No More Learning

turn inwards — this is what I mean by the^
growing. " internalisation " of man : consequently
we have the first growth in man, of what
subsequently was called his souLl The whole

inner world, originally as^ . thin as W it ha'a~

been stretched between two layers of skin,_burst
apart and expanded proportionately, and obtained _
depth, breadth, and height, when man's external
outlet became obstructed. These terrible bul-



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. lOI

warksjwith^ whyh„the, socig,} organisation . protected
its elf against the old instincts of freedo m (punish-
ments belong pre-eminently to these bulwarks),
brought it about that all those instincts of wild,
free, pro wling man became turned backwards
against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the delidCT^
in_p e. rse. cution, in s urprises, ch ange, des^. uctiOQT^

thejamiQg-j^lJhgsg„ffl§^i^ ag^'P^t tjasii:. jaaii

possessors : t his is the origin of the "bad conscience. 'j
It was man, who, lacking external enemies and
obstacles, and imprisoned as he was Jn , the
oppressive n arrowhesF^anH^monotony of custom,
in his own impatience lacerated, persecuted,
gnawed , frightened, arid Ill-treated himself; it was
this animal in the hands" of the tamer, which beat
itself against the bars of its cage ; it was this
being who, pining and yearning for that desert
home of which it had been deprived, was com-
pelled to create out of its own selfi_an. ady. eiiture,
a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert
— it was this foplj this" homesick "and desperate
prisoner — who invented the " bad conscience. "
But thereby he introduced that most grave and
sinister illness, from which mankind has not yet
recovered, the suffering of man from the disease
called man, as the result of a violent breaking from
his animal past, the result, as it were, of a spasm-
odic plunge into a new environment and new con-
ditions of existence^the result of a declaration^f
war^gainst the old m? flwefs",;7wHic¥'up'to that
time had been' the staple of his power, his joy,
his formidableness. Let us immediately add that
this fact of an animal ego turning against itself,



## p. (#116) ################################################

102 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

taking part against itself, produced in the world so
novel, profound, unheard-of, problematic, inconsist-
ent, and pregnant a phenomenon, that the aspect of
the world was radically altered thereby. In sooth,
only divine spectators could have appreciated the
drama that then began, and whose end baffles con-
jecture as yet — a drama too subtle, too wonderful,
too paradoxical to warrant its undergoing a non-
sensical and unheeded performance on some
random grotesque planet ! Henceforth man is to
be counted as one of the most unexpected and
sensational lucky shots in the game of the "big
baby" of Heracleitus, whether he be called Zeus
or Chance — he awakens on his behalf the interest,
excitement, hope, almost the confidence, of his
being the harbinger and forerunner of something,
of man being no end, but only a stage, an
interlude, a bridge, a great promise.

17-

It is primarily involved in this kypathesisuQf^
the origin of the bad conscience, that that alteraj^
tion was no gxaduai and no voluntary altststion,
and that it did . not manifest . itself „as,an^organic
adaptation to new conditions, but^as^,Ji,_bre^,'
a jump, a necessity, an inevitable fate, against
which there was no resistance and neyer a spark
of rese ntment. And secondarily, that the fitting
of a hithertolTrichecked and amorphous population
into a fixed form, starting as it had done iii^n act
of violence, could only be accomplished by acts
of violence and nothing else — that the oldest



## p. (#117) ################################################

"State" appeared consequently as a ghastly
tyranny, a grinding ruthless piece of machinery,
which went on working, till this raw material
of a semi - animal populace was not only
thoroughly kneaded and elastic, but also moulded.
I used the word " State " : my meaning is self-/
evident, namely, a herd of blonde beasts of prey, c
race of conquerors and masters, which with all its
warlike organisation and all its organising power
pounces with its terrible claws on a population,
in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but\
as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is the
origin of the " St ate/^ That fantastic theory that
"makes it begin'"wiith a contract is, I think, dis-
posed of. He who can command, he who is a
master^b y "^natur. e,". , he who comes"oal tEe~scene
forceful in deed and gesture — what has he to
^o with contracts ? Such beings defy calculation,
they come like fate^ without cause, reason, notice,
excuse, they are there like the lightning is there,
too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too
"different," to be personally even hated. Their
work is an instinctive creating and impressing ,
of forms, they are the most involuntary, un-
conscious artists that there are : — their appearance
produces instantaneously a scheme of sovereignty
which is live, in which the functions are partitioned
and apportioned, in which above all no part is
received or finds a place, until pregnant with a
" meaning " in regard to the whole. They afe\
ignorant of the meaning of guilt, responsibiltiy, '
consideration, are these born organisers ; in them
predominates that terrible artist - egoism, that



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I04 ' THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

gleams like brass, and that . knows itself justified
to all eternity, in its work||even as a mother in
her child. It is not in them that there grew
the bad conscience, that is elementary — but it
would not have grown without them, repulsive
growth as it was, it would be missing, had not
a tremendous quantity of freedom been expelled
from the world by the stress of their hammer-
strokes, their artist violence, or been at any
rate made invisible and, as it were, latent. This
instinct of freedom forced i nto being laten t-^t~is~
already _. clear — this instinct of freedom forced
back, trodden back, imprisoned ,within its elf, an d
finally only able tP find vent and relief in itself;
this, only this, is the beginning of the " bad
conscience. "

Beware of thinking lightly of this phenomenon,
by reason of its initial painful ugliness. At
batt. om it is the s ame active force_^gbich is ai-^pfjjT
on a more grandiose scale in _ those potent artists
and organisers, and, builds^ „ states, which here,
internally, on a smaller and pettierjcale_aQd-5Kith.
a retrogressive tendency, _ makes itself -a-Jaad-^on-
science in the " labyrinth of the breast," to use
Goethe's phrase, and which builds negativ-eJdeals. ;
it is, I repeat, that identiral in. <^t mct of freedom (to
use my own language, the will t o power) : only
the material, on which this force with all its con-
structive and tyrannous nature is let loose, is here
man himself, his whole old animal self — and not
as in the case of that more grandiose and sensa-



