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Title: The Genealogy of Morals
       The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.

Author: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Editor: Oscar Levy

Translator: Horace B. Samuel
            J. M. Kennedy

Release Date: June 13, 2016 [EBook #52319]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

A POLEMIC

BY

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

TRANSLATED BY

HORACE B. SAMUEL, M.A.

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES (FRAGMENT)


T. N. FOULIS

13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET

EDINBURGH: AND LONDON

1913




EDITOR'S NOTE.


In 1887, with the view of amplifying and completing certain new
doctrines which he had merely sketched in _Beyond Good and Evil_
(see especially aphorism 260), Nietzsche published _The Genealogy of
Morals_. This work is perhaps the least aphoristic, in form, of all
Nietzsche's productions. For analytical power, more especially in those
parts where Nietzsche examines the ascetic ideal, _The Genealogy of
Morals_ is unequalled by any other of his works; and, in the light
which it throws upon the attitude of the ecclesiast to the man of
resentment and misfortune, it is one of the most valuable contributions
to sacerdotal psychology.




CONTENTS.

FIRST ESSAY. "GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

SECOND ESSAY. "GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE

THIRD ESSAY. WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS?

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. Translated by J. M. Kennedy




PREFACE.


1.

We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own
good reason. We have never searched for ourselves--how should it then
come to pass, that we should ever _find_ ourselves? Rightly has it been
said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." _Our_
treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to
those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight,
and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts
only for one thing--to bring something "home to the hive!"

As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is
concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or
sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I
fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not
there, and certainly not our ear. Rather like one who, delighting
in a divine distraction, or sunken in the seas of his own soul, in
whose ear the clock has just thundered with all its force its twelve
strokes of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, "What has in
point of fact just struck?" so do we at times rub afterwards, as it
were, our puzzled ears, and ask in complete astonishment and complete
embarrassment, "Through what have we in point of fact just lived?"
further, "Who are we in point of fact?" and count, _after they have
struck_, as I have explained, all the twelve throbbing beats of the
clock of our experience, of our life, of our being--ah!--and count
wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves,
we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken,
for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, "Each one is the
farthest away from himself"--as far as ourselves are concerned we are
not "knowers."


2.

My thoughts concerning the _genealogy_ of our moral prejudices--for
they constitute the issue in this polemic--have their first, bald,
and provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms entitled
_Human, all-too-Human, a Book for Free Minds_, the writing of which
was begun in Sorrento, during a winter which allowed me to gaze over
the broad and dangerous territory through which my mind had up to that
time wandered. This took place in the winter of 1876-77; the thoughts
themselves are older. They were in their substance already the same
thoughts which I take up again in the following treatises:--we hope
that they have derived benefit from the long interval, that they have
grown riper, clearer, stronger, more complete. The fact, however,
that I still cling to them even now, that in the meanwhile they have
always held faster by each other, have, in fact, grown out of their
original shape and into each other, all this strengthens in my mind the
joyous confidence that they must have been originally neither separate
disconnected capricious nor sporadic phenomena, but have sprung from
a common root, from a fundamental "_fiat_" of knowledge, whose empire
reached to the soul's depth, and that ever grew more definite in its
voice, and more definite in its demands. That is the only state of
affairs that is proper in the case of a philosopher.

We have no right to be "_disconnected_"; we must neither err
"disconnectedly" nor strike the truth "disconnectedly." Rather with
the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our thoughts,
our values, our Yes's and No's and If's and Whether's, grow connected
and interrelated, mutual witnesses of _one_ will, _one_ health, _one_
kingdom, _one_ sun--as to whether they are to _your_ taste, these
fruits of ours?--But what matters that to the trees? What matters that
to us, us the philosophers?


3.

Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself, which I confess
reluctantly,--it concerns indeed _morality_,--a scrupulosity, which
manifests itself in my life at such an early period, with so much
spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and so keen an opposition
to environment, epoch, precedent, and ancestry that I should have
been almost entitled to style it my "_â priori_"--my curiosity and my
suspicion felt themselves betimes bound to halt at the question, of
what in point of actual fact was the _origin_ of our "Good" and of
our "Evil." Indeed, at the boyish age of thirteen the problem of the
origin of Evil already haunted me: at an age "when games and God divide
one's heart," I devoted to that problem my first childish attempt
at the literary game, my first philosophic essay--and as regards my
infantile solution of the problem, well, I gave quite properly the
honour to God, and made him the _father_ of evil. Did my own "_â
priori_" demand that precise solution from me? that new, immoral, or
at least "amoral" "_â priori_" and that "categorical imperative" which
was its voice (but oh! how hostile to the Kantian article, and how
pregnant with problems!), to which since then I have given more and
more attention, and indeed what is more than attention. Fortunately
I soon learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and
I gave up looking for a _supernatural_ origin of evil. A certain
amount of historical and philological education, to say nothing of
an innate faculty of psychological discrimination _par excellence_
succeeded in transforming almost immediately my original problem into
the following one:--Under what conditions did Man invent for himself
those judgments of values, "Good" and "Evil"? _And what intrinsic value
do they possess in themselves?_ Have they up to the present hindered
or advanced human well-being? Are they a symptom of the distress,
impoverishment, and degeneration of Human Life? Or, conversely, is
it in them that is manifested the fulness, the strength, and the
will of Life, its courage, its self-confidence, its future? On this
point I found and hazarded in my mind the most diverse answers, I
established distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I became a
specialist in my problem, and from my answers grew new questions, new
investigations, new conjectures, new probabilities; until at last I had
a land of my own and a soil of my own, a whole secret world growing and
flowering, like hidden gardens of whose existence no one could have an
inkling--oh, how happy are we, we finders of knowledge, provided that
we know how to keep silent sufficiently long.


4.

My first impulse to publish some of my hypotheses concerning the origin
of morality I owe to a clear, well-written, and even precocious little
book, in which a perverse and vicious kind of moral philosophy (your
real English kind) was definitely presented to me for the first time;
and this attracted me--with that magnetic attraction, inherent in that
which is diametrically opposed and antithetical to one's own ideas.
The title of the book was _The Origin of the Moral Emotions_; its
author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its appearance, 1877. I may almost
say that I have never read anything in which every single dogma and
conclusion has called forth from me so emphatic a negation as did that
book; albeit a negation tainted by either pique or intolerance. I
referred accordingly both in season and out of season in the previous
works, at which I was then working, to the arguments of that book, not
to refute them--for what have I got to do with mere refutations but
substituting, as is natural to a positive mind, for an improbable
theory one which is more probable, and occasionally no doubt, for one
philosophic error, another. In that early period I gave, as I have
said, the first public expression to those theories of origin to which
these essays are devoted, but with a clumsiness which I was the last
to conceal from myself, for I was as yet cramped, being still without
a special language for these special subjects, still frequently liable
to relapse and to vacillation. To go into details, compare what I say
in _Human, all-too-Human_, part i., about the parallel early history
of Good and Evil, Aph. 45 (namely, their origin from the castes of the
aristocrats and the slaves); similarly, Aph. 136 et seq., concerning
the birth and value of ascetic morality; similarly, Aphs. 96, 99,
vol. ii., Aph. 89, concerning the Morality of Custom, that far older
and more original kind of morality which is _toto cœlo_ different
from the altruistic ethics (in which Dr. Rée, like all the English
moral philosophers, sees the ethical "Thing-in-itself"); finally,
Aph. 92. Similarly, Aph. 26 in _Human, all-too-Human_, part ii., and
Aph. 112, the _Dawn of Day_, concerning the origin of Justice as a
balance between persons of approximately equal power (equilibrium as
the hypothesis of all contract, consequently of all law); similarly,
concerning the origin of Punishment, _Human, all-too-Human_, part
ii., Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which the deterrent object is neither
essential nor original (as Dr. Rée thinks:--rather is it that this
object is only imported, under certain definite conditions, and always
as something extra and additional).


5.

In reality I had set my heart at that time on something much more
important than the nature of the theories of myself or others
concerning the origin of morality (or, more precisely, the real
function from my view of these theories was to point an end to which
they were one among many means). The issue for me was the value
of morality, and on that subject I had to place myself in a state
of abstraction, in which I was almost alone with my great teacher
Schopenhauer, to whom that book, with all its passion and inherent
contradiction (for that book also was a polemic), turned for present
help as though he were still alive. The issue was, strangely enough,
the value of the "un-egoistic" instincts, the instincts of pity,
self-denial, and self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had so persistently
painted in golden colours, deified and etherealised, that eventually
they appeared to him, as it were, high and dry, as "intrinsic values
in themselves," on the strength of which he uttered both to Life
and to himself his own negation. But against _these very_ instincts
there voiced itself in my soul a more and more fundamental mistrust, a
scepticism that dug ever deeper and deeper: and in this very instinct
I saw the _great_ danger of mankind, its most sublime temptation and
seduction--seduction to what? to nothingness?--in these very instincts
I saw the beginning of the end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes
backwards, the will turning _against_ Life, the last illness announcing
itself with its own mincing melancholy: I realised that the morality
of pity which spread wider and wider, and whose grip infected even
philosophers with its disease, was the most sinister symptom of our
modern European civilisation; I realised that it was the route along
which that civilisation slid on its way to--a new Buddhism?--a European
Buddhism?--_Nihilism_? This exaggerated estimation in which modern
philosophers have held pity, is quite a new phenomenon: up to that time
philosophers were absolutely unanimous as to the worthlessness of pity.
I need only mention Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant--four
minds as mutually different as is possible, but united on one point;
their contempt of pity.


6.

This problem of the value of pity and of the pity-morality (I am an
opponent of the modern infamous emasculation of our emotions) seems at
the first blush a mere isolated problem, a note of interrogation for
itself; he, however, who once halts at this problem, and learns how to
put questions, will experience what I experienced:--a new and immense
vista unfolds itself before him, a sense of potentiality seizes him
like a vertigo, every species of doubt, mistrust, and fear springs
up, the belief in morality, nay, in all morality, totters,--finally a
new demand voices itself. Let us speak out this _new demand_: we need
a _critique_ of moral values, _the value of these values_ is for the
first time to be called into question--and for this purpose a knowledge
is necessary of the conditions and circumstances out of which these
values grew, and under which they experienced their evolution and
their distortion (morality as a result, as a symptom, as a mask, as
Tartuffism, as disease, as a misunderstanding; but also morality as a
cause, as a remedy, as a stimulant, as a fetter, as a drug), especially
as such a knowledge has neither existed up to the present time nor is
even now generally desired. The value of these "values" was taken for
granted as an indisputable fact, which was beyond all question. No one
has, up to the present, exhibited the faintest doubt or hesitation in
judging the "good man" to be of a higher value than the "evil man," of
a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, utility,
and prosperity generally, not forgetting the future. What? Suppose the
converse were the truth! What? Suppose there lurked in the "good man"
a symptom of retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison,
a _narcotic_, by means of which the present _battened on the future_!
More comfortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite, but also
pettier, meaner! So that morality would really be saddled with the
guilt, if the _maximum potentiality of the power and splendour_ of the
human species were never to be attained? So that really morality would
be the danger of dangers?


7.

Enough, that after this vista had disclosed itself to me, I myself had
reason to search for learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am
doing it even to this very day). It means traversing with new clamorous
questions, and at the same time with new eyes, the immense, distant,
and completely unexplored land of morality--of a morality which has
actually existed and been actually lived! and is this not practically
equivalent to first _discovering_ that land? If, in this context, I
thought, amongst others, of the aforesaid Dr. Rée, I did so because I
had no doubt that from the very nature of his questions he would be
compelled to have recourse to a truer method, in order to obtain his
answers. Have I deceived myself on that score? I wished at all events
to give a better direction of vision to an eye of such keenness, and
such impartiality. I wished to direct him to the real _history of
morality_, and to warn him, while there was yet time, against a world
of English theories that culminated in _the blue vacuum of heaven_.
Other colours, of course, rise immediately to one's mind as being a
hundred times more potent than blue for a genealogy of morals:--for
instance, grey, by which I mean authentic facts capable of definite
proof and having actually existed, or, to put it shortly, the whole
of that long hieroglyphic script (which is so hard to decipher) about
the past history of human morals. This script was unknown to Dr. Rée;
but he had read Darwin:--and so in his philosophy the Darwinian beast
and that pink of modernity, the demure weakling and dilettante, who
"bites no longer," shake hands politely in a fashion that is at least
instructive, the latter exhibiting a certain facial expression of
refined and good-humoured indolence, tinged with a touch of pessimism
and exhaustion; as if it really did not pay to take all these things--I
mean moral problems--so seriously. I, on the other hand, think that
there are no subjects which pay better for being taken seriously; part
of this payment is, that perhaps eventually they admit of being taken
gaily. This gaiety indeed, or, to use my own language, this joyful
wisdom, is a payment; a payment for a protracted, brave, laborious, and
burrowing seriousness, which, it goes without saying, is the attribute
of but a few. But on that day on which we say from the fullness of our
hearts, "Forward! our old morality too is fit material for Comedy,"
we shall have discovered a new plot, and a new possibility for the
Dionysian drama entitled The Soul's Fate--and he will speedily utilise
it, one can wager safely, he, the great ancient eternal dramatist of
the comedy of our existence.


8.

If this writing be obscure to any individual, and jar on his ears, I
do not think that it is necessarily I who am to blame. It is clear
enough, on the hypothesis which I presuppose, namely, that the reader
has first read my previous writings and has not grudged them a certain
amount of trouble: it is not, indeed, a simple matter to get really at
their essence. Take, for instance, my _Zarathustra_; I allow no one
to pass muster as knowing that book, unless every single word therein
has at some time wrought in him a profound wound, and at some time
exercised on him a profound enchantment: then and not till then can he
enjoy the privilege of participating reverently in the halcyon element,
from which that work is born, in its sunny brilliance, its distance,
its spaciousness, its certainty. In other cases the aphoristic form
produces difficulty, but this is only because this form is treated
_too casually_. An aphorism properly coined and cast into its final
mould is far from being "deciphered" as soon as it has been read; on
the contrary, it is then that it first requires _to be expounded_--of
course for that purpose an art of exposition is necessary. The third
essay in this book provides an example of what is offered, of what in
such cases I call exposition: an aphorism is prefixed to that essay,
the essay itself is its commentary. Certainly one _quality_ which
nowadays has been best forgotten--and that is why it will take some
time yet for my writings to become readable--is essential in order
to practise reading as an art--a quality for the exercise of which it
is necessary to be a cow, and under no circumstances a modern man!--
rumination.

Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine, July 1887.




FIRST ESSAY. "GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD."


1.

Those English psychologists, who up to the present are the only
philosophers who are to be thanked for any endeavour to get as far
as a history of the origin of morality--these men, I say, offer us
in their own personalities no paltry problem;--they even have, if I
am to be quite frank about it, in their capacity of living riddles,
an advantage over their books--_they themselves are interesting!_
These English psychologists--what do they really mean? We always
find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing
to the front the _partie honteuse_ of our inner world, and looking
for the efficient, governing, and decisive principle in that precise
quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race would be
the most reluctant to find it (for example, in the _vis inertiæ_ of
habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and fortuitous mechanism
and association of ideas, or in some factor that is purely passive,
reflex, molecular, or fundamentally stupid)--what is the real motive
power which always impels these psychologists in precisely _this_
direction? Is it an instinct for human disparagement somewhat sinister,
vulgar, and malignant, or perhaps incomprehensible even to itself? or
perhaps a touch of pessimistic jealousy, the mistrust of disillusioned
idealists who have become gloomy, poisoned, and bitter? or a petty
subconscious enmity and rancour against Christianity (and Plato), that
has conceivably never crossed the threshold of consciousness? or just a
vicious taste for those elements of life which are bizarre, painfully
paradoxical, mystical, and illogical? or, as a final alternative, a
dash of each of these motives--a little vulgarity, a little gloominess,
a little anti-Christianity, a little craving for the necessary piquancy?

But I am told that it is simply a case of old frigid and tedious frogs
crawling and hopping around men and inside men, as if they were as
thoroughly at home there, as they would be in a _swamp_.

I am opposed to this statement, nay, I do not believe it; and if, in
the impossibility of knowledge, one is permitted to wish, so do I wish
from my heart that just the converse metaphor should apply, and that
these analysts with their psychological microscopes should be, at
bottom, brave, proud, and magnanimous animals who know how to bridle
both their hearts and their smarts, and have specifically trained
themselves to sacrifice what is desirable to what is true, any truth
in fact, even the simple, bitter, ugly, repulsive, unchristian, and
immoral truths--for there are truths of that description.


2.

All honour, then, to the noble spirits who would fain dominate these
historians of morality. But it is certainly a pity that they lack the
_historical sense_ itself, that they themselves are quite deserted
by all the beneficent spirits of history. The whole train of their
thought runs, as was always the way of old-fashioned philosophers, on
thoroughly unhistorical lines: there is no doubt on this point. The
crass ineptitude of their genealogy of morals is immediately apparent
when the question arises of ascertaining the origin of the idea and
judgment of "good." "Man had originally," so speaks their decree,
"praised and called 'good' altruistic acts from the standpoint of
those on whom they were conferred, that is, those to whom they were
_useful_; subsequently the origin of this praise was _forgotten_, and
altruistic acts, simply because, as a sheer matter of habit, they were
praised as good, came also to be felt as good--as though they contained
in themselves some intrinsic goodness." The thing is obvious:--this
initial derivation contains already all the typical and idiosyncratic
traits of the English psychologists--we have "utility," "forgetting,"
"habit," and finally "error," the whole assemblage forming the basis
of a system of values, on which the higher man has up to the present
prided himself as though it were a kind of privilege of man in general.
This pride _must_ be brought low, this system of values _must_ lose its
values: is that attained?

Now the first argument that comes ready to my hand is that the real
homestead of the concept "good" is sought and located in the wrong
place: the judgment "good" did not originate among those to whom
goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves,
that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the
high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that
their actions were good, that is to say of the first order, in
contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and
the plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first
arrogated the right to create values for their own profit, and to
coin the names of such values: what had they to do with utility? The
standpoint of utility is as alien and as inapplicable as it could
possibly be, when we have to deal with so volcanic an effervescence of
supreme values, creating and demarcating as they do a hierarchy within
themselves: it is at this juncture that one arrives at an appreciation
of the contrast to that tepid temperature, which is the presupposition
on which every combination of worldly wisdom and every calculation of
practical expediency is always based--and not for one occasional, not
for one exceptional instance, but chronically. The pathos of nobility
and distance, as I have said, the chronic and despotic _esprit de
corps_ and fundamental instinct of a higher dominant race coming into
association with a meaner race, an "under race," this is the origin of
the antithesis of good and bad.

(The masters' right of giving names goes so far that it is permissible
to look upon language itself as the expression of the power of the
masters: they say "this _is_ that, and that," they seal finally every
object and every event with a sound, and thereby at the same time take
possession of it.) It is because of this origin that the word "good"
is far from having any necessary connection with altruistic acts, in
accordance with the superstitious belief of these moral philosophers.
On the contrary, it is on the occasion of the _decay_ of aristocratic
values, that the antitheses between "egoistic" and "altruistic"
presses more and more heavily on the human conscience--it is, to use
my own language, the _herd instinct_ which finds in this antithesis an
expression in many ways. And even then it takes a considerable time
for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant, for the valuation
to be inextricably dependent on this antithesis (as is the case in
contemporary Europe); for to-day that prejudice is predominant, which,
acting even now with all the intensity of an obsession and brain
disease, holds that "moral," "altruistic," and "_désintéressé_" are
concepts of equal value.


3.

In the second place, quite apart from the fact that this hypothesis as
to the genesis of the value "good" cannot be historically upheld, it
suffers from an inherent psychological contradiction. The utility of
altruistic conduct has presumably been the origin of its being praised,
and this origin has become _forgotten_:--But in what conceivable way is
this forgetting _possible_! Has perchance the utility of such conduct
ceased at some given moment? The contrary is the case. This utility has
rather been experienced every day at all times, and is consequently
a feature that obtains a new and regular emphasis with every fresh
day; it follows that, so far from vanishing from the consciousness, so
far indeed from being forgotten, it must necessarily become impressed
on the consciousness with ever-increasing distinctness. How much
more logical is that contrary theory (it is not the truer for that)
which is represented, for instance, by Herbert Spencer, who places
the concept "good" as essentially similar to the concept "useful,"
"purposive," so that in the judgments "good" and "bad" mankind is
simply summarising and investing with a sanction its _unforgotten_ and
_unforgettable_ experiences concerning the "useful-purposive" and the
"mischievous-non-purposive." According to this theory, "good" is the
attribute of that which has previously shown itself useful; and so
is able to claim to be considered "valuable in the highest degree,"
"valuable in itself." This method of explanation is also, as I have
said, wrong, but at any rate the explanation itself is coherent, and
psychologically tenable.


4.

The guide-post which first put me on the right track was this
question--what is the true etymological significance of the various
symbols for the idea "good" which have been coined in the various
languages? I then found that they all led back to _the same evolution
of the same idea_--that everywhere "aristocrat," "noble" (in the
social sense), is the root idea, out of which have necessarily
developed "good" in the sense of "with aristocratic soul," "noble,"
in the sense of "with a soul of high calibre," "with a privileged
soul"--a development which invariably runs parallel with that other
evolution by which "vulgar," "plebeian," "low," are made to change
finally into "bad." The most eloquent proof of this last contention
is the German word "_schlecht_" itself: this word is identical with
"_schlicht_"--(compare "_schlechtweg_" and "_schlechterdings_")--which,
originally and as yet without any sinister innuendo, simply denoted
the plebeian man in contrast to the aristocratic man. It is at the
sufficiently late period of the Thirty Years' War that this sense
becomes changed to the sense now current. From the standpoint of
the Genealogy of Morals this discovery seems to be substantial: the
lateness of it is to be attributed to the retarding influence exercised
in the modern world by democratic prejudice in the sphere of all
questions of origin. This extends, as will shortly be shown, even to
the province of natural science and physiology, which, _prima facie_
is the most objective. The extent of the mischief which is caused by
this prejudice (once it is free of all trammels except those of its own
malice), particularly to Ethics and History, is shown by the notorious
case of Buckle: it was in Buckle that that _plebeianism_ of the modern
spirit, which is of English origin, broke out once again from its
malignant soil with all the violence of a slimy volcano, and with that
salted, rampant, and vulgar eloquence with which up to the present time
all volcanoes have spoken.


5.

With regard to our problem, which can justly be called an intimate
problem, and which elects to appeal to only a limited number of ears:
it is of no small interest to ascertain that in those words and roots
which denote "good" we catch glimpses of that arch-trait, on the
strength of which the aristocrats feel themselves to be beings of
a higher order than their fellows. Indeed, they call themselves in
perhaps the most frequent instances simply after their superiority
in power (_e.g._ "the powerful," "the lords," "the commanders"), or
after the most obvious sign of their superiority, as for example
"the rich," "the possessors" (that is the meaning of _arya_; and the
Iranian and Slav languages correspond). But they also call themselves
after some _characteristic idiosyncrasy_; and this is the case which
now concerns us. They name themselves, for instance, "the truthful":
this is first done by the Greek nobility whose mouthpiece is found in
Theognis, the Megarian poet. The word ἐσθλος, which is coined for the
purpose, signifies etymologically "one who _is_," who has reality, who
is real, who is true; and then with a subjective twist, the "true,"
as the "truthful": at this stage in the evolution of the idea, it
becomes the motto and party cry of the nobility, and quite completes
the transition to the meaning "noble," so as to place outside the pale
the lying, vulgar man, as Theognis conceives and portrays him--till
finally the word after the decay of the nobility is left to delineate
psychological _noblesse_, and becomes as it were ripe and mellow. In
the word κακός as in δειλός (the plebeian in contrast to the ἀγαθός)
the cowardice is emphasised. This affords perhaps an inkling on what
lines the etymological origin of the very ambiguous ἀγαθός is to be
investigated. In the Latin _malus_ (which I place side by side with
μέλας) the vulgar man can be distinguished as the dark-coloured, and
above all as the black-haired ("_hic niger est_"), as the pre-Aryan
inhabitants of the Italian soil, whose complexion formed the clearest
feature of distinction from the dominant blondes, namely, the Aryan
conquering race:--at any rate Gaelic has afforded me the exact
analogue--_Fin_ (for instance, in the name Fin-Gal), the distinctive
word of the nobility, finally--good, noble, clean, but originally the
blonde-haired man in contrast to the dark black-haired aboriginals. The
Celts, if I may make a parenthetic statement, were throughout a blonde
race; and it is wrong to connect, as Virchow still connects, those
traces of an essentially dark-haired population which are to be seen
on the more elaborate ethnographical maps of Germany with any Celtic
ancestry or with any admixture of Celtic blood: in this context it is
rather the _pre-Aryan_ population of Germany which surges up to these
districts. (The same is true substantially of the whole of Europe: in
point of fact, the subject race has finally again obtained the upper
hand, in complexion and the shortness of the skull, and perhaps in
the intellectual and social qualities. Who can guarantee that modern
democracy, still more modern anarchy, and indeed that tendency to the
"Commune," the most primitive form of society, which is now common to
all the Socialists in Europe, does not in its real essence signify a
monstrous reversion--and that the conquering and _master_ race--the
Aryan race, is not also becoming inferior physiologically?) I believe
that I can explain the Latin _bonus_ as the "warrior": my hypothesis
is that I am right in deriving _bonus_ from an older _duonus_ (compare
_bellum_ = _duellum_ = _duen-lum_, in which the word _duonus_ appears
to me to be contained). Bonus accordingly as the man of discord, of
variance, "entzweiung" (_duo_), as the warrior: one sees what in
ancient Rome "the good" meant for a man. Must not our actual German
word _gut_ mean "_the godlike_, the man of godlike race"? and be
identical with the national name (originally the nobles' name) of the
_Goths_?

The grounds for this supposition do not appertain to this work.


6.

Above all, there is no exception (though there are opportunities for
exceptions) to this rule, that the idea of political superiority
always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority, in
those cases where the highest caste is at the same time the _priestly_
caste, and in accordance with its general characteristics confers on
itself the privilege of a title which alludes specifically to its
priestly function. It is in these cases, for instance, that "clean" and
"unclean" confront each other for the first time as badges of class
distinction; here again there develops a "good" and a "bad," in a sense
which has ceased to be merely social. Moreover, care should be taken
not to take these ideas of "clean" and "unclean" too seriously, too
broadly, or too symbolically: all the ideas of ancient man have, on
the contrary, got to be understood in their initial stages, in a sense
which is, to an almost inconceivable extent, crude, coarse, physical,
and narrow, and above all essentially unsymbolical. The "clean man" is
originally only a man who washes himself, who abstains from certain
foods which are conducive to skin diseases, who does not sleep with
the unclean women of the lower classes, who has a horror of blood--not
more, not much more! On the other hand, the very nature of a priestly
aristocracy shows the reasons why just at such an early juncture
there should ensue a really dangerous sharpening and intensification
of opposed values: it is, in fact, through these opposed values that
gulfs are cleft in the social plane, which a veritable Achilles of
free thought would shudder to cross. There is from the outset a
certain _diseased taint_ in such sacerdotal aristocracies, and in the
habits which prevail in such societies--habits which, _averse_ as they
are to action, constitute a compound of introspection and explosive
emotionalism, as a result of which there appears that introspective
morbidity and neurasthenia, which adheres almost inevitably to all
priests at all times: with regard, however, to the remedy which they
themselves have invented for this disease--the philosopher has no
option but to state, that it has proved itself in its effects a hundred
times more dangerous than the disease, from which it should have been
the deliverer. Humanity itself is still diseased from the effects of
the naïvetés of this priestly cure. Take, for instance, certain kinds
of diet (abstention from flesh), fasts, sexual continence, flight
into the wilderness (a kind of Weir-Mitchell isolation, though of
course without that system of excessive feeding and fattening which
is the most efficient antidote to all the hysteria of the ascetic
ideal); consider too the whole metaphysic of the priests, with its
war on the senses, its enervation, its hair-splitting; consider its
self-hypnotism on the fakir and Brahman principles (it uses Brahman as
a glass disc and obsession), and that climax which we can understand
only too well of an unusual satiety with its panacea of _nothingness_
(or God:--the demand for a _unio mystica_ with God is the demand of the
Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvana--and nothing else!). In sacerdotal
societies _every_ element is on a more dangerous scale, not merely
cures and remedies, but also pride, revenge, cunning, exaltation, love,
ambition, virtue, morbidity:--further, it can fairly be stated that it
is on the soil of this _essentially dangerous_ form of human society,
the sacerdotal form, that man really becomes for the first time an
_interesting animal_, that it is in this form that the soul of man has
in a higher sense attained _depths_ and become _evil_--and those are
the two fundamental forms of the superiority which up to the present
man has exhibited over every other animal.


7.

The reader will have already surmised with what ease the priestly mode
of valuation can branch off from the knightly aristocratic mode, and
then develop into the very antithesis of the latter: special impetus
is given to this opposition, by every occasion when the castes of the
priests and warriors confront each other with mutual jealousy and
cannot agree over the prize. The knightly-aristocratic "values" are
based on a careful cult of the physical, on a flowering, rich, and
even effervescing healthiness, that goes considerably beyond what
is necessary for maintaining life, on war, adventure, the chase,
the dance, the tourney--on everything, in fact, which is contained
in strong, free, and joyous action. The priestly-aristocratic mode
of valuation is--we have seen--based on other hypotheses: it is bad
enough for this class when it is a question of war! Yet the priests
are, as is notorious, _the worst enemies_--why? Because they are the
weakest. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into a monstrous
and sinister shape, a shape which is most crafty and most poisonous.
The really great haters in the history of the world have always been
priests, who are also the cleverest haters--in comparison with the
cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness is
practically negligible. Human history would be too fatuous for anything
were it not for the cleverness imported into it by the weak--take at
once the most important instance. All the world's efforts against the
"aristocrats," the "mighty," the "masters," the "holders of power,"
are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against
those classes by _the Jews_--the Jews, that priestly nation which
eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on
its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of
values, which was at the same time an act of the _cleverest revenge_.
Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation
of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews
who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic
= beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying
logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with
the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this
contrary equation, namely, "the wretched are alone the good; the poor,
the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the
sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones
who are blessed, for them alone is salvation--but you, on the other
hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity the
evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally
also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!" We know who
it was who reaped the heritage of this Jewish transvaluation. In the
context of the monstrous and inordinately fateful initiative which
the Jews have exhibited in connection with this most fundamental of
all declarations of war, I remember the passage which came to my pen
on another occasion (_Beyond Good and Evil_, Aph. 195)--that it was,
in fact, with the Jews that the _revolt of the slaves_ begins in the
sphere _of morals_; that revolt which has behind it a history of two
millennia, and which at the present day has only moved out of our
sight, because it--has achieved victory.


8.

