We are
unknown^
we „kno3Kers,- ourselves to \
^ourselves : this has its own good reason.
^ourselves : this has its own good reason.
Nietzsche - v13 - Genealogy of Morals
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Title: The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first complete
and authorized English translation, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
Author: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
Publisher: [Edinburgh and London : T. N. Foulis, 1909-1913. ]
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CORNELL UNIVERSITY
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uu iii i. ll University Library
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V. 13
The complete works of Fredrlch Nietzsche
3 1924 021 569 201
DATE DUE
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Cornell University
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There are no known copyright restrictions in
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THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The First Complete and Authorised English Translation
EDITED BY
Dr. OSCAR LEVY
VOLUME THIRTEEN
THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
## p. (#8) ##################################################
## p. (#9) ##################################################
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
THE GENEALOGY
OF MORALS
A POLEMIC
TRANSLATED BY
HORACE B. SAMUEL, M. A.
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
{FRAGMENT)
T. N. FOULIS
13 & IS FREDERICK STREET
EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
1913
## p. (#10) #################################################
Of the Second Edition
of One Thousand Copies
this is
No. .
-4w~L. 4i7. 0. .
## p. (#11) #################################################
EDITOR'S NOTE.
In 1887, with the view of amplifying and com-
pleting 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
## p. (#12) #################################################
## p. (#13) #################################################
CONTENTS.
FIRST ESSAY.
FACE
"Good and Evil," "Good and Bad" ■ - iS
SECOND ESSAY.
"Guilt," "Bad Conscience," and the Like 59
THIRD ESSAY.
What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals? - 119
Peoples and Countries. Translated by J. M.
Kennedy - - - - 213
## p. (#14) #################################################
## p. (#15) #################################################
PREFACE.
We are unknown^ we „kno3Kers,- ourselves to \
^ourselves : this has its own good reason. We |
have never search^_fgr_pursdves — how should '
"ff~tKeir"com? to pass, that we should ev er ^nd
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
A
## p. (#16) #################################################
2 PREFACE.
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,
li for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, " Each
1 one is the farthest away from himself" — as far
' as ourselves are concerned we are not " knowers. "
My^ thoughts c once rning^ the^(»«ea:/i:7g2' of our
moral prejudices — for they constitute the issue
in this polemic — have their first, bald, and pro-
visional 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
## p. (#17) #################################################
PREFACE. 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 spor-
adic phenomena, but have sprung from a common
root, from a fundamental "^fiat" of knowledge,
whose empire reached to the soul's depth, and
that ever grew more definite in its voice, and
more definite in its demands. That is the only
state of affairs that is proper in the case of a
philosopher.
We have no right to be "disconnected" ; we must
neither err " disconnectedly " nor strike the truth
"disconnectedly. " Rather with the necessity
with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our
thoughts, our values, our Yes's and No's and If's
and Whether's, grow connected and interrelated,
mutual witnesses of one will, one health, one
kingdom, one sun — as to whether they are to
your taste, these fruits of ours? — But what
matters that to the trees? What matters that
to us, us the philosophers ?
Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself,
which I confess reluctantly, — it concerns indeed
morality, — a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in
my life at such an early period, with so much
spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and
so keen an opposition to environment, epoch,
## p. (#18) #################################################
4 PREFACE.
precedent, and ancestry that I should have been
almost entitled to style it my '' A 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 ''^ndU)f
our " Evil. " Indeed, at-t4ie 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 q uite
properly the honour to God, and made him^tB^-
father of evil. Did my own " & priori " demand
that precise solution from me ? that new, immoral,
or at least "amoral" "d priori" and that "cate-
gorical 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 fo_r a^
supernatural origin of evil. A certain amount
of historical "a[n3" pHiIoiogical education, to say
notHng~'6r an innate faculty of psychological
discrimination par excellence succeeded in trans-
forming 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
## p. (#19) #################################################
PREFACE. 5
human well-being ? Are they a symptom of the
distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of
Human Xife ? "" Or, conversely, is it in them that
is'maiillested the fulness, the strengthj^ and the
wiTT of Li fe," its "t^urag^ its 'self-confidence. Jts
future? On this point I found and hazarded in
rayTIfflid the most diverse answers, I established
distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I
became a specialist in my problem, and from my
answers grew new questions, new investigations,
new conjectures, new probabilities ; until at last
I had a land of my own and a soil of my own,
a whole secret world growing and flowering, like
hidden gardens of whose existence no one could
have an inkling — oh, how happy are we, we
finders of knowledge, provided that we know how
to keep silent sufficiently long.