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. (^ lOS

tional phenomenon, the other man, other men.
This secret self-tyranny, this crueltjj^of_the„aJltist,
thiis^ delight in giving a form to on e's self as a piece
of difficult, refractorvj and suffering material, in

- -. ,,- n-i |-irx~~— ^ <iiin<lliiii J i n''" ii '■'"'"■ n il *" ■■ i"' " "" " " "T '" ' "' " " ' ' "ii^i

burning in ^ wiU, a critique, a contradiction, a
contempt, a_ n egation ^. . Ihis silUda;~jauad_shastiZ-„
labour of love on the part of a soul^whose will is^
cloven "Tntwo within itself, which makes itself
suffer fromaeTigKt"in tfie inffiction of sufifering ;
this wholly '«c? ? ! ? FT5a'd''"consctehce Tias finally (as
oTie' "already anticipates)— true fountainhead as
it is of idealism and imagination — produced an
abundance of" novel ancT amazing T5eaufy^an3
affirm^tion^^jiiiS perhaps "Kas" really teen thg,,££sJL
to give b irth to beauty at all. What would
beauty be, forsooth, if its contradiction had not
first been presented to consciousness, if the ugly
had not first said to itself, " I am ugly " ? At
any rate, after this hint the problem oi how far
idealism and bea uty can be traced in _such
opposite ideas as '^ seTflessness" self -denial, self-
sacrifice, b ecomes less problematical ; and in-
dubitably in future we shall certainly know the
real and original character of Ithe delight experi- .
enced by the self-less, the self-denying, the self-
sacrificing: this delight is a phase of crueltyj
[—So much provisionally for the origin of
' "altruism" as a moral value, and the marking
out the ground from which this value has grown :
it^is o nly the bad con science, only the will for,'
seIfciESiiZIES! ! SSSH^rnecessary conditronsj
for the -existence: of altruism as a value. \ "~ »



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Io6 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

19.

Undoubtedly the bad conscience is an illness,
but an illness like pregnancy is an illness. If
we search out the conditions under which this
illness reaches its most terrible and sublime
zenith, we shall see what really first brought
about its entry into the world. But to do this
we must take a long breath, and we must first
of all go back once again to an earlier point
of view. The relation at civil law of the ower to
his creditor (which has already been discussed in
detail), has been interpreted once again (and
indeed in a manner which historically is exceed-
ingly remarkable and suspicious) into a relation-
ship, which is perhaps more incomprehensible to
us moderns than to any other era ; that is, into
the relationship of the existing generation to its
ancestors. Within the original tribal association —
we are talking of primitive times — each living
generation recognises a legal obligation towards
the earlier generation, and particularly towards
the earliest, which founded the family (and this
is something much more than a mere sentimental
obligation, the existence of which, during the
longest period of man's history, is by no means
indisputable). There prevails in them the con-
viction that it is only thanks to sacrifices and
efforts of their ancestors, that the race persists
at all — and that this has to be paid back to
them by sacrifices and services. Thus is recog-
nised the owing of a debt, which accumulates
continually by reason of these ancestors never



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. I07

ceasing in their subsequent life as potent spirits
to secure by their power new privileges and
advantages to the race. Gratis, perchance ? But
there is no gratis for that raw and " mean-souled "
age. What return can be made? — Sacrifice (at
first, nourishment, in its crudest sense), festivals,
temples, tributes of veneration, above all, obedience
— since all customs are, qu& works of the ancestors,
equally their precepts and commands — are the
ancestors ever given enough ? This suspicion
remains and grows : from time to time it extorts
a great wholesale ransom, something monstrous
in the way of repayment of the creditor (the
notorious sacrifice of the first-born, for example,
blood, human blood in any case). The fear of
ancestors and their power, the consciousness of
owing debts to them, necessarily increases, accord-
ing to this kind of logic, in the exact proportion
that the race itself increases, that the race itself
becomes more victorious, more independent, more
honoured, more feared. This, and not the con-
trary, is the fact. Each step towards race decay, all
disastrous events, all symptoms of degeneration,
of approaching disintegration, always diminish the
fear of the founders' spirit, and whittle away the
idea of his sagacity, providence, and potent presence.
Conceive this crude kind of logic carried to its
climax : it follows that the ancestors of the most
powerful races must, through the growing fear
that they exercise on the imaginations, grow
themselves into monstrous dimensions, and become
relegated to the gloom of a divine mystery that
transcends invagination — the ancestor becomes at



## p. (#122) ################################################

I08 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

last necessarily transfigured into a god. Perhaps
this is the very origin of the gods, that is, an
origin from fear ! And those who feel bound to
add, " but from piety also," will have difficulty in
maintaining this theory, with regard to the
primeval and longest period of the human race.
And of course this is even more the case as
regards the middle period, the formative period
of the aristocratic races — the aristocratic races
which have given back with interest to their
founders, the ancestors (heroes, gods), all those
qualities which in the meanwhile have appeared
in themselves, that is, the aristocratic qualities.
We will later on glance again at the ennobling and
promotion of the gods (which of course is totally
distinct from their " sanctification ") : let us now
provisionally follow to its end the course of the
whole of this development of the consciousness of
" owing. "

20.