But you understand this not? You have no eyes for a force which
has taken two thousand years to achieve victory?--There is nothing
wonderful in this: all _lengthy_ processes are hard to see and to
realise. But _this_ is what took place: from the trunk of that tree
of revenge and hate, Jewish hate,--that most profound and sublime
hate, which creates ideals and changes old values to new creations,
the like of which has never been on earth,--there grew a phenomenon
which was equally incomparable, _a new love_, the most profound and
sublime of all kinds of love;--and from what other trunk could it have
grown? But beware of supposing that this love has soared on its upward
growth, as in any way a real negation of that thirst for revenge, as
an antithesis to the Jewish hate! No, the contrary is the truth! This
love grew out of that hate, as its crown, as its triumphant crown,
circling wider and wider amid the clarity and fulness of the sun, and
pursuing in the very kingdom of light and height its goal of hatred,
its victory, its spoil, its strategy, with the same intensity with
which the roots of that tree of hate sank into everything which was
deep and evil with increasing stability and increasing desire. This
Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this "Redeemer"
bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinful--was
he not really temptation in its most sinister and irresistible form,
temptation to take the tortuous path to those very _Jewish_ values and
those very Jewish ideals? Has not Israel really obtained the final goal
of its sublime revenge, by the tortuous paths of this "Redeemer," for
all that he might pose as Israel's adversary and Israel's destroyer? Is
it not due to the black magic of a really _great_ policy of revenge,
of a far-seeing, burrowing revenge, both acting and calculating with
slowness, that Israel himself must repudiate before all the world the
actual instrument of his own revenge and nail it to the cross, so
that all the world--that is, all the enemies of Israel--could nibble
without suspicion at this very bait? Could, moreover, any human mind
with all its elaborate ingenuity invent a bait that was more truly
_dangerous_? Anything that was even equivalent in the power of its
seductive, intoxicating, defiling, and corrupting influence to that
symbol of the holy cross, to that awful paradox of a "god on the
cross," to that mystery of the unthinkable, supreme, and utter horror
of the self-crucifixion of a god for the _salvation of man_? It is
at least certain that _sub hoc signo_ Israel, with its revenge and
transvaluation of all values, has up to the present always triumphed
again over all other ideals, over all more aristocratic ideals.


9.

"But why do you talk of nobler ideals? Let us submit to the facts;
that the people have triumphed--or the slaves, or the populace, or the
herd, or whatever name you care to give them--if this has happened
through the Jews, so be it! In that case no nation ever had a greater
mission in the world's history. The 'masters' have been done away
with; the morality of the vulgar man has triumphed. This triumph may
also be called a blood-poisoning (it has mutually fused the races)--I
do not dispute it; but there is no doubt but that this intoxication
has succeeded. The 'redemption' of the human race (that is, from the
masters) is progressing swimmingly; everything is obviously becoming
Judaised, or Christianised, or vulgarised (what is there in the
words?). It seems impossible to stop the course of this poisoning
through the whole body politic of mankind--but its _tempo_ and pace
may from the present time be slower, more delicate, quieter, more
discreet--there is time enough. In view of this context has the Church
nowadays any necessary purpose? has it, in fact, a right to live? Or
could man get on without it? _Quæritur_. It seems that it fetters and
retards this tendency, instead of accelerating it. Well, even that
might be its utility. The Church certainly is a crude and boorish
institution, that is repugnant to an intelligence with any pretence at
delicacy, to a really modern taste. Should it not at any rate learn to
be somewhat more subtle? It alienates nowadays, more than it allures.
Which of us would, forsooth, be a freethinker if there were no Church?
It is the Church which repels us, not its poison--apart from the Church
we like the poison." This is the epilogue of a freethinker to my
discourse, of an honourable animal (as he has given abundant proof),
and a democrat to boot; he had up to that time listened to me, and
could not endure my silence, but for me, indeed, with regard to this
topic there is much on which to be silent.


10.

The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of
_resentment_ becoming creative and giving birth to values--a resentment
experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet
of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary
revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant
affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the
very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and
"not itself": and this "no" is its creative deed. This volte-face of
the valuing standpoint--this _inevitable_ gravitation to the objective
instead of back to the subjective--is typical of "resentment": the
slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an external
and objective world, to employ physiological terminology, it requires
objective stimuli to be capable of action at all--its action is
fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when we come to
the aristocrat's system of values: it acts and grows spontaneously,
it merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful
and exultant "yes" to its own self;--its negative conception, "low,"
"vulgar," "bad," is merely a pale late-born foil in comparison with its
positive and fundamental conception (saturated as it is with life and
passion), of "we aristocrats, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy
ones."

When the aristocratic morality goes astray and commits sacrilege on
reality, this is limited to that particular sphere with which it
is _not_ sufficiently acquainted--a sphere, in fact, from the real
knowledge of which it disdainfully defends itself. It misjudges, in
some cases, the sphere which it despises, the sphere of the common
vulgar man and the low people: on the other hand, due weight should be
given to the consideration that in any case the mood of contempt, of
disdain, of superciliousness, even on the supposition that it _falsely_
portrays the object of its contempt, will always be far removed from
that degree of falsity which will always characterise the attacks--in
effigy, of course--of the vindictive hatred and revengefulness of
the weak in onslaughts on their enemies. In point of fact, there is
in contempt too strong an admixture of nonchalance, of casualness,
of boredom, of impatience, even of personal exultation, for it to be
capable of distorting its victim into a real caricature or a real
monstrosity. Attention again should be paid to the almost benevolent
_nuances_ which, for instance, the Greek nobility imports into all
the words by which it distinguishes the common people from itself;
note how continuously a kind of pity, care, and consideration imparts
its honeyed _flavour_, until at last almost all the words which are
applied to the vulgar man survive finally as expressions for "unhappy,"
"worthy of pity" (compare δειλο, δείλαιος, πονηρός, μοχθηρός]; the
latter two names really denoting the vulgar man as labour-slave
and beast of burden)--and how, conversely, "bad," "low," "unhappy"
have never ceased to ring in the Greek ear with a tone in which
"unhappy" is the predominant note: this is a heritage of the old noble
aristocratic morality, which remains true to itself even in contempt
(let philologists remember the sense in which ὀιζυρός, ἄνολβος, τλήμων,
δυστυχεῑν, ξυμφορά used to be employed). The "well-born" simply
_felt_ themselves the "happy"; they did not have to manufacture their
happiness artificially through looking at their enemies, or in cases
to talk and _lie themselves_ into happiness (as is the custom with all
resentful men); and similarly, complete men as they were, exuberant
with strength, and consequently _necessarily_ energetic, they were too
wise to dissociate happiness from action--activity becomes in their
minds necessarily counted as happiness (that is the etymology of εὖ
πρἆττειν)--all in sharp contrast to the "happiness" of the weak and
the oppressed, with their festering venom and malignity, among whom
happiness appears essentially as a narcotic, a deadening, a quietude,
a peace, a "Sabbath," an enervation of the mind and relaxation
of the limbs,--in short, a purely _passive_ phenomenon. While the
aristocratic man lived in confidence and openness with himself
(gennaios, "noble-born," emphasises the nuance "sincere," and perhaps
also "naïf"), the resentful man, on the other hand, is neither sincere
nor naïf, nor honest and candid with himself. His soul _squints_; his
mind loves hidden crannies, tortuous paths and back-doors, everything
secret appeals to him as _his_ world, _his_ safety, _his_ balm; he is
past master in silence, in not forgetting, in waiting, in provisional
self-depreciation and self-abasement. A race of such _resentful_ men
will of necessity eventually prove more _prudent_ than any aristocratic
race, it will honour prudence on quite a distinct scale, as, in fact, a
paramount condition of existence, while prudence among aristocratic men
is apt to be tinged with a delicate flavour of luxury and refinement;
so among them it plays nothing like so integral a part as that complete
certainty of function of the governing _unconscious_ instincts, or
as indeed a certain lack of prudence, such as a vehement and valiant
charge, whether against danger or the enemy, or as those ecstatic
bursts of rage, love, reverence, gratitude, by which at all times
noble souls have recognised each other. When the resentment of the
aristocratic man manifests itself, it fulfils and exhausts itself in
an immediate reaction, and consequently instills no _venom_: on the
other hand, it never manifests itself at all in countless instances,
when in the case of the feeble and weak it would be inevitable. An
inability to take seriously for any length of time their enemies,
their disasters, their _misdeeds_--that is the sign of the full strong
natures who possess a superfluity of moulding plastic force, that
heals completely and produces forgetfulness: a good example of this in
the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for any insults and
meannesses which were practised on him, and who was only incapable
of forgiving because he forgot. Such a man indeed shakes off with a
shrug many a worm which would have buried itself in another; it is
only in characters like these that we see the possibility (supposing,
of course, that there is such a possibility in the world) of the real
"_love_ of one's enemies." What respect for his enemies is found,
forsooth, in an aristocratic man--and such a reverence is already
a bridge to love! He insists on having his enemy to himself as his
distinction. He tolerates no other enemy but a man in whose character
there is nothing to despise and much to honour! On the other hand,
imagine the "enemy" as the resentful man conceives him--and it is here
exactly that we see his work, his creativeness; he has conceived "the
evil enemy," the "evil one," and indeed that is the root idea from
which he now evolves as a contrasting and corresponding figure a "good
one," himself--his very self!


11

The method of this man is quite contrary to that of the aristocratic
man, who conceives the root idea "good" spontaneously and straight
away, that is to say, out of himself, and from that material then
creates for himself a concept of "bad"! This "bad" of aristocratic
origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred--the
former an imitation, an "extra," an additional nuance; the latter,
on the other hand, the original, the beginning, the essential act in
the conception of a slave-morality--these two words "bad" and "evil,"
how great a difference do they mark, in spite of the fact that they
have an identical contrary in the idea "good." But the idea "good" is
not the same: much rather let the question be asked, "Who is really
evil according to the meaning of the morality of resentment?" In
all sternness let it be answered thus:--_just_ the good man of the
other morality, just the aristocrat, the powerful one, the one who
rules, but who is distorted by the venomous eye of resentfulness,
into a new colour, a new signification, a new appearance. This
particular point we would be the last to deny: the man who learnt to
know those "good" ones only as enemies, learnt at the same time not
to know them only as "_evil enemies_" and the same men who _inter
pares_ were kept so rigorously in bounds through convention, respect,
custom, and gratitude, though much more through mutual vigilance
and jealousy _inter pares_, these men who in their relations with
each other find so many new ways of manifesting consideration,
self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship, these men
are in reference to what is outside their circle (where the foreign
element, a _foreign_ country, begins), not much better than beasts
of prey, which have been let loose. They enjoy there freedom from
all social control, they feel that in the wilderness they can give
vent with impunity to that tension which is produced by enclosure and
imprisonment in the peace of society, they _revert_ to the innocence
of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who perhaps
come from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with
bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student's
prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an
ample theme to sing and celebrate. It is impossible not to recognise
at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the
magnificent _blonde brute_, avidly rampant for spoil and victory;
this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must
get loose again, must return into the wilderness--the Roman, Arabic,
German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian
Vikings, are all alike in this need. It is the aristocratic races who
have left the idea "Barbarian" on all the tracks in which they have
marched; nay, a consciousness of this very barbarianism, and even
a pride in it, manifests itself even in their highest civilisation
(for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in that celebrated
funeral oration, "Our audacity has forced a way over every land and
sea, rearing everywhere imperishable memorials of itself for _good_
and for _evil_"). This audacity of aristocratic races, mad, absurd,
and spasmodic as may be its expression; the incalculable and fantastic
nature of their enterprises,Pericles sets in special relief and
glory the ᾽ραθυμία of the Athenians, their nonchalance and contempt for
safety, body, life, and comfort, their awful joy and intense delight
in all destruction, in all the ecstasies of victory and cruelty,--all
these features become crystallised, for those who suffered thereby
in the picture of the "barbarian," of the "evil enemy," perhaps of
the "Goth" and of the "Vandal." The profound, icy mistrust which
the German provokes, as soon as he arrives at power,--even at the
present time,--is always still an aftermath of that inextinguishable
horror with which for whole centuries Europe has regarded the wrath
of the blonde Teuton beast (although between the old Germans and
ourselves there exists scarcely a psychological, let alone a physical,
relationship). I have once called attention to the embarrassment of
Hesiod, when he conceived the series of social ages, and endeavoured
to express them in gold, silver, and bronze. He could only dispose
of the contradiction, with which he was confronted, by the Homeric
world, an age magnificent indeed, but at the same time so awful and
so violent, by making two ages out of one, which he henceforth placed
one behind each other--first, the age of the heroes and demigods, as
that world had remained in the memories of the aristocratic families,
who found therein their own ancestors; secondly, the bronze age, as
that corresponding age appeared to the descendants of the oppressed,
spoiled, ill-treated, exiled, enslaved; namely, as an age of bronze,
as I have said, hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without
conscience, crushing everything, and bespattering everything with
blood. Granted the truth of the theory now believed to be true, that
the very _essence of all civilisation_ is to _train_ out of man, the
beast of prey, a tame and civilised animal, a domesticated animal,
it follows indubitably that we must regard as the real _tools of
civilisation_ all those instincts of reaction and resentment, by the
help of which the aristocratic races, together with their ideals,
were finally degraded and overpowered; though that has not yet come
to be synonymous with saying that the bearers of those tools also
_represented_ the civilisation. It is rather the contrary that is
not only probable--nay, it is _palpable_ to-day; these bearers of
vindictive instincts that have to be bottled up, these descendants of
all European and non-European slavery, especially of the pre-Aryan
population--these people, I say, represent the _decline_ of humanity!
These "tools of civilisation" are a disgrace to humanity, and
constitute in reality more of an argument against civilisation, more
of a reason why civilisation should be suspected. One may be perfectly
justified in being always afraid of the blonde beast that lies at
the core of all aristocratic races, and in being on one's guard: but
who would not a hundred times prefer to be afraid, when one at the
same time admires, than to be immune from fear, at the cost of being
perpetually obsessed with the loathsome spectacle of the distorted, the
dwarfed, the stunted, the envenomed? And is that not our fate? What
produces to-day our repulsion towards "man"?--for we _suffer_ from
"man," there is no doubt about it. It is not fear; it is rather that
we have nothing more to fear from men; it is that the worm "man" is in
the foreground and pullulates; it is that the "tame man," the wretched
mediocre and unedifying creature, has learnt to consider himself a goal
and a pinnacle, an inner meaning, an historic principle, a "higher
man"; yes, it is that he has a certain right so to consider himself,
in so far as he feels that in contrast to that excess of deformity,
disease, exhaustion, and effeteness whose odour is beginning to pollute
present-day Europe, he at any rate has achieved a relative success, he
at any rate still says "yes" to life.


12.

I cannot refrain at this juncture from uttering a sigh and one last
hope. What is it precisely which I find intolerable? That which I alone
cannot get rid of, which makes me choke and faint? Bad air! bad air!
That something misbegotten comes near me; that I must inhale the odour
of the entrails of a misbegotten soul!--That excepted, what can one
not endure in the way of need, privation, bad weather, sickness, toil,
solitude? In point of fact, one manages to get over everything, born
as one is to a burrowing and battling existence; one always returns
once again to the light, one always lives again one's golden hour of
victory--and then one stands as one was born, unbreakable, tense, ready
for something more difficult, for something more distant, like a bow
stretched but the tauter by every strain. But from time to time do ye
grant me--assuming that "beyond good and evil" there are goddesses who
can grant--one glimpse, grant me but one glimpse only, of something
perfect, fully realised, happy, mighty, triumphant, of something
that still gives cause for fear! A glimpse of a man that justifies
the existence of man, a glimpse of an incarnate human happiness that
realises and redeems, for the sake of which one may hold fast to _the
belief in man_! For the position is this: in the dwarfing and levelling
of the European man lurks _our_ greatest peril, for it is this outlook
which fatigues--we see to-day nothing which wishes to be greater, we
surmise that the process is always still backwards, still backwards
towards something more attenuated, more inoffensive, more cunning,
more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more
Christian--man, there is no doubt about it, grows always "better"
--the destiny of Europe lies even in this--that in losing the fear of
man, we have also lost the hope in man, yea, the will to be man. The
sight of man now fatigues.--What is present-day Nihilism if it is not
_that_?--We are tired of _man_.


13.

But let us come back to it; the problem of another origin of the
_good_--of the good, as the resentful man has thought it out--demands
its solution. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge
against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the
great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs
say among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and he who is as
far removed from being a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite,
a lamb,--is he not good?" then there is nothing to cavil at in the
setting up of this ideal, though it may also be that the birds of prey
will regard it a little sneeringly, and perchance say to themselves,
"_We_ bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even like them:
nothing is tastier than a tender lamb." To require of strength that it
should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a wish to
overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for
enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require
of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of
force is just such a quantum of movement, will, action--rather it
is nothing else than just those very phenomena of moving, willing,
acting, and can only appear otherwise in the misleading errors of
language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become
petrified therein), which understands, and understands wrongly, all
working as conditioned by a worker, by a "subject." And just exactly
as the people separate the lightning from its flash, and interpret the
latter as a thing done, as the working of a subject which is called
lightning, so also does the popular morality separate strength from the
expression of strength, as though behind the strong man there existed
some indifferent neutral _substratum_, which enjoyed a _caprice and
option_ as to whether or not it should express strength. But there
is no such _substratum_, there is no "being" behind doing, working,
becoming; "the doer" is a mere appanage to the action. The action is
everything. In point of fact, the people duplicate the doing, when they
make the lightning lighten, that is a "doing-doing": they make the same
phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause.
The scientists fail to improve matters when they say, "Force moves,
force causes," and so on. Our whole science is still, in spite of all
its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of
language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious
changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such
a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself"). What wonder,
if the suppressed and stealthily simmering passions of revenge and
hatred exploit for their own advantage this belief, and indeed hold no
belief with a more steadfast enthusiasm than this--"that the strong
has the _option_ of being weak, and the bird of prey of being a lamb."
Thereby do they win for themselves the right of attributing to the
birds of prey the _responsibility_ for being birds of prey: when the
oppressed, down-trodden, and overpowered say to themselves with the
vindictive guile of weakness, "Let us be otherwise than the evil,
namely, good! and good is every one who does not oppress, who hurts
no one, who does not attack, who does not pay back, who hands over
revenge to God, who holds himself, as we do, in hiding; who goes out
of the way of evil, and demands, in short, little from life; like
ourselves the patient, the meek, the just,"--yet all this, in its cold
and unprejudiced interpretation, means nothing more than "once for
all, the weak are weak; it is good to do _nothing for which we are not
strong enough_"; but this dismal state of affairs, this prudence of the
lowest order, which even insects possess (which in a great danger are
fain to sham death so as to avoid doing "too much"), has, thanks to
the counterfeiting and self-deception of weakness, come to masquerade
in the pomp of an ascetic, mute, and expectant virtue, just as though
the _very_ weakness of the weak--that is, forsooth, its _being_, its
working, its whole unique inevitable inseparable reality--were a
voluntary result, something wished, chosen, a deed, an act of _merit_.
This kind of man finds the belief in a neutral, free-choosing "subject"
_necessary_ from an instinct of self-preservation, of self-assertion,
in which every lie is fain to sanctify itself. The subject (or, to
use popular language, the _soul_) has perhaps proved itself the best
dogma in the world simply because it rendered possible to the horde
of mortal, weak, and oppressed individuals of every kind, that most
sublime specimen of self-deception, the interpretation of weakness as
freedom, of being this, or being that, as _merit_.


14.

Will any one look a little into--right into--the mystery of how _ideals
are manufactured_ in this world? Who has the courage to do it? Come!

Here we have a vista opened into these grimy workshops. Wait just a
moment, dear Mr. Inquisitive and Foolhardy; your eye must first grow
accustomed to this false changing light--Yes! Enough! Now speak! What
is happening below down yonder? Speak out that what you see, man of the
most dangerous curiosity--for now _I_ am the listener.

"I see nothing, I hear the more. It is a cautious, spiteful, gentle
whispering and muttering together in all the corners and crannies. It
seems to me that they are lying; a sugary softness adheres to every
sound. Weakness is turned to _merit_, there is no doubt about it--it is
just as you say."

Further!

"And the impotence which requites not, is turned to 'goodness,' craven
baseness to meekness, submission to those whom one hates, to obedience
(namely, obedience to one of whom they say that he ordered this
submission--they call him God). The inoffensive character of the weak,
the very cowardice in which he is rich, his standing at the door, his
forced necessity of waiting, gain here fine names, such as 'patience,'
which is also called 'virtue'; not being able to avenge one's self, is
called not wishing to avenge one's self, perhaps even forgiveness (for
_they_ know not what they do--we alone know what _they_ do). They also
talk of the 'love of their enemies' and sweat thereby."

Further!

"They are miserable, there is no doubt about it, all these whisperers
and counterfeiters in the corners, although they try to get warm by
crouching close to each other, but they tell me that their misery is
a favour and distinction given to them by God, just as one beats the
dogs one likes best; that perhaps this misery is also a preparation, a
probation, a training; that perhaps it is still more something which
will one day be compensated and paid back with a tremendous interest in
gold, nay in happiness. This they call 'Blessedness.'"

Further!

"They are now giving me to understand, that not only are they better
men than the mighty, the lords of the earth, whose spittle they have
got to lick (not out of fear, not at all out of fear! But because
God ordains that one should honour all authority)--not only are they
better men, but that they also have a 'better time,' at any rate,
will one day have a 'better time.' But enough! Enough! I can endure
it no longer. Bad air! Bad air! These workshops _where ideals are
manufactured_--verily they reek with the crassest lies."

Nay. Just one minute! You are saying nothing about the masterpieces
of these virtuosos of black magic, who can produce whiteness, milk,
and innocence out of any black you like: have you not noticed what a
pitch of refinement is attained by their _chef d'œuvre_, their most
audacious, subtle, ingenious, and lying artist-trick? Take care! These
cellar-beasts, full of revenge and hate--what do they make, forsooth,
out of their revenge and hate? Do you hear these words? Would you
suspect, if you trusted only their words, that you are among men of
resentment and nothing else?

"I understand, I prick my ears up again (ah! ah! ah! and I hold my
nose). Now do I hear for the first time that which they have said so
often: 'We good, _we are the righteous_'--what they demand they call
not revenge but 'the triumph of _righteousness_'; what they hate is
not their enemy, no, they hate 'unrighteousness,' 'godlessness'; what
they believe in and hope is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication
of sweet revenge (--"sweeter than honey," did Homer call it?), but the
victory of God, of the _righteous_ _God_ over the 'godless'; what is
left for them to love in this world is not _their_ brothers in hate,
but their 'brothers in love,' as they say, all the good and righteous
on the earth."

And how do they name that which serves them as a solace against all
the troubles of life--their phantasmagoria of their anticipated future
blessedness?

"How? Do I hear right? They call it 'the last judgment,' the advent of
their kingdom, 'the kingdom of God'--but _in the meanwhile_ they live
'in faith,' 'in love,' 'in hope.'"

Enough! Enough!


15.

In the faith in what? In the love for what? In the hope of what? These
weaklings!--they also, forsooth, wish to be the strong some time; there
is no doubt about it, some time _their_ kingdom also must come--"the
kingdom of God" is their name for it, as has been mentioned: they are
so meek in everything! Yet in order to experience _that_ kingdom it
is necessary to live long, to live beyond death,--yes, _eternal_ life
is necessary so that one can make up for ever for that earthly life
"in faith," "in love," "in hope." Make up for what? Make up by what?
Dante, as it seems to me, made a crass mistake when with awe-inspiring
ingenuity he placed that inscription over the gate of his hell, "Me too
made eternal love": at any rate the following inscription would have
a much better right to stand over the gate of the Christian Paradise
and its "eternal blessedness"--"Me too made eternal hate"--granted
of course that a truth may rightly stand over the gate to a lie! For
what is the blessedness of that Paradise? Possibly we could quickly
surmise it; but it is better that it should be explicitly attested by
an authority who in such matters is not to be disparaged, Thomas of
Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. "_Beati in regno celesti_" says
he, as gently as a lamb, "_videbunt pœnas damnatorum, ut beatitudo
illis magis complaceat_." Or if we wish to hear a stronger tone, a word
from the mouth of a triumphant father of the Church, who warned his
disciples against the cruel ecstasies of the public spectacles--But
why? Faith offers us much more,--says he, _de Spectac._, c. 29
ss.,--something much stronger; thanks to the redemption, joys of quite
another kind stand at our disposal; instead of athletes we have our
martyrs; we wish for blood, well, we have the blood of Christ--but
what then awaits us on the day of his return, of his triumph. And
then does he proceed, does this enraptured visionary: "_at enim
supersunt alia spectacula, ille ultimas et perpetuus judicii dies, ille
nationibus insperatus, ille derisus, cum tanta sæculi vetustas et tot
ejus nativitates uno igne haurientur. Quæ tunc spectaculi latitudo!
Quid admirer! quid rideam! Ubigaudeam! Ubi exultem, spectans tot et
tantos reges, qui in cœlum recepti nuntiabantur, cum ipso Jove et ipsis
suis testibus in imis tenebris congemescentes! Item præsides_" (the
provincial governors) "_persecutores dominici nominis sævioribus quam
ipsi flammis sævierunt insultantibus contra Christianos liquescentes!
Quos præterea sapientes illos philosophos coram discipulis suis una
conflagrantibus erubescentes, quibus nihil ad deum pertinere suadebant,
quibus animas aut nullas aut non in pristina corpora redituras
affirmabant! Etiam poetas non ad Rhadamanti nec ad Minois, sed ad
inopinati Christi tribunal palpitantes! Tunc magis tragœdi audiendi,
magis scilicet vocales_" (with louder tones and more violent shrieks)
"_in sua propria calamitate; tunc histriones cognoscendi, solutiores
multo per ignem; tunc spectandus auriga in flammea rota totus rubens,
tunc xystici contemplandi non in gymnasiis, sed in igne jaculati, nisi
quod ne tunc quidem illos velim vivos, ut qui malim ad eos potius
conspectum insatiabilem conferre, qui in dominum scevierunt. Hic est
ille, dicam fabri aut quæstuariæ filius_" (as is shown by the whole of
the following, and in particular by this well-known description of the
mother of Jesus from the Talmud, Tertullian is henceforth referring to
the Jews), "_sabbati destructor, Samarites et dæmonium habens. Hic est
quem a Juda redemistis, hic est ille arundine et colaphis diverberatus,
sputamentis de decoratus, felle et acete potatus. Hic est, quem
clam discentes subripuerunt, ut resurrexisse dicatur vel hortulanus
detraxit, ne lactucæ suæ frequentia commeantium laderentur. Ut talia
species, ut talibus exultes, quis tibi prætor aut consul aut sacerdos
de sua liberalitate prastabit? Et tamen hæc jam habemus quodammodo per
fidem spiritu imaginante repræsentata. Ceterum qualia illa sunt, quæ
nec oculus vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascenderunt?_" (I
Cor. ii. 9.) "_Credo circo et utraque cavea_" (first and fourth row,
or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stage) "_et omni
studio gratiora._" _Per fidem_: so stands it written.


16.

Let us come to a conclusion. The two _opposing values_, "good and bad,"
"good and evil," have fought a dreadful, thousand-year fight in the
world, and though indubitably the second value has been for a long time
in the preponderance, there are not wanting places where the fortune
of the fight is still undecisive. It can almost be said that in the
meanwhile the fight reaches a higher and higher level, and that in the
meanwhile it has become more and more intense, and always more and more
psychological; so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive mark
of the _higher nature_, of the more psychological nature, than to be in
that sense self-contradictory, and to be actually still a battleground
for those two opposites. The symbol of this fight, written in a writing
which has remained worthy of perusal throughout the course of history
up to the present time, is called "Rome against Judæa, Judæa against
Rome." Hitherto there has been no greater event than _that_ fight,
the putting of _that_ question, _that_ deadly antagonism. Rome found
in the Jew the incarnation of the unnatural, as though it were its
diametrically opposed monstrosity, and in Rome the Jew was held to
be _convicted of hatred_ of the whole human race: and rightly so, in
so far as it is right to link the well-being and the future of the
human race to the unconditional mastery of the aristocratic values, of
the Roman values. What, conversely, did the Jews feel against Rome?
One can surmise it from a thousand symptoms, but it is sufficient to
carry one's mind back to the Johannian Apocalypse, that most obscene
of all the written outbursts, which has revenge on its conscience.
(One should also appraise at its full value the profound logic of the
Christian instinct, when over this very book of hate it wrote the name
of the Disciple of Love, that self-same disciple to whom it attributed
that impassioned and ecstatic Gospel--therein lurks a portion of
truth, however much literary forging may have been necessary for
this purpose.) The Romans were the strong and aristocratic; a nation
stronger and more aristocratic has never existed in the world, has
never even been dreamed of; every relic of them, every inscription
enraptures, granted that one can divine _what_ it is that writes the
inscription. The Jews, conversely, were that priestly nation of
resentment par excellence, possessed by a unique genius for popular
morals: just compare with the Jews the nations with analogous gifts,
such as the Chinese or the Germans, so as to realise afterwards what is
first rate, and what is fifth rate.

Which of them has been provisionally victorious, Rome or Judæa? but
there is not a shadow of doubt; just consider to whom in Rome itself
nowadays you bow down, as though before the quintessence of all the
highest values--and not only in Rome, but almost over half the world,
everywhere where man has been tamed or is about to be tamed--to _three
Jews_, as we know, and _one Jewess_ (to Jesus of Nazareth, to Peter
the fisher, to Paul the tent-maker, and to the mother of the aforesaid
Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome is undoubtedly
defeated. At any rate there took place in the Renaissance a brilliantly
sinister revival of the classical ideal, of the aristocratic valuation
of all things: Rome herself, like a man waking up from a trance,
stirred beneath the burden of the new Judaised Rome that had been built
over her, which presented the appearance of an œcumenical synagogue
and was called the "Church": but immediately Judæa triumphed again,
thanks to that fundamentally popular (German and English) movement
of revenge, which is called the Reformation, and taking also into
account its inevitable corollary, the restoration of the Church--the
restoration also of the ancient graveyard peace of classical Rome.
Judæa proved yet once more victorious over the classical ideal in the
French Revolution, and in a sense which was even more crucial and even
more profound: the last political aristocracy that existed in Europe,
that of the _French_ seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, broke into
pieces beneath the instincts of a resentful populace--never had the
world heard a greater jubilation, a more uproarious enthusiasm: indeed,
there took place in the midst of it the most monstrous and unexpected
phenomenon; the ancient ideal _itself_ swept before the eyes and
conscience of humanity with all its life and with unheard-of splendour,
and in opposition to resentment's lying war-cry of _the prerogative
of the most_, in opposition to the will to lowliness, abasement, and
equalisation, the will to a retrogression and twilight of humanity,
there rang out once again, stronger, simpler, more penetrating than
ever, the terrible and enchanting counter-warcry of _the prerogative of
the few_! Like a final signpost to other ways, there appeared Napoleon,
the most unique and violent anachronism that ever existed, and in him
the incarnate problem _of the aristocratic ideal in itself_--consider
well what a problem it is:--Napoleon, that synthesis of Monster and
Superman.


17.

Was it therewith over? Was that greatest of all antitheses of ideals
thereby relegated _ad acta_ for all time? Or only postponed, postponed
for a long time? May there not take place at some time or other a
much more awful, much more carefully prepared flaring up of the old
conflagration? Further! Should not one wish _that_ consummation with
all one's strength?--will it one's self? demand it one's self? He who
at this juncture begins, like my readers, to reflect, to think further,
will have difficulty in coming quickly to a conclusion,--ground enough
for me to come myself to a conclusion, taking it for granted that for
some time past what I mean has been sufficiently clear, what I exactly
_mean_ by that dangerous motto which is inscribed on the body of my
last book: _Beyond Good and Evil_--at any rate that is not the same as
"Beyond Good and Bad."


Note.--I avail myself of the opportunity offered by this treatise to
express, openly and formally, a wish which up to the present has only
been expressed in occasional conversations with scholars, namely,
that some Faculty of philosophy should, by means of a series of prize
essays, gain the glory of having promoted the further study of the
_history of morals_--perhaps this book may serve to give forcible
impetus in such a direction. With regard to a possibility of this
character, the following question deserves consideration. It merits
quite as much the attention of philologists and historians as of actual
professional philosophers.

