Morgan, Classics of Moral and Political Theory, fifth edition

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how then should it happen that we find ourselves one day? It has rightly been said: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”;¹ our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are forever underway toward them, as born winged animals and honey-gatherers of the spirit, concerned with all our heart about only one thing—“bringing home” something. As for the rest of life, the so-called “experiences”—who of us even has enough seriousness for them? Or enough time? In such matters I’m afraid we were never really “with it”: we just don’t have our heart there—or even our ear! Rather, much as a divinely distracted, self-absorbed person into whose ear the bell has just boomed its twelve strokes of noon suddenly awakens and wonders, “what did it actually toll just now?” so we rub our ears afterwards and ask, completely amazed, completely disconcerted, “what did we actually experience just now?” still more: “who are we actually?” and count up, afterwards, as stated, all twelve quavering bell strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being—alas! and miscount in the process … We remain of necessity strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves, for us the maxim reads to all eternity: “each is furthest from himself,”—with respect to ourselves we are not “knowers”…

—My thoughts on the origins of our moral prejudices—for that is what this polemic is about—found their first, economical, and preliminary expression in the collection of aphorisms that bears the title Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, the writing of that was begun in Sorrento during a winter that permitted me to pause, as a traveler pauses, and look out over the broad and dangerous land through which my spirit had thus far traveled. This occurred in the winter of 1876–77; the thoughts themselves are older. In essentials they were already the same thoughts which I now take up again in the treatises at hand: let us hope that the long period in between has been good for them, that they have become more mature, brighter, stronger, more perfect! That I still hold fast to them today, that they themselves have, in the meantime, held to each other ever more firmly, indeed have grown into each other and become intermeshed, strengthens within me the cheerful confidence that they came about not singly, not arbitrarily, not sporadically, but rather from the beginning arose out of a common root, out of a basic will of knowledge which commands from deep within, speaking ever more precisely, demanding something ever more precise. For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to be single in anything: we may neither err singly nor hit upon the truth singly. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit our thoughts grow out of us, our values, our yes’s and no’s and if’s and whether’s—the whole lot related and connected among themselves, witnesses to one will, one health, one earthly kingdom, one sun.—And do they taste good to you, these fruits of ours?—But of what concern is that to the trees! Of what concern is that to us, us philosophers! …

Given a skepticism that is characteristic of me, to which I reluctantly admit—for it is directed towards morality, towards everything on earth that has until now been celebrated as morality—a skepticism that first appeared so early in my life, so spontaneously, so irrepressibly, so much in contradiction to my environment, age, models, origins, that I almost have the right to call it my “a priori”—it was inevitable that early on my curiosity and my suspicion as well would stop at the question: what, in fact, is the origin of our good and evil? In fact, the problem of the origin of evil haunted me as a thirteen-year-old lad: at an age when one has “half child’s play, half God in one’s heart,”² I devoted my first literary child’s play to it, my first philosophic writing exercise—and as to my “solution”to the problem back then, well, I gave the honor to God, as is fitting, and made him the father of evil. Was this what my “a priori”³ wished of me? that new, immoral, at least immoralistic “a priori” and the, alas! so anti-Kantian, so mysterious “categorical imperative” speaking through it, to which I have since increasingly lent my ear, and not just my ear? … Fortunately I learned early on to distinguish theological from moral prejudice and no longer sought the origin of evil behind the world. A little historical and philological schooling, combined with an innate sense of discrimination in all psychological questions, soon transformed my problem into a different one: under what conditions did man invent those value judgments good and evil? and what value do they themselves have? Have they inhibited or furthered human flourishing up until now? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or, conversely, do they betray the fullness, the power, the will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future?—In response I found and ventured a number of answers; I distinguished ages, peoples, degrees of rank among individuals; I divided up my problem; out of the answers came new questions, investigations, conjectures, probabilities: until I finally had a land of my own, a ground of my own, an entire unspoken growing blossoming world, secret gardens as it were, of which no one was permitted even an inkling … O how we are happy, we knowers, provided we simply know how to be silent long enough! …

The first impetus to divulge something of my hypotheses on the origin of morality came to me from a clear, tidy, and smart, even overly smart little book in which for the first time I was clearly confronted by the reverse and perverse sort of genealogical hypotheses, the specifically English sort, and this book attracted me—with that power of attraction exerted by everything contrary, everything antipodal. The title of the little book was The Origin of Moral Sensations; its author, Dr. Paul Rée;⁴ the year of its publication, 1877. I may never have read anything to which I so emphatically said “no” as I did to this book, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion: and yet entirely without vexation or impatience. In the previously named volume on which I was then working, I made occasional and occasionally inopportune reference to the propositions of that book, not that I refuted them—what have I to do with refutations!—but rather, as befits a positive spirit, putting in place of the improbable the more probable, sometimes in place of one error another one. It was then, as mentioned, that I brought into the light of day those hypotheses concerning origins to which these treatises are devoted, clumsily, as I wish last of all to conceal from myself—still unfree, still without a language of my own for these things of my own, and with many a relapse and wavering. In particular, compare what I say in Human, All Too Human 45, on the dual prehistory of good and evil (namely out of the sphere of the nobles and that of the slaves); likewise section 136, on the value and origins of ascetic morality; likewise 96, 99, and volume II, 89, on the “morality of custom,” that much older and more original kind of morality that is removed toto caelo⁵ from the altruistic manner of valuation (which Dr. Rée, like all English genealogists of morality, sees as the moral manner of valuation in itself); likewise volume I, 92; Wanderer, section 26; Daybreak, 112, on the origins of justice as a settlement between approximately equal powers (equilibrium as presupposition of all contracts, accordingly of all law); likewise Wanderer 22 and 33, on the origins of punishment, for which the purpose of terrorizing is neither essential nor present at the beginning (as Dr. Rée believes:—rather this was inserted into it, under specific circumstances, and always as something incidental, as something additional).

Actually there was something much more important on my mind just then than my own or anyone else’s hypothesizing about the origin of morality (or, more precisely: the latter concerned me solely for the sake of an end to which it is one means among many). The issue for me was the value of morality—and over this I had to struggle almost solely with my great teacher Schopenhauer,⁶ to whom that book, the passion and the secret contradiction of that book, is directed, as if to a contemporary (—for that book, too, was a “polemic”). In particular the issue was the value of the unegoistic, of the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice, precisely the instincts that Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and made otherworldly until finally they alone were left for him as the “values in themselves,” on the basis of which he said “no” to life, also to himself. But against precisely these instincts there spoke from within me an ever more fundamental suspicion, an ever deeper-delving skepticism! Precisely here I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime lure and temptation—and into what? into nothingness?—precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standstill, the backward-glancing tiredness, the will turning against life, the last sickness gently and melancholically announcing itself: I understood the ever more widely spreading morality of compassion—which seized even the philosophers and made them sick—as the most uncanny symptom of our now uncanny European culture, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a Buddhism for Europeans? to—nihilism? … For this preferential treatment and overestimation of compassion on the part of modern philosophers is something new: until this point philosophers had agreed precisely on the worthlessness of compassion. I name only Plato, Spinoza,⁷ La Rochefoucauld,⁸ and Kant, four spirits as different from each other as possible, but united on one point: their low regard for compassion.—

This problem of the value of compassion and of the morality of compassion (—I am an opponent of the disgraceful modern softening of feelings—) appears at first to be only an isolated matter, a lone question mark; whoever sticks here for once, however, and learns to ask questions here, will fare as I have fared:—an immense new vista opens up to him, a possibility takes hold of him like a dizziness, every sort of mistrust, suspicion, fear springs forth, the belief in morality, in all morality totters,—finally a new challenge is heard. Let us speak it aloud, this new challenge: we need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values must itself be called into question—and for this we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which they have grown, under which they have developed and shifted (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartuffery, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as medicine, as stimulus, as inhibitor, as poison), knowledge of a kind that has neither existed up until now nor even been desired. One has taken the value of these “values” as given, as a fact, as beyond all calling-into-question; until now one has not had even the slightest doubt or hesitation in ranking “the good” as of higher value than “the evil,” of higher value in the sense of its furtherance, usefulness, beneficiality—with respect to man in general (taking into account the future of man). What? if the opposite were true? What? if a symptom of regression also lay in the “good,” likewise a danger, a temptation, a poison, a narcotic through which perhaps the present were living at the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also in a reduced style, on a lower level? … So that precisely morality would be to blame if a highest power and splendor of the human type—in itself possible—were never attained? So that precisely morality were the danger of dangers? …

Suffice it to say that once this prospect opened up to me, I myself had reasons for looking about for learned, bold, and industrious comrades (I am still doing so today). It is a matter of traveling the vast, distant, and so concealed land of morality—of the morality which has really existed, really been lived—with a completely new set of questions and as it were with new eyes: and is this not virtually to discover this land for the first time? … If in the process I thought of, among others, the above named Dr. Rée, this happened because I had no doubt that he would be pushed by the very nature of his questions to a more correct method of attaining answers. Did I deceive myself in this? My wish, in any case, was to turn so sharp and disinterested an eye in a better direction, the direction of the real history of morality and to warn him while there was still time against such English hypothesizing into the blue. It is of course obvious which color must be a hundred times more important to a genealogist of morality than blue: namely gray, which is to say, that which can be documented, which can really be ascertained, which has really existed, in short, the very long, difficult-to-decipher hieroglyphic writing of the human moral past! This was unknown to Dr. Rée; but he had read Darwin:⁹—and thus in his hypothesizing we have, in a manner that is at least entertaining, the Darwinian beast politely joining hands with the most modern, unassuming moral milquetoast who “no longer bites”—the latter with an expression of a certain good-natured and refined indolence on his face, into which is mixed even a grain of pessimism, of weariness: as if there weren’t really any reward for taking all these things—the problems of morality—so seriously. To me it seems that, on the contrary, there are no things which would reward one more for taking them seriously; to which reward belongs, for example, that one might perhaps some day gain permission to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness, or to say it in my language, gay science—is a reward: a reward for a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness that is admittedly not for everyone. On that day, however, when we say from a full heart: “Onward! even our old morality belongs in comedy!” we will have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of the “Destiny of the Soul”—: and he will certainly make use of it, one can bet on that, he, the great old eternal comic poet of our existence! …

—If this book is unintelligible to anyone and hard on the ears, the fault, as I see it, does not necessarily lie with me. It is clear enough, presupposing, as I do, that one has first read my earlier writings and has not spared some effort in the process: these are in fact not easily accessible. As far as my Zarathustra is concerned, for example, I count no one an authority on it who has not at sometime been deeply wounded and at sometime deeply delighted by each of its words: for only then may he enjoy the privilege of reverent participation in the halcyon element out of which the work was born, in its sunny brightness, distance, expanse, and certainty. In other cases the aphoristic form creates a difficulty—it lies in the fact that we don’t attach enough weight to this form today. An aphorism honestly coined and cast has not been “deciphered” simply because it has been read through; rather its interpretation must now begin, and for this an art of interpretation is needed. In the third treatise of this book I have offered a sample of what I call “interpretation” in such a case:—an aphorism is placed before this treatise, the treatise itself is a commentary on it. Admittedly, to practice reading as an art in this way one thing above all is necessary, something which these days has been unlearned better than anything else—and it will therefore be a while before my writings are “readable”—something for which one must almost be a cow and in any case not a “modern man”: ruminating …

—These English psychologists whom we also have to thank for the only attempts so far to produce a history of the genesis of morality—they themselves are no small riddle for us; I confess, in fact, that precisely as riddles in the flesh they have something substantial over their books—they themselves are interesting! These English psychologists—what do they actually want? One finds them, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, always at the same task, namely of pushing the partie honteuse¹⁰ of our inner world into the foreground and of seeking that which is actually effective, leading, decisive for our development, precisely where the intellectual pride of man would least of all wish to find it (for example in the vis inertiae¹¹ of habit or in forgetfulness or in a blind and accidental interlacing and mechanism of ideas or in anything purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and fundamentally mindless)—what is it actually that always drives these psychologists in precisely this direction? Is it a secret, malicious, base instinct to belittle mankind, one that perhaps cannot be acknowledged even to itself ? Or, say, a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disappointed, gloomy idealists who have become poisonous and green? Or a little subterranean animosity and rancor against Christianity (and Plato) that has perhaps not yet made it past the threshold of consciousness? Or even a lascivious taste for the disconcerting, for the painful-paradoxical, for the questionable and nonsensical aspects of existence? Or finally—a little of everything, a little meanness, a little gloominess, a little anti-Christianity, a little tickle and need for pepper? … But I am told that they are simply old, cold, boring frogs who creep and hop around on human beings, into human beings, as if they were really in their element there, namely in a swamp. I resist this, still more, I don’t believe it; and if one is permitted to wish where one cannot know, then I wish from my heart that the reverse may be the case with them—that these explorers and microscopists of the soul are basically brave, magnanimous, and proud animals who know how to keep a rein on their hearts as well as their pain and have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, to every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, unpleasant, unchristian, immoral truth … For there are such truths.—

Hats off then to whatever good spirits may be at work in these historians of morality! Unfortunately, however, it is certain that they lack the historical spirit itself, that they have been left in the lurch precisely by all the good spirits of history! As is simply the age-old practice among philosophers, they all think essentially ahistorically; of this there is no doubt. The ineptitude of their moral genealogy is exposed right at the beginning, where it is a matter of determining the origins of the concept and judgment “good.” “Originally”—so they decree—“unegoistic actions were praised and called good from the perspective of those to whom they were rendered, hence for whom they were useful; later one forgot this origin of the praise and, simply because unegoistic actions were as a matter of habit always praised as good, one also felt them to be good—as if they were something good in themselves.” One sees immediately: this first derivation already contains all the characteristic traits of the idiosyncrasy of English psychologists—we have “usefulness,” “forgetting,” “habit,” and in the end “error,” all as basis for a valuation of which the higher human being has until now been proud as if it were some kind of distinctive prerogative of humankind. This pride must be humbled, this valuation devalued: has this been achieved? … Now in the first place it is obvious to me that the actual genesis of the concept “good” is sought and fixed in the wrong place by this theory: the judgment “good” does not stem from those to whom “goodness” is rendered! Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is the noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and high-minded who felt and ranked themselves and their doings as good, which is to say, as of the first rank, in contrast to everything base, low-minded, common, and vulgar. Out of this pathos of distance they first took for themselves the right to create values, to coin names for values: what did they care about usefulness! The viewpoint of utility is as foreign and inappropriate as possible, especially in relation to so hot an outpouring of highest rank-ordering, rank-distinguishing value judgments: for here feeling has arrived at an opposite of that low degree of warmth presupposed by every calculating prudence, every assessment of utility—and not just for once, for an hour of exception, but rather for the long run. As was stated, the pathos of nobility and distance, this lasting and dominant collective and basic feeling of a higher ruling nature in relation to a lower nature, to a “below”—that is the origin of the opposition “good” and “bad.” (The right of lords to give names goes so far that we should allow ourselves to comprehend the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of those who rule: they say “this is such and such,” they seal each thing and happening with a sound and thus, as it were, take possession of it.) It is because of this origin that from the outset the word “good” does not necessarily attach itself to “unegoistic” actions—as is the superstition of those genealogists of morality. On the contrary, only when aristocratic value judgments begin to decline does this entire opposition “egoistic” “unegoistic” impose itself more and more on the human conscience—to make use of my language, it is the herd instinct that finally finds a voice (also words) in this opposition. And even then it takes a long time until this instinct becomes dominant to such an extent that moral valuation in effect gets caught and stuck at that opposition (as is the case in present-day Europe: today the prejudice that takes “moral,” “unegoistic,” “désintéressé”¹² to be concepts of equal value already rules with the force of an “idée fixe”¹³ and sickness in the head).

In the second place, however: quite apart from the historical untenability of that hypothesis concerning the origins of the value judgment “good,” it suffers from an inherent psychological absurdity. The usefulness of the unegoistic action is supposed to be the origin of its praise, and this origin is supposed to have been forgotten:—how is this forgetting even possible? Did the usefulness of such actions cease at some point? The opposite is the case: this usefulness has been the everyday experience in all ages, something therefore that was continually underscored anew; accordingly, instead of disappearing from consciousness, instead of becoming forgettable, it could not help but impress itself upon consciousness with ever greater clarity. How much more reasonable is that opposing theory (it is not therefore truer—) advocated for example by Herbert Spencer¹⁴—which ranks the concept “good” as essentially identical with the concept “useful,” “purposive,” so that in the judgments “good” and “bad” humanity has summed up and sanctioned its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences concerning what is useful-purposive, what is injurious-nonpurposive. Good, according to this theory, is whatever has proved itself as useful from time immemorial: it may thus claim validity as “valuable in the highest degree,” as “valuable in itself.” This path of explanation is also false, as noted above, but at least the explanation is in itself reasonable and psychologically tenable.