According to the teaching of history, the con-
sciousness of owing debts to the deity by no
means came to an end with the decay of the
clan organisation of society ; just as mankind has
inherited the ideas of " good " and " bad " from
the race-nobility (together with its fundamental
tendency towards establishing social distinctions),
so with the heritage of the racial and tribal gods
it has also inherited the incubus of debts as yet
unpaid and the desire to discharge them. The
transition is effected by those large populations of
slaves and bondsmen, who, whether through com-



## p. (#123) ################################################

"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE, AND THE LIKE. 109

pulsion or through submission and " mimicry "\
have accommodated themselves to the religion of ]
their masters ; through this channel these inherited
tendencies inundate the world. iThe feeling of
owing a debt to the deity has grown continu-
ously for several centuries, always in the same
proportion in which the idea of God and the con-
sciousness of God have grown and become exalted
among mankind! (The whole history of ethnic
fights, victories, reconciliations, amalgamations,
everything, in fact, which precedes the eventual
classing of all the social elements in each great
race-synthesis, are mirrored in the hotch-potch
genealogy of their gods, in the legends of their
fights, victories, and reconciliations. Progress to-
wards universal empires invariably means progress
towards universal deities ; despotism, with its sub-
jugation of the independent nobility, always paves
the way for some system or other of monotheism. )
The appearance of the Christian god, as the record
god up to this time, has for that very reason
brought equally into the world the record amount!
of guilt consciousness. Granted that we have'
gradually started on the reverse movement, there
is no little probability in the deduction, based on
the continuous decay in the belief in the Christian
god, to the effect that there also already exists a
considerable decay in the human consciousness of
owing (ought) ; in fact, we cannot shut our eyes
to the prospect of the complete and eventual
triumph of atheism freeing mankind from all
this feeling of obligation to their origin, their
causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second



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no THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

innocence complement and supplement each
other.

21.

So much for my rough and preliminary sketch
of the interrelation of the ideas " ought " (owe) and
" duty " with the postulates of religion. I have
intentionally shelved up to the present the actual
moralisation of these ideas (their being pushed
back into the conscience, or more precisely the
interweaving of the bad conscience with the idea
of God), and at the end of the last paragraph
used language to the effect that this moralisation
did not exist, and that consequently these ideas
had necessarily come to an end, by reason of
what had happened to their hypothesis, the
credence in our " creditor," in God. The actual
facts differ terribly from this theory. It is with
the moralisation of the ideas " ought " and " duty,"
and with their being pushed back into the bad
conscience, that comes the first actual attempt to
reverse the direction of the development we have
just described, or at any rate to arrest its evolu-
tion ; it is just at this juncture that the very hope
of an eventual redemption has to put itself once
for all into the prison of pessimism, it is at this
juncture that the eye has to recoil and rebound in
despair from off an adamantine impossibility, it is
at this juncture that the ideas " guilt " and " duty "
have to turn backwards — turn backwards against
whom? There is no doubt about it; primarily
against the " ower," in whom the bad conscience
now establishes itself, eats, extends, and grows



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 1 1 1

like a polypus throughout its length and breadth,
all with such virulence, that at last, with the
impossibility of paying the debt, there becomes
conceived the idea of the impossibility of paying
the penalty, the thought of its inexpiability (the
idea of " eternal punishment ") — finally, too, it
turns against the " creditor," whether found in the
causa prima of man, the origin of the human race,
its sire, who henceforth becomes burdened with a
curse (" Adam," " original sin," " determination of
the will "), or in Nature from whose womb man
springs, and on whom the responsibility for the
principle of evil is now cast (" Diabolisation of
Nature"), or in existence generally, on this logic
an absolute white elephant, with which mankind is
landed (the Nihilistic flight from life, the demand
for Nothingness, or for the opposite of existence,
for some other existence. Buddhism and the like)
— 'till suddenly we stand before that paradoxical
and awful expedient, through which a tortured
humanity has found a temporary alleviation, that
stroke of genius calledlChristianity : — God person-
ally immolating himself for the debt of man, God
paying himself personally out of a pound of his
own flesh, God as the one being who can deliver
man from what man had become unable to deliver
himself — the creditor playing scapegoat for his
debtor, from love (can you believe it ? ), from love
of his debtor ! . . . J

The reader will already have conjectured what
took place on the stage and behind the scenes of



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112 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

this drama. \That will for seltJtor
verted cruelty of the anijnal man, ,3KhQ,_JtH£asd.
subjective, and scared -iato introapfijction (encaged
as he was in " the State," as part pf his taming
process), invented the„ had_-CQnscience-so-as~t©
hurt himself, after the natur:al. . xmtiet for t[i|p j;;! "
to hurt, became blocked — in other words, this man
of the mS" coHscience_ explajte^ ^he religious
hypothesis so as to ^garry his« martyr^orn to the
ghastliest pitch of agoriis ed_ intensity. \ Owing
something to^ God: t his thought be comes his
instrument of tortmg. He apprehends in God the
most extreme antitheses that he can find to his
own characteristic and ineradicable animal instincts,
he himself gives a new interpretation to these
animal instincts as being against what he " owes "
to God (as enmity, rebellion, and revolt against
the " Lord," the " Father," the " Sire," the " Begin-
ning of the world "), he places himself between the
horns of the dilemma,^God "arid " DeviH" Every
negation which he is inclined to utter to himself;
to the nature, naturalness, an3 reality of"Kis"bellig;~
he whips into an ejaculation of "yes"," uttering it
as something existing, living, efficlg1! Tt,"'"as beiiig-
G od. ja s the holiness of God, the judgment of God,
as the hangmanship of God, as transcendence, as
eternity, as unending torment, as hell, as infinity
of punishment and guilt. This is a kind of mad-
ness of the will in the sphere oTpsychoTogical
cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled ^— -man's
wiU to fin^ himgplf gniH-y and-blamewort hv to the
point of inexpiability, his wi// to think of himself
as punished, without the punishment evCT^Being



