimed to have wit- nessed their apotheosis and with Jove himself. And when I see those [provincial] governors, persecutors of the Lord’s name, melting in flames more savage than those with which they insolently raged against Christians! When I see those wise philosophers who persuaded their disciples that nothing was of any concern to God and who affirmed to them either that we have no souls or that our souls will not return to their original bodies! Now they are ashamed before those disciples, as they are burned together with them. Also the poets trembling before the tribunal not of Minos or of Radamanthus, but of the unexpected Christ! Then the tragic actors will be easier to hear because they will be in better voice [i.e. screaming even louder] in their own tragedy. Then the actors of pantomime will be easy to recognize, being much more nimble than usual because of the fire. Then the charioteer will be on view, all red in a wheel of flame and the athletes, thrown not in the gymnasia but into the fire. Unless even then I don’t want to see them [alive +], preferring to cast an insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord. ‘This is he’, I will say, ‘that son of a carpenter or prostitute [– Tertullian refers to the Jews from now on, as is shown by what follows and in particular by this well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talmud – ] that destroyer of the Sabbath, that Samaritan, that man who had a devil. He it is whom you bought from Judas, who was beaten with a reed and with fists, who was defiled with spit and had gall and vinegar to drink. He it is whom his disciples secretly took away so that it might be said that he had risen again, or whom the gardener removed so that his lettuces would not be harmed by the crowd of visitors.’ What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you from his largesse the chance of seeing and exulting in such things? And yet to some extent we have such things already through faith, made present in the imagining spirit. Furthermore what sorts of things are those which the eye has not seen nor the ear heard, and which have not come into the human heart? (!. Cor. ", #) I believe that they are more pleasing than the circus or both of the enclosures [first and fourth rank of seats, or, accord- ing to others, the comic and the tragic stages] or than any race-track.’

The material above in square brackets is Nietzsche’s addition to Tertullian’s text. At ‘[alive +]’ Nietzsche incorrectly reads ‘vivos’ (‘alive’) for ‘visos’ (‘seen’).

43 ‘By my faith’.

although the latter has been dominant for a long time, there is still no lack of places where the battle remains undecided. You could even say that, in the meantime, it has reached ever greater heights but at the same time has become ever deeper and more intellectual: so that there is, today, perhaps no more distinguishing feature of the ‘higher nature’, the intellectual nature, than to be divided in this sense and really and truly a battle ground for these opposites. The symbol of this fight, written in a script which has hitherto remained legible throughout human history, is ‘Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome’: – up to now there has been no greater event than this battle, this question, this contradiction of mortal enemies. Rome saw the Jew as something contrary to nature, as though he were its antipodean monster (Monstrum); in Rome, the Jew was looked upon as con- victed of hatred against the whole of mankind:44 rightly, if one is right in linking the well being and future of the human race with the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, Roman values. What, on the other hand, did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess from a thousand indicators; but it is enough to call once more to mind the Apocalypse of John, the wildest of all outbursts ever written which revenge has on its conscience. (By the way, we must not underestimate the profound consistency of Christian instinct in inscribing this book of hate to the disciple of love, the very same to whom it attributed that passionately ecstatic gospel –: there is some truth in this, however much literary counterfeiting might have been necessary to the purpose.) So the Romans were the strong and noble, stronger and nobler than anybody hitherto who had lived or been dreamt of on earth; their every relic and inscription brings delight, provided one can guess what it is that is doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were a priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, possessing an unparalleled genius for popular morality: compare peoples with similar talents, such as the Chinese or the Germans, with the Jews, and you will realize who are first rate and who are fifth. Which of them has prevailed for the time being, Rome or Judea? But there is no trace of doubt: just consider to whom you bow down in Rome itself, today, as though to the embodiment of the highest values – and not just in Rome, but over nearly half the earth, every- where where man has become tame or wants to become tame, to three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (to Jesus of Nazareth, Peter the Fisherman, Paul the Carpet-Weaver and the mother of Jesus mentioned first, whose

On the Genealogy of Morality

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44 At Annals XV. ## Tacitus describes ‘those popularly called “Christians” ’ as ‘convicted of hatred against the whole human species’; at Histories V.$ he claims that the Jews show benevolence to one another, but exhibit hatred of all the rest of the world.

name was Mary). This is very remarkable: without a doubt Rome has been defeated. However, in the Renaissance there was a brilliant, uncanny reawakening of the classical ideal, of the noble method of valuing every- thing: Rome itself woke up, as though from suspended animation, under the pressure of the new, Judaic Rome built over it, which looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called ‘Church’: but Judea triumphed again at once, thanks to that basically proletarian (German and English) ressentiment-movement which people called the Reformation, including its inevitable consequence, the restoration of the church, – as well as the restoration of the ancient, tomb-like silence of classical Rome. In an even more decisive and profound sense than then, Judea once again triumphed over the classical ideal with the French Revolution: the last political nobil- ity in Europe, that of the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, col- lapsed under the ressentiment-instincts of the rabble, – the world had never heard greater rejoicing and more uproarious enthusiasm! True, the most dreadful and unexpected thing happened in the middle: the ancient ideal itself appeared bodily and with unheard-of splendour before the eye and conscience of mankind, and once again, stronger, simpler and more pen- etrating than ever, in answer to the old, mendacious ressentiment slogan of priority for the majority, of man’s will to baseness, abasement, levelling, decline and decay, there rang out the terrible and enchanting counter- slogan: priority for the few! Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared as a man more unique and late-born for his times than ever a man had been before, and in him, the problem of the noble ideal itself was made flesh – just think what a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of Unmensch (brute) and Übermensch (overman) . . .

!" – Was it over after that? Was that greatest among all conflicts of ideals

placed ad acta for ever? Or just postponed, postponed indefinitely? . . . Won’t there have to be an even more terrible flaring up of the old flame, one prepared much longer in advance? And more: shouldn’t one desire that with all one’s strength? or will it, even? or even promote it? . . . Whoever, like my readers, now starts to ponder these points and reflect further, will have difficulty coming to a speedy conclusion, – reason enough, then, for me to come to a conclusion myself, assuming that it has been sufficiently clear for some time what I want, what I actually want with that dangerous slogan which is written on the spine of my last book, Beyond Good and Evil . . . at least this does not mean ‘Beyond Good and Bad.’ – –

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First essay

Note. I take the opportunity presented to me by this essay, of publicly and formally expressing a wish that I have only expressed in occasional conversations with scholars up till now: that is, that some Faculty of Philosophy should do the great service of promoting the study of the history of morality by means of a series of academic prize essays: – perhaps this book might serve to give a powerful impetus in such a direc- tion. With regard to such a possibility, I raise the following question for consideration: it merits the attention of philologists and historians as well as those who are actually philosophers by profession:

‘What signposts does linguistics, especially the study of etymology, give to the history of the evolution of moral concepts? ’

– On the other hand, it is just as essential to win the support of physiolo- gists and doctors for these problems (on the value of all previous valuations): we can leave it to the professional philosophers to act as advo- cates and mediators in this, once they have completely succeeded in trans- forming the originally so reserved and suspicious relationship between philosophy, physiology and medicine into the most cordial and fruitful exchange. Indeed, every table of values, every ‘thou shalt’ known to history or the study of ethnology, needs first and foremost a physiological elucida- tion and interpretation, rather than a psychological one; and all of them await critical study from medical science. The question: what is this or that table of values and ‘morals’ worth? needs to be asked from different angles; in particular, the question ‘value for what?’ cannot be examined too finely. Something, for example, which obviously had value with regard to the longest possible life-span of a race (or to the improvement of its abilities to adapt to a particular climate, or to maintaining the greatest number) would not have anything like the same value if it was a question of devel- oping a stronger type. The good of the majority and the good of the minor- ity are conflicting moral standpoints: we leave it to the naïvety of English biologists to view the first as higher in value as such . . . All sciences must, from now on, prepare the way for the future work of the philosopher: this work being understood to mean that the philosopher has to solve the problem of values and that he has to decide on the rank order of values. –

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Second essay: ‘Guilt’, ‘bad conscience’ and related matters

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To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise – is that not pre- cisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind? is it not the real problem of humankind? . . . The fact that this problem has been solved to a large degree must seem all the more sur- prising to the person who can fully appreciate the opposing force, forget- fulness. Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertiae, as superficial people believe, but is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word, to which we owe the fact that what we simply live through, experience, take in, no more enters our consciousness during digestion (one could call it spiritual ingestion) than does the thousand-fold process which takes place with our physical consumption of food, our so-called ingestion. To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other; a little peace, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, predicting, pre- determining (our organism runs along oligarchic lines, you see) – that, as I said, is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest and etiquette: from which we can immediately see how there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness. The person in whom this apparatus of suppression is damaged, so that it stops working, can be compared (and not just com- pared –) to a dyspeptic; he cannot ‘cope’ with anything . . . And precisely