—The pointer to the right path was given to me by the question: what do the terms coined for “good” in the various languages actually mean from an etymological viewpoint? Here I found that they all lead back to the same conceptual transformation—that everywhere the basic concept is “noble,” “aristocratic” in the sense related to the estates, out of which “good” in the sense of “noble of soul,” “high-natured of soul,” “privileged of soul” necessarily develops: a development that always runs parallel to that other one which makes “common,” “vulgar,” “base” pass over finally into the concept “bad.” The most eloquent example of the latter is the German word “schlecht” [bad] itself: which is identical with “schlicht” [plain, simple]—compare “schlechtweg,” “schlechterdings” [simply or downright]—and originally designated the plain, the common man, as yet without a suspecting sideward glance, simply in opposition to the noble one. Around the time of the Thirty-Years’ War, in other words late enough, this sense shifts into the one now commonly used.—With respect to morality’s genealogy this appears to me to be an essential insight; that it is only now being discovered is due to the inhibiting influence that democratic prejudice exercises in the modern world with regard to all questions of origins. And this influence extends all the way into that seemingly most objective realm of natural science and physiology, as I shall merely hint at here. But the nonsense that this prejudice—once unleashed to the point of hate—is able to inflict, especially on morality and history, is shown by Buckle’s¹⁵ notorious case; the plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English descent, sprang forth there once again on its native ground, vehemently like a muddy volcano and with that oversalted, overloud, common eloquence with which until now all volcanoes have spoken.—

With regard to our problem—which can for good reasons be called a quiet problem and which addresses itself selectively to but few ears—it is of no small interest to discover that often in those words and roots that designate “good” that main nuance still shimmers through with respect to which the nobles felt themselves to be humans of a higher rank. To be sure, they may name themselves in the most frequent cases simply after their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the lords,” “the commanders”) or after the most visible distinguishing mark of this superiority, for example as “the rich,” “the possessors,” (that is the sense of arya;¹⁶ and likewise in Iranian and Slavic). But also after a typical character trait: and this is the case which concerns us here. They call themselves for example “the truthful”—led by the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis.¹⁷ The word coined for this, esthlos,¹⁸ means according to its root one who is, who possesses reality, who is real, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true one as the truthful one: in this phase of the concept’s transformation it becomes the by- and catchword of the nobility and passes over completely into the sense of “aristocratic,” as that which distinguishes from the lying common man as Theognis understands and depicts him—until finally, after the demise of the nobility, the word remains as the term for noblesse of soul and becomes as it were ripe and sweet. In the word kakos¹⁹ as well as in deilos²⁰ (the plebeian in contrast to the agathos)²¹ cowardliness is underscored: perhaps this gives a hint in which direction one should seek the etymological origins of agathos, which can be interpreted in many ways. In the Latin malus²² (beside which I place melas),²³ the common man could be characterized as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired (“hic niger est—”),²⁴ as the pre-Aryan occupant of Italian soil, who by his color stood out most clearly from the blonds who had become the rulers, namely the Aryan conqueror-race; at any rate Gaelic offered me an exactly corresponding case—fin²⁵ (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguishing word of the nobility, in the end, the good, noble, pure one, originally the blond-headed one, in contrast to the dark, black-haired original inhabitants. The Celts, incidentally, were by all means a blond race; it is wrong to associate those tracts of an essentially dark-haired population, which are noticeable on the more careful ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic origins or blood mixtures, as even Virchow²⁶ does: rather it is the pre-Aryan population of Germany that comes to the fore in these places. (The same is true for almost all of Europe: in essence, the subjected race has in the end regained the upper hand there, in color, shortness of skull, perhaps even in intellectual and social instincts—who will guarantee us that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and in particular that inclination toward the “commune,” the most primitive form of society—an inclination now common to all of Europe’s socialists—does not signify, on the whole, a tremendous atavism—and that the race of lords and conquerors, that of the Aryans, is not in the process of succumbing physiologically as well? …) I believe I may interpret the Latin bonus²⁷ as “the warrior”: assuming that I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older duonus²⁸ (compare bellum = duellum = duenlum,²⁹ in which that duonus seems to me to be preserved). Bonus accordingly as man of strife, of division (duo), as man of war—one sees what it was about a man that constituted his “goodness” in ancient Rome. Our German “gut” [good] itself: wasn’t it supposed to mean “the godly one,” the man “of godly race”? And to be identical with the name for the nation (originally for the nobility) of the Goths? The reasons for this supposition do not belong here.—

To this rule that the concept of superiority in politics always resolves itself into a concept of superiority of soul, it is not immediately an exception (although it provides occasion for exceptions) when the highest caste is at the same time the priestly caste and hence prefers for its collective name a predicate that recalls its priestly function. Here, for example, “pure” and “impure” stand opposite each other for the first time as marks of distinction among the estates; and here, too, one later finds the development of a “good” and a “bad” in a sense no longer related to the estates. Incidentally, let one beware from the outset of taking these concepts “pure” and “impure” too seriously, too broadly, or even too symbolically: rather all of earlier humanity’s concepts were initially understood in a coarse, crude, superficial, narrow, straightforward, and above all unsymbolic manner, to an extent that we can hardly imagine. The “pure one” is from the beginning simply a human being who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that bring about skin diseases, who doesn’t sleep with the dirty women of the baser people, who abhors blood—nothing more, at least not much more! On the other hand the entire nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy admittedly makes clear why it was precisely here that the valuation opposites could so soon become internalized and heightened in a dangerous manner; and indeed through them gulfs were finally torn open between man and man across which even an Achilles of free-spiritedness will not be able to leap without shuddering. From the beginning there is something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies and in the habits ruling there, ones turned away from action, partly brooding, partly emotionally explosive, habits that have as a consequence the intestinal disease and neurasthenia that almost unavoidably clings to the priests of all ages; but what they themselves invented as a medicine against this diseasedness of theirs—must we not say that in the end it has proved itself a hundred times more dangerous in its aftereffects than the disease from which it was to redeem them? Humanity itself still suffers from the aftereffects of these priestly cure naïvetés! Think, for example, of certain dietary forms (avoidance of meat), of fasting, of sexual abstinence, of the flight “into the wilderness” (Weir-Mitchellian isolation,³⁰ admittedly without the ensuing fattening diet and over-feeding, which constitutes the most effective antidote for all the hysteria of the ascetic ideal): in addition, the whole anti-sensual metaphysics of priests, which makes lazy and over-refined, their self-hypnosis after the manner of the fakir and Brahmin—brahma used as glass pendant and idée fixe—and the final, only too understandable general satiety along with its radical cure, nothingness (or God—the longing for a unio mystica³¹ with God is the longing of the Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvâna—and nothing more!) With priests everything simply becomes more dangerous, not only curatives and healing arts, but also arrogance, revenge, acuity, excess, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease;—though with some fairness one could also add that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil—and these are, after all, the two basic forms of the previous superiority of man over other creatures! …

—One will already have guessed how easily the priestly manner of valuation can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic and then develop into its opposite; this process is especially given an impetus every time the priestly caste and the warrior caste confront each other jealously and are unable to agree on a price. The knightly-aristocratic value judgments have as their presupposition a powerful physicality, a blossoming, rich, even overflowing health, together with that which is required for its preservation: war, adventure, the hunt, dance, athletic contests, and in general everything which includes strong, free, cheerful-hearted activity. The priestly-noble manner of valuation—as we have seen—has other presuppositions: too bad for it when it comes to war! Priests are, as is well known, the most evil enemies—why is that? Because they are the most powerless. Out of their powerlessness their hate grows into something enormous and uncanny, into something most spiritual and most poisonous. The truly great haters in the history of the world have always been priests, also the most ingenious haters:—compared with the spirit of priestly revenge all the rest of spirit taken together hardly merits consideration. Human history would be much too stupid an affair without the spirit that has entered into it through the powerless:—let us turn right to the greatest example. Of all that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the mighty,” “the lords,”“the power-holders,” nothing is worthy of mention in comparison with that which the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people who in the end were only able to obtain satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical revaluation of their values, that is, through an act of spiritual revenge. This was the only way that suited a priestly people, the people of the most suppressed priestly desire for revenge. It was the Jews who in opposition to the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) dared its inversion, with fear-inspiring consistency, and held it fast with teeth of the most unfathomable hate (the hate of powerlessness), namely: “the miserable alone are the good; the poor, powerless, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious, the only blessed in God, for them alone is there blessedness,—whereas you, you noble and powerful ones, you are in all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless, you will eternally be the wretched, accursed, and damned!” … We know who inherited this Jewish revaluation … In connection with the enormous and immeasurably doom-laden initiative provided by the Jews with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I call attention to the proposition which I arrived at on another occasion (“Beyond Good and Evil” section 195)—namely, that with the Jews the slave revolt in morality begins: that revolt which has a two-thousand-year history behind it and which has only moved out of our sight today because it—has been victorious …

—But you don’t understand that? You don’t have eyes for something that has taken two thousand years to achieve victory? … There is nothing to wonder at in this: all lengthy things are difficult to see, to see in their entirety. This however is what happened: out of the trunk of that tree of revenge and hate, Jewish hate—the deepest and most sublime hate, namely an ideal-creating, value-reshaping hate whose like has never before existed on earth—grew forth something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all kinds of love:—and from what other trunk could it have grown? … But by no means should one suppose it grew upwards as, say, the true negation of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hate! No, the reverse is the truth! This love grew forth out of it, as its crown, as the triumphant crown unfolding itself broadly and more broadly in purest light and sunny fullness, reaching out, as it were, in the realm of light and of height, for the goals of that hate—for victory, for booty, for seduction—with the same drive with which the roots of that hate sunk themselves ever more thoroughly and greedily down into everything that had depth and was evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, as the embodied Gospel of Love, this “Redeemer” bringing blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinners—was he not precisely seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, the seduction and detour to precisely those Jewish values and reshapings of the ideal? Has not Israel reached the final goal of its sublime desire for revenge precisely via the detour of this “Redeemer,” this apparent adversary and dissolver of Israel? Does it not belong to the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge, of a far-seeing, subterranean, slow-working and pre-calculating revenge, that Israel itself, before all the world, should deny as its mortal enemy and nail to the cross the actual tool of its revenge, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could take precisely this bait without thinking twice? And, out of all sophistication of the spirit, could one think up any more dangerous bait? Something that in its enticing, intoxicating, anesthetizing, destructive power might equal that symbol of the “holy cross,” that gruesome paradox of a “god on the cross,” that mystery of an inconceivable, final, extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man? … What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo³² Israel, with its revenge and revaluation of all values, has thus far again and again triumphed over all other ideals, over all more noble ideals.——

—“But why are you still talking about nobler ideals! Let’s submit to the facts: the people were victorious—or ‘the slaves,’ or ‘the mob,’ or ‘the herd,’ or whatever you like to call them—if this happened through the Jews, so be it! then never has a people had a more world-historic mission. ‘The lords’ are cast off; the morality of the common man has been victorious. One may take this victory to be at the same time a blood poisoning (it mixed the races together)—I won’t contradict; in any event it is beyond doubt that this toxication succeeded. The ‘redemption’ of the human race (namely from ‘the lords’) is well under way; everything is jewifying or christifying or mobifying as we watch (what do the words matter!). The progress of this poisoning through the entire body of humanity appears unstoppable, from now on its tempo and step may even be slower, more refined, less audible, more thoughtful—one has time after all … Does the church today still have a necessary task in this scheme, still a right to existence at all? Or could one do without it? Quaeritur.³³ It seems more likely that it inhibits and holds back this progress instead of accelerating it? Well, even that could be its usefulness … By now it is certainly something coarse and peasant-like, which repels a more delicate intelligence, a truly modern taste. Shouldn’t it at least become somewhat refined? … Today it alienates more than it seduces … Which of us indeed would be a free spirit if there were no church? The church, not its poison, repels us … Leaving the church aside, we, too, love the poison …”—This, the epilogue of a “free spirit” to my speech, an honest animal, as he has richly betrayed, moreover a democrat; he had listened to me up until then and couldn’t stand to hear me be silent. For at this point I have much to be silent about.—

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings denied the true reaction, that of the deed, who recover their losses only through an imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant yes-saying to oneself, from the outset slave morality says “no” to an “outside,” to a “different,” to a “not-self”: and this “no” is its creative deed. This reversal of the value-establishing glance—this necessary direction toward the outside instead of back onto oneself—belongs to the very nature of ressentiment: in order to come into being, slave-morality always needs an opposite and external world; it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to be able to act at all,—its action is, from the ground up, reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble manner of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks out its opposite only in order to say “yes” to itself still more gratefully and more jubilantly—its negative concept “low” “common” “bad” is only an after-birth, a pale contrast-image in relation to its positive basic concept, saturated through and through with life and passion: “we noble ones, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy ones!” When the noble manner of valuation lays a hand on reality and sins against it, this occurs relative to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently acquainted, indeed against a real knowledge of which it rigidly defends itself: in some cases it forms a wrong idea of the sphere it holds in contempt, that of the common man, of the lower people; on the other hand, consider that the affect of contempt, of looking down on, of the superior glance—assuming that it does falsify the image of the one held in contempt—will in any case fall far short of the falsification with which the suppressed hate, the revenge of the powerless, lays a hand on its opponent—in effigy, of course. Indeed there is too much carelessness in contempt, too much taking-lightly, too much looking-away and impatience mixed in, even too much of a feeling of cheer in oneself, for it to be capable of transforming its object into a real caricature and monster. Do not fail to hear the almost benevolent nuances that, for example, the Greek nobility places in all words by which it distinguishes the lower people from itself; how they are mixed with and sugared by a kind of pity, considerateness, leniency to the point that almost all words that apply to the common man ultimately survive as expressions for “unhappy” “pitiful” (compare deilos, deilaios, poneros, mochtheros, the latter two actually designating the common man as work-slave and beast of burden)³⁴—and how, on the other hand, to the Greek ear “bad” “low” “unhappy” have never ceased to end on the same note, with a tone color in which “unhappy” predominates: this as inheritance of the old, nobler aristocratic manner of valuation that does not deny itself even in its contempt (let philologists be reminded of the sense in which oizyros, anolbos, tlemon, dystychein, xymphora are used).³⁵ The “wellborn” simply felt themselves to be the “happy”; they did not first have to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies, to talk themselves into it, to lie themselves into it (as all human beings of ressentiment tend to do); and as full human beings, overloaded with power and therefore necessarily active, they likewise did not know how to separate activity out from happiness,—for them being active is of necessity included in happiness (whence eu prattein³⁶ takes its origins)—all of this very much in opposition to “happiness” on the level of the powerless, oppressed, those festering with poisonous and hostile feelings, in whom it essentially appears as narcotic, anesthetic, calm, peace, “Sabbath,” relaxation of mind and stretching of limbs, in short, passively. While the noble human being lives with himself in confidence and openness (gennaios “noble-born” underscores the nuance “sincere” and probably also “naive”) the human being of ressentiment is neither sincere, nor naive, nor honest and frank with himself. His soul looks obliquely at things; his spirit loves hiding places, secret passages and backdoors, everything hidden strikes him as his world, his security, his balm; he knows all about being silent, not forgetting, waiting, belittling oneself for the moment, humbling oneself. A race of such human beings of ressentiment in the end necessarily becomes more prudent than any noble race, it will also honor prudence in an entirely different measure: namely as a primary condition of existence. With noble human beings, in contrast, prudence is likely to have a refined aftertaste of luxury and sophistication about it:—here it is not nearly as essential as the complete functional reliability of the regulating unconscious instincts or even a certain imprudence, for example the gallant making-straight-for-it, be it toward danger, be it toward the enemy, or that impassioned suddenness of anger, love, reverence, gratitude, and revenge by which noble souls in all ages have recognized each other. For the ressentiment of the noble human being, when it appears in him, runs its course and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, therefore it does not poison—on the other hand it does not appear at all in countless cases where it is unavoidable in all the weak and powerless. To be unable for any length of time to take his enemies, his accidents, his misdeeds themselves seriously—that is the sign of strong, full natures in which there is an excess of formative, reconstructive, healing power that also makes one forget (a good example of this from the modern world is Mirabeau,³⁷ who had no memory for insults and base deeds committed against him and who was only unable to forgive because he—forgot). Such a human is simply able to shake off with a single shrug a collection of worms that in others would dig itself in; here alone is also possible—assuming that it is at all possible on earth—the true “love of one’s enemies.” What great reverence for his enemies a noble human being has!—and such reverence is already a bridge to love … After all, he demands his enemy for himself, as his distinction; he can stand no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to hold in contempt and a very great deal to honor! On the other hand, imagine “the enemy” as the human being of ressentiment conceives of him—and precisely here is his deed, his creation: he has conceived of “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” and this indeed as the basic concept, starting from which he now also thinks up, as reaction and counterpart, a “good one”—himself! …