## p. (#127) ################################################

"3

able to balance the guil t, his will to infect and to
poison the fundamental basis of the universe with
the problem of punishment and guilt, in order to
cut off once and for all any escape out of this
labyrinth of " fixed ideas," his will for rearing an
ideal — that of the " holy God " — face to face with
which he can have tangible proof of his own un-
worthiness. Alas for this mad melancholy beast
man ! What phantasies invade it, what paroxysms
of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and mental
bestiality break out immediately, at the very
slightest check on its being the beast of action.
All this is excessively interesting, but at the same
time tainted with a black, gloomy, enervating
melancholy, so that a forcible veto must be in-
voked against looking too long into these abysses.
Here is disease, undubitably, the most ghastly
disease that has as yet played havoc among men :
and he who can still hear (but man turns now
deaf ears to such sounds), how in this night of
torment and nonsense there has rung out the cry
of love, the cry of the most passionate ecstasy, of
redemption in love, he turns away gripped by an
invincible horror — in man there is so much that
is ghastly — too long has the world been a mad-
house. .

23.

Let this suffice once for all concerning the origin
of the " holy God. " The fact that in itself the
conception of gods is not bound to lead necessarily
to this degradation of the imagination (a temporary
representation of whose vagaries we felt bound to
H



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114 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

give), the fact that there exist nobler methods of
utilising the invention of gods than in this self-
crucifixion and self-degradation of man, in which
the last two thousand years of Europe have been
past masters — these facts can fortunately be still
perceived from every glance that we cast at the
/Grecian gods, these mirrors of noble and grandiose
men, in which the animal in man felt itself deified,
and did not devour itself in subjective frenzj^
These Greeks long utilised their gods as simple
buffers against the " bad conscience " — so that they
could continue to enjoy their freedom of soul :
this, of course, is diametrically opposed to Chris-
tianity's theory of its god. They went very far
on this principle, did these splendid and lion-
hearted children ; and there is no lesser authority
than that of the Homeric Zeus for making them
realise occasionally that they are taking life too
casually. " Wonderful," says he on one occasion
— it has to do with the case of . (Egistheus, a very
bad case indeed —

" Wonderful how they grumble, the mortals against
the immortals,
Only from us, they presume, comes evil, but in

their folly.
Fashion they, spite of fate, the doom of their
own disaster. "

Yet the reader will note and observe that this
Olympian spectator and judge is far from being
angry with them and thinking evil of them on
this score. " How foolish they are," so thinks he



## p. (#129) ################################################

" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 1 1 5

of the misdeeds of mortals — and " folly," " im-
prudence," " a little brain disturbance," and nothing
more, are what the Greeks, even of the strongest,
bravest period, have admitted to be the ground of
much that is evil and fatal. — Folly, not sin, do you
understand? . . . But even this brain disturbance
was a problem — " Come, how is it even possible ?
How could it have really got in brains like ours,
the brains of men of aristocratic ancestry, of men
of fortune, of men of good natural endowments, of
men of the best society, of men of nobility and
virtue ? " This was the question that for century on
century the aristocratic Greek put to himself when
confronted with every (to him incomprehensible)
outrage and sacrilege with which one of his peers
had polluted himself. " It must be that a god
had infatuated him," he would say at last, nodding
his head. — This solution is typical of the GreeksTl
. . . accordingly the gods in those times subserved
the functions of justifying man to a certain extent
even in evil — in those days they took upon them-
selves not the punishment, but, what is more
noble, the guilt. [

24.

I conclude with three queries, as you will see.
" Is an ideal actually set up he re, orjs^one^pulled^
do wn? " I am perhaps asked. . . . But have ye
"sSSTciently asked yourselves how dear a payment
hasth e settin g up of every ideal in the worl d"
e xacted ? T o achieve that consummation how
much truth must' ^a^a^_^be_lra^^ced3[^^rnns-_
understood, how many lies must be sanctified,



## p. (#130) ################################################

Il6 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

how much conscience has got to be distiirbed, how
many pounds of " God " have got to be sacrificed
every time ? To enable a sanctuary^ to b&„set up
a sanctuary has got to be destroyed : that is a law
— ^5how"iiTe an instance where it has not been
fulfilled ! . . . We modern men, we inherit the
immemorial tradition of vivisecting the conscience,
and practising cruelty to our animal selves. That
is the sphere of our most protracted training,
perhaps of our artistic prowess, at any rate of our
dilettantism and our perverted taste. I Man has
for too long regarded his natural proclivities with
an " evil eye," so that eventually they have become
in his system affiliated to a bad conscience. A
converse endeavour would be intrinsically fea sible
— but who is strong enough to attempt it? —
namely, to affiliate to the " bad conscience " alt
those unnatui'-al proclivities, all those transcendentaT
aspirations, contrary to sense, instinct, nature, and
animalism — in short, all past and present ideals,
which are all ideals opposed to life, and_traducing
the wo rld. ] To whom is one to turn nowadays
with SMc/i hopes and pretensions ? — It is just the
g-ood men that we should thus bring about our
ears ; and in addition, as stands to reason, the
indolent, the hedgers, the vain, the hysterical, the
tired. . . . What is more offensive or more
thoroughly calculated to alienate, than giving any
hint of the exalted severity with which we treat
ourselves ? And again how conciliatory, how full
of love does all the world show itself towards us
so soon as we do as all the world does, and " let
ourselves go" like all the world. For such a