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this necessarily forgetful animal, in whom forgetting is a strength, repre- senting a form of robust health, has bred for himself a counter-device, memory, with the help of which forgetfulness can be suspended in certain cases, – namely in those cases where a promise is to be made: conse- quently, it is by no means merely a passive inability to be rid of an impres- sion once it has made its impact, nor is it just indigestion caused by giving your word on some occasion and finding you cannot cope, instead it is an active desire not to let go, a desire to keep on desiring what has been, on some occasion, desired, really it is the will’s memory: so that a world of strange new things, circumstances and even acts of will may be placed quite safely in between the original ‘I will’, ‘I shall do’ and the actual dis- charge of the will, its act, without breaking this long chain of the will. But what a lot of preconditions there are for this! In order to have that degree of control over the future, man must first have learnt to distinguish between what happens by accident and what by design, to think causally, to view the future as the present and anticipate it, to grasp with certainty what is end and what is means, in all, to be able to calculate, compute – and before he can do this, man himself will really have to become reliable, regular, necessary, even in his own self-image, so that he, as someone making a promise is, is answerable for his own future!

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That is precisely what constitutes the long history of the origins of responsibility. That particular task of breeding an animal with the prerog- ative to promise includes, as we have already understood, as precondition and preparation, the more immediate task of first making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, a peer amongst peers, orderly and conse- quently predictable. The immense amount of labour involved in what I have called the ‘morality of custom’ [see Daybreak, I, "; #$; #%]45, the actual labour of man on himself during the longest epoch of the human race, his whole prehistoric labour, is explained and justified on a grand scale, in spite of the hardness, tyranny, stupidity and idiocy it also contained, by this fact: with the help of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket, man was made truly predictable. Let us place ourselves, on the other hand, at the end of this immense process where the tree actually bears fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally reveal what they were simply the

On the Genealogy of Morality

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45 See below, supplementary material, pp. #&&–'.

means to: we then find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree, like only to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-ethical individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ are mutually exclusive), in short, we find a man with his own, independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise – and in him a proud con- sciousness quivering in every muscle of what he has finally achieved and incorporated, an actual awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in general has reached completion. This man who is now free, who actually has the prerogative to promise, this master of the free will, this sov- ereign – how could he remain ignorant of his superiority over everybody who does not have the prerogative to promise or answer to himself, how much trust, fear and respect he arouses – he ‘merits’ all three – and how could he, with his self-mastery, not realise that he has necessarily been given mastery over circumstances, over nature and over all creatures with a less enduring and reliable will? The ‘free’ man, the possessor of an endur- ing, unbreakable will, thus has his own standard of value: in the possession of such a will: viewing others from his own standpoint, he respects or despises; and just as he will necessarily respect his peers, the strong and the reliable (those with the prerogative to promise), – that is everyone who promises like a sovereign, ponderously, seldom, slowly, and is sparing with his trust, who confers an honour when he places his trust, who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he is strong enough to remain upright in the face of mishap or even ‘in the face of fate’ –: so he will necessarily be ready to kick the febrile whippets who promise without that prerogative, and will save the rod for the liar who breaks his word in the very moment it passes his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraor- dinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny, has penetrated him to his lowest depths and become an instinct, his dominant instinct: – what will he call his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for it? No doubt about the answer: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience . . .

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His conscience? . . . We can presume, in advance, that the concept ‘conscience’, which we meet here in its highest, almost disconcerting form, already has a long history and metamorphosis behind it. To be answerable to oneself, and proudly, too, and therefore to have the preroga- tive to say ‘yes’ to oneself – is, as I said, a ripe fruit, but also a late fruit: –

Second essay

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how long must this fruit have hung, bitter and sour, on the tree! And for even longer there was nothing to see of this fruit, – nobody could have promised it would be there, although it is certain that everything about the tree was ready and growing towards it! – ‘How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you impress something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this personification of forgetfulness, so that it will stick?’ . . . This age-old question was not resolved with gentle solutions and methods, as can be imagined; perhaps there is nothing more terrible and strange in man’s prehistory than his technique of mnemonics. ‘A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory’ – that is a proposition from the oldest (and unfortunately the longest-lived) psychology on earth. You almost want to add that wherever on earth you still find ceremonial, solemnity, mystery, gloomy shades in the lives of men and peoples, some- thing of the dread with which everyone, everywhere, used to make promises, give pledges and commendation, is still working: the past, the most prolonged, deepest, hardest past, breathes on us and rises up in us when we become ‘solemn’. When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, torments and sacrifices: the most horrifying sacrifices and forfeits (the sacrifice of the first-born belongs here), the most disgusting mutilations (for example, castration), the cruellest rituals of all religious cults (and all religions are, at their most fundamental, systems of cruelty) – all this has its origin in that particular instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics. In a certain sense, the whole of asceticism belongs here: a few ideas have to be made ineradicable, ubiquitous, unforgettable, ‘fixed’, in order to hypnotize the whole nervous and intellectual system through these ‘fixed ideas’ – and ascetic procedures and lifestyles are a method of freeing those ideas from competition with all other ideas, of making them ‘unforgettable’. The worse man’s memory has been, the more dreadful his customs have appeared; in particular, the harshness of the penal law gives a measure of how much trouble it had in conquering forgetfulness, and preserving a few primitive requirements of social life in the minds of these slaves of the mood and desire of the moment. We Germans certainly do not regard ourselves as a particularly cruel or hard-hearted people, still less as particularly irresponsible and happy-go-lucky; but you only have to look at our old penal code in order to see how difficult it was on this earth to breed a ‘nation of thinkers’ (by which I mean: the nation in Europe that still contains the maximum of reliability, solemnity,

On the Genealogy of Morality

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tastelessness and sobriety, qualities which give it the right to breed all sorts of European mandarin). These Germans made a memory for them- selves with dreadful methods, in order to master their basic plebeian instincts and the brutal crudeness of the same: think of old German pun- ishments such as stoning (– even the legend drops the millstone on the guilty person’s head), breaking on the wheel (a unique invention and spe- ciality of German genius in the field of punishment!), impaling, ripping apart and trampling to death by horses (‘quartering’), boiling of the crim- inal in oil or wine (still in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the popular flaying (‘cutting strips’), cutting out flesh from the breast; and, of course, coating the wrong-doer with honey and leaving him to the flies in the scorching sun. With the aid of such images and procedures, man was eventually able to retain five or six ‘I-don’t-want-to’s’ in his memory, in connection with which a promise had been given, in order to enjoy the advantages of society – and there you are! With the aid of this sort of memory, people finally came to ‘reason’! – Ah, reason, solemnity, master- ing of emotions, this really dismal thing called reflection, all these privil- eges and splendours man has: what a price had to be paid for them! how much blood and horror lies at the basis of all ‘good things’! . . .

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How, then, did that other ‘dismal thing’, the consciousness of guilt, the whole ‘bad conscience’, come into the world? – And with this we return to our genealogists of morality. I’ll say it again – or maybe I haven’t said it yet? – they are no good. No more than five spans of their own, merely ‘modern’ experience; no knowledge and no will to know the past; still less an instinct for history, a ‘second sight’ so necessary at this point – and yet they go in for the history of morality: of course, this must logically end in results that have a more than brittle relationship to the truth. Have these genealogists of morality up to now ever remotely dreamt that, for example, the main moral concept ‘Schuld’ (‘guilt’) descends from the very material concept of ‘Schulden’ (‘debts’)? Or that punishment, as retribution, evolved quite independently of any assump- tion about freedom or lack of freedom of the will? – and this to the point where a high degree of humanization had first to be achieved, so that the animal ‘man’ could begin to differentiate between those much more primitive nuances ‘intentional’, ‘negligent’, ‘accidental’, ‘of sound mind’ and their opposites, and take them into account when dealing out

Second essay

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punishment. That inescapable thought, which is now so cheap and apparently natural, and which has had to serve as an explanation of how the sense of justice came about at all on earth, ‘the criminal deserves to be punished because he could have acted otherwise’, is actually an extremely late and refined form of human judgment and inference; whoever thinks it dates back to the beginning is laying his coarse hands on the psychology of primitive man in the wrong way. Throughout most of human history, punishment has not been meted out because the mis- creant was held responsible for his act, therefore it was not assumed that the guilty party alone should be punished: – but rather, as parents still punish their children, it was out of anger over some wrong that had been suffered, directed at the perpetrator, – but this anger was held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent which can be paid in compensation, if only through the pain of the person who injures. And where did this primeval, deeply-rooted and perhaps now ineradicable idea gain its power, this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already let it out: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the very conception of a ‘legal subject’ and itself refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trade and traffic.

