1887 2026
This is an AI modernization of On the Genealogy of Morals into contemporary English. The original is available from Nietzsche Source (eKGWB). Also available as an epub.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote On the Genealogy of Morals in about three weeks in July 1887, at Sils-Maria in the Swiss Alps, and had it printed in Leipzig that November at his own expense. He was forty-two, retired from his professorship at Basel for eight years, half-blind and often ill, and almost unread. The year before, he had published Beyond Good and Evil, and almost nobody had understood it. The Genealogy was meant to say the same things more plainly. Its subtitle is "A Polemic": it is written to start a fight.
The book is a preface and three essays. The first asks where our words "good" and "evil" came from, and answers that there were once two moralities: the nobles' "good and bad," which meant strong and weak, and a morality invented by the people they ruled, who turned the nobles' good into "evil" and called their own weakness virtue. Nietzsche calls this the slave revolt in morality. The second essay traces guilt and conscience back to debts and punishment, and argues that the bad conscience is cruelty turned inward. The third asks why priests, philosophers, artists and saints have worshipped self-denial, and answers that suffering people would rather suffer for a reason than for none.
A few of his terms need a word first. Ressentiment is French, and he uses the French: not ordinary resentment but a lasting, powerless grudge that has to take its revenge in imagination. The "blond beast" of the first essay is the lion, the beast of prey, which he says lies inside every noble race, Roman, Arab, Japanese and Germanic alike. The Nazis later quoted the phrase as racial praise of Germans. Nietzsche himself mocks German nationalists throughout, and calls antisemites liars and speculators. His sister Elisabeth, who married one and controlled his papers after his collapse in 1889, did much to spread the misreading.
He also makes claims a modern reader should meet as his, not ours. In the second essay he asserts that Africans feel pain less than Europeans do, a common belief of his century with no basis; it is translated as he wrote it. His arguments about Jews, priests, women and the weak are given at full strength, because the book cannot be judged otherwise.
This edition is translated from Nietzsche's German, with Horace B. Samuel's 1913 English version consulted for sense only. His dashes, italics, rhetorical questions and the imagined reader he keeps interrupting himself to answer are all kept. Each essay keeps his own Roman section numbers.
Essay One: "Good and Evil," "Good and Bad"
Essay Two: "Guilt," "Bad Conscience," and the Like
Essay Three: What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?
Added to my most recently published book, "Beyond Good and Evil," as a supplement and clarification.
We are unknown to ourselves, we seekers of knowledge — we ourselves to ourselves: and there is a good reason for it. We have never gone looking for ourselves — so how could it ever happen that one day we found ourselves? It has rightly been said: "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; and our treasure is wherever the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always on our way there, born winged creatures and honey-gatherers of the spirit, and at heart we really care about only one thing — "bringing something home." As for the rest of life, the so-called "experiences" — which of us even has the seriousness for them? Or the time? When it comes to such things we were never, I am afraid, really "all there": our heart simply is not in it — and not even our ear! Think of a man lost in some godlike distraction, sunk deep inside himself, who has just had the bell boom its twelve strokes of noon into his ear with all its might, and who wakes up all at once and asks himself, "what was that striking, just now?" That is how we are: every so often we rub our ears afterward and ask, quite astonished, quite embarrassed, "what was it we actually just lived through? more than that: who are we, actually?" and we count back, afterward, as I said, over all twelve trembling strokes of the bell of our experience, our life, our being — ah! and we lose count as we do it… We necessarily remain strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we are bound to mistake ourselves for someone else; for us the saying holds for all eternity, "Each of us is farthest from himself" — where we ourselves are concerned, we are no "seekers of knowledge"…
— My thoughts on the origin of our moral prejudices — for that is what this polemic is about — first found expression, sparingly and provisionally, in that collection of aphorisms titled "Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits." I began writing it in Sorrento, during a winter that let me stop the way a wanderer stops and survey the wide and dangerous country my spirit had traveled through until then. That was the winter of 1876-77; the thoughts themselves are older. In the main they were already the same thoughts I take up again in the present essays: — let us hope the long interval has done them good, that they have grown riper, brighter, stronger, more complete! But the fact that I still hold to them today, that in the meantime they have held ever more firmly to one another, have in fact grown into and through one another — that strengthens my glad confidence that from the very beginning they did not arise in me singly, at random, here and there, but from one common root: from a fundamental will to knowledge, commanding from deep down, speaking ever more definitely, demanding something ever more definite. For that is the only fitting way, with a philosopher. We have no right to be single in anything: we may neither go wrong singly nor hit on the truth singly. No: with the same necessity by which a tree bears its fruit, our thoughts grow out of us, our values, our Yeses and Noes and Ifs and Whethers — all of them related, all of them bound up with one another, and witnesses of one will, one health, one soil, one sun. — Whether they are to your taste, these fruits of ours? — But what is that to the trees! What is that to us, to us philosophers!…