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 1 1 7

consummation we need spirits of different calibre
than seems really feasible in this age ; spirits
rendered potent through wars and victories, to
whom conquest, adventure, danger, even pain, have
become a need ; for such a consummation we need
habituation to sharp, rare air, to winter wanderings,
to literal and metaphorical ice and mountains ; we
even need a kind of sublime malice, a supreme
and most self-conscious insolence of knowledge,
which is the appanage of great health ; we need (to
summarise the awful truth) just this great health !
Is this even feasible to-day ? . . . But some day,
in a stronger age than this rotting and intros~pective
present, must he~Tn sronT^comeTo^^uSj^^eve^ the
redeemer of great love and scorn, the creative
spirit, reboiimffing°TyTlie"impetus of KisjDwn force"
back^gain awayTronPevetyTranscendental plane
and dimension, he whose solitude is misunder-
standed of the people, a s though it were a flig ht
Jrnm rqfilit y ; — whi1p actually it is only his diving,
burrowing, and penetr ating into reality, sotTTat
"when he^comes again to the lighT 'Ee''^h at once
^""^-S 5fe2HLfeyJfes§--®esns Jhg^«(;/(? ? «^^f(? ^ of this
reality :. . its redem ption from the curse which the
old ideal has laid upon it.
1 This maiaof tKe'future,
wholFHiF^^lg' vO-i1T7eaeemjas_fromJthe old ideal,
as Jie jafilLfroxiil that IdgaT's^ necessary corollary of
great n ausea, wil l_tojiot hingness, and Nihilism ;
tKis tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, whiST
renders the will again free, who gives back to the
world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist
and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of
Nothingness — he must one day come. \



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Il8 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

25.

But what am I talking of? Enough ! Enough ?
At this juncture I have only one proper course,
silence : otherwise I trespass on a domain open
alone to one who is younger than I, one stronger,
more "future" than I — open alone to Zara-
thustra, Zarathustra the godless.



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THIRD ESSAY.

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC
IDEALS?

" Careless, mocking, forceful — so does wisdom wish us : she
is a woman, and never loves any one but a warrior. "

Thus Spake Zarathustra.



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What is the meaning of ascetic ideals ? In
artists, nothing, or too much ; in philosophers and
scholars, a kind of " flair " and instinct for the con-
ditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism ;
in women, at best an additional seductive fascina-
tion, a little morbidezza on a fine piece of flesh,
the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal ; in physio-
logical failures and whiners (in the majority of
mortals), an attempt to pose as " too good " for this
world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief
weapon in the battle with lingering pain and
ennui ; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best
engine of power, and also the supreme authority
for power ; in saints, finally a pretext for hiberna-
tion, their novissima glories cupido, their peace in
nothingness (" God "), their form of madness.

But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has
meant so much to man, lies expressed the funda-
mental featare of man's will, his horror vacui: he
needs a ^«'g/-^rr. ^od. ,ii will, sooner will Incinilngness
dian not will at all. -^- Am I_J3ot__ understpoji ? ^—
Have I not been understood ? — " Certainly not,
sir ? "^^Wgll, Jet us begin. at- lh e -J a eg Janing.

2.

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals ? Or, to
take an individual case in regard to which I have



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122 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

often been consulted, what is the meaning, for
example, of an artist like Richard Wagner paying
homage to chastity in his old age ? He had
always done so, of course, in a certain sense, but
it was not till quite the end, that he did so in
an ascetic sense. What is the meaning of this
" change of attitude," this radical revolution in his
attitude — for that was what it was? Wagner
veered thereby straight round into his own opposite.
What is the meaning of an artist veering round
into his own opposite? At this point (granted
that we do not mind stopping a little/Over this
question), we immediately call to xamd the best,
strongest, gayest, and boldest period, that there
perhaps ever was in Wagner's life : that was the
period when he was genuinely and deeply
occupied with the idea of " Luther's Wedding. "
Who knows what chance is responsible for our
now having the Meistersingers instead of this
wedding music ? And how much in the latter is
perhaps just an echo of the former ? But there
is no doubt but that the theme would have dealt
with the praise of chastity. And certainly it
would also have dealt with the praise of sensuality,
and even so, it would seem quite in order, and
even so, it would have been equally Wagnerian.
For there is no necessary antithesis between
chastity and sensuality : every j [ood rnarriagg,

every authentic^ hear t-felt love trans cgnda this

antithesis. Wagner wouI3, it seems to me, have

~3one well'lo have brought this pleasing reality

home once again to his Germans, by means of a

bold and graceful " Luther Comedy," for there



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 1 23

were and are among the Germans many revilers
of sensuality ; and perhaps Luther's greatest merit
lies just in the fact of his having had the courage
of his sensuality (it used to be called, prettily
enough, " evangelistic freedom "). But even in
those cases where that antithesis between chastity
and sensuality does exist, there has fortunately
been for some time no necessity for it to be in
any way a tragic antithesis. This should, at any
rate, be the case with all beings who are sound
in mind and body, who are far from reckoning
their delicate balance between " animal " and
"angel," as being on the face of it one of the
principles opposed to existence — the most subtle
and brilliant spirits, such as Goethe, such as Hafiz,
have even seen in this a further charm of life.
Such " conflicts " actually allure one to life. On
the other hand, it is only too clear that when
once these ruined swine are reduced to worshipping
chastity — and there are such swine — they only
see and worship in it the antithesis to themselves,
the antithesis to ruined swine. Oh what a tragic
grunting and eagerness ! You can just think of
it — they worship that painful and superfluous
contrast, which Richard Wagner in his latter days
undoubtedly wished to set to music, and to place
on the stage ! " For what purpose, forsooth f "
as we may reasonably ask. What did the swine
matter to him ; what do they matter to us ?