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To be sure, thinking about these contractual relationships, as can be expected from what has gone before, arouses all kinds of suspicion and hostility towards the primitive men who created them or permitted them. Precisely here, promises are made; precisely here, the person making the promise has to have a memory made for him: precisely here, we may suppose, is a repository of hard, cruel, painful things. The debtor, in order to inspire confidence that the promise of repayment will be honoured, in order to give a guarantee of the solemnity and sanctity of his promise, and in order to etch the duty and obligation of repayment into his conscience, pawns something to the creditor by means of the contract in case he does not pay, something that he still ‘possesses’ and controls, for example, his body, or his wife, or his freedom, or his life (or, in certain religious cir- cumstances, even his after-life, the salvation of his soul, finally, even his peace in the grave: as in Egypt, where the corpse of a debtor found no peace from the creditor even in the grave – and this peace meant a lot precisely to the Egyptians). But in particular, the creditor could inflict all

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kinds of dishonour and torture on the body of the debtor, for example, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt: – from this standpoint there were everywhere, early on, estimates which went into horrifyingly minute and fastidious detail, legally drawn up estimates for individual limbs and parts of the body. I regard it as definite progress and proof of a freer, more open-handed calculation, of a more Roman pricing of justice, when Rome’s code of the Twelve Tables decreed that it did not matter how much or how little a creditor cut off in such a circumstance, ‘si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto’.46 Let’s be quite clear about the logic of this whole matter of compensation: it is strange enough. The equivalence is provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly making up for the wrong (so, instead of compensation in money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure is given to the creditor as repay- ment and compensation, – the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought, the pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire’,47 the enjoyment of violating: an enjoyment that is prized all the higher, the lower and baser the position of the creditor in the social scale, and which can easily seem a delicious titbit to him, even a foretaste of higher rank. Through punishment of the debtor, the cred- itor takes part in the rights of the masters: at last he, too, shares the elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone as an ‘infe- rior’ – or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of exacting pun- ishment, is already transferred to the ‘authorities’, of seeing the debtor despised and maltreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. –

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In this sphere of legal obligations, then, the moral conceptual world of ‘debt’, ‘conscience’, ‘duty’, ‘sacred duty’, has its breeding ground – all began with a thorough and prolonged bloodletting, like the beginning of all great things on earth. And may we not add that this world has really never quite lost a certain odour of blood and torture? (not even with old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty . . .). In the same way, it was here that the uncanny and perhaps inextricable link-up between the

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46 ‘If they have cut off more or less, let that not be considered a crime.’ This is from the Third Table, section !. Modern editions read a slightly different text here with ‘se’ (= sine) for ‘ne’: ‘If they have cut off more or less, let it be honestly done.’

47 P. Mérimée, Lettres à une inconnue (Paris, #$%"), I. $: ‘To do evil for the pleasure of doing it’.

ideas of ‘debt and suffering’ was first crocheted together. I ask again: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for ‘debts’? To the degree that to make someone suffer is pleasure in its highest form, and to the degree that the injured party received an extraordinary counter-pleasure in exchange for the injury and distress caused by the injury: to make someone suffer, – a true feast, something that, as I mentioned, rose in price the more it contrasted with the rank and social position of the cred- itor. I say all this in speculation: because such subterranean things are dif- ficult to fathom out, besides being embarrassing; and anyone who clumsily tries to interject the concept ‘revenge’ has merely obscured and darkened his own insight, rather than clarified it (– revenge itself just leads us back to the same problem: ‘how can it be gratifying to make someone suffer?’). It seems to me that the delicacy and even more the tartuffery of tame house-pets (meaning modern man, meaning us) revolts against a truly forceful realization of the degree to which cruelty is part of the festive joy of the ancients and, indeed, is an ingredient in nearly every pleasure they have; on the other hand, how naïve and innocent their need for cruelty appears, and how fundamental is that ‘disinterested malice’ (or, to use Spinoza’s words, the sympathia malevolens) they assume is a normal human attribute –: making it something to which conscience says a hearty ‘yes’! A more piercing eye would perhaps be able to detect, even now, plenty of these most primitive and basic festive joys of man; in Beyond Good and Evil, VII, section !!"48 (earlier in Daybreak, I, sections #$, %%, ##&)49 I pointed a wary finger at the ever-growing intellectualiza- tion and ‘deification’ of cruelty, which runs though the whole history of higher culture (and indeed, constitutes it in an important sense). At all events, not so long ago it was unthinkable to hold a royal wedding or full- scale festival for the people without executions, tortures or perhaps an auto-da-fé, similarly, no noble household was without creatures on whom people could discharge their malice and cruel taunts with impunity (– remember Don Quixote, for example, at the court of the Duchess:50 today we read the whole of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it is almost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incompre- hensible to the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clear conscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselves to death). To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – that

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48 See below, Supplementary material, pp. #(&–'. 49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. #&%–", pp. #')–#, pp. #'&–'. 50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs &#–%.

is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-human proposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as people say, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act out a ‘demonstration’ of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is what the oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punish- ment, too, has such very strong festive aspects! –

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– By the way, these ideas certainly don’t make me wish to help provide our pessimists with new grist for their discordant and creaking mills of disgust with life; on the contrary, I expressly want to place on record that at the time when mankind felt no shame towards its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is today, with its pessimists. The heavens dark- ened over man in direct proportion to the increase in his feeling shame at being man. The tired, pessimistic outlook, mistrust of life’s riddle, the icy ‘no’ of nausea at life – these are not signs of the wickedest epoch of the human race: on the contrary, they come to light as the bog-plants they are only in their natural habitat, the bog, – I mean the sickly mollycoddling and sermonizing, by means of which the animal ‘man’ is finally taught to be ashamed of all his instincts. On the way to becoming an ‘angel’ (not to use a stronger word here), man has upset his stomach and developed a furry tongue so that he finds not only that the joy and innocence of animals is disgusting, but that life itself is distasteful: – so that every now and again, he is so repelled by himself that he holds his nose and dis- approvingly recites a catalogue of his offensive features, with Pope Innocent the Third (‘conception in filth, loathsome method of feeding in the womb, sinfulness of the raw material of man, terrible stench, secre- tion of saliva, urine and excrement’).51 Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the oppo- site assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps

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51 This is not a quotation, but rather Nietzsche’s own summary of the topics discussed in the first few sections of De miseria humanae conditionis (also known as De contemptu mundi and by various other titles). This short treatise, written in $$%& by Cardinal Lotario dei Segni (who in $$%' acceded to the Papacy as Innocent III) was extremely popular in the late Middle Ages, sizable chunks of it turning up, for instance, in The Canterbury Tales (particularly in the Man of Law’s ‘Prologue’ and ‘Tale’).

pain – I say this to comfort the squeamish – did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction; – they do not do that to Negroes. (The curve of human capacity for pain actually does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural élite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suf- fering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in sci- entific research is as nothing.) Perhaps I can even be allowed to admit the possibility that pleasure in cruelty does not really need to have died out: perhaps, just as pain today hurts more, it needed, in this connection, some kind of sublimation and subtilization, it had to be transformed into the imaginative and spiritual, and adorned with such inoffensive names that they do not arouse the suspicion of even the most delicate hypocritical conscience (‘tragic pity’ is one such name, another is ‘les nostalgies de la croix’). What actually arouses indignation over suffering is not the suf- fering itself, but the senselessness of suffering: but neither for the Christian, who saw in suffering a whole, hidden machinery of salvation, nor for naïve man in ancient times, who saw all suffering in relation to spectators or to instigators of suffering, was there any such senseless suf- fering. In order to rid the world of concealed, undiscovered, unseen suf- fering and deny it in all honesty, people were then practically obliged to invent gods and intermediate beings at every level, in short, something that also roamed round in obscurity, which could see in the dark and which would not miss out on an interesting spectacle of pain so easily. With the aid of such inventions, life then played the trick it has always known how to play, of justifying itself, justifying its ‘evil’; nowadays it might need rather different inventions to help it (for example, life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). ‘All evil is justified if a god takes pleasure in it’: so ran the primitive logic of feeling – and was this logic really restricted to primitive times? The gods viewed as the friends of cruel spectacles – how deeply this primeval concept still penetrates into our European civilization! Maybe we should consult Calvin and Luther on the matter. At all events, the Greeks could certainly think of offering their gods no more acceptable a side-dish to their happiness than the joys of cruelty. So how do you think Homer made his gods look down on the fortunes of men? What final, fundamental meaning did the Trojan War