"_What indication of the history of the evolution of the moral ideas is
afforded by philology, and especially by etymological investigation?_"

On the other hand, it is of course equally necessary to induce
physiologists and doctors to be interested in these problems (_of the
value of the valuations_ which have prevailed up to the present): in
this connection the professional philosophers may be trusted to act
as the spokesmen and intermediaries in these particular instances,
after, of course, they have quite succeeded in transforming the
relationship between philosophy and physiology and medicine, which
is originally one of coldness and suspicion, into the most friendly
and fruitful reciprocity. In point of fact, all tables of values,
all the "thou shalts" known to history and ethnology, need primarily
a _physiological_, at any rate in preference to a psychological,
elucidation and interpretation; all equally require a critique from
medical science. The question, "What is the _value_ of this or that
table of 'values' and morality?" will be asked from the most varied
standpoints. For instance, the question of "valuable _for what_" can
never be analysed with sufficient nicety. That, for instance, which
would evidently have value with regard to promoting in a race the
greatest possible powers of endurance (or with regard to increasing its
adaptability to a specific climate, or with regard to the preservation
of the greatest number) would have nothing like the same value, if it
were a question of evolving a stronger species. In gauging values,
the good of the majority and the good of the minority are opposed
standpoints: we leave it to the naïveté of English biologists to regard
the former standpoint as _intrinsically_ superior. _All_ the sciences
have now to pave the way for the future task of the philosopher; this
task being understood to mean, that he must solve the problem of
_value_, that he has to fix the _hierarchy of values_.




SECOND ESSAY. "GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE.


1.

The breeding of an animal that _can promise_--is not this just that
very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is
not this the very problem of man? The fact that this problem has been
to a great extent solved, must appear all the more phenomenal to one
who can estimate at its full value that force of _forgetfulness_ which
works in opposition to it. Forgetfulness is no mere _vis inertiæ_,
as the superficial believe, rather is it a power of obstruction,
active and, in the strictest sense of the word, positive--a power
responsible for the fact that what we have lived, experienced, taken
into ourselves, no more enters into consciousness during the process
of digestion (it might be called psychic absorption) than all the
whole manifold process by which our physical nutrition, the so-called
"incorporation," is carried on. The temporary shutting of the doors
and windows of consciousness, the relief from the clamant alarums and
excursions, with which our subconscious world of servant organs works
in mutual co-operation and antagonism; a little quietude, a little
_tabula rasa_ of the consciousness, so as to make room again for the
new, and above all for the more noble functions and functionaries, room
for government, foresight, predetermination (for our organism is on an
oligarchic model)--this is the utility, as I have said, of the active
forgetfulness, which is a very sentinel and nurse of psychic order,
repose, etiquette; and this shows at once why it is that there can
exist no happiness, no gladness, no hope, no pride, no real _present_,
without forgetfulness. The man in whom this preventative apparatus is
damaged and discarded, is to be compared to a dyspeptic, and it is
something more than a comparison--he can "get rid of" nothing. But
this very animal who finds it necessary to be forgetful, in whom, in
fact, forgetfulness represents a force and a form of _robust_ health,
has reared for himself an opposition-power, a memory, with whose help
forgetfulness is, in certain instances, kept in check--in the cases,
namely, where promises have to be made;--so that it is by no means
a mere passive inability to get rid of a once indented impression,
not merely the indigestion occasioned by a once pledged word, which
one cannot dispose of, but an _active_ refusal to get rid of it, a
continuing and a wish to continue what has once been willed, an actual
_memory of the will_; so that between the original "I will," "I shall
do," and the actual discharge of the will, its act, we can easily
interpose a world of new strange phenomena, circumstances, veritable
volitions, without the snapping of this long chain of the will. But
what is the underlying hypothesis of all this? How thoroughly, in order
to be able to regulate the future in this way, must man have first
learnt to distinguish between necessitated and accidental phenomena, to
think causally, to see the distant as present and to anticipate it, to
fix with certainty what is the end, and what is the means to that end;
above all, to reckon, to have power to calculate--how thoroughly must
man have first become _calculable, disciplined, necessitated_ even for
himself and his own conception of himself, that, like a man entering
into a promise, he could guarantee himself _as a future_.


2.

This is simply the long history of the origin of _responsibility_.
That task of breeding an animal which can make promises, includes, as
we have already grasped, as its condition and preliminary, the more
immediate task of first _making_ man to a certain extent, necessitated,
uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently calculable. The
immense work of what I have called, "morality of custom"[1] (cp. _Dawn
of Day_, Aphs. 9, 14, and 16), the actual work of man on himself during
the longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work,
finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of all its innate
hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy) in this fact: man, with
the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-waistcoats,
was _made_ genuinely calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at
the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally
matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally
bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as
the ripest fruit on its tree the _sovereign individual_, that resembles
only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the
autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are
mutually-exclusive terms),--in short, the man of the personal, long,
and independent will, _competent to promise_, and we find in him a
proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of _what_ has been at
last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of
power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this
man who has grown to freedom, who is really _competent_ to promise,
this lord of the _free_ will, this sovereign--how is it possible for
him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable
of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great
is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes--he "deserves"
all three--not to know that with this mastery over himself he is
necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature,
over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters?
The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this
possession his _standard of value_: looking out from himself upon
the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he
honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind
themselves by promises),--that is, every one who promises like a
sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his
trusts but confers _honour_ by the very fact of trusting, who gives
his word as something that can be relied on, because he knows himself
strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of disasters, even in the
"teeth of fate,"--so with equal necessity will he have the heel of his
foot ready for the lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have
no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready for the liar,
who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is on his lips.
The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of _responsibility_,
the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and
over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become
an instinct, a dominating instinct--what name will he give to it, to
this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there
is no doubt about it--the sovereign man calls it his _conscience_.


3.

His conscience?--One apprehends at once that the idea "conscience,"
which is here seen in its supreme manifestation, supreme in fact to
almost the point of strangeness, should already have behind it a long
history and evolution. The ability to guarantee one's self with all
due pride, and also at the same time to _say yes_ to one's self--that
is, as has been said, a ripe fruit, but also a _late_ fruit:--How long
must needs this fruit hang sour and bitter on the tree! And for an even
longer period there was not a glimpse of such a fruit to to be had--no
one had taken it on himself to promise it, although everything on the
tree was quite ready for it, and everything was maturing for that very
consummation. "How is a memory to be made for the man-animal? How is an
impression to be so deeply fixed upon this ephemeral understanding,
half dense, and half silly, upon this incarnate forgetfulness, that
it will be permanently present?" As one may imagine, this primeval
problem was not solved by exactly gentle answers and gentle means;
perhaps there is nothing more awful and more sinister in the early
history of man than his _system of mnemonics_. "Something is burnt in
so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops _hurting_
remains in his memory." This is an axiom of the oldest (unfortunately
also the longest) psychology in the world. It might even be said that
wherever solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colours are now
found in the life of the men and of nations of the world, there is some
_survival_ of that horror which was once the universal concomitant of
all promises, pledges, and obligations. The past, the past with all
its length, depth, and hardness, wafts to us its breath, and bubbles
up in us again, when we become "serious." When man thinks it necessary
to make for himself a memory, he never accomplishes it without blood,
tortures, and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures
(among them the sacrifice of the first-born), the most loathsome
mutilation (for instance, castration), the most cruel rituals of all
the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom systems
of cruelty)--all these things originate from that instinct which
found in pain its most potent mnemonic. In a certain sense the whole
of asceticism is to be ascribed to this: certain ideas have got to
be made inextinguishable, omnipresent, "fixed," with the object of
hypnotising the whole nervous and intellectual system through these
"fixed ideas"--and the ascetic methods and modes of life are the means
of freeing those ideas from the competition of all other ideas so as to
make them "unforgettable." The worse memory man had, the ghastlier the
signs presented by his customs; the severity of the penal laws affords
in particular a gauge of the extent of man's difficulty in conquering
forgetfulness, and in keeping a few primal postulates of social
intercourse ever present to the minds of those who were the slaves
of every momentary emotion and every momentary desire. We Germans do
certainly not regard ourselves as an especially cruel and hard-hearted
nation, still less as an especially casual and happy-go-lucky one;
but one has only to look at our old penal ordinances in order to
realise what a lot of trouble it takes in the world to evolve a
"nation of thinkers" (I mean: _the_ European nation which exhibits at
this very day the maximum of reliability, seriousness, bad taste, and
positiveness, which has on the strength of these qualities a right to
train every kind of European mandarin). These Germans employed terrible
means to make for themselves a memory, to enable them to master their
rooted plebeian instincts and the brutal crudity of those instincts:
think of the old German punishments, for instance, stoning (as far back
as the legend, the millstone falls on the head of the guilty man),
breaking on the wheel (the most original invention and speciality of
the German genius in the sphere of punishment), dart-throwing, tearing,
or trampling by horses ("quartering"), boiling the criminal in oil or
wine (still prevalent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the
highly popular flaying ("slicing into strips"), cutting the flesh out
of the breast; think also of the evil-doer being besmeared with honey,
and then exposed to the flies in a blazing sun. It was by the help of
such images and precedents that man eventually kept in his memory five
or six "I will nots" with regard to which he had already given his
_promise_, so as to be able to enjoy the advantages of society--and
verily with the help of this kind of memory man eventually attained
"reason"! Alas! reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all
these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection, all these
privileges and pageantries of humanity: how dear is the price that they
have exacted! How much blood and cruelty is the foundation of all "good
things"!


4.

But how is it that that other melancholy object, the consciousness of
sin, the whole "bad conscience," came into the world? And it is here
that we turn back to our genealogists of morals. For the second time
I say--or have I not said it yet?--that they are worth nothing. Just
their own five-spans-long limited modern experience; no knowledge of
the past, and no wish to know it; still less a historic instinct, a
power of "second sight" (which is what is really required in this
case)--and despite this to go in for the history of morals. It stands
to reason that this must needs produce results which are removed from
the truth by something more than a respectful distance.

Have these current genealogists of morals ever allowed themselves to
have even the vaguest notion, for instance, that the cardinal moral
idea of "ought"[2] originates from the very material idea of "owe"? Or
that punishment developed as a retaliation absolutely independently
of any preliminary hypothesis of the freedom or determination of the
will?--And this to such an extent, that a high degree of civilisation
was always first necessary for the animal man to begin to make those
much more primitive distinctions of "intentional," "negligent,"
"accidental," "responsible," and their contraries, and apply them
in the assessing of punishment. That idea--"the wrong-doer deserves
punishment _because_ he might have acted otherwise," in spite of the
fact that it is nowadays so cheap, obvious, natural, and inevitable,
and that it has had to serve as an illustration of the way in which
the sentiment of justice appeared on earth, is in point of fact
an exceedingly late, and even refined form of human judgment and
inference; the placing of this idea back at the beginning of the world
is simply a clumsy violation of the principles of primitive psychology.
Throughout the longest period of human history punishment was _never_
based on the responsibility of the evil-doer for his action, and was
consequently not based on the hypothesis that only the guilty should
be punished;--on the contrary, punishment was inflicted in those days
for the same reason that parents punish their children even nowadays,
out of anger at an injury that they have suffered, an anger which vents
itself mechanically on the author of the injury--but this anger is kept
in bounds and modified through the idea that every injury has somewhere
or other its _equivalent_ price, and can really be paid off, even
though it be by means of pain to the author. Whence is it that this
ancient deep-rooted and now perhaps ineradicable idea has drawn its
strength, this idea of an equivalency between injury and pain? I have
already revealed its origin, in the contractual relationship between
_creditor_ and _ower_, that is as old as the existence of legal rights
at all, and in its turn points back to the primary forms of purchase,
sale, barter, and trade.


5.

The realisation of these contractual relations excites, of course (as
would be already expected from our previous observations), a great
deal of suspicion and opposition towards the primitive society which
made or sanctioned them. In this society promises will be made; in
this society the object is to provide the promiser with a memory;
in this society, so may we suspect, there will be full scope for
hardness, cruelty, and pain: the "ower," in order to induce credit
in his promise of repayment, in order to give a guarantee of the
earnestness and sanctity of his promise, in order to drill into his
own conscience the duty, the solemn duty, of repayment, will, by
virtue of a contract with his creditor to meet the contingency of
his not paying, pledge something that he still possesses, something
that he still has in his power, for instance, his life or his wife,
or his freedom or his body (or under certain religious conditions
even his salvation, his soul's welfare, even his peace in the grave;
so in Egypt, where the corpse of the ower found even in the grave no
rest from the creditor--of course, from the Egyptian standpoint, this
peace was a matter of particular importance). But especially has the
creditor the power of inflicting on the body of the ower all kinds of
pain and torture--the power, for instance, of cutting off from it an
amount that appeared proportionate to the greatness of the debt;--this
point of view resulted in the universal prevalence at an early date of
precise schemes of valuation, frequently horrible in the minuteness
and meticulosity of their application, _legally_ sanctioned schemes of
valuation for individual limbs and parts of the body. I consider it as
already a progress, as a proof of a freer, less petty, and more Roman
conception of law, when the Roman Code of the Twelve Tables decreed
that it was immaterial how much or how little the creditors in such a
contingency cut off, "si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto." Let
us make the logic of the whole of this equalisation process clear; it
is strange enough. The equivalence consists in this: instead of an
advantage directly compensatory of his injury (that is, instead of an
equalisation in money, lands, or some kind of chattel), the creditor
is granted by way of repayment and compensation a certain _sensation
of satisfaction_--the satisfaction of being able to vent, without any
trouble, his power on one who is powerless, the delight "_de faire le
mal pour le plaisir de le faire_," the joy in sheer violence: and this
joy will be relished in proportion to the lowness and humbleness of
the creditor in the social scale, and is quite apt to have the effect
of the most delicious dainty, and even seem the foretaste of a higher
social position. Thanks to the punishment of the "ower," the creditor
participates in the rights of the masters. At last he too, for once in
a way, attains the edifying consciousness of being able to despise and
ill-treat a creature--as an "inferior"--or at any rate of _seeing_ him
being despised and ill-treated, in case the actual power of punishment,
the administration of punishment, has already become transferred to the
"authorities." The compensation consequently consists in a claim on
cruelty and a right to draw thereon.


6.

It is then in _this_ sphere of the law of contract that we find the
cradle of the whole moral world of the ideas of "guilt," "conscience,"
"duty," the "sacredness of duty,"--their commencement, like the
commencement of all great things in the world, is thoroughly and
continuously saturated with blood. And should we not add that this
world has never really lost a certain savour of blood and torture (not
even in old Kant; the categorical imperative reeks of cruelty). It was
in this sphere likewise that there first became formed that sinister
and perhaps now indissoluble association of the ideas of "guilt" and
"suffering." To put the question yet again, why can suffering be a
compensation for "owing"?--Because the _infliction_ of suffering
produces the highest degree of happiness, because the injured party
will get in exchange for his loss (including his vexation at his loss)
an extraordinary counter-pleasure: the _infliction_ of suffering--a
real _feast_, something that, as I have said, was all the more
appreciated the greater the paradox created by the rank and social
status of the creditor. These observations are purely conjectural; for,
apart from the painful nature of the task, it is hard to plumb such
profound depths: the clumsy introduction of the idea of "revenge" as a
connecting-link simply hides and obscures the view instead of rendering
it clearer (revenge itself simply leads back again to the identical
problem--"How can the infliction of suffering be a satisfaction?").
In my opinion it is repugnant to the delicacy, and still more to the
hypocrisy of tame domestic animals (that is, modern men; that is,
ourselves), to realise with all their energy the extent to which
_cruelty_ constituted the great joy and delight of ancient man, was
an ingredient which seasoned nearly all his pleasures, and conversely
the extent of the naïveté and innocence with which he manifested his
need for cruelty, when he actually made as a matter of principle
"disinterested malice" (or, to use Spinoza's expression, the _sympathia
malevolens_) into a _normal_ characteristic of man--as consequently
something to which the conscience says a hearty yes. The more profound
observer has perhaps already had sufficient opportunity for noticing
this most ancient and radical joy and delight of mankind; in _Beyond
Good and Evil_, Aph. 188 (and even earlier, in _The Dawn of Day_, Aphs.
18, 77, 113), I have cautiously indicated the continually growing
spiritualisation and "deification" of cruelty, which pervades the
whole history of the higher civilisation (and in the larger sense even
constitutes it). At any rate the time is not so long past when it was
impossible to conceive of royal weddings and national festivals on a
grand scale, without executions, tortures, or perhaps an _auto-da-fé_",
or similarly to conceive of an aristocratic household, without a
creature to serve as a butt for the cruel and malicious baiting of the
inmates. (The reader will perhaps remember Don Quixote at the court of
the Duchess: we read nowadays the whole of _Don Quixote_ with a bitter
taste in the mouth, almost with a sensation of torture, a fact which
would appear very strange and very incomprehensible to the author and
his contemporaries--they read it with the best conscience in the world
as the gayest of books; they almost died with laughing at it.) The
sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one
more good--this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental maxim,
old, powerful, and "human, all-too-human"; one, moreover, to which
perhaps even the apes as well would subscribe: for it is said that in
inventing bizarre cruelties they are giving abundant proof of their
future humanity, to which, as it were, they are playing the prelude.
Without cruelty, no feast: so teaches the oldest and longest history of
man--and in punishment too is there so much of the festive.


7.

Entertaining, as I do, these thoughts, I am, let me say in parenthesis,
fundamentally opposed to helping our pessimists to new water for the
discordant and groaning mills of their disgust with life; on the
contrary, it should be shown specifically that, at the time when
mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life in the world was
brighter than it is nowadays when there are pessimists. The darkening
of the heavens over man has always increased in proportion to the
growth of man's shame _before man_. The tired pessimistic outlook,
the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy negation of disgusted
ennui, all those are not the signs of the _most evil_ age of the human
race: much rather do they come first to the light of day, as the
swamp-flowers, which they are, when the swamp to which they belong,
comes into existence--I mean the diseased refinement and moralisation,
thanks to which the "animal man" has at last learnt to be ashamed of
all his instincts. On the road to angelhood (not to use in this context
a harder word) man has developed that dyspeptic stomach and coated
tongue, which have made not only the joy and innocence of the animal
repulsive to him, but also life itself:--so that sometimes he stands
with stopped nostrils before his own self, and, like Pope Innocent the
Third, makes a black list of his own horrors ("unclean generation,
loathsome nutrition when in the maternal body, badness of the matter
out of which man develops, awful stench, secretion of saliva, urine,
and excrement"). Nowadays, when suffering is always trotted out
as the first argument _against_ existence, as its most sinister
query, it is well to remember the times when men judged on converse
principles because they could not dispense with the _infliction_ of
suffering, and saw therein a magic of the first order, a veritable
bait of seduction to life.

Perhaps in those days (this is to solace the weaklings) pain did not
hurt so much as it does nowadays: any physician who has treated negroes
(granted that these are taken as representative of the prehistoric
man) suffering from severe internal inflammations which would bring
a European, even though he had the soundest constitution, almost to
despair, would be in a position to come to this conclusion. Pain has
_not_ the same effect with negroes. (The curve of human sensibilities
to pain seems indeed to sink in an extraordinary and almost sudden
fashion, as soon as one has passed the upper ten thousand or ten
millions of over-civilised humanity, and I personally have no doubt
that, by comparison with one painful night passed by one single
hysterical chit of a cultured woman, the suffering of all the animals
taken together who have been put to the question of the knife, so as
to give scientific answers, are simply negligible.) We may perhaps
be allowed to admit the possibility of the craving for cruelty not
necessarily having become really extinct: it only requires, in view
of the fact that pain hurts more nowadays, a certain sublimation and
subtilisation, it must especially be translated to the imaginative and
psychic plane, and be adorned with such smug euphemisms, that even the
most fastidious and hypocritical conscience could never grow suspicious
of their real nature ("Tragic pity" is one of these euphemisms:
another is "_les nostalgies de la croix_"). What really raises one's
indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but
the senselessness of suffering; such a _senselessness_, however,
existed neither in Christianity, which interpreted suffering into a
whole mysterious salvation-apparatus, nor in the beliefs of the naive
ancient man, who only knew how to find a meaning in suffering from
the standpoint of the spectator, or the inflictor of the suffering.
In order to get the secret, undiscovered, and unwitnessed suffering
out of the world it was almost compulsory to invent gods and a
hierarchy of intermediate beings, in short, something which wanders
even among secret places, sees even in the dark, and makes a point
of never missing an interesting and painful spectacle. It was with
the help of such inventions that life got to learn the _tour de
force_, which has become part of its stock-in-trade, the _tour de
force_ of self-justification, of the justification of evil; nowadays
this would perhaps require other auxiliary devices (for instance,
life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil is
justified in the sight of which a god finds edification," so rang the
logic of primitive sentiment--and, indeed, was it only of primitive?
The gods conceived as friends of spectacles of cruelty--oh how far
does this primeval conception extend even nowadays into our European
civilisation! One would perhaps like in this context to consult Luther
and Calvin. It is at any rate certain that even the Greeks knew no
more piquant seasoning for the happiness of their gods than the joys
of cruelty. What, do you think, was the mood with which Homer makes
his gods look down upon the fates of men? What final meaning have at
bottom the Trojan War and similar tragic horrors? It is impossible to
entertain any doubt on the point: they were intended as festival games
for the gods, and, in so far as the poet is of a more godlike breed
than other men, as festival games also for the poets. It was in just
this spirit and no other, that at a later date the moral philosophers
of Greece conceived the eyes of God as still looking down on the moral
struggle, the heroism, and the self-torture of the virtuous; the
Heracles of duty was on a stage, and was conscious of the fact; virtue
without witnesses was something quite unthinkable for this nation of
actors. Must not that philosophic invention, so audacious and so fatal,
which was then absolutely new to Europe, the invention of "free will,"
of the absolute spontaneity of man in good and evil, simply have been
made for the specific purpose of justifying the idea, that the interest
of the gods in humanity and human virtue was _inexhaustible_?

There would never on the stage of this free-will world be a dearth of
really new, really novel and exciting situations, plots, catastrophes.
A world thought out on completely deterministic lines would be easily
guessed by the gods, and would consequently soon bore them--sufficient
reason for these _friends of the gods_, the philosophers, not to
ascribe to their gods such a deterministic world. The whole of ancient
humanity is full of delicate consideration for the spectator, being as
it is a world of thorough publicity and theatricality, which could not
conceive of happiness without spectacles and festivals.--And, as has
already been said, even in great punishment there is so much which is
festive.


8.

The feeling of "ought," of personal obligation (to take up again
the train of our inquiry), has had, as we saw, its origin in the
oldest and most original personal relationship that there is, the
relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower: here it
was that individual confronted individual, and that individual
_matched himself against_ individual. There has not yet been found
a grade of civilisation so low, as not to manifest some trace of
this relationship. Making prices, assessing values, thinking out
equivalents, exchanging--all this preoccupied the primal thoughts
of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted
_thinking_ itself: it was here that was trained the oldest form of
sagacity, it was here in this sphere that we can perhaps trace the
first commencement of man's pride, of his feeling of superiority over
other animals. Perhaps our word "Mensch" (_manas_) still expresses
just something of _this_ self-pride: man denoted himself as the being
who measures values, who values and measures, as the "assessing"
animal _par excellence_. Sale and purchase, together with their
psychological concomitants, are older than the origins of any form of
social organisation and union: it is rather from the most rudimentary
form of individual right that the budding consciousness of exchange,
commerce, debt, right, obligation, compensation was first transferred
to the rudest and most elementary of the social complexes (in their
relation to similar complexes), the habit of comparing force with
force, together with that of measuring, of calculating. His eye was
now focussed to this perspective; and with that ponderous consistency
characteristic of ancient thought, which, though set in motion with
difficulty, yet proceeds inflexibly along the line on which it has
started, man soon arrived at the great generalisation, "everything has
its price, _all_ can be paid for," the oldest and most naive moral
canon of _justice_, the beginning of all "kindness," of all "equity,"
of all "goodwill," of all "objectivity" in the world. Justice in this
initial phase is the goodwill among people of about equal power to come
to terms with each other, to come to an understanding again by means of
a settlement, and with regard to the less powerful, to _compel_ them
to agree among themselves to a settlement.


9.

Measured always by the standard of antiquity (this antiquity, moreover,
is present or again possible at all periods), the community stands to
its members in that important and radical relationship of creditor to
his "owers." Man lives in a community, man enjoys the advantages of
a community (and what advantages! we occasionally underestimate them
nowadays), man lives protected, spared, in peace and trust, secure
from certain injuries and enmities, to which the man outside the
community, the "peaceless" man, is exposed,--a German understands the
original meaning of "Elend" (_êlend_),--secure because he has entered
into pledges and obligations to the community in respect of these very
injuries and enmities. What happens _when this is not the case_? The
community, the defrauded creditor, will get itself paid, as well as it
can, one can reckon on that. In this case the question of the direct
damage done by the offender is quite subsidiary: quite apart from
this the criminal[3] is above all a breaker, a breaker of word and
covenant _to the whole_, as regards all the advantages and amenities
of the communal life in which up to that time he had participated. The
criminal is an "ower" who not only fails to repay the advances and
advantages that have been given to him, but even sets out to attack
his creditor: consequently he is in the future not only, as is fair,
deprived of all these advantages and amenities--he is in addition
reminded of the _importance_ of those advantages. The wrath of the
injured creditor, of the community, puts him back in the wild and
outlawed status from which he was previously protected: the community
repudiates him--and now every kind of enmity can vent itself on him.
Punishment is in this stage of civilisation simply the copy, the mimic,
of the normal treatment of the hated, disdained, and conquered enemy,
who is not only deprived of every right and protection but of every
mercy; so we have the martial law and triumphant festival of the _væ
victis_! in all its mercilessness and cruelty. This shows why war
itself (counting the sacrificial cult of war) has produced all the
forms under which punishment has manifested itself in history.


10.

As it grows more powerful, the community tends to take the offences of
the individual less seriously, because they are now regarded as being
much less revolutionary and dangerous to the corporate existence: the
evil-doer is no more outlawed and put outside the pale, the common
wrath can no longer vent itself upon him with its old licence,--on
the contrary, from this very time it is against this wrath, and
particularly against the wrath of those directly injured, that the
evil-doer is carefully shielded and protected by the community. As, in
fact, the penal law develops, the following characteristics become
more and more clearly marked: compromise with the wrath of those
directly affected by the misdeed; a consequent endeavour to localise
the matter and to prevent a further, or indeed a general spread of
the disturbance; attempts to find equivalents and to settle the whole
matter (compositio); above all, the will, which manifests itself with
increasing definiteness, to treat every offence as in a certain degree
capable of _being paid off_, and consequently, at any rate up to a
certain point, to _isolate_ the offender from his act. As the power and
the self-consciousness of a community increases, so proportionately
does the penal law become mitigated; conversely every weakening and
jeopardising of the community revives the harshest forms of that law.
The creditor has always grown more humane proportionately as he has
grown more rich; finally the amount of injury he can endure without
really suffering becomes the criterion of his wealth. It is possible
to conceive of a society blessed with so great a _consciousness of its
own power_ as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting
its wrong-doers go _scot-free_.--"What do my parasites matter to me?"
might society say. "Let them live and flourish! I am strong enough for
it."--The justice which began with the maxim, "Everything can be paid
off, everything must be paid off," ends with connivance at the escape
of those who cannot pay to escape--it ends, like every good thing on
earth, by _destroying itself_.--The self-destruction of Justice! we
know the pretty name it calls itself--_Grace!_ it remains, as is
obvious, the privilege of the strongest, better still, their super-law.


11.

A deprecatory word here against the attempts, that have lately been
made, to find the origin of justice on quite another basis--namely,
on that of _resentment_. Let me whisper a word in the ear of the
psychologists, if they would fain study revenge itself at close
quarters: this plant blooms its prettiest at present among Anarchists
and anti-Semites, a hidden flower, as it has ever been, like the
violet, though, forsooth, with another perfume. And as like must
necessarily emanate from like, it will not be a matter for surprise
that it is just in such circles that we see the birth of endeavours (it
is their old birthplace--compare above, First Essay, paragraph 14),
to sanctify _revenge_ under the name of _justice_ (as though Justice
were at bottom merely a _development_ of the consciousness of injury),
and thus with the rehabilitation of revenge to reinstate generally
and collectively all the _reactive_ emotions. I object to this last
point least of all. It even seems _meritorious_ when regarded from the
standpoint of the whole problem of biology (from which standpoint the
value of these emotions has up to the present been underestimated).
And that to which I alone call attention, is the circumstance that
it is the spirit of revenge itself, from which develops this new
nuance of scientific equity (for the benefit of hate, envy, mistrust,
jealousy, suspicion, rancour, revenge). This scientific "equity"
stops immediately and makes way for the accents of deadly enmity and
prejudice, so soon as another group of emotions comes on the scene,
which in my opinion are of a much higher biological value than these
reactions, and consequently have a paramount claim to the valuation
and appreciation of science: I mean the really _active_ emotions, such
as personal and material ambition, and so forth. (E. Dühring, _Value
of Life; Course of Philosophy_, and _passim_.) So much against this
tendency in general: but as for the particular maxim of Dühring's,
that the home of Justice is to be found in the sphere of the reactive
feelings, our love of truth compels us drastically to invert his own
proposition and to oppose to him this other maxim: the _last_ sphere
conquered by the spirit of justice is the sphere of the feeling of
reaction! When it really comes about that the just man remains just
even as regards his injurer (and not merely cold, moderate, reserved,
indifferent: being just is always a _positive_ state); when, in spite
of the strong provocation of personal insult, contempt, and calumny,
the lofty and clear objectivity of the just and judging eye (whose
glance is as profound as it is gentle) is untroubled, why then we have
a piece of perfection, a past master of the world--something, in fact,
which it would not be wise to expect, and which should not at any
rate be too easily _believed_. Speaking generally, there is no doubt
but that even the justest individual only requires a little dose of
hostility, malice, or innuendo to drive the blood into his brain and
the fairness _from_ it. The active man, the attacking, aggressive man
is always a hundred degrees nearer to justice than the man who merely
reacts; he certainly has no need to adopt the tactics, necessary in the
case of the reacting man, of making false and biassed valuations of his
object. It is, in point of fact, for this reason that the aggressive
man has at all times enjoyed the stronger, bolder, more aristocratic,
and also _freer_ outlook, the _better_ conscience. On the other hand,
we already surmise who it really is that has on his conscience the
invention of the "bad conscience,"--the resentful man! Finally, let man
look at himself in history. In what sphere up to the present has the
whole administration of law, the actual need of law, found its earthly
home? Perchance in the sphere of the reacting man? Not for a minute:
rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive man? I
deliberately defy the above-mentioned agitator (who himself makes this
self-confession, "the creed of revenge has run through all my works
and endeavours like the red thread of Justice"), and say, that judged
historically law in the world represents the very war _against_ the
reactive feelings, the very war waged on those feelings by the powers
of activity and aggression, which devote some of their strength to
damming and keeping within bounds this effervescence of hysterical
reactivity, and to forcing it to some compromise. Everywhere where
justice is practised and justice is maintained, it is to be observed
that the stronger power, when confronted with the weaker powers which
are inferior to it (whether they be groups, or individuals), searches
for weapons to put an end to the senseless fury of resentment, while
it carries on its object, partly by taking the victim of resentment
out of the clutches of revenge, partly by substituting for revenge a
campaign of its own against the enemies of peace and order, partly
by finding, suggesting, and occasionally enforcing settlements,
partly by standardising certain equivalents for injuries, to which
equivalents the element of resentment is henceforth finally referred.
The most drastic measure, however, taken and effectuated by the supreme
power, to combat the preponderance of the feelings of spite and
vindictiveness--it takes this measure as soon as it is at all strong
enough to do so--is the foundation of _law_, the imperative declaration
of what in its eyes is to be regarded as just and lawful, and what
unjust and unlawful: and while, after the foundation of law, the
supreme power treats the aggressive and arbitrary acts of individuals,
or of whole groups, as a violation of law, and a revolt against
itself, it distracts the feelings of its subjects from the immediate
injury inflicted by such a violation, and thus eventually attains the
very opposite result to that always desired by revenge, which sees
and recognises nothing but the standpoint of the injured party. From
henceforth the eye becomes trained to a more and more _impersonal_
valuation of the deed, even the eye of the injured party himself
(though this is in the final stage of all, as has been previously
remarked)--on this principle "right" and "wrong" first manifest
themselves after the foundation of law (and not, as Dühring maintains,
only after the act of violation). To talk of intrinsic right and
intrinsic wrong is absolutely non-sensical; intrinsically, an injury,
an oppression, an exploitation, an annihilation can be nothing wrong,
inasmuch as life is _essentially_ (that is, in its cardinal functions)
something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and
annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without such a character.
It is necessary to make an even more serious confession:--viewed from
the most advanced biological standpoint, conditions of legality can be
only _exceptional conditions_, in that they are partial restrictions
of the real life-will, which makes for power, and in that they are
subordinated to the life-will's general end as particular means,
that is, as means to create _larger_ units of strength. A legal
organisation, conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a weapon
in a fight of complexes of power, but as a weapon _against_ fighting,
generally something after the style of Dühring's communistic model
of treating every will as equal with every other will, would be a
principle _hostile to life_, a destroyer and dissolver of man, an
outrage on the future of man, a symptom of fatigue, a secret cut to
Nothingness.--


12.