3.
At this point it is impossible to beg the
further question of what he really had to do with



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124 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

that manly (ah, so unmanly) country bumpkin,
that poor devil and natural, Parsifal, whom he
eventually made a Catholic by such fraudulent
devices. What? Was this Parsifal really meant
seriously "i One might be tempted to suppose
the contrary, even to wish it — that the Wagner-
ian Parsifal was meant joyously, like a concluding
play of a trilogy or satyric drama, in which
Wagner the tragedian wished to take farewell of
us, of himself, above all of tragedy, and to do so in
a manner that should be quite fitting and worthy,
that is, with an excess of the most extreme and
flippant parody of the tragic itself, of the ghastly
earthly seriousness and earthly woe of old — a
parody of that most crude phase in the unnatural-
ness of the ascetic ideal, that had at length been
overcome. That, as I have said, would have been
quite worthy of a great tragedian ; who like every
artist first attains the supreme pinnacle of his
greatness when he can look down into himself and
his art, when he can laugh at himself. Is Wagner's
Parsifal his secret laugh of superiority over
himself, the triumph of that supreme artistic
freedom and artistic transcendency which he has
at length attained. We might, I repeat, wish it
were so, for what can Parsifal, taken seriously,
amount to? Is it really necessary to see in it
(according to an expression once used against me)
the product of an insane hate of knowledge, mind,
and flesh ? A curse on flesh and spirit in one
breath of hate ? An apostasy and reversion to the
morbid Christian and obscurantist ideals? And
finally a self-negation and self-elimination on the



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? 12$

part of an artist, who till then had devoted all the
strength of his will to the contrary, namely, the
highest artistic expression of soul and body. And
not only of his art ; of his life as well. Just
remember with what enthusiasm Wagner followed
in the footsteps of Feuerbach. Feuerbach's motto
of "healthy sensuality" rang in the ears of
Wagner during the thirties and forties of the
century, as it did in the ears of many Germans
(they dubbed themselves " Young Germans "), like
the word of redemption. Did he eventually
change his mind on the subject ? For it seems at
any rate that he eventually wished to change his
teaching on that subject . . . and not only is
that the case with the Parsifal trumpets on the
stage : in the melancholy, cramped, and em-
barrassed lucubrations of his later years, there
are a hundred places in which there are manifesta-
tions of a secret wish and will, a despondent,
uncertain, unavowed will to preach actual retro-
gression, conversion, Christianity, mediaevalism,
and to say to his disciples, " All is vanity ! Seek
salvation elsewhere ! " Even the " blood of the
Redeemer " is once invoked.

Let me speak out my mind in a case like this,
which has many painful elements — and it is a
typical case : it is certainly best to separate an
artist from his work so completely that he can-
not be taken as seriously as his work. He is
after all merely the presupposition of his work



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126 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

the womb, the soil, in certain cases the dung and
manure, on which and out of which it grows —
and consequently, in most cases, something that
must be forgotten if the work itself is to be en-
joyed. The insight into the origin of a work is
a matter for psychologists and vivisectors, but
never either in the present or the future for the
aesthetes, the artists. The author and creator
of Parsifal was as little spared the necessity of
sinking and living himself into the terrible depths
and foundations of medieval soul-contrasts, the
necessity of a malignant abstraction from all
intellectual elevation, severity, and discipline, the
necessity of a kind of mental perversity (if the
reader will pardon me such a word), as little as
a pregnant woman is spared the horrors and
marvels of pregnancy, which, as I have said, must
be forgotten if the child is to be enjoyed. We
must guard ourselves against the confusion, into
which an artist himself would fall only too easily
(to employ the English terminology) out of
psychological " contiguity " ; as though the artist
himself actually were the object which he is able
to represent, imagine, and express. In point of fact,
the position is that even if he conceived he were
such an object, he would certainly not represent,
conceive, express it. Homer would not have
created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer
had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust.
A complete and perfect artist is to all eternity
separated from the " real," from the actual ; on
the other hand, it will be appreciated that he can
at times get tired to the point of despair of this



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? 1 27

eternal " unreality " and falseness of his inner-
most being — and that he then sometimes
attempts to trespass on to the most forbidden
ground, on reality, and attempts to have real
existence. With what success? The success will
be guessed — it is the typical velleity of the artist ;
the same velleity to which Wagner fell a victim
in his old age, and for which he had to pay so
dearly and so fatally (he lost thereby his most
valuable friends). But after all, quite apart from
this velleity, who would not wish emphatically
for Wagner's own sake that he had taken fare-
well of us and of his art in a different manner,
not with a Parsifal, but in more victorious, more
self-confident, more Wagnerian style — a style
less misleading, a style less ambiguous with regard
to his whole meaning, less Schopenhauerian, less
Nihilistic? . . .

What, then, is the meaning of ascetic ideals ?
In' the case of an artist we are getting to under-
sraflg^heir . iaeamiig_^:„J\7i2^g^ at all . . . or so
much that it is as good as nothing at all. Indeed,
what is the use of them ? Our artists have for a
long time past not taken up a sufficiently inde- .
pendent attitude, either in the world or against it,
to warrant their valuations and the changes in
these valuations exciting interest. At all times
they have played the valet of some morality,
philosophy, or religion, quite apart from the fact
that unfortunately they have often enough been
the inordinately supple courtiers of their clients



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128 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

and patrons, and the inquisitive toadies of the
powers that are existing, or even of the new
powers to come. To put it at the lowest, they
always need a rampart, a support, an already
constituted authority : artists never stand by
themselves, standing alone is opposed to their
deepest instincts. So, for example, did Richard
Wagner take, " when the time had come," the
philosopher Schopenhauer for his covering man
in front, for his rampart. Who would consider
it even thinkable, that he would have had the
courage for an ascetic ideal, without the support
afforded him by the philosophy of Schopenhauer,
without the authority of Schopenhauer, which
dominated Europe in the seventies ? (This is
without consideration of the question whether an
artist without the milk * of an orthodoxy would
have been possible at all. ) This brings us to the
more serious question : What is _ the meaning of
a real philosopher paying homage to the ascetic
ideal, a really self-dependent intellect like Schcr-''
penhauer, a man and knight with a glance of
bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who
knows how to stand alone without first waiting
for men who cover him in front, and the nods of
his superiors ? Let us now consider at once the
remarkable attitude of Schopenhauer towards art,
an attitude which has even a fascination for
certain types. For that is obviously the reason
why Richard Wagner all at once went over to

* An allusion to the celebrated monologue in William
Tell.



