THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

A POLEMIC
BY

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

TRANSLATED BY

HORACE B. SAMUEL, M.A.

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES (FRAGMENT)

TRANSLATED BY J. M. KENNEDY
 The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

The First Complete and Authorised English Translation

Edited by Dr Oscar Levy

Volume Eight
T.N. FOULIS

13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET

EDINBURGH: AND LONDON

1913
CONTENTS

PREFACE.
FIRST ESSAY. "GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

SECOND ESSAY. "GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE.

THIRD ESSAY.
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
EDITOR'S NOTE.
In 1887, with the view of amplifying and completing certain new doctrines which he
had merely sketched in Beyond Good and Evil (see especially aphorism 260), Nietzsche
published The Genealogy of Morals. This work is perhaps the least aphoristic, in form,
of all Nietzsche's productions. For analytical power, more especially in those parts
where Nietzsche examines the ascetic ideal, The Genealogy of Morals is unequalled by
any other of his works; and, in the light which it throws upon the attitude of the
ecclesiast to the man of resentment and misfortune, it is one of the most valuable
contributions to sacerdotal psychology.

[Pg 1]

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[Pg
2] 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[Pg 3] 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,[Pg 4]
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[Pg
5] 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[Pg 6]
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[Pg 7] 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[Pg 8] 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[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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[Pg 11] 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.
[Pg 12]
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[Pg 13] 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.
[Pg 15]
[Pg 17]

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,[Pg 18] 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[Pg 19] 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[Pg 20] 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[Pg 21] 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[Pg 22] 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[Pg 23] "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.
[Pg 24]
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[Pg 25] 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[Pg 26] 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[Pg 27] 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[Pg 28] 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[Pg 29] 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[Pg 30] 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[Pg 31] 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,[Pg 32] 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[Pg 33] 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[Pg 34] 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[Pg 35] 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[Pg 36] 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[Pg 37] "Sabbath," an enervation of the mind and relaxation of the
limbs,—in short, a purely passive phenomenon. While the aristocratic man lived in confidence and
openness with himself (γενναῐος, "nobleε-born," emphasises the nuance "sincere," and perhaps also
"naïf"), the resentful man, on the other hand, is neither sincere nor naïf, nor honest and candid with
himself. His soul squints; his mind loves hidden crannies, tortuous paths and back-doors, everything
secret appeals to him as his world, his safety, his balm; he is past master in silence, in not forgetting,
in waiting, in provisional self-depreciation and self-abasement. A race of such resentful men will of
necessity eventually prove more prudent than any aristocratic race, it will honour prudence on quite
a distinct scale, as, in fact, a paramount condition of existence, while prudence among aristocratic
men is apt to be tinged with a delicate flavour of luxury and refinement; so among them it plays
nothing like so integral a part as that complete certainty of function of the governing unconscious
instincts, or as indeed a certain lack of prudence, such as a vehement and valiant charge, whether
against danger or the enemy, or as those ecstatic bursts of rage, love, reverence, gratitude, by which
at all times noble souls have recognised each other. When the resentment of the aristocratic man
manifests itself, it fulfils and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and consequently instills no
venom: on the other hand, it never manifests itself at all in countless instances, when in the case of
the feeble and weak it would be inevitable. An[Pg 38] 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[Pg 39] 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[Pg 40] 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,[Pg 41]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,[Pg 42] 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[Pg 43] 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.[Pg 44] 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[Pg
45] 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[Pg 46] 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[Pg 47] 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[Pg 48] 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[Pg 49]
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[Pg 50] 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:[Pg 51] 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[Pg 52]
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[Pg 53] 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[Pg 54] 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.[Pg 55] 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[Pg 56] 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[Pg 57] 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[Pg 58] 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.