A word more on the origin and end of punishment--two problems which
are or ought to be kept distinct, but which unfortunately are usually
lumped into one. And what tactics have our moral genealogists employed
up to the present in these cases? Their inveterate naïveté. They find
out some "end" in the punishment, for instance, revenge and deterrence,
and then in all their innocence set this end at the beginning, as the
_causa fiendi_ of the punishment, and--they have done the trick. But
the patching up of a history of the origin of law is the last use to
which the "End in Law"[4] ought to be put. Perhaps there is no more
pregnant principle for any kind of history than the following, which,
difficult though it is to master, _should_ none the less be _mastered_
in every detail.--The origin of the existence of a thing and its final
utility, its practical application and incorporation in a system of
ends, are _toto cœlo_ opposed to each other--everything, anything,
which exists and which prevails anywhere, will always be put to new
purposes by a force superior to itself, will be commandeered afresh,
will be turned and transformed to new uses; all "happening" in the
organic world consists of _overpowering_ and dominating, and again all
overpowering and domination is a new interpretation and adjustment,
which must necessarily obscure or absolutely extinguish the subsisting
"meaning" and "end." The most perfect comprehension of the utility
of any physiological organ (or also of a legal institution, social
custom, political habit, form in art or in religious worship) does not
for a minute imply any simultaneous comprehension of its origin: this
may seem uncomfortable and unpalatable to the older men,--for it has
been the immemorial belief that understanding the final cause or the
utility of a thing, a form, an institution, means also understanding
the reason for its origin: to give an example of this logic, the eye
was made to see, the hand was made to grasp. So even punishment was
conceived as invented with a view to punishing. But all ends and all
utilities are only _signs_ that a Will to Power has mastered a less
powerful force, has impressed thereon out of its own self the meaning
of a function; and the whole history of a "Thing," an organ, a custom,
can on the same principle be regarded as a continuous "sign-chain"
of perpetually new interpretations and adjustments, whose causes, so
far from needing to have even a mutual connection, sometimes follow
and alternate with each other absolutely haphazard. Similarly, the
evolution of a "thing," of a custom, is anything but its _progressus_
to an end, still less a logical and direct _progressus_ attained
with the minimum expenditure of energy and cost: it is rather the
succession of processes of subjugation, more or less profound, more
or less mutually independent, which operate on the thing itself; it
is, further, the resistance which in each case invariably displayed
this subjugation, the Protean wriggles by way of defence and reaction,
and, further, the results of successful counter-efforts. The form is
fluid, but the meaning is even more so--even inside every individual
organism the case is the same: with every genuine growth of the whole,
the "function" of the individual organs becomes shifted,--in certain
cases a partial perishing of these organs, a diminution of their
numbers (for instance, through annihilation of the connecting members),
can be a symptom of growing strength and perfection. What I mean is
this: even partial _loss of utility_, decay, and degeneration, loss of
function and purpose, in a word, death, appertain to the conditions
of the genuine _progressus_; which always appears in the shape of
a will and way to _greater_ power, and is always realised at the
expense of innumerable smaller powers. The magnitude of a "progress"
is gauged by the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires: humanity
as a mass sacrificed to the prosperity of the one _stronger_ species
of Man--that _would be_ a progress. I emphasise all the more this
cardinal characteristic of the historic method, for the reason that in
its essence it runs counter to predominant instincts and prevailing
taste, which much prefer to put up with absolute casualness, even with
the mechanical senselessness of all phenomena, than with the theory
of a power-will, in exhaustive play throughout all phenomena. The
democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and wishes to
rule, the modern _misarchism_ (to coin a bad word for a bad thing),
has gradually but so thoroughly transformed itself into the guise of
intellectualism, the most abstract intellectualism, that even nowadays
it penetrates and _has the right_ to penetrate step by step into the
most exact and apparently the most objective sciences: this tendency
has, in fact, in my view already dominated the whole of physiology
and biology, and to their detriment, as is obvious, in so far as
it has spirited away a radical idea, the idea of true _activity_.
The tyranny of this idiosyncrasy, however, results in the theory
of "adaptation" being pushed forward into the van of the argument,
exploited; adaptation--that means to say, a second-class activity, a
mere capacity for "reacting"; in fact, life itself has been defined
(by Herbert Spencer) as an increasingly effective internal adaptation
to external circumstances. This definition, however, fails to realise
the real essence of life, its will to power. It fails to appreciate the
paramount superiority enjoyed by those plastic forces of spontaneity,
aggression, and encroachment with their new interpretations and
tendencies, to the operation of which adaptation is only a natural
corollary: consequently the sovereign office of the highest
functionaries in the organism itself (among which the life-will appears
as an active and formative principle) is repudiated. One remembers
Huxley's reproach to Spencer of his "administrative Nihilism": but it
is a case of something much _more_ than "administration."


13.

To return to our subject, namely _punishment_, we must make
consequently a double distinction: first, the relatively permanent
_element_, the custom, the act, the "drama," a certain rigid sequence
of methods of procedure; on the other hand, the fluid element, the
meaning, the end, the expectation which is attached to the operation of
such procedure. At this point we immediately assume, _per analogiam_
(in accordance with the theory of the historic method, which we have
elaborated above), that the procedure itself is something older and
earlier than its utilisation in punishment, that this utilisation was
_introduced_ and interpreted into the procedure (which had existed
for a long time, but whose employment had another meaning), in short,
that the case is _different_ from that hitherto supposed by our _naïf_
genealogists of morals and of law, who thought that the procedure was
_invented_ for the purpose of punishment, in the same way that the hand
had been previously thought to have been invented for the purpose of
grasping. With regard to the other element in _punishment_, its fluid
element, its meaning, the idea of punishment in a very late stage of
civilisation (for instance, contemporary Europe) is not content with
manifesting merely one meaning, but manifests a whole synthesis "of
meanings." The past general history of punishment, the history of its
employment for the most diverse ends, crystallises eventually into
a kind of unity, which is difficult to analyse into its parts, and
which, it is necessary to emphasise, absolutely defies definition.
(It is nowadays impossible to say definitely _the precise reason_
for punishment: all ideas, in which a whole process is promiscuously
comprehended, elude definition; it is only that which has no history,
which can be defined.) At an earlier stage, on the contrary, that
synthesis of meanings appears much less rigid and much more elastic; we
can realise how in each individual case the elements of the synthesis
change their value and their position, so that now one element and
now another stands out and predominates over the others, nay, in
certain cases one element (perhaps the end of deterrence) seems to
eliminate all the rest. At any rate, so as to give some idea of the
uncertain, supplementary, and accidental nature of the meaning of
punishment and of the manner in which one identical procedure can
be employed and adapted for the most diametrically opposed objects,
I will at this point give a scheme that has suggested itself to
me, a scheme itself based on comparatively small and accidental
material.--Punishment, as rendering the criminal harmless and incapable
of further injury.--Punishment, as compensation for the injury
sustained by the injured party, in any form whatsoever (including
the form of sentimental compensation).--Punishment, as an isolation
of that which disturbs the equilibrium, so as to prevent the further
spreading of the disturbance.--Punishment as a means of inspiring
fear of those who determine and execute the punishment.--Punishment
as a kind of compensation for advantages which the wrong-doer has
up to that time enjoyed (for example, when he is utilised as a
slave in the mines).--Punishment, as the elimination of an element
of decay (sometimes of a whole branch, as according to the Chinese
laws, consequently as a means to the purification of the race, or
the preservation of a social type).---Punishment as a festival, as
the violent oppression and humiliation of an enemy that has at last
been subdued.--Punishment as a mnemonic, whether for him who suffers
the punishment--the so-called "correction," or for the witnesses of
its administration. Punishment, as the payment of a fee stipulated
for by the power which protects the evil-doer from the excesses of
revenge.--Punishment, as a compromise with the natural phenomenon
of revenge, in so far as revenge is still maintained and claimed
as a privilege by the stronger races.--Punishment as a declaration
and measure of war against an enemy of peace, of law, of order,
of authority, who is fought by society with the weapons which war
provides, as a spirit dangerous to the community, as a breaker of the
contract on which the community is based, as a rebel, a traitor, and a
breaker of the peace.


14.

This list is certainly not complete; it is obvious that punishment
is overloaded with utilities of all kinds. This makes it all the
more permissible to eliminate one supposed utility, which passes, at
any rate in the popular mind, for its most essential utility, and
which is just what even now provides the strongest support for that
faith in punishment which is nowadays for many reasons tottering.
Punishment is supposed to have the value of exciting in the guilty
the consciousness of guilt; in punishment is sought the proper
instrumentum of that psychic reaction which becomes known as a "bad
conscience," "remorse." But this theory is even, from the point of
view of the present, a violation of reality and psychology: and how
much more so is the case when we have to deal with the longest period
of man's history, his primitive history! Genuine remorse is certainly
extremely rare among wrong-doers and the victims of punishment; prisons
and houses of correction are not _the_ soil on which this worm of
remorse pullulates for choice--this is the unanimous opinion of all
conscientious observers, who in many cases arrive at such a judgment
with enough reluctance and against their own personal wishes. Speaking
generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it
sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of
resistance. When it happens that it breaks the man's energy and brings
about a piteous prostration and abjectness, such a result is certainly
even less salutary than the average effect of punishment, which is
characterised by a harsh and sinister doggedness. The thought of those
_prehistoric_ millennia brings us to the unhesitating conclusion,
that it was simply through punishment that the evolution of the
consciousness of guilt was most forcibly retarded--at any rate in the
victims of the punishing power. In particular, let us not underestimate
the extent to which, by the very sight of the judicial and executive
procedure, the wrong-doer is himself prevented from feeling that his
deed, the character of his act, is _intrinsically_ reprehensible: for
he sees clearly the same kind of acts practised in the service of
justice, and then called good, and practised with a good conscience;
acts such as espionage, trickery, bribery, trapping, the whole
intriguing and insidious art of the policeman and the informer--the
whole system, in fact, manifested in the different kinds of punishment
(a system not excused by passion, but based on principle), of robbing,
oppressing, insulting, imprisoning, racking, murdering.--All this
he sees treated by his judges, not as acts meriting censure and
condemnation _in themselves_, but only in a particular context and
application. It was not on this soil that grew the "bad conscience,"
that most sinister and interesting plant of our earthly vegetation--
in point of fact, throughout a most lengthy period, no suggestion of
having to do with a "guilty man" manifested itself in the consciousness
of the man who judged and punished. One had merely to deal with an
author of an injury, an irresponsible piece of fate. And the man
himself, on whom the punishment subsequently fell like a piece of fate,
was occasioned no more of an "inner pain" than would be occasioned by
the sudden approach of some uncalculated event, some terrible natural
catastrophe, a rushing, crushing avalanche against which there is no
resistance.


15.

This truth came insidiously enough to the consciousness of Spinoza (to
the disgust of his commentators, who (like Kuno Fischer, for instance)
give themselves no end of _trouble_ to misunderstand him on this
point), when one afternoon (as he sat raking up who knows what memory)
he indulged in the question of what was really left for him personally
of the celebrated _morsus conscientiæ_--Spinoza, who had relegated
"good and evil" to the sphere of human imagination, and indignantly
defended the honour of his "free" God against those blasphemers who
affirmed that God did everything _sub ratione boni_ ("but this was
tantamount to subordinating God to fate, and would really be the
greatest of all absurdities"). For Spinoza the world had returned
again to that innocence in which it lay before the discovery of the
bad conscience: what, then, had happened to the _morsus conscientiæ_?
"The antithesis of _gaudium_," said he at last to himself,--"A sadness
accompanied by the recollection of a past event which has turned out
contrary to all expectation" (_Eth_. III., Propos. XVIII. Schol.
i. ii.). Evil-doers have throughout thousands of years felt when
overtaken by punishment _exactly like Spinoza_, on the subject of
their "offence": "here is something which went wrong contrary to my
anticipation," not "I ought not to have done this."--They submitted
themselves to punishment, just as one submits one's self to a disease,
to a misfortune, or to death, with that stubborn and resigned fatalism
which gives the Russians, for instance, even nowadays, the advantage
over us Westerners, in the handling of life. If at that period there
was a critique of action, the criterion was prudence: the real _effect_
of punishment is unquestionably chiefly to be found in a sharpening
of the sense of prudence, in a lengthening of the memory, in a will
to adopt more of a policy of caution, suspicion, and secrecy; in the
recognition that there are many things which are unquestionably beyond
one's capacity; in a kind of improvement in self-criticism. The broad
effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the
increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery
of the desires: so it is that punishment _tames_ man, but does not make
him "better"--it would be more correct even to go so far as to assert
the contrary ("Injury makes a man cunning," says a popular proverb: so
far as it makes him cunning, it makes him also bad. Fortunately, it
often enough makes him stupid).


16.

At this juncture I cannot avoid trying to give a tentative and
provisional expression to my own hypothesis concerning the origin of
the bad conscience: it is difficult to make it fully appreciated,
and it requires continuous meditation, attention, and digestion. I
regard the bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound
to contract under the stress of the most radical change which he has
ever experienced--that change, when he found himself finally imprisoned
within the pale of society and of peace.

Just like the plight of the water-animals, when they were compelled
either to become land-animals or to perish, so was the plight of these
half-animals, perfectly adapted as they were to the savage life of war,
prowling, and adventure--suddenly all their instincts were rendered
worthless and "switched off." Henceforward they had to walk on their
feet--"carry themselves," whereas heretofore they had been carried by
the water: a terrible heaviness oppressed them. They found themselves
clumsy in obeying the simplest directions, confronted with this new
and unknown world they had no longer their old guides--the regulative
instincts that had led them unconsciously to safety--they were reduced,
were those unhappy creatures, to thinking, inferring, calculating,
putting together causes and results, reduced to that poorest and most
erratic organ of theirs, their "consciousness." I do not believe
there was ever in the world such a feeling of misery, such a leaden
discomfort--further, those old instincts had not immediately ceased
their demands! Only it was difficult and rarely possible to gratify
them: speaking broadly, they were compelled to satisfy themselves by
new and, as it were, hole-and-corner methods. All instincts which
do not find a vent without, _turn inwards_--this is what I mean by
the growing "internalisation" of man: consequently we have the first
growth in man, of what subsequently was called his soul. The whole
inner world, originally as thin as if it had been stretched between
two layers of skin, burst apart and expanded proportionately, and
obtained depth, breadth, and height, when man's external outlet
became _obstructed_. These terrible bulwarks, with which the social
organisation protected itself against the old instincts of freedom
(punishments belong pre-eminently to these bulwarks), brought it
about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man became
turned backwards against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the delight
in persecution, in surprises, change, destruction--the turning all
these instincts against their own possessors: this is the origin of
the "bad conscience." It was man, who, lacking external enemies and
obstacles, and imprisoned as he was in the oppressive narrowness and
monotony of custom, in his own impatience lacerated, persecuted,
gnawed, frightened, and ill-treated himself; it was this animal in the
hands of the tamer, which beat itself against the bars of its cage; it
was this being who, pining and yearning for that desert home of which
it had been deprived, was compelled to create out of its own self, an
adventure, a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert--it was
this fool, this homesick and desperate prisoner--who invented the "bad
conscience." But thereby he introduced that most grave and sinister
illness, from which mankind has not yet recovered, the suffering of
man from the disease called man, as the result of a violent breaking
from his animal past, the result, as it were, of a spasmodic plunge
into a new environment and new conditions of existence, the result of
a declaration of war against the old instincts, which up to that time
had been the staple of his power, his joy, his formidableness. Let
us immediately add that this fact of an animal ego turning against
itself, taking part against itself, produced in the world so novel,
profound, unheard-of, problematic, inconsistent, and _pregnant_ a
phenomenon, that the aspect of the world was radically altered thereby.
In sooth, only divine spectators could have appreciated the drama
that then began, and whose end baffles conjecture as yet--a drama too
subtle, too wonderful, too paradoxical to warrant its undergoing a
non-sensical and unheeded performance on some random grotesque planet!
Henceforth man is to be counted as one of the most unexpected and
sensational lucky shots in the game of the "big baby" of Heracleitus,
whether he be called Zeus or Chance--he awakens on his behalf the
interest, excitement, hope, almost the confidence, of his being the
harbinger and forerunner of something, of man being no end, but only a
stage, an interlude, a bridge, a great promise.


17.

It is primarily involved in this hypothesis of the origin of the bad
conscience, that that alteration was no gradual and no voluntary
alteration, and that it did not manifest itself as an organic
adaptation to new conditions, but as a break, a jump, a necessity, an
inevitable fate, against which there was no resistance and never a
spark of resentment. And secondarily, that the fitting of a hitherto
unchecked and amorphous population into a fixed form, starting as
it had done in an act of violence, could only be accomplished by
acts of violence and nothing else--that the oldest "State" appeared
consequently as a ghastly tyranny, a grinding ruthless piece of
machinery, which went on working, till this raw material of a
semi-animal populace was not only thoroughly kneaded and elastic, but
also _moulded_. I used the word "State": my meaning is self-evident,
namely, a herd of blonde beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and
masters, which with all its warlike organisation and all its organising
power pounces with its terrible claws on a population, in numbers
possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad.
Such is the origin of the "State." That fantastic theory that makes it
begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command,
he who is a master by "nature," he who comes on the scene forceful
in deed and gesture--what has he to do with contracts? Such beings
defy calculation, they come like fate, without cause, reason, notice,
excuse, they are there like the lightning is there, too terrible, too
sudden, too convincing, too "different," to be personally even hated.
Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of forms, they
are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are:--their
appearance produces instantaneously a scheme of sovereignty which is
live, in which the functions are partitioned and apportioned, in which
above all no part is received or finds a place, until pregnant with
a "meaning" in regard to the whole. They are ignorant of the meaning
of guilt, responsibility, consideration, are these born organisers;
in them predominates that terrible artist-egoism, that gleams like
brass, and that knows itself justified to all eternity, in its work,
even as a mother in her child. It is not in _them_ that there grew
the bad conscience, that is elementary--but it would not have grown
_without_ them, repulsive growth as it was, it would be missing, had
not a tremendous quantity of freedom been expelled from the world by
the stress of their hammer-strokes, their artist violence, or been at
any rate made invisible and, as it were, _latent_. This _instinct of
freedom_ forced into being latent--it is already clear--this instinct
of freedom forced back, trodden back, imprisoned within itself, and
finally only able to find vent and relief in itself; this, only this,
is the beginning of the "bad conscience."


18.

Beware of thinking lightly of this phenomenon, by reason of its initial
painful ugliness. At bottom it is the same active force which is at
work on a more grandiose scale in those potent artists and organisers,
and builds states, which here, internally, on a smaller and pettier
scale and with a retrogressive tendency, makes itself a bad science in
the "labyrinth of the breast," to use Goethe's phrase, and which builds
negative ideals; it is, I repeat, that identical _instinct of freedom_
(to use my own language, the will to power): only the material, on
which this force with all its constructive and tyrannous nature is
let loose, is here man himself, his whole old animal self--and not as
in the case of that more grandiose and sensational phenomenon, the
_other_ man, _other_ men. This secret self-tyranny, this cruelty of
the artist, this delight in giving a form to one's self as a piece of
difficult, refractory, and suffering material, in burning in a will, a
critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a negation; this sinister and
ghastly labour of love on the part of a soul, whose will is cloven
in two within itself, which makes itself suffer from delight in the
infliction of suffering; this wholly _active_ bad conscience has
finally (as one already anticipates)--true fountainhead as it is of
idealism and imagination--produced an abundance of novel and amazing
beauty and affirmation, and perhaps has really been the first to
give birth to beauty at all. What would beauty be, forsooth, if its
contradiction had not first been presented to consciousness, if the
ugly had not first said to itself, "I am ugly"? At any rate, after this
hint the problem of how far idealism and beauty can be traced in such
opposite ideas as "_selflessness_," _self-denial_, _self-sacrifice_,
becomes less problematical; and indubitably in future we shall
certainly know the real and original character of the _delight_
experienced by the self-less, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing:
this delight is a phase of cruelty.--So much provisionally for the
origin of "altruism" as a _moral_ value, and the marking out the ground
from which this value has grown: it is only the bad conscience, only
the will for self-abuse, that provides the necessary conditions for the
existence of altruism as a _value_.


19.

Undoubtedly the bad conscience is an illness, but an illness like
pregnancy is an illness. If we search out the conditions under which
this illness reaches its most terrible and sublime zenith, we shall see
what really first brought about its entry into the world. But to do
this we must take a long breath, and we must first of all go back once
again to an earlier point of view. The relation at civil law of the
ower to his creditor (which has already been discussed in detail), has
been interpreted once again (and indeed in a manner which historically
is exceedingly remarkable and suspicious) into a relationship, which
is perhaps more incomprehensible to us moderns than to any other era;
that is, into the relationship of the _existing_ generation to its
_ancestors_. Within the original tribal association--we are talking of
primitive times--each living generation recognises a legal obligation
towards the earlier generation, and particularly towards the earliest,
which founded the family (and this is something much more than a mere
sentimental obligation, the existence of which, during the longest
period of man's history, is by no means indisputable). There prevails
in them the conviction that it is only thanks to sacrifices and efforts
of their ancestors, that the race _persists_ at all--and that this
has to be _paid back_ to them by sacrifices and services. Thus is
recognised the _owing_ of a debt, which accumulates continually by
reason of these ancestors never ceasing in their subsequent life as
potent spirits to secure by their power new privileges and advantages
to the race. Gratis, perchance? But there is no gratis for that raw
and "mean-souled" age. What return can be made?--Sacrifice (at first,
nourishment, in its crudest sense), festivals, temples, tributes of
veneration, above all, obedience--since all customs are, _quâ_ works of
the ancestors, equally their precepts and commands--are the ancestors
ever given enough? This suspicion remains and grows: from time to time
it extorts a great wholesale ransom, something monstrous in the way of
repayment of the creditor (the notorious sacrifice of the first-born,
for example, blood, human blood in any case). The _fear_ of ancestors
and their power, the consciousness of owing debts to them, necessarily
increases, according to this kind of logic, in the exact proportion
that the race itself increases, that the race itself becomes more
victorious, more independent, more honoured, more feared. This, and not
the contrary, is the fact. Each step towards race decay, all disastrous
events, all symptoms of degeneration, of approaching disintegration,
always _diminish_ the fear of the founders' spirit, and whittle away
the idea of his sagacity, providence, and potent presence. Conceive
this crude kind of logic carried to its climax: it follows that the
ancestors of the _most powerful_ races must, through the growing fear
that they exercise on the imaginations, grow themselves into monstrous
dimensions, and become relegated to the gloom of a divine mystery that
transcends imagination--the ancestor becomes at last necessarily
transfigured into a _god_. Perhaps this is the very origin of the gods,
that is, an origin from _fear_! And those who feel bound to add, "but
from piety also," will have difficulty in maintaining this theory,
with regard to the primeval and longest period of the human race. And
of course this is even more the case as regards the _middle_ period,
the formative period of the aristocratic races--the aristocratic
races which have given back with interest to their founders, the
ancestors (heroes, gods), all those qualities which in the meanwhile
have appeared in themselves, that is, the aristocratic qualities. We
will later on glance again at the ennobling and promotion of the gods
(which of course is totally distinct from their "sanctification"): let
us now provisionally follow to its end the course of the whole of this
development of the consciousness of "owing."


20.

According to the teaching of history, the consciousness of owing
debts to the deity by no means came to an end with the decay of the
clan organisation of society; just as mankind has inherited the
ideas of "good" and "bad" from the race-nobility (together with its
fundamental tendency towards establishing social distinctions), so
with the heritage of the racial and tribal gods it has also inherited
the incubus of debts as yet unpaid and the desire to discharge them.
The transition is effected by those large populations of slaves and
bondsmen, who, whether through compulsion or through submission and
"_mimicry,_" have accommodated themselves to the religion of their
masters; through this channel these inherited tendencies inundate
the world. The feeling of owing a debt to the deity has grown
continuously for several centuries, always in the same proportion in
which the idea of God and the consciousness of God have grown and
become exalted among mankind. (The whole history of ethnic fights,
victories, reconciliations, amalgamations, everything, in fact, which
precedes the eventual classing of all the social elements in each great
race-synthesis, are mirrored in the hotch-potch genealogy of their
gods, in the legends of their fights, victories, and reconciliations.
Progress towards universal empires invariably means progress towards
universal deities; despotism, with its subjugation of the independent
nobility, always paves the way for some system or other of monotheism.)
The appearance of the Christian god, as the record god up to this time,
has for that very reason brought equally into the world the record
amount of guilt consciousness. Granted that we have gradually started
on the _reverse_ movement, there is no little probability in the
deduction, based on the continuous decay in the belief in the Christian
god, to the effect that there also already exists a considerable
decay in the human consciousness of owing (ought); in fact, we cannot
shut our eyes to the prospect of the complete and eventual triumph of
atheism freeing mankind from all this feeling of obligation to their
origin, their _causa prima_. Atheism and a kind of second innocence
complement and supplement each other.


21.

So much for my rough and preliminary sketch of the interrelation of
the ideas "ought" (owe) and "duty" with the postulates of religion. I
have intentionally shelved up to the present the actual moralisation
of these ideas (their being pushed back into the conscience, or more
precisely the interweaving of the _bad_ conscience with the idea of
God), and at the end of the last paragraph used language to the effect
that this moralisation did not exist, and that consequently these ideas
had necessarily come to an end, by reason of what had happened to their
hypothesis, the credence in our "creditor," in God. The actual facts
differ terribly from this theory. It is with the moralisation of the
ideas "ought" and "duty," and with their being pushed back into the
_bad_ conscience, that comes the first actual attempt to _reverse_ the
direction of the development we have just described, or at any rate
to arrest its evolution; it is just at this juncture that the very
hope of an eventual redemption _has to_ put itself once for all into
the prison of pessimism, it is at this juncture that the eye _has to_
recoil and rebound in despair from off an adamantine impossibility,
it is at this juncture that the ideas "guilt" and "duty" have to turn
backwards--turn backwards against _whom_? There is no doubt about
it; primarily against the "ower," in whom the bad conscience now
establishes itself, eats, extends, and grows like a polypus throughout
its length and breadth, all with such virulence, that at last, with
the impossibility of paying the debt, there becomes conceived the
idea of the impossibility of paying the penalty, the thought of its
inexpiability (the idea of "eternal punishment")--finally, too, it
turns against the "creditor," whether found in the _causa prima_ of
man, the origin of the human race, its sire, who henceforth becomes
burdened with a curse ("Adam," "original sin," "determination of the
will"), or in Nature from whose womb man springs, and on whom the
responsibility for the principle of evil is now cast ("Diabolisation of
Nature"), or in existence generally, on this logic an absolute _white
elephant_, with which mankind is landed (the Nihilistic flight from
life, the demand for Nothingness, or for the opposite of existence, for
some other existence, Buddhism and the like)--till suddenly we stand
before that paradoxical and awful expedient, through which a tortured
humanity has found a temporary alleviation, that stroke of genius
called Christianity:--God personally immolating himself for the debt of
man, God paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh, God
as the one being who can deliver man from what man had become unable to
deliver himself--the creditor playing scapegoat for his debtor, from
_love_ (can you believe it?), from love of his debtor!...


22.

The reader will already have conjectured what took place on the stage
and behind the scenes of this drama. That will for self-torture, that
inverted cruelty of the animal man, who, turned subjective and scared
into introspection (encaged as he was in "the State," as part of his
taming process), invented the bad conscience so as to hurt himself,
after the _natural_ outlet for this will to hurt, became blocked--in
other words, this man of the bad conscience exploited the religious
hypothesis so as to carry his martyrdom to the ghastliest pitch of
agonised intensity. Owing something to _God_: this thought becomes his
instrument of torture. He apprehends in God the most extreme antitheses
that he can find to his own characteristic and ineradicable animal
instincts, he himself gives a new interpretation to these animal
instincts as being against what he "owes" to God (as enmity, rebellion,
and revolt against the "Lord," the "Father," the "Sire," the "Beginning
of the world"), he places himself between the horns of the dilemma,
"God" and "Devil." Every negation which he is inclined to utter to
himself, to the nature, naturalness, and reality of his being, he
whips into an ejaculation of "yes," uttering it as something existing,
living, efficient, as being God, as the holiness of God, the judgment
of God, as the hangmanship of God, as transcendence, as eternity, as
unending torment, as hell, as infinity of punishment and guilt. This is
a kind of madness of the will in the sphere of psychological cruelty
which is absolutely unparalleled:--man's _will_ to find himself guilty
and blameworthy to the point of inexpiability, his _will_ to think of
himself as punished, without the punishment ever being able to balance
the guilt, his _will_ to infect and to poison the fundamental basis
of the universe with the problem of punishment and guilt, in order to
cut off once and for all any escape out of this labyrinth of "fixed
ideas," his will for rearing an ideal--that of the "holy God"--face to
face with which he can have tangible proof of his own un-worthiness.
Alas for this mad melancholy beast man! What phantasies invade it,
what paroxysms of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and _mental
bestiality_ break out immediately, at the very slightest check on its
being the beast of action. All this is excessively interesting, but
at the same time tainted with a black, gloomy, enervating melancholy,
so that a forcible veto must be invoked against looking too long into
these abysses. Here is _disease_, undubitably, the most ghastly disease
that has as yet played havoc among men: and he who can still hear (but
man turns now deaf ears to such sounds), how in this night of torment
and nonsense there has rung out the cry of _love_, the cry of the most
passionate ecstasy, of redemption in _love_, he turns away gripped by
an invincible horror--in man there is so much that is ghastly--too long
has the world been a mad-house.


23.

Let this suffice once for all concerning the origin of the "holy God."
The fact that _in itself_ the conception of gods is not bound to
lead necessarily to this degradation of the imagination (a temporary
representation of whose vagaries we felt bound give), the fact that
there exist nobler methods of utilising the invention of gods than in
this self-crucifixion and self-degradation of man, in which the last
two thousand years of Europe have been past masters--these facts can
fortunately be still perceived from every glance that we cast at the
Grecian gods, these mirrors of noble and grandiose men, in which the
_animal_ in man felt itself deified, and did _not_ devour itself in
subjective frenzy. These Greeks long utilised their gods as simple
buffers against the "bad conscience"--so that they could continue
to enjoy their freedom of soul: this, of course, is diametrically
opposed to Christianity's theory of its god. They went _very far_ on
this principle, did these splendid and lion-hearted children; and
there is no lesser authority than that of the Homeric Zeus for making
them realise occasionally that they are taking life too casually.
"Wonderful," says he on one occasion--it has to do with the case of
Ægistheus, a _very_ bad case indeed--

    "Wonderful how they grumble, the mortals against the immortals,
    _Only from us_, they presume, _comes evil_, but in their folly,
    Fashion they, spite of fate, the doom of their own disaster."