My first impulse to publish some of my
hypotheses concerning the origin of morality I
owe to a clear, well-written, and even precocious
little book, in which a perverse and vicious kind
of moral philosophy (your real English kind) was
definitely presented to me for the first time; and
this attracted me — with that magnetic attraction,
inherent in that which is diametrically opposed and
antithetical to one's own ideas. The title of the
book was The Origin of the Moral Emotions ; its
author, Dr. Paul R^e ; the year of its appearance,
1877. I may almost say that I have never read
## p. (#20) #################################################
6 PREFACE.
anything in which every single dogma and con-
clusion has called forth from me so emphatic a
negation as did that book ; albeit a negation un-
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 prob-
able, 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, com-
pare 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 ccelo different from the altruistic ethics (in
which Dr. R^e, like all the English moral philo-
sophers, 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
## p. (#21) #################################################
PREFACE. 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, ail-too- Human, part
ii. , Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which__the_^tfii:rent
object is neither ess entiaT" n nr— oriflrinaJ-, (as Dr.
KSeTKir^s : — rather is it that this object is only
imported, under certain definite conditions, and
always as something extra and additional).
In reality I had set my heart at that time on
something much more important than the nature of
the theories of myself or others concerning the origin
of morality (or, more precisely, the real function
from my view of these theories was to point an
end to which they were one among many means).
The issucfbrme was the jvalue of^ morality, ana]
on Jhat subject Lhad. to ,place_. myself . in a state"
oLabfitraction, in which I was almost alone with
my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that
book, with all its passion and inherent contra-
diction (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
" unegoistic " 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
## p. (#22) #################################################
8 PREFACE.
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 funda-
mental mistrust, a scepticism that dug ever deeper
and deeper : and in this very instinct I saw \h& great
danger of mankind,its most sublime temptation and
seduction — seduction to what ? to nothingness ? —
Tin these very instincts I saw the beginning of the
/ end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes back-
( wards, 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 f This ex-
aggerated 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_Jthe
P'&-BPiLality (I' am an opponent of the modern
infamous emasculation of our emotions) seems at
the first blush a mere isolated problem, a note^ih
## p. (#23) #################################################
PREFACE.
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 Ualues is tor Thg
'fl fst time to be called mto question — and for this
purpose a^knavdedge. ia. necessary of the conditions
and circumstances out of which these values grew,
and untfenrfat d 'i lliey exueiieiice d"TEeir~evolurion
and„tbeir distortion (morality as a result, as a
symptom, as a mask, as Tartuttism, 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 suchalcnowreageTiaslnelther existed
up to the present time nor is even now generally
clesired. 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 com-
## p. (#24) #################################################
lO PREFACE.
fortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite,
but also pettier, meaner! So that morality
would really be saddled with the guilt, if the
maximum potentiality of the power and splendour of
the human species were never to be attained?
So that really morality would be the danger of
dangers ?
Enough, that after this vista had disclosed
itself to me, I myself had reason to search for
learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am
doing it even to this very day). It means travers-
ing 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. Rde, 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
## p. (#25) #################################################
PREFACE. 1 1
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 un-
known to Dr. R^e ; 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 han^think that there are no subjects which,
pay better for being^_^Jtak£n. ^-sedQusly ;_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 full-
ness of our hearts, " Forward !
We are unknown^ we „kno3Kers,- ourselves to \
^ourselves : this has its own good reason. We |
have never search^_fgr_pursdves — how should '
"ff~tKeir"com? to pass, that we should ev er ^nd
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
A
## p. (#16) #################################################
2 PREFACE.
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,
li for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, " Each
1 one is the farthest away from himself" — as far
' as ourselves are concerned we are not " knowers. "
My^ thoughts c once rning^ the^(»«ea:/i:7g2' of our
moral prejudices — for they constitute the issue
in this polemic — have their first, bald, and pro-
visional 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
## p. (#17) #################################################
PREFACE. 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 spor-
adic phenomena, but have sprung from a common
root, from a fundamental "^fiat" of knowledge,
whose empire reached to the soul's depth, and
that ever grew more definite in its voice, and
more definite in its demands. That is the only
state of affairs that is proper in the case of a
philosopher.
We have no right to be "disconnected" ; we must
neither err " disconnectedly " nor strike the truth
"disconnectedly. " Rather with the necessity
with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our
thoughts, our values, our Yes's and No's and If's
and Whether's, grow connected and interrelated,
mutual witnesses of one will, one health, one
kingdom, one sun — as to whether they are to
your taste, these fruits of ours? — But what
matters that to the trees? What matters that
to us, us the philosophers ?
Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself,
which I confess reluctantly, — it concerns indeed
morality, — a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in
my life at such an early period, with so much
spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and
so keen an opposition to environment, epoch,
## p. (#18) #################################################
4 PREFACE.
precedent, and ancestry that I should have been
almost entitled to style it my '' A 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 ''^ndU)f
our " Evil. " Indeed, at-t4ie 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 q uite
properly the honour to God, and made him^tB^-
father of evil. Did my own " & priori " demand
that precise solution from me ? that new, immoral,
or at least "amoral" "d priori" and that "cate-
gorical 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 fo_r a^
supernatural origin of evil. A certain amount
of historical "a[n3" pHiIoiogical education, to say
notHng~'6r an innate faculty of psychological
discrimination par excellence succeeded in trans-
forming 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
## p. (#19) #################################################
PREFACE. 5
human well-being ? Are they a symptom of the
distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of
Human Xife ? "" Or, conversely, is it in them that
is'maiillested the fulness, the strengthj^ and the
wiTT of Li fe," its "t^urag^ its 'self-confidence. Jts
future? On this point I found and hazarded in
rayTIfflid the most diverse answers, I established
distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I
became a specialist in my problem, and from my
answers grew new questions, new investigations,
new conjectures, new probabilities ; until at last
I had a land of my own and a soil of my own,
a whole secret world growing and flowering, like
hidden gardens of whose existence no one could
have an inkling — oh, how happy are we, we
finders of knowledge, provided that we know how
to keep silent sufficiently long.
My first impulse to publish some of my
hypotheses concerning the origin of morality I
owe to a clear, well-written, and even precocious
little book, in which a perverse and vicious kind
of moral philosophy (your real English kind) was
definitely presented to me for the first time; and
this attracted me — with that magnetic attraction,
inherent in that which is diametrically opposed and
antithetical to one's own ideas. The title of the
book was The Origin of the Moral Emotions ; its
author, Dr. Paul R^e ; the year of its appearance,
1877. I may almost say that I have never read
## p. (#20) #################################################
6 PREFACE.
anything in which every single dogma and con-
clusion has called forth from me so emphatic a
negation as did that book ; albeit a negation un-
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 prob-
able, 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, com-
pare 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 ccelo different from the altruistic ethics (in
which Dr. R^e, like all the English moral philo-
sophers, 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
## p. (#21) #################################################
PREFACE. 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, ail-too- Human, part
ii. , Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which__the_^tfii:rent
object is neither ess entiaT" n nr— oriflrinaJ-, (as Dr.
KSeTKir^s : — rather is it that this object is only
imported, under certain definite conditions, and
always as something extra and additional).
In reality I had set my heart at that time on
something much more important than the nature of
the theories of myself or others concerning the origin
of morality (or, more precisely, the real function
from my view of these theories was to point an
end to which they were one among many means).
The issucfbrme was the jvalue of^ morality, ana]
on Jhat subject Lhad. to ,place_. myself . in a state"
oLabfitraction, in which I was almost alone with
my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that
book, with all its passion and inherent contra-
diction (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
" unegoistic " 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
## p. (#22) #################################################
8 PREFACE.
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 funda-
mental mistrust, a scepticism that dug ever deeper
and deeper : and in this very instinct I saw \h& great
danger of mankind,its most sublime temptation and
seduction — seduction to what ? to nothingness ? —
Tin these very instincts I saw the beginning of the
/ end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes back-
( wards, 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 f This ex-
aggerated 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_Jthe
P'&-BPiLality (I' am an opponent of the modern
infamous emasculation of our emotions) seems at
the first blush a mere isolated problem, a note^ih
## p. (#23) #################################################
PREFACE.
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 Ualues is tor Thg
'fl fst time to be called mto question — and for this
purpose a^knavdedge. ia. necessary of the conditions
and circumstances out of which these values grew,
and untfenrfat d 'i lliey exueiieiice d"TEeir~evolurion
and„tbeir distortion (morality as a result, as a
symptom, as a mask, as Tartuttism, 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 suchalcnowreageTiaslnelther existed
up to the present time nor is even now generally
clesired. 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 com-
## p. (#24) #################################################
lO PREFACE.
fortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite,
but also pettier, meaner! So that morality
would really be saddled with the guilt, if the
maximum potentiality of the power and splendour of
the human species were never to be attained?
So that really morality would be the danger of
dangers ?
Enough, that after this vista had disclosed
itself to me, I myself had reason to search for
learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am
doing it even to this very day). It means travers-
ing 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. Rde, 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
## p. (#25) #################################################
PREFACE. 1 1
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 un-
known to Dr. R^e ; 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 han^think that there are no subjects which,
pay better for being^_^Jtak£n. ^-sedQusly ;_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 full-
ness of our hearts, " Forward ! our old morality
too is fit material for Comedyl' 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.
