Nietzsche-Genealogy

On the Genealogy of Morals

A Polemical Tract

Friedrich Nietzsche

Leipzig 1887

[This document, which has been translated by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada, is in the public domain and may be used by anyone, in whole or in part, without permission and without charge, provided the source is acknowledged. Editorial comments and translations in square brackets and italics are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from Nietzsche's text. Note that in the translation Nietzsche's longer paragraphs have been broken up into shorter units.
For comments, questions, corrections, please contact Ian Johnston. This text was last revised on December 21, 2001]
Table of Contents
Prologue
First Essay
Good and Evil, Good and Bad
Second Essay
Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters
Third Essay
What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?

Prologue

We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people-we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said that "Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also." Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures-collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home." As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience"-which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been "missing the point."

Our hearts have not even been engaged-nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself "What exactly did that clock strike?"-so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed "What have we really just experienced? And more: "Who are we really?" Then, as I've mentioned, we count-after the fact-all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being-alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man is furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not "knowledgeable people."

My thoughts over the origin of our moral prejudices-for this polemical tract is concerned about that origin-had their first brief and provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms which carried the title Human, All-too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, a book which I started to write in Sorrento, during a winter when I had the chance to pause, just as a traveller stops, to look over the wide and dangerous land through which my spirit had wandered up to that point. This happened in the winter 1876-77, but the ideas themselves are older. In the main points, they were the same ideas which I am taking up again in these present essays. Let's hope that the long interval of time has done them some good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger, and more complete!

The fact that today I still stand by these ideas, that in the intervening time they themselves have constantly become more strongly associated with one another, even to the point of growing into each other and intertwining, that has reinforced in me the joyful confidence that they may not have originally developed in me as single, random, or sporadic ideas, but up out of common roots, from some fundamental will for knowledge ruling from deep within, always speaking with greater clarity, always demanding greater clarity. In fact, that's the only thing appropriate for a philosopher. We have no right to be isolated in any way: we are not permitted to make isolated mistakes or to run into isolated truths. Our ideas, our values, our affirmations and denials, our if's and but's-these rather grow out of us from the same necessity which makes a tree bear its fruit-totally related and interlinked amongst each other, witnesses of one will, one health, one soil, one sun. As for the question whether these fruits of ours taste good to you, what does that matter to the trees! What concern is that of ours, we philosophers!

Because of a quirk in my own nature, to which I confess reluctantly, for it concerns itself with morality, with everything which up to the present has been celebrated on earth as morality, a quirk which came into my life early, so uninvited, so irresistibly, in such contradiction to my surroundings, my age, the examples around me, and my origin, that I almost have the right to call it my "a priori"-because of this, my curiosity and my suspicions soon enough had to pause at the question about where our good and evil really originated.

In fact, already as a thirteen-year-old lad, I was confronted with the problem of the origin of evil. At an age when one has "half childish play, half God in one's heart," I devoted my first childish literary trifle, my first written philosophical exercise, to this problem. And so far as my "solution" to the problem at that time is concerned, well, I gave that honour to God, as is reasonable, and made him the father of evil.

Is that what my "a priori" demanded of me precisely, that new immoral, at the very least unmoral "a priori" and the cryptic "categorical imperative" which spoke out from it, alas, so anti-Kantian, which I have increasingly listened to ever since-and not just listened to? Luckily I soon learned to separate theological prejudices from moral ones, and I no longer sought the origin of evil behind the world. Some education in history and philology, along with an inherently refined sense concerning psychological questions in general, quickly changed my problem into something else: Under what conditions did men invent for themselves these value judgments good and evil? And what inherent value do they have? Have they hindered or fostered human well-being up to now? Are they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying life? Or is it the other way around-do they indicate fullness, power, a will for living, courage, confidence, the future?

From there I came across and proposed all sorts of answers for myself. I distinguished between ages, peoples, different ranks of individuals. I kept refining my problem. Out of the answers arose new questions, investigations, assumptions, probabilities-until at last I had my own country, my own soil, a totally secluded, flowering, blooming world, like a secret garden, of which no one had the slightest inkling . . . Oh, how lucky we are, we knowledgeable people, provided that we know how to stay silent long enough!

The first stimulus to publish something of my hypothesis concerning the origin of morality was given to me by a lucid, tidy, clever, even precocious little book in which for the first time I clearly ran into a topsy-turvy and perverse type of genealogical hypothesis-a genuinely English style. It drew me with that power of attraction which everything opposite, everything antipodal contains. The title of this booklet was The Origin of the Moral Feelings. Its author was Dr Paul Ree, and it appeared in the year 1877. It's likely I have never read anything which I would have denied, statement by statement, conclusion by conclusion, as I did with this book, but without any sense of annoyance or impatience.

In the work I mentioned above, on which I was working at the time, I made opportune and inopportune references to statements in Dr. Ree's book, not in order to prove them wrong (what have I to do with preparing such refutations!) but, as is appropriate to a positive spirit, to put in the place of something unlikely something more likely, in the place of some error in detail some other error.

At that time, as I said, for the first time I brought into the light of day my hypotheses about genealogy, to which these essays have been dedicated-but clumsily (as I will be the last to deny), still fettered, still without my own language for these concerns of mine, and with all sorts of retreating and vacillating. For particular details, you should compare what I said in Human, All-too Human, on p. 51, about the double nature of the prehistory of good and evil (that is, in the spheres of the nobility and the slaves); similarly, pages 119 ff concerning the worth and origin of ascetic morality, as well as pages 78, 82, and 2.35 concerning the "Morality of Custom," that much older and more primitive style of morality, which lies an enormous distance from the altruistic way of valuing (which Dr. Ree, like all English genealogists of morality, sees as the very essence of moral evaluation); similarly, p. 74 of the Wanderer, and p. 99 of The Dawn concerning the origin of justice as a compromise between approximately equal powers (equality as a precondition of all contracts and therefore of justice); likewise concerning the origin of punishment in Wanderer, p 25, 34, for which an intent to terrify is neither the essential thing nor the origin (as Dr. Ree claims-it is far more likely first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something incidental, something additional).

But basically even then the real concern for me at heart was something much more important than coming up with hypotheses about the origin of morality, either my own or from other people (or, more precisely stated-this latter issue was important to me only for the sake of a goal to which it was one path out of many). For me the issue was the value of morality-and in that matter I had to take issue almost alone with my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom, as if to a contemporary, that book, with its passion and hidden contradiction, addressed itself (for that book was also a "polemical tract"). The most specific issue was the worth of the "unegoistic," the instinct for pity, self-denial, self-sacrifice, something which Schopenhauer himself had painted with gold, deified, and projected into the next world for so long that it finally became for him "value in itself" and the reason why he said No to life and even to himself.

But a constantly more fundamental suspicion of exactly this instinct voiced itself in me, a scepticism which always dug deeper! It was precisely here that I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime temptation and seduction. But in what direction? To nothingness? It was precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standing still, the backward-glancing exhaustion, the will turning itself against life, the final illness tenderly and sadly announcing itself. I understood the morality of pity, which was always seizing more and more around it, even the philosophers which it made sick, as the most sinister symptom of our European culture, which itself had become sinister, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to nihilism? . . . This modern philosophical preference for and overvaluing of pity is really something new. Concerning the worthlessness of pity philosophers up to now were in agreement. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant-four spirits as different from one another as possible, but united in one thing, in the low value they set on pity.-

This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity (I'm an opponent of the disgraceful modern immaturity of feelings) appeared at first to be only something isolated, a detached question mark. But anyone who remains there for a while and learns some questions, will experience what happened to me-a huge new vista opens up before him, a possibility grips him like an attack of dizziness, all sorts of mistrust, suspicion, and fear spring up-his belief in morality, in all morality, starts to totter, and finally he hears a new demand.

Let's proclaim this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, and we must first question the very value of these values. For that we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstance out of which these values grew, under which they have developed and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as hypocrisy, as illness, as misunderstanding-but also morality as cause, as means of healing, as stimulant, as scruples, as poison), a knowledge of the sort which has not been there until now, something which has not even been wished for.

People have taken the worth of these "values" as something given, as self-evident, as beyond all dispute. Up until now people have also not had the least doubts about or wavered in setting up "the good man" as more valuable than "the evil man," of higher worth in the sense of the improvement, usefulness, and prosperity of mankind in general (along with the future of humanity). Now what about this? What if the truth were the other way around? What if in the "good" there lay a symptom of regression, something like a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, something which makes the present live at the cost of the future? Perhaps something more comfortable, less dangerous, but also on a smaller scale, something more demeaning? . . . So that this very morality would be guilty if the highest possible power and magnificence of the human type were never attained? So that this very morality might be the danger of all dangers?

For me it was enough that once this insight revealed itself to me, I had a reason to look around for learned, bold, and hard-working comrades (today I'm still searching). It's a matter of traveling through the immense, distant, and so secretive land of the morality which was really there, the land of really living morality, with nothing but new questions and, as it were, new eyes. Isn't that almost like first discovering this land?

In this matter, I thought of, among others, the above-mentioned Dr. Ree, because I happened to have no doubts at all that by the very nature of his questions he would be driven to a more correct methodology in order to arrive at any answers. Have I deceived myself in all this? At any rate, my desire was to provide a better direction for such a keen and objective eye as his, a direction leading to a true history of morality and to advise him in time against the English way of making hypotheses by staring off into the blue.

For, indeed, it's obvious which colour must be a hundred times more important for someone seeking a genealogy of morals than this blue-namely, gray, in other words, what has been documented, what can be established as the truth, what really took place, in short, the long, difficult-to-decipher hieroglyphic writing of the past in human morality. This was unknown to Dr. Ree. But he had read Darwin, so that to some extent in his hypotheses the Darwinian beast and the most modern modest and tender moral sensibility, which "no longer bites," politely extend their hands to each other in a way that is at least entertaining-with the latter bearing a facial expression revealing a certain good-natured and refined indolence, in which is mixed a grain of pessimism and exhaustion, as if it is really not worth taking all these things, the problems of morality, so seriously.

For me things appear reversed-there are no issues which are more worth taking seriously-among the rewards, for example, is the fact that one day perhaps people will be permitted to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness, or, to say it in my own language, the gay science, is a reward, a reward for a lengthy, brave, hard-working, and underground seriousness, which, of course, is not something for everyone. But on that day when from full hearts we say "Forward! Our old morality also belongs in a comedy!", we'll have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of "the fate of the soul." And we can bet that the grand old immortal comic poet of our existence will put it to good use!. . .