Yet the reader will note and observe that this Olympian spectator and
judge is far from being angry with them and thinking evil of them on
this score. "How _foolish_ they are," so thinks he of the misdeeds
of mortals--and "folly," "imprudence," "a little brain disturbance,"
and nothing more, are what the Greeks, even of the strongest, bravest
period, have admitted to be the ground of much that is evil and
fatal.--Folly, _not_ sin, do you understand?... But even this brain
disturbance was a problem--"Come, how is it even possible? How could it
have really got in brains like ours, the brains of men of aristocratic
ancestry, of men of fortune, of men of good natural endowments, of
men of the best society, of men of nobility and virtue?" This was the
question that for century on century the aristocratic Greek put to
himself when confronted with every (to him incomprehensible) outrage
and sacrilege with which one of his peers had polluted himself. "It
must be that a god had infatuated him," he would say at last, nodding
his head.--This solution is _typical_ of the Greeks, ... accordingly
the gods in those times subserved the functions of justifying man to a
certain extent even in evil--in those days they took upon themselves
not the punishment, but, what is more noble, the guilt.


24.

I conclude with three queries, as you will see. "Is an ideal actually
set up here, or is one pulled down?" I am perhaps asked.... But have
ye sufficiently asked yourselves how dear a payment has the setting up
of every ideal in the world exacted? To achieve that consummation how
much truth must always be traduced and misunderstood, how many lies
must be sanctified, how much conscience has got to be disturbed, how
many pounds of "God" have got to be sacrificed every time? To enable
a sanctuary to be set up _a sanctuary has got to be destroyed_: that
is a law--show me an instance where it has not been fulfilled!...
We modern men, we inherit the immemorial tradition of vivisecting
the conscience, and practising cruelty to our animal selves. That is
the sphere of our most protracted training, perhaps of our artistic
prowess, at any rate of our dilettantism and our perverted taste. Man
has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an "evil eye,"
so that eventually they have become in his system affiliated to a
bad conscience. A converse endeavour would be intrinsically feasible
--but who is strong enough to attempt it?--namely, to affiliate to
the "bad conscience" all those _unnatural_ proclivities, all those
transcendental aspirations, contrary to sense, instinct, nature, and
animalism--in short, all past and present ideals, which are all ideals
opposed to life, and traducing the world. To whom is one to turn
nowadays with _such_ hopes and pretensions?--It is just the _good_
men that we should thus bring about our ears; and in addition, as
stands to reason, the indolent, the hedgers, the vain, the hysterical,
the tired.... What is more offensive or more thoroughly calculated
to alienate, than giving any hint of the exalted severity with which
we treat ourselves? And again how conciliatory, how full of love
does all the world show itself towards us so soon as we do as all
the world docs, and "let ourselves go" like all the world. For such
a consummation we need spirits of _different_ calibre than seems
really feasible in this age; spirits rendered potent through wars and
victories, to whom conquest, adventure, danger, even pain, have become
a need; for such a consummation we need habituation to sharp, rare air,
to winter wanderings, to literal and metaphorical ice and mountains; we
even need a kind of sublime malice, a supreme and most self-conscious
insolence of knowledge, which is the appanage of great health; we need
(to summarise the awful truth) just this _great health_!

Is this even feasible to-day?... But some day, in a stronger age
than this rotting and introspective present, must he in sooth come
to us, even the _redeemer_ of great love and scorn, the creative
spirit, rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again away
from every transcendental plane and dimension, he whose solitude
is misunderstanded (sic) of the people, as though it were a flight
_from_ reality;--while actually it is only his diving, burrowing, and
penetrating _into_ reality, so that when he comes again to the light
he can at once bring about by these means the _redemption_ of this
reality; its redemption from the curse which the old ideal has laid
upon it. This man of the future, who in this wise will redeem us from
the old ideal, as he will from that ideal's necessary corollary of
great nausea, will to nothingness, and Nihilism; this tocsin of noon
and of the great verdict, which renders the will again free, who gives
back to the world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist and
Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of Nothingness--_he must one
day come_.


25.

But what am I talking of? Enough! Enough? At this juncture I have
only one proper course, silence: otherwise tresspass on a domain open
alone to one who is younger than I, one stronger, more "_future_" than
I--open alone to _Zarathustra, Zarathustra the godless._


[1] The German is: "_Sittlichkeit der Sitte_." H. B. S.

[2] The German world "_schuld_" means both debt and guilt. Cp. the
English "owe" and "ought," by which I occasionally render the double
meaning.--H. B. S.

[3] German: "_Verbrecher_."--H.B.S.

[4] An allusion to _Der Zweck im Recht_, by the great German jurist,
Professor Ihering.




THIRD ESSAY.


WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS?


"Careless, mocking, forceful--so does wisdom wish us: she is a woman,
and never loves any one but a warrior." Thus Spake Zarathustra.


1.

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too
much; in philosophers and scholars, a kind of "flair" and instinct for
the conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women,
at best an _additional_ seductive fascination, a little _morbidezza_
on a fine piece of flesh, the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in
physiological failures and whiners (in the _majority_ of mortals),
an attempt to pose as "too good" for this world, a holy form of
debauchery, their chief weapon in the battle with lingering pain and
ennui; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best engine of
power, and also the supreme authority for power; in saints, finally
a pretext for hibernation, their _novissima gloriæ cupido_, their
peace in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness.

But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to
man, lies expressed the fundamental feature of man's will, his
_horror vacui: he needs a goal_--and he will sooner will nothingness
than not will at all.--Am I not understood?--Have I not been
understood?--"Certainly not, sir?"--Well, let us begin at the beginning.


2.

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? Or, to take an individual
case in regard to which I have often been consulted, what is the
meaning, for example, of an artist like Richard Wagner paying homage
to chastity in his old age? He had always done so, of course, in a
certain sense, but it was not till quite the end, that he did so in
an ascetic sense. What is the meaning of this "change of attitude,"
this radical revolution in his attitude--for that was what it was?
Wagner veered thereby straight round into his own opposite. What is
the meaning of an artist veering round into his own opposite? At
this point (granted that we do not mind stopping a little over this
question), we immediately call to mind the best, strongest, gayest,
and boldest period, that there perhaps ever was in Wagner's life: that
was the period, when he was genuinely and deeply occupied with the
idea of "Luther's Wedding." Who knows what chance is responsible for
our now having the _Meistersingers_ instead of this wedding music?
And how much in the latter is perhaps just an echo of the former? But
there is no doubt but that the theme would have dealt with the praise
of chastity. And certainly it would also have dealt with the praise
of sensuality, and even so, it would seem quite in order, and even
so, it would have been equally Wagnerian. For there is no necessary
antithesis between chastity and sensuality: every good marriage, every
authentic heart-felt love transcends this antithesis. Wagner would, it
seems to me, have done well to have brought this _pleasing_ reality
home once again to his Germans, by means of a bold and graceful "Luther
Comedy," for there were and are among the Germans many revilers of
sensuality; and perhaps Luther's greatest merit lies just in the fact
of his having had the courage of his _sensuality_ (it used to be
called, prettily enough, "evangelistic freedom "). But even in those
cases where that antithesis between chastity and sensuality does exist,
there has fortunately been for some time no necessity for it to be in
any way a tragic antithesis. This should, at any rate, be the case with
all beings who are sound in mind and body, who are far from reckoning
their delicate balance between "animal" and "angel," as being on the
face of it one of the principles opposed to existence--the most subtle
and brilliant spirits, such as Goethe, such as Hafiz,> have even seen
in this a _further_ charm of life. Such "conflicts" actually allure
one to life. On the other hand, it is only too clear that when once
these ruined swine are reduced to worshipping chastity--and there
are such swine--they only see and worship in it the antithesis to
themselves, the antithesis to ruined swine. Oh what a tragic grunting
and eagerness! You can just think of it--they worship that painful
and superfluous contrast, which Richard Wagner in his latter days
undoubtedly wished to set to music, and to place on the stage! "_For
what purpose, forsooth?_" as we may reasonably ask. What did the swine
matter to him; what do they matter to us?


3.

At this point it is impossible to beg the further question of what he
really had to do with that manly (ah, so unmanly) country bumpkin,
that poor devil and natural, Parsifal, whom he eventually made a
Catholic by such fraudulent devices. What? Was this Parsifal really
meant _seriously_? One might be tempted to suppose the contrary, even
to wish it--that the Wagnerian Parsifal was meant joyously, like a
concluding play of a trilogy or satyric drama, in which Wagner the
tragedian wished to take farewell of us, of himself, above all of
tragedy, and to do so in a manner that should be quite fitting and
worthy, that is, with an excess of the most extreme and flippant parody
of the tragic itself, of the ghastly earthly seriousness and earthly
woe of old--a parody of that _most crude phase_ in the unnaturalness
of the ascetic ideal, that had at length been overcome. That, as I
have said, would have been quite worthy of a great tragedian; who like
every artist first attains the supreme pinnacle of his greatness when
he can look _down_ into himself and his art, when he can _laugh_ at
himself. Is Wagner's Parsifal his secret laugh of superiority over
himself, the triumph of that supreme artistic freedom and artistic
transcendency which he has at length attained. We might, I repeat,
wish it were so, for what can Parsifal, _taken seriously_, amount to?
Is it really necessary to see in it (according to an expression once
used against me) the product of an insane hate of knowledge, mind,
and flesh? A curse on flesh and spirit in one breath of hate? An
apostasy and reversion to the morbid Christian and obscurantist ideals?
And finally a self-negation and self-elimination on the part of an
artist, who till then had devoted all the strength of his will to the
contrary, namely, the _highest_ artistic expression of soul and body.
And not only of his art; of his life as well. Just remember with what
enthusiasm Wagner followed in the footsteps of Feuerbach. Feuerbach's
motto of "healthy sensuality" rang in the ears of Wagner during the
thirties and forties of the century, as it did in the ears of many
Germans (they dubbed themselves "_Young_ Germans"), like the word of
redemption. Did he eventually _change his mind_ on the subject? For it
seems at any rate that he eventually wished to _change his teaching_
on that subject ... and not only is that the case with the Parsifal
trumpets on the stage: in the melancholy, cramped, and embarrassed
lucubrations of his later years, there are a hundred places in which
there are manifestations of a secret wish and will, a despondent,
uncertain, unavowed will to preach actual retrogression, conversion,
Christianity, mediævalism, and to say to his disciples, "All is vanity!
Seek salvation elsewhere!" Even the "blood of the Redeemer" is once
invoked.


4.

Let me speak out my mind in a case like this, which has many painful
elements--and it is a typical case: it is certainly best to separate
an artist from his work so completely that he cannot be taken as
seriously as his work. He is after all merely the presupposition of
his work, the womb, the soil, in certain cases the dung and manure,
on which and out of which it grows--and consequently, in most cases,
something that must be forgotten if the work itself is to be enjoyed.
The insight into the _origin_ of a work is a matter for psychologists
and vivisectors, but never either in the present or the future for the
æsthetes, the artists. The author and creator of Parsifal was as little
spared the necessity of sinking and living himself into the terrible
depths and foundations of mediæval soul-contrasts, the necessity of a
malignant abstraction from all intellectual elevation, severity, and
discipline, the necessity of a kind of mental perversity (if the reader
will pardon me such a word), as little as a pregnant woman is spared
the horrors and marvels of pregnancy, which, as I have said, must
be forgotten if the child is to be enjoyed. We must guard ourselves
against the confusion, into which an artist himself would fall only
too easily (to employ the English terminology) out of psychological
"contiguity"; as though the artist himself actually were the object
which he is able to represent, imagine, and express. In point of fact,
the position is that even if he conceived he were such an object, he
would certainly not represent, conceive, express it. Homer would not
have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an
Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust. A complete and perfect artist
is to all eternity separated from the "real," from the actual; on the
other hand, it will be appreciated that he can at times get tired to
the point of despair of this eternal "unreality" and falseness of his
innermost being--and that he then sometimes attempts to trespass on
to the most forbidden ground, on reality, and attempts to have real
_existence_. With what success? The success will be guessed--it is the
_typical velleity_ of the artist; the same velleity to which Wagner
fell a victim in his old age, and for which he had to pay so dearly and
so fatally (he lost thereby his most valuable friends). But after all,
quite apart from this velleity, who would not wish emphatically for
Wagner's own sake that he had taken farewell of us and of his art in a
_different_ manner, not with a _Parsifal_, but in more victorious, more
self-confident, more Wagnerian style--a style less misleading, a style
less ambiguous with regard to his whole meaning, less Schopenhauerian,
less Nihilistic?...


5.

What, then, is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the case of an artist
we are getting to understand their meaning: _Nothing at all_ ... or so
much that it is as good as nothing at all. Indeed, what is the use of
them? Our artists have for a long time past not taken up a sufficiently
independent attitude, either in the world or against it, to warrant
their valuations and the changes in these valuations exciting interest.
At all times they have played the valet of some morality, philosophy,
or religion, quite apart from the fact that unfortunately they
have often enough been the inordinately supple courtiers of their
clients and patrons, and the inquisitive toadies of the powers that
are existing, or even of the new powers to come. To put it at the
lowest, they always need a rampart, a support, an already constituted
authority: artists never stand by themselves, standing alone is opposed
to their deepest instincts. So, for example, did _Richard Wagner_
take, "when the time had come," the philosopher Schopenhauer for his
covering man in front, for his rampart. Who would consider it even
thinkable, that he would have had the _courage_ for an ascetic ideal,
without the support afforded him by the philosophy of Schopenhauer,
without the authority of Schopenhauer, which _dominated_ Europe in the
seventies? (This is without consideration of the question whether an
artist without the milk[1] of an orthodoxy would have been possible at
all.) This brings us to the more serious question: What is the meaning
of a real _philosopher_ paying homage to the ascetic ideal, a really
self-dependent intellect like Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a
glance of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows how to
stand alone without first waiting for men who cover him in front, and
the nods of his superiors? Let us now consider at once the remarkable
attitude of Schopenhauer towards _art_, an attitude which has even a
fascination for certain types. For that is obviously the reason why
Richard Wagner _all at once_ went over to Schopenhauer (persuaded
thereto, as one knows, by a poet, Herwegh), went over so completely
that there ensued the cleavage of a complete theoretic contradiction
between his earlier and his later æsthetic faiths--the earlier, for
example, being expressed in _Opera and Drama_, the later in the
writings which he published from 1870 onwards. In particular, Wagner
from that time onwards (and this is the volte-face which alienates us
the most) had no scruples about changing his judgment concerning the
value and position of music itself. What did he care if up to that time
he had made of music a means, a medium, a "woman," that in order to
thrive needed an end, a man--that is, the drama? He suddenly realised
that _more_ could be effected by the novelty of the Schopenhauerian
theory in _majorem musicæ gloriam_--that is to say, by means of the
_sovereignty_ of music, as Schopenhauer understood it; music abstracted
from and opposed to all the other arts, music as the independent
art-in-itself, _not_ like the other arts, affording reflections of the
phenomenal world, but rather the language of the will itself, speaking
straight out of the "abyss" as its most personal, original, and direct
manifestation. This extraordinary rise in the value of music (a rise
which seemed to grow out of the Schopenhauerian philosophy) was at
once accompanied by an unprecedented rise in the estimation in which
the musician himself was held: he became now an oracle, a priest, nay,
more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece for the "intrinsic essence
of things," a telephone from the other world--from henceforward
he talked not only music, did this ventriloquist of God, he talked
metaphysic; what wonder that one day he eventually talked _ascetic
ideals_.


6.

Schopenhauer has made use of the Kantian treatment of the æsthetic
problem--though he certainly did not regard it with the Kantian eyes.
Kant thought that he showed honour to art when he favoured and placed
in the foreground those of the predicates of the beautiful, which
constitute the honour of knowledge: impersonality and universality.
This is not the place to discuss whether this was not a complete
mistake; all that I wish to emphasise is that Kant, just like other
philosophers, instead of envisaging the æsthetic problem from the
standpoint of the experiences of the artist (the creator), has only
considered art and beauty from the standpoint of the spectator, and
has thereby imperceptibly imported the spectator himself into the idea
of the "beautiful"! But if only the philosophers of the beautiful had
sufficient knowledge of this "spectator"!--Knowledge of him as a great
fact of personality, as a great experience, as a wealth of strong and
most individual events, desires, surprises, and raptures in the sphere
of beauty! But, as I feared, the contrary was always the case. And so
we get from our philosophers, from the very beginning, definitions
on which the lack of a subtler personal experience squats like a fat
worm of crass error, as it does on Kant's famous definition of the
beautiful. "That is beautiful," says Kant, "which pleases without
interesting." Without interesting! Compare this definition with this
other one, made by a real "spectator" and "artist"--by Stendhal, who
once called the beautiful _une promesse de bonheur_. Here, at any rate,
the one point which Kant makes prominent in the æsthetic position is
repudiated and eliminated--_le désintéressement_. Who is right, Kant
or Stendhal? When, forsooth, our æsthetes never get tired of throwing
into the scales in Kant's favour the fact that under the magic of
beauty men can look at even naked female statues "without interest,"
we can certainly laugh a little at their expense:--in regard to this
ticklish point the experiences of _artists_ are more "interesting,"
and at any rate Pygmalion was not necessarily an "unæsthetic man." Let
us think all the better of the innocence of our æsthetes, reflected
as it is in such arguments; let us, for instance, count to Kant's
honour the country-parson naïveté of his doctrine concerning the
peculiar character of the sense of touch! And here we come back to
Schopenhauer, who stood in much closer neighbourhood to the arts
than did Kant, and yet never escaped outside the pale of the Kantian
definition; how was that? The circumstance is marvellous enough: he
interprets the expression, "without interest," in the most personal
fashion, out of an experience which must in his case have been part and
parcel of his regular routine. On few subjects does Schopenhauer speak
with such certainty as on the working of æsthetic contemplation: he
says of it that it simply counteracts sexual interest, like lupulin
and camphor; he never gets tired of glorifying this escape from
the "Life-will" as the great advantage and utility of the æsthetic
state. In fact, one is tempted to ask if his fundamental conception
of Will and Idea, the thought that there can only exist freedom from
the "will" by means of "idea," did not originate in a generalisation
from this sexual experience. (In all questions concerning the
Schopenhauerian philosophy, one should, by the bye, never lose sight of
the consideration that it is the conception of a youth of twenty-six,
so that it participates not only in what is peculiar to Schopenhauer's
life, but in what is peculiar to that special period of his life.)
Let us listen, for instance, to one of the most expressive among the
countless passages which he has written in honour of the æsthetic
state (_World as Will and Idea_, i. 231); let us listen to the tone,
the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude, with which such words
are uttered: "This is the painless state which Epicurus praised as
the highest good and as the state of the gods; we are during that
moment freed from the vile pressure of the will, we celebrate the
Sabbath of the will's hard labour, the wheel of Ixion stands still."
What vehemence of language! What images of anguish and protracted
revulsion! How almost pathological is that temporal antithesis between
"that moment" and everything else, the "wheel of Ixion," "the hard
labour of the will," "the vile pressure of the will." But granted
that Schopenhauer was a hundred times right for himself personally,
how does that help our insight into the nature of the beautiful?
Schopenhauer has described one effect of the beautiful,--the calming
of the will,--but is this effect really normal? As has been mentioned,
Stendhal, an equally sensual but more happily constituted nature than
Schopenhauer, gives prominence to another effect of the "beautiful."
"The beautiful promises happiness." To him it is just the excitement
of the "will"(the "interest") by the beauty that seems the essential
fact. And does not Schopenhauer ultimately lay himself open to the
objection, that he is quite wrong in regarding himself as a Kantian on
this point, that he has absolutely failed to understand in a Kantian
sense the Kantian definition of the beautiful--;that the beautiful
pleased him as well by means of an interest, by means, in fact, of the
strongest and most personal interest of all, that: of the victim of
torture who escapes from his torture?--And to come back again to our
first question, "What is the meaning of a philosopher paying homage to
ascetic ideals?" We get now, at any rate, a first hint; he wishes to
escape _from a torture_.


7.

Let us beware of making dismal faces at the word "torture"--there is
certainly in this case enough to deduct, enough to discount--there is
even something to laugh at. For we must certainly not underestimate
the fact that Schopenhauer, who in practice treated sexuality as
a personal enemy (including its tool, woman, that "_instrumentum
diaboli_"), needed enemies to keep him in a good humour; that he loved
grim, bitter, blackish-green words; that he raged for the sake of
raging, out of passion; that he would have grown ill, would have become
a _pessimist_ (for he was not a pessimist, however much he wished to
be), without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality, and the
whole "will for existence" "keeping on." Without them Schopenhauer
would not have "kept on," that is a safe wager; he would have run away:
but his enemies held him fast, his enemies always enticed him back
again to existence, his wrath was just as theirs' was to the ancient
Cynics, his balm, his recreation, his recompense, his _remedium_
against disgust, his _happiness_. So much with regard to what is most
personal in the case of Schopenhauer; on the other hand, there is
still much which is typical in him--and only now we come back to our
problem. It is an accepted and indisputable fact, so long as there
are philosophers in the world and wherever philosophers have existed
(from India to England, to take the opposite poles of philosophic
ability), that there exists a real irritation and rancour on the part
of philosophers towards sensuality. Schopenhauer is merely the most
eloquent, and if one has the ear for it, also the most fascinating
and enchanting outburst. There similarly exists a real philosophic
bias and affection for the whole ascetic ideal; there should be no
illusions on this score. Both these feelings, as has been said, belong
to the type; if a philosopher lacks both of them, then he is--you may
be certain of it--never anything but a "pseudo." What does this mean?
For this state of affairs must first be, interpreted: in itself it
stands there stupid, to all eternity, like any "Thing-in-itself." Every
animal, including la bête philosophe, strives instinctively after an
_optimum_ of favourable conditions, under which he can let his whole
strength have play, and achieves his maximum consciousness of power;
with equal instinctiveness, and with a fine perceptive flair which is
superior to any reason, every animal shudders mortally at every kind
of disturbance and hindrance which obstructs or could obstruct his way
to that optimum (it is not his way to happiness of which I am talking,
but his way to power, to action, the most powerful action, and in
point of fact in many cases his way to unhappiness). Similarly, the
philosopher shudders mortally at <b>marriage</b>, together with all
that could persuade him to it--marriage as a fatal hindrance on the
way to the _optimum_. Up to the present what great philosophers have
been married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant,
Schopenhauer--they were not married, and, further, one cannot _imagine_
them as married. A married philosopher belongs to _comedy_, that is
my rule; as for that exception of a Socrates--the malicious Socrates
married himself, it seems, _ironice_, just to prove this _very_ rule.
Every philosopher would say, as Buddha said, when the birth of a son
was announced to him: "Râhoula has been born to me, a fetter has been
forged for me" (Râhoula means here "a little demon"); there must come
an hour of reflection to every "free spirit" (granted that he has had
previously an hour of thoughtlessness), just as one came once to the
same Buddha: "Narrowly cramped," he reflected, "is life in the house;
it is a place of uncleanness; freedom is found in leaving the house."
Because he thought like this, he left the house. So many bridges to
independence are shown in the ascetic idea], that the philosopher
cannot refrain from exultation and clapping of hands when he hears
the history of all those resolute ones, who on one day uttered a nay
to all servitude and went into some _desert_; even granting that they
were only strong asses, and the absolute opposite of strong minds.
What, then, does the ascetic ideal mean in a philosopher? This is my
answer--it will have been guessed long ago: when he sees this ideal
the philosopher smiles because he sees therein an _optimum_ of the
conditions of the highest and boldest intellectuality; he does not
thereby deny "existence," he rather affirms thereby _his_ existence
and _only_ his existence, and this perhaps to the point of not being
far off the blasphemous wish, _pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat
philosophus, fiam!_


8.

These philosophers, you see, are by no means uncorrupted witnesses and
judges of the _value_ of the ascetic ideal. They think _of themselves_
--what is the "saint" to them? They think of that which to them
personally is most indispensable; of freedom from compulsion,
disturbance, noise: freedom from business, duties, cares; of clear
head; of the dance, spring, and flight of thoughts; of good air--rare,
clear, free, dry, as is the air on the heights, in which every animal
creature becomes more intellectual and gains wings; they think of
peace in every cellar; all the hounds neatly chained; no baying of
enmity and uncouth rancour; no remorse of wounded ambition; quiet
and submissive internal organs, busy as mills, but unnoticed; the
heart alien, transcendent, future, posthumous--to summarise, they
mean by the ascetic ideal the joyous asceticism of a deified and
newly fledged animal, sweeping over life rather than resting. We know
what are the three great catch-words of the ascetic ideal: poverty,
humility, chastity; and now just look closely at the life of all
the great fruitful inventive spirits--you will always find again
and again these three qualities up to a certain extent. _Not_ for a
minute, as is self-evident, as though, perchance, they were part of
their virtues--what has this type of man to do with virtues?--but as
the most essential and natural conditions of their _best_ existence,
their _finest_ fruitfulness. In this connection it is quite possible
that their predominant intellectualism had first to curb an unruly and
irritable pride, or an insolent sensualism, or that it had all its
work cut out to maintain its wish for the "desert" against perhaps
an inclination to luxury and dilettantism, or similarly against an
extravagant liberality of heart and hand. But their intellect did
effect all this, simply because it was the _dominant_ instinct, which
carried through its orders in the case of all the other instincts.
It effects it still; if it ceased to do so, it would simply not be
dominant. But there is not one iota of "virtue" in all this. Further,
the _desert_, of which I just spoke, in which the strong, independent,
and well-equipped spirits retreat into their hermitage--oh, how
different is it from the cultured classes' dream of a desert! In
certain cases, in fact, the cultured classes themselves are the desert.
And it is certain that all the actors of the intellect would not endure
this desert for a minute. It is nothing like romantic and Syrian enough
for them, nothing like enough of a stage desert! Here as well there
are plenty of asses, but at this point the resemblance ceases. But a
desert nowadays is something like this--perhaps a deliberate obscurity;
a getting-out-of the way of one's self; a fear of noise, admiration,
papers, influence; a little office, a daily task, something that hides
rather than brings to light; sometimes associating with harmless,
cheerful beasts and fowls, the sight of which refreshes; a mountain for
company, but not a dead one, one with _eyes_ (that is, with lakes);
in certain cases even a room in a crowded hotel where one can reckon
on not being recognised, and on being able to talk with impunity to
every one: here is the desert--oh, it is lonely enough, believe me!
I grant that when Heracleitus retreated to the courts and cloisters
of the colossal temple of Artemis, that "wilderness" was worthier;
why do we _lack_ such temples? (perchance we do not lack them: I just
think of my splendid study in the _Piazza di San Marco_, in spring, of
course, and in the morning, between ten and twelve). But that which
Heracleitus shunned is still just what we too avoid nowadays: the
noise and democratic babble of the Ephesians, their politics, their
news from the "empire" (I mean, of course, Persia), their market-trade
in "the things of to-day "--for there is one thing from which we
philosophers especially need a rest--from the things of "to-day." We
honour the silent, the cold, the noble, the far, the past, everything,
in fact, at the sight of which the soul is not bound to brace itself up
and defend itself--something with which one can speak without _speaking
aloud_. Just listen now to the tone a spirit has when it speaks; every
spirit has its own tone and loves its own tone. That thing yonder, for
instance, is bound to be an agitator, that is, a hollow head, a hollow
mug: whatever may go into him, everything comes back from him dull and
thick, heavy with the echo of the great void. That spirit yonder nearly
always speaks hoarse: has he, perchance, _thought_ himself hoarse?
It may be so--ask the physiologists--but he who thinks in _words_,
thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it shows that he does not
think of objects or think objectively, but only of his relations
with objects--that, in point of fact, he only thinks of himself and
his audience). This third one speaks aggressively, he comes too near
our body, his breath blows on us--we shut our mouth involuntarily,
although he speaks to us through a book: the tone of his style supplies
the reason--he has no time, he has small faith in himself, he finds
expression now or never. But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks
softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited, A philosopher
is recognised by the fact that he shuns three brilliant and noisy
things--fame, princes, and women: which is not to say that they do not
come to him. He shuns every glaring light: therefore he shuns his time
and its "daylight." Therein he is as a shadow; the deeper sinks the
sun, the greater grows the shadow. As for his humility, he endures, as
he endures darkness, a certain dependence and obscurity: further, he is
afraid of the shock of lightning, he shudders at the insecurity of a
tree which is too isolated and too exposed, on which every storm vents
its temper, every temper its storm. His "maternal" instinct, his secret
love for that which grows in him, guides him into states where he is
relieved from the necessity of taking care of _himself_, in the same
way in which the "_mother_" instinct in woman has thoroughly maintained
up to the present woman's dependent position. After all, they demand
little enough, do these philosophers, their favourite motto is, "He
who possesses is possessed." All this is _not_, as I must say again
and again, to be attributed to a virtue, to a meritorious wish for
moderation and simplicity; but because their supreme lord so demands
of them, demands wisely and inexorably; their lord who is eager only
for one thing, for which alone he musters, and for which alone he
hoards everything--time, strength, love, interest. This kind of man
likes not to be disturbed by enmity, he likes not to be disturbed by
friendship, it is a type which forgets or despises easily. It strikes
him as bad form to play the martyr, "to _suffer_ for truth"--he leaves
all that to the ambitious and to the stage-heroes of the intellect,
and to all those, in fact, who have time enough for such luxuries
(they themselves, the philosophers, have something _to do_ for truth).
They make a sparing use of big words; they are said to be adverse to
the word "truth" itself: it has a "high falutin'" ring. Finally, as
far as the chastity of philosophers is concerned, the fruitfulness
of this type of mind is manifestly in another sphere than that of
children; perchance in some other sphere, too, they have the survival
of their name, their little immortality (philosophers in ancient
India would express themselves with still greater boldness: "Of what
use is posterity to him whose soul is the world?"). In this attitude
there is not a trace of chastity, by reason of any ascetic scruple or
hatred of the flesh, any more than it is chastity for an athlete or a
jockey to abstain from women; it is rather the will of the dominant
instinct, at any rate, during the period of their advanced philosophic
pregnancy. Every artist knows the harm done by sexual intercourse
on occasions of great mental strain and preparation; as far as the
strongest artists and those with the surest instincts are concerned,
this is not necessarily a case of experience--hard experience--but it
is simply their "maternal" instinct which, in order to benefit the
growing work, disposes recklessly (beyond all its normal stocks and
supplies) of the _vigour_ of its _animal_ life; the greater power then
_absorbs_ the lesser. Let us now apply this interpretation to gauge
correctly the case of Schopenhauer, which we have already mentioned: in
his case, the sight of the beautiful acted manifestly like a resolving
irritant on the chief power of his nature (the power of contemplation
and of intense penetration); so that this strength exploded and became
suddenly master of his consciousness. But this by no means excludes
the possibility of that particular sweetness and fulness, which is
peculiar to the æsthetic state, springing directly from the ingredient
of sensuality (just as that "idealism" which is peculiar to girls at
puberty originates in the same source)--it may be, consequently, that
sensuality is not removed by the approach of the æsthetic state, as
Schopenhauer believed, but merely becomes transfigured, and ceases to
enter into the consciousness as sexual excitement. (I shall return once
again to this point in connection with the more delicate problems of
the _physiology of the æsthetic_, a subject which up to the present has
been singularly untouched and unelucidated.)