## p. (#26) #################################################
12 PREFACE.
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 ex-
pounded — 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 nowa-
days has been best forgotten — and that is
why it will take some time yet for my writings
## p. (#27) #################################################
PREFACE. 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.
## p. (#28) #################################################
## p. (#29) #################################################
FIRST ESSAY.
•GOOD AND EVIL. " '«GOOD AND BAD. "
## p. (#30) #################################################
## p. (#31) #################################################
I.
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 in-
voluntarily 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 in-
tellectual self-respect of the race would be the
most reluctant to find it (for example, in the vis
inertice 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 incom-
prehensible even to itself? or perhaps a touch
of pessimistic jealousy, the mistrust of dis-
illusioned idealists who have become gloomy,
## p. (#32) #################################################
1 8 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.
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 psycho-
logical microscopes should be, at bottom, brave,
proud, and magnanimous animals who know how
to bridle both their hearts and their smarts, and
have specifically trained themselves to sacrifice
what is desirable to what is true, any truth in fact^
even the simple, bitter, ugly, repulsive, unchristian,
and immoral truths — for there are truths of that
description. ^^
All honour, then, to the noble spirits who would
fain dominate these historians of morality. But
it is certainly a pity that they lack the historiccf
## p. (#33) #################################################
"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD. " ig
sense itself, that they themselves, ar^ quite rie. '^qriherihj
by all the beneficent spirits of histo ry. The
whole train of their thought runs, as was always
the ,_way__5r oldTasEiohecf " pBirosopHefsP^ori
thoroughly unhist6ncaniH5sT"'thef6~ is n5' doubt
on~ THI5''poinl:r~ TTiS ~ 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 calle d ' good ' altciiiatic_acts_lrom -the stand-
point of those on whom they were conferred, that
is, those_lQjffiJiOJ3i_theyjyere «i'^«</^_subsequently
the origin of this praise was forgotten, and altru-
istic acts, siniply 'because, as a sheer matter of
habit, they were praised as g ood, came also Jp be
felt asgood;; — as though they contained in them-
selves 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," " for-
getting/' " 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 privi-
lege of man in general. This pride must be
brought low, this system of values^^Ki^it 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
## p. (#34) #################################################
20 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.
rather has it been the good themselves, that is,
the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed,
the high-minded, who have felt that they them-
selves were good, and that their actions were good,
that is to say of the first order, in contradistinc-
tion 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 them-
selves : 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 badj
(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
## p. (#35) #################################################
"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD. " 21
sound, and thereby at the same time take posses-
sion of it. ) It is because of this origin that the
word " good " is far from having any necessary
connection with altruistic acts, in accordance witlW
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 " d^sint&ess^" are concepts of
equal value.
In the second place, quite apart from the fact
that this hypothesis as to the genesis of the value
" good " cannot be historically upheld, it suffers
from an inherent psychological contradiction.
The ,jitjlity;^j^ ^tjruistic^conduct— has- p re su mably
origin h ap hprnmp fnro-nfUjuj — But in what con-
ceivable way is this forgetting . . po^sitde} Has
perchance the utility of such conduct ceased at
some given moment? The contrary is the case.
Thjsjitjljty j^gg ra. thpr hppn experienced every day
## p. (#36) #################################################
22 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.
at all times, and is consequently a feature that
oUtalns a new and regular emphasis with every
fresh day ; it follows that, so far from vanishing
from The consciousness, so far mdeed from^ being
forgotten, it must necessarily become impresse3~
on the consciousness with ever-increasing distmet-
ness. How much more logical is that contrary
theory (it is not the truer for that) which is repre-
sented, 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 concern-
ing 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 con-
sidered " valuable in the highest degree," " valu-
able in itself. " This method of explanation is
also, as I have said, wrong, but at any rate
the explanation itself is coherent, and psycho-
logically tenable.
Th£j[uide^pjt jvhichjfirst put me on the right
track was this question— what is the true etymo;^
logical jignificance of the various symbols for the
idea " good " which haye^been-coinedin the various
languages ? I then found that they all led back toT
the same evolution of the same idea — that every-
where " aristocrat," " noble " (in the social sense), is
the root idea, out of which have necessarily devel-
## p. (#37) #################################################
"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD. " 23
Oped " 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. " t 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 aristo-
cratic 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 dis-
covery seems to be substantial : the lateness of it
is to be attributed to the retarding influence exer-
cised in the modern world by democratic prejudice
in the sphere of all questions of origin. This ex-
tends, as will shortly be shown, even to the province
of natural science and physiology, vthlchprima 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), parti-
cularly 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.