If this writing is incomprehensible to someone or other and hurts his ears, the blame for that, it strikes me, is not necessarily mine. The writing is sufficiently clear given the conditions I set out-that you have first read my earlier writings and have taken some trouble to do that, for, in fact, these works are not easily accessible. For example, so far as my Zarathustra is concerned, I don't consider anyone knowledgeable about it who has not at some time or another been deeply wounded by and profoundly delighted with every word in it. For only then can he enjoy the privilege of sharing with reverence in the halcyon element out of which that work was born, in its sunny clarity, distance, breadth, and certainty.

In other cases the aphoristic form creates difficulties which stem from the fact that nowadays people don't take this form seriously enough. An aphorism, properly stamped and poured, has not been "deciphered" simply by being read. It's much more the case that only now can one begin to explicate it-and that requires an art of interpretation. In the third essay of this book I have set out a model of what I call an "interpretation" for such a case. In this essay an aphorism is presented, and the essay itself is a commentary on it. Of course, in order to practice this style of reading as an art, one thing is above all essential-something that today has been thoroughly forgotten (and so it will require still more time before my writings are "readable")-something for which one almost needs to be a cow, at any rate not a modern man-rumination.

Sils-Maria, Oberengadin

July 1887

First Essay

Good and Evil, Good and Bad

These English psychologists whom we have to thank for the only attempts up to this point to produce a history of the origins of morality-in themselves they serve up to us no small riddle. In the way of a lively riddle, they even offer, I confess, something substantially more than their books-they are interesting in themselves! These English psychologists-what do they really want? We find them, willingly or unwillingly, always at the same work, that is, hauling the partie honteuse [shameful part] of our inner world into the foreground, in order to look right there for the truly effective and operative force which has determined our development, the very place where man's intellectual pride least wishes to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae [force of inertia] of habit or in forgetfulness or in a blind, contingent, mechanical joining of ideas or in something else purely passive, automatic, reflex, molecular, and completely stupid)-what is it that really drives these psychologists always in this particular direction?

Is it a secret, malicious, common instinct (perhaps one which is self-deceiving) for belittling humanity? Or something like a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of idealists who've become disappointed, gloomy, venomous, and green. Or a small underground hostility and rancour towards Christianity (and Plato), which perhaps has never once managed to cross the threshold of consciousness? Or even a lecherous taste for what is odd or painfully paradoxical, for what in existence is questionable and ridiculous? Or finally a bit of all of these-a little vulgarity, a little gloominess, a little hostility to Christianity, a little thrill, and a need for pepper? . . .

But people tell me that these men are simply old, cold, boring frogs, which creep and hop around people as if they were in their own proper element, that is, in a swamp. I resist that idea when I hear it. What's more, I don't believe it. And if one is permitted to hope where one cannot know, then I hope from my heart that the situation with these men could be reversed, that these investigators peering at the soul through their microscopes could be thoroughly brave, generous, and proud animals, who know how to control their hearts and their pain and who have educated themselves to sacrifice everything desirable for the sake of the truth, for the sake of every truth, even the simple, the bitter, the hateful, the repellent, the unchristian, the unmoral truth. . . . For there are such truths.-

So all respect to the good spirits that may govern in these historians of morality! But it's certainly a pity that they lack the historical spirit itself, that they've been left in the lurch by all the good spirits of history! Collectively they all think essentially unhistorically, in the traditional manner of philosophers. Of that there is no doubt. The incompetence of their genealogies of morals reveals itself at the very beginning, where the issue is to determine the origin of the idea and of the judgment "good."

"People," so they proclaim, "originally praised unegoistic actions and called them good from the perspective of those for whom they were done, that is, those for whom such actions were useful. Later people forgot how this praise began, and because unegoistic actions had, according to custom, always been praised as good, people then simply felt them as good, as if they were something inherently good."

We see right away that this initial derivation already contains all the typical characteristics of the idiosyncrasies of English psychologists-we have "usefulness," "forgetting," "habit," and finally "error," all as the foundation for an evaluation in which the higher man up to this time has taken pride, as if it were a sort of privilege of men generally. This pride should be humbled, this evaluation of worth emptied of value. Has that been achieved?

Now, first of all, it's obvious to me that from this theory the origin of the idea "good" has been sought for and established in the wrong place: the judgment "good" did not move here from those to whom "goodness" was shown! It is much more that case that the "good people" themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, higher-ranking and higher-thinking people felt and set themselves and their actions up as good, that is to say, of the first rank, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and vulgar. From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values, to stamp out the names for values. What did they care about usefulness!

In relation to such a hot pouring out of the highest rank-ordering, rank-setting judgments of value, the point of view which considers utility is as foreign and inappropriate as possible. Here the feeling has reached the opposite of that low level of warmth which is a condition for that calculating shrewdness, that calculation by utility-and not just for a moment, not for an exceptional hour, but permanently. The pathos of nobility and distance, as mentioned, the lasting and domineering feeling, something total and complete, of a higher ruling nature in relation to a lower nature, to an "beneath"-that is the origin of the opposition between "god" and "bad." (The right of the master to give names extends so far that we could permit ourselves to grasp the origin of language itself as an expression of the power of the rulers: they say "that is such and such," seal every object and event with a sound and, in so doing, take possession of it.)

Given this origin, the word "good" was not in any way necessarily tied up with "unegoistic" actions, as the superstitions of those genealogists of morality tell us. Rather, that occurs for the first time with the collapse of aristocratic value judgments, when this entire contrast between "egoistic" and "unegoistic" pressed itself ever more strongly into human awareness-it is, to use my own words, the instinct of the herd which, through this contrast, finally gets its word (and its words). And even so, it took a long time until this instinct in the masses became ruler, with the result that moral evaluation got downright hung up and bogged down on this opposition (as is the case, for example, in modern Europe: today the prejudice that takes "moralistic," "unegoistic," "desinteresse" [disinterested] as equally valuable ideas already governs, with the force of a "fixed idea" and a disease of the brain).

Secondly, however, and quite separate from the fact that this hypothesis about the origin of the value judgment "good" is historically untenable, it suffers from an inherent psychological contradiction. The utility of the unegoistic action is supposed to be the origin of the praise it receives, and this origin has allegedly been forgotten: but how is this forgetting even possible? Could the usefulness of such actions at some time or other just stop? The case is the opposite: this utility has rather been an everyday experience throughout the ages, and thus something that has always been constantly re-emphasized. Hence, instead of disappearing out of consciousness, instead of becoming something forgettable, it must have pressed itself into the consciousness with ever-increasing clarity.

How much more sensible is the contrasting theory (which is not therefore closer to the truth), for example, the one which is advocated by Herbert Spencer: he proposes that the idea "good" is essentially the same as the idea "useful" or "functional," so that in judgments about "good" and "bad" human beings sum up and endorse the experiences they have not forgotten and cannot forget concerning the useful-functional and the harmful-useless. According to this theory, good is something which has always proved useful, so that it may assert its validity as "valuable in the highest degree" or as "valuable in itself." This path to an explanation is, as mentioned, also false, but at least the account itself is sensible and psychologically tenable.

I was given a hint in the right direction by this question: What, from an etymological perspective, do the meanings of "Good" as manifested in different languages really mean? There I found that all of them lead back to the same transformation of ideas, that everywhere "noble" or "aristocratic" in a social sense is the fundamental idea out of which "good" in the sense of "spiritually noble," "aristocratic," "spiritually high-minded," "spiritually privileged" necessarily develop-a process which always runs in parallel with that other one which finally transforms "common," "vulgar," and "low" into the concept "bad." The most eloquent example of the latter is the German word "schlect"[bad] itself-which is identical with the word "schlicht" [plain]-compare "schlectweg" [quite simply] and "schlechterdings" [simply]. Originally these words designated the plain, common man, but without any suspicious side glance, simply in contrast to the nobility. Around the time of the Thirty Years War approximately-hence late enough-this sense changed into the one used now.

In connection with the genealogy of morals, this point strikes me as a fundamental insight-that it was first discovered so late we can ascribe to the repressive influence which democratic prejudice in the modern world exercises over all questions of origin. And this occurs in the apparently objective realm of natural science and physiology, a point which I can only hint at here. But the sort of mischief this prejudice can cause, once it has become unleashed as hatred, particularly where morality and history are concerned, is revealed in the well-known case of Buckle: the plebeian nature of the modern spirit, which originated in England, broke out once again on its home turf, as violently as a muddy volcano and with the same salty, overloud, and common eloquence with which all previous volcanoes have spoken (1).

With respect to our problem-which for good reasons we can call a quiet problem, so refined that it directs itself only at a few ears-there is no little interest in establishing the point that often in those words and roots which designate "good" there still shines through the main nuance of what made the nobility feel they were men of higher rank. It's true that in most cases they perhaps named themselves simply after their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "those in command") or after the most visible sign of their superiority, for example, as "the rich" or "the owners" (that is the meaning of arya, and the corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic). But they also named themselves after a typical characteristic, and that is the case which is our concern here.

For instance, they called themselves "the truthful"-above all the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theogonis. The word developed for this characteristic-esthlos [fine, noble]-indicates, according to its root meaning, a man who is, who possess reality, who really exists. Then, with a subjective transformation, it indicates the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of conceptual transformation it became the slogan and catch phrase for the nobility, and its sense shifted entirely over to "aristocratic," to mark a distinction from the lying common man, as Theogonis takes and presents him, until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word remains as a designation of spiritual nobility and, so to speak, becomes ripe and sweet.

In the word kakos [weak, worthless] as in the word deilos [cowardly] (the plebeian in contrast to the agathos [good, excellent]) the cowardice is emphasized. This perhaps provides a hint about the direction in which we have to seek the etymological origin for the multiple meanings of agathos. In the Latin word malus [bad] (which I place alongside melas [black]) the common man could be designated as the dark-coloured, above all as the dark-haired ("hic niger est" [this man is black]), as the pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil, who stood out from those who became dominant, the blonds, that is, the conquering race of Aryans, most clearly through this colour. At any rate, the Gaelic race offers me an exactly corresponding example. The word fin (for example, in the name Fin-Gal), the term designating nobility and finally the good, noble, and pure, originally referred to the blond-headed man in contrast to the dusky, dark-haired original inhabitants.