Precisely the reverse, therefore, of the case of the noble one, who conceives the basic concept “good” in advance and spontaneously, starting from himself that is, and from there first creates for himself an idea of “bad”! This “bad” of noble origin and that “evil” out of the brewing cauldron of unsatiated hate—the first, an after-creation, something on the side, a complementary color; the second, in contrast, the original, the beginning, the true deed in the conception of a slave morality—how differently the two words “bad” and “evil” stand there, seemingly set in opposition to the same concept “good”! But it is not the same concept “good”: on the contrary, just ask yourself who is actually “evil” in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. To answer in all strictness: precisely the “good one” of the other morality, precisely the noble, the powerful, the ruling one, only recolored, only reinterpreted, only reseen through the poisonous eye of ressentiment. There is one point we wish to deny least of all here: whoever encounters those “good ones” only as enemies encounters nothing but evil enemies, and the same humans who are kept so strictly within limits inter pares,³⁸ by mores, worship, custom, gratitude, still more by mutual surveillance, by jealousy, and who on the other hand in their conduct towards each other prove themselves so inventive in consideration, self-control, tact, loyalty, pride, and friendship,—they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey toward the outside world, where that which is foreign, the foreign world, begins. There they enjoy freedom from all social constraint; in the wilderness they recover the losses incured through the tension that comes from a long enclosure and fencing-in within the peace of the community; they step back into the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, as jubilant monsters, who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, torture with such high spirits and equanimity that it seems as if they have only played a student prank, convinced that for years to come the poets will again have something to sing and to praise. At the base of all these noble races one cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast who roams about lusting after booty and victory; from time to time this hidden base needs to discharge itself, the animal must get out, must go back into the wilderness: Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—in this need they are all alike. It is the noble races who have left the concept “barbarian” in all their tracks wherever they have gone; indeed from within their highest culture a consciousness of this betrays itself and even a pride in it (for example when Pericles says to his Athenians in that famous funeral oration, “to every land and sea our boldness has broken a path, everywhere setting up unperishing monuments in good and bad”). This “boldness” of noble races—mad, absurd, sudden in its expression; the unpredictable, in their enterprises even the improbable—Pericles singles out for distinction the rhathymia³⁹ of the Athenians—their indifference and contempt toward all security, body, life, comfort; their appalling light-heartedness and depth of desire in all destruction, in all the delights of victory and of cruelty—all was summed up for those who suffered from it in the image of the “barbarian,” of the “evil enemy,” for example the “Goth,” the “Vandal.” The deep, icy mistrust that the German stirs up as soon as he comes into power, today once again—is still an atavism of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe has for centuries watched the raging of the blond Germanic beast (although there is hardly a conceptual, much less a blood-relationship between the ancient Teutons and us Germans). I once called attention to Hesiod’s embarrassment as he was devising the succession of the cultural ages and attempted to express it in terms of gold, silver, bronze: he knew of no other way to cope with the contradiction posed by the glorious but likewise so gruesome, so violent world of Homer, than by making one age into two, which he now placed one after the other—first the age of the heroes and demigods of Troy and Thebes, as this world had remained in the memory of the noble dynasties who had their own ancestors there; then the bronze age, which was that same world as it appeared to the descendants of the downtrodden, plundered, mistreated, dragged-off, sold-off: an age of bronze, as stated—hard, cold, cruel, without feeling or conscience, crushing everything and covering it with blood. Assuming it were true, that which is now in any case believed as “truth,” that the meaning of all culture is simply to breed a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, out of the beast of prey “man,” then one would have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment, with the help of which the noble dynasties together with their ideals were finally brought to ruin and overwhelmed, as the actual tools of culture; which is admittedly not to say that the bearers of these instincts themselves at the same time also represent culture. On the contrary, the opposite would not simply be probable—no! today it is obvious! These bearers of the oppressing and retaliation-craving instincts, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, of all pre-Aryan population in particular—they represent the regression of humankind! These “tools of culture” are a disgrace to humanity, and rather something that raises a suspicion, a counter-argument against “culture” in general! It may be entirely justifiable if one cannot escape one’s fear of the blond beast at the base of all noble races and is on guard: but who would not a hundred times sooner fear if he might at the same time admire, than not fear but be unable to escape the disgusting sight of the deformed, reduced, atrophied, poisoned? And is that not our doom? What causes our aversion to “man”?—for we suffer from man, there is no doubt.—Not fear; rather that we have nothing left to fear in man; that the worm “man” is in the foreground and teeming; that the “tame man,” this hopelessly mediocre and uninspiring being, has already learned to feel himself as the goal and pinnacle, as the meaning of history, as “higher man”—indeed that he has a certain right to feel this way, insofar as he feels himself distanced from the profusion of the deformed, sickly, tired, worn-out of which Europe today is beginning to stink; hence as something that is at least relatively well-formed, at least still capable of living, that at least says “yes” to life …

—At this point I will not suppress a sigh and a final confidence. What is it that I in particular find utterly unbearable? That with which I cannot cope alone, that causes me to suffocate and languish? Bad air! Bad air! That something deformed comes near me; that I should have to smell the entrails of a deformed soul! … How much can one not otherwise bear of distress, deprivation, foul weather, infirmity, drudgery, isolation? Basically one deals with everything else, born as one is to a subterranean and fighting existence; again and again one reaches the light, again and again one experiences one’s golden hour of victory,—and then one stands there as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for something new, something still more difficult, more distant, like a bow that any distress simply pulls tauter still.—But from time to time grant me—assuming that there are heavenly patronesses beyond good and evil—a glimpse, grant me just one glimpse of something perfect, completely formed, happy, powerful, triumphant, in which there is still something to fear! Of a human being who justifies man himself; a human being who is a stroke of luck, completing and redeeming man, and for whose sake one may hold fast to belief in man! … For things stand thus: the reduction and equalization of the European human conceals our greatest danger, for this sight makes tired … We see today nothing that wishes to become greater, we sense that things are still going downhill, downhill—into something thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more apathetic, more Chinese, more Christian—man, there is no doubt, is becoming ever “better” … Precisely here lies Europe’s doom—with the fear of man we have also forfeited the love of him, the reverence toward him, the hope for him, indeed the will to him. The sight of man now makes tired—what is nihilism today if it is not that? … We are tired of man …

—But let us come back: the problem of the other origin of “good,” of the good one as conceived by the man of ressentiment, demands its conclusion.—That the lambs feel anger toward the great birds of prey does not strike us as odd: but that is no reason for holding it against the great birds of prey that they snatch up little lambs for themselves. And when the lambs say among themselves “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is as little as possible a bird of prey but rather its opposite, a lamb,—isn’t he good?” there is nothing to criticize in this setting up of an ideal, even if the birds of prey should look on this a little mockingly and perhaps say to themselves: “we do not feel any anger towards them, these good lambs, as a matter of fact, we love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”—To demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a desire to overwhelm, a desire to cast down, a desire to become lord, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as nonsensical as to demand of weakness that it express itself as strength. A quantum of power is just such a quantum of drive, will, effect—more precisely, it is nothing other than this very driving, willing, effecting, and only through the seduction of language (and the basic errors of reason petrified therein), which understands and misunderstands all effecting as conditioned by an effecting something, by a “subject,” can it appear otherwise. For just as common people separate the lightning from its flash and take the latter as a doing, as an effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength as if there were behind the strong an indifferent substratum that is free to express strength—or not to. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind the doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is everything. Common people basically double the doing when they have the lightning flash; this is a doing-doing: the same happening is posited first as cause and then once again as its effect. Natural scientists do no better when they say “force moves, force causes,” and so on—our entire science, despite all its coolness, its freedom from affect, still stands under the seduction of language and has not gotten rid of the changelings slipped over on it, the “subjects” (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, likewise the Kantian “thing in itself “): small wonder if the suppressed, hiddenly glowing affects of revenge and hate exploit this belief and basically even uphold no other belief more ardently than this one, that the strong one is free to be weak, and the bird of prey to be a lamb:—they thereby gain for themselves the right to hold the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey … When out of the vengeful cunning of powerlessness the oppressed, downtrodden, violated say to themselves: “let us be different from the evil ones, namely good! And good is what everyone is who does not do violence, who injures no one, who doesn’t attack, who doesn’t retaliate, who leaves vengeance to God, who keeps himself concealed, as we do, who avoids all evil, and in general demands very little of life, like us, the patient, humble, righteous”—it means, when listened to coldly and without prejudice, actually nothing more than: “we weak ones are simply weak; it is good if we do nothing for which we are not strong enough”—but this harsh matter of fact, this prudence of the lowest order, which even insects have (presumably playing dead when in great danger in order not to do “too much”), has, thanks to that counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, clothed itself in the pomp of renouncing, quiet, patiently waiting virtue, as if the very weakness of the weak—that is to say, his essence, his effecting, his whole unique, unavoidable, undetachable reality—were a voluntary achievement, something willed, something chosen, a deed, a merit. This kind of human needs the belief in a neutral “subject” with free choice, out of an instinct of self-preservation, self-affirmation, in which every lie tends to hallow itself. It is perhaps for this reason that the subject (or, to speak more popularly, the soul) has until now been the best article of faith on earth, because it made possible for the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, that sublime self-deception of interpreting weakness itself as freedom, of interpreting their being-such-and-such as a merit.

Would anyone like to go down and take a little look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on earth? Who has the courage to do so? … Well then! The view into these dark workplaces is unobstructed here. Wait just a moment, Mr. Wanton-Curiosity and Daredevil: your eyes must first get used to this falsely shimmering light … So! Enough! Now speak! What’s going on down there? Tell me what you see, man of the most dangerous curiosity—now I am the one listening.—

—“I don’t see anything, but I hear all the more. There is a cautious malicious quiet whispering and muttering-together out of all corners and nooks. It seems to me that they are lying; a sugary mildness sticks to each sound. Weakness is to be lied into a merit, there is no doubt about it—it is just as you said.”—

—“and the powerlessness that does not retaliate into kindness; fearful baseness into ‘humility’; subjection to those whom one hates into ‘obedience’ (namely to one whom they say orders this subjection—they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak one, cowardice itself, which he possesses in abundance, his standing-at-the-door, his unavoidable having-to-wait, acquires good names here, such as ‘patience,’ it is even called virtue itself; not being able to avenge oneself is called not wanting to avenge oneself, perhaps even forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do—we alone know what they do!’). They also talk of ‘love of one’s enemies’—and sweat while doing so.”

—“They are miserable, there is no doubt, all of these whisperers and nook-and-cranny counterfeiters, even if they are crouching together warmly—but they tell me that their misery is a distinction and election from God, that one beats the dogs one loves the most; perhaps this misery is also a preparation, a test, a schooling, perhaps it is still more—something for which there will one day be retribution, paid out with enormous interest in gold, no! in happiness. This they call ‘blessedness.’”

—“Now they are giving me to understand that they are not only better than the powerful, the lords of the earth, whose saliva they must lick (not out of fear, not at all out of fear! but rather because God commands that they honor all authority)—that they are not only better, but that they are also ‘better off,’ at least will be better off one day. But enough! enough! I can’t stand it anymore. Bad air! Bad air! This workplace where they fabricate ideals—it seems to me it stinks of sheer lies.”

—No! A moment more! You haven’t said anything about the masterpiece of these artists of black magic who produce white, milk, and innocence out of every black:—haven’t you noticed what the height of their sophistication is, their boldest, finest, most ingenious, most mendacious artistic stroke? Pay attention! These cellar animals full of revenge and hate—what is it they make precisely out of this revenge and hate? Did you ever hear these words? Would you guess, if you trusted their words alone, that those around you are all humans of ressentiment? …

—“I understand, I’ll open my ears once again (oh! oh! oh! and close my nose). Now for the first time I hear what they have said so often: ‘We good ones—we are the just’—what they demand they call not retaliation but rather ‘the triumph of justice’; what they hate is not their enemy, no! they hate ‘injustice,’ ‘ungodliness’; what they believe and hope for is not the hope for revenge, the drunkenness of sweet revenge (—already Homer called it ‘sweeter than honey’), but rather the victory of God, of the just God over the ungodly; what is left on earth for them to love are not their brothers in hate but rather their ‘brothers in love,’ as they say, all the good and just on earth.”

—And what do they call that which serves them as comfort against all the sufferings of life—their phantasmagoria of the anticipated future blessedness?

—“What? Did I hear right? They call that ‘the last judgment,’ the coming of their kingdom, of the ‘kingdom of God’—meanwhile, however, they live ‘in faith,’ ‘in love,’ ‘in hope.’”

In faith in what? In love of what? In hope of what?—These weak ones—someday they too want to be the strong ones, there is no doubt, someday their “kingdom” too shall come—among them it is called “the kingdom of God” pure and simple, as was noted: they are of course so humble in all things! Even to experience that they need to live long, beyond death—indeed they need eternal life so that in the ‘kingdom of God’ they can also recover eternally the losses incurred during that earth-life “in faith, in love, in hope.” Recover their losses for what? Recover their losses through what? … It was a gross blunder on Dante’s part, it seems to me, when, with terror-instilling ingenuousness, he placed over the gate to his hell the inscription “I, too, was created by eternal love”:—in any case, over the gate of the Christian paradise and its “eternal blessedness” there would be better justification for allowing the inscription to stand “I, too, was created by eternal hate”—assuming that a truth may stand above the gate to a lie! For what is the blessedness of that paradise? … We would perhaps guess it already; but it is better that it is expressly documented for us by an authority not to be underestimated in such matters, Thomas Aquinas,⁴⁰ the great teacher and saint. “Beati in regno coelestia,” he says meekly as a lamb, “videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.”⁴¹ Or would you like to hear it in a stronger key, for instance from the mouth of a triumphant church father⁴² who counseled his Christians against the cruel pleasures of the public spectacles—and why? “Faith offers us much more,”—he says, De spectac. c. 29 ss.—“something much stronger; thanks to salvation there are entirely different joys at our disposal; in place of the athletes we have our martyrs; if we desire blood, well, we have the blood of Christ … But what awaits us above all on the day of his return, of his triumph!”—and now he continues, the enraptured visionary: “At enim supersunt alia spectacula, ille ultimus et perpetuus judicii dies, ille nationibus insperatus, ille derisus, cum tanta saeculi vetustas et tot ejus nativitates uno igne haurientur. Quae tunc spectaculi latitudo! Quid admirer! Quid rideam! Ubi gaudeam! Ubi exultem, spectans tot et tantos reges, qui in coelum recepti nuntiabantur, cum ipso Jove et ipsis suis testibus in imis tenebris congemescentes! Item praesides (the provincial governor) persecutores dominici nominis saevioribus quam ipsi flammis saevierunt insultantibus contra Christianos liquescentes! Quos praeterea sapientes illos philosophos coram discipulis suis una conflagrantibus erubescentes, quibus nihil ad deum pertinere suadebant, quibus animas aut nullas aut non in pristina corpora redituras affirmabant! Etiam poëtàs non ad Rhadamanti nec ad Minois, sed ad inopinati Christi tribunal palpitantes! Tunc magis tragoedi audiendi, magis scilicet vocales (in better voice, even more awful screamers) in sua propria calamitate; tunc histriones cognoscendi, solutiores multo per ignem; tunc spectandus auriga in flammea rota totus rubens, tunc xystici contemplandi non in gymnasiis, sed in igne jaculati, nisi quod ne tunc quidem illos velim vivos, ut qui malim ad eos potius conspectum insatiabilem conferre, qui in dominum desaevierunt. ‘Hic est ille, dicam, fabri aut quaestuariae filius (as everything that follows shows, and in particular this well-known designation from the Talmud for the mother of Jesus, from here on Tertullian means the Jews), sabbati destructor, Samarites et daemonium habens. Hic est, quem a Juda redemistis, hic est ille arundine et colaphis diverberatus, sputamentis dedecoratus, felle et aceto potatus. Hic est, quem clam discentes subripuerunt, ut resurrexisse dicatur vel hortulanus detraxit, ne lactucae suae frequentia commeantium laederentur.’ Ut talia spectes, ut talibus exultes, quis tibi praetor aut consul aut quaestor aut sacerdos de sua liberalitate praestabit? Et tamen haec jam habemus quodammodo per fidem spiritu imaginante repraesentata. Ceterum qualia illa sunt, quae nec oculus vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascenderunt? (1 Cor. 2:9) Credo circo et utraque cavea (first and fourth tiers, or, according to others, comic and tragic stages) et omni stadio gratiora.”⁴³—Per fidem:⁴⁴ thus it is written.