## p.
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Title: The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first complete
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Author: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
Publisher: [Edinburgh and London : T. N. Foulis, 1909-1913. ]
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THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The First Complete and Authorised English Translation
EDITED BY
Dr. OSCAR LEVY
VOLUME THIRTEEN
THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
## p. (#8) ##################################################
## p. (#9) ##################################################
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
THE GENEALOGY
OF MORALS
A POLEMIC
TRANSLATED BY
HORACE B. SAMUEL, M. A.
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
{FRAGMENT)
T. N. FOULIS
13 & IS FREDERICK STREET
EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
1913
## p. (#10) #################################################
Of the Second Edition
of One Thousand Copies
this is
No. .
-4w~L. 4i7. 0. .
## p. (#11) #################################################
EDITOR'S NOTE.
In 1887, with the view of amplifying and com-
pleting 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
## p. (#12) #################################################
## p. (#13) #################################################
CONTENTS.
FIRST ESSAY.
FACE
"Good and Evil," "Good and Bad" ■ - iS
SECOND ESSAY.
"Guilt," "Bad Conscience," and the Like 59
THIRD ESSAY.
What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals? - 119
Peoples and Countries. Translated by J. M.
Kennedy - - - - 213
## p. (#14) #################################################
## p. (#15) #################################################
PREFACE.
We are unknown^ we „kno3Kers,- ourselves to \
^ourselves : this has its own good reason. We |
have never search^_fgr_pursdves — how should '
"ff~tKeir"com? to pass, that we should ev er ^nd
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
A
## p. (#16) #################################################
2 PREFACE.
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,
li for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, " Each
1 one is the farthest away from himself" — as far
' as ourselves are concerned we are not " knowers. "
My^ thoughts c once rning^ the^(»«ea:/i:7g2' of our
moral prejudices — for they constitute the issue
in this polemic — have their first, bald, and pro-
visional 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
## p. (#17) #################################################
PREFACE. 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 spor-
adic phenomena, but have sprung from a common
root, from a fundamental "^fiat" of knowledge,
whose empire reached to the soul's depth, and
that ever grew more definite in its voice, and
more definite in its demands. That is the only
state of affairs that is proper in the case of a
philosopher.
We have no right to be "disconnected" ; we must
neither err " disconnectedly " nor strike the truth
"disconnectedly. " Rather with the necessity
with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our
thoughts, our values, our Yes's and No's and If's
and Whether's, grow connected and interrelated,
mutual witnesses of one will, one health, one
kingdom, one sun — as to whether they are to
your taste, these fruits of ours? — But what
matters that to the trees? What matters that
to us, us the philosophers ?
Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself,
which I confess reluctantly, — it concerns indeed
morality, — a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in
my life at such an early period, with so much
spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and
so keen an opposition to environment, epoch,
## p. (#18) #################################################
4 PREFACE.
precedent, and ancestry that I should have been
almost entitled to style it my '' A 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 ''^ndU)f
our " Evil. " Indeed, at-t4ie 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 q uite
properly the honour to God, and made him^tB^-
father of evil. Did my own " & priori " demand
that precise solution from me ? that new, immoral,
or at least "amoral" "d priori" and that "cate-
gorical 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 fo_r a^
supernatural origin of evil. A certain amount
of historical "a[n3" pHiIoiogical education, to say
notHng~'6r an innate faculty of psychological
discrimination par excellence succeeded in trans-
forming 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
## p. (#19) #################################################
PREFACE. 5
human well-being ? Are they a symptom of the
distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of
Human Xife ? "" Or, conversely, is it in them that
is'maiillested the fulness, the strengthj^ and the
wiTT of Li fe," its "t^urag^ its 'self-confidence. Jts
future? On this point I found and hazarded in
rayTIfflid the most diverse answers, I established
distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I
became a specialist in my problem, and from my
answers grew new questions, new investigations,
new conjectures, new probabilities ; until at last
I had a land of my own and a soil of my own,
a whole secret world growing and flowering, like
hidden gardens of whose existence no one could
have an inkling — oh, how happy are we, we
finders of knowledge, provided that we know how
to keep silent sufficiently long.
