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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
LIBRARIES.
roJACA, N. Y. 14583
JOHN M. OLIN
tfBRARY
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uu iii i. ll University Library
B 3312. E52L66
V. 13
The complete works of Fredrlch Nietzsche
3 1924 021 569 201
DATE DUE
-^n^
- iMMlilllWll
jwH-**f SBT
y^ ^'i a r
phinteoinu. s. a.
## p. (#4) ##################################################
Cornell University
Library
The original of tliis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.
http://www. archive. org/details/cu31 924021 569201
## p. (#5) ##################################################
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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
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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 !
ll University Library
B 3312. E52L66
V. 13
The complete works of Fredrlch Nietzsche
3 1924 021 569 201
DATE DUE
-^n^
- iMMlilllWll
jwH-**f SBT
y^ ^'i a r
phinteoinu. s. a.
## p. (#4) ##################################################
Cornell University
Library
The original of tliis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.
http://www. archive. org/details/cu31 924021 569201
## p. (#5) ##################################################
## p. (#6) ##################################################
## p. (#7) ##################################################
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 ! 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.
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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 ?
Find more books at https://www. hathitrust. org.
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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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
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## 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
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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) #################################################
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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 !
ll University Library
B 3312. E52L66
V. 13
The complete works of Fredrlch Nietzsche
3 1924 021 569 201
DATE DUE
-^n^
- iMMlilllWll
jwH-**f SBT
y^ ^'i a r
phinteoinu. s. a.
## p. (#4) ##################################################
Cornell University
Library
The original of tliis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.
http://www. archive. org/details/cu31 924021 569201
## p. (#5) ##################################################
## p. (#6) ##################################################
## p. (#7) ##################################################
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 ! 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
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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.
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FIRST ESSAY.
•GOOD AND EVIL. " '«GOOD AND BAD. "
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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,
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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 ?