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and similar tragic atrocities have? We can be in no doubt: they were intended to be festivals for the gods: and, to the extent that the poet has a more ‘god-like’ nature in these matters, probably festivals for the poets, too . . . It was no different when later Greek moral philosophers thought that the eyes of the gods still looked down on moral struggles, on the heroism and self-inflicted torture of the virtuous: the ‘Heracles of duty’ was on stage and knew it; unwitnessed virtue was something inconceiv- able for this nation of actors. Might it not be the case that that extremely foolhardy and fateful philosophical invention, first devised for Europe, of the ‘free will’, of man’s absolute freedom [Spontaneität] to do good or evil, was chiefly thought up to justify the idea that the interest of the gods in man, in man’s virtue, could never be exhausted? On the stage of this earth there would never be any lack of real novelty, real unheard-of suspense, intrigues, catastrophes: a world planned on completely deterministic lines would have been predictable and therefore soon boring for the gods, – sufficient reason for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to impute a deterministic world of that sort to their gods! Everybody in antiquity is full of tender consideration for ‘the spectator’, people in antiquity form an essentially public, essentially visible world, incapable of conceiving of happiness without spectacles and feasts. – And, as already stated, severe punishment, too, has very strong festive features! . . .

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The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, to pursue our train of inquiry again, originated, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive per- sonal relationship there is, in the relationship of buyer and seller, credi- tor and debtor: here person met person for the first time, and measured himself person against person. No form of civilization has been discov- ered which is so low that it did not display something of this relationship. Fixing prices, setting values, working out equivalents, exchanging – this preoccupied man’s first thoughts to such a degree that in a certain sense it constitutes thought: the most primitive kind of cunning was bred here, as was also, presumably, the first appearance of human pride, man’s sense of superiority over other animals. Perhaps our word ‘man’ (manas) expresses something of this first sensation of self-confidence: man desig- nated himself as the being who measures values, who values and mea- sures, as the ‘calculating animal as such’. Buying and selling, with their psychological trappings, are older even than the beginnings of any social

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form of organization or association: it is much more the case that the ger- minating sensation of barter, contract, debt, right, duty, compensation was simply transferred from the most rudimentary form of the legal rights of persons to the most crude and elementary social units (in their rela- tions with similar units), together with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating. Now the eye was focused in this direction in any case: and with the ponderous consistency characteristic of the ancients’ way of thinking, which, though difficult to get started, never deviated once it was moving, man soon arrived at the great gener- alization: ‘Every thing has its price: everything can be compensated for’ – the oldest, most naïve canon of morals relating to justice, the beginning of all ‘good naturedness’, ‘equity’, all ‘good will’, all ‘objectivity’ on earth. Justice at this first level is the good will, between those who are roughly equal, to come to terms with each other, to ‘come to an understanding’ again by means of a settlement – and, in connection with those who are less powerful, to force them to reach a settlement amongst themselves. –

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Still measuring with the standard of prehistoric times (a prehistory which, by the way, exists at all times or could possibly re-occur): the com- munity has the same basic relationship to its members as the creditor to the debtor. You live in a community, you enjoy the benefits of a commu- nity (oh, what benefits! sometimes we underestimate them today), you live a sheltered, protected life in peace and trust, without any worry of suffering certain kinds of harm and hostility to which the man outside, the ‘man without peace’, is exposed – a German understands what ‘misery’, êlend,52 originally means –, you make pledges and take on obligations to the community with just that harm and hostility in mind. What happens if you do not? The community, the cheated creditor, will make you pay up as best it can, you can be sure of that. The immediate damage done by the offender is what we are talking about least: quite apart from this, the law- breaker is a ‘breaker’, somebody who has broken his contract and his word to the whole, in connection with all the valued features and amenities of communal life that he has shared up till now. The lawbreaker is a debtor who not only fails to repay the benefits and advances granted to him, but also actually assaults the creditor: so, from now on, as is fair, he is not only

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52 literally ‘other country’ i.e. banishment, exile.

deprived of all these valued benefits, – he is now also reminded how important these benefits are. The anger of the injured creditor, the com- munity, makes him return to the savage and outlawed state from which he was sheltered hitherto: he is cast out – and now any kind of hostile act can be perpetrated on him. ‘Punishment’ at this level of civilization is simply a copy, a mimus, of normal behaviour towards a hated, disarmed enemy who has been defeated, and who has not only forfeited all rights and safeguards, but all mercy as well; in fact, the rules of war and the victory celebration of vae victis!53 in all their mercilessness and cruelty: – which explains the fact that war itself (including the warlike cult of the sacrifi- cial victim) has given us all forms in which punishment manifests itself in history.

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As a community grows in power, it ceases to take the offence of the individual quite so seriously, because these do not seem to be as danger- ous and destabilizing for the survival of the whole as they did earlier: the wrongdoer is no longer ‘deprived of peace’ and cast out, nor can the general public vent their anger on him with the same lack of constraint, – instead the wrongdoer is carefully shielded by the community from this anger, especially from that of the immediate injured party, and given pro- tection. A compromise with the anger of those immediately affected by the wrongdoing; and therefore an attempt to localize the matter and head off further or more widespread participation and unrest; attempts to work out equivalents and settle the matter (the compositio); above all, the will, manifesting itself ever more distinctly, to treat every offence as being something that can be paid off, so that, at least to a certain degree, the wrongdoer is isolated from his deed – these are the characteristics imprinted more and more clearly into penal law in its further develop- ment. As the power and self-confidence of a community grows, its penal law becomes more lenient; if the former is weakened or endangered, harsher forms of the latter will re-emerge. The ‘creditor’ always becomes more humane as his wealth increases; finally, the amount of his wealth determines how much injury he can sustain without suffering from it. It is not impossible to imagine society so conscious of its power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury available to it, – that of letting its

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53 ‘Woe to the vanquished’ (Livy v. #%).

malefactors go unpunished. ‘What do I care about my parasites’, it could say, ‘let them live and flourish: I am strong enough for all that!’ . . . Justice, which began by saying ‘Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off ’, ends by turning a blind eye and letting off those unable to pay, – it ends, like every good thing on earth, by sublimating itself. The self- sublimation of justice: we know what a nice name it gives itself – mercy; it remains, of course, the prerogative of the most powerful man, better still, his way of being beyond the law.

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– Now a derogatory mention of recent attempts to seek the origin of justice elsewhere, – namely in ressentiment. A word in the ear of the psy- chologists, assuming they are inclined to study ressentiment close up for once: this plant thrives best amongst anarchists and anti-Semites today, so it flowers like it always has done, in secret, like a violet but with a dif- ferent scent. And just as like always gives rise to like, it will come as no surprise to find attempts coming once more from these circles, as so often before – see section !" [Essay I] above, – to sanctify revenge with the term justice – as though justice were fundamentally simply a further develop- ment of the feeling of having been wronged – and belatedly to legitimize with revenge emotional reactions in general, one and all. The latter is something with which I least take issue: with regard to the whole biolog- ical problem (where the value of these emotions has been underestimated up till now), I even view it as a merit. All I want to point out is the fact that this new nuance of scientific balance (which favours hatred, envy, resent- ment, suspicion, rancune and revenge) stems from the spirit of ressenti- ment itself. This ‘scientific fairness’ immediately halts and takes on aspects of a deadly animosity and prejudice the minute it has to deal with a different set of emotions, which, to my mind, are of much greater bio- logical value than those of reaction and therefore truly deserve to be sci- entifically valued, highly valued: namely the actual active emotions such as lust for mastery, greed and the like. (E. Dühring, The Value of Life. A Course in Philosophy; basically, all of it.) So much for my general objec- tions to this tendency; but concerning Dühring’s specific proposition that the seat of justice is found in the territory of reactive sentiment, for the sake of accuracy we must unceremoniously replace this with another proposition: the last territory to be conquered by the spirit of justice is that of reactive sentiment! If it actually happens that the just man remains