9.

A certain asceticism, a grimly gay whole-hearted renunciation, is, as
we have seen, one of the most favourable conditions for the highest
intellectualism, and, consequently, for the most natural corollaries
of such intellectualism: we shall therefore be proof against any
surprise at the philosophers in particular always treating the ascetic
ideal with a certain amount of predilection. A serious historical
investigation shows the bond between the ascetic ideal and philosophy
to be still much tighter and still much stronger. It may be said that
it was only in the _leading strings_ of this ideal that philosophy
really learnt to make its first steps and baby paces--alas how
clumsily, alas how crossly, alas how ready to tumble down and lie on
its stomach was this shy little darling of a brat with its bandy legs!
The early history of philosophy is like that of all good things;--for a
long time they had not the courage to be themselves, they kept always
looking round to see if no one would come to their help; further, they
were afraid of all who looked at them. Just enumerate in order the
particular tendencies and virtues of the philosopher--his tendency to
doubt, his tendency to deny, his tendency to wait (to be "ephectic"),
his tendency to analyse, search, explore, dare, his tendency to compare
and to equalise, his will to be neutral and objective, his will for
everything which is "_sine ira et studio_":--has it yet been realised
that for quite a lengthy period these tendencies went counter to the
first claims of morality and conscience? (To say nothing at all of
_Reason_, which even Luther chose to call _Frau Klüglin_,[2] the sly
whore.) Has it been yet appreciated that a philosopher, in the event
of his _arriving_ at self-consciousness, must needs feel himself an
incarnate "nitimur in vetitum"--and consequently guard himself against
"his own sensations," against self-consciousness? It is, I repeat, just
the same with all good things, on which we now pride ourselves; even
judged by the standard of the ancient Greeks, our whole modern life,
in so far as it is not weakness, but power and the consciousness of
power, appears pure "Hybris" and godlessness: for the things which are
the very reverse of those which we honour to-day, have had for a long
time conscience on their side, and God as their guardian. "Hybris"
is our whole attitude to nature nowadays, our violation of nature
with the help of machinery, and all the unscrupulous ingenuity of our
scientists and engineers. "Hybris" is our attitude to God, that is, to
some alleged teleological and ethical spider behind the meshes of the
great trap of the causal web. Like Charles the Bold in his war with
Louis the Eleventh, we may say, "je combats l'universelle araignée";
"Hybris" is our attitude to ourselves--for we experiment with ourselves
in a way that we would not allow with any animal, and with pleasure
and curiosity open our soul in our living body: what matters now to
us the "salvation" of the soul? We heal ourselves afterwards: being
ill is instructive, we doubt it not, even more instructive than being
well--inoculators of disease seem to us to-day even more necessary
than any medicine-men and "saviours." There is no doubt we do violence
to ourselves nowadays, we crackers of the soul's kernel, we incarnate
riddles, who are ever asking riddles, as though life were naught else
than the cracking of a nut; and even thereby must we necessarily become
day by day more and more worthy to be asked questions and worthy to ask
them, even thereby do we perchance also become worthier to--live?

... All good things were once bad things; from every original sin has
grown an original virtue. Marriage, for example, seemed for a long time
a sin against the rights of the community; a man formerly paid a fine
for the insolence of claiming one woman to himself (to this phase
belongs, for instance, the _jus primæ noctis_, to-day still in Cambodia
the privilege of the priest, that guardian of the "good old customs").

The soft, benevolent, yielding, sympathetic feelings--eventually valued
so highly that they almost became "intrinsic values," were for a very
long time actually despised by their possessors: gentleness was then
a subject for shame, just as hardness is now (compare _Beyond Good
and Evil_, Aph. 260). The submission to law: oh, with what qualms of
conscience was it that the noble races throughout the world renounced
the _vendetta_ and gave the law power over themselves! Law was long a
_vetitum_, a blasphemy, an innovation; it was introduced with force,
like a force, to which men only submitted with a sense of personal
shame. Every tiny step forward in the world was formerly made at
the cost of mental and physical torture. Nowadays the whole of this
point of view--"that not only stepping forward, nay, stepping at all,
movement, change, all needed their countless martyrs," rings in our
ears quite strangely. I have put it forward in the _Dawn of Day_, Aph.
18. "Nothing is purchased more dearly," says the same book a little
later, "than the modicum of human reason and freedom which is now our
pride. But that pride is the reason why it is now almost impossible
for us to feel in sympathy with those immense periods of the 'Morality
of Custom,' which lie at the beginning of the 'world's history,'
constituting as they do the real decisive historical principle which
has fixed the character of humanity; those periods, I repeat, when
throughout the world suffering passed for virtue, cruelty for virtue,
deceit for virtue, revenge for virtue, repudiation of the reason for
virtue; and when, conversely, well-being passed current for danger, the
desire for knowledge for danger, pity for danger, peace for danger,
being pitied for shame, work for shame, madness for divinity, and
_change_ for immorality and incarnate corruption!"


10.

There is in the same book, Aph. 12, an explanation of the _burden_
of unpopularity under which the earliest race of contemplative men
had to live--despised almost as widely as they were first feared!
Contemplation first appeared on earth in a disguised shape, in an
ambiguous form, with an evil heart and often with an uneasy head:
there is no doubt about it. The inactive, brooding, unwarlike element
in the instincts of contemplative men long invested them with a cloud
of suspicion: the only way to combat this was to excite a definite
_fear_. And the old Brahmans, for example, knew to a nicety how to do
this! The oldest philosophers were well versed in giving to their very
existence and appearance, meaning, firmness, background, by reason
whereof men learnt to _fear_ them; considered more precisely, they
did this from an even more fundamental need, the need of inspiring
in themselves fear and self-reverence. For they found even in their
own souls all the valuations turned _against_ themselves; they had
to fight down every kind of suspicion and antagonism against "the
philosophic element in themselves." Being men of a terrible age,
they did this with terrible means: cruelty to themselves, ingenious
self-mortification--this was the chief method of these ambitious
hermits and intellectual revolutionaries, who were obliged to force
down the gods and the traditions of their own soul, so as to enable
themselves to _believe_ in their own revolution. I remember the famous
story of the King Vicvamitra, who, as the result of a thousand years
of self-martyrdom, reached such a consciousness of power and such a
confidence in himself that he undertook to build a _new heaven_: the
sinister symbol of the oldest and newest history of philosophy in the
whole world. Every one who has ever built anywhere a "_new heaven_"
first found the power thereto in his _own hell_.. .. Let us compress
the facts into a short formula. The philosophic spirit had, in order
to be _possible_ to any extent at all, to masquerade and disguise
itself as one of the _previously fixed_ types of the contemplative
man, to disguise itself as priest, wizard, soothsayer, as a religious
man generally: the _ascetic ideal_ has for a long time served the
philosopher as a superficial form, as a condition which enabled him
to exist. .. . To be able to be a philosopher he had to exemplify the
ideal; to exemplify it, he was bound to _believe_ in it. The peculiarly
etherealised abstraction of philosophers, with their negation of the
world, their enmity to life, their disbelief in the senses, which has
been maintained up to the most recent time, and has almost thereby come
to be accepted as the ideal _philosophic attitude_--this abstraction
is the result of those enforced conditions under which philosophy
came into existence, and continued to exist; inasmuch as for quite
a very long time philosophy would have been _absolutely impossible_
in the world without an ascetic cloak and dress, without an ascetic
self-misunderstanding. Expressed plainly and palpably, the _ascetic
priest_ has taken the repulsive and sinister form of the caterpillar,
beneath which and behind which alone philosophy could live and slink
about.. ..

Has all that really changed? Has that flamboyant and dangerous winged
creature, that "spirit" which that caterpillar concealed within itself,
has it, I say, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, lighter world, really
and finally flung off its hood and escaped into the light? Can we
to-day point to enough pride, enough daring, enough courage, enough
self-confidence, enough mental will, enough will for responsibility,
enough freedom of the will, to enable the philosopher to be now in the
world really--_possible_?


11.

And now, after we have caught sight of the _ascetic priest_, let us
tackle our problem. What is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? It now
first becomes serious--vitally serious. We are now confronted with the
_real representatives of the serious_. "What is the meaning of all
seriousness?" This even more radical question is perchance already
on the tip of our tongue: a question, fairly, for physiologists, but
which we for the time being skip. In that ideal the ascetic priest
finds not only his faith, but also his will, his power, his interest.
His _right_ to existence stands and falls with that ideal. What wonder
that we here run up against a terrible opponent (on the supposition,
of course, that we are the opponents of that ideal), an opponent
fighting for his life against those who repudiate that ideal!. .. On
the other hand, it is from the outset improbable that such a biased
attitude towards our problem will do him any particular good; the
ascetic priest himself will scarcely prove the happiest champion of
his own ideal (on the same principle on which a woman usually fails
when she wishes to champion "woman")--let alone proving the most
objective critic and judge of the controversy now raised. We shall
therefore--so much is already obvious--rather have actually to help
him to defend himself properly against ourselves, than we shall have
to fear being too well beaten by him. The idea, which is the subject
of this dispute, is the value of our life from the standpoint of the
ascetic priests: this life, then (together with the whole of which it
is a part, "Nature," "the world," the whole sphere of becoming and
passing away), is placed by them in relation to an existence of quite
another character, which it excludes and to which it is opposed, unless
it _deny_ its own self: in this case, the case of an ascetic life,
life is taken as a bridge to another existence. The ascetic treats
life as a maze, in which one must walk backwards till one comes to the
place where it starts; or he treats it as an error which one may, nay
_must_, refute by action: for he demands that he should be followed;
he enforces, where he can, his valuation of existence. What does this
mean? Such a monstrous valuation is not an exceptional case, or a
curiosity recorded in human history: it is one of the most general
and persistent facts that there are. The reading from the vantage
of a distant star of the capital letters of our earthly life, would
perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the especially
_ascetic planet_, a den of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive
creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the
world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out
of pleasure in hurting--presumably their one and only pleasure. Let
us consider how regularly, how universally, how practically at every
single period the ascetic priest puts in his appearance: he belongs to
no particular race; he thrives everywhere; he grows out of all classes.
Not that he perhaps bred this valuation by heredity and propagated
it--the contrary is the case. It must be a necessity of the first order
which makes this species, hostile, as it is, to _life_, always grow
again and always thrive again.--_Life_ itself must certainly _have an
interest_ in the continuance of such a type of self-contradiction. For
an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without
parallel, the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that
would be master, not over some element in life, but over life itself,
over life's deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an
attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does
the green eye of jealousy turn even against physiological well-being,
especially against the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy;
while a sense of pleasure is experienced and _sought_ in abortion, in
decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment,
in the exercising, flagellation, and sacrifice of the self. All this
is in the highest degree paradoxical: we are here confronted with a
rift that _wills_ itself to be a rift, which _enjoys_ itself in this
very _suffering_, and even becomes more and more certain of itself,
more and more triumphant, in proportion as its own presupposition,
physiological vitality, _decreases_. "The triumph just in the supreme
agony ": under this extravagant emblem did the ascetic ideal fight from
of old; in this mystery of seduction, in this picture of rapture and
torture, it recognised its brightest light, its salvation, its final
victory. _Crux, nux, lux_--it has all these three in one.


12.

Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness
is induced to _philosophise_; on what will it vent its pet caprice?
On that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true,
to be real; it will look for _error_ in those very places where the
life instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for
instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy,
reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity,
the whole logical contrast of "_Subject_" and "_Object_"--errors,
nothing but errors! To renounce the belief in one's own ego, to
deny to one's self one's own "reality"--what a triumph! and here
already we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not merely
a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but an infliction of
violence and cruelty on _reason_; and this ecstasy culminates in the
ascetic self-contempt, the ascetic scorn of one's own reason making
this decree: _there is_ a domain of truth and of life, but reason is
specially _excluded_ therefrom.. .. By the bye, even in the Kantian
idea of "the intellegible character of things" there remains a trace
of that schism, so dear to the heart of the ascetic, that schism
which likes to turn reason against reason; in fact, "intelligible
character" means in Kant a kind of quality in things of which the
intellect comprehends this much, that for it, the intellect, it is
_absolutely incomprehensible_. After all, let us, in our character
of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of
the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for
too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege!
In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very _wishing_
to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the
intellect for its eternal "_Objectivity_"--objectivity being understood
not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable
and non-sensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons _in
one's power_ and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how
to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the _difference_ in
the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us,
forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more
carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has
set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge";
let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas
as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself":--in
these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think,
an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which
the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those
functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became
seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the
non-sensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing
from a perspective, only a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more
emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we
train on the same thing, the more complete will be our "idea" of that
thing, our "objectivity." But the elimination of the will altogether,
the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could
do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?


13.

But let us turn back. Such a self-contradiction, as apparently
manifests itself among the ascetics, "Life turned against Life,"
is--this much is absolutely obvious--from the physiological and not now
from the psychological standpoint, simply nonsense. It can only be an
apparent contradiction; it must be a kind of provisional expression, an
explanation, a formula, an adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding
of something, whose real nature could not be understood for a long
time, and whose _real essence_ could not be described; a mere word
jammed into an old _gap_ of human knowledge. To put briefly the
facts against its being real: _the ascetic ideal springs from the
prophylactic and self-preservative instincts which mark a decadent
life_, which seeks by every means in its power to maintain its position
and fight for its existence; it points to a partial physiological
depression and exhaustion, against which the most profound and intact
life-instincts fight ceaselessly with new weapons and discoveries. The
ascetic ideal is such a weapon: its position is consequently exactly
the reverse of that which the worshippers of the ideal imagine--life
struggles in it and through it with death and against death; the
ascetic ideal is a dodge for the _preservation_ of life. An important
fact is brought out in the extent to which, as history teaches, this
ideal could rule and exercise power over man, especially in all those
places where the civilisation and taming of man was completed: that
fact is, the diseased state of man up to the present, at any rate, of
the man who has been tamed, the physiological struggle of man with
death (more precisely, with the disgust with life, with exhaustion,
with the wish for the "end"). The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish
for an existence of another kind, an existence on another plane,--he
is, in fact, the highest point of this wish, its official ecstasy and
passion: but it is the very _power_ of this wish which is the fetter
that binds him here; it is just that which makes him into a tool that
must labour to create more favourable conditions for earthly existence,
for existence on the human plane--it is with this very power that he
keeps the whole herd of failures, distortions, abortions, unfortunates,
_sufferers from themselves_ of every kind, fast to existence, while
he as the herdsman goes instinctively on in front. You understand
me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this
denier--he actually belongs to the really great _conservative_ and
_affirmative_ forces of life.... What does it come from, this diseased
state? For man is more diseased, more uncertain, more changeable,
more unstable than any other animal, there is no doubt of it--he is
the diseased animal: what does it spring from? Certainly he has also
dared, innovated, braved more, challenged fate more than all the other
animals put together; he, the great experimenter with himself, the
unsatisfied, the insatiate, who struggles for the supreme mastery with
beast, Nature, and gods, he, the as yet ever uncompelled, the ever
future, who finds no more any rest from his own aggressive strength,
goaded inexorably on by the spur of the future dug into the flesh of
the present:--how should not so brave and rich an animal also be the
most endangered, the animal with the longest and deepest sickness
among all sick animals?... Man is sick of it, oft enough there are
whole epidemics of this satiety (as about 1348, the time of the Dance
of Death): but even this very nausea, this tiredness, this disgust
with himself, all this is discharged from him with such force that
it is immediately made into a new fetter. His "nay," which he utters
to life, brings to light as though by magic an abundance of graceful
"yeas"; even when he _wounds_ himself, this master of destruction, of
self-destruction, it is subsequently the wound itself that forces him
to live.


14.

The more normal is this sickliness in man--and we cannot dispute
this normality--the higher honour should be paid to the rare cases
of psychical and physical powerfulness, the _windfalls_ of humanity,
and the more strictly should the sound be guarded from that worst of
air, the air of the sick-room. Is that done? The sick are the greatest
danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to
the strong, but from the weakest. Is that known? Broadly considered,
it is not for a minute the fear of man, whose diminution should be
wished for; for this fear forces the strong to be strong, to be at
times terrible--it preserves in its integrity the sound type of man.
What is to be feared, what does work with a fatality found in no other
fate, is not the great fear of, but the great _nausea_ with, man; and
equally so the great pity for man. Supposing that both these things
were one day to espouse each other, then inevitably the maximum of
monstrousness would immediately come into the world--the "last will"
of man, his will for nothingness, Nihilism. And, in sooth, the way is
well paved thereto. He who not only has his nose to smell with, but
also has eyes and ears, he sniffs almost wherever he goes to-day an
air something like that of a mad-house, the air of a hospital--I am
speaking, as stands to reason, of the cultured areas of mankind, of
every kind of "Europe" that there is in fact in the world. The _sick_
are the great danger of man, _not_ the evil, _not_ the "beasts of
prey." They who are from the outset botched, oppressed, broken, those
are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the life beneath the
feet of man, who instil the most dangerous venom and scepticism into
our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. Where shall we escape from
it, from that covert look (from which we carry away a deep sadness),
from that averted look of him who is misborn from the beginning, that
look which betrays what such a man says to himself--that look which is
a groan?" Would that I were something else," so groans this look, "but
there is no hope. I am what I am: how could I get away from myself?
And, verily--_I am sick of myself!_" On such a soil of self-contempt,
a veritable swamp soil, grows that weed, that poisonous growth, and
all so tiny, so hidden, so ignoble, so sugary. Here teem the worms
of revenge and vindictiveness; here the air reeks of things secret
and unmentionable; here is ever spun the net of the most malignant
conspiracy--the conspiracy of the sufferers against the sound and the
victorious; here is the sight of the victorious _hated_. And what
lying so as not to acknowledge this hate as hate! What a show of big
words and attitudes, what an art of "righteous" calumniation! These
abortions! what a noble eloquence gushes from their lips! What an
amount of sugary, slimy, humble submission oozes in their eyes! What do
they really want? At any rate to _represent_ righteousness ness, love,
wisdom, superiority, that is the ambition of these "lowest ones," these
sick ones! And how clever does such an ambition make them! You cannot,
in fact, but admire the counterfeiter dexterity with which the stamp
of virtue, even the ring, the golden ring of virtue, is here imitated.
They have taken a lease of virtue absolutely for themselves, have these
weaklings and wretched invalids, there is no doubt of it; "We alone are
the good, the righteous," so do they speak, "we alone are the _homines
bonæ voluntatis_." They stalk about in our midst as living reproaches,
as warnings to us--as though health, fitness, strength, pride, the
sensation of power, were really vicious things in themselves, for
which one would have some day to do penance, bitter penance. Oh, how
they themselves are ready in their hearts to exact penance, how they
thirst after being _hangmen_!

Among them is an abundance of revengeful ones disguised as judges,
who ever mouth the word righteousness like a venomous spittle--with
mouth, I say, always pursed, always ready to spit at everything,
which does not wear a discontented look, but is of good cheer as it
goes on its way. Among them, again, is that most loathsome species
of the vain, the lying abortions, who make a point of representing
"beautiful souls," and perchance of bringing to the market as "purity
of heart" their distorted sensualism swathed in verses and other
bandages; the species of "self-comforters" and masturbators of their
own souls. The sick man's will to represent _some_ form or other of
superiority, his instinct for crooked paths, which lead to a tyranny
over the healthy--where can it not be found, this will to power of
the very weakest? The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her
in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising. The sick woman,
moreover, spares nothing living, nothing dead; she grubs up again the
most buried things (the Bogos say, "Woman is a hyena"). Look into
the background of every family, of every body, of every community:
everywhere the fight of the sick against the healthy--a silent fight
for the most part with minute poisoned powders, with pin-pricks, with
spiteful grimaces of patience, but also at times with that diseased
pharisaism of _pure_ pantomime, which plays for choice the rôle of
"righteous indignation." Right into the hallowed chambers of knowledge
can it make itself heard, can this hoarse yelping of sick hounds, this
rabid lying and frenzy of such "noble" Pharisees (I remind readers, who
have ears, once more of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen Dühring,
who makes the most disreputable and revolting use in all present-day
Germany of moral refuse; Dühring, the paramount moral blusterer that
there is to-day, even among his own kidney, the Anti-Semites). They
are all men of resentment, are these physiological distortions and
worm-riddled objects, a whole quivering kingdom of burrowing revenge,
indefatigable and insatiable in its outbursts against the happy, and
equally so in disguises for revenge, in pretexts for revenge: when
will they really reach their final, fondest, most sublime triumph of
revenge? At that time, doubtless, when they succeed in pushing their
own misery, in fact, all misery, _into the consciousness_ of the happy;
so that the latter begin one day to be ashamed of their happiness,
and perchance say to themselves when they meet, "It is a shame to be
happy! _there is too much misery!_" ... But there could not possibly
be a greater and more fatal misunderstanding than that of the happy,
the fit, the strong in body and soul, beginning in this way to doubt
their right to happiness. Away with this "perverse world"! Away with
this shameful soddenness of sentiment! Preventing the sick making the
healthy sick--for that is what such a soddenness comes to--this ought
to be our supreme object in the world--but for this it is above all
essential that the healthy should remain _separated_ from the sick,
that they should even guard themselves from the look of the sick, that
they should not even associate with the sick. Or may it, perchance,
be their mission to be nurses or doctors? But they could not mistake
and disown their mission more grossly--the higher must not degrade
itself to be the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance must to all
eternity keep their missions also separate. The right of the happy to
existence, the right of bells with a full tone over the discordant
cracked bells, is verily a thousand times greater: they alone are the
_sureties_ of the future, they alone are _bound_ to man's future. What
they can, what they must do, that can the sick never do, should never
do! but if _they are to_ be enabled to do what _only_ they must do,
how can they possibly be free to play the doctor, the comforter, the
"Saviour" of the sick?... And therefore good air! good air! and away,
at any rate, from the neighbourhood of all the madhouses and hospitals
of civilisation! And therefore good company, _our own_ company, or
solitude, if it must be so! but away, at any rate, from the evil fumes
of internal corruption and the secret worm-eaten state of the sick!
that, forsooth, my friends, we may defend ourselves, at any rate for
still a time, against the two worst plagues that could have been
reserved for us--against the _great nausea with man_! against the_
great pity for man_!


15.

If you have understood in all their depths--and I demand that you
should _grasp them profoundly_ and understand them profoundly--the
reasons for the impossibility of its being the business of the healthy
to nurse the sick, to make the sick healthy, it follows that you have
grasped this further necessity--the necessity of doctors and nurses
_who themselves are sick_. And now we have and hold with both our hands
the essence of the ascetic priest. The ascetic priest must be accepted
by us as the predestined saviour, herdsman, and champion of the sick
herd: thereby do we first understand his awful historic mission. The
_lordship over sufferers_ is his kingdom, to that points his instinct,
in that he finds his own special art, his master-skill, his kind of
happiness. He must himself be sick, he must be kith and kin to the
sick and the abortions so as to understand them, so as to arrive at an
understanding with them; but he must also be strong, even more master
of himself than of others, impregnable, forsooth, in his will for
power, so as to acquire the trust and the awe of the weak, so that he
can be their hold, bulwark, prop, compulsion, overseer, tyrant, god.
He has to protect them, protect his herds--_against_ whom? Against
the healthy, doubtless also against the envy towards the healthy. He
must be the natural adversary and _scorner_ of every rough, stormy,
reinless, hard, violently-predatory health and power. The priest is
the first form of the more delicate animal that scorns more easily
than it hates. He will not be spared the waging of war with the beasts
of prey, a war of guile (of "spirit") rather than of force, as is
self-evident--he will in certain cases find it necessary to conjure up
out of himself, or at any rate to represent practically a new type of
the beast of prey--a new animal monstrosity in which the polar bear,
the supple, cold, crouching panther, and, not least important, the fox,
are joined together in a trinity as fascinating as it is fearsome.
If necessity exacts it, then will he come on the scene with bearish
seriousness, venerable, wise, cold, full of treacherous superiority, as
the herald and mouthpiece of mysterious powers, sometimes going among
even the other kind of beasts of prey, determined as he is to sow on
their soil, wherever he can, suffering, discord, self-contradiction,
and only too sure of his art, always to be lord of _sufferers_ at all
times. He brings with him, doubtless, salve and balsam; but before he
can play the physician he must first wound; so, while he soothes the
pain which the wound makes, _he at the same time poisons the wound_.
Well versed is he in this above all things, is this wizard and wild
beast tamer, in whose vicinity everything healthy must needs become
ill, and everything ill must needs become tame. He protects, in sooth,
his sick herd well enough, does this strange herdsman; he protects
them also against themselves, against the sparks (even in the centre
of the herd) of wickedness, knavery, malice, and all the other ills
that the plaguey and the sick are heir to; he fights with cunning,
hardness, and stealth against anarchy and against the ever imminent
break-up inside the herd, where _resentment_, that most dangerous
blasting-stuff and explosive, ever accumulates and accumulates. Getting
rid of this blasting-stuff in such a way that it does not blow up the
herd and the herdsman, that is his real feat, his supreme utility;
if you wish to comprise in the shortest formula the value of the
priestly life, it would be correct to say the priest is the _diverter
of the course of resentment_. Every sufferer, in fact, searches
instinctively for a cause of his suffering; to put it more exactly,
a doer,--to put it still more precisely, a sentient _responsible_
doer,--in brief, something living, on which, either actually or in
_effigie_, he can on any pretext vent his emotions. For the venting
of emotions is the sufferer's greatest attempt at alleviation, that
is to say, _stupefaction_, his mechanically desired narcotic against
pain of any kind. It is in this phenomenon alone that is found,
according to my judgment, the real physiological cause of resentment,
revenge, and their family is to be found--that is, in a demand for the
_deadening of pain through emotion_: this cause is generally, but in
my view very erroneously, looked for in the defensive parry of a bare
protective principle of reaction, of a "reflex movement" in the case
of any sudden hurt and danger, after the manner that a decapitated
frog still moves in order to get away from a corrosive acid. But the
difference is fundamental. In one case the object is to prevent being
hurt any more; in the other case the object is to _deaden_ a racking,
insidious, nearly unbearable pain by a more violent emotion of any
kind whatsoever, and at any rate for the time being to drive it out of
the consciousness--for this purpose an emotion is needed, as wild an
emotion as possible, and to excite that emotion some excuse or other
is needed. "It must be somebody's fault that I feel bad"--this kind of
reasoning is peculiar to all invalids, and is but the more pronounced,
the more ignorant they remain of the real cause of their feeling bad,
the physiological cause (the cause may lie in a disease of the _nervus
sympathicus_, or in an excessive secretion of bile, or in a want of
sulphate and phosphate of potash in the blood, or in pressure in the
bowels which stops the circulation of the blood, or in degeneration of
the ovaries, and so forth). Ail sufferers have an awful resourcefulness
and ingenuity in finding excuses for painful emotions; they even
enjoy their jealousy, their broodings over base actions and apparent
injuries, they burrow through the intestines of their past and present
in their search for obscure mysteries, wherein they will be at liberty
to wallow in a torturing suspicion and get drunk on the venom of their
own malice--they tear open the oldest wounds, they make themselves
bleed from the scars which have long been healed, they make evil-doers
out of friends, wife, child, and everything which is nearest to them.
"I suffer: it must be somebody's fault"--so thinks every sick sheep.
But his herdsman, the ascetic priest, says to him, "Quite so, my sheep,
it must be the fault of some one; but thou thyself art that some one,
it is all the fault of thyself alone--_it is the fault of thyself alone
against thyself_": that is bold enough, false enough, but one thing is
at least attained; thereby, as I have said, the course of resentment
is--_diverted_.


16.

You can see now what the remedial instinct of life has at least _tried_
to effect, according to my conception, through the ascetic priest,
and the purpose for which he had to employ a temporary tyranny of
such paradoxical and anomalous ideas as "guilt," "sin," "sinfulness,"
"corruption," "damnation." What was done was to make the sick
_harmless_ up to a certain point, to destroy the incurable by means of
themselves, to turn the milder cases severely on to themselves, to give
their resentment a backward direction ("man needs but one thing"), and
to _exploit_ similarly the bad instincts of all sufferers with a view
to self-discipline, self-surveillance, self-mastery. It is obvious that
there can be no question at all in the case of a "medication" of this
kind, a mere emotional medication, of any real _healing_ of the sick in
the physiological sense; it cannot even for a moment be asserted that
in this connection the instinct of life has taken healing as its goal
and purpose. On the one hand, a kind of congestion and organisation of
the sick (the word "Church" is the most popular name for it): on the
other, a kind of provisional safeguarding of the comparatively healthy,
the more perfect specimens, the cleavage of a _rift_ between healthy
and sick--for a long time that was all! and it was much! it was very
much!

I am proceeding, as you see, in this essay, from an hypothesis which,
as far as such readers as I want are concerned, does not require to be
proved; the hypothesis that "sinfulness" in man is not an actual fact,
but rather merely the interpretation of a fact, of a physiological
discomfort,--a discomfort seen through a moral religious perspective
which is no longer binding upon us. The fact, therefore, that any one
feels "guilty," "sinful," is certainly not yet any proof that he is
right in feeling so, any more than any one is healthy simply because
he feels healthy. Remember the celebrated witch-ordeals: in those days
the most acute and humane judges had no doubt but that in these cases
they were confronted with guilt,--the "witches"_ themselves had no
doubt on the point_,--and yet the guilt was lacking. Let me elaborate
this hypothesis: I do not for a minute accept the very "pain in the
soul" as a real fact, but only as an explanation (a casual explanation)
of facts that could not hitherto be precisely formulated; I regard
it therefore as something as yet absolutely in the air and devoid of
scientific cogency--just a nice fat word in the place of a lean note
of interrogation. When any one fails to get rid of his "pain in the
soul," the cause is, speaking crudely, to be found _not_ in his "soul"
but more probably in his stomach (speaking crudely, I repeat, but by
no means wishing thereby that you should listen to me or understand
me in a crude spirit). A strong and well-constituted man digests his
experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his
meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. If he fails to
"relieve himself" of an experience, this kind of indigestion is quite
as much physiological as the other indigestion--and indeed, in more
ways than one, simply one of the results of the other. You can adopt
such a theory, and yet _entre nous_ be nevertheless the strongest
opponent of all materialism.


17.