My first impulse to publish some of my
hypotheses concerning the origin of morality I
owe to a clear, well-written, and even precocious
little book, in which a perverse and vicious kind
of moral philosophy (your real English kind) was
definitely presented to me for the first time; and
this attracted me — with that magnetic attraction,
inherent in that which is diametrically opposed and
antithetical to one's own ideas. The title of the
book was The Origin of the Moral Emotions ; its
author, Dr. Paul R^e ; the year of its appearance,
1877. I may almost say that I have never read
## p. (#20) #################################################
6 PREFACE.
anything in which every single dogma and con-
clusion has called forth from me so emphatic a
negation as did that book ; albeit a negation un-
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 prob-
able, 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, com-
pare 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 ccelo different from the altruistic ethics (in
which Dr. R^e, like all the English moral philo-
sophers, 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
## p. (#21) #################################################
PREFACE. 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, ail-too- Human, part
ii. , Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which__the_^tfii:rent
object is neither ess entiaT" n nr— oriflrinaJ-, (as Dr.
KSeTKir^s : — rather is it that this object is only
imported, under certain definite conditions, and
always as something extra and additional).
In reality I had set my heart at that time on
something much more important than the nature of
the theories of myself or others concerning the origin
of morality (or, more precisely, the real function
from my view of these theories was to point an
end to which they were one among many means).
The issucfbrme was the jvalue of^ morality, ana]
on Jhat subject Lhad. to ,place_. myself . in a state"
oLabfitraction, in which I was almost alone with
my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that
book, with all its passion and inherent contra-
diction (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
" unegoistic " 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
## p. (#22) #################################################
8 PREFACE.
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 funda-
mental mistrust, a scepticism that dug ever deeper
and deeper : and in this very instinct I saw \h& great
danger of mankind,its most sublime temptation and
seduction — seduction to what ? to nothingness ? —
Tin these very instincts I saw the beginning of the
/ end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes back-
( wards, 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 f This ex-
aggerated 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_Jthe
P'&-BPiLality (I' am an opponent of the modern
infamous emasculation of our emotions) seems at
the first blush a mere isolated problem, a note^ih
## p. (#23) #################################################
PREFACE.
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 Ualues is tor Thg
'fl fst time to be called mto question — and for this
purpose a^knavdedge. ia. necessary of the conditions
and circumstances out of which these values grew,
and untfenrfat d 'i lliey exueiieiice d"TEeir~evolurion
and„tbeir distortion (morality as a result, as a
symptom, as a mask, as Tartuttism, 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 suchalcnowreageTiaslnelther existed
up to the present time nor is even now generally
clesired. 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 com-
## p. (#24) #################################################
lO PREFACE.
fortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite,
but also pettier, meaner! So that morality
would really be saddled with the guilt, if the
maximum potentiality of the power and splendour of
the human species were never to be attained?
So that really morality would be the danger of
dangers ?
Enough, that after this vista had disclosed
itself to me, I myself had reason to search for
learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am
doing it even to this very day). It means travers-
ing 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. Rde, 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
## p. (#25) #################################################
PREFACE. 1 1
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 un-
known to Dr. R^e ; 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 han^think that there are no subjects which,
pay better for being^_^Jtak£n. ^-sedQusly ;_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 full-
ness of our hearts, " Forward !
We are unknown^ we „kno3Kers,- ourselves to \
^ourselves : this has its own good reason. We |
have never search^_fgr_pursdves — how should '
"ff~tKeir"com? to pass, that we should ev er ^nd
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
A
## p. (#16) #################################################
2 PREFACE.
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,
li for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, " Each
1 one is the farthest away from himself" — as far
' as ourselves are concerned we are not " knowers. "
My^ thoughts c once rning^ the^(»«ea:/i:7g2' of our
moral prejudices — for they constitute the issue
in this polemic — have their first, bald, and pro-
visional 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
## p. (#17) #################################################
PREFACE. 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 spor-
adic phenomena, but have sprung from a common
root, from a fundamental "^fiat" of knowledge,
whose empire reached to the soul's depth, and
that ever grew more definite in its voice, and
more definite in its demands. That is the only
state of affairs that is proper in the case of a
philosopher.
We have no right to be "disconnected" ; we must
neither err " disconnectedly " nor strike the truth
"disconnectedly. " Rather with the necessity
with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our
thoughts, our values, our Yes's and No's and If's
and Whether's, grow connected and interrelated,
mutual witnesses of one will, one health, one
kingdom, one sun — as to whether they are to
your taste, these fruits of ours? — But what
matters that to the trees? What matters that
to us, us the philosophers ?
Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself,
which I confess reluctantly, — it concerns indeed
morality, — a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in
my life at such an early period, with so much
spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and
so keen an opposition to environment, epoch,
## p. (#18) #################################################
4 PREFACE.
precedent, and ancestry that I should have been
almost entitled to style it my '' A 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 ''^ndU)f
our " Evil. " Indeed, at-t4ie 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 q uite
properly the honour to God, and made him^tB^-
father of evil. Did my own " & priori " demand
that precise solution from me ? that new, immoral,
or at least "amoral" "d priori" and that "cate-
gorical 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 fo_r a^
supernatural origin of evil. A certain amount
of historical "a[n3" pHiIoiogical education, to say
notHng~'6r an innate faculty of psychological
discrimination par excellence succeeded in trans-
forming 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
## p. (#19) #################################################
PREFACE. 5
human well-being ? Are they a symptom of the
distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of
Human Xife ? "" Or, conversely, is it in them that
is'maiillested the fulness, the strengthj^ and the
wiTT of Li fe," its "t^urag^ its 'self-confidence. Jts
future? On this point I found and hazarded in
rayTIfflid the most diverse answers, I established
distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I
became a specialist in my problem, and from my
answers grew new questions, new investigations,
new conjectures, new probabilities ; until at last
I had a land of my own and a soil of my own,
a whole secret world growing and flowering, like
hidden gardens of whose existence no one could
have an inkling — oh, how happy are we, we
finders of knowledge, provided that we know how
to keep silent sufficiently long.
My first impulse to publish some of my
hypotheses concerning the origin of morality I
owe to a clear, well-written, and even precocious
little book, in which a perverse and vicious kind
of moral philosophy (your real English kind) was
definitely presented to me for the first time; and
this attracted me — with that magnetic attraction,
inherent in that which is diametrically opposed and
antithetical to one's own ideas. The title of the
book was The Origin of the Moral Emotions ; its
author, Dr. Paul R^e ; the year of its appearance,
1877. I may almost say that I have never read
## p. (#20) #################################################
6 PREFACE.
anything in which every single dogma and con-
clusion has called forth from me so emphatic a
negation as did that book ; albeit a negation un-
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 prob-
able, 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, com-
pare 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 ccelo different from the altruistic ethics (in
which Dr. R^e, like all the English moral philo-
sophers, 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
## p. (#21) #################################################
PREFACE. 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, ail-too- Human, part
ii. , Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which__the_^tfii:rent
object is neither ess entiaT" n nr— oriflrinaJ-, (as Dr.
KSeTKir^s : — rather is it that this object is only
imported, under certain definite conditions, and
always as something extra and additional).
In reality I had set my heart at that time on
something much more important than the nature of
the theories of myself or others concerning the origin
of morality (or, more precisely, the real function
from my view of these theories was to point an
end to which they were one among many means).
The issucfbrme was the jvalue of^ morality, ana]
on Jhat subject Lhad. to ,place_. myself . in a state"
oLabfitraction, in which I was almost alone with
my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that
book, with all its passion and inherent contra-
diction (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
" unegoistic " 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
## p. (#22) #################################################
8 PREFACE.
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 funda-
mental mistrust, a scepticism that dug ever deeper
and deeper : and in this very instinct I saw \h& great
danger of mankind,its most sublime temptation and
seduction — seduction to what ? to nothingness ? —
Tin these very instincts I saw the beginning of the
/ end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes back-
( wards, 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 f This ex-
aggerated 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_Jthe
P'&-BPiLality (I' am an opponent of the modern
infamous emasculation of our emotions) seems at
the first blush a mere isolated problem, a note^ih
## p. (#23) #################################################
PREFACE.
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 Ualues is tor Thg
'fl fst time to be called mto question — and for this
purpose a^knavdedge. ia. necessary of the conditions
and circumstances out of which these values grew,
and untfenrfat d 'i lliey exueiieiice d"TEeir~evolurion
and„tbeir distortion (morality as a result, as a
symptom, as a mask, as Tartuttism, 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 suchalcnowreageTiaslnelther existed
up to the present time nor is even now generally
clesired. 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 com-
## p. (#24) #################################################
lO PREFACE.
fortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite,
but also pettier, meaner! So that morality
would really be saddled with the guilt, if the
maximum potentiality of the power and splendour of
the human species were never to be attained?
So that really morality would be the danger of
dangers ?
Enough, that after this vista had disclosed
itself to me, I myself had reason to search for
learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am
doing it even to this very day). It means travers-
ing 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. Rde, 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
## p. (#25) #################################################
PREFACE. 1 1
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 un-
known to Dr. R^e ; 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 han^think that there are no subjects which,
pay better for being^_^Jtak£n. ^-sedQusly ;_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 full-
ness of our hearts, " Forward ! our old morality
too is fit material for Comedyl' 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.