There is a scruple of my own that I admit reluctantly — it concerns morality, everything that has ever been celebrated on earth as morality — a scruple that showed up in my life so early, so unasked-for, so unstoppably, so at odds with my surroundings, my age, the examples around me and where I came from, that I would almost be entitled to call it my "a priori." Because of it, my curiosity and my suspicion alike were bound to stop, early on, at the question of what origin our good and evil actually have. In fact, the problem of the origin of evil was already on my trail when I was a boy of thirteen: at an age when one has "half children's games, half God in the heart," I devoted to it my first literary children's game, my first exercise in philosophical writing — and as for my "solution" to the problem back then, well, I gave God the honor, as is only fair, and made him the father of evil. Was that what my "a priori" wanted of me — just that? That new, immoral, or at least immoralist "a priori," and the oh-so-anti-Kantian, oh-so-puzzling "categorical imperative" that speaks out of it, to which I have since lent more and more of my ear — and not only my ear?… Luckily I learned early to separate the theological prejudice from the moral one, and I stopped looking for the origin of evil behind the world. A little historical and philological training, together with an inborn choosiness about psychological questions in general, soon turned my problem into a different one: under what conditions did man invent those value judgments, good and evil? And what value do they themselves have? Have they so far hindered or advanced human flourishing? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of life degenerating? Or the reverse — do they reveal the fullness, the strength, the will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future? — To this I found and ventured a good many answers of my own; I distinguished ages, peoples, grades of rank among individuals; I narrowed my problem down; the answers turned into new questions, investigations, guesses, probabilities: until at last I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, a whole quiet, growing, flowering world, secret gardens so to speak, which no one was allowed to suspect… Oh how happy we are, we seekers of knowledge, provided only that we know how to keep quiet long enough!…
What first pushed me to make some of my hypotheses about the origin of morality public was a clear, clean, clever — and precocious — little book, in which an upside-down and perverse kind of genealogical hypothesis, the genuinely English kind, confronted me plainly for the first time; and it drew me — with the pull that everything opposite, everything antipodal, has. The title of the little book was "The Origin of the Moral Sensations"; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year it appeared, 1877. Perhaps I have never read anything to which I said No, to myself, so thoroughly, sentence by sentence and conclusion by conclusion, as I did to this book: yet entirely without annoyance or impatience. In the work I named above, which I was writing at the time, I referred to the propositions of that book in season and out of season — not by refuting them (what do I have to do with refutations!) but, as suits a positive spirit, by putting the more probable in place of the improbable, and now and then one error in place of another. That was when, as I said, I first brought into the daylight those hypotheses about origins to which these essays are devoted — clumsily, as I would be the last to hide from myself, still unfree, still without a language of my own for these things of my own, and with plenty of backsliding and wavering. For the details, compare what I say in "Human, All Too Human," p. 51, about the double prehistory of good and evil (namely, out of the sphere of the noble and out of that of the slaves); likewise pp. 119ff. on the value and origin of ascetic morality; likewise pp. 78, 82, and vol. II, p. 35, on "the morality of custom" — that long age before history when being moral meant nothing more than obeying custom — a far older and more original kind of morality, a whole heaven away from the altruistic way of valuing (in which Dr. Rée, like all the English genealogists of morality, sees the moral way of valuing as such); likewise p. 74; "The Wanderer and His Shadow," p. 29; "Daybreak," p. 99, on the origin of justice as a settlement between parties of roughly equal power (balance as the precondition of all contracts, and so of all law); likewise, on the origin of punishment, "The Wanderer and His Shadow," pp. 25, 34, for which the purpose of scaring people off is neither essential nor original (as Dr. Rée thinks: — rather, it was read into punishment only later, under particular circumstances, and always as something on the side, something added on).
At bottom, what I really cared about just then was something far more important than my own or anyone else's hypothesizing about the origin of morality (or, more precisely: the hypothesizing mattered only for the sake of one purpose, to which it is one means among many). What was at stake for me was the value of morality — and on that I had to have it out, almost alone, with my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that book, the passion and the hidden contradiction of that book, is addressed, as if he were still present (— for that book, too, was a "polemic"). What was at stake, in particular, was the value of the "unegoistic," the instincts of pity, self-denial, self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer of all people had gilded, made gods of, and packed off to the next world for so long that in the end they were all that was left to him as "values in themselves," and on their basis he said No to life, and to himself as well. But it was precisely against these instincts that an ever more fundamental suspicion spoke out of me, a skepticism that dug ever deeper! Precisely here I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime lure and seduction — seduction to where? into nothingness? — precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standstill, the weariness that looks back, the will turning against life, the last sickness announcing itself tenderly and mournfully: I understood the morality of pity, spreading ever wider, seizing even the philosophers and making them sick, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture, which has itself become uncanny; as its detour toward a new Buddhism? toward a Buddhism for Europeans? toward — nihilism?… This modern preference of the philosophers for pity, this overrating of it, is in fact something new: until now the philosophers had agreed precisely on the worthlessness of pity. I need only name Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant, four spirits as different from one another as could be, but one in one thing: in their low opinion of pity. —
This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity (— I am an opponent of the shameful modern softening of feeling —) looks at first like something isolated, a question mark standing by itself; but whoever once gets stuck here, once learns to ask questions here, will have the experience I had: — an immense new view opens up before him, a possibility grips him like dizziness, every kind of mistrust, suspicion and fear leaps out, the belief in morality, in all morality, totters — and at last a new demand makes itself heard. Let us say it out loud, this new demand: we need a critique of moral values; the value of these values is itself to be called into question, for once — and for that we need to know the conditions and circumstances out of which they grew, under which they developed and shifted (morality as a result, as a symptom, as a mask, as hypocrisy, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as a cause, as a remedy, as a stimulant, as a brake, as a poison), a knowledge of a kind that has never existed until now, nor even been wanted. People took the value of these "values" as given, as a fact, as beyond all questioning; until now no one has had the faintest doubt or hesitation about ranking "the good man" higher in value than "the evil man," higher in the sense of advancing, benefiting, and promoting the flourishing of man in general (the future of man included). What if the reverse were the truth? What if the "good man" too were a symptom of decline, and likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present, say, were living at the expense of the future? More comfortably, perhaps, with less risk, but also on a smaller scale, lower?… So that morality itself would be to blame if the highest power and splendor possible for the human type were never reached? So that morality itself would be the danger of dangers?…