Incidentally, the Celts were a thoroughly blond race. People are wrong when they link the traces of a basically dark-haired population, which are noticeable on the carefully prepared ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic origin and mixing of blood, as Virchow does. It is much rather the case that in these places the pre-Aryan population of Germany emerged. (The same is true for almost all of Europe: essentially the conquered races finally attained the upper hand for themselves once again in colour, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can confirm for us that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that preference for the "Commune," for the primitive form of society, which all European socialists now share, does not indicate a monstrous counter-attack and that the ruling and master race, the Aryans, is not being defeated, even physiologically?)

The Latin word bonus I believe I can explicate as "the warrior," provided that I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older word duonus (compare bellum [war] = duellum [war] = duen-lum, which seems to me to contain that word duonus). Hence, bonus as a man of war, of division (duo), as a warrior. We can see what constituted a man's "goodness" in ancient Rome. What about our German word "Gut" [good] itself. Doesn't it indicate "den Gottlichen" [the god-like man]? And isn't it identical to the people's (originally the nobles') name for the Goths? The basis for this hypothesis does not belong here.

From this rule that the concept of political superiority always resolves itself into the concept of spiritual priority, it is not really an exception (although there is room for exceptions), when the highest caste is also the priest caste and consequently for its total range of meanings prefers a scale of values which recalls its priestly function. So, for example, for the first time the words "pure" and "impure" appear as marks of one's social position and later a "good" and a "bad" develop which no longer refer to social position.

People should be warned not to take these ideas of "pure" and "impure" from the outset too seriously, too broadly, or even symbolically. All the ideas of ancient humanity are much rather initially to be understood to a degree we can hardly imagine as coarse, crude, superficial, narrow, blunt and, in particular, unsymbolic. The "pure man" is from the start simply a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods which produce diseases of the skin, who doesn't sleep with the dirty women of the lower people, who has a horror of blood-no more, not much more!

On the other hand, from the very nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy it is clear enough how even here early on the opposition between different evaluations could become dangerously internalized and sharpened. And in fact they finally ripped open fissures between man and man, over which even an Achilles or a free spirit could not cross without shivering. From the very beginning there is something unhealthy about such priestly aristocracies and about the customary attitudes which govern in them, which turn away from action, sometimes brooding, sometimes exploding with emotion, as a result of which in the priests of almost all ages there have appeared debilitating intestinal illness and neurasthenia.

But what they themselves came up with as a remedy for this pathological disease-surely we can assert that it has finally shown itself, through its effects, as even a hundred times more dangerous than the illness for which it was meant to provide relief. Human beings are still sick from the after effects of this priestly naivete in healing! Let's think, for example, of certain forms of diet (avoiding meat), of fasting, of celibacy, of the flight "into the desert" (Weir Mitchell's isolation, but naturally without the fattening up cure and overeating which follow it-a treatment which constitutes the most effective treatment for all hysteria induced by the ideals of asceticism): consider also the whole metaphysic of the priests-so hostile to the senses, making men so lazy and sophisticated-or the way they hypnotize themselves in the manner of fakirs and Brahmins-Brahmanism employed as a glass head and a fixed idea Consider finally the only too understandable and common dissatisfaction with its radical cure, with nothingness (or God-the desire for a unio mystica [mystical union] with God is the desire of the Buddhist for nothingness, nirvana-nothing more!).

Among the priests, everything becomes more dangerous-not only the remedies and arts of healing, but also pride, vengeance, mental acuity, excess, love, thirst for power, virtue, illness-although it's fair enough to add that on the foundation of this basically dangerous form of human existence, the priest, for the first time the human being became, in general, an interesting animal, that here the human soul first attained depth in a higher sense and became evil-and, indeed, these are the two fundamental reasons for humanity's superiority, up to now, over other animals.

You will have already guessed how easily the priestly way of evaluating could split from the knightly-aristocratic and then continue to develop into its opposite. Such a development receives a special stimulus every time the priest caste and the warrior caste confront each other jealously and are not willing to agree about the winner. The knightly-aristocratic judgments of value have as their basic assumption a powerful physicality, a blooming, rich, even overflowing health, together with those things which are required to maintain these qualities-war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general everything which involves strong, free, happy action. The priestly-noble method of evaluating has, as we saw, other preconditions: these make it difficult enough for them when it comes to war!

As is well known, priests are the most evil of enemies-but why? Because they are the most powerless. From their powerlessness, their hate grows into something immense and terrifying, to the most spiritual and most poisonous manifestations. Those who have been the greatest haters in world history and the most spiritually rich haters have always been the priests-in comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are hardly worth considering. Human history would be a really stupid affair without that spirit which entered it from the powerless.

Let us quickly consider the greatest example. Everything on earth which has been done against "the nobility," "the powerful," "the masters," "the possessors of power" is not worth mentioning in comparison with what the Jews have done against them-the Jews, that priestly people who knew how to get final satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical transformation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge. This was appropriate only to a priestly people with the most deeply rooted priestly desire for revenge.

In opposition to the aristocratic value equations (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = loved by god), the Jews successfully and with a fearsome consistency dared to reverse it and to hang on to that with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of the powerless), that is, to "only those who suffer are good; only the poor, the powerless, the low are good; only the suffering, those in need, the sick, the ugly are the pious; only they are blessed by God; for them alone there is salvation. By contrast, you privileged and powerful people, you are for all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lecherous, insatiable, the godless-you will also be the unblessed, the cursed, and the damned for all eternity!" We know who inherited this Judaic transformation of values . . .

In connection with that huge and immeasurably disastrous initiative which the Jews launched with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the sentence I wrote at another time (in Beyond Good and Evil, p. 118)-namely, that with the Jews the slave condition in morality begins: that condition which has a two-thousand-year-old history behind it and which we nowadays no longer notice because, well, because it has triumphed.

But you fail to understand that? You have no eye for something that needed two millennia to emerge victorious? . . . That's nothing to wonder at: all lengthy things are hard to see, to assess. However, that's what took place: out of the trunk of that tree of vengeance and hatred, Jewish hatred, the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values-something whose like has never been seen on earth-from that grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all the forms of love. From what other trunk could that have grown? . . .

However, you must not make the mistake of thinking that this love arose essentially as the denial of that thirst for vengeance, as the opposite of Jewish hatred. No. The reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred, as its crown, as the victorious crown extending itself wider and wider in the purest brightness and sunshine, which, so to speak, was seeking for the kingdom of light and height, the goal of that hate-aiming for victory, trophies, seduction-with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were sinking down ever deeper and more greedily into everything deep and evil.

Take this Jesus of Nazareth, the bodily evangelist of love, the "Saviour," who brought holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the sinners. Was he not in fact seduction in its most terrible and irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Judaic values and new ideals? Didn't Israel in fact attain, with the detour of this "Saviour," with this apparent enemy to and dissolver of Israel, the final goal of its sublime thirst for vengeance? Isn't it part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of vengeance, a far-sighted, underground, slowly expropriating, and premeditated revenge, that Israel itself had to disown and nail to the cross the tool essential to its revenge before all the world, so that "all the world," that is, all Israel's enemies, could then swallow this bait?

On the other hand, could anyone, using the full subtlety of his mind, imagine a more dangerous bait? Something to match the enticing, intoxicating, narcotizing, corrupting power of that symbol of the "holy cross," that ghastly paradox of a "god on the cross," that mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of god for the salvation of mankind? . . . At least it is certain that sub hoc signo [under this sign] Israel, with its vengeance and revaluation of the worth of all other previous values, has triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.

"But what are you doing still talking about more noble ideals! Let's look at the facts: the people have triumphed-or 'the slaves,' or 'the rabble,' or 'the herd,' or whatever you want to call them-if this has taken place because of the Jews, then good for them! No people had a more world-historical mission. 'The masters' have been disposed of. The morality of the common man has won. We may take this victory as a blood poisoning (it did mix the races up)-I don't deny that. But this intoxication has undoubtedly been successful. The 'Salvation' of the human race (namely, from 'the masters') is well under way. Everything is turning Jewish or Christian or plebeian (what do the words matter!).

The progress of this poison through the entire body of humanity seems irresistible-although its tempo and pace may seem from now on constantly slower, more delicate, less audible, more circumspect-well, we have time enough. . . From this point of view, does the church today still have necessary work to do, does it really have a right to exist? Or could we dispense with it? Quaeritur. [That's a question to be asked]. It seems that it obstructs and hinders the progress of this poison, instead of speeding it up? Well, that might even be what makes the church useful . . . Certainly the church is something positively gross and vulgar, which a more delicate intelligence, a truly modern taste resists. Should the church at least not be something more sophisticated? . . . Today the church alienates more than it seduces. . . Who among us would really be a free spirit if the church were not there? The church repels us, not its poison. . . . Apart from the church, we love the poison. . . "

This is the epilogue of a "free thinker" to my speech, an honest animal, who has revealed himself well-and he's a democrat. He listened to me up that that point and couldn't stand to hear my silence. But for me at this point there is much to be silent about.

The slave revolt in morality begins when the resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the resentment of those beings who are prevented from a genuinely active reaction and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary vengeance. While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant self-affirmation, slave morality from the start says No to what is "outside," "other," "a non-self". And this No is its creative act. This transformation of the glance which confers value-this necessary projection towards what is outer instead of back into itself-that is inherent in resentment. In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself. Psychologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all. Its action is basically reaction.

The reverse is the case with the noble method of valuing: it acts and grows spontaneously. It seeks its opposite only to affirm itself even more thankfully, with even more rejoicing. Its negative concept of "low," "common," "bad" is only a pale contrasting image after the fact in relation to its positive basic concept, intoxicated with life and passion, "We are noble, good, beautiful, and happy!" When the noble way of evaluating makes a mistake and abuses reality, that happens with reference to the sphere which it does not know well enough, indeed, the sphere it has strongly resisted learning the truth about: under certain circumstances it misjudges the sphere it despises-the sphere of the common man, the low people.

On the other hand, we should consider that even assuming that the effect of contempt, of looking down or looking superior, falsifies the image of the person despised, such distortion will fall short by a long way of the distortion with which the repressed hatred and vengeance of the powerless man mistakenly assault his opponent-naturally, in effigy. In fact, in contempt there is too much negligence, too much dismissiveness, too much looking away and impatience, all mixed together, even too much feeling of joy, for it to be capable of converting its object into a truly distorted monster.