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just even towards someone who has wronged him (and not just cold, mod- erate, remote and indifferent: to be just is always a positive attitude), if the just and judging eye, gazing with a lofty, clear objectivity both penetrating and merciful, is not dimmed even in the face of personal injury, of scorn and suspicion, well, that is a piece of perfection, the highest form of mastery to be had on earth, – and even something that we would be wise not to expect and should certainly find difficult to believe. Certainly, on average, even a small dose of aggression, malice or insinuation is enough to make the most upright man see red and drive moderation out of his sight. The active, aggressive, over-reaching man is still a hundred paces nearer to justice then the man who reacts; he simply does not need to place a false and prejudiced interpretation on the object of his attention, like the man who reacts does, has to do. In fact, this explains why the aggres- sive person, as the stronger, more courageous, nobler man, has always had a clearer eye, a better conscience on his side: on the other hand it is easy to guess who has the invention of ‘bad conscience’ on his conscience, – the man of ressentiment! Finally, just cast your eye around in history: in what sphere, up till now, has the whole treatment of justice, and the actual need for justice, resided? With men who react, perhaps? Not in the least: but with the active, the strong, the spontaneous and the aggressive. Historically speaking, justice on earth represents – I say this to the annoy- ance of the above-mentioned agitator (who himself once confessed: ‘The doctrine of revenge has woven its way though all my work and activities as the red thread of justice’)54 – the battle, then, against reactive senti- ment, the war waged against the same on the part of active and aggres- sive forces, which have partly expended their strength in trying to put a stop to the spread of reactive pathos, to keep it in check and within bounds, and to force a compromise with it. Everywhere that justice is practised and maintained, the stronger power can be seen looking for means of putting an end to the senseless ravages of ressentiment amongst those inferior to it (whether groups or individuals), partly by lifting the object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge, partly by substituting, for revenge, a struggle against the enemies of peace and order, partly by working out compensation, suggesting, sometimes enforcing it, and partly by promoting certain equivalences for wrongs into a norm which ressentiment, from now on, has to take into account. The most decisive thing, however, that the higher authorities can invent and enforce against

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54 E. Dühring, Sache, Leben, und Feinde (Karlsruhe, Leipzig, #$$%), p. %"&.

the even stronger power of hostile and spiteful feelings – and they do it as soon as they are strong enough – is the setting up of a legal system, the imperative declaration of what counts as permissible in their eyes, as just, and what counts as forbidden, unjust: once the legal code is in place, by treating offence and arbitrary actions against the individual or groups as a crime, as violation of the law, as insurrection against the higher author- ities themselves, they distract attention from the damage done by such violations, and ultimately achieve the opposite of what revenge sets out to do, which just sees and regards as valid the injured party’s point of view –: from then on the eye is trained for an evermore impersonal interpretation of the action, even the eye of the injured party (although, as stated, this happens last). – Therefore ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ only start from the moment when a legal system is set up (and not, as Dühring says, from the moment when the injury is done.) To talk of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ as such is meaning- less, an act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be ‘unjust’ as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner, or at least these are its fundamental processes and it cannot be thought of without these characteristics. One has to admit to oneself something even more unpalatable: that viewed from the highest biological standpoint, states of legality can never be any- thing but exceptional states, as partial restrictions of the true will to life, which seeks power and to whose overall purpose they subordinate them- selves as individual measures, that is to say, as a means of creating greater units of power. A system of law conceived as sovereign and general, not as a means for use in the fight between units of power but as a means against fighting in general, rather like Dühring’s communistic slogan that every will should regard every other will as its equal, this would be a prin- ciple hostile to life, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of fatigue and a secret path to nothingness. –

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Now another word on the origin and purpose of punishment – two problems which are separate, or ought to be: unfortunately people usually throw them together. How have the moral genealogists reacted so far in this matter? Naively, as is their wont –: they highlight some ‘purpose’ in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then innocently place the purpose at the start, as causa fiendi of punishment, and – have finished. But ‘purpose in law’ is the last thing we should apply to the history of the

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emergence of law: on the contrary, there is no more important proposi- tion for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach, – namely that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that any- thing in existence, having somehow come about, is continually inter- preted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ [Sinn] and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. No matter how per- fectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. So people think punishment has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development’ of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expen- diture of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less pro- found, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning’ [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning’ [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts, – sometimes the partial destruction of organs, the reduction in their number (for example, by the destruction of intermediary parts) can be a sign of increasing vigour and perfection. To speak plainly: even the partial reduction in usefulness, decay and

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degeneration, loss of meaning [Sinn] and functional purpose, in short death, make up the conditions of true progressus: always appearing, as it does, in the form of the will and way to greater power and always emerg- ing victorious at the cost of countless smaller forces. The amount of ‘progress’ can actually be measured according to how much has had to be sacrificed to it; man’s sacrifice en bloc to the prosperity of one single stronger species of man – that would be progress . . . – I lay stress on this major point of historical method, especially as it runs counter to just that prevailing instinct and fashion which would much rather come to terms with absolute randomness, and even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory that a power-will is acted out in all that happens. The democratic idiosyncrasy of being against everything that dominates and wants to dominate, the modern misarchism (to coin a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually shaped and dressed itself up as intellectual, most intellectual, so much so that it already, today, little by little penetrates the strictest, seemingly most objective sciences, and is allowed to do so; indeed, I think it has already become master of the whole of physiology and biology, to their detriment, naturally, by spiriting away their basic concept, that of actual activity. On the other hand, the pressure of this idiosyncrasy forces ‘adaptation’ into the foreground, which is a second- rate activity, just a reactivity, indeed life itself has been defined as an increasingly efficient inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But this is to misunderstand the essence of life, its will to power, we overlook the prime importance that the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative forces have, which ‘adaptation’ follows only when they have had their effect; in the organism itself, the dominant role of these highest functionaries, in whom the life- will is active and manifests itself, is denied. One recalls what Huxley reproached Spencer with, – his ‘administrative nihilism’: but we are dealing with more than ‘administration’ . . .

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– To return to our topic, namely punishment, we have to distinguish between two of its aspects: one is its relative permanence, the custom, the act, the ‘drama’, a certain strict sequence of procedures, the other is its fluidity, its meaning [Sinn], purpose and expectation, which is linked to the carrying out of such procedures. And here, without further ado, I assume, per analogiam, according to the major point of historical method

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just developed, that the procedure itself will be something older, pre- dating its use as punishment, that the latter was only inserted and inter- preted into the procedure (which had existed for a long time though it was thought of in a different way), in short, that the matter is not to be understood in the way our naïve moral and legal genealogists assumed up till now, who all thought the procedure had been invented for the purpose of punishment, just as people used to think that the hand had been invented for the purpose of grasping. With regard to the other element in punishment, the fluid one, its ‘meaning’, the concept ‘punishment’ pre- sents, at a very late stage of culture (for example, in Europe today), not just one meaning but a whole synthesis of ‘meanings’ [Sinnen]: the history of punishment up to now in general, the history of its use for a variety of purposes, finally crystallizes55 in a kind of unity which is diffi- cult to dissolve back into its elements, difficult to analyse and, this has to be stressed, is absolutely undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say pre- cisely why people are actually punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined.) At an earlier stage, however, the synthesis of ‘meanings’ appeared much easier to undo and shift; we can still make out how, in every single case, the elements of the synthesis change valence and alter the order in which they occur so that now this, then that element stands out and dominates, to the detriment of the others, indeed, in some circumstances one element (for example, the purpose of deterrence) seems to overcome all the rest. To at least give an impression of how uncertain, belated and haphazard the ‘meaning’ of punishment is, and how one and the same procedure can be used, inter- preted and adapted for fundamentally different projects: you have here a formula that suggested itself to me on the basis of relatively restricted and random material. Punishment as a means of rendering harmless, of pre- venting further harm. Punishment as payment of a debt to the creditor in any form (even one of emotional compensation). Punishment as a means of isolating a disturbance of balance, to prevent further spread of the dis- turbance. Punishment as a means of inspiring the fear of those who deter- mine and execute punishment. Punishment as a sort of counter-balance to the privileges which the criminal has enjoyed up till now (for example, by using him as a slave in the mines). Punishment as a rooting-out of degenerate elements (sometimes a whole branch, as in Chinese law:

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55 Cf. Stendhal, De l’amour, chs ##ff.

whereby it becomes a means of keeping the race pure or maintaining a social type). Punishment as a festival, in the form of violating and mocking an enemy, once he is finally conquered. Punishment as an aide memoire, either for the person suffering the punishment – so called ‘reform’, or for those who see it carried out. Punishment as payment of a fee stipulated by the power which protects the wrongdoer from the excesses of revenge. Punishment as a compromise with the natural state of revenge, in so far as the latter is still nurtured and claimed as a privi- lege by more powerful clans. Punishment as a declaration of war and a war measure against an enemy of peace, law, order, authority, who is fought as dangerous to the life of the community, in breach of the con- tract on which the community is founded, as a rebel, a traitor and breaker of the peace, with all the means war can provide. –