Let us conclude. The two opposed values ‘good and bad,’ ‘good and evil,’ have fought a terrible millennia-long battle on earth; and as certainly as the second value has had the upper hand for a long time, even so there is still no shortage of places where the battle goes on, undecided. One could even say that it has in the meantime been borne up ever higher and precisely thereby become ever deeper, ever more spiritual: so that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the “higher nature,” of the more spiritual nature, than to be conflicted in that sense and still a real battleground for those opposites. The symbol of this battle, written in a script that has so far remained legible across all of human history, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome”:—so far there has been no greater event than this battle, this formulation of the problem, this mortally hostile contradiction. Rome sensed in the Jew something like anti-nature itself, its antipodal monstrosity as it were; in Rome the Jew was held to have been “convicted of hatred against the entire human race”: rightly so, insofar as one has a right to tie the salvation and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, of Roman values. What the Jews on the other hand felt towards Rome? One can guess it from a thousand indications; but it will suffice to recall again the Johannine Apocalypse, that most immoderate of all written outbursts that revenge has on its conscience. (Do not underestimate, by the way, the profound consistency of the Christian instinct when it gave precisely this book of hate the name of the disciple of love, the same one to whom it attributed that enamored-rapturous gospel—: therein lies a piece of truth, however much literary counterfeiting may have been needed for this purpose.) The Romans were after all the strong and noble ones, such that none stronger and nobler have ever existed, ever even been dreamt of; everything that remains of them, every inscription thrills, supposing that one can guess what is doing the writing there. The Jews, conversely, were that priestly people of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt a popular-moral genius without parallel: just compare the peoples with related talents—for instance the Chinese or the Germans—with the Jews in order to feel what is first and what fifth rank. Which of them has been victorious in the meantime, Rome or Judea? But there is no doubt at all: just consider before whom one bows today in Rome itself as before the quintessence of all the highest values—and not only in Rome, but over almost half the earth, everywhere that man has become tame or wants to become tame,—before three Jews, as everyone knows, and one Jewess (before Jesus of Nazareth, the fisher Peter, the carpet-weaver Paul, and the mother of the aforementioned Jesus, called Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome has succumbed without any doubt. To be sure, in the Renaissance there was a brilliant-uncanny reawakening of the classical ideal, of the noble manner of valuing all things: Rome itself moved like one awakened from apparent death, under the pressure of the new Judaized Rome built above it, which presented the appearance of an ecumenical synagogue and was called “church”: but immediately Judea triumphed again, thanks to that thoroughly mobbish (German and English) ressentiment movement called the Reformation, and that which had to follow from it, the restoration of the church—also the restoration of the old sepulchral sleep of classical Rome. In an even more decisive and more profound sense than before, Judea once again achieved a victory over the classical ideal with the French Revolution: the last political nobleness there was in Europe, that of the seventeenth and eighteenth French centuries, collapsed under the instincts of popular ressentiment—never on earth has a greater jubilation, a noisier enthusiasm been heard! It is true that in the midst of all this the most enormous, most unexpected thing occurred: the classical ideal itself stepped bodily and with unheard of splendor before the eyes and conscience of humanity—and once again, more strongly, more simply, more penetratingly than ever, the terrible and thrilling counter-slogan “the privilege of the few” resounded in the face of the old lie-slogan of ressentiment, “the privilege of the majority,” in the face of the will to lowering, to debasement, to leveling, to the downward and evening-ward of man! Like a last sign pointing to the other path, Napoleon appeared, that most individual and late-born human being there ever was, and in him the incarnate problem of the noble ideal in itself—consider well, what kind of problem it is: Napoleon, this synthesis of an inhuman and a superhuman …

—Was that the end of it? Was that greatest of all conflicts of ideals thus placed ad acta⁴⁵ for all time? Or just postponed, postponed for a long time? … Won’t there have to be a still much more terrible, much more thoroughly prepared flaming up of the old fire someday? Still more: wouldn’t precisely this be something to desire with all our might? even to will? even to promote? … Whoever starts at this point, like my readers, to ponder, to think further, will hardly come to an end any time soon—reason enough for me to come to an end myself, assuming that it has long since become sufficiently clear what I want, what I want precisely with that dangerous slogan that is so perfectly tailored to my last book: “Beyond Good and Evil” … At the very least this does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad.”—

Note. I take advantage of the opportunity that this treatise gives me to express publicly and formally a wish that until now I have expressed only in occasional conversations with scholars: namely that some philosophical faculty might do a great service for the promotion of moral-historical studies through a series of academic essay contests:—perhaps this book will serve to give a forceful impetus in just such a direction. With respect to a possibility of this sort let me suggest the following question: it merits the attention of philologists and historians as much as that of those who are actual scholars of philosophy by profession.

“What clues does the study of language, in particular etymological research, provide for the history of the development of moral concepts?”

—On the other hand it is admittedly just as necessary to win the participation of physiologists and physicians for these problems (of the value of previous estimations of value): it may be left to the professional philosophers to act as advocates and mediators in this individual case as well, after they have succeeded in reshaping in general the relationship between philosophy, physiology, and medicine—originally so standoffish, so mistrustful—into the friendliest and most fruit-bearing exchange. Indeed every value table, every “thou shalt,” of which history or ethnological research is aware, needs physiological illumination and interpretation first of all, in any case before the psychological; all of them likewise await a critique on the part of medical science. The question: what is the value of this or that value table or “morality”? demands to be raised from the most diverse perspectives; for this “value relative to what end?” cannot be analyzed too finely. Something, for example, that clearly had value with regard to the greatest possible longevity of a race (or to a heightening of its powers of adaptation to a specific climate, or to the preservation of the greatest number), would by no means have the same value if it were an issue of developing a stronger type. The welfare of the majority and the welfare of the few are opposing value viewpoints: to hold the former one to be of higher value already in itself, this we will leave to the naïveté of English biologists … All sciences are henceforth to do preparatory work for the philosopher’s task of the future: understanding this task such that the philosopher is to solve the problem of value, that he is to determine the order of rank among values.—

To breed an animal that is permitted to promise—isn’t this precisely the paradoxical task nature has set for itself with regard to man? isn’t this the true problem of man? … That this problem has been solved to a high degree must appear all the more amazing to one who can fully appreciate the force working in opposition, that of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial believe; rather, it is an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of suppression, and is responsible for the fact that whatever we experience, learn, or take into ourselves enters just as little into our consciousness during the condition of digestion (one might call it “inanimation”) as does the entire thousand-fold process through which the nourishing of our body, so-called “incorporation,” runs its course. To temporarily close the doors and windows of consciousness; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which our underworld of subservient organs works for and against each other; a little stillness, a little tabula rasa of consciousness so that there is again space for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, foreseeing, predetermining (for our organism is set up oligarchically)—that is the use of this active forgetfulness, a doorkeeper as it were, an upholder of psychic order, of rest, of etiquette: from which one can immediately anticipate the degree to which there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness. The human being in whom this suppression apparatus is damaged and stops functioning is comparable to a dyspeptic (and not just comparable—) he can’t “process” anything … Precisely this necessarily forgetful animal in whom forgetting represents a force, a form of strong health, has now bred in itself an opposite faculty, a memory, with whose help forgetfulness is disconnected for certain cases,—namely for those cases where a promise is to be made: it is thus by no means simply a passive no-longer-being-able-to-get-rid-of the impression once it has been inscribed, not simply indigestion from a once-pledged word over which one cannot regain control, but rather an active no-longer-wanting-to-get-rid-of, a willing on and on of something one has once willed, a true memory of the will: so that a world of new strange things, circumstances, even acts of the will may be placed without reservation between the original “I want,” “I will do,” and the actual discharge of the will, its act, without this long chain of the will breaking. But how much this presupposes! In order to have this kind of command over the future in advance, man must first have learned to separate the necessary from the accidental occurrence, to think causally, to see and anticipate what is distant as if it were present, to fix with certainty what is end, what is means thereto, in general to be able to reckon, to calculate,—for this, man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, in his own image of himself as well, in order to be able to vouch for himself as future, as one who promises does!

Precisely this is the long history of the origins of responsibility. As we have already grasped, the task of breeding an animal that is permitted to promise includes, as condition and preparation, the more specific task of first making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and accordingly predictable. The enormous work of what I have called “morality of custom” (cf. Daybreak 9, 14, 16)—the true work of man on himself for the longest part of the duration of the human race, his entire prehistoric work, has in this its meaning, its great justification—however much hardness, tyranny, mindlessness, and idiocy may be inherent in it: with the help of the morality of custom and the social straightjacket man was made truly calculable. If, on the other hand, we place ourselves at the end of the enormous process, where the tree finally produces its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally brings to light that to which it was only the means: then we will find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, the individual resembling only himself, free again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supermoral (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive), in short, the human being with his own independent long will, the human being who is permitted to promise—and in him a proud consciousness, twitching in all his muscles, of what has finally been achieved and become flesh in him, a true consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the completion of man himself. This being who has become free, who is really permitted to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign—how could he not know what superiority he thus has over all else that is not permitted to promise and vouch for itself, how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he awakens—he “earns” all three—and how this mastery over himself also necessarily brings with it mastery over circumstances, over nature and all lesser-willed and more unreliable creatures? The “free” human being, the possessor of a long, unbreakable will, has in this possession his standard of value as well: looking from himself toward the others, he honors or holds in contempt; and just as necessarily as he honors the ones like him, the strong and reliable (those who are permitted to promise),—that is, everyone who promises like a sovereign, weightily, seldom, slowly, who is stingy with his trust, who conveys a mark of distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something on which one can rely because he knows himself to be strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even “against fate”—: just as necessarily he will hold his kick in readiness for the frail dogs who promise although they are not permitted to do so, and his switch for the liar who breaks his word already the moment it leaves his mouth. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and fate, has sunk into his lowest depth and has become instinct, the dominant instinct:—what will he call it, this dominant instinct, assuming that he feels the need to have a word for it? But there is no doubt: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience …

His conscience? … One can guess in advance that the concept “conscience,” which we encounter here in its highest, almost disconcerting form, already has behind it a long history and metamorphosis. To be permitted to vouch for oneself, and with pride, hence to be permitted to say “yes” to oneself too—that is, as noted, a ripe fruit, but also a late fruit:—how long this fruit had to hang on the tree harsh and sour! And for a still much longer time one could see nothing of such a fruit,—no one could have promised it, however certainly everything on the tree was prepared and in the process of growing towards it!—“How does one make a memory for the human animal? How does one impress something onto this partly dull, partly scattered momentary understanding, this forgetfulness in the flesh, so that it remains present?” … As one can imagine, the answers and means used to solve this age-old problem were not exactly delicate; there is perhaps nothing more terrible and more uncanny in all of man’s prehistory than his mnemo-technique. “One burns something in so that it remains in one’s memory: only what does not cease to give pain remains in one’s memory”—that is a first principle from the most ancient (unfortunately also longest) psychology on earth. One might even say that everywhere on earth where there is still solemnity, seriousness, secrecy, gloomy colors in the life of man and of a people, something of that terribleness continues to be felt with which every where on earth one formerly promised, pledged, vowed: the past, the longest deepest hardest past, breathes on us and wells up in us when we become “serious.” Whenever man considered it necessary to make a memory for himself it was never done without blood, torment, sacrifice; the most gruesome sacrifices and pledges (to which sacrifices of firstborn belong), the most repulsive mutilations (castrations, for example), the cruelest ritual forms of all religious cults (and all religions are in their deepest foundations systems of cruelties)—all of this has its origin in that instinct that intuited in pain the most powerful aid of mnemonics. In a certain sense the entirety of asceticism belongs here: a few ideas are to be made indelible, omnipresent, unforgettable, “fixed,” for the sake of hypnotizing the entire nervous and intellectual system with these “fixed ideas”—and the ascetic procedures and forms of life are means for taking these ideas out of competition with all other ideas in order to make them “unforgettable.” The worse humanity was “at memory” the more terrible is the appearance of its practices; the harshness of penal laws in particular provides a measuring stick for the amount of effort it took to achieve victory over forgetfulness and to keep a few primitive requirements of social co-existence present for these slaves of momentary affect and desire. We Germans certainly do not regard ourselves as a particularly cruel and hard-hearted people, still less as particularly frivolous or living-for-the-day; but one need only look at our old penal codes to discover what amount of effort it takes to breed a “people of thinkers” on earth (that is to say: the people of Europe, among whom one still finds even today the maximum of confidence, seriousness, tastelessness, and matter-of-factness, qualities which give it a right to breed every type of European mandarin). Using terrible means these Germans have made a memory for themselves in order to become master over their mobbish basic instincts and the brutal heavy-handedness of the same: think of the old German punishments, for example of stoning (—even legend has the millstone fall on the head of the guilty one), breaking on the wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty of German genius in the realm of punishment!), casting stakes, having torn or trampled by horses (“quartering”), boiling the criminal in oil or wine (as late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the popular flaying (“Riemenschneiden”), cutting flesh from the breast; also, no doubt, that the evil-doer was smeared with honey and abandoned to the flies under a burning sun. With the help of such images and processes one finally retains in memory five, six “I will nots,” in connection with which one has given one’s promise in order to live within the advantages of society,—and truly! with the help of this kind of memory one finally came “to reason”!—Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, this entire gloomy matter called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been paid for! how much blood and horror there is at the base of all “good things”! …

But how then did that other “gloomy thing,” the consciousness of guilt, the entire “bad conscience” come into the world?—And thus we return to our genealogists of morality. To say it once more—or haven’t I said it at all yet?—they aren’t good for anything. Their own five-span-long, merely “modern” experience; no knowledge, no will to knowledge of the past; still less an instinct for history, a “second sight” necessary precisely here—and nonetheless doing history of morality: this must in all fairness end with results that stand in a relation to truth that is not even flirtatious. Have these previous genealogists of morality even remotely dreamt, for example, that that central moral concept “guilt” had its origins in the very material concept “debt”? Or that punishment as retribution developed completely apart from any presupposition concerning freedom or lack of freedom of the will?—and to such a degree that in fact a high level of humanization is always necessary before the animal “man” can begin to make those much more primitive distinctions “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,” “accountable,” and their opposites, and to take them into account when measuring out punishment. The thought, now so cheap and apparently so natural, so unavoidable, a thought that has even had to serve as an explanation of how the feeling of justice came into being at all on earth—“the criminal has earned his punishment because he could have acted otherwise”—is in fact a sophisticated form of human judging and inferring that was attained extremely late; whoever shifts it to the beginnings lays a hand on the psychology of older humanity in a particularly crude manner. Throughout the greatest part of human history punishment was definitely not imposed because one held the evil-doer responsible for his deed, that is, not under the presupposition that only the guilty one is to be punished:—rather, as parents even today punish their children, from anger over an injury suffered, which is vented on the agent of the injury—anger held within bounds, however, and modified through the idea that every injury has its equivalent in something and can really be paid off, even if only through the pain of its agent. Whence has this age-old, deeply-rooted, perhaps now no longer eradicable idea taken its power—the idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already given it away: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the existence of “legal subjects” and in turn points back to the basic forms of purchase, sale, exchange, trade, and commerce.