[Pg 59]
[Pg 61]

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[Pg 62] 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[Pg 63] 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[Pg 64] 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[Pg 65] 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[Pg 66] 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[Pg 67] 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"),[Pg 68] 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[Pg 69] 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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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,[Pg 72] 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[Pg 73] 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[Pg 74]
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[Pg 75] 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[Pg 76] 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[Pg 77] 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[Pg 78] 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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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[Pg 81] 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:[Pg 82] 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[Pg 83] 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[Pg 84] 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,[Pg 85] 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[Pg 86] 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[Pg 87] 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[Pg 88] 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[Pg 89]
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[Pg 90] 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[Pg 91] 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[Pg
92] 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,[Pg 93] 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[Pg 94] 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[Pg 95] 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[Pg 96] 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[Pg 97] 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)[Pg 98] 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[Pg 99] 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[Pg 100] 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,[Pg 101] 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,[Pg 102] 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[Pg 103] "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[Pg 104] 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[Pg 105] 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.
[Pg 106]
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[Pg 107] 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[Pg 108] 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[Pg 109]
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[Pg 110] 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[Pg 111] 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[Pg
112] 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[Pg 113] 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[Pg 114] 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[Pg 115] 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,[Pg 116] 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[Pg 117] 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.
[Pg 118]
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.

[Pg 119]

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.