But is he really a _physician_, this ascetic priest? We already
understand why we are scarcely allowed to call him a physician, however
much he likes to feel a "saviour" and let himself be worshipped as a
saviour.[3] It is only the actual suffering, the discomfort of the
sufferer, which he combats, _not_ its cause, not the actual state of
sickness--this needs must constitute our most radical objection to
priestly medication. But just once put yourself into that point of
view, of which the priests have a monopoly, you will find it hard to
exhaust your amazement, at what from that standpoint he has completely
seen, sought, and found. The _mitigation_ of suffering, every kind of
"consoling"--all this manifests itself as his very genius: with what
ingenuity has he interpreted his mission of consoler, with what aplomb
and audacity has he chosen weapons necessary for the part. Christianity
in particular should be dubbed a great treasure-chamber of ingenious
consolations,--such a store of refreshing, soothing, deadening drugs
has it accumulated within itself; so many of the most dangerous and
daring expedients has it hazarded; with such subtlety, refinement,
Oriental refinement, has it divined what emotional stimulants can
conquer, at any rate for a time, the deep depression, the leaden
fatigue, the black melancholy of physiological cripples--for, speaking
generally, all religions are mainly concerned with fighting a certain
fatigue and heaviness that has infected everything. You can regard it
as _prima facie_ probable that in certain places in the world there
was almost bound to prevail from time to time among large masses of
the population a _sense of physiological depression_, which, however,
owing to their lack of physiological knowledge, did not appear to their
consciousness as such, so that consequently its "cause" and its _cure_
can only be sought and essayed in the science of moral psychology
(this, in fact, is my most general formula for what is generally called
a "_religion_"). Such a feeling of depression can have the most diverse
origins; it may be the result of the crossing of too heterogeneous
races (or of classes--genealogical and racial differences are also
brought out in the classes: the European "Weltschmerz," the "Pessimism"
of the nineteenth century, is really the result of an absurd and sudden
class-mixture); it may be brought about by a mistaken emigration--a
race falling into a climate for which its power of adaptation is
insufficient (the case of the Indians in India); it may be the effect
of old age and fatigue (the Parisian pessimism from 1850 onwards); it
may be a wrong diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages, the nonsense
of vegetarianism--which, however, have in their favour the authority
of Sir Christopher in Shakespeare); it may be blood-deterioration,
malaria, syphilis, and the like (German depression after the Thirty
Years' War, which infected half Germany with evil diseases, and
thereby paved the way for German servility, for German pusillanimity).
In such a case there is invariably recourse to a _war_ on a grand scale
with the feeling of depression; let us inform ourselves briefly on its
most important practices and phases (I leave on one side, as stands to
reason, the actual _philosophic_ war against the feeling of depression
which is usually simultaneous--it is interesting enough, but too
absurd, too practically negligible, too full of cobwebs, too much of a
hole-and-corner affair, especially when pain is proved to be a mistake,
on the _naïf_ hypothesis that pain must needs _vanish_ when the mistake
underlying it is recognised--but behold! it does anything but vanish
...). That dominant depression is _primarily fought_ by weapons which
reduce the consciousness of life itself to the lowest degree. Wherever
possible, no more wishes, no more wants; shun everything which produces
emotion, which produces "blood" (eating no salt, the fakir hygiene);
no love; no hate; equanimity; no revenge; no getting rich; no work;
begging; as far as possible, no woman, or as little woman as possible;
as far as the intellect is concerned, Pascal's principle, "_il faut
s'abêtir._" To put the result in ethical and psychological language,
"self-annihilation," "sanctification"; to put it in physiological
language, "hypnotism"--the attempt to find some approximate human
equivalent for what _hibernation_ is for certain animals, for what
_æstivation_ is for many tropical plants, a minimum of assimilation
and metabolism in which life just manages to subsist without really
coming into the consciousness. An amazing amount of human energy
has been devoted to this object--perhaps uselessly? There cannot be
the slightest doubt but that such _sportsmen_ of "saintliness," in
whom at times nearly every nation has abounded, have really found a
genuine relief from that which they have combated with such a rigorous
_training_--in countless cases they really escaped by the help of their
system of hypnotism _away_ from deep physiological depression; their
method is consequently counted among the most universal ethnological
facts. Similarly it is improper to consider such a plan for starving
the physical element and the desires, as in itself a symptom of
insanity (as a clumsy species of roast-beef-eating "freethinkers" and
Sir Christophers are fain to do); all the more certain is it that their
method can and does pave the way to all kinds of mental disturbances,
for instance, "inner lights" (as far as the case of the Hesychasts of
Mount Athos), auditory and visual hallucinations, voluptuous ecstasies
and effervescences of sensualism (the history of St. Theresa). The
explanation of such events given by the victims is always the acme of
fanatical falsehood; this is self-evident. Note well, however, the tone
of implicit gratitude that rings in the very _will_ for an explanation
of such a character. The supreme state, salvation itself, that final
goal of universal hypnosis and peace, is always regarded by them as
the mystery of mysteries, which even the most supreme symbols are
inadequate to express; it is regarded as an entry and homecoming to the
essence of things, as a liberation from all illusions, as "knowledge,"
as "truth," as "being" as an escape from every end, every wish, every
action, as something even beyond Good and Evil.

"Good and Evil," quoth the Buddhists, "both are fetters. The perfect
man is master of them both."

"The done and the undone," quoth the disciple of the Vedanta, "do
him no hurt; the good and the evil he shakes from off him, sage that
he is; his kingdom suffers no more from any act; good and evil, he
goes beyond them both."--An absolutely Indian conception, as much
Brahmanist as Buddhist. Neither in the Indian nor in the Christian
doctrine is this "Redemption" regarded as attainable by means of
virtue and moral improvement, however high they may place the value of
the hypnotic efficiency of virtue: keep clear on this point--indeed
it simply corresponds with the facts. The fact that they remained
_true_ on this point is perhaps to be regarded as the best specimen
of realism in the three great religions, absolutely soaked as they
are with morality, with this one exception. "For those who know,
there is no duty." "Redemption is not attained by the acquisition of
virtues; for redemption consists in being one with Brahman, who is
incapable of acquiring any perfection; and equally little does it
consist in the _giving up of faults_, for the Brahman, unity with whom
is what constitutes redemption, is eternally pure" (these passages
are from the Commentaries of the Cankara, quoted from the first real
European _expert_ of the Indian philosophy, my friend Paul Deussen).
We wish, therefore, to pay honour to the idea of "redemption" in
the great religions, but it is somewhat hard to remain serious in
view of the appreciation meted out to the _deep sleep_ by these
exhausted pessimists who are too tired even to dream--to the deep
sleep considered, that is, as already a fusing into Brahman, as the
attainment of the _unio mystica_ with God. "When he has completely gone
to sleep," says on this point the oldest and most venerable "script,"
"and come to perfect rest, so that he sees no more any vision, then,
oh dear one, is he united with Being, he has entered into his own
self--encircled by the Self with its absolute knowledge, he has no
more any consciousness of that which is without or of that which is
within. Day and night cross not these bridges, nor age, nor death,
nor suffering, nor good deeds, nor evil deeds." "In deep sleep," say
similarly the believers in this deepest of the three great religions,
"does the soul lift itself from out this body of ours, enters the
supreme light and stands out therein in its true shape: therein is it
the supreme spirit itself, which travels about, while it jests and
plays and enjoys itself, whether with women, or chariots, or friends;
there do its thoughts turn no more back to this appanage of a body,
to which the 'prana' (the vital breath) is harnessed like a beast of
burden to the cart." None the less we will take care to realise (as
we did when discussing "redemption") that in spite of all its pomps
of Oriental extravagance this simply expresses the same criticism on
life as did the clear, cold, Greekly cold, but yet suffering Epicurus.
The hypnotic sensation of nothingness, the peace of deepest sleep,
anæsthesia in short––that is what passes with the sufferers and the
absolutely depressed for, forsooth, their supreme good, their value
of values; that is what <b>must</b> be treasured by them as something
positive, be felt by them as the essence of _the_ Positive (according
to the same logic of the feelings, nothingness is in all pessimistic
religions called God).


18.

Such a hypnotic deadening of sensibility and susceptibility to pain,
which presupposes somewhat rare powers, especially courage, contempt
of opinion, intellectual stoicism, is less frequent than another
and certainly easier _training_ which is tried against states of
depression. I mean _mechanical activity_. It is indisputable that a
suffering existence can be thereby considerably alleviated. This fact
is called to-day by the somewhat ignoble title of the "Blessing of
work." The alleviation consists in the attention of the sufferer being
absolutely diverted from suffering, in the incessant monopoly of the
consciousness by action, so that consequently there is little room left
for suffering––for _narrow_ is it, this chamber of human consciousness!
Mechanical activity and its corollaries, such as absolute regularity,
punctilious unreasoning obedience, the chronic routine of life, the
complete occupation of time, a certain liberty to be impersonal, nay, a
training in "impersonality," self-forgetfulness, "_incuria sui_"––with
what thoroughness and expert subtlety have all these methods been
exploited by the ascetic priest in his war with pain!

When he has to tackle sufferers of the lower orders, slaves, or
prisoners (or women, who for the most part are a compound of
labour-slave and prisoner), all he has to do is to juggle a little
with the names, and to rechristen, so as to make them see henceforth
a benefit, a comparative happiness, in objects which they hated--the
slave's discontent with his lot was at any rate not invented by the
priests. An even more popular means of fighting depression is the
ordaining of a _little joy_, which is easily accessible and can be made
into a rule; this medication is frequently used in conjunction with
the former ones. The most frequent form in which joy is prescribed
as a cure is the joy in _producing_ joy (such as doing good, giving
presents, alleviating, helping, exhorting, comforting, praising,
treating with distinction); together with the prescription of "love
your neighbour." The ascetic priest prescribes, though in the most
cautious doses, what is practically a stimulation of the strongest
and most life-assertive impulse--the Will for Power. The happiness
involved in the "smallest superiority" which is the concomitant of all
benefiting, helping, extolling, making one's self useful, is the most
ample consolation, of which, if they are well-advised, physiological
distortions avail themselves: in other cases they hurt each other, and
naturally in obedience to the same radical instinct. An investigation
of the origin of Christianity in the Roman world shows that
co-operative unions for poverty, sickness, and burial sprang up in the
lowest stratum of contemporary society, amid which the chief antidote
against depression, the little joy experienced in mutual benefits,
was deliberately fostered. Perchance this was then a novelty, a real
discovery? This conjuring up of the will for co-operation, for family
organisation, for communal life, for "_Cœnacula_" necessarily brought
the Will for Power, which had been already infinitesimally stimulated,
to a new and much fuller manifestation. The herd organisation is a
genuine advance and triumph in the fight with depression. With the
growth of the community there matures even to individuals a new
interest, which often enough takes him out of the more personal
element in his discontent, his aversion to himself, the "_despectus
sui_" of Geulincx. All sick and diseased people strive instinctively
after a herd-organisation, out of a desire to shake off their sense of
oppressive discomfort and weakness; the ascetic priest divines this
instinct and promotes it; wherever a herd exists it is the instinct
of weakness which has wished for the herd, and the cleverness of the
priests which has organised it, for, mark this: by an equally natural
necessity the strong strive as much for _isolation_ as the weak for
_union_: when the former bind themselves it is only with a view to an
aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of their Will for Power,
much against the wishes of their individual consciences; the latter,
on the contrary, range themselves together with positive _delight_ in
such a muster--their instincts are as much gratified thereby as the
instincts of the "born master" (that is, the solitary beast-of-prey
species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by organisation.
There is always lurking beneath every oligarchy--such is the
universal lesson of history--the desire for tyranny. Every oligarchy
is continually quivering with the tension of the effort required by
each individual to keep mastering this desire. (Such, _e.g._, was
the Greek; Plato shows it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his
contemporaries--and _himself_.)


19.

The methods employed by the ascetic priest, which we have already
learnt to know--stifling of all vitality, mechanical energy, the
little joy, and especially the method of "love your neighbour"
herd-organisation, the awaking of the communal consciousness of power,
to such a pitch that the individual's disgust with himself becomes
eclipsed by his delight in the thriving of the community--these are,
according to modern standards, the "innocent" methods employed in
the fight with depression; let us turn now to the more interesting
topic of the "guilty" methods. The guilty methods spell one thing:
to produce _emotional excess_--which is used as the most efficacious
anæsthetic against their depressing state of protracted pain; this
is why priestly ingenuity has proved quite inexhaustible in thinking
out this one question: "_By what means_ can you produce an emotional
excess?" This sounds harsh: it is manifest that it would sound nicer
and would grate on one's ears less, if I were to say, forsooth: "The
ascetic priest made use at all times of the enthusiasm contained in all
strong emotions." But what is the good of still soothing the delicate
ears of our modern effeminates? What is the good _on our side_ of
budging one single inch before their verbal Pecksniffianism. For us
psychologists to do that would be at once _practical Pecksniffianism_,
apart from the fact of its nauseating us. The _good taste_ (others
might say, the righteousness) of a psychologist nowadays consists, if
at all, in combating the shamefully moralised language with which all
modern judgments on men and things are smeared. For, do not deceive
yourself: what constitutes the chief characteristic of modern souls and
of modern books is not the lying, but the _innocence_ which is part
and parcel of their intellectual dishonesty. The inevitable running up
against this "innocence" everywhere constitutes the most distasteful
feature of the somewhat dangerous business which a modern psychologist
has to undertake: it is a part of our great danger--it is a road which
perhaps leads us straight to the great nausea--I know quite well the
purpose which all modern books will and can serve (granted that they
last, which I am not afraid of, and granted equally that there is to
be at some future day a generation with a more rigid, more severe,
and _healthier_ taste)--the _function_ which all modernity generally
will serve with posterity: that of an emetic,--and this by reason of
its moral sugariness and falsity, its ingrained feminism, which it is
pleased to call "Idealism," and at any rate believes to be idealism.
Our cultured men of to-day, our "good" men, do not lie--that is true;
but it does _not_ redound to their honour! The real lie, the genuine,
determined, "honest" lie (on whose value you can listen to Plato) would
prove too tough and strong an article for them by a long way; it would
be asking them to do what people have been forbidden to ask them to do,
to open their eyes to their own selves, and to learn to distinguish
between "true" and "false" in their own selves. The dishonest lie alone
suits them: everything which feels a good man is perfectly incapable of
any other attitude to anything than that of a dishonourable liar, an
absolute liar, but none the less an innocent liar, a blue-eyed liar, a
virtuous liar. These "good men," they are all now tainted with morality
through and through, and as far as honour is concerned they are
disgraced and corrupted for all eternity. Which of them _could stand_ a
further truth "about man"? or, put more tangibly, which of them could
put up with a true biography? One or two instances: Lord Byron composed
a most personal autobiography, but Thomas Moore was "too good" for it;
he burnt his friend's papers. Dr. Gwinner, Schopenhauer's executor, is
said to have done the same; for Schopenhauer as well wrote much about
himself, and perhaps also against himself: (εἰς ἑαντόν). The virtuous
American Thayer, Beethoven's biographer, suddenly stopped his work: he
had come to a certain point in that honourable and simple life, and
could stand it no longer. Moral: What sensible man nowadays writes one
honest word about himself? He must already belong to the Order of Holy
Foolhardiness. We are promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner; who
doubts but that it would be a _clever_ autobiography? Think, forsooth,
of the grotesque horror which the Catholic priest Janssen aroused in
Germany with his inconceivably square and harmless pictures of the
German Reformation; what wouldn't people do if some real psychologist
were to tell us about a genuine Luther, tell us, not with the moralist
simplicity of a country priest or the sweet and cautious modesty of a
Protestant historian, but say with the fearlessness of a Taine, that
springs from force of character and not from a prudent toleration of
force. (The Germans, by the bye, have already produced the classic
specimen of this toleration--they may well be allowed to reckon him as
one of their own, in Leopold Ranke, that born classical advocate of
every _causa fortior_, that cleverest of all the clever opportunists.)


20.

But you will soon understand me.--Putting it shortly, there is reason
enough, is there not, for us psychologists nowadays never getting from
a certain mistrust of out _own selves_? Probably even we ourselves are
still "too good" for our work, probably, whatever contempt we feel
for this popular craze for morality, we ourselves are perhaps none
the less its victims, prey, and slaves; probably it infects even us.
Of what was that diplomat warning us, when he said to his colleagues:
"Let us especially mistrust our first impulses, gentlemen! _they are
almost always good_"? So should nowadays every psychologist talk to
his colleagues. And thus we get back to our problem, which in point
of fact does require from us a certain severity, a certain mistrust
especially against "first impulses." The ascetic ideal in the service
of projected emotional excess:--he who remembers the previous essay
will already partially anticipate the essential meaning compressed
into these above ten words. The thorough unswitching of the human
soul, the plunging of it into terror, frost, ardour, rapture, so as
to free it, as through some lightning shock, from all the smallness
and pettiness of unhappiness, depression, and discomfort: what ways
lead to _this_ goal? And which of these ways does so most safely?...
At bottom all great emotions have this power, provided that they find
a sudden outlet--emotions such as rage, fear, lust, revenge, hope,
triumph, despair, cruelty; and, in sooth, the ascetic priest has had
no scruples in taking into his service the whole pack of hounds that
rage in the human kennel, unleashing now these and now those, with the
same constant object of waking man out of his protracted melancholy,
of chasing away, at any rate for a time, his dull pain, his shrinking
misery, but always under the sanction of a religious interpretation
and justification. This emotional excess has subsequently to be _paid
for_, this is self-evident--it makes the ill more ill--and therefore
this kind of remedy for pain is according to modern standards a
"guilty" kind.

The dictates of fairness, however, require that we should all the
more emphasise the fact that this remedy is applied with _a good
conscience_, that the ascetic priest has prescribed it in the most
implicit belief in its utility and indispensability;--often enough
almost collapsing in the presence of the pain which he created;--that
we should similarly emphasise the fact that the violent physiological
revenges of such excesses, even perhaps the mental disturbances, are
not absolutely inconsistent with the general tenor of this kind of
remedy; this remedy, which, as we have shown previously, is _not_ for
the purpose of healing diseases, but of fighting the unhappiness of
that depression, the alleviation and deadening of which was its object.
The object was consequently achieved. The keynote by which the ascetic
priest was enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music
to play on the fibres of the human soul--was, as every one knows, the
exploitation of the feeling of "_guilt_." I have already indicated in
the previous essay the origin of this feeling--as a piece of animal
psychology and nothing else: we were thus confronted with the
feeling of "guilt," in its crude state, as it were. It was first in
the hands of the priest, real artist that he was in the feeling of
guilt, that it took shape--oh, what a shape! "Sin"--for that is the
name of the new priestly version of the animal "bad-conscience" (the
inverted cruelty)--has up to the present been the greatest event in the
history of the diseased soul: in "sin" we find the most perilous and
fatal masterpiece of religious interpretation. Imagine man, suffering
from himself, some way or other but at any rate physiologically,
perhaps like an animal shut up in a cage, not clear as to the why and
the wherefore! imagine him in his desire for reasons--reasons bring
relief--in his desire again for remedies, narcotics at last, consulting
one, who knows even the occult--and see, lo and behold, he gets a hint
from his wizard, the ascetic priest, his _first_ hint on the "cause" of
his trouble: he must search for it in _himself_, in his guiltiness, in
a piece of the past, he must understand his very suffering as a _state
of punishment_. He has heard, he has understood, has the unfortunate:
he is now in the plight of a hen round which a line has been drawn. He
never gets out of the circle of lines. The sick man has been turned
into "the sinner"--and now for a few thousand years we never get away
from the sight of this new invalid, of "a sinner"--shall we ever get
away from it?--wherever we just look, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of
the sinner always moving in one direction (in the direction of guilt,
the _only_ cause of suffering); everywhere the evil conscience, this
"_greuliche thier_,"[4] to use Luther's language; everywhere rumination
over the past, a distorted view of action, the gaze of the "green-eyed
monster" turned on all action; everywhere the wilful misunderstanding
of suffering, its transvaluation into feelings of guilt, fear of
retribution; everywhere the scourge, the hairy shirt, the starving
body, contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the ghastly
wheel of a restless and morbidly eager conscience; everywhere mute
pain, extreme fear, the agony of a tortured heart, the spasms of an
unknown happiness, the shriek for "redemption." In point of fact,
thanks to this system of procedure, the old depression, dullness,
and fatigue were absolutely conquered, life itself became _very_
interesting again, awake, eternally awake, sleepless, glowing, burnt
away, exhausted and yet not tired--such was the figure cut by man,
"the sinner," who was initiated into these mysteries. This grand old
wizard of an ascetic priest fighting with depression--he had clearly
triumphed, _his_ kingdom had come: men no longer grumbled at pain, men
_panted_ after pain: "_More pain!_ More pain!" So for centuries on end
shrieked the demand of his acolytes and initiates. Every emotional
excess which hurt; everything which broke, overthrew, crushed,
transported, ravished; the mystery of torture-chambers, the ingenuity
of hell itself--all this was now discovered, divined, exploited, all
this was at the service of the wizard, all this served to promote the
triumph of his ideal, the ascetic ideal. "_My kingdom is not of this
world_," quoth he, both at the beginning and at the end: had he still
the right to talk like that?--Goethe has maintained that there are only
thirty-six tragic situations: we would infer from that, did we not know
otherwise, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He--knows more.


21.

So far as all _this_ kind of priestly medicine-mongering, the "guilty"
kind, is concerned, every word of criticism is superfluous. As for the
suggestion that emotional excess of the type, which in these cases
the ascetic priest is fain to order to his sick patients (under the
most sacred euphemism, as is obvious, and equally impregnated with
the sanctity of his purpose), has ever really been of use to any sick
man, who, forsooth, would feel inclined to maintain a proposition of
that character? At any rate, some understanding should be come to as
to the expression "be of use." If you only wish to express that such a
system of treatment has _reformed_ man, I do not gainsay it: I merely
add that "reformed" conveys to my mind as much as "tamed," "weakened,"
"discouraged," "refined," "daintified," "emasculated" (and thus it
means almost as much as injured). But when you have to deal principally
with sick, depressed, and oppressed creatures, such a system, even
granted that it makes the ill "better," under any circumstances also
makes them more _ill_: ask the mad-doctors the invariable result of a
methodical application of penance-torture, contrition, and salvation
ecstasies. Similarly ask history. In every body politic where the
ascetic priest has established this treatment of the sick, disease has
on every occasion spread with sinister speed throughout its length
and breadth. What was always the "result"? A shattered nervous system,
in addition to the existing malady, and this in the greatest as in the
smallest, in the individuals as in masses. We find, in consequence of
the penance and redemption-training, awful epileptic epidemics, the
greatest known to history, such as the St. Vitus and St. John dances
of the Middle Ages; we find, as another phase of its after-effect,
frightful mutilations and chronic depressions, by means of which the
temperament of a nation or a city (Geneva, Bale) is turned once for
all into its opposite;--this _training_, again, is responsible for
the witch-hysteria, a phenomenon analogous to somnambulism (eight
great epidemic outbursts of this only between 1564 and 1605);--we
find similarly in its train those delirious death-cravings of large
masses, whose awful "shriek," "_evviva la morte!_" was heard over the
whole of Europe, now interrupted by voluptuous variations and anon by
a rage for destruction, just as the same emotional sequence with the
same intermittencies and sudden changes is now universally observed
in every case where the ascetic doctrine of sin scores once more a
great success (religious neurosis _appears_ as a manifestation of the
devil, there is no doubt of it. What is it? _Quæritur_). Speaking
generally, the ascetic ideal and its sublime-moral cult, this most
ingenious, reckless, and perilous systematisation of all methods of
emotional excess, is writ large in a dreadful and unforgettable fashion
on the whole history of man, and unfortunately not only on history.
I was scarcely able to put forward any other element which attacked
the health and race efficiency of Europeans with more destructive
power than did this ideal; it can be dubbed,without exaggeration,
_the real fatality_ in the history of the health of the European man.
At the most you can merely draw a comparison with the specifically
German influence: I mean the alcohol poisoning of Europe, which up
to the present has kept pace exactly with the political and racial
pre–dominance of the Germans (where they inoculated their blood,
there too did they inoculate their vice). Third in the series comes
syphilis--_magno sed proximo intervallo_.


22.

The ascetic priest has, wherever he has obtained the mastery, corrupted
the health of the soul, he has consequently also corrupted _taste in
artibus et litteris_--he corrupts it still. "Consequently?" I hope I
shall be granted this "consequently "; at any rate, I am not going to
prove it first. One solitary indication, it concerns the arch-book of
Christian literature, their real model, their "book-in-itself." In the
very midst of the Græco-Roman splendour, which was also a splendour
of books, face to face with an ancient world of writings which had
not yet fallen into decay and ruin, at a time when certain books were
still to be read, to possess which we would give nowadays half our
literature in exchange, at that time the simplicity and vanity of
Christian agitators (they are generally called Fathers of the Church)
dared to declare: "We too have our classical literature, we _do not
need that of the Greeks_"--and meanwhile they proudly pointed to their
books of legends, their letters of apostles, and their apologetic
tractlets, just in the same way that to-day the English "Salvation
Army" wages its fight against Shakespeare and other "heathens" with
an analogous literature. You already guess it, I do not like the "New
Testament"; it almost upsets me that I stand so isolated in my taste
so far as concerns this valued, this over-valued Scripture; the taste
of two thousand years is _against_ me; but what boots it! "Here I
stand! I cannot help myself"[5]--I have the courage of my bad taste.
The Old Testament--yes, that is something quite different, all honour
to the Old Testament! I find therein great men, an heroic landscape,
and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the incomparable naïveté
_of the strong heart_; further still, I find a people. In the New, on
the contrary, just a hostel of petty sects, pure rococo of the soul,
twisting angles and fancy touches, nothing but conventicle air, not to
forget an occasional whiff of bucolic sweetness which appertains to the
epoch (_and_ the Roman province) and is less Jewish than Hellenistic.
Meekness and braggadocio cheek by jowl; an emotional garrulousness
that almost deafens; passionate hysteria, but no passion; painful
pantomime; here manifestly every one lacked good breeding. How dare any
one make so much fuss about their little failings as do these pious
little fellows! No one cares a straw about it--let alone God. Finally
they actually wish to have "the crown of eternal life," do all these
little provincials! In return for what, in sooth? For what end? It is
impossible to carry insolence any further. An immortal Peter! who could
stand _him_! They have an ambition which makes one laugh: the _thing_
dishes up cut and dried his most personal life, his melancholies, and
common-or-garden troubles, as though the Universe itself were under
an obligation to bother itself about them, for it never gets tired of
wrapping up God Himself in the petty misery in which its troubles are
involved. And how about the atrocious form of this chronic hobnobbing
with God? This Jewish, and not merely Jewish, slobbering and clawing
importunacy towards God!--There exist little despised "heathen nations"
in East Asia, from whom these first Christians could have learnt
something worth learning, a little tact in worshiping; these nations
do not allow themselves to say aloud the name of their God. This seems
to me delicate enough, it is certain that it is _too_ delicate, and
not only for primitive Christians; to take a contrast, just recollect
Luther, the most "eloquent" and insolent peasant whom Germany has had,
think of the Lutherian tone, in which he felt quite the most in his
element during his _tête-à-têtes_ with God. Luther's opposition to the
mediæval saints of the Church (in particular, against "that devil's
hog, the Pope"), was, there is no doubt, at bottom the opposition of
a boor, who was offended at the _good etiquette_ of the Church, that
worship-etiquette of the sacerdotal code, which only admits to the
holy of holies the initiated and the silent, and shuts the door against
the boors. These definitely were not to be allowed a hearing in this
planet--but Luther the peasant simply wished it otherwise; as it was,
it was not German enough for him. He personally wished himself to talk
direct, to talk personally, to talk "straight from the shoulder" with
his God. Well, he's done it. The ascetic ideal, you will guess, was at
no time and in no place, a school of good taste, still less of good
manners--at the best it was a school for sacerdotal manners: that is,
it contains in itself something which was a deadly enemy to all good
manners. Lack of measure, opposition to measure, it is itself a "_non
plus ultra_."


23.

The ascetic ideal has corrupted not only health and taste, there are
also third, fourth, fifth, and sixth things which it has corrupted--I
shall take care not to go through the catalogue (when should I get to
the end?). I have here to expose not what this ideal effected; but
rather only what it _means_, on what it is based, what lies lurking
behind it and under it, that of which it is the provisional expression,
an obscure expression bristling with queries and misunderstandings.
And with _this_ object only in view I presumed "not to spare" my
readers a glance at the awfulness of its results, a glance at its
fatal results; I did this to prepare them for the final and most
awful aspect presented to me by the question of the significance of
that ideal. What is the significance of the _power_ of that ideal,
the monstrousness of its power? Why is it given such an amount of
scope? Why is not a better resistance offered against it? The ascetic
ideal expresses one will: where is the opposition will, in which an
opposition ideal expresses itself? The ascetic ideal has an aim--
this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of
human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow;
it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it
forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it repudiates, denies,
affirms, confirms, only in the sense of its own interpretation (and was
there ever a more thoroughly elaborated system of interpretation?);
it subjects itself to no power, rather does it believe in its own
precedence over every power--it believes that nothing powerful exists
in the world that has not first got to receive from "it" a meaning,
a right to exist, a value, as being an instrument in its work, a
way and means to its end, to one end. Where is the _counterpart_ of
this complete system of will, end, and interpretation? Why is the
counterpart lacking? Where is the other "one aim"? But I am told it
is not lacking, that not only has it fought a long and fortunate fight
with that ideal, but that further it has already won the mastery over
that ideal in all essentials: let our whole modern _science_ attest
this--that modern science, which, like the genuine reality-philosophy
which it is, manifestly believes in itself alone, manifestly has the
courage to be itself, the will to be itself, and has got on well
enough without God, another world, and negative virtues.

With all their noisy agitator-babble, however, they effect nothing with
me; these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices do
not come from the deeps with sufficient audibility, they are not the
mouthpiece for the abyss of scientific knowledge--for to-day scientific
knowledge is an abyss--the word "science," in such trumpeter-mouths,
is a prostitution, an abuse, an impertinence. The truth is just the
opposite from what is maintained in the ascetic theory. Science has
to-day absolutely no belief in itself, let alone in an ideal superior
to itself, and wherever science still consists of passion, love,
ardour, suffering, it is not the opposition to that ascetic ideal, but
rather the _incarnation of its latest and noblest form_. Does that ring
strange? There are enough brave and decent working people, even among
the learned men of to-day, who like their little corner, and who, just
because they are pleased so to do, become at times indecently loud with
their demand, that people to-day should be quite content, especially
in science--for in science there is so much useful work to do. I do
not deny it--there is nothing I should like less than to spoil the
delight of these honest workers in their handiwork; for I rejoice in
their work. But the fact of science requiring hard work, the fact of
its having contented workers, is absolutely no proof of science as a
whole having to-day one end, one will, one ideal, one passion for a
great faith; the contrary, as I have said, is the case. When science
is not the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal--but these are
cases of such rarity, selectness, and exquisiteness, as to preclude the
general judgment being affected thereby--science is a _hiding-place_
for every kind of cowardice, disbelief, remorse, _despectio sui_, bad
conscience--it is the very _anxiety_ that springs from having no ideal,
the suffering from the _lack_ of a great love, the discontent with an
enforced moderation. Oh, what does all science not cover to-day? How
much, at any rate, does it not try to cover? The diligence of our best
scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their
brain at both ends--their very mastery in their handiwork--how often is
the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continuing to see a
certain thing? Science as a self-anæsthetic: _do you know that_? You
wound them--every one who consorts with scholars experiences this--you
wound them sometimes to the quick through just a harmless word; when
you think you are paying them a compliment you embitter them beyond all
bounds, simply because you didn't have the _finesse_ to infer the real
kind of customers you had to tackle, the _sufferer_ kind (who won't own
up even to themselves what they really are), the dazed and unconscious
kind who have only one fear--_coming to consciousness_.


24.