Calling to mind these contract relationships admittedly awakens various kinds of suspicion and resistance toward the earlier humanity that created or permitted them, as is, after the preceding remarks, to be expected from the outset. Precisely here there are promises made; precisely here it is a matter of making a memory for the one who promises; precisely here, one may suspect, will be a place where one finds things that are hard, cruel, embarrassing. In order to instill trust in his promise of repayment, to provide a guarantee for the seriousness and the sacredness of his promise, to impress repayment on his conscience as a duty, as an obligation, the debtor—by virtue of a contract—pledges to the creditor in the case of non-payment something else that he “possesses,” over which he still has power, for example his body or his wife or his freedom or even his life (or, under certain religious conditions, even his blessedness, the salvation of his soul, finally even his peace in the grave: as in Egypt where the corpse of the debtor found no rest from the creditor, even in the grave—and indeed there was something to this rest, precisely among the Egyptians.) Above all, however, the creditor could subject the body of the debtor to all manner of ignominy and torture, for example cutting as much from it as appeared commensurate to the magnitude of the debt:—and everywhere and early on there were exact assessments of value developed from this viewpoint—some going horribly into the smallest detail—legally established assessments of the individual limbs and areas on the body. I take it already as progress, as proof of a freer, more grandly calculating, more Roman conception of the law when the Twelve Tables legislation of Rome decreed it was of no consequence how much or how little the creditors cut off in such a case, “si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto.”⁴⁶ Let us make clear to ourselves the logic of this whole form of compensation: it is foreign enough. The equivalence consists in this: that in place of an advantage that directly makes good for the injury (hence in place of a compensation in money, land, possession of any kind) the creditor is granted a certain feeling of satisfaction as repayment and compensation,—the feeling of satisfaction that comes from being permitted to vent his power without a second thought on one who is powerless, the carnal delight “de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire,”⁴⁷ the enjoyment of doing violence: which enjoyment is valued all the higher the lower and baser the creditor’s standing in the social order and can easily appear to him as a most delectable morsel, indeed as a foretaste of a higher status. Through his “punishment” of the debtor the creditor participates in a right of lords: finally he, too, for once attains the elevating feeling of being permitted to hold a being in contempt and maltreat it as something “beneath himself”—or at least, if the actual power of punishment, the execution of punishment has already passed over into the hands of the “authorities,” of seeing it held in contempt and maltreated. The compensation thus consists in a directive and right to cruelty.—

In this sphere, in contract law that is, the moral conceptual world “guilt,” “conscience,” “duty,” “sacredness of duty” has its genesis—its beginning, like the beginning of everything great on earth, was thoroughly and prolongedly drenched in blood. And might one not add that this world has in essence never again entirely lost a certain odor of blood and torture? (not even in old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty …) It was likewise here that that uncanny and perhaps now inextricable meshing of ideas, “guilt and suffering,” was first knitted. Asking once again: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making-suffer felt good, and in the highest degree; to the extent that the injured one exchanged for what was lost, including the displeasure over the loss, an extraordinary counter-pleasure: making-suffer,—a true festival, something that, as stated, stood that much higher in price, the more it contradicted the rank and social standing of the creditor. This stated as conjecture: for it is difficult to see to the bottom of such subterranean things, not to mention that it is embarrassing; and whoever clumsily throws the concept of “revenge” into the middle of it all has covered and obscured his insight into the matter rather than making it easier (—revenge simply leads back to the same problem: “how can making-suffer be a satisfaction?). It seems to me that it is repugnant to the delicacy, even more to the Tartuffery of tame domestic animals (which is to say modern humans, which is to say us) to imagine in all its force the degree to which cruelty constitutes the great festival joy of earlier humanity, indeed is an ingredient mixed in with almost all of their joys; how naïvely, on the other hand, how innocently its need for cruelty manifests itself, how universally they rank precisely “disinterested malice” (or, to speak with Spinoza, sympathia malevolens)⁴⁸ as a normal quality of man—: thus as something to which the conscience heartily says “yes”! Perhaps even today there is enough of this oldest and most pervasive festival joy of man for a more profound eye to perceive; in Beyond Good and Evil 229 (even earlier in Daybreak 18, 77, 113), I pointed with a cautious finger to the ever-growing spiritualization and “deification” of cruelty that runs though the entire history of higher culture (and in a significant sense even constitutes it). In any case it has not been all that long since one could not imagine royal marriages and folk festivals in the grandest style without executions, torturings, or perhaps an auto-da-fé, likewise no noble household without beings on whom one could vent one’s malice and cruel teasing without a second thought (—think for example of Don Quixote at the court of the Duchess: today we read the entire Don Quixote with a bitter taste on our tongue, almost with anguish, and would as a result appear very strange, very puzzling to its author and his contemporaries—they read it with the very clearest conscience as the most lighthearted of books, they practically laughed themselves to death over it). Seeing-suffer feels good, making-suffer even more so—that is a hard proposition, but a central one, an old powerful human-all-too-human proposition, to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: for it is said that in thinking up bizarre cruelties they already abundantly herald and, as it were, “prelude” man. Without cruelty, no festival: thus teaches the oldest, longest part of man’s history—and in punishment too there is so much that is festive!—

—With these thoughts, incidentally, it is by no means my intent to help our pessimists to new grist for their discordant and creaking mills of life-weariness; on the contrary they are meant expressly to show that back then, when humanity was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more lighthearted than it is now that there are pessimists. The darkening of the heavens over man has always increased proportionally as man has grown ashamed of man. The tired pessimistic glance, the mistrust toward the riddle of life, the icy “no” of disgust at life—these are not the distinguishing marks of the most evil ages of the human race: rather, being the swamp plants they are, they first enter the light of day when the swamp to which they belong appears,—I mean the diseased softening and moralization by virtue of which the creature “man” finally learns to be ashamed of all of his instincts. Along the way to “angel” (to avoid using a harsher word here) man has bred for himself that upset stomach and coated tongue through which not only have the joy and innocence of the animal become repulsive but life itself has become unsavory:—so that he at times stands before himself holding his nose and, along with Pope Innocent the Third, disapprovingly catalogues his repulsive traits (“impure begetting, disgusting nourishment in the womb, vileness of the matter out of which man develops, revolting stench, excretion of saliva, urine, and feces”). Now, when suffering is always marshalled forth as the first among the arguments against existence, as its nastiest question mark, one would do well to remember the times when one made the reverse judgment because one did not wish to do without making-suffer and saw in it an enchantment of the first rank, an actual seductive lure to life. Perhaps back then—to the comfort of delicate souls—pain didn’t yet hurt as much as it does today; at least such a conclusion will be permissible for a physician who has treated Negroes (taken as representatives of prehistorical man—) for cases of serious internal infection that would almost drive even the best constituted European to despair;—in Negroes they do not do this. (Indeed the curve of human capacity for feeling pain appears to sink extraordinarily and almost abruptly as soon as one gets beyond the upper ten thousand or ten million of the highest level of culture; and I, for my part, do not doubt that when held up against one painful night of a single hysterical educated female the combined suffering of all the animals thus far questioned with the knife to obtain scientific answers simply isn’t worth considering.) Perhaps one may even be allowed to admit the possibility that this pleasure in cruelty needn’t actually have died out: but, in the same proportion as the pain hurts more today, it would need a certain sublimation and subtilization, namely it would have to appear translated into the imaginative and inward, adorned with all kinds of names so harmless that they arouse no suspicion, not even in the most delicate, most hypocritical conscience (“tragic pity” is such a name; another is “les nostalgies de la croix”).⁴⁹ What actually arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering in itself, but rather the senselessness of suffering; but neither for the Christian, who has interpreted into suffering an entire secret salvation machinery, nor for the naive human of older times, who knew how to interpret all suffering in terms of spectators or agents of suffering, was there any such meaningless suffering at all. So that concealed, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering could be banished from the world and honestly negated, one was almost compelled back then to invent gods and intermediate beings of all heights and depths, in short, something that also roams in secret, that also sees in the dark, and that does not easily let an interesting painful spectacle escape it. For with the help of such inventions life back then was expert at the trick at which it has always been expert, of justifying itself, of justifying its “evil”; today it would perhaps need other auxiliary inventions for this (for example life as riddle, life as epistemological problem). “Every evil is justified, the sight of which edifies a god”: thus went the prehistoric logic of feeling—and, really, was it only the prehistoric? The gods, conceived of as friends of cruel spectacles—oh how far this age-old conception extends even into our humanized Europe! on this point one may consult with Calvin⁵⁰ and Luther⁵¹ for instance. It is certain in any case that the Greeks still knew of no more pleasant offering with which to garnish the happiness of their gods than the joys of cruelty. With what sort of eyes then do you think Homer had his gods look down on the fates of humans? What was the ultimate meaning of Trojan wars and similar tragic horrors? There can be no doubt at all: they were meant as festival games for the gods: and, insofar as the poet is in this respect more “godlike” than other humans, probably also as festival games for the poets … The moral philosophers of Greece later imagined the eyes of the gods no differently, still glancing down at the moral struggle, at the heroism and the self-torture of the virtuous: the “Heracles of duty” was on a stage, he also knew he was on it; virtue without witnesses was something entirely inconceivable for this people of spectacles. Wasn’t that philosophers’ invention, so audacious, so fateful, which was first devised for Europe back then—that of “free will,” of the absolute spontaneity of man in good and evil—devised above all in order to create a right to the idea that the interest of the gods in man, in human virtue, could never be exhausted? On this stage, the earth, there would never be a shortage of truly new things, of truly unheard-of tensions, complications, catastrophes: a world conceived as completely deterministic would have been predictable for the gods and accordingly soon tiring—reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to expect their gods to be able to deal with such a deterministic world! In antiquity all of humanity is full of tender considerations for “the spectator,” as an essentially public, essentially visible world that could not imagine happiness without spectacles and festivals.—And, as already mentioned, in great punishment too there is so much that is festive! …

The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation—to take up the train of our investigation again—had its origin, as we have seen, in the oldest and most primitive relationship among persons there is, in the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: here for the first time person stepped up against person, here for the first time a person measured himself by another person. No degree of civilization however low has yet been discovered in which something of this relationship was not already noticeable. Making prices, gauging values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging—this preoccupied man’s very first thinking to such an extent that it is in a certain sense thinking itself: here that oldest kind of acumen was bred, here likewise we may suspect the first beginnings of human pride, man’s feeling of pre-eminence with respect to other creatures. Perhaps our word “man” (manas)⁵² still expresses precisely something of this self-esteem: man designated himself as the being who measures values, who values and measures, as the “appraising animal in itself.” Purchase and sale, together with their psychological accessories, are older than even the beginnings of any societal associations and organizational forms: it was out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights that the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, right, obligation, compensation first transferred itself onto the coarsest and earliest communal complexes (in their relationship to similar complexes), together with the habit of comparing, measuring, and calculating power against power. The eye was simply set to this perspective: and with that clumsy consistency characteristic of earlier humanity’s thinking—which has difficulty moving but then continues relentlessly in the same direction—one arrived straightaway at the grand generalization “every thing has its price; everything can be paid off”—at the oldest and most naive moral canon of justice, at the beginning of all “good-naturedness,” all “fairness,” all “good will,” all “objectivity” on earth. Justice at this first stage is the good will among parties of approximately equal power to come to terms with one another, to reach an “understanding” again by means of a settlement—and in regard to less powerful parties, to force them to a settlement among themselves.—

Always measured by the standard of an earlier time (which earlier time is, by the way, at all times present or again possible): the community, too, thus stands to its members in that important basic relationship, that of the creditor to his debtor. One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of a community (oh what advantages! we sometimes underestimate this today), one lives protected, shielded, in peace and trust, free from care with regard to certain injuries and hostilities to which the human outside, the “outlaw,” is exposed—a German understands what “Elend,” êlend⁵³ originally means—, since one has pledged and obligated oneself to the community precisely in view of these injuries and hostilities. What happens in the other case? The community, the deceived creditor, will exact payment as best it can, one can count on that. Here it is least of all a matter of the direct injury inflicted by the injuring party; quite apart from this, the criminal is above all a “breaker,” one who breaks his contract and word with the whole, in relation to all goods and conveniences of communal life in which he has until this point had a share. The criminal is a debtor who not only fails to pay back the advantages and advances rendered him, but also even lays a hand on his creditor: he therefore not only forfeits all of these goods and advantages from now on, as is fair,—he is also now reminded how much there is to these goods. The anger of the injured creditor, of the community, gives him back again to the wild and outlawed condition from which he was previously protected: it expels him from itself,—and now every kind of hostility may vent itself on him. At this level of civilization “punishment” is simply the copy, the mimus of normal behavior toward the hated, disarmed, defeated enemy, who has forfeited not only every right and protection, but also every mercy; in other words, the law of war and the victory celebration of vae victis!⁵⁴ in all their ruthlessness and cruelty:—which explains why war itself (including the warlike cult of sacrifice) has supplied all the forms in which punishment appears in history.

As its power grows, a community no longer takes the transgressions of the individual so seriously because they can no longer count as dangerous and subversive for the continued existence of the whole to the same extent as formerly: the evildoer is no longer “made an outlaw” and cast out; the general anger is no longer allowed to vent itself in the same unbridled manner as formerly—rather, from now on, the evildoer is carefully defended against this anger, particularly that of the ones directly injured, and taken under the protection of the whole. Compromise with the anger of the one immediately affected by the misdeed; a striving to localize the case and prevent a further or indeed general participation and unrest; attempts to find equivalents and to settle the entire affair (the compositio);⁵⁵ above all the increasingly more resolute will to understand every offense as in some sense capable of being paid off, hence, at least to a certain extent, to isolate the criminal and his deed from each other—these are the traits that are imprinted with increasing clarity onto the further development of penal law. If the power and the self-confidence of a community grow, the penal law also always becomes milder; every weakening and deeper endangering of the former brings the latter’s harsher forms to light again. The “creditor” has always become more humane to the degree that he has become richer; finally the amount of injury he can bear without suffering from it even becomes the measure of his wealth. It would not be impossible to imagine a consciousness of power in society such that society might allow itself the noblest luxury there is for it—to leave the one who injures it unpunished. “What concern are my parasites to me?” it might then say. “Let them live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!” … The justice that began with “everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,” ends by looking the other way and letting the one unable to pay go free,—it ends like every good thing on earth, by cancelling itself. This self-cancellation of justice: we know what pretty name it gives itself—mercy; as goes without saying, it remains the privilege of the most powerful, better still, his beyond-the-law.

—Here a word in opposition to recent attempts to seek the origin of justice on an entirely different ground,—namely that of ressentiment. First, for the ears of psychologists, supposing they should have the desire to study ressentiment itself up close for once: this plant now blooms most beautifully among anarchists and anti-Semites—in secret, incidentally, as it has always bloomed, like the violet, albeit with a different scent. And as like must necessarily always proceed from like, so it will not surprise us to see proceeding again from just such circles attempts like those often made before—compare above, section 14—to hallow revenge under the name of justice—as if justice were basically only a further development of the feeling of being wounded—and retroactively to raise to honor along with revenge the reactive affects in general and without exception. At the latter I would least take offense: with respect to the entire biological problem (in relation to which the value of these affects has thus far been underestimated) it would even appear to me to be a merit. I call attention only to the circumstance that it is from the spirit of ressentiment itself that this new nuance of scientific fairness (in favor of hate, envy, ill will, suspicion, rancor, revenge) grows forth. For this “scientific fairness” immediately shuts down and makes room for accents of mortal hostility and prejudice as soon as it is a matter of another group of affects that are, it seems to me, of still much higher biological value than those reactive ones, and accordingly deserve all the more to be scientifically appraised and esteemed: namely the truly active affects like desire to rule, greed, and the like. (E. Dühring,⁵⁶ Value of Life; Course in Philosophy; basically everywhere.) So much against this tendency in general: as for Dühring’s particular proposition that the homeland of justice is to be sought on the ground of reactive feeling, one must, for love of the truth, pit against it in stark reversal this alternative proposition: the last ground conquered by the spirit of justice is the ground of reactive feeling! If it really happens that the just man remains just even toward those who injure him (and not merely cold, moderate, distant, indifferent: being just is always a positive way of behaving), if the high, clear objectivity—that sees as deeply as it does generously—of the just eye, the judging eye, does not cloud even under the assault of personal injury, derision, accusation, well, then that is a piece of perfection and highest mastery on earth—what is more, something one would be prudent not to expect here, in which one in any case should not all too easily believe. Even with the most righteous persons it is certain that a small dose of attack, malice, insinuation is, on the average, already enough to chase the blood into their eyes and the fairness out. The active, the attacking, encroaching human is still located a hundred paces nearer to justice than the reactive one; he simply has no need to appraise his object falsely and with prejudice as the reactive human does, must do. Therefore in all ages the aggressive human, as the stronger, more courageous, more noble one, has in fact also had the freer eye, the better conscience on his side: conversely one can already guess who actually has the invention of the “bad conscience” on his conscience,—the human being of ressentiment! Finally, just look around in history: in which sphere has the entire administration of justice, also the true need for justice, thus far been at home on earth? Perhaps in the sphere of the reactive human? Absolutely not: rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive. Considered historically, justice on earth represents—let it be said to the annoyance of the above-named agitator (who himself once confessed: “the doctrine of revenge runs through all my works and efforts as the red thread of justice”)—precisely the battle against reactive feelings, the war against them on the part of active and aggressive powers that have used their strength in part to call a halt to and impose measure on the excess of reactive pathos and to force a settlement. Everywhere justice is practiced and upheld one sees a stronger power seeking means to put an end to the senseless raging of ressentiment among weaker parties subordinated to it (whether groups or individuals), in part by pulling the object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge, in part by setting in the place of revenge the battle against the enemies of peace and order, in part by inventing, suggesting, in some cases imposing compensations, in part by raising certain equivalents for injuries to the status of a norm to which ressentiment is henceforth once and for all restricted. But the most decisive thing the highest power does and forces through against the predominance of counter-and after-feelings—which it always does as soon as it is in any way strong enough to do so—is the establishment of the law, the imperative declaration of what in general is to count in its eyes as permitted, as just, what as forbidden, as unjust: after it has established the law, it treats infringements and arbitrary actions of individuals or entire groups as wanton acts against the law, as rebellion against the highest power itself, thereby diverting the feeling of its subjects away from the most immediate injury caused by such wanton acts and thus achieving in the long run the opposite of what all revenge wants, which sees only the viewpoint of the injured one, allows only it to count—from now on the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal appraisal of deeds, even the eye of the injured one himself (although this last of all, as was mentioned at the start).—Accordingly, only once the law has been established do “justice” and “injustice” exist (and not as Dühring would have it, beginning with the act of injuring). To talk of justice and injustice in themselves is devoid of all sense; in itself injuring, doing violence, pillaging, destroying naturally cannot be “unjust,” insofar as life acts essentially—that is, in its basic functions—in an injuring, violating, pillaging, destroying manner and cannot be thought at all without this character. One must even admit to oneself something still more problematic: that, from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of justice can never be anything but exceptional conditions, as partial restrictions of the true will of life—which is out after power—and subordinating themselves as individual means to its overall end: that is, as means for creating greater units of power. A legal system conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the battle of power complexes, but rather as means against all battle generally, say in accordance with Dühring’s communist cliché that every will must accept every other will as equal, would be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of man, an attempt to kill the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret pathway to nothingness.—