Enough: once this view had opened up to me, I myself had reasons to look around for learned, bold and hardworking companions (I am still doing it today). The task is to travel through the immense, distant, and so well hidden country of morality — the morality that has really existed, really been lived — with nothing but new questions and, so to speak, with new eyes: and does that not amount almost to discovering this country for the first time?… If in this connection I also thought of Dr. Rée, among others, it was because I had no doubt at all that the very nature of his questions would push him toward a more correct method for reaching answers. Was I deceived in that? In any case my wish was to give an eye so sharp and so detached a better direction, the direction toward the real history of morality, and to warn him in good time against that English way of hypothesizing into the blue. For it is obvious which color must matter a hundred times more to a genealogist of morality than blue of all things: namely the gray, I mean what is documented, what can really be established, what has really been there — in short, the whole long hieroglyphic script, so hard to decipher, of humanity's moral past! — That was unknown to Dr. Rée; but he had read Darwin: — and so, in his hypotheses, in a way that is at least entertaining, the Darwinian beast and the ultra-modern, modest moral weakling who "no longer bites" politely shake hands, the latter with a look of a certain good-natured, refined indolence on his face, with even a grain of pessimism, of weariness, mixed in: as if it were really not worth the trouble to take all these things — the problems of morality — so seriously. To me, on the contrary, there seem to be no things at all that would better reward being taken seriously; and part of that reward, for example, is that one day, perhaps, we are allowed to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness or, to say it in my language, the gay science — is a reward: a reward for a long, brave, hardworking and underground seriousness, which admittedly is not for everyone. But on the day we say with a full heart, "forward! our old morality too belongs in the comedy!" we will have discovered a new twist and a new possibility for the Dionysian drama of "the fate of the soul" —: and he will know how to make use of it, you can bet on that, he, the great old eternal comic poet of our existence!…
— If this book is unintelligible to anyone and hard on the ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine. It is clear enough, assuming what I do assume: that you have first read my earlier writings and spared no pains over them — for they are indeed not easy to get into. As for my "Zarathustra," for instance, I count no one as knowing it who has not, at some point, been deeply wounded by every one of its words, and at some point deeply delighted by them: only then may he enjoy the privilege of sharing, with reverence, in the halcyon calm out of which that work was born — its sunny brightness, its distance, its breadth and certainty. In other cases the difficulty lies in the aphoristic form: the trouble is that today people do not take this form seriously enough. An aphorism, honestly minted and cast, has not been "deciphered" just because it has been read; rather, that is where its interpretation has to begin, and for that an art of interpretation is needed. In the third essay of this book I have offered a model of what I call "interpretation" in such a case: — an aphorism stands at the head of that essay, and the essay itself is its commentary. Admittedly, to practice reading as an art in this way, one thing above all is needed, something that today has been thoroughly unlearned — which is why my writings will take a while yet to become "readable" — something for which one must be almost a cow, and at any rate not a "modern man": chewing the cud…
Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine, in July 1887.
— These English psychologists, whom we also have to thank for the only attempts made so far to get anywhere near a history of how morality came to be — they set us no small riddle in their own persons; in fact, I have to confess that, as riddles made flesh, they have one essential advantage over their books — they themselves are interesting! These English psychologists — what do they actually want? Whether they mean to or not, you always find them at the same job: dragging the shameful part of our inner world into the foreground and looking for what really drives us, what steers us, what decides our development, in precisely the place where man's intellectual pride would wish least of all to find it (in the inertia of habit, for example, or in forgetfulness, or in some blind and accidental tangle and machinery of ideas, or in anything purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid) — what is it that keeps driving these psychologists in exactly this direction? Is it a secret, spiteful, mean instinct for belittling man, one that perhaps does not even admit itself? Or is it a kind of pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disappointed idealists who have turned gloomy, poisonous and green? Or a small underground hostility and grudge against Christianity (and Plato), which may never even have crossed the threshold of consciousness? Or, worse, a lustful taste for whatever is strange, painfully paradoxical, questionable and absurd about existence? Or finally — a bit of everything: a little meanness, a little gloom, a little anti-Christianity, a little itch and craving for pepper?… But I am told that they are simply old, cold, boring frogs, crawling and hopping around men and into men as though they were right in their element there, namely in a swamp. I hear this reluctantly; more than that, I do not believe it; and if one may wish where one cannot know, then I wish with all my heart that the reverse were true of them — that these researchers, these microscopists of the soul, were at bottom brave, generous and proud animals, who know how to keep their hearts and their pains in check and have trained themselves to sacrifice everything desirable to the truth, to every truth, even the plain, harsh, ugly, repugnant, unchristian, immoral truth… For there are such truths. —