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The list is certainly not complete; punishment can clearly be seen to be richly laden with benefits of all kinds. This provides all the more justifi- cation for us to deduct one supposed benefit that counts as its most char- acteristic in popular perception, – faith in punishment, which is shaky today for several reasons, has its strongest support in precisely this. Punishment is supposed to have the value of arousing the feeling of guilt in the guilty party; in it, people look for the actual instrumentum of the mental reflex which we call ‘bad conscience’ or ‘pang of conscience’. But by doing this, people are violating reality and psychology even as it is today: and much more so for the longest period in the history of mankind, its prehistory! The real pang of conscience, precisely amongst criminals and convicts, is something extremely rare, prisons and gaols are not nurs- eries where this type of gnawing pang chooses to thrive: – on this, all con- scientious observers are agreed, in many cases reaching such a conclusion reluctantly and against their personal inclinations. On the whole, punish- ment makes men harder and colder, it concentrates, it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power to resist. If it does happen that a man’s vigour is broken, resulting in his wretched prostration and self- abasement, a result of this sort is certainly less edifying than the average effect of punishment: as characterised by a dry, morose solemnity. If we just think about those centuries before the history of mankind, we can safely conclude that the evolution of a feeling of guilt was most strongly impeded through punishment, – at any rate, with regard to the victims on

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whom the primitive measures were carried out. Nor must we underesti- mate the degree to which the mere sight of the judicial executive proce- dures inhibits the criminal himself from experiencing his act, his mode of conduct, as reprehensible as such: because he sees the same kind of action practised in the service of justice and given approval, practised with a good conscience: like spying, duping, bribing, setting traps, the whole intricate and wily skills of the policeman and prosecutor, as well as the most thorough robbery, violence, slander, imprisonment, torture and murder, carried out without even having emotion as an excuse, all prac- tices that are manifest in the various kinds of punishment, – none of which is seen by his judges as a depraved and condemned act as such, but only in certain respects and applications. ‘Bad conscience’, the most uncanny and most interesting plant of our earthly vegetation, did not grow in this soil, – in fact, for most of the time it did not enter the consciousness of those who judged and punished that they were dealing with a ‘guilty party’. Instead, it was a question of someone who had caused harm, an irrespon- sible piece of fate. He himself, the recipient of punishment, which again descended like a piece of fate, felt no ‘inner pain’ beyond what he would feel if something unforeseen suddenly happened, a terrible natural disas- ter, a boulder falling on him and crushing him, where resistance is futile.

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Spinoza became aware of this in a way that made him show his true colours (to the annoyance of his critics, who systematically attempt to mis- understand him on this point, Kuno Fischer,56 for example), when, one afternoon, rummaging around among who knows what memories, he turned his attention to the question of what actually remained for him, himself, of that famous morsus conscientiae57 – he who had relegated good and evil to man’s imagination and angrily defended the honour of his ‘free’ God against the blasphemists who asserted that God operates everything sub ratione boni58 (‘but that would mean that God is subject to fate and would really be the greatest of all absurdities’ –).59 For Spinoza, the world had returned to that state of innocence in which it had lain before the invention of bad conscience: what had then become of morsus

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56 Cf. his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (Heidelberg, !#$"), !.%. 57 ‘bite of conscience’. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics III, Definitions XVI, XVII, XXVI. 58 ‘to attain some good’. 59 Spinoza, Ethics Proposition II scholium %.

conscientiae? ‘The opposite of gaudium’,60 he finally said to himself, ‘– a sadness accompanied by the notion of a past event which turned out con- trary to expectation.’ Eth iii, Propos. xviii Schol. i ii. For millennia, wrong- doers overtaken by punishment have felt no different than Spinoza with regard to their ‘offence’: ‘something has gone unexpectedly wrong here’, not ‘I ought not to have done that’ –, they submitted to punishment as you submit to illness or misfortune or death, with that brave, unrebellious fatalism that still gives the Russians, for example, an advantage over us Westerners in the way they handle life. If, in those days, there was any criticism of the deed, it came from intelligence, which practised criticism: we must certainly seek the actual effect of punishment primarily in the sharpening of intelligence, in a lengthening of the memory, in a will to be more cautious, less trusting, to go about things more circumspectly from now on, in the recognition that one was, once and for all, too weak for many things, in a sort of improvement of self-assessment. What can largely be achieved by punishment, in man or beast, is the increase of fear, the intensification of intelligence, the mastering of desires: punishment tames man in this way but does not make him ‘better’, – we would be more justified in asserting the opposite. (‘You can learn from your mistakes’ as the saying goes, but what you learn also makes you bad. Fortunately it often enough makes you stupid.)

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At this point I can no longer avoid giving a first, preliminary expres- sion to my own theory on the origin of ‘bad conscience’: it is not easy to get a hearing for this hypothesis and it needs to be pondered, watched and slept on. I look on bad conscience as a serious illness to which man was forced to succumb by the pressure of the most fundamental of all changes which he experienced, – that change whereby he finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of society and peace. It must have been no different for these semi-animals, happily adapted to the wilderness, war, the wandering life and adventure than it was for the sea animals when they were forced to either become land animals or perish – at one go, all instincts were devalued and ‘suspended’. Now they had to walk on their feet and ‘carry themselves’, whereas they had been carried by the water up till then: a terrible heaviness bore down on them. They felt they were

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60 ‘gladness’.

clumsy at performing the simplest task, they did not have their familiar guide any more for this new, unknown world, those regulating impulses that unconsciously led them to safety – the poor things were reduced to relying on thinking, inference, calculation, and the connecting of cause with effect, that is, to relying on their ‘consciousness’, that most impov- erished and error-prone organ! I do not think there has ever been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort, – and meanwhile, the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their demands! But it was difficult and seldom possible to give in to them: they mainly had to seek new and as it were underground gratifications. All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards – this is what I call the inter- nalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his ‘soul’. The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gained depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed. Those terrible bul- warks with which state organizations protected themselves against the old instincts of freedom – punishments are a primary instance of this kind of bulkwark – had the result that all those instincts of the wild, free, roving man were turned backwards, against man himself. Animosity, cruelty, the pleasure of pursuing, raiding, changing and destroying – all this was pitted against the person who had such instincts: that is the origin of ‘bad conscience’. Lacking external enemies and obstacles, and forced into the oppressive narrowness and conformity of custom, man impatiently ripped himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed at himself, gave himself no peace and abused himself, this animal who battered himself raw on the bars of his cage and who is supposed to be ‘tamed’; man, full of empti- ness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert, has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness – this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of ‘bad conscience’. With it, however, the worst and most insidious illness was introduced, one from which mankind has not yet recovered; man’s sickness of man, of himself: as the result of a forcible breach with his animal past, a simultaneous leap and fall into new situations and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against all the old instincts on which, up till then, his strength, pleasure and formidableness had been based. Let us immediately add that, on the other hand, the prospect of an animal soul turning against itself, taking a part against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard-of, puzzling,

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contradictory and momentous [Zukunftsvolles] on earth that the whole character of the world changed in an essential way. Indeed, a divine audi- ence was needed to appreciate the spectacle that began then, but the end of which is not yet in sight, – a spectacle too subtle, too wonderful, too paradoxical to be allowed to be played senselessly unobserved on some ridiculous planet! Since that time, man has been included among the most unexpected and exciting throws of dice played by Heraclitus’ ‘great child’, call him Zeus or fate,61 – he arouses interest, tension, hope, almost certainty for himself, as though something were being announced through him, were being prepared, as though man were not an end but just a path, an episode, a bridge, a great promise . . .