We should not fail to hear the almost benevolent nuances which for a Greek noble, for example, lay in all the words with which he set himself above the lower people-how a constant type of pity, consideration, and forbearance is mixed in there, sweetening the words, to the point where almost all words which refer to the common man finally remain as expressions for "unhappy," "worthy of pity" (compare deilos [cowardly], deilaios [lowly, mean], poneros [oppressed by toil, wretched], mochtheros [suffering, wretched]-the last two basically designating the common man as a slave worker and beast of burden). On the other hand, for the Greek ear the words "bad," "low," "unhappy" have never stopped echoing a single note, one tone colour, in which "unhappy" predominates. That is the inheritance of the old, noble, aristocratic way of evaluating, which does not betray its principles even in contempt.

(Philologists might recall the sense in which oizuros [miserable], anolbos [unblessed], tlemon [wretched], dustychein [unfortunate], xymfora [misfortune] were used). The "well born" felt that they were "the happy ones"; they did not have to construct their happiness artificially first by looking at their enemies, or in some circumstance to talk themselves into it, to lie to themselves (the way all men of resentment habitually do). Similarly they knew, as complete men, overloaded with power and thus necessarily active, they must not separate action from happiness. They considered being active necessarily associated with happiness (that's where the phrase eu prattein [do well, succeed] derives its origin)-all this is very much the opposite of "happiness" at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, those festering with poisonous and hostile feelings, among whom happiness comes out essentially as a narcotic, an anesthetic, quiet, peace, "Sabbath", relaxing the soul, stretching one's limbs, in short, as something passive.

While the noble man lives for himself with trust and candour (gennaios, meaning "of noble birth" stresses the nuance "upright" and also probably "naive"), the man of resentment is neither upright nor naive, nor honest and direct with himself. His soul squints. His spirit loves hiding places, secret paths, and back doors. Everything furtive attracts him as his world, his security, his refreshment. He understands about remaining silent, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily diminishing himself, humiliating himself. A race of such men will necessarily end up cleverer than any noble race. It will value cleverness to a very different extent, that is, as a condition of existence of the utmost importance; whereas, cleverness among noble men easily acquires a delicate aftertaste of luxury and sophistication about it. Here it is not nearly so important as the complete certainly of the ruling unconscious instincts or even a certain lack of cleverness, something like brave recklessness, whether in the face of danger or of an enemy, or wildly enthusiastic, sudden fits of anger, love, reverence, thankfulness, and vengefulness, by which in all ages noble souls have recognized each other.

The resentment of the noble man himself, if it comes over him, consumes and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction and therefore does not poison. On the other hand, in countless cases it just does not appear, whereas in the case of all weak and powerless people it is unavoidable. The noble man cannot take his enemies, his misfortunes, even his bad deeds seriously for very long-that is the mark of a strong, complete nature, in whom there is a surplus of plastic, creative, healing power, which also can make one forget (a good example for that from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory of the insults and maliciousness people directed at him, and who therefore could not forgive, because he just forgot). Such a man with one shrug throws off him all those worms which eat into other men. Only here is possible (provided that it is at all possible on earth) the real "love for one's enemy." How much respect a noble man already has for his enemies! And such a respect is already a bridge to love . . . In fact, he demands his enemy for himself, as his mark of honour. Indeed, he has no enemy other than one who has nothing to despise and a great deal to respect! By contrast, imagine for yourself "the enemy" as a man of resentment conceives him-and right here we have his action, his creation: he has conceptualized "the evil enemy,: "the evil one," and as a fundamental idea-and from that he now thinks his way to an opposite image and counterpart, a "good man"-himself!

We see exactly the opposite with the noble man, who conceives the fundamental idea "good" in advance and spontaneously by himself and from there first creates a picture of "bad" for himself. This "bad" originating from the noble man and that "evil" arising out of the stew pot of insatiable hatred-of these the first is a later creation, an afterthought, a complementary colour; whereas the second is the original, the beginning, the essential act of conception in slave morality.

Although the two words "bad" and "evil" both seem opposite to the same idea of "good," how different they are. But it is not the same idea of the "good"; it is much rather a question of who the "evil man" really is, in the sense of the morality of resentment. The strict answer to that is this: precisely the "good man" of the other morality, the noble man himself, the powerful, the ruling man, only coloured over, reinterpreted, and seen through the poisonous eyes of resentment.

Here there is one thing we will be the last to deny: the man who knows these "good men" only as enemies, knows them as nothing but evil enemies, and the same men who are so strongly held bound by custom, honour, habit, thankfulness, even more by mutual suspicion and jealousy inter pares [among equals] and who, by contrast, demonstrate in relation to each other such resourceful consideration, self-control, refinement, loyalty, pride, and friendship-these men, once outside where the strange world, the foreign, begins, are not much better than beasts of prey turned loose. There they enjoy freedom from all social constraints. In the wilderness they make up for the tension which a long fenced-in confinement within the peace of the community brings about. They go back to the innocent consciousness of a wild beast of prey, as joyful monsters, who perhaps walk away from a dreadful sequence of murder, arson, rape, and torture with exhilaration and spiritual equilibrium, as if they had merely pulled off a student prank, convinced that the poets now have something more to sing about and praise for a long time.

At the bottom of all these noble races we cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the blond beast splendidly roaming around in its lust for loot and victory. This hidden basis from time to time needs to be discharged: the animal must come out again, must go back into the wilderness,-Roman, Arab, German, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings-in this need they are all alike.

It was the noble races which left behind the concept of the "barbarian" in all their tracks, wherever they went. A consciousness of and a pride in this fact reveals itself even in their highest culture (for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians, in that famous Funeral Speech, "our audacity has broken a way through to every land and sea, putting up permanent memorials to itself for good and ill."). This "audacity" of the noble races, mad, absurd, sudden in the way it expresses itself, its unpredictability, even the improbability of its undertakings-Pericles emphatically praises the rayhumia [mental balance, freedom from anxiety] of the Athenians-its indifference to and contempt for safety, body, life, comfort, its fearsome cheerfulness and the depth of its joy in all destruction, in all the physical pleasures of victory and cruelty-everything summed up for those who suffer from such audacity in the image of the "barbarian," the "evil enemy," something like the "Goth" or the "Vandal."

The deep, icy mistrust which the German evokes, as soon as he comes to power-even today-is still an after-effect of that unforgettable terror with which for a century Europe confronted the rage of the blond German beast (although there is hardly any idea linking the old Germanic tribes and we Germans, let alone any blood relationship).

Once before I have remarked on Hesiod's dilemma when he thought up his sequence of cultural periods and sought to express them as Gold, Silver, and Iron. But he didn't know what to do with the contradiction presented to him by the marvelous but, at the same time, so horrifying world of Homer, other than to make two cultural ages out of one, then placing one after the other-first the age of Heroes and Demi-gods from Troy and Thebes, just as that world remained as a memorial for the noble races who had their own ancestors in it, and then the Iron Age, as that same world appeared to the descendants of the downtrodden, exploited, ill treated, those carried off and sold-a metallic age, as mentioned: hard, cold, cruel, empty of feeling and scruples, with everything crushed and covered over in blood.

Assuming as true what in any event is taken as "the truth" nowadays, that it is precisely the purpose of all culture to breed a tame and civilized animal, a domestic pet, out of the beast of prey "man," then we would undoubtedly have to consider the essential instruments of culture all those instinctive reactions and resentments by means of which the noble races with all their ideals were finally disgraced and overpowered-but that would not be to claim that the bearers of these instincts also in themselves represented culture. It would much rather be the case that the opposite is not only probable-no! nowadays it is visibly apparent. These people carrying instincts for oppression and a lust for revenge, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, and all pre-Aryan populations in particular, represent the regression of mankind! These "instruments of culture" are a disgrace to humanity, more a reason to be suspicious of or a counterargument against "culture" in general!

We may well be right when we hang onto our fear of the blond beast at the base of all noble races and keep up our guard. But who would not find it a hundred times better to fear if he could at the same time be allowed to admire, rather than not fear and no longer be able to rid himself of the disgusting sight of the failures, the stunted, the emaciated, the poisoned? Is not that our fate? Today what is it that constitutes our aversion to "man"? For we suffer from man-there's no doubt of that. It's not a matter of fear, rather it's the fact that we have nothing more to fear from men, that the maggot "man" is in the foreground swarming around, that the "tame man," the hopelessly mediocre and unpleasant man, has already learned to feel that he is the goal, the pinnacle, the meaning of history, "the higher man,"-yes indeed, he even has a certain right to feel that about himself, insofar as he feels separate from the excess of failed, sick, tired, spent people, who are nowadays beginning to make Europe stink, and feels at least somewhat successful, at least still capable of life, at least able to say "yes" to life.

At this point I won't suppress a sigh and a final hope. What is it exactly than I find so totally unbearable? Something which I cannot deal with on my own, which makes me choke and feel faint? Bad air! Bad air! It's when something which has failed comes close to me, when I have to smell the entrails of a failed soul! Apart from that what can we not endure by way of need, deprivation, bad weather, infirmity, hardship, loneliness? Basically we can deal with all the other things, born as we are to an underground and struggling existence. We come back again and again into the light, we live over and over our golden hour of victory-and then we stand there, just as we were born, unbreakable, tense, ready for something new, for something even more difficult, more distant, like a bow which all trouble only serves to pull more tight.

But if there are heavenly goddesses who are our patrons, beyond good and evil, then from time to time grant me a glimpse, grant me a single glimpse into something perfect, something completely developed, something happy, powerful, triumphant, from which there is still something to fear! A glimpse of a man who justifies humanity, of a complementary and redeeming stroke-of-luck of a man, for whose sake we can hang onto a faith in humanity! . . .

For matters stand like this: the diminution and levelling of European man hides our greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us tired. We don't see anything today which wants to be greater. We suspect that things are constantly going down and down into something thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian-humanity, there is no doubt, is becoming constantly "better" . . . Europe's fate lies right here. With our fear of mankind we also have lost our love for mankind, our reverence for mankind, our hopes for mankind, even our will to be mankind. A glimpse at man makes us tired-what is today's nihilism, if it is not that? . . . We are weary of man.