Yet a word on the origin and purpose of punishment—two problems that fall out or ought to fall out separately: unfortunately they are usually lumped together. How do the previous genealogists of morality carry on in this case? Naively, as they have always carried on—: they discover some “purpose” or other in punishment, for example revenge or deterrence, then innocently place this purpose at the beginning as causa fiendi⁵⁷ of punishment, and—are done. The “purpose in law,” however, is the last thing that is usable for the history of the genesis of law: on the contrary, for history of every kind there is no more important proposition than that one which is gained with such effort but also really ought to be gained,—namely, that the cause of the genesis of a thing and its final usefulness, its actual employment and integration into a system of purposes, lie toto caelo apart; that something extant, something that has somehow or other come into being, is again and again interpreted according to new views, monopolized in a new way, transformed and rearranged for a new use by a power superior to it; that all happening in the organic world is an overpowering, a becoming-lord-over; and that, in turn, all overpowering and becoming-lord-over is a new interpreting, an arranging by means of which the previous “meaning” and “purpose” must of necessity become obscured or entirely extinguished. However well one has grasped the utility of some physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, a form in the arts or in religious cult), one has still not comprehended anything regarding its genesis: as uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to earlier ears,—for from time immemorial one had thought that in comprehending the demonstrable purpose, the usefulness of a thing, a form, an arrangement, one also comprehended the reason for its coming into being—the eye as made to see, the hand as made to grasp. Thus one also imagined punishment as invented for punishing. But all purposes, all utilities, are only signs that a will to power has become lord over something less powerful and has stamped its own functional meaning onto it; and in this manner the entire history of a “thing,” an organ, a practice can be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and arrangements, whose causes need not be connected even among themselves—on the contrary, in some cases only accidentally follow and replace one another. The “development” of a thing, a practice, an organ is accordingly least of all its progressus toward a goal, still less a logical and shortest progressus, reached with the smallest expenditure of energy and cost,—but rather the succession of more or less profound, more or less independent processes of overpowering that play themselves out in it, including the resistances expended each time against these processes, the attempted changes of form for the purpose of defense and reaction, also the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid but the “meaning” is even more so … Even in the individual organism things are no different: with each essential growth of the whole the “meaning” of the individual organs shifts as well,—in some cases their partial destruction, their reduction in number (for example through destruction of the intermediate members), can be a sign of growing strength and perfection. I wanted to say: even the partial loss of utility, atrophying and degenerating, the forfeiture of meaning and purposiveness, in short death, belongs to the conditions of true progressus: which always appears in the form of a will and way to greater power and is always pushed through at the expense of numerous smaller powers. The magnitude of a “progress” is even measured by the mass of all that had to be sacrificed for it; humanity as mass sacrificed for the flourishing of a single stronger species of human being—that would be progress …—I emphasize this main viewpoint of historical methodology all the more because it basically goes against the presently ruling instincts and taste of the times, which would rather learn to live with the absolute randomness, indeed the mechanistic senselessness of all happening than with the theory of a power-will playing itself out in all happening. The democratic idiosyncrasy against everything that rules and desires to rule, the modern misarchism (to create a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually transformed and disguised itself into something spiritual, most spiritual, to such an extent that today it is already penetrating, is allowed to penetrate, step by step into the most rigorous, apparently most objective sciences; indeed it appears to me already to have become lord over the whole of physiology and the doctrine of life—to its detriment, as goes without saying—by removing through sleight of hand one of its basic concepts, that of true activity. Under the pressure of that idiosyncrasy one instead places “adaptation” in the foreground, that is to say an activity of second rank, a mere reactivity; indeed life itself is defined as an ever more purposive inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). In so doing, however, one mistakes the essence of life, its will to power; in so doing one overlooks the essential pre-eminence of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering, and formative forces, upon whose effect the “adaptation” first follows; in so doing one denies the lordly role of the highest functionaries in the organism itself, in which the will of life appears active and form-giving. One recalls that for which Huxley⁵⁸ reproached Spencer—his “administrative nihilism”: but it is a matter of more than just “administering” …

—To return to our topic, namely to punishment, one must then distinguish in it two sorts of things: first that which is relatively permanent in it, the practice, the act, the “drama,” a certain strict sequence of procedures; on the other hand that which is fluid in it, the meaning, the purpose, the expectation tied to the execution of such procedures. It is presupposed here without further ado, per analogy, according to the main viewpoint of the historical methodology just developed, that the procedure itself will be something older, earlier than its use for punishment, that the latter was first placed into, interpreted into the procedure (which had long existed, but was practiced in another sense)—in short, that things are not as our naive genealogists of morality and law have thus far assumed, all of whom thought of the procedure as invented for the purpose of punishing, as one once thought of the hand as invented for the purpose of grasping. Now as for that other element in punishment—that which is fluid, its “meaning”—in a very late state of culture (for example in present-day Europe), the concept “punishment” in fact no longer represents a single meaning at all but rather an entire synthesis of “meanings”: the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its exploitation for the most diverse purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is difficult to dissolve, difficult to analyze and—one must emphasize—is completely and utterly undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for sure why we actually punish: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.) In an earlier stage, by contrast, that synthesis of “meanings” still appears more soluble, also more capable of shifts; one can still perceive in each individual case how the elements of the synthesis change their valence and rearrange themselves accordingly, so that now this, now that element comes to the fore and dominates at the expense of the remaining ones, indeed in some cases one element (say the purpose of deterrence) seems to cancel out all the rest of the elements. To give at least some idea of how uncertain, how after-the-fact, how accidental “the meaning” of punishment is and how one and the same procedure can be used, interpreted, arranged with respect to fundamentally different intentions: I offer here the schema that offered itself to me on the basis of a relatively small and random body of material. Punishment as rendering-harmless, as prevention of further injury. Punishment as payment to the injured party for the injury, in any form (even in that of a compensating affect). Punishment as isolation of a disturbance of equilibrium in order to prevent a further spreading of the disturbance. Punishment as instilling fear of those who determine and execute the punishment. Punishment as a kind of compensation for the benefits the criminal has enjoyed up to that point (for example when he is made useful as a slave in the mines). Punishment as elimination of a degenerating element (in some cases of an entire branch, as according to Chinese law: thus as a means for preserving the purity of the race or for maintaining a social type). Punishment as festival, namely as mocking and doing violence to a finally defeated enemy. Punishment as making a memory, whether for the one who suffers the punishment—so-called “improvement”—or for the witnesses of the execution. Punishment as payment of an honorarium, stipulated on the part of the power that protects the evil-doer from the excesses of revenge. Punishment as compromise with the natural state of revenge, insofar as the latter is still upheld and claimed as a privilege by powerful clans. Punishment as declaration of war and war-time measure against an enemy of peace, of law, of order, of authority, whom one battles—with the means that war furnishes—as dangerous to the community, as in breach of contract with respect to its presuppositions, as a rebel, traitor, and breaker of the peace.—

This list is certainly not complete; obviously punishment is overladen with utilities of all kinds. All the more reason to subtract from it a supposed utility that admittedly counts in popular consciousness as its most essential one,—precisely the one in which belief in punishment, teetering today for several reasons, still finds its most forceful support. Punishment is supposed to have the value of awakening in the guilty one the feeling of guilt; one seeks in it the true instrumentum of that reaction of the soul called “bad conscience,” “pang of conscience.” But by so doing one lays a hand on reality and on psychology, even for today—and how much more for the longest part of the history of man, his prehistory! Precisely among criminals and prisoners the genuine pang of conscience is something extremely rare; the prisons, the penitentiaries are not the breeding places where this species of gnawing worm most loves to flourish:—on this there is agreement among all conscientious observers, who in many cases render a judgment of this sort reluctantly enough and against their most personal wishes. In general, punishment makes hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance. If it should happen that it breaks the vigor and brings about a pitiful prostration and self-abasement, such a result is surely even less pleasing than the average effect of punishment—which is characterized by a dry gloomy seriousness. But if we think, say, of those millennia before the history of man, then one may unhesitatingly judge that it is precisely through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt has been most forcefully held back—at least with respect to the victims on whom the punishing force vented itself. For let us not underestimate the extent to which precisely the sight of the judicial and executive procedures prevents the criminal from feeling his deed, the nature of his action, as in itself reprehensible, for he sees the very same kind of actions committed in the service of justice and then approved, committed with a good conscience: thus spying, outwitting, bribery, entrapment, the whole tricky and cunning art of police and prosecutors; moreover—based on principle, without even the excuse of emotion—robbing, overpowering, slandering, taking captive, torturing, murdering as displayed in the various kinds of punishment—all of these thus actions his judges in no way reject and condemn in themselves, but rather only in a certain respect and practical application. The “bad conscience,” this most uncanny and interesting plant of our earthly vegetation, did not grow on this ground,—indeed, in the consciousness of the ones judging, the ones punishing, there was for the longest time nothing expressed that suggested one was dealing with a “guilty one.” But rather with an instigator of injury, with an irresponsible piece of fate. And the one himself upon whom the punishment afterwards fell, again like a piece of fate, had no other “inner pain” than he would have had at the sudden occurrence of something unanticipated, of a frightful natural event, of a plummeting, crushing boulder against which one can no longer fight.

This once entered Spinoza’s consciousness in an ensnaring manner (to the vexation of his interpreters, who really exert themselves to misunderstand him at this point, for example Kuno Fischer)⁵⁹ when one afternoon, bothered by who knows what kind of memory, he dwelt on the question of what actually remained for him of the famous morsus conscientiae⁶⁰—he who had sent good and evil into exile among the human illusions and had fiercely defended the honor of his “free” God against those blasphemers who claimed something to the effect that God works everything sub ratione boni⁶¹ (“that, however, would be to subject God to fate and would in truth be the greatest of all absurdities”—). For Spinoza the world had stepped back again into that innocence in which it had lain before the invention of the bad conscience: what had become of the morsus conscientiae in the process? “The opposite of gaudium,”⁶² he finally said to himself,—“a sadness, accompanied by the image of a past matter that has turned out in a manner contrary to all expectation.” Eth. III propos. XVIII schol. I. II. For thousands of years instigators of evil overtaken by punishment have felt no different than Spinoza with regard to their “transgression”: “something has unexpectedly gone wrong here,” not: “I should not have done that”—they submitted themselves to the punishment as one submits to a sickness or a misfortune or to death, with that stouthearted fatalism without revolt by which the Russians, for example, even today have the advantage over us Westerners in dealing with life. If there was a critique of the deed back then, it was prudence that exercised this critique on the deed: without question we must seek the actual effect of punishment above all in a sharpening of prudence, in a lengthening of memory, in a will hereafter to proceed more cautiously, more mistrustfully, more secretively, in the insight that one is once and for all too weak for many things, in a kind of improvement in self-assessment. Generally what can be achieved among humans and animals through punishment is an increase of fear, a sharpening of prudence, mastery of the appetites: punishment thus tames man, but it does not make him “better”—one might with greater justification maintain the opposite. (“Injury makes prudent,” say the common folk: insofar as it makes prudent, it also makes bad. Fortunately, it often enough makes stupid.)

At this point I can no longer avoid helping my own hypothesis on the origin of the “bad conscience” to a first, preliminary expression: it is not easy to present and needs to be considered, guarded, and slept over for a long time. I take bad conscience to be the deep sickness into which man had to fall under the pressure of that most fundamental of all changes he ever experienced—the change of finding himself enclosed once and for all within the sway of society and peace. Just as water animals must have fared when they were forced either to become land animals or to perish, so fared these half animals who were happily adapted to wilderness, war, roaming about, adventure—all at once all of their instincts were devalued and “disconnected.” From now on they were to go on foot and “carry themselves” where they had previously been carried by the water: a horrible heaviness lay upon them. They felt awkward doing the simplest tasks; for this new, unfamiliar world they no longer had their old leaders, the regulating drives that unconsciously guided them safely—they were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, connecting cause and effect, these unhappy ones, reduced to their “consciousness,” to their poorest and most erring organ! I do not believe there has ever been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort—and yet those old instincts had not all at once ceased to make their demands! It’s just that it was difficult and seldom possible to yield to them: for the most part they had to seek new and as it were subterranean gratifications. All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves inwards—this is what I call the internalizing of man: thus first grows in man that which he later calls his “soul.” The entire inner world, originally thin as if inserted between two skins, has spread and unfolded, has taken on depth, breadth, height to the same extent that man’s outward discharging has been obstructed. Those terrible bulwarks with which the organization of the state protects itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments belong above all else to these bulwarks—brought it about that all those instincts of the wild free roaming human turned themselves backwards against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, pleasure in persecution, in assault, in change, in destruction—all of that turning itself against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of “bad conscience.” The man who, for lack of external enemies and resistance, and wedged into an oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom, impatiently tore apart, persecuted, gnawed at, stirred up, maltreated himself; this animal that one wants to “tame” and that beats itself raw on the bars of its cage; this deprived one, consumed by homesickness for the desert, who had to create out of himself an adventure, a place of torture, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness—this fool, this longing and desperate prisoner became the inventor of “bad conscience.” In him, however, the greatest and most uncanny of sicknesses was introduced, one from which man has not recovered to this day, the suffering of man from man, from himself—as the consequence of a forceful separation from his animal past, of a leap and plunge, as it were, into new situations and conditions of existence, of a declaration of war against the old instincts on which his energy, desire, and terribleness had thus far rested. Let us immediately add that, on the other hand, with the appearance on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, something so new, deep, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of future had come into being that the appearance of the earth was thereby essentially changed. Indeed, divine spectators were necessary to appreciate the spectacle that thus began and whose end is still by no means in sight—a spectacle too refined, too wonderful, too paradoxical to be permitted to play itself out senselessly-unnoticed on some ridiculous star! Since that time man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the game played by the “big child” of Heraclitus, whether called Zeus or chance—he awakens for himself an interest, an anticipation, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something were announcing itself, something preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a path, an incident, a bridge, a great promise …

To the presupposition of this hypothesis on the origin of bad conscience belongs first, that this change was not gradual, not voluntary, and that it presented itself not as an organic growing into new conditions, but rather as a break, a leap, a compulsion, an inescapable doom, against which there was no struggle and not even any ressentiment. Second, however, that this fitting of a previously unrestrained and unformed population into a fixed form, given its beginning in an act of force, could be brought to its completion only by acts of force—that the oldest “state” accordingly made its appearance as a terrible tyranny, as a crushing and ruthless machinery, and continued to work until finally such a raw material of people and half-animals was not only thoroughly kneaded and pliable but also formed. I use the word “state”: it goes without saying who is meant by this—some pack of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and lords, which, organized in a warlike manner and with the power to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible paws on a population enormously superior in number perhaps, but still formless, still roaming about. It is in this manner, then, that the “state” begins on earth: I think the flight of fancy that had it beginning with a “contract” has been abandoned. Whoever can give orders, whoever is “lord” by nature, whoever steps forth violently, in deed and gesture—what does he have to do with contracts! With such beings one does not reckon, they come like fate, without basis, reason, consideration, pretext; they are there like lightning is there: too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different” even to be so much as hated. Their work is an instinctive creating of forms, impressing of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are:—where they appear, in a short time something new stands there, a ruling structure that lives, in which parts and functions are delimited and related to one another, in which nothing at all finds a place that has not first had placed into it a “meaning” with respect to the whole. They do not know what guilt, what responsibility, what consideration is, these born organizers; in them that terrible artists’ egoism rules, that has a gaze like bronze and that knows itself already justified to all eternity in its “work,” like the mother in her child. They are not the ones among whom “bad conscience” grew, that is clear from the outset—but it would not have grown without them, this ugly growth, it would be missing, if an enormous quantity of freedom had not been banished from the world, at least from visibility, and made latent as it were, under the pressure of the blows of their hammers, of their artist’s violence. This instinct for freedom, forcibly made latent—we have already grasped it—this instinct for freedom, driven back, suppressed, imprisoned within, and finally discharging and venting itself only on itself: this, only this, is bad conscience in its beginnings.