And now look at the other side, at those rare cases, of which I spoke,
the most supreme idealists to be found nowadays among philosophers and
scholars. Have we, perchance, found in them the sought-for _opponents_
of the ascetic ideal, its _anti-idealists_? In fact, they _believe_
themselves to be such, these "unbelievers" (for they are all of them
that): it seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea
of being opponents of this ideal, so earnest are they on this subject,
so passionate in word and gesture;--but does it follow that what
they believe must necessarily be _true_? We "knowers" have grown by
degrees suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion has step by
step habituated us to draw just the opposite conclusions to what people
have drawn before; that is to say, wherever the strength of a belief
is particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of
proving what is believed, the conclusion of its actual _improbability_.
We do not again deny that "faith produces salvation": _for that very
reason_ we do deny that faith _proves_ anything,--a strong faith, which
produces happiness, causes suspicion of the object of that faith, it
does not establish its "truth," it does establish a certain probability
of--_illusion_. What is now the position in these cases? These
solitaries and deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their
claim to intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic
spirits, who constitute the glory of our time; all these pale atheists,
anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, "ephectics,"
and "hectics" of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the
latter, both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists
of knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience
dwells and is alive--in point of fact they believe themselves as far
away as possible from the ascetic ideal, do these "free, very free
spirits": and yet, if I may reveal what they themselves cannot see--for
they stand too near themselves: this ideal is simply _their_ ideal,
they represent it nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves
are its most spiritualised product, its most advanced picket of
skirmishers and scouts, its most insidious delicate and elusive form
of seduction.--If I am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will
be one with this sentence: for some time past there have been no
free spirits; _for they still believe in truth_. When the Christian
Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order
of assassins, that order of free spirits _par excellence_, whose
lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order of monks
has ever attained, then in some way or other they managed to get an
inkling of that symbol and tally-word, that was reserved for the
highest grade alone as their _secretum_, "Nothing is true, everything
is allowed,"--in sooth, that was _freedom_ of thought, thereby was
_taking leave_ of the very belief in truth. Has indeed any European,
any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into this proposition
and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know _from experience_ the
Minotauros of this den.--I doubt it--nay, I know otherwise. Nothing
is more really alien to these "mono-fanatics," these _so-called_
"free spirits," than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no
respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their
belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this perhaps too much from
experience at close quarters--that dignified philosophic abstinence
to which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of
the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does
affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual,
the _factum brutum_, that fatalism in "_petits faits_" (ce petit
faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind
of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation
generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting,
suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other _essential_
attributes of interpretation)--all this, considered broadly, expresses
the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation
of the senses (it is at bottom only a _modus_ of that repudiation.)
But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith
_in the ascetic ideal itself_, even though it take the form of its
unconscious imperatives,--make no mistake about it, it is the faith,
I repeat, in a _metaphysical_ value, an _intrinsic_ value of truth,
of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal
(it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does
not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a
science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always
exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning,
a limit and method, a _right_ to existence. (He who holds a contrary
opinion on the subject--he, for example, who takes it upon himself to
establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"--has first got
to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself--the
gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable
females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it--and here I quote my _Joyful
Wisdom_, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that
daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith
in science, _asserts thereby a different world_ from that of life,
nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that
different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart,
this world, _our_ world? The belief on which our faith in science is
based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief--even we knowers
of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from
that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith,
from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief
that God is truth, that truth is _divine_.... But what if this belief
becomes more and more incredible, what if nothing proves itself to
be divine, unless it be error, blindness, lies--what if God, Himself
proved Himself to be our _oldest lie_?"--It is necessary to stop at
this point and to consider the situation carefully. Science itself now
_needs_ a justification (which is not for a minute to say that there
is such a justification). Turn in this context to the most ancient and
the most modern philosophers: they all fail to realise the extent of
the need of a justification on the part of the Will for Truth--here
is a gap in every philosophy--what is it caused by? Because up to the
present the ascetic ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was
fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because Truth
was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this "allowed"?
From the minute that the belief in the God of the ascetic ideal is
repudiated, there exists _a new problem_: the problem of the value of
truth. The Will for Truth needed a critique--let us define by these
words our own task---the value of truth is tentatively _to be called
in question_.... (If this seems too laconically expressed, I recommend
the reader to peruse again that passage from the _Joyful Wisdom_ which
bears the title, "How far we also are still pious," Aph. 344, and best
of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as the Preface to
_The Dawn of Day_.)


25.

No! You can't get round me with science, when I search for the natural
antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: "_Where_
is the opposed will in which the _opponent ideal_ expresses itself?"
Science is not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this
function; in every department science needs an ideal value, a power
which creates values, and in whose _service_ it _can believe_ in itself
--science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic
ideal is not in itself antagonistic; speaking roughly, it rather
represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal.
Tested more exactly, its opposition and antagonism are concerned not
with the ideal itself, but only with that ideal's outworks, its outer
garb, its masquerade, with its temporary hardening, stiffening, and
dogmatising--it makes the life in the ideal free once more, while it
repudiates its superficial elements. These two phenomena, science and
the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same basis––I have already made
this clear––the basis, I say, oft the same over-appreciation of truth
(more accurately the same belief in the _impossibility_ of valuing and
of criticising truth), and consequently they are _necessarily_ allies,
so that, in the event of their being attacked, they must always be
attacked and called into question together. A valuation of the ascetic
ideal inevitably entails a valuation of science as well; lose no time
in seeing this clearly, and be sharp to catch it! (_Art_, I am speaking
provisionally, for I will treat it on some other occasion in greater
detail,––art, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the _will for
deception_ has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally
opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt
this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up
to the present. Plato _versus_ Homer, that is the complete, the true
antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the
great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the
_golden_ nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic
ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic _corruption_ that
there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent
phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered
physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as
does the ascetic ideal: a certain _impoverishment of life_ is the
presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the
emotions, slackening of the _tempo_, the substitution of dialectic for
instinct, _seriousness_ impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness,
that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling,
toiling life). Consider the periods in a nation in which the learned
man comes into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often
of sunset, of decay--the effervescing strength, the confidence in
life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderance of
the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent
of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women,
the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life.
(Science handled as a problem! what is the meaning of science?--upon
this point the Preface to the _Birth of Tragedy_.) No! this "modern
science"--mark you this well--is at times the _best_ ally for the
ascetic ideal, and for the very reason that it is the ally which is
most unconscious, most automatic, most secret, and most subterranean!
They have been playing into each other's hands up to the present, have
these "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that ideal (take
care, by the bye, not to think that these opponents are the antithesis
of this ideal, that they are the _rich_ in spirit--that they are _not_;
I have called them the _hectic_ in spirit). As for these celebrated
victories of science; there is no doubt that they are _victories_--but
victories over what? There was not for a single minute any victory
among their list over the ascetic ideal, rather was it made stronger,
that is to say, more elusive, more abstract, more insidious, from
the fact that a wall, an outwork, that had got built on to the main
fortress and disfigured its appearance, should from time to time be
ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by science. Does any one seriously
suggest that the downfall of the theological astronomy signified the
downfall of that ideal?--Has, perchance, man grown _less in need_ of a
transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that
time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in
the _visible_ order of the universe? Has there not been since the time
of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and
his _will_ for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his
uniquenesses irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone--he
has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he
who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God").
Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane--he rolls
faster and faster away from the centre--whither? into nothingness?
into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"--Well! this
would be the straight way--to the old ideal?--All science (and by no
means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating
effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates
my own importance"), all science, natural as much as _unnatural_--by
unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason--nowadays sets out to
talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion
had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far
as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter
form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's _contempt of himself_,
that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final
and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point
of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten
how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to
_counteract_ the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that
Kant's _victory_ over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul,"
"Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the
theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?––
And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute,
if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that
from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a
winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he
has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue
their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the
respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics,
reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they
now worship _their very query_ as God? (Xaver Doudan talks somewhere
of the _ravages_ which _l'habitude d'admirer l'inintelligible au lieu
de rester tout simplement dans l'inconnu_ has produced––the ancients,
he thinks, must have been exempt from those ravages.) Supposing that
everything, "known" to man, fails to satisfy his desires, and on the
contrary contradicts and horrifies them, what a divine way out of all
this to be able to look for the responsibility, not in the "desiring"
but in "knowing"!––"There is no knowledge. _Consequently_––there is
a God"; what a novel _elegantia syllogism_i! what a triumph for the
ascetic ideal!


26.

Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show in its demeanour
greater confidence in life, greater confidence in its ideals? Its
loftiest pretension is now to be a _mirror_; it repudiates all
teleology; it will have no more "proving"; it disdains to play the
judge, and thereby shows its good taste––it asserts as little as it
denies, it fixes, it "describes." All this is to a high degree ascetic,
but at the same time it is to a much greater degree _nihilistic_; make
no mistake about this! You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but
determined gaze,––an eye that _looks out_ as an isolated North Pole
explorer looks out (perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look
back?)––there is snow––here is life silenced, the last crows which
caw here are called "whither?" "Vanity," "Nada"––here nothing more
flourishes and grows, at the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg
and the "pity" of Tolstoi. But as for that other school of historians,
a perhaps still more "modern" school, a voluptuous and lascivious
school which ogles life and the ascetic ideal with equal fervour,
which uses the word "artist" as a glove, and has nowadays established
a "corner" for itself, in all the praise given to contemplation; oh,
what a thirst do these sweet intellectuals excite even for ascetics
and winter landscapes! Nay! The devil take these "contemplative" folk!
How much liefer would I wander with those historical Nihilists through
the gloomiest, grey, cold mist!––nay, I shall not mind listening
(supposing I have to choose) to one who is completely unhistorical
and anti-historical (a man, like Dühring for instance, over whose
periods a hitherto shy and unavowed species of "beautiful souls" has
grown intoxicated in contemporary Germany, _the species anarchistica_
within the educated proletariate). The "contemplative" are a hundred
times worse––I never knew anything which produced such intense
nausea as one of those "objective" _chairs_,[6] one of those scented
mannikins-about-town of history, a thing half-priest, half-satyr (Renan
_parfum_), which betrays by the high, shrill falsetto of his applause
what he lacks and where he lacks it, who betrays where in this case
the Fates have plied their ghastly shears, alas! in too surgeon-like
a fashion! This is distasteful to me, and irritates my patience; let
him keep patient at such sights who has nothing to lose thereby,––such
a sight enrages me, such spectators embitter me against the "play,"
even more than does the play itself (history itself, you understand);
Anacreontic moods imperceptibly come over me. This Nature, who gave
to the steer its horn, to the lion its χάσμ ὀδοντων, for what purpose
did Nature give me my foot?––To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not merely
to run away! To trample on all the worm-eaten "chairs," the cowardly
contemplators, the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters with
ascetic ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All reverence
on my part to the ascetic ideal, _in so far as it is honourable_! So
long as it believes in itself and plays no pranks on us! But I like
not all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiate ambition to smell
of the infinite, until eventually the infinite smells of bugs; I like
not the whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life;
I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves in wisdom
and look "objective"; I like not the agitators dressed up as heroes,
who hide their dummy-heads behind the stalking-horse of an ideal; I
like not the ambitious artists who would fain play the ascetic and
the priest, and are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns; I like not,
again, these newest speculators in idealism, the Anti-Semites, who
nowadays roll their eyes in the patent Christian-Aryan-man-of-honour
fashion, and by an abuse of moralist attitudes and agitation dodges, so
cheap as to exhaust any patience, strive to excite all the blockhead
elements in the populace (the invariable success of _every_ kind of
intellectual charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs together with
the almost indisputable and already quite palpable desolation of the
German mind, whose cause I look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers,
politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition
precedent of this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the
strong but narrow principle, "Germany, Germany above everything,"[7]
and finally the _paralysis agitans_ of "modern ideas"). Europe
nowadays is, above all, wealthy and ingenious in means of excitement;
it apparently has no more crying necessity than _stimulantia_ and
alcohol. Hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most fiery
spirits of the mind; hence too the repulsive, evil-smelling, perjured,
pseudo–alcoholic air everywhere. I should like to know how many cargoes
of imitation idealism, of hero-costumes and high falutin' clap-trap,
how many casks of sweetened pity liqueur (Firm: _la religion de la
souffrance_), how many crutches of righteous indignation for the help
of these flat-footed intellects, how many _comedians_ of the Christian
moral ideal would need to-day to be exported from Europe, to enable
its air to smell pure again. It is obvious that, in regard to this
over-production, a new _trade_ possibility lies open; it is obvious
that there is a new business to be done in little ideal idols and
obedient "idealists"--don't pass over this tip! Who has sufficient
courage? We have in _our hands_ the possibility of idealising the whole
earth. But what am I talking about courage? we only need one thing
here--a hand, a free, a very free hand.


27.

Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of
the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our
problem can certainly do without them, the problem of _meaning_ of
the ascetic ideal--what has it got to do with yesterday or to-day?
those things shall be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in
another connection (under the title "A Contribution to the History of
European Nihilism," I refer for this to a work which I am preparing:
_The Will to Power, an Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values_).
The only reason why I come to allude to it here is this: the ascetic
ideal has at times, even in the most intellectual sphere, only one
real kind of enemies and _damagers_: these are the comedians of this
ideal--for they awake mistrust. Everywhere otherwise, where the mind
is at work seriously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it
dispenses altogether now with an ideal (the popular expression for this
abstinence is "Atheism")--_with the exception of the will for truth_.
But this will, this _remnant_ of an ideal, is, if you will believe me,
that ideal itself in its severest and cleverest formulation, esoteric
through and through, stripped of all outworks, and consequently not so
much its remnant as its _kernel_. Unqualified honest atheism (and its
air only do we breathe, we, the most intellectual men of this age) is
_not_ opposed to that ideal, to the extent that it appears to be; it is
rather one of the final phases of its evolution, one of its syllogisms
and pieces of inherent logic--it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of
a two-thousand-year training in truth, which finally forbids itself
_the lie of the belief in God_. (The same course of development in
India--quite independently, and consequently of some demonstrative
value--the same ideal driving to the same conclusion the decisive point
reached five hundred years before the European era, or more precisely
at the time of Buddha--it started in the Sankhyam philosophy, and then
this was popularised through Buddha, and made into a religion.)

_What_, I put the question with all strictness, has really _triumphed_
over the Christian God? The answer stands in my _Joyful Wisdom_, Aph.
357: "the Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was
with increasing seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian
conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience
into intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though
it were a proof of the goodness and guardianship of God; interpreting
history in honour of a divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral
order of the world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal
experiences, as pious men have for long enough explained them, as
though every arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented
and sent out of love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now
done away with, all this has the conscience _against_ it, and is
regarded by every subtler conscience as disreputable, dishonourable,
as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice--by means of this severity,
if by means of anything at all, are we, in sooth, _good Europeans_
and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-mastery.". .. All
great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act
of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary
"self-mastery" even in the essence of life--ever is the law-giver
finally exposed to the cry, "_patere legem quam ipse tulisti_"; in
thus wise did Christianity _go to ruin as a dogma_, through its own
morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as
a morality--we are standing on the threshold of this event. After
Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, it
finally draws its _strongest conclusion_, its conclusion against
itself; this, however, happens, when it puts the question, "_what is
the meaning of every will for truth?_" And here again do I touch on my
problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet _I know_ of no
friends): what sense has our whole being, if it does not mean that in
our own selves that will for truth has come to its own consciousness
_as a problem_?---By reason of this attainment of self-consciousness
on the part of the will for truth, morality from henceforward--there
is no doubt about it--goes _to pieces_: this is that great hundred-act
play that is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most
terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all
plays.


28.

If you except the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man had no meaning.
His existence on earth contained no end; "What is the purpose of man
at all?" was a question without an answer; the _will_ for man and the
world was lacking; behind every great human destiny rang as a refrain
a still greater "Vanity!" The ascetic ideal simply means this: that
something _was lacking_, that a tremendous _void_ encircled man--he did
not know how to justify himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself,
he _suffered_ from the problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in
other ways, he was in the main a _diseased_ animal; but his problem
was not suffering itself, but the lack of an answer to that crying
question, "_To what purpose_ do we suffer?" Man, the bravest animal
and the one most inured to suffering, does _not_ repudiate suffering in
itself: he _wills_ it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown
a meaning for it, a _purpose_ of suffering. _Not_ suffering, but the
senselessness of suffering was the curse which till then lay spread
over humanity--_and the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning!_ It was up
till then the only meaning; but any meaning is better than no meaning;
the ascetic ideal was in that connection the _"faute de mieux" par
excellence_ that existed at that time. In that ideal suffering _found
an explanation_; the tremendous gap seemed filled; the door to all
suicidal Nihilism was closed. The explanation--there is no doubt about
it--brought in its train new suffering, deeper, more penetrating, more
venomous, gnawing more brutally into life: it brought all suffering
under the perspective of _guilt_; but in spite of all that--man was
_saved_ thereby, he had a _meaning_, and from henceforth was no more
like a leaf in the wind, a shuttle-cock of chance, of nonsense, he
could now "will" something--absolutely immaterial to what end, to what
purpose, with what means he wished: _the will itself was saved_. It
is absolutely impossible to disguise _what_ in point of fact is made
clear by every complete will that has taken its direction from the
ascetic ideal: this hate of the human, and even more of the animal,
and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason
itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to get right
away from all illusion, change, growth, death, wishing and even
desiring--all this means--let us have the courage to grasp it--a will
for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most
fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains _a will_!--and
to say at the end that which I said at the beginning--man will wish
_Nothingness_ rather than not wish _at all_.



[1] An allusion to the celebrated monologue in William Tell.

[2] Mistress Sly.--Tr.

[3] In the German text "Heiland." This has the double meaning of
"healer" and "saviour."--H. B. S.

[4] "Horrible beast."

[5] "Here I stand! I cannot help myself. God help me! Amen"--were
Luther's words before the Reichstag at Worms.--H. B. S.

[6] E.g. Lectureships.

[7] An allusion to the well-known patriotic song.--H. B. S.




PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. Translated by J. M. KENNEDY.


[The following twenty-seven fragments were intended by Nietzsche to
form a supplement to Chapter VIII. of _Beyond Good and Evil_, dealing
with Peoples and Countries.]


1.

The Europeans now imagine themselves as representing, in the main, the
highest types of men on earth.


2.

A characteristic of Europeans: inconsistency between word and deed;
the Oriental is true to himself in daily life. How the European has
established colonies is explained by his nature, which resembles that
of a beast of prey.

This inconsistency is explained by the fact that Christianity has
abandoned the class from which it sprang.

This is the difference between us and the Hellenes: their morals grew
up among the governing castes. Thucydides' morals are the same as those
that exploded everywhere with Plato.

Attempts towards honesty at the Renaissance, for example: always for
the benefit of the arts. Michael Angelo's conception of God as the
"Tyrant of the World" was an honest one.


3.

I rate Michael Angelo higher than Raphael, because, through all the
Christian clouds and prejudices of his time, he saw the ideal of a
culture _nobler_ than the Christo-Raphaelian: whilst Raphael truly
and modestly glorified only the values handed down to him, and did
not carry within himself any inquiring, yearning instincts. Michael
Angelo, on the other hand, saw and felt the problem of the law-giver of
new values: the problem of the conqueror made perfect, who first had
to subdue the "hero within himself," the man exalted to his highest
pedestal, master even of his pity, who mercilessly shatters and
annihilates everything that does not bear his own stamp, shining in
Olympian divinity. Michael Angelo was naturally only at certain moments
so high and so far beyond his age and Christian Europe: for the most
part he adopted a condescending attitude towards the eternal feminine
in Christianity; it would seem, indeed, that in the end he broke down
before her, and gave up the ideal of his most inspired hours. It was
an ideal which only a man in the strongest and highest vigour of life
could bear; but not a man advanced in years! Indeed, he would have had
to demolish Christianity with his ideal! But he was not thinker and
philosopher enough for that Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci alone of those
artists had a really super-Christian outlook. He knows the East, the
"land of dawn," within himself as well as without himself. There is
something super-European and silent in him: a characteristic of every
one who has seen too wide a circle of things good and bad.


4.

How much we have learnt and learnt anew in fifty years! The whole
Romantic School with its belief in "the people" is refuted! No Homeric
poetry as "popular" poetry! No deification of the great powers of
Nature! No deduction from language-relationship to race-relationship!
No "intellectual contemplations" of the supernatural! No truth
enshrouded in religion!

The problem of truthfulness is quite a new one. I am astonished. From
this standpoint we regard such natures as Bismarck as culpable out of
carelessness, such as Richard Wagner out of want of modesty; we would
condemn Plato for his _pia fraus_, Kant for the derivation of his
Categorical Imperative, his own belief certainly not having come to him
from this source.

Finally, even doubt turns against itself: doubt in doubt. And the
question as to the _value_ of truthfulness and its extent lies _there_.


5.

What I observe with pleasure in the German is his Mephistophelian
nature; but, to tell the truth, one must have a higher conception of
Mephistopheles than Goethe had, who found it necessary to _diminish_
his Mephistopheles in order to magnify his "inner Faust." The true
German Mephistopheles is much more dangerous, bold, wicked, and
cunning, and consequently more open-hearted: remember the nature
of Frederick the Great, or of that much greater Frederick, the
Hohenstaufen, Frederick II.

The real German Mephistopheles crosses the Alps, and believes that
everything there belongs to him. Then he recovers himself, like
Winckelmann, like Mozart. He looks upon Faust and Hamlet as
caricatures, invented to be laughed at, and upon Luther also. Goethe
had his good German moments, when he laughed inwardly at all these
things. But then he fell back again into his cloudy moods.


6.

Perhaps the Germans have only grown up in a wrong climate! There is
something in them that might be Hellenic!--something that is awakened
when they are brought into touch with the South--Winckelmann, Goethe,
Mozart. We should not forget, however, that we are still young. Luther
is still our last event; our last book is still the Bible. The Germans
have never yet "moralised." Also, the very food of the Germans was
their doom: its consequence, Philistinism.


7.

The Germans are a dangerous people: they are experts at inventing
intoxicants. Gothic, rococo (according to Semper), the historical sense
and exoticism, Hegel, Richard Wagner--Leibniz, too (dangerous at the
present day)--(they even idealised the serving soul as the virtue of
scholars and soldiers, also as the simple mind). The Germans may well
be the most composite people on earth.

"The people of the Middle," the inventors of porcelain, and of a kind
of Chinese breed of Privy Councillor.


8.

The smallness and baseness of the German soul were not and are not
consequences of the system of small states; for it is well known that
the inhabitants of much smaller states were proud and independent:
and it is not a large state _per se_ that makes souls freer and more
manly. The man whose soul obeys the slavish command: "Thou shalt and
must kneel!" in whose body there is an involuntary bowing and scraping
to titles, orders, gracious glances from above--well, such a man
in an "Empire" will only bow all the more deeply and lick the dust
more fervently in the presence of the greater sovereign than in the
presence of the lesser: this cannot be doubted. We can still see in the
lower classes of Italians that aristocratic self-sufficiency; manly
discipline and self-confidence still form a part of the long history
of their country: these are virtues which once manifested themselves
before their eyes. A poor Venetian gondolier makes a far better figure
than a Privy Councillor from Berlin, and is even a better man in the
end--any one can see this. Just ask the women.


9.

Most artists, even some of the greatest (including the historians) have
up to the present belonged to the serving classes (whether they serve
people of high position or princes or women or "the masses"), not to
speak of their dependence upon the Church and upon moral law. Thus
Rubens portrayed the nobility of his age; but only according to their
vague conception of taste, not according to his own measure of beauty
on the whole, therefore, against his own taste. Van Dyck was nobler in
this respect: who in all those whom he painted added a certain amount
of what he himself most highly valued: he did not descend from himself,
but rather lifted up others to himself when he "rendered."

The slavish humility of the artist to his public (as Sebastian Bach has
testified in undying and outrageous words in the dedication of his High
Mass) is perhaps more difficult to perceive in music; but it is all the
more deeply engrained. A hearing would be refused me if I endeavoured
to impart my views on this subject. Chopin possesses distinction, like
Van Dyck. The disposition of Beethoven is that of a proud peasant;
of Haydn, that of a proud servant. Mendelssohn, too, possesses
distinction--like Goethe, in the most natural way in the world.


10.

We could at any time have counted on the fingers of one hand those
German learned men who possessed wit: the remainder have understanding,
and a few of them, happily, that famous "childlike character"
which divines.... It is our privilege: with this "divination" German
science has discovered some things which we can hardly conceive of, and
which, after all, do not exist, perhaps. It is only the Jews among the
Germans who do not "divine" like them.


11.

As Frenchmen reflect the politeness and _esprit_ of French society,
so do Germans reflect something of the deep, pensive earnestness of
their mystics and musicians, and also of their silly childishness. The
Italian exhibits a great deal of republican distinction and art, and
can show himself to be noble and proud without vanity.


12.

A larger number of the higher and better-endowed men will, I hope, have
in the end so much self-restraint as to be able to get rid of their bad
taste for affectation and sentimental darkness, and to turn against
Richard Wagner as much as against Schopenhauer. These two Germans are
leading us to ruin; they flatter our dangerous qualities. A stronger
future is prepared for us in Goethe, Beethoven, and Bismarck than in
these racial aberrations. We have had no philosophers yet.


13.

The peasant is the commonest type of noblesse, for he is dependent upon
himself most of all. Peasant blood is still the best blood in Germany
--for example, Luther, Niebuhr, Bismarck.

Bismarck a Slav. Let any one look upon the face of Germans. Everything
that had manly, exuberant blood in it went abroad. Over the smug
populace remaining, the slave-souled people, there came an improvement
from abroad, especially by a mixture of Slavonic blood.

The Brandenburg nobility and the Prussian nobility in general (and the
peasant of certain North German districts), comprise at present the
most manly natures in Germany.

That the manliest men shall rule: this is only the natural order of
things.


14.

The future of German culture rests with the sons of the Prussian
officers.


15.

There has always been a want of wit in Germany, and mediocre heads
attain there to the highest honours, because even they are rare. What
is most highly prized is diligence and perseverance and a certain
cold-blooded, critical outlook, and, for the sake of such qualities,
German scholarship and the German military system have become paramount
in Europe.


16.

Parliaments may be very useful to a strong and versatile statesman:
he has something there to rely upon (every such thing must, however,
be able to resist!)--upon which he can throw a great deal of
responsibility. On the whole, however, I could wish that the counting
mania and the superstitious belief in majorities were not established
in Germany, as with the Latin races, and that one could finally invent
something new even in politics! It is senseless and dangerous to let
the custom of universal suffrage--which is still but a short time under
cultivation, and could easily be uprooted--take a deeper root: whilst,
of course, its introduction was merely an expedient to steer clear of
temporary difficulties.


17.

Can any one interest himself in this German Empire? Where is the new
thought? Is it only a new combination of power? All the worse, if it
does not know its own mind. Peace and laisser aller are not types of
politics for which I have any respect. Ruling, and helping the highest
thoughts to victory--the only things that can make me interested in
Germany. England's small-mindedness is the great danger now on earth.
I observe more inclination towards greatness in the feelings of the
Russian Nihilists than in those of the English Utilitarians. We require
an intergrowth of the German and Slav races, and we require, too, the
cleverest financiers, the Jews, for us to become masters of the world.

(a) The sense of reality.

(b) A giving-up of the English principle of the people's right of
representation. We require the representation of the great interests.

(c) We require an unconditional union with Russia, together with a
mutual plan of action which shall not permit any English schemata to
obtain the mastery in Russia. No American future!

(d) A national system of politics is untenable, and embarrassment by
Christian views is a very great evil. In Europe all sensible people are
sceptics, whether they say so or not.


18.

I see over and beyond all these national wars, new "empires," and
whatever else lies in the foreground. What I am concerned with--for I
see it preparing itself slowly and hesitatingly--is the United Europe.
It was the only real work, the one impulse in the souls, of all the
broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century--this preparation
of a new synthesis, and the tentative effort to anticipate the future
of "the European." Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew
old, did they fall back again into the national narrowness of the
"Fatherlanders"--then they were once more "patriots." I am thinking
of men like Napoleon, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal,
Schopenhauer. Perhaps Richard Wagner likewise belongs to their number,
concerning whom, as a successful type of German obscurity, nothing can
be said without some such "perhaps."

But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new unity there
comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small States of Europe--I
refer to all our present kingdoms and "empires"--will in a short time
become economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled struggle
for the possession of local and international trade. Money is even
now compelling European nations to amalgamate into one Power. In
order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery
of the world with good prospects of victory (it is easy to perceive
against whom this battle will be waged), she must probably "come to
an understanding" with England. The English colonies are needed for
this struggle, just as much as modern Germany, to play her new rôle of
broker and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland.
For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to
continue to act her old part for fifty years more; the impossibility
of shutting out _homines novi_ from the government will ruin her, and
her continual change of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the
carrying out of any tasks which require to be spread out over a long
period of time. A man must to-day be a soldier first and foremost that
he may not afterwards lose his credit as a merchant. Enough; here,
as in other matters, the coming century will be found following in
the footsteps of Napoleon--the first man, and the man of greatest
initiative and advanced views, of modern times. For the tasks of the
next century, the methods of popular representation and parliaments are
the most inappropriate imaginable.


19.

The condition of Europe in the next century will once again lead to the
breeding of manly virtues, because men will live in continual danger.
Universal military service is already the curious antidote which we
possess for the effeminacy of democratic ideas, and it has grown up out
of the struggle of the nations. (Nation--men who speak one language
and read the same newspapers. These men now call themselves "nations,"
and would far too readily trace their descent from the same source and
through the same history; which, however, even with the assistance of
the most malignant lying in the past, they have not succeeded in
doing.)


20.

What quagmires and mendacity must there be about if it is possible,
in the modern European hotch-potch, to raise questions of "race"! (It
being premised that the origin of such writers is not in Horneo and
Borneo.)


21.

Maxim: To associate with no man who takes any part in the mendacious
race swindle.


22.

With the freedom of travel now existing, groups of men of the same
kindred can join together and establish communal habits and customs.
The overcoming of "nations."


23.

To make Europe a centre of culture, national stupidities should not
make us blind to the fact that in the higher regions there is already a
continuous reciprocal dependence. France and German philosophy. Richard
Wagner and Paris (1830-50). Goethe and Greece. All things are impelled
towards, a synthesis of the European past in the highest types of mind.


24.

Mankind has still much before it--how, generally speaking, could
the ideal be taken from the past? Perhaps merely in relation to the
present, which latter is possibly a lower region.


25.

This is our distrust, which recurs again and again; our care, which
never lets us sleep; our question, which no one listens to or wishes
to listen to; our Sphinx, near which there is more than one precipice:
we believe that the men of present-day Europe are deceived in regard
to the things which we love best, and a pitiless demon (no, not
pitiless, only indifferent and puerile)--plays with our hearts and
their enthusiasm, as it may perhaps have already played with everything
that lived and loved; I believe that everything which we Europeans
of to-day are in the habit of admiring as the values of all these
respected things called "humanity," "mankind," "sympathy," "pity," may
be of some value as the debilitation and moderating of certain powerful
and dangerous primitive impulses. Nevertheless, in the long run all
these things are nothing else than the belittlement of the entire type
"man," his mediocrisation, if in such a desperate situation I may make
use of such a desperate expression. I think that the commedia umana for
an epicurean spectator-god must consist in this: that the Europeans, by
virtue of their growing morality, believe in all their innocence and
vanity that they are rising higher and higher, whereas the truth is
that they are sinking lower and lower--i.e. through the cultivation of
all the virtues which are useful to a herd, and through the repression
of the other and contrary virtues which give rise to a new, higher,
stronger, masterful race of men--the first-named virtues merely develop
the herd-animal in man and stabilitate the animal "man," for until now
man has been "the animal as yet unstabilitated."


26.

Genius and Epoch.--Heroism is no form of selfishness, for one is
shipwrecked by it.... The direction of power is often conditioned by
the state of the period in which the great man happens to be born; and
this fact brings about the superstition that he is the expression of
his time. But this same power could be applied in several different
ways; and between him and his time there is always this difference:
that public opinion always worships the herd instinct,--_i.e._ the
instinct of the weak,--while he, the strong man, rights for strong
ideals.


27.

The fate now overhanging Europe is simply this: that it is exactly
her strongest sons that come rarely and late to the spring-time of
their existence; that, as a rule, when they are already in their early
youth they perish, saddened, disgusted, darkened in mind, just because
they have already, with the entire passion of their strength, drained
to the dregs the cup of disillusionment, which in our days means the
cup of knowledge, and they would not have been the strongest had
they not also been the most disillusionised. For that is the test of
their power--they must first of all rise out of the illness of their
epoch to reach their own health. A late spring-time is their mark of
distinction; also, let us add, late merriment, late folly, the late
exuberance of joy! For this is the danger of to-day: everything that we
loved when we were young has betrayed us. Our last love--the love which
makes us acknowledge her, our love for Truth--let us take care that
she, too, does not betray us!





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