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The first assumption in my theory on the origin of bad conscience is that the alteration was not gradual and voluntary and did not represent an organic assimilation into new circumstances, but was a breach, a leap, a compulsion, an inescapable fate that nothing could ward off, which occasioned no struggle, not even any ressentiment. A second assumption, however, is that the shaping of a population, which had up till now been unrestrained and shapeless, into a fixed form, as happened at the begin- ning with an act of violence, could only be concluded with acts of vio- lence, – that consequently the oldest ‘state’ emerged as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery, and continued working until the raw material of people and semi-animals had been finally not just kneaded and made compliant, but shaped. I used the word ‘state’: it is obvious who is meant by this – some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race, which, organized on a war footing, and with the power to organize, unscrupulously lays its dreadful paws on a populace which, though it might be vastly greater in number, is still shapeless and shift- ing. In this way, the ‘state’ began on earth: I think I have dispensed with the fantasy which has it begin with a ‘contract’. Whoever can command, whoever is a ‘master’ by nature, whoever appears violent in deed and gesture – what is he going to care about contracts! Such beings cannot be reckoned with, they come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration or pretext, they appear just like lightning appears, too terrible, sudden, convincing and ‘other’ even to be hated. What they do is to create and

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61 Heraclitus, Fragment #%.

imprint forms instinctively, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are: – where they appear, soon something new arises, a struc- ture of domination [Herrschafts–Gebilde] that lives, in which parts and functions are differentiated and related to one another, in which there is absolutely no room for anything that does not first acquire ‘meaning’ with regard to the whole. They do not know what guilt, responsibility, consid- eration are, these born organizers; they are ruled by that terrible inner artist’s egoism which has a brazen countenance and sees itself justified to all eternity by the ‘work’, like the mother in her child. They are not the ones in whom ‘bad conscience’ grew; that is obvious – but it would not have grown without them, this ugly growth would not be there if a huge amount of freedom had not been driven from the world, or at least driven from sight and, at the same time, made latent by the pressure of their hammer blows and artists’ violence. This instinct of freedom, forcibly made latent – we have already seen how – this instinct of freedom forced back, repressed, incarcerated within itself and finally able to discharge and unleash itself only against itself: that, and that alone, is bad conscience in its beginnings.

!"

We must be wary of thinking disparagingly about this whole phenom- enon because it is inherently ugly and painful. Fundamentally, it is the same active force as the one that is at work on a grand scale in those artists of violence and organizers, and that builds states, which here, internally, and on a smaller, pettier scale, turned backwards, in the ‘labyrinth of the breast’, as Goethe would say,62 creates bad conscience for itself, and builds negative ideals, it is that very instinct for freedom (put into my language: the will to power): except that the material on which the formative and rapacious nature of this force vents itself is precisely man himself, his whole animal old self – and not, as in that greater and more eye-catching phenomenon, the other man, the other men. This secret self-violation, this artist’s cruelty, this desire to give form to oneself as a piece of difficult, resisting, suffering matter, to brand it with a will, a critique, a contradic- tion, a contempt, a ‘no’, this uncanny, terrible but joyous labour of a soul voluntarily split within itself, which makes itself suffer out of the pleasure of making suffer, this whole active ‘bad conscience’ has finally – we have

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62 In the last strophe of his poem ‘An den Mond’ (‘To the Moon’) (!%%").

already guessed – as true womb of ideal and imaginative events, brought a wealth of novel, disconcerting beauty and affirmation to light, and perhaps for the first time, beauty itself . . . What would be ‘beautiful’, if the contrary to it had not first come to awareness of itself, if ugliness had not first said to itself: ‘I am ugly’? . . . At least, after this clue, one puzzle will be less puzzling, namely how an ideal, something beautiful, can be hinted at in self-contradictory concepts such as selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice, and furthermore, I do not doubt that we know one thing –, what kind of pleasure it is which, from the start, the selfless, the self- denying, the self-sacrificing feel: this pleasure belongs to cruelty. – So much, for the time being, on the descent of the ‘unegoistic’ as a moral value and on the delineation of the ground on which this value has grown: only bad conscience, only the will to self-violation provides the precon- dition for the value of the unegoistic. –

!"

Bad conscience is a sickness, there is no point in denying it, but a sick- ness rather like pregnancy. Let us examine the conditions under which this sickness reached its most terrible and sublime peak: – we shall see what, with this, really entered the world. But we shall need a great deal of staying power, – and first we have to return to an earlier point. The rela- tionship of a debtor to his creditor in civil law, about which I have written at length already, was for a second time transformed through interpreta- tion, in a historically extremely strange and curious manner, into a rela- tionship in which it is perhaps least comprehensible to us modern men: that is the relationship of the present generation to their forebears. Within the original tribal association – we are talking about primeval times – the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation towards the earlier generation, and in particular towards the earliest, which founded the tribe (and this was not just a sentimental tie: this latter could, with good reason, be denied altogether for the longest period of the human race). There is a prevailing conviction that the tribe exists only because of the sacrifices and deeds of the forefathers, – and that these have to be paid back with sacrifices and deeds: people recognize an indebtedness [Schuld], which continually increases because these ancestors continue to exist as mighty spirits, giving the tribe new advantages and lending it some of their power. Do they do this for nothing, perhaps? But there is no ‘for nothing’ for those raw and ‘spiritually impoverished’ ages. What can

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people give them in return? Sacrifices (originally as food in the crudest sense), feasts, chapels, tributes, above all, obedience – for all traditions are, as works of the ancestors, also their rules and orders –: do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows: from time to time it exacts a payment on a grand scale, something immense as a repayment to the ‘creditor’ (the infamous sacrifice of the first-born, for example, blood, human blood in any case). Following this line of thought, the dread of the ancestor and his power, the consciousness of debts towards him, increases inevitably, in direct proportion to the increase in power of the tribe itself, that is, in proportion as the tribe itself becomes ever more vic- torious, independent, honoured and feared. And not the other way round! Every step towards the weakening of the tribe, all unfortunate calamities, all signs of degeneration and imminent disintegration, always lessen rather than increase the dread of the spirit of its founder, and lead to an ever lower opinion of his sagacity, providence and powerful presence. If you think this sort of crude logic through to the end: it follows that through the hallucination of the growing dread itself, the ancestors of the most powerful tribes must have grown to an immense stature and must have been pushed into the obscurity of divine mystery and transcendence: – inevitably the ancestor himself is finally transfigured into a god. Perhaps we have here the actual origin of gods, an origin, then, in fear! . . . And whoever should deem fit to add: ‘but in piety, too!’ would have difficulty in justifying the claim for the longest period of the human race, pre- history. All the more so, however, would he be right, for the middle period in which the noble tribes developed: – who actually did repay, with inter- est, their founders, their ancestors (heroes, gods) with all the attributes which, in the meantime, had become manifest in themselves, the noble attributes. Later, we shall take another look at the way gods are ennobled and exalted (which is not at all to say they were ‘hallowed’): but let us, for the present, pursue the course of this whole development of the con- sciousness of guilt to its conclusion.

!"

The awareness of having debts to gods did not, as history teaches, come to an end even after the decline of ‘communities’ organized on the prin- ciple of blood relationship; just as man inherited the concepts of ‘good and bad’ from the nobility of lineage (together with its psychological basic tendency to institute orders of rank), he also inherited, along with the

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divinities of tribes and clans, the burden of unpaid debts and the longing for them to be settled. (Those large populations of slaves and serfs who adapted themselves to the divinity cults of their masters, whether through compulsion, submission or mimicry, form the transitional stage: from them, the inheritance overflows in every direction.) The feeling of indebt- edness towards a deity continued to grow for several millennia, and indeed always in the same proportion as the concept of and feeling for God grew in the world and was carried aloft. (The whole history of ethnic battles, victories, reconciliations and mergers, and everything that pre- cedes the eventual rank-ordering of the diverse elements of the popula- tion in every great racial synthesis, is mirrored in the genealogical chaos of their gods, in the legends of their battles, victories and reconciliations; the progression to universal empires is always the progress to universal deities at the same time: despotism, with its subjugation of the independ- ent nobility, always prepares the way for some sort of monotheism as well.) The advent of the Christian God as the maximal god yet achieved, thus also brought about the appearance of the greatest feeling of indebt- edness on earth. Assuming that we have now started in the reverse direc- tion, we should be justified in deducing, with no little probability, that from the unstoppable decline in faith in the Christian God there is, even now, a considerable decline in the consciousness of human debt; indeed, the possibility cannot be rejected out of hand that the complete and definitive victory of atheism might release humanity from this whole feeling of being indebted towards its beginnings, its causa prima. Atheism and a sort of second innocence belong together. –

!"