One should guard against forming a low opinion of this entire phenomenon just because it is ugly and painful from the outset. After all, the active force that is at work on a grander scale in those violence-artists and organizers and that builds states, is basically the same force that here—inwardly, on a smaller, pettier scale, in a backwards direction, in the “labyrinth of the breast,” to use Goethe’s words—creates for itself the bad conscience and builds negative ideals: namely that instinct for freedom (speaking in my language: the will to power). Only here the matter on which this force’s formative and violating nature vents itself is precisely man himself, his entire animal old self—and not, as in that larger and more conspicuous phenomenon, the other human, the other humans. This secret self-violation, this artists’ cruelty, this pleasure in giving oneself—as heavy resisting suffering matter—a form, in burning into oneself a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a “no”; this uncanny and horrifying-pleasurable work of a soul compliant-conflicted with itself, that makes itself suffer out of pleasure in making-suffer, this entire active “bad conscience,” as the true womb of ideal and imaginative events, finally brought to light—one can guess it already—a wealth of new disconcerting beauty and affirmation and perhaps for the first time beauty itself … For what would be “beautiful” if contradiction had not first come to a consciousness of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself “I am ugly”? … After this hint, that enigma will at the least be less enigmatic, namely, to what extent an ideal, a beauty can be suggested by contradictory concepts like selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice; and we know one thing henceforth, this I do not doubt—namely what kind of pleasure it is that the selfless, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing feel from the very start: this pleasure belongs to cruelty.—So much for the present on the origins of the “unegoistic” as a moral value and toward staking out the ground from which this value has grown: bad conscience, the will to self-maltreatment, first supplies the presupposition for the value of the unegoistic.—

It is a sickness, bad conscience—this admits of no doubt—but a sickness as pregnancy is a sickness. Let us seek out the conditions under which this sickness has come to its most terrible and most sublime pinnacle:—we shall see just what it was that thus first made its entry into the world. For this we need a long breath,—and to start off we must return once again to an earlier viewpoint. The civil-law relationship of the debtor to his creditor, of which I have already spoken at length, was once again—and indeed in a manner that is historically exceedingly curious and questionable—interpreted into a relationship in which it is for us modern humans perhaps at its most incomprehensible: namely the relationship of those presently living to their ancestors. Within the original clan association—we are speaking of primeval times—the living generation always acknowledges a juridical obligation to the earlier generation, and particularly to the earliest one, which founded the clan (and by no means a mere sentimental obligation: one might with good reason even deny the latter altogether for the longest part of the existence of the human race). Here the conviction holds sway that it is only through the sacrifices and achievements of the ancestors that the clan exists at all,—and that one has to repay them through sacrifices and achievements: one thereby acknowledges a debt that is continually growing, since these ancestors, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, do not cease to use their strength to bestow on the clan new benefits and advances. For nothing perhaps? But to those brutal and “soul-poor” ages there is no “for nothing.” What can one give back to them? Sacrifices (initially only nourishment, in the coarsest sense), festivals, shrines, tributes, above all obedience—for all customs, as works of the ancestors, are also their statutes and commands—: does one ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows: from time to time it forces a great redemption, lock, stock, and barrel, some enormity of a counter-payment to the “creditor” (the notorious sacrifice of the firstborn, for example; blood, human blood in any case). The fear of the progenitor and his power, the consciousness of debts toward him necessarily increases, according to this kind of logic, to exactly the same degree that the power of the clan itself increases, that the clan itself stands ever more victorious, independent, honored, feared. By no means the other way around! Rather every step toward the atrophying of the clan, all miserable chance occurrences, all signs of degeneration, of approaching dissolution always diminish the fear of the spirit of the founder and give an ever more reduced notion of his shrewdness, his foresightedness, and his presence as power. If one imagines this brutal kind of logic carried through to its end: finally, through the imagination of growing fear the progenitors of the most powerful clans must have grown into enormous proportions and have been pushed back into the darkness of a divine uncanniness and unimaginability:—in the end the progenitor is necessarily transfigured into a god. This may even be the origin of the gods, an origin, that is, out of fear! … And those who think it necessary to add: “but also out of piety!” would hardly be right with regard to the longest period of the human race, its primeval period. All the more, admittedly, for the middle period in which the noble clans take shape:—who in fact returned, with interest, to their originators, the ancestors (heroes, gods) all of the qualities that had in the meantime become apparent in them, the noble qualities. Later we will take another look at the aristocratizing and ennobling of the gods (which is by no means their “hallowing”): for the present let us simply bring the course of this whole development of guilt consciousness to a conclusion.

As history teaches, the consciousness of having debts to the deity by no means came to an end even after the decline of the “community” organized according to blood-relationships; in the same way that it inherited the concepts “good and bad” from the clan nobility (together with its basic psychological propensity for establishing orders of rank), humanity also inherited, along with the deities of the clan and tribe, the pressure of the still unpaid debts and of the longing for the redemption of the same. (The transition is made by those broad slave and serf populations who adapted themselves to the cult of the gods practiced by their lords, whether through force or through submissiveness and mimicry: starting from them, this inheritance then overflows in all directions.) For several millennia the feeling of guilt toward the deity did not stop growing and indeed grew ever onward in the same proportion as the concept of god and the feeling for god grew on earth and was borne up on high. (The whole history of ethnic fighting, triumphing, reconciling, merging—everything that precedes the final rank-ordering of all ethnic elements in every great racial synthesis—is reflected in the genealogical confusion of their gods, in the legends of their fights, triumphs, and reconciliations; development toward universal empires is also always development toward universal deities; despotism with its overpowering of the independent nobility also always prepares the way for some kind of monotheism.) The rise of the Christian god as the maximum god that has been attained thus far therefore also brought a maximum of feelings of guilt into appearance on earth. Assuming that we have by now entered into the reverse movement, one might with no little probability deduce from the unstoppable decline of faith in the Christian god that there would already be a considerable decline in human consciousness of guilt as well; indeed the prospect cannot be dismissed that the perfect and final victory of atheism might free humanity from this entire feeling of having debts to its beginnings, its causa prima.⁶³ Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.—

So much for the present, in short and roughly speaking, on the connection of the concepts “guilt,” “duty” to religious presuppositions: I have until now intentionally left aside the actual moralization of these concepts (their being pushed back into conscience, more precisely the entanglement of bad conscience with the concept of god) and at the end of the previous section even spoke as if there were no such moralization, consequently, as if those concepts were now necessarily coming to an end now that their presupposition, the faith in our “creditor,” in God, has fallen. The facts of the case diverge from this in a terrible manner. With the moralization of the concepts guilt and duty, with their being pushed back into bad conscience, we have in actual fact the attempt to reverse the direction of the development just described, at least to bring its movement to a standstill: precisely the prospect of a conclusive redemption shall now pessimistically close itself off once and for all; the gaze shall now bleakly deflect off, deflect back from a brazen impossibility; those concepts “guilt” and “duty” shall now turn themselves backwards—and against whom? There can be no doubt: first against the “debtor,” in whom bad conscience now fixes itself firmly, eats into him, spreads out, and grows like a polyp in every breadth and depth until finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, the impossibility of discharging penance is also conceived of, the idea that it cannot be paid off (“eternal punishment”)—; finally, however, even against the “creditor,” think here of the causa prima of man, of the beginning of the human race, of its progenitor, who is now burdened with a curse (“Adam,” “Original Sin,” “unfreedom of the will”) or of nature, from whose womb man arises and into which the evil principle is now placed (“demonizing of nature”) or of existence generally, which is left as valueless in itself (nihilistic turning away from it, longing into nothingness or longing into its “opposite,” a being-other, Buddhism and related things)—until all at once we stand before the paradoxical and horrifying remedy in which tortured humanity found temporary relief, Christianity’s stroke of genius: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of man, God himself exacting payment of himself, God as the only one who can redeem from man what has become irredeemable for man himself—the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love (is that credible?—), out of love for his debtor! …

One will already have guessed what actually happened with all of this and under all of this: that will to self-torment, that suppressed cruelty of the animal-human who had been made inward, scared back into himself, of the one locked up in the “state” for the purpose of taming, who invented the bad conscience in order to cause himself pain after the more natural outlet for this desire to cause pain was blocked,—this man of bad conscience has taken over the religious presupposition in order to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome severity and sharpness. Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture for him. In “God” he captures the most extreme opposites he can find to his actual and inescapable animal instincts; he reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as guilt before God (as hostility, rebellion, insurrection against the “lord,” the “father,” the primal ancestor and beginning of the world); he harnesses himself into the contradiction “God” and “devil”; he takes all the “no” that he says to himself, to nature, naturalness, the facticity of his being and casts it out of himself as a “yes,” as existing, corporeal, real, as God, as holiness of God, as judgeship of God, as executionership of God, as beyond, as eternity, as torture without end, as hell, as immeasurability of punishment and guilt. This is a kind of madness of the will in psychic cruelty that has absolutely no equal: the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to the point that it cannot be atoned for; his will to imagine himself punished without the possibility of the punishment ever becoming equivalent to the guilt; his will to infect and make poisonous the deepest ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order to cut off the way out of this labyrinth of “idées fixes” once and for all; his will to erect an ideal—that of the “holy God”—in order, in the face of the same, to be tangibly certain of his absolute unworthiness. Oh, this insane sad beast man! What ideas occur to it, what anti-nature, what paroxysms of nonsense; what bestiality of idea immediately breaks forth when it is hindered only a little from being a beast of deed ! … All of this is interesting to the point of excess, but also of such black gloomy unnerving sadness that one must forcibly forbid oneself to look too long into these abysses. Here there is sickness, beyond all doubt, the most terrible sickness that has thus far raged in man:—and whoever is still capable of hearing (but one no longer has the ears for it today!—) how in this night of torture and absurdity the cry love resounded, the cry of the most longing delight, of redemption in love, will turn away, seized by an invincible horror … There is so much in man that is horrifying! … The earth has been a madhouse for too long! …

Let this suffice once and for all concerning the origins of the “holy God.”—That in itself the conception of gods does not necessarily lead to this degradation of the imagination, which we could not spare ourselves from calling to mind for a moment, that there are more noble ways of making use of the fabrication of gods than for this self-crucifixion and self-defilement of man in which Europe’s last millennia have had their mastery—this can fortunately be read from every glance one casts on the Greek gods, these reflections of noble and autocratic human beings in whom the animal in man felt itself deified and did not tear itself apart, did not rage against itself! For the longest time these Greeks used their gods precisely to keep “bad conscience” at arm’s length, to be able to remain cheerful about their freedom of soul: that is, the reverse of the use which Christianity made of its god. They took this to great lengths, these splendid and lionhearted childish ones; and no lesser authority than that of the Homeric Zeus himself gives them to understand here and there that they make it too easy for themselves. “A wonder!” he says once—it concerns the case of Aegisthus, a very bad case—

A wonder, how much the mortals complain against the gods!

Only from us is there evil, they think; but they themselves

Create their own misery through lack of understanding, even counter to fate.

But one hears and sees at the same time that even this Olympian spectator and judge is far from being angry at them for this and from thinking evil of them: “how foolish they are!” so he thinks in the face of the misdeeds of the mortals,—and “foolishness,” “lack of understanding,” a little “disturbance in the head,” this much even the Greeks of the strongest, bravest age allowed themselves as the reason for much that was bad and doom-laden:—foolishness, not sin! do you understand that? … But even this disturbance in the head was a problem—“indeed, how is it even possible? whence could it actually have come, given heads such as we have, we men of noble descent, of happiness, of optimal form, of the best society, of nobility, of virtue?”—thus the noble Greek wondered for centuries in the face of every incomprehensible atrocity and wanton act with which one of his equals had sullied himself. “A god must have beguiled him,” he said to himself finally, shaking his head … This way out is typical of the Greeks … In this manner the gods served in those days to justify humans to a certain degree even in bad things, they served as causes of evil—in those days it was not the punishment they took upon themselves but rather, as is more noble, the guilt …

—I close with three question marks, as one can of course see. “Is an ideal actually being erected here or is one being demolished?” thus one might ask me … But have you ever asked yourselves enough how dearly the erection of every ideal on earth has exacted its payment? How much reality always had to be libeled and mistaken, how much lying sanctified, how much conscience disturbed, how much “god” had to be sacrificed each time? So that a sanctuary can be erected, a sanctuary must be shattered: that is the law—show me a case where it is not fulfilled! … We modern humans, we are the heirs of millennia of conscience-vivisection and cruelty to the animal-self: in this we have our longest practice, our artistry perhaps, in any case our sophistication, our over-refinement of taste. For all too long man has regarded his natural inclinations with an “evil eye,” so that in him they have finally become wedded to “bad conscience.” A reverse attempt would in itself be possible—but who is strong enough for it?—namely to wed to bad conscience the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which is contrary to the senses, contrary to the instincts, contrary to nature, contrary to the animal—in short the previous ideals which are all ideals hostile to life, ideals of those who libel the world. To whom to turn today with such hopes and demands? … In so doing one would have precisely the good human beings against oneself; and, in fairness, the comfortable, the reconciled, the vain, the enraptured, the tired … What is there that insults more deeply, that separates off so fundamentally, as letting others notice something of the strictness and height with which one treats oneself? And on the other hand—how accommodating, how full of love the whole world shows itself toward us as soon as we do like all the world and “let ourselves go” like all the world! … For this goal one would need a different kind of spirits than are probable in this of all ages: spirits strengthened by wars and victories, for whom conquering, adventure, danger, pain have even become a need; for this one would need acclimatization to sharp high air, to wintry journeys, to ice and mountain ranges in every sense; for this one would need a kind of sublime malice itself, an ultimate most self-assured mischievousness of knowledge, which belongs to great health; one would need, in brief and gravely enough, precisely this great health! … Is this even possible today? … But someday, in a stronger time than this decaying, self-doubting present, he really must come to us, the redeeming human of the great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength again and again drives him out of any apart or beyond, whose loneliness is misunderstood by the people as if it were a flight from reality—: whereas it is only his submersion, burial, absorption in reality so that one day, when he again comes to light, he can bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the previous ideal placed upon it. This human of the future who will redeem us from the previous ideal as much as from that which had to grow out of it, from the great disgust, from the will to nothingness; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope; this Anti-Christ and anti-nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness—he must one day come …

—But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point there is only one thing fitting for me, to be silent: otherwise I would be laying a hand on that which only a younger one is free to choose, a “more future one,” a stronger one than I am—which only Zarathustra is free to choose, Zarathustra the godless …

Carefree, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman, she always loves only a warrior.

What do ascetic ideals mean?—Among artists nothing or too many different things; among philosophers and scholars something like a nose and instinct for the most favorable preconditions of higher spirituality; among women, at best, one more charming trait of seduction, a little morbidezza on beautiful flesh, the angelicalness of a pretty, fat animal; among the physiologically failed and out of sorts (among the majority of mortals) an attempt to appear to oneself to be “too good” for this world, a holy form of excess, their principal instrument in the battle with slow pain and with boredom; among priests the true priests’ faith, their best tool of power, also the “most high” permission to power; among saints, finally, a pretext for hibernation, their novissima gloriae cupido,⁶⁴ their rest in nothingness (“God”), their form of madness. That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui:⁶⁵ it needs a goal,—and it would rather will nothingness than not will.—Am I understood? Have I been understood? … “Absolutely not! dear Sir!”—Then let us start at the beginning.