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? 1 29

Schopenhauer (persuaded thereto, as one knows,
by a poet, Herwegh), went over so completely that
there ensued the cleavage of a complete theoretic
contradiction between his earlier and his later
aesthetic faiths — the earlier, for example, being
expressed in Opera and Drama, the later in the
writings which he published from 1870 onwards.
In particular, Wagner from that time onwards (and
this is the volte-face which alienates us the most)
had no scruples about changing his judgment con-
cerning the value and position of music itself.
What did he care if up to that time he had made
of music a means, a medium, a " woman," that in
order to thrive needed an end, a man — that is, the
drama ? He suddenly realised that more could be
effected by the novelty of the Schopenhauerian
theory in majorem musiccs gloriam — that is to say,
by means of the sovereignty of music, as Schopen-
hauer understood it ; music abstracted from and
opposed to all the other arts, music as the in-
dependent art-in-itself, not like the other arts,
affording reflections of the phenomenal world, but ■
rather the language of the will itself, speaking
straight out of the " abyss " as its most personal,
original, and direct manifestation. This extra-
ordinary rise in the value of music (a rise which
seemed to grow out of the Schopenhauerian
philosophy) was at once accompanied by an un-
precedented rise in the estimation in which the
musician himself was held : he became now an
oracle, a priest, nay, more than a priest, a kind of
mouthpiece for the " intrinsic essence of things,"
a telephone from the other world — from hence-



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I30 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

forward he talked not only music, did this
ventriloquist of God, he talked metaphysic ;
what wonder that one day he eventually talked
ascetic ideals.

Schopenhauer has made use of the Kantian treat-
ment of the esthetic problem — though he certainly
did not regard it with the Kantian eyes. Kant
thought that he showed honour to art when he
favoured and placed in the foreground those of
the predicates of the beautiful, which constitute
the honour of knowledge : impersonality and uni-
versality. This is not the place to discuss whether
this was not a complete mistake ; all that I wish
to emphasise is that Kant, just like other philo-
sophers, instead of envisaging the esthetic prob-
lem from the standpoint of the experiences of
the artist (the creator), has only considered art and
beauty from the standpoint of the spectator, and
has thereby imperceptibly imported the spectator
himself into the idea of the " beautiful " ! But if
only the philosophers of the beautiful had suffi-
cient knowledge of this "spectator"! — Know-
ledge of him as a great fact of personality, as a
great experience, as a wealth of strong and most
individual events, desires, surprises, and raptures
in the sphere of beauty ! But, as I feared, the
contrary was always the case. And so we get
from our philosophers, from the very beginning,
definitions on which the lack of a subtler personal
experience squats like a fat worm of crass error,
as it does on Kant's famous definition of the



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 1 3 1

beautiful. " That is beautiful," says Kant, " which
pleases without interesting. " Without interesting !
Compare this definition with this other one, made
by a real " spectator " and " artist " — by Stendhal,
who once called the beautiful une promesse de
honheur. Here, at any rate, the one point which
Kant makes prominent in the aesthetic position
is repudiated and eliminated — le desinteressement.
Who is right, Kant or Stendhal ? When, forsooth,
our aesthetes never get tired of throwing into the
scales in Kant's favour the fact that under the
magic of beauty men can look at even naked
female statues " without interest," we can certainly
laugh a little at their expense : — in regard to this
ticklish point the experiences of artists are more
" interesting," and at any rate Pygmalion was not
necessarily an " unsesthetic man. " Let us think
all the better of the innocence of our aesthetes,
reflected as it is in such arguments ; let us, for
instance, count to Kant's honour the country-
parson na'lvet^ of his doctrine concerning the
peculiar character of the sense of touch ! And
here we come back to Schopenhauer, who stood
in much closer neighbourhood to the arts than
did Kant, and yet never escaped outside the pale
of the Kantian definition ; how was that ? The
circumstance is marvellous enough : he interprets
the expression, " without interest," in the most
personal fashion, out of an experience which must
in his case have been part and parcel of his
regular routine. On few subjects does Schopen-
hauer speak with such certainty as on the work-
ing of aesthetic contemplation : he says of it that



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132 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

it simply counteracts sexual interest, like lupulin
and camphor ; he never gets tired of glorifying
this escape from the " Life-will " as the great
advantage and utility of the sesthetic state. In
fact, one is tempted to ask if his fundamental
conception of Will and Idea, the thought that
there can only exist freedom from the " will " by
means of " idea," did not originate in a generalisa-
tion from this sexual experience. (In all questions
concerning the Schopenhauerian philosophy, one
should, by the bye, never lose sight of the con-
sideration that it is the conception of a youth ol
twenty-six, so that it participates not only in
what is peculiar to Schopenhauer's life, but in
what is peculiar to that special period of his life. )
Let us listen, for instance, to one of the most
expressive among the countless passages which
he has written in honour of the aesthetic state
( World as Will and Idea, i. 231); let us listen to
the tone, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude,
with which such words are uttered : " This is the
painless state which Epicurus praised as the
highest good and as the state of the gods; we
are during that moment freed from the vile pres-
sure of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the
will's hard labour, the wheel of Ixion stands still. "
What vehemence of language ! What images of
anguish and protracted revulsion ! How almost
pathological is that temporal antithesis between
" that moment " and everything else, the " wheel
of Ixion," " the hard labour of the will," " the vile
pressure of the will. " But granted that Schopen-
hauer was a hundred times right for himself