All honor, then, to the good spirits that may hold sway in these historians of morality! But it is unfortunately certain that they lack the historical spirit itself, that they have been left in the lurch by precisely all the good spirits of history! They all think, as is the old habit of philosophers, in an essentially unhistorical way; there is no doubt about that. The bungling of their genealogy of morality shows up right at the start, where the task is to work out where the concept and the judgment "good" come from. "Originally" — so they decree — "unegoistic actions were praised and called good by those to whom they were done, that is, those to whom they were useful; later this origin of the praise was forgotten, and unegoistic actions, simply because they were habitually praised as good, came to be felt as good as well — as if they were something good in themselves." You can see at once: this first derivation already contains all the typical features of the English psychologists' idiosyncrasy — we have "utility," "forgetting," "habit" and finally "error," all of it as the foundation of a valuation in which the higher man has until now taken pride, as in a kind of privilege of man as such. This pride is meant to be humbled, this valuation devalued: has that been achieved?… Now, first of all, it is plain to me that this theory looks for the real birthplace of the concept "good," and locates it, in the wrong place: the judgment "good" does not come from those to whom "goodness" is shown! On the contrary, it was "the good" themselves — that is, the noble, the powerful, the higher-placed and the high-minded — who felt and ranked themselves and their doings as good, that is, as of the first rank, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common and mob-like. It was out of this pathos of distance — the lasting feeling of height and difference that the noble have toward those below them — that they first took the right to create values and to coin the names of values: what did utility matter to them! The standpoint of utility is as foreign and ill-suited as anything could be to such a hot outpouring of the highest value judgments, the ones that establish rank and set rank apart: here feeling has arrived at precisely the opposite of that low temperature which every calculating prudence, every reckoning of utility, presupposes — and not for one occasion, not for one exceptional hour, but for good. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I said, the lasting and dominant overall feeling, the basic feeling, of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to a "below" — that is the origin of the opposition "good" and "bad." (The masters' right to give names goes so far that we should allow ourselves to see the origin of language itself as an expression of the rulers' power: they say "this is such and such," they seal every thing and every event with a sound and thereby, as it were, take possession of it.) It follows from this origin that the word "good" is from the very start not necessarily tied to "unegoistic" actions at all — as the superstition of those genealogists of morality would have it. On the contrary, it is only with a decline of aristocratic value judgments that this whole opposition "egoistic" and "unegoistic" forces itself more and more on the human conscience — it is, to use my own language, the herd instinct that finally finds its voice (and its words) in that opposition. And even then it takes a long time before this instinct becomes master to such a degree that moral valuation actually gets caught and stuck on that opposition (as is the case in present-day Europe, for example: today the prejudice that takes "moral," "unegoistic," "disinterested" as concepts of equal value already rules with the force of a "fixed idea" and a sickness of the head).
Second, though: quite apart from the fact that this hypothesis about the origin of the value judgment "good" is historically untenable, it suffers in itself from a psychological absurdity. The usefulness of the unegoistic action is supposed to be the origin of the praise it gets, and this origin is supposed to have been forgotten: — how is such forgetting even possible? Did the usefulness of such actions stop at some point, perhaps? The opposite is the case: this usefulness has been the everyday experience of every age, something underlined afresh again and again; and so, instead of vanishing from consciousness, instead of becoming forgettable, it must have stamped itself on consciousness ever more clearly. How much more reasonable is that opposite theory (it is not therefore any truer —), held for example by Herbert Spencer: he treats the concept "good" as essentially the same as the concept "useful," "expedient," so that in the judgments "good" and "bad" humanity has summed up and sanctioned precisely its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences of what is useful and expedient and what is harmful and inexpedient. Good, according to this theory, is what has always proved useful: so it may claim to count as "valuable in the highest degree," as "valuable in itself." This route of explanation is also wrong, as I said, but at least the explanation is reasonable in itself and psychologically tenable.
— The pointer to the right road came to me from the question of what the words for "good" coined by the various languages actually mean, etymologically speaking: there I found that they all lead back to the same transformation of a concept — that everywhere "noble," "highborn" in the sense of social rank is the basic concept, out of which "good" in the sense of "noble of soul," "highborn of soul," "high-natured of soul," "privileged of soul" necessarily develops: a development that always runs parallel to that other one which finally turns "common," "mob-like," "low" into the concept "bad." The most eloquent example of the latter is the German word "schlecht," "bad," itself: it is identical with "schlicht," "plain" — compare "schlechtweg" and "schlechterdings," which still mean "simply," "plainly" — and originally it meant the plain, common man, with no suspicious sidelong glance yet, simply as opposed to the noble man. Around the time of the Thirty Years' War — late enough, then — this meaning shifts into the one in use today. — This strikes me as an essential insight for the genealogy of morality; that it is only being found so late is due to the drag that the democratic prejudice of the modern world exerts on all questions of origin. And this reaches even into the apparently most objective field of natural science and physiology, as I can only hint here. But what mischief this prejudice can do, once it is unbridled to the point of hatred, especially for morality and history, is shown by the notorious case of Buckle; there the plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English descent, broke out once more on its native soil, violent as a mud volcano and with that oversalted, overloud, common eloquence with which all volcanoes have spoken until now. —