What do ascetic ideals mean?—Or, to take an individual case, about which I have often enough been asked for advice, what does it mean, for example, when, in his old age, an artist like Richard Wagner⁶⁶ pays homage to chastity? In a certain sense, admittedly, he has always done this; but only at the very end in an ascetic sense. What does this change of “sense,” this radical reversal of sense mean?—for that is what it was, Wagner thus suddenly somersaulted directly into his opposite. What does it mean when an artist suddenly somersaults into his opposite? … Here we are at once reminded—supposing we are willing to pause a moment at this question—of what was perhaps the best, strongest, most cheerful-hearted, most courageous time in Wagner’s life: it was back when the idea of Luther’s marriage occupied him inwardly and deeply. Who knows on what chance events it actually depended that today instead of this marriage music we have the Meistersinger? And how much of the former still resounds in the latter? But there is no doubt that this “Marriage of Luther,” too, would have been a praise of chastity. To be sure, also a praise of sensuality:—and precisely so would it seem to me to be in order, precisely so would it also have been “Wagnerian.” For between chastity and sensuality there is no necessary opposition; every good marriage, every true affair of the heart is beyond this opposition. Wagner would have done well, it seems to me, to have brought home this pleasant fact to his Germans once again with the help of a lovely and stout-hearted Luther comedy, for there are and always have been many libelers of sensuality among the Germans; and perhaps nowhere has Luther performed a greater service than precisely in having had the courage to his sensuality (it was called in those days, delicately enough, the “Protestant freedom” …) But even in the case where there really is that opposition between chastity and sensuality, it is fortunately by no means necessary that it be a tragic opposition. This would seem to hold at least for all better-formed, more high-spirited mortals who are far from automatically counting their labile balance between “animal and angel” among the arguments against existence,—the subtlest and brightest, like Goethe, like Hafiz, have even seen in this one more enticement to life. Precisely such “contradictions” seduce to existence … On the other hand it is only too clear that when swine who have come to ruin are once brought to the point of worshipping chastity—and there are such swine!—they will see and worship in it only their opposite, the opposite of swine come to ruin—oh with what tragic grunting and zeal! one can imagine it—the embarrassing and superfluous opposite that Richard Wagner indisputably still wanted to set to music and put on stage at the end of his life. And to what end? as one may in fairness ask. For what were the swine to him, what are they to us?—

And yet admittedly that other question cannot be avoided here: just what was that manly (alas, so unmanly) “simplicity from the country” to him, that poor devil and lad of nature Parsifal, whom he with such ensnaring means finally made Catholic—what? was this Parsifal meant at all seriously? For one could be tempted to conjecture, even to wish the opposite—that the Wagnerian Parsifal were meant lightheartedly, a closing piece and satyr-play, as it were, with which the tragedian Wagner wanted to take leave of us, also of himself, above all of tragedy in a manner fitting for and worthy of him, namely with an excess of highest and most mischievous parody of the tragic itself, of the entire gruesome earthly seriousness and wretchedness of earlier times, of the coarsest form—now finally overcome—found in the anti-nature of the ascetic ideal. This, as noted, would have been worthy precisely of a great tragedian: who, like every artist, only arrives at the final pinnacle of his greatness when he is able to see himself and his art beneath him,—when he is able to laugh at himself. Is Wagner’s Parsifal his secret laughter of superiority at himself, the triumph of this final highest artist’s freedom, artist’s otherworldliness? As stated, one would like to wish it: for what would a seriously intended Parsifal be? Is it really necessary to see in it (as someone put it in conversation with me) “the product of an insane hatred of knowledge, spirit, and sensuality”? A curse on senses and spirit in a single hatred and breath? An apostasy and return to obscurantist and Christian-diseased ideals? And finally even a negating of self, a crossing-out of self on the part of an artist who until that point had been out with all the might of his will after the opposite, namely the highest spiritualization and sensualization of his art? And not only of his art: also of his life. Recall how enthusiastically in his day Wagner walked in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach:⁶⁷ Feuerbach’s word concerning “healthy sensuality”—in the thirties and forties this sounded to Wagner as to many Germans (—they called themselves the “young Germans”) like the word of redemption. Did he in the end learn otherwise? Since it seems at least that in the end he had the will to teach otherwise … And not only from the stage, with the Parsifal-trombones:—in the murky writings of his last years, just as unfree as they are clueless, there are a hundred passages in which a secret wish and will betrays itself, a despondent, uncertain, unacknowledged will to preach, in essence, changing of one’s way, conversion, negation, Christianity, Middle Ages and to say to his disciples: “it is nothing! Seek your salvation elsewhere!” Even the “blood of the Redeemer” is invoked at one point …

To state my opinion in a case of this sort, in which there is much that is embarrassing—and it is a typical case—: one certainly does best to separate an artist from his work to the extent of not taking him as seriously as his work. He is in the end only the precondition of his work, the womb, the ground, in some cases the fertilizer and manure on which, out of which, it grows,—and thus in most cases something one must forget if one wants to enjoy the work itself. Looking into the origins of a work is the business of physiologists and vivisectors of the spirit: never ever of the aesthetic human being, the artist! The poet and shaper of Parsifal was no more spared a deep, thorough, even frightening acclimatization and descent into medieval contrasts of the soul, a hostile aloofness from all height, rigor, and discipline of the spirit, a kind of intellectual perversity (if one will pardon the word) than a pregnant woman is spared the repulsive and strange aspects of pregnancy: which one must forget, as noted, in order to enjoy the child. One should be on guard against the confusion into which an artist himself all too easily falls, out of psychological contiguity, to put it as the English do: as if he himself were what he is able to depict, think up, express. In fact, the situation is such that if he were precisely that, he would certainly not depict, think up, express it; a Homer would not have written an Achilles nor Goethe a Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust. A perfect and whole artist is separated to all eternity from the “real,” the actual; on the other hand one understands how he can at times become tired to the point of despair of this eternal “irreality” and falseness of his innermost existence—and that he makes the attempt to encroach for once upon what is most forbidden precisely to him, upon what is real—makes the attempt truly to be. With what success? One can guess … It is the typical velleity of the artist: the same velleity into which Wagner lapsed, having grown old, and for which he had to pay so dearly, so fatefully (—through it he lost the valuable part of his friends). Finally, however, still disregarding this velleity entirely, who would not like to wish for Wagner’s own sake that he had taken leave of us and of his art differently, not with a Parsifal, but rather in a manner that was more victorious, more self-assured, more Wagnerian—less misleading, less ambiguous about what he really wanted, less Schopenhauerian, less nihilistic? …

—What then do ascetic ideals mean? In the case of an artist, as we have grasped by now: absolutely nothing! … Or so many things that it is as good as absolutely nothing! … Let us first of all eliminate artists: they are far from standing independently enough in the world and against the world for their valuations and the changes in these to deserve interest in themselves! In all ages they have been valets of a morality or philosophy or religion; quite apart from the fact that, unfortunately, they have often enough been the all-too-pliant courtiers of their disciples and patrons, and flatterers with a good nose for old or newly rising powers. At the very least they always need a protective armor, a backing, a previously established authority: artists never stand by themselves, standing alone goes against their deepest instincts. Thus Richard Wagner, for example, took the philosopher Schopenhauer as his front man, as his protective armor when “the time had come”:—who could consider it even thinkable that he would have had the courage for an ascetic ideal without the backing that Schopenhauer’s philosophy offered him, without Schopenhauer’s authority, which was gaining predominance in Europe in the seventies? (not yet having assessed whether an artist would have even been possible in the new Germany without the milk of a pious, imperially pious way of thinking).—And with this we have arrived at the more serious question: what does it mean when a real philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal, a spirit who really stands on his own, like Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a brazen glance, who has the courage to himself, who knows how to stand alone and does not first wait for front men and nods from on high?—Let us immediately consider here the strange and for many kinds of people even fascinating stance Schopenhauer took toward art: it was, after all, clearly for the sake of this that Richard Wagner initially converted to Schopenhauer (convinced to do so by a poet, as is well known, by Herwegh),⁶⁸ and to such an extent that a complete theoretical contradiction thus opened up between his earlier and his later aesthetic beliefs—the former expressed for example in “Opera and Drama,” the latter in the writings he published from 1870 on. In particular, from here on Wagner ruthlessly changed—this is perhaps the most disconcerting thing of all—his judgment concerning the value and status of music itself: what did it matter to him that he had previously made a means out of it, a medium, a “woman,” that simply had to have a purpose, a man in order to prosper—namely drama! He grasped all at once that with Schopenhauer’s theory and innovation more could be done in majorem musicae gloriam⁶⁹—namely with the sovereignty of music as Schopenhauer understood it: music set apart from all other arts, the independent art in itself, not, like these, offering representations of phenomenality, but rather speaking the language of the will itself, directly out of the “abyss,” as its most authentic, most original, least derivative revelation. With this extraordinary rise in the value of music, as it seemed to grow forth out of Schopenhauerian philosophy, the musician himself all at once rose in price to an unheard-of degree: he now became an oracle, a priest, indeed more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the “in itself” of things, a telephone of the beyond—henceforth he spoke not only music, this ventriloquist of God—he spoke metaphysics: any wonder that one day he finally spoke ascetic ideals? …

Schopenhauer used the Kantian formulation of the aesthetic problem for his own purpose—although he most certainly did not view it with Kantian eyes. Kant intended to honor art when, among the predicates of the beautiful, he privileged and placed in the foreground those that constitute the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity. Whether this was not on the whole a mistake cannot be dealt with here; I wish only to underscore that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem starting from the experiences of the artist (the one who creates), thought about art and the beautiful from the viewpoint of the “spectator” and thus, without it being noticed, got the “spectator” himself into the concept “beautiful.” If only this “spectator” had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of the beautiful, however!—namely as a great personal fact and experience, as a wealth of most personal intense experiences, desires, surprises, delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear the opposite was always the case: and thus we receive from them, right from the beginning, definitions in which, as in that famous definition Kant gives of the beautiful, the lack of more refined self-experience sits in the form of a fat worm of basic error. “The beautiful,” Kant said, “is what pleases without interest.” Without interest! Compare this definition with one made by a real “spectator” and artist—Stendhal,⁷⁰ who in one place calls the beautiful une promesse de bonheur.⁷¹ What is rejected and crossed out here, in any case, is precisely the one thing Kant emphasizes in the aesthetic condition: le desinteressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?—Admittedly, if our aestheticians never tire of throwing into the balance in Kant’s favor that under the enchantment of beauty one can look at even robeless female statues “without interest,” then certainly one may laugh a little at their expense:—the experiences of artists in connection with this sensitive point are “more interesting,” and Pygmalion was in any case not necessarily an “unaesthetic human being.” Let us think all the more highly of the innocence of our aestheticians that is reflected in such arguments; for example, let us give Kant credit for what he knows to teach—with the naïvete of a country priest—about the characteristic nature of the sense of touch!—And here we come back to Schopenhauer, who stood much closer to the arts than Kant and still did not get out from under the spell of the Kantian definition: how did this happen? The circumstance is odd enough: he interpreted the expression “without interest” in the most personal manner, on the basis of what must have been one of his most regular experiences. There are few things about which Schopenhauer speaks so certainly as about the effect of aesthetic contemplation: he says of it that it counteracts precisely sexual “interestedness,” much like lupulin and camphor, that is; he never grew tired of glorifying this breaking free from the “will” as the greatest merit and use of the aesthetic condition. Indeed, one might be tempted to ask whether his basic conception of “will and representation,” the thought that there can be a redemption from the “will” only through “representation,” did not originate from a generalization of that sexual experience. (In all questions relating to Schopenhauerian philosophy, by the way, one must never ignore the fact that it is the conception of a twenty-six-year-old young man; so that it participates not only in that which is specific to Schopenhauer but also in that which is specific to that season of life.) Let us hear, for example, one of the most explicit of the countless passages he wrote in honor of the aesthetic condition (World as Will and Representation I, 231), let us hear the tone, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude with which such words were spoken. “This is the painless condition that Epicurus praised as the highest good and as the condition of the gods; we are, for that moment, freed from the base drive of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the prison-house work of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still” … What vehemence of words! What images of torture and of prolonged satiety! What an almost pathological temporal juxtaposition of “that moment” and the usual “wheel of Ixion,” the “prison-house work of willing,” the “base drive of the will”! But supposing that Schopenhauer were right a hundred times over for himself, what would this have contributed to our insight into the essence of the beautiful? Schopenhauer described one effect of the beautiful, the will-calming one—is it even a regularly occurring one? Stendhal, as noted, a no less sensual but more happily-formed nature than Schopenhauer, emphasizes a different effect of the beautiful: “the beautiful promises happiness”—to him it is precisely the excitement of the will (“of interest”) by the beautiful that seems to be the fact of the matter. And could one not finally urge upon Schopenhauer himself the objection that he was very wrong in thinking himself a Kantian in this, that he did not at all understand the Kantian definition of the beautiful in a Kantian sense—that the beautiful is pleasing to him, too, out of an “interest,” even out of the strongest of all, the most personal of all interests: that of the tortured one who breaks free from his torture? … And, to come back to our first question, “what does it mean when a philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal?,” we get at least a first hint here: he wants to break free from a torture.—

Let us take care not to make gloomy faces right away at the word “torture”: in this case in particular there is still plenty to count on the other side of the ledger, plenty to deduct—there is even still something to laugh at. For let us not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who in fact treated sexuality as a personal enemy (including its tool, woman, this “instrumentum diaboli”),⁷² needed enemies in order to remain in good spirits; that he loved grim bilious black-green words; that he became angry for the sake of being angry, out of passion; that he would have become sick, would have become a pessimist (—for he was not one, as much as he wished it) without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality, and the entire will to being-here, remaining-here. Schopenhauer would otherwise not have remained here, one can bet on that, he would have run away: his enemies, however, held him fast, his enemies seduced him again and again into existence, just as with the ancient Cynics, his anger was his balm, his recreation, his compensation, his remedium⁷³ against disgust, his happiness. So much with respect to what is most personal in Schopenhauer’s case; on the other hand there is also something typical in him—and only here do we again come to our problem. It is indisputable that for as long as there have been philosophers on earth and wherever there have been philosophers (from India to England, to take the polar opposites in talent for philosophy) there has existed a characteristic philosophers’ irritability and rancor against sensuality—Schopenhauer is only its most eloquent and, if one has the ear for it, also most rousing and most enchanting outburst;—there has likewise existed a characteristic philosophers’ prepossession and cordiality regarding the whole ascetic ideal; one ought not to entertain any illusions about or against this. Both belong, as noted, to the type; if both are absent in a philosopher then he is always—of this one may be certain—only a “so-called” philosopher. What does that mean? For one must first interpret this set of facts: in itself it stands there, stupid to all eternity, like every “thing in itself.” Every animal, thus also la bête philosophe,⁷⁴ instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can vent its power completely and attain its maximum in the feeling of power; just as instinctively, and with a keenness of scent that “surpasses all understanding,” every animal abhors troublemakers and obstacles of every kind that do or could lay themselves across its path to the optimum (—it is not its path to “happiness” of which I speak, but rather its path to power, to the deed, to the most powerful doing, and in most cases in actual fact its path to unhappiness). In this manner the philosopher abhors marriage together with that which might persuade him to it—marriage as obstacle and doom along his path to the optimum. What great philosopher thus far has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not; still more, one cannot even imagine them being married. A married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception Socrates, the malicious Socrates, it seems, married ironice, expressly to demonstrate this very proposition. Every philosopher would speak as Buddha once spoke when the birth of a son was announced to him: “Râhula has been born to me, a fetter has been forged for me” (here Râhula means “a small daemon”); to every “free spirit” a thoughtful hour must come, supposing he has previously had a thoughtless one, such as once came to the same Buddha—“narrowly constrained, he thought to himself, is life in the house, a place of impurity; freedom is in leaving the house”: “as he was thinking thus, he left the house.” The ascetic ideal points out so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot, without inner jubilation and clapping of hands, hear the story of all those determined ones who one day said “no” to all unfreedom and went into some sort of desert—even supposing that they were merely strong asses and completely and utterly the opposite of a strong spirit. What, accordingly, does the ascetic ideal mean for a philosopher? My answer is—one will have guessed it long ago: at its sight the philosopher smiles at an optimum of the conditions for highest and boldest spirituality—in this he does not negate “existence,” rather he affirms his existence and only his existence, and this perhaps to the degree that the wanton wish is never far away: pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam! …⁷⁵