[Pg 121]
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[Pg
122] 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[Pg 123]
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[Pg 124]
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[Pg 125] 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,[Pg 126] 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[Pg
127] 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[Pg 128] 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[Pg 129] 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[Pg 130] 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[Pg 131] 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[Pg 132] 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[Pg 133] 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[Pg 134] 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[Pg 135] lacks both of them, then he is—you may be certain of it—never anything but a
"pseudo." What does this mean? For this state of affairs must first be, interpreted: in itself it stands
there stupid, to all eternity, like any "Thing-in-itself." Every animal, including la bête philosophe,
strives instinctively after an optimum of favourable conditions, under which he can let his whole
strength have play, and achieves his maximum consciousness of power; with equal instinctiveness,
and with a fine perceptive flair which is superior to any reason, every animal shudders mortally at
every kind of disturbance and hindrance which obstructs or could obstruct his way to that optimum
(it is not his way to happiness of which I am talking, but his way to power, to action, the most
powerful action, and in point of fact in many cases his way to unhappiness). Similarly, the
philosopher shudders mortally at marriage, together with all that could persuade him to it—
marriage as a fatal hindrance on the way to the optimum. Up to the present what great philosophers
have been married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they
were not married, and, further, one cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher belongs
to comedy, that is my rule; as for that exception of a Socrates—the malicious Socrates married
himself, it seems, ironice, just to prove this very rule. Every philosopher would say, as Buddha said,
when the birth of a son was announced to him: "Râhoula has been born to me, a fetter has been
forged for me" (Râhoula means here[Pg 136] "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[Pg 137] 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[Pg 138] 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[Pg 139] 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[Pg
140] 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[Pg 141]
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[Pg 142]
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[Pg 143] 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[Pg 144] 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[Pg 145] 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[Pg 146] 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[Pg 147] 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[Pg 148]
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[Pg 149] 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,[Pg 150] 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[Pg 151]
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[Pg 152] 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[Pg
153] 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[Pg 154] 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,[Pg 155] 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[Pg 156] 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[Pg 157] 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[Pg 158] 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[Pg 159] 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[Pg 160] 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[Pg 161] 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[Pg 162] 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[Pg 163] 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[Pg 164] 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[Pg 165] 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[Pg 166] 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.[Pg 167] 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.
[Pg 168]
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[Pg
169] 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,[Pg
170] 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[Pg 171] 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[Pg 172] illusions, as "knowledge," as "truth," as "being" as an escape from every
end, every wish, every action, as something even beyond Good and Evil.
"Good and Evil," quoth the Buddhists, "both are fetters. The perfect man is master of them both."
"The done and the undone," quoth the disciple of the Vedânta, "do him no hurt; the good and the
evil he shakes from off him, sage that he is; his kingdom suffers no more from any act; good and
evil, he goes beyond them both."—An absolutely Indian conception, as much Brahmanist as
Buddhist. Neither in the Indian nor in the Christian doctrine is this "Redemption" regarded as
attainable by means of virtue and moral improvement, however high they may place the value of
the hypnotic efficiency of virtue: keep clear on this point—indeed it simply corresponds with the
facts. The fact that they remained true on this point is perhaps to be regarded as the best specimen
of realism in the three great religions, absolutely soaked as they are with morality, with this one
exception. "For those who know, there is no duty." "Redemption is not attained by the acquisition of
virtues; for redemption consists in being one with Brahman, who is incapable of acquiring any
perfection; and equally little does it consist in the giving up of faults, for the Brahman, unity with
whom is what constitutes redemption, is eternally pure" (these passages are from the Commentaries
of the Cankara, quoted from the first real European expert of the Indian philosophy, my friend Paul
Deussen). We wish, therefore, to pay honour to the idea of "redemption"[Pg 173] 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[Pg 174] of deepest sleep, anæsthesia in short––that is what passes with the sufferers and
the absolutely depressed for, forsooth, their supreme good, their value of values; that is what must
be treasured by them as something positive, be felt by them as the essence of the Positive
(according to the same logic of the feelings, nothingness is in all pessimistic religions called God).
18.
Such a hypnotic deadening of sensibility and susceptibility to pain, which presupposes somewhat
rare powers, especially courage, contempt of opinion, intellectual stoicism, is less frequent than
another and certainly easier training which is tried against states of depression. I mean mechanical
activity. It is indisputable that a suffering existence can be thereby considerably alleviated. This fact
is called to-day by the somewhat ignoble title of the "Blessing of work." The alleviation consists in
the attention of the sufferer being absolutely diverted from suffering, in the incessant monopoly of
the consciousness by action, so that consequently there is little room left for suffering––for narrow
is it, this chamber of human consciousness! Mechanical activity and its corollaries, such as absolute
regularity, punctilious unreasoning obedience, the chronic routine of life, the complete occupation
of time, a certain liberty to be impersonal, nay, a training in "impersonality," self-forgetfulness,
"incuria sui"––with what thoroughness and expert subtlety have all[Pg 175] 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,[Pg 176] 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[Pg 177]
"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[Pg 178] 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[Pg 179] 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[Pg 180] 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[Pg 181] 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.[Pg
182] 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![Pg 183] "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[Pg 184] 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,[Pg 185]
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[Pg 186] 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[Pg 187] 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[Pg 188] 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[Pg 189] 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[Pg 190] 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[Pg 191] 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[Pg 192] 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[Pg 193] 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[Pg 194] 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[Pg
195] 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[Pg 196] 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[Pg 197] 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[Pg 198]
"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[Pg 199] 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[Pg 200] 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[Pg 201] 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[Pg 202], 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[Pg 203] is no knowledge.
Consequently––there is a God"; what a novel elegantia syllogismi! what a triumph for the ascetic
ideal!
26.
Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show in its demeanour greater confidence in life,
greater confidence in its ideals? Its loftiest pretension is now to be a mirror; it repudiates all
teleology; it will have no more "proving"; it disdains to play the judge, and thereby shows its good
taste––it asserts as little as it denies, it fixes, it "describes." All this is to a high degree ascetic, but at
the same time it is to a much greater degree nihilistic; make no mistake about this! You see in the
historian a gloomy, hard, but determined gaze,––an eye that looks out as an isolated North Pole
explorer looks out (perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look back?)––there is snow––here
is life silenced, the last crows which caw here are called "whither?" "Vanity," "Nada"––here nothing
more flourishes and grows, at the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg and the "pity" of Tolstoi.
But as for that other school of historians, a perhaps still more "modern" school, a voluptuous and
lascivious school which ogles life and the ascetic ideal with equal fervour, which uses the word
"artist" as a glove, and has nowadays established a "corner" for itself, in all the praise given to
contemplation; oh, what a thirst do these sweet intellectuals excite even for[Pg 204] 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[Pg 205] 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][Pg 206] 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[Pg 207] 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[Pg 208] 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,[Pg 209] 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[Pg
210] 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:[Pg 211] 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.

[Pg 213]
[Pg 215]

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.
[Pg 216]
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[Pg 217] 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[Pg 218] 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,[Pg
219] 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.
[Pg 220]
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[Pg 221]
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.
[Pg 222]
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.
[Pg 223]
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[Pg 224] 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[Pg 225] 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[Pg 226] 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.
[Pg 227]
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[Pg 228] (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[Pg 229]
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!