With regard to our problem, which for good reasons can be called a quiet problem and turns, choosily, to only a few ears, it is of no small interest to establish that in many of the words and roots that mean "good" the main shade of meaning still shows through — the shade that made the noble feel themselves men of a higher rank. True, in the most frequent cases they perhaps name themselves simply after their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "the commanders") or after the most visible badge of this superiority, for example as "the rich," "the owners" (that is the meaning of arya; and correspondingly in Iranian and Slavic). But also after a typical trait of character: and this is the case that concerns us here. They call themselves, for example, "the truthful": first of all the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The word coined for this, esthlos, means at its root one who is, who has reality, who is real, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true man as the truthful man: in this phase of the concept's transformation it becomes the slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense "noble," to mark itself off from the lying common man as Theognis takes him and paints him — until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word is left over to describe nobility of soul, and becomes, so to speak, ripe and sweet. In the word kakos, "bad," as in deilos, "cowardly" (the plebeian as opposed to the agathos, the good man), cowardice is underlined: this perhaps gives a hint of the direction in which we should look for the etymological origin of agathos, which can be read in more than one way. In the Latin malus, "bad" (which I set beside the Greek melas, "black"), the common man may have been marked out as the dark-colored man, above all as the black-haired man ("hic niger est —": "this man is black —"), as the pre-Aryan occupant of Italian soil, who stood out most clearly by his color from the blond, that is Aryan, conquering race that had become the rulers; at least the Gaelic offered me the exactly corresponding case — fin (in the name Fin-Gal, for example), the word that marked out the nobility, in the end the good, noble, pure man, originally the blond-head, as opposed to the dark, black-haired original inhabitants. The Celts, by the way, were a thoroughly blond race; it is a mistake to connect those streaks of an essentially dark-haired population, which show up on the more careful ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic descent or mixture of blood, as Virchow still does: in these places it is rather the pre-Aryan population of Germany that comes through. (The same is true of almost all of Europe: in essentials the subjugated race has in the end got the upper hand there again, in color, in shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can guarantee us that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and especially that leaning toward the "commune," the most primitive form of society, which all the socialists of Europe now have in common, does not mean, in the main, an enormous throwback — and that the conquering and master race, that of the Aryans, is going under physiologically as well?…) The Latin bonus, "good," I believe I may interpret as "the warrior": provided I am right to trace bonus back to an older duonus (compare bellum, "war," = duellum = duen-lum, in which that duonus seems to me to be preserved). Bonus, then, as the man of strife, of splitting in two (duo), as the man of war: you can see what made up a man's "goodness" in ancient Rome. Our German "gut," "good," itself: should it not mean "the godlike," the man "of godlike race"? And be identical with the name of the people (originally of the nobility) — the Goths? The reasons for this conjecture do not belong here. —
This rule — that the concept of political precedence always resolves itself into a concept of precedence of soul — has, to begin with, no exception (though it gives occasion for exceptions) when the highest caste is at the same time the priestly caste and therefore prefers, as its collective name, a label that recalls its priestly function. There, for example, "pure" and "impure" first confront each other as badges of rank; and here too a "good" and a "bad" later develop in a sense that is no longer about rank. But we should guard against taking these concepts "pure" and "impure" too heavily, too broadly or even symbolically from the start: all the concepts of early humanity were, on the contrary, understood at first in a way we can hardly imagine — crude, clumsy, external, narrow, downright and above all unsymbolic. The "pure man" is from the beginning merely a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that bring on skin diseases, who does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower classes, who has a horror of blood — no more, not much more! On the other hand, the whole character of an essentially priestly aristocracy does make it clear why it was here that, so early, the opposed valuations could turn inward and sharpen in a dangerous way; and indeed, through them, chasms have finally been torn open between man and man that even an Achilles of free-thinking will not leap across without a shudder. There is from the beginning something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies and in the habits that rule there, habits turned away from action, partly brooding, partly explosive with feeling, whose consequence seems to be that intestinal morbidity and nervous exhaustion that clings almost unavoidably to the priests of all ages; but as for what they themselves invented as a remedy against this morbidity of theirs — must we not say that in its after-effects it has in the end proved a hundred times more dangerous than the sickness it was supposed to cure? Humanity itself is still sick from the after-effects of these naive priestly cures! Think, for example, of certain forms of diet (avoiding meat), of fasting, of sexual abstinence, of the flight "into the desert" (the isolation of a Weir Mitchell cure, though without the fattening and overfeeding that follow it, which is the most effective antidote to all the hysteria of the ascetic ideal): add to that the whole metaphysics of the priests, hostile to the senses, making men lazy and over-refined, their self-hypnosis after the manner of the fakir and the Brahman — Brahman used as a glass knob and fixed idea — and the final, only too understandable, universal weariness of it all with its radical cure, nothingness (or God: — the longing for a mystical union with God is the Buddhist's longing for nothingness, Nirvana — and no more!). With the priests, simply, everything becomes more dangerous, not only cures and healing arts but also pride, revenge, sharpness of mind, debauchery, love, lust for power, virtue, sickness; — though in fairness one could certainly add that it was only on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man became an interesting animal at all, that only here did the human soul gain depth in a higher sense and become evil — and those, after all, are the two basic forms of man's superiority so far over the rest of the animals!…
— You will already have guessed how easily the priestly way of valuing can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic one and then go on to develop into its opposite; and there is a special push toward this every time the priestly caste and the warrior caste confront each other in jealousy and will not agree about the prize. The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presuppose a powerful body, a flourishing, rich, even overflowing health, together with what keeps it going: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, tournaments and everything at all that involves strong, free, high-spirited action. The priestly-noble way of valuing has — we saw it — other presuppositions: too bad for it when war is the business at hand! The priests are, as everyone knows, the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most powerless. Out of powerlessness their hatred grows into something monstrous and uncanny, something most spiritual and most poisonous. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests, and the most ingenious haters too: — next to the spirit of priestly revenge, all the rest of spirit hardly counts at all. Human history would be far too stupid a thing without the spirit that the powerless have brought into it: — let us take the greatest example right away. Everything that has ever been done on earth against "the noble," "the mighty," "the masters," "the holders of power" is not worth mentioning compared with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people, which in the end knew how to get satisfaction from its enemies and conquerors only through a radical revaluation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge. That alone was fitting for a priestly people, the people of the most deeply held-back priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who, against the aristocratic equation of values (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God), dared the reversal, with a terrifying consistency, and held it fast with the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of powerlessness), namely: "the wretched alone are the good; the poor, the powerless, the low alone are the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the ugly are also the only pious ones, the only ones blessed by God, for them alone is there blessedness — whereas you, you noble and mighty ones, you are for all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless; and you will also be, forever, the unblessed, the cursed and the damned!"… We know who inherited this Jewish revaluation… As for the monstrous initiative, fateful beyond all measure, that the Jews took with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the sentence I arrived at on another occasion ("Beyond Good and Evil," p. 118) — namely, that with the Jews the slave revolt in morality begins: that revolt which has two thousand years of history behind it and which has only slipped out of our sight today because it — has been victorious…
— But you do not understand this? You have no eyes for something that took two thousand years to reach victory?… There is nothing to wonder at in that: all long things are hard to see, hard to see whole. This, though, is the event: out of the trunk of that tree of revenge and hatred, of Jewish hatred — the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred that creates ideals and remakes values, whose like has never been on earth — there grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all kinds of love: — and from what other trunk could it have grown?… But let no one imagine that it grew up as the real denial of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred as its crown — as the triumphant crown, unfolding wider and wider in the purest brightness and fullness of sunlight. In the kingdom of light and height, so to speak, this crown pursued the goals of that hatred — victory, spoils, seduction — with the same urge with which the roots of that hatred sank down ever more thoroughly and greedily into everything that had depth and was evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, as the gospel of love made flesh, this "Redeemer" bringing blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinners — was he not precisely seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, the seduction and the detour to exactly those Jewish values and innovations of the ideal? Did Israel not reach the final goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely by the detour of this "Redeemer," this apparent adversary and dissolver of Israel? Is it not part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge, a far-sighted, underground, slow-gripping, forward-calculating revenge, that Israel itself had to disown the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as something mortally hostile and nail it to the cross, so that "all the world," that is, all Israel's enemies, could swallow this very bait without a second thought? And on the other hand, could anyone, with all the refinement of the spirit, think up a more dangerous bait? Something that could match, in seductive, intoxicating, numbing, corrupting power, that symbol of the "holy cross," that gruesome paradox of a "God on the cross," that mystery of an unthinkable last and utmost cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?… This much at least is certain: under this sign, Israel, with its revenge and its revaluation of all values, has so far triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals. — —
— "But why are you still talking about nobler ideals! Let us bow to the facts: the people have won — or 'the slaves,' or 'the mob,' or 'the herd,' or whatever you like to call them — and if this happened through the Jews, well then! no people ever had a more world-historic mission. 'The masters' are done away with; the morality of the common man has won. You may take this victory as a blood poisoning at the same time (it has mixed the races together) — I don't dispute it; but there is no doubt that this poisoning has succeeded. The 'redemption' of the human race (from 'the masters,' that is) is well on its way; everything is visibly turning Jewish or Christian or mob-like (what do words matter!). The course of this poisoning, through the whole body of humanity, seems unstoppable; its tempo and its pace may even from now on be ever slower, finer, less audible, more careful — there's time, after all… Does the Church, in this light, still have a necessary task today, still any right to exist at all? Or could we do without it? That is the question. It seems that it hinders and holds back that course rather than speeding it up? Well, that might be exactly its usefulness… By now it is certainly something coarse and boorish, which a more delicate intelligence, a truly modern taste, finds repellent. Should it not at least refine itself a little?… Today it puts people off more than it seduces them… Which of us would be a free spirit if there were no Church? It is the Church we find repellent, not its poison… Setting the Church aside, we too love the poison…" — That was the epilogue to my speech from a "free spirit" — an honest animal, as he has amply shown, and a democrat besides; he had listened to me up to that point and could not stand to hear me fall silent. For me, you see, there is a great deal at this point to be silent about. —
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment — the slow, poisonous grudge of those who cannot strike back — of creatures who are denied the real reaction, the reaction of the deed, and who make up for it only through an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality grows out of a triumphant Yes to itself, slave morality says No from the very start to an "outside," to an "other," to a "not-self": and this No is its creative deed. This reversal of the value-setting gaze — this necessary direction outward instead of back toward oneself — is part and parcel of ressentiment: in order to come into being at all, slave morality always needs an opposing outside world first; physiologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all — its action is, from the ground up, a reaction. The opposite is the case with the noble way of valuing: it acts and grows spontaneously; it seeks out its opposite only so as to say Yes to itself still more gratefully, still more jubilantly — its negative concept "low," "common," "bad" is only a pale contrast-image, born afterward, next to its positive basic concept, soaked through and through with life and passion: "we noble ones, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy ones!"