But let's go back: the problem with the other origin of the "good," of the good as the man of resentment has imagined it for himself, demands some conclusion. That lambs are annoyed at the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and it provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey, because they snatch away small lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves "These predatory birds are evil-and whoever is least like a predatory bird-and especially who is like its opposite, a lamb-shouldn't that animal be good?" there is nothing to find fault with in this setting up of an ideal, except for the fact that the birds of prey might look down with a little mockery and perhaps say to themselves "We are not at all annoyed with these good lambs-we even love them. Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."

To demand that strength does not express itself as strength, that it must not consist of a will to overpower, a will to throw down, a will to rule, a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumph-that is as unreasonable as to demand that weakness express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action-indeed, it is nothing but these drives, willing, and actions in themselves-and it cannot appear as anything else except through the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by something which causes actions, by a "Subject."

In fact, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject, which is called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of that strength, as if behind the strong person there is an indifferent substrate, which is free to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substrate, there is no "being" behind the doing, acting, becoming. "The doer" is merely invented after the fact-the act is everything. People basically duplicate the event: when they see lightning, well, that is an action of an action: they set up the same event first as the cause and then again as its effect.

Natural scientists are no better when they say "Force moves, force causes" and so on-our entire scientific knowledge, for all its coolness, its freedom from feelings, still remains exposed to the seductions of language and has not gotten rid of the changelings foisted on it, the "Subject" (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, like the Kantian "Thing in itself"): it's no wonder that the repressed, secretly smouldering feelings of rage and hate use this belief for themselves and, in fact, maintain a faith in nothing more strongly than in the idea that the strong are free to be weak and predatory birds are free to be lambs-and in so doing, they arrogate to themselves the right to blame the birds of prey for being birds of prey . . .

When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the conquered say to each other, with the vengeful cunning of the powerless, "Let us be different from evil people, namely, good! And that man is good who does not overpower, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who does not retaliate, who hands revenge over to God, who keeps himself hidden, as we do, who avoids all evil and demands little from life in general-like us, the patient, humble, and upright"-what that amounts to, coolly expressed and without bias, is essentially nothing more than "We weak people are merely weak. It's good if we do nothing, because we are not strong enough."

But this bitter state, this shrewdness of the lowest ranks, which even insects possess (for in great danger they stand as if they were dead in order not to do "too much"), has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, dressed itself in the splendour of a self-denying, still, patient virtue, just as if the weakness of the weak man himself-that means his essence, his actions, his entire single, inevitable, and irredeemable reality-is a voluntary achievement, something willed, chosen, an act, something of merit. This kind of man needs to believe in the disinterested, freely choosing "subject" out of his instinct for self-preservation, self-approval, in which every falsehood is habitually sanctified. The subject (or, to use a more popular style, the soul) has up to now probably been the best principle for belief on earth, because, for the majority of the dying, the weak, and the downtrodden of all sorts, it makes possible a sublime self-deception which establishes weakness itself as freedom and their being like this or that as something meritorious.

Is there anyone who would like to take a little look down on and under that secret how man fabricates an ideal on earth? Who has the courage for that? Come on, now! Here is an open glimpse into this dark workshop. Just wait a moment, my dear Mr. Presumptuous and Nosy: your eye must first get used to this artificial flickering light. . . So, enough! Now speak! What's going on down there? Speak up. Say what you see, man of the most dangerous curiosity-now I'm the one who's listening.-

-"I see nothing, but I hear all the more. It is a careful and crafty light rumour-mongering and whispering from every nook and cranny. It seem to me that people are lying; a sugary mildness clings to every sound. Weakness is going to be falsified into something of merit. There's no doubt about it-things are just as you said they were."

-Keep talking!

"-and powerlessness which does not retaliate is being falsified into 'goodness,' anxious baseness into 'humility,' submission before those one hates to 'obedience' (of course, obedience to the one who, they say, commands this submission-they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak man, even cowardice, in which he is rich, his standing at the door, his inevitable need to wait around-here these acquire good names, like 'patience' and are called virtue. That incapacity for revenge is called the lack of desire for revenge, perhaps even forgiveness ('for they know not what they do-only we know what they do!'). And people are talking about 'love for one's enemy'-and sweating as they say it."

-Keep talking!

"They are miserable-there's no doubt about that-all these rumour mongers and counterfeiters in the corners, although crouched down beside each other in the warmth-but they are telling me that their misery is God's choice, His sign. One beats the dog one loves the most. Perhaps this misery may be a preparation, a test, an education, perhaps it is even more-something that will one day be rewarded and paid out with huge interest in gold, no, in happiness. They call that 'blessedness'."

-Go on!

"Now they are telling me that they are not only better than the powerful, the masters of the earth, whose spit they have to lick (not out of fear, certainly not out of fear, but because God commands that they honour those in authority)-they are not only better than these but they also are 'better off,' or at any rate will one day have it better. But enough! Enough! I can't endure it any more. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where man fabricates ideals-it seems to me it stinks from nothing but lies."

-No! Just wait a minute more! So far you haven't said anything about the masterpiece of these black magicians who know how to make whiteness, milk, and innocence out of every blackness. Have you not noticed the perfection of their sophistication, their most daring, refined, most spiritual, most fallacious artistic attempt. Pay attention! These cellar animals full of vengeance and hatred-what are they making right now out of that vengeance and hatred? Have you ever heard these words? If you heard only their words, would you suspect that you were completely among men of resentment?

-"I understand. Once again I'll open my ears (oh! oh! oh! and hold my nose). Now I'm hearing for the first time what they've been saying so often: 'We good men-we are the righteous'-what they demand they don't call repayment but 'the triumph of righteousness.' What they hate is not their enemy. No! They hate 'injustice,' 'godlessness.' What they believe and hope is not a hope for revenge, the intoxication of sweet vengeance (something Homer called 'sweeter than honey') but the victory of God, the righteous God, over the godless. What remains for them to love on earth are not their brothers in hatred but their 'brothers in love,' as they say, all the good and righteous people on the earth."

-And what do they call what serves them as a consolation for all the suffering of life-their phantasmagoria of future blessedness which they are expecting?

-"What that? Am I hearing correctly? They call that 'the last judgment,' the coming to their kingdom, the coming of 'God's kingdom'-but in the meanwhile they live 'in faith,' 'in love,' 'in hope.'"

-Enough! Enough!

Belief in what? Love for what? Hope for what? There's no doubt that these weak people at some time or another also want to be the strong people, some day their "kingdom" is supposed to arrive-they call it simply "the kingdom of God," as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! But to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death-in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can win eternal recompense in the "kingdom of God" for this earthly life "in faith, in love, in hope." Recompense for what? Recompense through what?

In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity meant to inspire terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell: "Eternal love also created me." Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its "eternal blessedness" it would, in any event, be more fitting to set the inscription "Eternal hate also created me"-provided it's all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie!

For what is the bliss of this paradise? . . . We might well have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: . "Beati in regno coelesti", he says, as gently as a lamb, "videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat" ["In the kingdom of heaven the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss."]

Or do you want to hear that message in a stronger tone, something from the mouth of a triumphant father of the church [Tertullian], who warns his Christians against the cruel sensuality of the public spectacles. But why? "Faith offers much more to us," he says, "something much stronger. Thanks to the redemption, very different joys are ours to command; in place of the athletes, we have our martyrs. If we want blood, well, we have the blood of Christ . . . But think of what awaits us on the day of his coming again, his triumph!"-and now he takes off, the rapturous 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 governors) 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 pristine corpora redituras affirmabant! Etiam poetas non ad Rhadamanti nec ad Minois, sed ad inopinati Christi tribunal palpitantes! Tunc magis tragoedi audiendi, magis scilicet vocales (better voices since they will be screaming in greater terror) 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 desaevierung. 'Hic est ille, dicam, fabri aut quaestuariae filis (in everything that follows and especially in the well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talamud Tertullian from this point on is referring to 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 tier of seats or, according to others, the comic and tragic stages). Through faith: that's how it's written.

[However there are other spectacles-that last eternal day of judgment, ignored by nations, derided by them, when the accumulation of the years and all the many things which they produced will be burned in a single fire. What a broad spectacle then appears! How I will be lost in admiration! How I will laugh! How I will rejoice! I'll be full of exaltation then as I see so many great kings who by public report were accepted into heaven groaning in the deepest darkness with Jove himself and alongside those very men who testified on their behalf! They will include governors of provinces who persecuted the name of our lord burning in flames more fierce that those with which they proudly raged against the Christians! And those wise philosophers who earlier convinced their disciples that god was irrelevant and who claimed either that there is no such thing as a soul or that our souls would not return to their original bodies will be ashamed as they burn in the conflagration with those very disciples. And the poets will be there, shaking with fear, not in front of the tribunal of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the Christ they did not anticipate! Then it will be easier to hear the tragic actors, because their voice will be more resonant in their own calamity (better voices since they will be screaming in greater terror). The actors will then be easier to recognize, for the fire will make them much more agile. Then the charioteer will be on show, all red in a wheel of fire, and the athletes will visible, thrown, not in the gymnasium, but in the fire, unless I have no wish to look at their bodies then, so that I can more readily cast an insatiable gaze on those who raged against our Lord. "This is the man," I will say, "the son of a workman or a prostitute (in everything that follows and especially in the well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talamud Tertullian from this point on is refering to the Jews), the destroyer of the sabbath, the Samaritan possessed by the devil. He is the man whom you brought from Judas, the man who was beaten with a reed and with fists, reviled with spit, who was given gall and vinegar to drink. He is the man whom his disciples took away in secret, so that it could be said that he was resurrected or whom the gardener took away, so that the crowd of visitors would not harm his lettuces." What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will from his own generosity grant you the sight of such things or the exultation in them? And yet we already have these things to a certain extent through faith, represented to us by the imagining spirit. Besides, what sorts of things has the eye not seen or the ear not heard and what sorts of things have not arisen in the human heart (1. Cor. 2, 9)? I believe these are more pleasing than the race track and the circus and both enclosures (first and fourth tier of seats or, according to others, the comic and tragic stages). Through faith: that's how it's written.