## p. (#26) #################################################
12 PREFACE.
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 ex-
pounded — 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 nowa-
days has been best forgotten — and that is
why it will take some time yet for my writings
## p. (#27) #################################################
PREFACE. 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.
## p. (#28) #################################################
## p. (#29) #################################################
FIRST ESSAY.
•GOOD AND EVIL. " '«GOOD AND BAD. "
## p. (#30) #################################################
## p. (#31) #################################################
I.
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 in-
voluntarily 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 in-
tellectual self-respect of the race would be the
most reluctant to find it (for example, in the vis
inertice 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 incom-
prehensible even to itself? or perhaps a touch
of pessimistic jealousy, the mistrust of dis-
illusioned idealists who have become gloomy,
## p. (#32) #################################################
1 8 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.
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 psycho-
logical microscopes should be, at bottom, brave,
proud, and magnanimous animals who know how
to bridle both their hearts and their smarts, and
have specifically trained themselves to sacrifice
what is desirable to what is true, any truth in fact^
even the simple, bitter, ugly, repulsive, unchristian,
and immoral truths — for there are truths of that
description. ^^
All honour, then, to the noble spirits who would
fain dominate these historians of morality. But
it is certainly a pity that they lack the historiccf
## p. (#33) #################################################
"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD. " ig
sense itself, that they themselves, ar^ quite rie. '^qriherihj
by all the beneficent spirits of histo ry. The
whole train of their thought runs, as was always
the ,_way__5r oldTasEiohecf " pBirosopHefsP^ori
thoroughly unhist6ncaniH5sT"'thef6~ is n5' doubt
on~ THI5''poinl:r~ TTiS ~ 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 calle d ' good ' altciiiatic_acts_lrom -the stand-
point of those on whom they were conferred, that
is, those_lQjffiJiOJ3i_theyjyere «i'^«</^_subsequently
the origin of this praise was forgotten, and altru-
istic acts, siniply 'because, as a sheer matter of
habit, they were praised as g ood, came also Jp be
felt asgood;; — as though they contained in them-
selves 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," " for-
getting/' " 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 privi-
lege of man in general. This pride must be
brought low, this system of values^^Ki^it 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
## p. (#34) #################################################
20 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.
rather has it been the good themselves, that is,
the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed,
the high-minded, who have felt that they them-
selves were good, and that their actions were good,
that is to say of the first order, in contradistinc-
tion 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 them-
selves : 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 badj
(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
## p. (#35) #################################################
"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD. " 21
sound, and thereby at the same time take posses-
sion of it. ) It is because of this origin that the
word " good " is far from having any necessary
connection with altruistic acts, in accordance witlW
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 " d^sint&ess^" are concepts of
equal value.
In the second place, quite apart from the fact
that this hypothesis as to the genesis of the value
" good " cannot be historically upheld, it suffers
from an inherent psychological contradiction.
The ,jitjlity;^j^ ^tjruistic^conduct— has- p re su mably
origin h ap hprnmp fnro-nfUjuj — But in what con-
ceivable way is this forgetting . . po^sitde} Has
perchance the utility of such conduct ceased at
some given moment? The contrary is the case.
Thjsjitjljty j^gg ra. thpr hppn experienced every day
## p. (#36) #################################################
22 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.
at all times, and is consequently a feature that
oUtalns a new and regular emphasis with every
fresh day ; it follows that, so far from vanishing
from The consciousness, so far mdeed from^ being
forgotten, it must necessarily become impresse3~
on the consciousness with ever-increasing distmet-
ness. How much more logical is that contrary
theory (it is not the truer for that) which is repre-
sented, 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 concern-
ing 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 con-
sidered " valuable in the highest degree," " valu-
able in itself. " This method of explanation is
also, as I have said, wrong, but at any rate
the explanation itself is coherent, and psycho-
logically tenable.
Th£j[uide^pjt jvhichjfirst put me on the right
track was this question— what is the true etymo;^
logical jignificance of the various symbols for the
idea " good " which haye^been-coinedin the various
languages ? I then found that they all led back toT
the same evolution of the same idea — that every-
where " aristocrat," " noble " (in the social sense), is
the root idea, out of which have necessarily devel-
## p. (#37) #################################################
"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD. " 23
Oped " 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. " t 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 aristo-
cratic 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 dis-
covery seems to be substantial : the lateness of it
is to be attributed to the retarding influence exer-
cised in the modern world by democratic prejudice
in the sphere of all questions of origin. This ex-
tends, as will shortly be shown, even to the province
of natural science and physiology, vthlchprima 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), parti-
cularly 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.
## p.