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 133

personally, how does that help our insight into
the nature of the beautiful ? Schopenhauer has
described one effect of the beautiful, — the calming
of the will, — but is this effect really normal ?
As has been mentioned, Stendhal, an equally
sensual but more happily constituted nature than
Schopenhauer, gives prominence to another effect
of the " beautiful. " " The^ beautiful promises
happiness. '' To him it is just the excitement "oT'the
"will "(tp "^interest "£j)j;;J^lJbeaHty ^tfiitLieisii"
the essential fact. And does not Schopenhauer
ultimately lay himself open to the objection, that
he is quite wrong in regarding himself as a Kantian
on this point, that he has absolutely failed to
understand in a Kantian sense the Kantian
definition of the beautiful — ;that the beautiful
pleased him as well by means^ of _an interest, by
means, in fact, of the strongest and most personal
interest of all, that: of the victim of torture who
escapes ^from his torture? — And to come back
again to our first question, " What is the meaning
of a philosopher paying homage to ascetic ideals ? "
We geFiiow, afany rate, a first hintj_he wishes to
escape from, a torture.

Let us beware of making dismal faces at the
word " torture "—there is certainly in this case
enough to deduct, enough to discount — there is
even something to laugh at. For we must
certainly not underestimate the fact that Scho-
penhauer, who in practice treated sexuality as a



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134 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

personal enemy (including its tool, woman, that
" instrumentum diaboli "), needed enemies to keep
him in a good humour ; that he loved grim, bitter,
blackish-green words ; that he raged for the sake
of raging, out of passion ; that he would have
grown ill, would have become a pessimist (for he
was not a pessimist, however much he wished to
be), without his enemies, without Hegel, woman,
sensuality, and the whole " will for existence "
" keeping on. " Without them Schopenhauer
would not have " kept on," that is a safe wager ; he
would have run away : but his enemies held him
fast, his enemies always enticed him back again
to existence, his wrath was just as theirs' was to
the ancient Cynics, his balm, his recreation, his
recompense, his remedium against disgust, his
happiness. So much with regard to what is most
personal in the case of Schopenhauer ; on the
other hand, there is still much which is typical
in him — and only now we come back to our
problem. It is a n ac cepted and indisputable fact,

^O long as thprp arp pTiilngnpliprc: jn^HT? |^ffff]7an?

wherever philosophers have_existed (from India
fo England, to take the opposite poles of philo-
sophic ability), that there exists a,. . jcmlJrritatio»-
andj:ancour on the part of philosoghas. towards_
sensyality^^ Schopenhauer is merely the most
eloquent, and if one has the ear for it, also the
most fascinating and enchanting outburst. There ^
similarly exists a real philosophic bias and affection
for the whole ascetic ideal; there should ""tjeTio
illusions on this score. Both these feelingspas
has been said, belong to the type ; if a philosopher



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? I35

lacks both of them, then he is — you may be
certain of it — never anything but a "pseudo. "
What does this mean ? For this state of affairs
must first be, interpreted : in itself it stands there
stupid, to all eternity, like any " Thing-in-itself. "
Every animal, includingY« hete pMlosophe,'&TL'ves
inslinctively after an optimum of favourable con-
ditions^ un(ier which he can let his whole strength
have play, and achieves his maximum conseious-
ness" of power ; witti equal instinctiveness, and
with a fine perceptive flair which is superior to
any reason, every animal shudders mortally at
every kind of disturbance and hindrance which
obstructs or could obstruct his way to ^zX optimum
(it is not his way to happiness of which I am
talking, but his way to power, to action, the most
powerful action, and in point of fact in many
cases his way to unhappiness). Similarly, the
philosopher shudders mortally at marriage, to^dCcv&t
with all that could persuade him to it — marriage
as a fatal hindrance on the way to the optimum.
Up to the present what great philosophers have
been married? Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer — they
were not married, and, further, one cannot im. agine
them as married. A married philosopher belongs
to comedy, that is my rule ; as for that exception
of a Socrates — the malicious Socrates married
himself, it seems, ironice, just to prove this very
rule. Every philosopher would say, as Buddha
said, when the birth of a son was announced to
him : " R^houla has been born to me, a fetter
has been forged for me" (Rahoula means here



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136 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

" a little demon ") ; there must come an hour of
reflection to every " free spirit " (granted that he
has had previously an hour of thoughtlessness),
just as one came once to the same Buddha :
" Narrowly cramped," he reflected, " is life in the
house ; it is a place of uncleanness ; freedom is
found in leaving the house. " Because he thought
like this, he left the house. So many bridges to
independence are shown in the ascetic idea], that
the philosopher cannot refrain from exultation and
clapping of hands when he hears the history of all
those resolute ones, who on one day uttered a nay
to all servitude and went into some desert; even
granting that they were only strong asses, and
the absolute opposite of strong minds. What,
then, does the ascetic ideal mean in a philosopher ?
This is my answer — it will have been guessed
long ago : when he sees this ideal the philosopher
smiles because he sees therein an optimum of the
conditions of the highest and boldest intellectu-
ality ; he does not thereby deny " existence," he
rather affirms thereby his existence and only his
existence, and this perhaps to the point of not
being far off the blasphemous ■w\^,pereat mundus,
fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiant ! . . .

8.

These philosophers, you see, are by no means
uncorrupted witnesses and judges of the value of
the ascetic ideal. They think of themselves — what
is the " saint " to them ? They think of that which
to them personally is most indisgensaBleT of



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 1 37

freedCTiJrojm compulsion, disturbance, noise : free-
donTlrom^ business ,. duties, cares-^-Qfa clear b.