Let's bring this to a conclusion. The two opposing values "good and bad," "good and evil" have fought a fearful battle on earth for thousands of years. If it's true that the second value in each pair has for a long time had the upper hand, there's no lack of places where the battle goes on without a final decision. We ourselves could say that in the intervening time the battle has been constantly drawn to greater heights and greater depths and has become continuously more spiritual, so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a "higher nature," a more spiritual nature, than that it is split in this sense and is truly a battleground for these opposites.

The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called "Rome Against Judea, Judea Against Rome." To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, the contradiction between these deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jews were something contrary to nature itself, something like its monstrous polar opposite. In Rome the Jew was considered "guilty of hatred again the entire human race." And that view was correct, to the extent we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.

By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat oneself again to the Apocalypse of John, that wildest of all written outbursts which vengeance has on its conscience. (Incidentally, we must not underestimate the deep consistency of the Christian instinct, when it ascribed this very book of hate to the name of the disciple of love, the same man to whom it attributed that wildly enthusiastic amorous gospel-there is some truth to this, no matter how much literary counterfeiting may have been necessary for that book to make its point)

The Romans were the strong and noble men, stronger and nobler than any people who'd lived on earth up until then-or even than any people who'd ever been dreamed up. Everything they left as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can guess what was doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par excellence that priestly people of resentment, who possessed an unparalleled genius for popular morality. Just compare people with related talents-say, the Chinese or the Germans-with the Jews in order to understand who's in first place and who's fifth.

Which of them has proved victorious for the time being, Rome or Judea? Surely there's not the slightest doubt. Just think of who it is people bow down to today in Rome as the personification of all the highest values-and not only in Rome, but in almost half the earth, everywhere where people have become merely tame or want to become tame-in front of three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (before Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet worker Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, named Mary).

Now, this is very remarkable: without doubt Rome has been conquered. It's true that in the Renaissance there was a brilliant, incredible re-awakening of the classical ideal, the noble way of evaluating everything. Rome itself behaved like someone who'd woken up from a coma induced by the pressure of the new Jewish Rome built over it, which looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called "the church." But immediately Judea triumphed again, thanks to that basically vulgar (German and English) movement of resentment, which we call the Reformation, together with what had to follow as a consequence, the re-establishment of the church, as well as the re-establishment of the old grave-like tranquillity of classical Rome.

In what is an even more decisive and deeper sense, Judea once again was victorious over the classical ideal at the time of the French Revolution. The last political nobility which we had in Europe, in seventeenth and eighteenth century France, broke apart under the instinct of popular resentment-never on earth has there ever been heard a greater rejoicing, a noisier enthusiasm! It's true that in the midst of all this the most dreadful and most unexpected events took place: the old ideal itself stepped physically and with unheard-of splendour before the eyes and the conscience of humanity-and once again stronger, simpler, and more urgently than ever rang out, in opposition to the old lie, to the slogan of resentment about the privileged rights of the majority, in opposition to that will for a low condition, abasement, equality, for the decline and extinguishing of mankind-in opposition to all that there rang out a fearsome and delightful counter-slogan about the privileged rights of the few! As a last signpost to a different road, Napoleon appeared, the most singular and late-born man there ever was, and in him the problem of the inherently noble ideal was made flesh. We might well think about what sort of a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman . . .

Did that end it? Was that greatest of all opposition of ideals thus set ad acta [aside] for all time? Or was it merely postponed, postponed indefinitely? . . . Some day, after a much longer preparation, will an even more fearful blaze from the old fire not have to take place? More than that: isn't this exactly something we should hope for with all our strength-even will it or demand it? . . .

Anyone who, like my readers, begins to reflect on these points and to think further will have difficulty coming to a quick conclusion-reason enough for me to come to a conclusion myself, provided that it has been crystal clear for a long time what I want, precisely what I want with that dangerous slogan which is written on the body of my last book: "Beyond Good and Evil" . . . at least this does not mean "Beyond Good and Bad"

Note

I'm taking the opportunity provided to me by this essay publicly and formally to state a desire which I have expressed up to now only in occasional conversations with scholars, namely, that some philosophical faculty might set up a series of award-winning academic essays in order to serve the advancement of studies into the history of morality. Perhaps this book will serve to provide a forceful push in precisely such a direction. Bearing in mind a possibility of this sort, let me suggest the following question-it merits the attention of philologists and historians as much as of professional philosophical scholars:

What indications does the scientific study of language, especially etymological research, provide for the history of the development of moral concepts?

On the other hand, it is, of course, just as necessary to attract the participation of physiologists and doctors in this problem (of the value of all methods of evaluating up to now). That task might be left to the faculties of philosophers, after they have completely succeeded in converting the relationship between philosophy, physiology, and medicine, originally so aloof, so mistrusting, into the most friendly and fruitful exchange. In fact, all the tables of value, all the "you should's," which history or ethnology knows about, need, first and foremost, illumination and interpretation from physiology, rather than from psychology.

And all of them similarly await a critique from the point of view of medical science. The question "What is this or that table of values and 'morality' worth?" will be set under the different perspectives. For we cannot analyze the question "Value for what?" too finely. Something, for example, that has an apparent value with respect to the longest possible capacity for survival of a race (or for an increase in its power to adapt to a certain climate or for the preservation of the greatest number) has nothing like the same value, if the issue is one of developing a stronger type. The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the fewest are opposing viewpoints for values. We will leave it to the naivete of English biologists to take the first as the one of inherently higher value. All the sciences from now on have to advance the future work of the philosopher, understanding this task as solving the problem of value, determining the rank order of values.

Second Essay

Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters

To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises-surely that is the essence of the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn't that the real problem of human beings? The fact that this problem has largely been resolved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a vis interiae [a force of inertia], as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense.

We can ascribe to forgetfulness the fact what while we are digesting what we live through and experience and then absorb (we might call the process mental ingestion [Einverseeling]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the thousand-fold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung]). The doors and windows of consciousness are shut from time to time, so that it stays undisturbed from the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our functional organs keeps them working for and against one another-a small quiet place, a little tabula rasa [blank slate] of the consciousness, so that there will again be room for something new, above all, for the nobler functions and officials, for ruling, thinking ahead, determining what to do (our organism is arranged as an oligarchy)-that is, as I said, the use of active forgetfulness, like some porter at the door, a maintainer of psychic order, quiet, and etiquette. From that we can see at once how, if forgetfulness were not present, there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hoping, no pride, no present. The man in whom this repression apparatus is harmed and not working properly we can compare to a dyspeptic (and not just compare)-he is "finished" with nothing.

Now this necessarily forgetful animal in which forgetfulness is present as a force, as a form of strong health, has had an opposing capability bred into it, a memory, with the help of which, in certain cases, its forgetfulness will cease to function-that is, for those cases where promises are to be made. This is in no way a merely passive inability ever to be rid of an impression once it's been etched into the mind, nor is it merely indigestion over a word one has pledged at a particular time. No, it's an active wish not to be free of the matter, a continuing desire for what one willed at a particular time, a real memory of one's will, so that between the original "I will" or "I will do" and the actual discharge of the will, its real action, without thinking about it, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of the will can intervene, without breaking this long chain of the will.

But consider what that presupposes! In order to organize the future in this manner, human beings must have first learned to separate necessary events from chance events, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see distant events as if they were present, to anticipate them, to set goals and the means to reach them safely, to develop a capability for figures and calculations in general-and for that to occur, a human being must necessarily have first become something one could predict, something bound by regular rules, even in the way he imagined himself to himself, so that finally he is able to act like someone who makes promises-who makes himself into a pledge for the future!

Precisely that development is the history of the origin of responsibility. The task of breeding an animal with a right to make promises contains within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the more urgent prior task of making a human being necessarily uniform to some extent, one among many other like him, regular and consequently predictable. The immense task in what I have called the "morality of custom" (cf. Daybreak, p. 7, 13, 16), the essential work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his entire pre-historical work, derives its meaning, its grand justification, from the following point, no matter how much hardship, tyranny, monotony and idiocy it also manifested: with the help of the morality of custom and the social strait jacket, the human being was rendered truly predictable.

Now, let's position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree finally yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means. We find-as the ripest fruit on that tree-the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which has broken loose again from the morality of custom-the autonomous individual beyond morality (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive terms)-in short, the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled to make promises-and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved and given living embodiment in him: a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally.

This man who has become free, who really has the right to make promises, this master of free will, this sovereign-how can he not realize the superiority he enjoys over everyone who does not have the right to make a promise and make pledges on his own behalf, knowing how much trust, how much fear, and how much respect he creates (he is worthy of all three) and how, with this mastery over himself, he has necessarily been given in addition mastery over his circumstances, over nature, and over all creatures with a shorter and less reliable will?

The "free" man, the owner of an enduring unbreakable will, by possessing this, also acquires his own standard of value: he looks out from himself at others and confers respect or withholds it. And just as it will be necessary for him to honour those like him, the strong and dependable (who are entitled to make promises), in other words everyone who makes promises like a sovereign, seriously, rarely, and slowly, who is sparing with his trust, who honours another when he does trust, who gives his word as something reliable, because he knows he is strong enough to remain upright when opposed by misfortune, even when "opposed by fate," so it will be necessary for him to keep his foot ready to kick the scrawny unreliable men, who make promises without being entitled to, and hold his cane ready to punish the liar who breaks his word in the very moment it comes out of his mouth.

The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and destiny have become internalized into the deepest parts of him and grown instinctual, have now become a dominating instinct. What will he call it, this dominating instinct, given that he finds he needs a word for it? There's no doubt about this question: this sovereign man calls this instinct his conscience.

His conscience? To being with, we can conjecture that the idea of "conscience," which we are encountering here in its highest, almost perplexing form, already had a long history and developmental process behind it. To be entitled to pledge one's word, to do it with pride, and also to say "yes" to oneself-that right is a ripe fruit, as I have mentioned, but it is also a late fruit. For what a long stretch of time this fruit must have hung tart and sour on the tree! And for an even longer time it was impossible to see any such fruit. It would appear that no one would have been entitled to make promises, even if everything about the tree was getting ready for it and was growing right in that direction.

"How does one create a memory for the human animal? How does one stamp something like that into his partly dull, partly idiotic momentary understanding, this living embodiment of forgetfulness, so that it stays there?" This ancient problem, as you can imagine, was not resolved right away with tender answers and methods. Perhaps there is nothing more fearful and more terrible in the entire pre-history of human beings than the technique for developing his memory. "We burn something in so that it remains in the memory. Only something which never ceases to cause pain stays in the memory"-that is a leading principle of the most ancient (and unfortunately the most recent) psychology on earth.