When the noble way of valuing goes wrong and sins against reality, it does so with regard to the sphere it does not know well enough — indeed, the sphere it stiffly refuses to really get to know: in some cases it misjudges the sphere it despises, that of the common man, of the low people. On the other hand, consider this: in any case the feeling of contempt, of looking down, of looking over someone's head — even granting that it falsifies the image of the one despised — will fall far short of the falsification that the hatred held in check, the revenge of the powerless, will commit on its opponent — in effigy, of course. There is in fact too much carelessness mixed into contempt, too much taking things lightly, too much looking away and impatience, even too much good cheer of its own, for it to be able to turn its object into a real caricature and monster. Do not miss the almost kindly shades of meaning that the Greek nobility, for example, puts into all the words by which it sets the lower people apart from itself; how a kind of regret, consideration, indulgence keeps mixing in and sweetening them, until in the end almost all the words that fall to the common man are left over as expressions for "unhappy," "pitiable" (compare deilos, "cowardly, wretched," deilaios, "miserable," poneros, "toiling, worthless," mochtheros, "laboring, wretched" — the last two really marking the common man as a work-slave and beast of burden) — and how, on the other side, "bad," "low," "unhappy" have never stopped sounding in a single note to the Greek ear, with a tone-color in which "unhappy" wins out: this as a legacy of the old, nobler, aristocratic way of valuing, which does not deny itself even in contempt (— philologists may be reminded in what sense oizyros, anolbos, tlemon, dystychein, xymphora — "wretched," "luckless," "suffering," "to be unlucky," "misfortune" — are used). The "well-born" simply felt themselves to be the "happy"; they did not have to construct their happiness artificially by first looking at their enemies, or in some cases talk themselves into it, lie themselves into it (as all men of ressentiment habitually do); and likewise, as full men, overloaded with strength and therefore necessarily active, they knew better than to separate happiness from action — for them, being active is necessarily counted as part of happiness (which is where eu prattein, "to do well," meaning also "to fare well," comes from) — all of this in sharp contrast to the "happiness" at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, those festering with poisonous and hostile feelings, among whom it appears essentially as a narcotic, a numbing, rest, peace, "Sabbath," a slackening of the mind and a stretching of the limbs — in short, as something passive. While the noble man lives with himself in trust and openness (gennaios, "well-born," underlines the shade of "sincere" and probably also "naive"), the man of ressentiment is neither sincere nor naive, nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors; everything hidden appeals to him as his world, his safety, his comfort; he knows all about silence, about not forgetting, about waiting, about making himself small and humble for the time being. A race of such men of ressentiment will necessarily end up cleverer than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness on a completely different scale: namely as a condition of existence of the first rank, whereas among noble men cleverness easily carries a fine aftertaste of luxury and refinement: — here it is nowhere near as essential as the perfect, sure functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts, or even as a certain lack of cleverness — the brave charge straight ahead, whether at danger or at the enemy, or that passionate suddenness of anger, love, reverence, gratitude and revenge by which noble souls have recognized one another in every age. Even the ressentiment of the noble man, when it does appear in him, runs its course and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and so it does not poison: on the other hand, in countless cases it does not appear at all, where in all the weak and powerless it is unavoidable. Not being able to take one's enemies, one's misfortunes, even one's own misdeeds seriously for long — that is the mark of strong, full natures, with a surplus of plastic, restoring, healing power in them, a power that also makes one forget (a good example of this from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for the insults and the low tricks people played on him, and who could not forgive only because he — forgot). With a single shrug such a man shakes off a lot of vermin that would burrow deep into others; only here, assuming it is possible on earth at all, is the real "love of one's enemies" possible. How much reverence a noble man already has for his enemies! — and such reverence is already a bridge to love… He positively demands his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can put up with no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and a great deal to honor! By contrast, picture "the enemy" as the man of ressentiment conceives him — and precisely here is his deed, his creation: he has conceived "the evil enemy," "the evil one," and conceived him as the basic concept, from which, as an afterimage and counterpart, he now goes on to think up a "good one" as well — himself!…
So, exactly the reverse of the noble man, who conceives the basic concept "good" in advance and spontaneously — out of himself, that is — and only from there creates for himself an idea of "bad"! This "bad" of noble origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred — the first a copy made afterward, a side issue, a complementary color; the second, by contrast, the original, the beginning, the real deed in the conception of a slave morality — how differently the two words "bad" and "evil" stand there, though both seem to be set against the same concept "good"! But it is not the same concept "good": rather, ask yourself who is actually "evil," in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. Answered with full strictness: precisely the "good man" of the other morality, precisely the noble, the powerful, the ruling man — only recolored, only reinterpreted, only seen the wrong way round through the poison-eye of ressentiment. Here there is one thing we would be the last to deny: whoever came to know those "good ones" only as enemies came to know nothing but evil enemies; and the same men who are held so strictly within bounds by custom, reverence, usage, gratitude, and even more by mutual watching, by jealousy among equals, who on the other side prove so inventive in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship in their dealings with one another — out there, where the foreign begins, where foreign parts begin, they are not much better than beasts of prey let loose. There they enjoy freedom from every social constraint; in the wilderness they make up for the tension that a long confinement, a long fencing-in within the peace of the community produces; they step back into the innocence of the beast of prey's conscience, as jubilant monsters who perhaps walk away from a horrible sequence of murder, arson, rape and torture with high spirits and a calm soul, as if it had been nothing but a student prank, convinced that the poets now have something to sing and celebrate for a long time to come. At the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey is unmistakable, the magnificent blond beast, prowling about avid for spoils and victory; this hidden core needs to be discharged from time to time, the animal has to get out again, has to go back into the wilderness: — the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings — in this need they are all alike. It is the noble races that have left the concept "barbarian" behind on every trail they walked; even their highest culture betrays an awareness of this, and even a pride in it (for example when Pericles says to his Athenians, in that famous funeral speech, "our daring has broken its way to every land and sea, raising imperishable monuments to itself everywhere, for good and for ill"). This "daring" of the noble races, mad, absurd, sudden as it shows itself; the unpredictable, the improbable quality of their very undertakings — Pericles singles out the rhathymia of the Athenians, their carefree ease, for special praise — their indifference to and contempt for safety, body, life, comfort; their terrible cheerfulness and depth of pleasure in all destroying, in all the delights of victory and cruelty — all of this summed itself up, for those who suffered from it, in the image of the "barbarian," the "evil enemy," the "Goth," say, or the "Vandal." The deep, icy mistrust that the German stirs up as soon as he comes to power — now once again — is still an echo of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe watched the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries (although between the old Germanic tribes and us Germans there is hardly a conceptual relationship, let alone a blood relationship).