So much for a brief and rough preliminary outline of the connection between the concepts ‘debt/guilt’ and ‘duty’ and religious precepts: I have so far intentionally set aside the actual moralization of these con- cepts (the way they are pushed back into conscience; more precisely, the way bad conscience is woven together with the concept of God), and at the conclusion of the last section I actually spoke as though this moral- ization did not exist, consequently, as though these concepts would nec- essarily come to an end once the basic premise no longer applied, the credence we lend our ‘creditor’, God. The facts diverge from this in a ter- rible way. With the moralization of the concepts debt/guilt and duty and their relegation to bad conscience, we have, in reality, an attempt to reverse

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the direction of the development I have described, or at least halt its movement: now the prospect for a once-and-for-all payment is to be fore- closed, out of pessimism, now our glance is to bounce and recoil discon- solately off an iron impossibility, now those concepts ‘debt’ and ‘duty’ are to be reversed – but against whom? It is indisputable: firstly against the ‘debtor’, in whom bad conscience now so firmly establishes itself, eating into him, broadening out and growing, like a polyp, so wide and deep that in the end, with the impossibility of paying back the debt, is conceived the impossibility of discharging the penance, the idea that it cannot be paid off (‘eternal punishment’); ultimately, however, against the ‘credi- tor’, and here we should think of the causa prima of man, the beginning of the human race, of his ancestor who is now burdened with a curse (‘Adam’, ‘original sin’, ‘the will in bondage’), or of nature, from whose womb man originated and to whom the principle of evil is imputed (dia- bolization of nature), or of existence in general, which is left standing as inherently worthless (a nihilistic turning-away from existence, the desire for nothingness or desire for the ‘antithesis’, to be other, Buddhism and such like) – until, all at once, we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient through which a martyred humanity has sought temporary relief, Christianity’s stroke of genius: none other than God sacrificing himself for man’s debt, none other than God paying himself back, God as the only one able to redeem man from what, to man himself, has become irredeemable – the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love (would you credit it? –), out of love for his debtor! . . .

!!

You will already have guessed what has really gone on with all this and behind all this: that will to torment oneself, that suppressed cruelty of animal man who has been frightened back into himself and given an inner life, incarcerated in the ‘state’ to be tamed, and has discovered bad con- science so that he can hurt himself, after the more natural outlet of this wish to hurt had been blocked, – this man of bad conscience has seized on religious presupposition in order to provide his self-torture with its most horrific hardness and sharpness. Debt towards God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture. In ‘God’ he seizes upon the ultimate antithesis he can find to his real and irredeemable animal instincts, he reinterprets these self-same animal instincts as debt/guilt before God (as animosity, insurrection, rebellion against the ‘master’, the ‘father’, the

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primeval ancestor and beginning of the world), he pitches himself into the contradiction of ‘God’ and ‘Devil’, he emits every ‘no’ which he says to himself, nature, naturalness and the reality of his being as a ‘yes’, as exist- ing, living, real, as God, as the holiness of God, as God-the-Judge, as God-the-Hangman, as the beyond, as eternity, as torture without end, as hell, as immeasurable punishment and guilt. We have here a sort of madness of the will showing itself in mental cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled: man’s will to find himself guilty and condemned without hope of reprieve, his will to think of himself as punished, without the punishment ever being equivalent to the level of guilt, his will to infect and poison the fundamentals of things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order to cut himself off, once and for all, from the way out of this labyrinth of ‘fixed ideas’, this will to set up an ideal – that of a ‘holy God’ –, in order to be palpably convinced of his own absolute worthless- ness in the face of this ideal. Alas for this crazy, pathetic beast man! What ideas he has, what perversity, what hysterical nonsense, what bestiality of thought immediately erupts, the moment he is prevented, if only gently, from being a beast in deed! . . . This is all almost excessively interesting, but there is also a black, gloomy, unnerving sadness to it as well, so that one has to force oneself to forgo peering for too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, without a doubt, the most terrible sickness ever to rage in man: – and whoever is still able to hear (but people have no ear for it now- adays! –) how the shout of love has rung out during this night of torture and absurdity, the shout of the most yearning rapture, of salvation through love, turns away, gripped by an unconquerable horror . . . There is so much in man that is horrifying! . . . The world has been a madhouse for too long! . . .

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That should be enough, once and for all, about the descent of the ‘holy God’. – That the conception of gods does not, as such, necessarily lead to that deterioration of the imagination which we had to think about for a moment, that there are nobler ways of making use of the invention of gods than man’s self-crucifixion and self-abuse, ways in which Europe excelled during the last millennia, – this can fortunately be deduced from any glance at the Greek gods, these reflections of noble and proud men in whom the animal in man felt deified, did not tear itself apart and did not rage against itself ! These Greeks, for most of the time, used their gods

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expressly to keep ‘bad conscience’ at bay so that they could carry on enjoying their freedom of soul: therefore, the opposite of the way Christendom made use of its God. They went very far in this, these mar- vellous, lion-hearted children; and no less an authority than the Homeric Zeus gives them to understand that they are making it too easy for them- selves. ‘Strange!’, he says on one occasion – he is talking about the case of Aegisthus, a very bad case –

Strange how much the mortals complain about the gods! We alone cause evil, they claim, but they themselves, through folly, bring about their own distress, even contrary to fate!63

Yet we can immediately hear and see that even this Olympian observer and judge has no intention of bearing them a grudge for this and think- ing ill of them: ‘How foolish they are’ is what he thinks when the mortals misbehave, – ‘foolishness’, ‘stupidity’, a little ‘mental disturbance’, this much even the Greeks of the strongest, bravest period allowed themselves as a reason for much that was bad or calamitous: – foolishness, not sin! you understand? . . . But even this mental disturbance was a problem – ‘Yes, how is this possible? Where can this have actually come from with minds like ours, we men of high lineage, happy, well-endowed, high-born, noble and virtuous?’ – for centuries, the noble Greek asked himself this in the face of any incomprehensible atrocity or crime with which one of his peers had sullied himself. ‘A god must have confused him’, he said to himself at last, shaking his head . . . This solution is typical for the Greeks . . . In this way, the gods served to justify man to a certain degree, even if he was in the wrong they served as causes of evil – they did not, at that time, take the punishment on themselves, but rather, as is nobler, the guilt . . .

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– I shall conclude with three question marks, that much is plain. ‘Is an ideal set up or destroyed here?’ you might ask me . . . But have you ever asked yourselves properly how costly the setting up of every ideal on earth has been? How much reality always had to be vilified and misunderstood in the process, how many lies had to be sanctified, how much conscience had to be troubled, how much ‘god’ had to be sacrificed every time? If a

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63 Odyssey I. %!–".

shrine is to be set up, a shrine has to be destroyed: that is the law – show me an example where this does not apply! . . . We moderns have inherited millennia of conscience-vivisection and animal-torture inflicted on our- selves: we have had most practice in it, are perhaps artists in the field, in any case it is our raffinement and the indulgence of our taste. For too long, man has viewed his natural inclinations with an ‘evil eye’, so that they finally came to be intertwined with ‘bad conscience’ in him. A reverse experiment should be possible in principle – but who has sufficient strength? – by this, I mean an intertwining of bad conscience with per- verse inclinations, all those other-worldly aspirations, alien to the senses, the instincts, to nature, to animals, in short all the ideals which up to now have been hostile to life and have defamed the world. To whom should we turn with such hopes and claims today? . . . We would have none other than the good men against us; and, as is fitting, the lazy, the complacent, the vain, the zealous, the tired . . . What is more deeply offensive to others and separates us more profoundly from them than allowing them to realize something of the severity and high-mindedness with which we treat ourselves? And again – how co-operative and pleasant everyone is towards us, as soon as we do as everyone else does and ‘let ourselves go’ like everyone else! . . . For that purpose, we would need another sort of spirit than those we are likely to encounter in this age: spirits who are strengthened by wars and victories, for whom conquest, adventure, danger and even pain have actually become a necessity; they would also need to be acclimatized to thinner air higher up, to winter treks, ice and mountains in every sense, they would need a sort of sublime nastiness [Bosheit] itself, a final, very self-assured wilfulness of insight which belongs to great health, in brief and unfortunately, they would need pre- cisely this great health! . . . Is this at all possible today? . . . But some time, in a stronger age than this mouldy, self-doubting present day, he will have to come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit who is pushed out of any position ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ by his surging strength again and again, whose solitude will be misunderstood by the people as though it were flight from reality –: whereas it is just his way of being absorbed, buried and immersed in reality so that from it, when he emerges into the light again, he can return with the redemption of this reality: redeem it from the curse which its ideal has placed on it up till now. This man of the future will redeem us, not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from those things which had to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of

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midday and of great decision that makes the will free again, which gives earth its purpose and man his hope again, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness – he must come one day . . .

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– But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point just one thing is proper, silence: otherwise I shall be misappropriating something that belongs to another, younger man, one ‘with more future’, one stronger than me – something to which Zarathustra alone is entitled, Zarathustra the Godless . . .

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