We might even say that everywhere on earth nowadays where there is still solemnity, seriousness, mystery, gloomy colours in the lives of men and people, something of that terror is still at work, the fear with which in earlier times on earth people made promises, pledged their word, or praised something. The past, the longest, deepest, most severe past, breathes on us and surfaces in us when we become "solemn." When the human being considered it necessary to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, martyrs, and sacrifices-the most terrible sacrifices and pledges (among them the sacrifice of the first born), the most repulsive self-mutilations (for example castration), the cruellest forms of ritual in all the religious cults (and all religions are at bottom systems of cruelty)-all that originates in that instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful means of helping to develop the memory.

In a certain sense all asceticism belongs here: a couple of ideas need to be made indissoluble, omnipresent, unforgettable, "fixed," in order to hypnotize the entire nervous and intellectual system through these "fixed ideas"-and the ascetic procedures and forms of life are the means whereby these ideas are freed from jostling around with all the other ideas, in order to make them "unforgettable." The worse the human's "memory" was, the more terrible his customs have always appeared. The harshness of the laws of punishment provide a special standard for measuring how much trouble people went to in order to triumph over forgetfulness and to maintain the awareness of a few primitive demands of social living together for this slave of momentary feelings and desires.

We Germans certainly do not think of ourselves as a particularly cruel and hard-hearted people, even less as particularly careless people who live only in the present. But have a look at our old penal code in order to understand how much trouble it took on this earth to breed a "People of Thinkers" (by that I mean the peoples of Europe, among whom today we still find a maximum of trust, seriousness, tastelessness, and practicality, and who with these characteristics have a right to breed all sorts of European mandarins). These Germans have used terrible means to make themselves a memory in order to attain mastery over their vulgar and brutally crude basic instincts. Think of the old German punishments, for example, stoning (even the legend lets the mill stone fall on the head of the guilty person), breaking on the wheel (the unique invention and specialty of the German genius in the area of punishment!), impaling on a stake, ripping people apart or stamping them to death with horses ("quartering"), boiling the criminal in oil or wine (still done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the well-loved practice of flaying ("cutting flesh off in strips"), carving flesh out of the chest, along with, of course, covering the offender with honey and leaving him to the flies in the burning sun.

With the help of such images and procedures people finally retained five or six "I will not's" in their memory, and so far as these precepts were concerned they gave their word in order to live with the advantages of society-and that was that! With the assistance of this sort of memory people finally came to "reason"! Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over emotions, the whole gloomy business called reflection, all these privileges and ceremonies of human beings-how expensive they were! How much blood and horror is the basis for all "good things."

But then how did that other "gloomy business," the consciousness of guilt, the whole "bad conscience" come into the world? With this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I'll say it once more-or perhaps I haven't said it at all yet-they are useless. With their own purely "modern" experience extending only through five periods, with no knowledge of or any desire to know the past, and even less historical insight, a "second perspective"-something so necessary at this point-they nonetheless pursue the history of morality. That must inevitably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth.

Have these genealogists of morality up to this point allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, the major moral principle "guilt" [Schuld] derives its origin from the very materialistic idea "debt" [Schulden] or that punishment developed entirely as repayment, without reference to any assumption about the freedom or lack of freedom of the will-and did so to the point where it first required a high degree of human development [Vermenschlichung] so that the animal "man" began to make those much more primitive distinctions between "intentional," "negligent," "accidental," "of sound mind," and their opposites and bring them to bear when handing out punishment? That unavoidable idea, nowadays so trite and apparently natural, which has really had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of justice in general came into existence on earth-"The criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise"-this idea, in fact, is an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making.

Anyone who moves this idea back to the very beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of primitive humanity. For the most extensive period of human history punishment was not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, nor was it assumed that only the guilty party should be punished. It was much more the case, as it still is now when parents punish their children, of anger over some harm which people have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator. But this anger was restrained and modified through the idea that every injury had some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that was through the pain of the perpetrator.

Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as ancient as the idea of "someone subject to law" and which, in itself, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.

It's true that recalling this contractual relationship arouses, as we might expect from what I have observed above, all sorts of suspicion of and opposition to primitive humanity which established or allowed it. It's precisely at this point that people make promises. Here the pertinent issue is that the person who makes a promise has to have a memory created for him, so that precisely at this point, we can surmise, there exists a site for what is hard, cruel, and painful. In order to inspire trust in his promise to pay back, in order to give his promise a guarantee of its seriousness and sanctity, in order to impress on his own conscience the idea of paying back as a duty, an obligation, the debtor, by virtue of the contract, pledges to the creditor, in the event that he does not pay, something that he still "owns," something over which he still exercises 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, or finally his peace in the grave, as was the case in Egypt, where the dead body of the debtor even in the grave found no peace from the creditor-and it's certain that with the Egyptians such peace was particularly important). That means that the creditor could inflict all kinds of ignominy and torture on the body of the debtor-for instance, slicing off the body as much as seemed appropriate for the size of the debt. And this point of view early on and everywhere gave rise to precise, horrific estimates going into finer and finer details, legally established estimates, about individual limbs and body parts. I consider it already a step forward, as evidence of a freer conception of the law, something which calculates more grandly, something more Roman, when Rome's Twelve Tables of Laws decreed it was all the same, no matter how much or how little the creditor cut off in such cases: "si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto" [let it not be thought a crime if they cut off more or less].

Let's clarify the logic of this whole method of compensation-it is weird enough. The equivalency is given in this way: instead of an advantage making up directly for the harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land, possessions of some sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation-the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in "de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire" [doing wrong for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the "punishment" of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters. Finally he himself for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone "below himself," as someone he is entitled to mistreat-or at least, in the event that the real force of punishment, of inflicting punishment, has already been transferred to the "authorities," the feeling of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consist of a permission for and right to cruelty.

In this area, that is, in the laws of obligation, the world of moral concepts "guilt," "conscience," and "sanctity of obligations" was conceived. Its beginnings, just like the beginnings of everything great on earth, were watered thoroughly and for a long time with blood. And can we not add that this world deep down has never again been completely free of a certain smell of blood and torture-(not even with old Kant whose categorical imperative stinks of cruelty . . . ). In addition, here the weird knot linking the ideas of "guilt and suffering," which perhaps has become impossible to undo, was first knit together.

Let me pose the question once more: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for "debts"? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury and for the distress caused by the injury, got an offsetting pleasure-making someone suffer-a real feast, something that, as I've said, was valued all the more, the greater the difference between him and the rank and social position of the creditor. I have been speculating here, for it's difficult to see such subterranean things from the surface, quite apart from the fact that it's an embarrassing subject.

Anyone who crudely throws into the middle of all this the idea of "revenge" has merely buried and dimmed his insights rather than illuminated them (revenge itself takes us back to the very same problem "How can making someone suffer give us a feeling of satisfaction?"). It seems to me that the delicacy and even more the hypocrisy of tame house pets (I mean modern man, I mean us) resist a really powerful understanding of just how much cruelty contributes to the great celebratory joy of primitive humanity, as an ingredient mixed into almost all their enjoyments and, from another perspective, how naive and innocent their need for cruelty appears, how they basically accept "disinterested malice" (or to use Spinoza's words, the sympathia malevolens [malevolent sympathy]) as a normal human characteristic, and hence as something to which their conscience says a heartfelt Yes!

A more deeply penetrating eye might still notice, even today, enough of this most ancient and most basic celebratory human joy. In Beyond Good and Evil, p. 117 ff. (even earlier in Daybreak, p. 17, 68, 102), I pointed a cautious finger at the constantly growing spiritualization and "deification" of cruelty, which runs through the entire history of higher culture (and, in a significant sense, even constitutes that culture). In any case, it's not so long ago that people wouldn't think of an aristocratic wedding and folk festival in a grand style without executions, tortures, or something like an auto-da-fe [burning at the stake], and no noble household lacked creatures on whom people could vent their malice and cruel taunts without a second thought (remember Don Quixote at the court of the duchess). Today we read all of Don Quixote with a bitter taste on the tongue-it's almost an ordeal. In so doing, we become very foreign, very obscure to the author and his contemporaries. They read it with a fully clear conscience as the most cheerful of books. They almost died laughing at it.

Watching suffering makes people feel good, making someone suffer makes them feel even better-that is a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle, which, by the way, even the apes might agree with. For people say that, in thinking up bizarre cruelties, the apes already anticipate a great many human actions and, as it were, act them out. Without cruelty there is no celebration: that's what the oldest and longest era of human history teaches us-and with punishment, too, there is so much celebration!-

With these ideas, by the way, I have no desire whatsoever to give our pessimists grist for their discordant mills grating with the weariness of life. On the contrary, I want to state very clearly that in that period when human beings had not yet become ashamed of their cruelty, life on earth was happier than it is now, now that we have our pessimists. The darkening of heaven over men's heads always increased quickly in proportion to the growth of human beings' shame at human beings. The tired pessimistic look, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy denial stemming from disgust with life-these are not the signs of the wickedest eras in the history of human beings. It's more the case that they first come to light as the swamp plants they are when the swamp to which they belong is there-I mean the sickly mollycoddling and moralizing, thanks to which the animal "man" finally learns to feel shame about all his instincts.

On his way to becoming an "angel" (not to use a harsher word here), man developed an upset stomach and a furry tongue which made him not only fight against the joy and innocence of the animal but even lose his taste for life, so that now and then he stands there, holds his nose, and with Pope Innocent III disapproves of himself and makes a catalogue of his nastiness ("conceived in filth, disgustingly nourished in his mother's body, developed out of evil material stuff, stinking horribly, discharging spit, urine, and excrement"). Now, when suffering always has to march out as the first argument against existence, as its most serious question mark, it's good for us to remember the times when people saw things the other way around, because they couldn't do without making people suffer and saw a first-class magic in it, a really tempting enticement for living.

Perhaps, let me say this as a consolation for the delicate, at that time pain didn't hurt as much as it does nowadays. At least that could be the conclusion of a doctor who had treated a Negro (taking the latter as a representative of pre-historical man) for a bad case of inner inflammation, which drives the European with the best constitution to despair but which doesn't have the same effect on the Negro. (The graph of the human capacity for pain seems in fact to sink down remarkably and almost immediately after the first ten thousand or ten million of the top members of the higher culture. And I personally have no doubt that, in comparison with one painful night of a single hysterical well-educated female, the total suffering of all animals which up to now have been interrogated by the knife of science is really insignificant).

Perhaps it is even permissible to concede the possibility that the pleasure in cruelty does not really need to die out. Since today pain does more harm, the relevant pleasure needed only to be sublimated and made more subtle-in other words, it had to appear translated into the imaginative and spiritual and embellished with nothing but names so unobjectionable that they arouse no suspicion in even the most delicate hypocritical conscience ("tragic pity" is one such name; another is "les nostalgies de la croix" [nostalgia for the cross]). What really enrages people about suffering is not the suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering. But neither for the Christian, who sees in suffering an entire secret machinery for salvation, nor for the naive men of older times, who understood how to interpret all suffering in relation to the spectator or to the person inflicting the suffering, was there generally any such meaningless suffering.

In order for the hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering to be removed from the world and for people to be able to deny it honestly, they were then almost compelled to invent gods and intermediate beings at all levels, high and low-briefly put, something that also roamed in hidden places, that also looked into the darkness, and that would not readily permit an interesting painful spectacle to escape its attention. Hence, with the help of such inventions life then understood and has always understood how to justify itself by a trick, how to justify its "evil." Nowadays perhaps it requires other helpful inventions (for example, life as riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil which is uplifting in the eyes of God is justified": that's how the pre-historical logic of feeling rang out-and was that really confined to pre-history? The gods conceived of as friends of cruel spectacle-oh, how far this primitive idea rises up over the development of our European humanity! We might well seek advice from Calvin and Luther on this point.

At any rate it is certain that even the Greeks knew of no more acceptable snack to offer their gods for their happiness that the joys of cruelty. With what sort of expression, do you think, did Homer allow his gods to look down on the fate of men? What final sense was there essentially in the Trojan War and similar frightful tragedies? We cannot entertain the slightest doubts about this: they were intended as celebrations for the gods-and, to the extent that the poet is in these matters more "godlike" than other men, as festivals for the poets as well. Later the Greek moral philosophers in the same way imagined the eyes of god looking down on the moral struggles, on heroism and the self-mutilation of the virtuous: the "Hercules of duty" was on stage, and he knew he was there. Without someone watching, virtue for this race of actors was something entirely inconceivable.

Surely that daring and fateful philosophical invention, first made for Europe at that time, the "free will," the absolutely spontaneous nature of human beings in matters of good and evil, was created above all to justify the idea that the interest of gods in men and in human virtue could never run out? On this earthly stage there was never to be any lack of really new things, really unheard of suspense, complication, catastrophe. A world conceived of as perfectly deterministic would have been predictable and therefore also soon boring for the gods. That was reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to ascribe such a deterministic world to their gods! All of ancient humanity is full of sensitive consideration for "the spectator," for a truly public, truly visible world, which did not know how to imagine happiness without dramatic performances and festivals. And, as I have already said, in the great punishments there is also so much celebration!

To resume the path of our enquiry, the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation has, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is and has been-in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person encountered another person and measured himself against him. We have not yet found a civilization at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible. To set prices, measure values, think up equivalencies, to exchange things-that preoccupied man's very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it's what thinking is.

The very oldest form of astuteness was bred here-here, too, we can assume are the first beginnings of human pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word "man" [Mensch] (manas) continues to express directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the "calculating animal as such." Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organization and grouping. It is much rather the case that out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal right the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, compensation were first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relationships with similar social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating. The eye was now at any rate adjusted to this perspective, and with that awkward consistency characteristic of the thinking in ancient human beings, hard to get started but then inexorably moving forward in the same direction, people soon reached the great generalization "Everything has its price, everything can be paid off"-the oldest and most naive moral principle of justice, the beginning of all "good nature," all "fairness," all "good will," all "objectivity" on earth. Justice at this first stage is good will among those approximately equal in power to come to terms with each other, to "understand" each other again by compensation-and in relation to those less powerful, to compel them to arrive at some settlement among themselves.

Still measuring by the standard of pre-history (a pre-history which, by the way, is present at all times or is capable of returning), the community also stands in relation to its members in that important basic relationship of the creditor to his debtors. People live in a community. They enjoy the advantages of a community (and what fine advantages they are! Nowadays we sometimes underestimate them)-they live protected, cared for, in peace and trust, without worries concerning certain injuries and enmities from which the man outside the community, the "man without peace," is excluded-a German understands what "misery" [Elend] or elend [other country] originally meant-and how people pledge themselves to and enter into obligations with the community bearing in mind precisely these injuries and enmities.

What will happen with an exception to this case? The community, the defrauded creditor, will see that it gets paid as well as it can-on that people can rely. The issue here is least of all the immediate damage which the offender has caused. Setting this to one side, the lawbreaker [Verbrecher] is above all a "breaker" [Brecher]-a breaker of contracts and a breaker of his word against the totality, with respect to all the good features and advantages of the communal life in which, up to that point, he has had a share. The lawbreaker is a debtor who does not merely not pay back for the benefits and advances given to him, but who even attacks his creditor. So from this point on not only does he lose, as is reasonable, all these good things and benefits, but he is also more pertinently reminded what these good things are all about.

The anger of the injured creditor, the community, gives him back the wild condition, as free as a bird, from which he was earlier protected. It pushes him away from it, and now every form of hostility can vent itself on him. At this stage of cultural behaviour "punishment" is simply the copy, the mimus, of the normal conduct towards the hated, disarmed enemy who has been thrown down, who has lost not only all rights and protection but also all mercy-hence it is a case of the rights of war and the victory celebration of vae victis [woe to the conquered] in all its ruthlessness and cruelty, which accounts for the fact that war itself (including the warlike cult of sacrifice) has given us all the ways in which punishment has appeared in history.

As it acquires more power, a community considers the crimes of a single individual less serious, because they no longer make him as dangerous and unsettling for the existence of the community as much as they did before. The wrong doer is no longer "left without peace" and thrown out, and the common anger can no longer vent itself on him without restraint to the same extent it did before. It is rather the case that the wrong doer from now on is carefully protected by the community against this anger, particularly from that of the injured person, and is taken into protective custody. The compromise with the anger of those most immediately affected by the wrong doing, and thus the effort to localize the case and to avert a wider or even a general participation and unrest, attempts to find equivalents and to settle the whole business (the compositio), above all the desire, appearing with ever-increasing clarity, to consider every crime as, in some sense or other, capable of being paid off, and thus, at least to some extent, to separate the criminal and his crime from each other-those are the characteristics stamped more and more clearly on the further development of criminal law.

If the power and the self-confidence of a community keeps growing, the criminal law grows constantly milder. Every weakening and profound jeopardizing of the community brings the harsher forms of criminal law to light once more. The "creditor" always became proportionally more human as he became richer. Finally the amount of his wealth itself establishes how much damage he can sustain without suffering from it. It would not be impossible to imagine a society with a consciousness of its own power which allowed itself the most privileged luxury which it can have-letting its criminals go free without punishment. "Why should I really bother about my parasites," it would then say. "May they live and prosper-for that I am still sufficiently strong!" . . . Justice, which started by stating "Everything is capable of being paid for, everything must be paid off" ends at that point, by covering its eyes and letting the person incapable of payment go free-it ends, as every good thing on earth ends, by doing away with itself. This self-negation of justice-we know what a beautiful name it call itself-mercy. It goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or even better, his movement beyond the law.

Now a critical word about a recently published attempt to find the origin of justice in quite a different place-that is, in resentment. But first let me speak a word in the ear of the psychologists, provided that they have any desire to study resentment itself up close for once: this plant grows most beautifully nowadays among anarchists and anti-Semites-in addition, it blooms, as it always has, in hidden places, like the violet, although it has a different fragrance. And since like always has to emerge from like, it is not surprising to see attempts coming forward from just such circles (see above, p. 30 [First Essay]) to sanctify revenge under the name of justice, as if justice were basically simply a further development of a feeling of being injured [Verletzt-seins], and to bring belated respect to emotional reactions generally, all of them, using the idea of revenge.

With this last point I personally take the least offence. It even seems to me a service, so far as the entire biological problem is concerned (in connection with which the worth of these emotions has been underestimated up to now). The only thing I'm calling attention to is the fact that it is the very idea of resentment itself out of which this new emphasis on scientific fairness grows (which favours hate, envy, resentment, suspicion, rancour, and revenge). This "scientific fairness," that is, ceases immediately and gives way to tones of mortal enmity and prejudice as soon as it deals with another group of emotions which, it strikes me, have a much higher biological worth than those reactive ones and which therefore have earned the right to be scientifically assessed and given a high value-namely, the truly active emotions, like desire for mastery, acquisitiveness, and so on (E. Duhring, The Value of Life: A Course in Philosophy, the whole book really). So much against this tendency in general.

But in connection with Duhring's single principle that we must seek the homeland of justice in the land of the reactive feeling, we must, for love of the truth, rudely turn this around by setting out a different principle: the last territory to be conquered by the spirit of justice is the land of the reactive emotions! If it is truly the case that the just man remains just even towards someone who has injured him (and not just cold, moderate, strange, indifferent: being just is always a positive attitude), if under the sudden attack of personal injury, ridicule, and suspicion, the gaze of the lofty, clear, deep, and benevolent objectivity of the just and judging eye does not grow dark, well, that's a piece of perfection and the highest mastery on earth, even something that it would be wise for people not to expect and certainly not to believe in too easily.

It's certainly true that, on average, even among the most just people even a small dose of hostility, malice, and insinuation is enough to make them see red and chase fairness out of their eyes. The active, aggressive, over-reaching human being is always placed a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive. For him it is not even necessary in the slightest to estimate an object falsely and with bias, the way the reactive man does and must do. Thus, as a matter of fact, at all times the aggressive human being-the stronger, braver, more noble man-has always had on his side a better conscience as well as a more independent eye. And by contrast, we can already guess who generally has the invention of "bad conscience" on his conscience-the man of resentment!

Finally, let's look around in history: up to now in what area has the whole implementation of law in general as well as the essential need for law been at home? Could it be in the area of the reactive human beings? That is entirely wrong. It is much more the case that it's been at home with the active, strong, spontaneous, and aggressive men. Historically conside