I once drew attention to Hesiod's embarrassment when he was devising the sequence of the ages of culture and trying to express them in gold, silver and bronze: he could find no other way to deal with the contradiction that the magnificent but also so dreadful, so violent world of Homer presented him than by making two ages out of one, which he then set one after the other — first the age of the heroes and demigods of Troy and Thebes, as that world had survived in the memory of the noble families who had their own ancestors in it; then the bronze age, as that same world appeared to the descendants of the trampled, the robbed, the mistreated, the dragged-off, the sold: as an age of bronze, as I said, hard, cold, cruel, without feeling or conscience, crushing everything and smearing it over with blood.
Suppose it were true — what is in any case believed as "truth" today — that the very meaning of all culture is to breed, out of the beast of prey "man," a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal: then we would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment, with whose help the noble families together with their ideals were finally brought to ruin and overpowered, as the real tools of culture; which, admittedly, would still not be to say that their bearers at the same time represented culture themselves. Rather, the opposite would be not only probable — no! today it is plain to see! These bearers of the instincts that press down and crave payback, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, of all the pre-Aryan population in particular — they represent the regression of mankind! These "tools of culture" are a disgrace to man, and if anything a suspicion, an argument against "culture" as such! We may be entirely within our rights never to shake off the fear of the blond beast at the bottom of all noble races, and to stay on guard: but who would not a hundred times rather be afraid, if he may admire at the same time, than not be afraid, and in exchange never again be rid of the disgusting sight of the botched, the shrunken, the stunted, the poisoned? And is that not our doom? What causes our aversion to "man" today — for we suffer from man, there is no doubt about it. — Not fear; rather, that we no longer have anything to fear in man; that the vermin "man" is in the foreground and swarming; that the "tame man," the hopelessly mediocre and dreary man, has already learned to feel himself as the goal and the summit, as the meaning of history, as the "higher man"; — yes, that he has a certain right to feel that way, insofar as he feels himself at a distance from the glut of the botched, the sickly, the tired, the worn-out, which Europe is beginning to stink of today, and so as something that has at least relatively turned out well, that is at least still capable of life, that at least still says Yes to life…
— At this point I will not hold back a sigh and one last hope. What is it that I, of all people, find completely unbearable? The thing I alone cannot cope with, that makes me choke and wither? Bad air! Bad air! That something botched comes near me; that I have to smell the entrails of a botched soul!… Otherwise, what do we not put up with in the way of hardship, privation, bad weather, sickness, toil, loneliness? Basically we cope with everything else, born as we are to an underground and fighting existence; again and again we come up into the light, again and again we live our golden hour of victory — and then we stand there as we were born, unbreakable, taut, ready for something new, something still harder, still farther off, like a bow that every hardship only draws tighter. — But from time to time grant me — assuming there are kindly goddesses up there, beyond good and evil, who grant such things — one glimpse, grant me just one single glimpse of something perfect, something that turned out completely, something happy, powerful, triumphant, in which there is still something to fear! A glimpse of a man who justifies man, of a complementary and redeeming stroke of luck in man, for whose sake we may hold on to the belief in man!… For this is how things stand: the shrinking and leveling of European man holds our greatest danger, for this sight makes us tired… Today we see nothing that wants to grow greater; we sense that it still goes down, down, into something thinner, more good-natured, more clever, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian — man, there is no doubt about it, keeps getting "better"… Right here lies Europe's doom — with the fear of man we have also lost the love of him, the reverence for him, the hope in him, indeed the will to him. The sight of man now makes us tired — what is nihilism today, if it is not that?… We are tired of man…
— But let us come back: the problem of the other origin of the "good," of the good as the man of ressentiment has thought it up, demands its conclusion. — That the lambs bear a grudge against the great birds of prey is no surprise: only, that is no reason to hold it against the great birds of prey that they carry off little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is as little as possible a bird of prey, rather its opposite, a lamb — shouldn't he be good?" there is nothing to object to in this setting-up of an ideal, even if the birds of prey will look on a little mockingly and perhaps say to themselves: "we don't hate them at all, these good lambs — we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb." —
To demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a wanting-to-overpower, a wanting-to-throw-down, a wanting-to-become-master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, effect — more than that, it is nothing other than this very driving, willing, effecting itself. Only under the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all effecting as conditioned by something that effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the common people separate the lightning from its flash and take the flash as a doing, as the effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality too separates strength from the expressions of strength, as if behind the strong man there were an indifferent substrate that was free to express strength or not. But there is no such substrate; there is no "being" behind the doing, the acting, the becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything. The common people basically double the deed when they say the lightning flashes: that is a doing-doing; they posit the same event once as the cause and then once more as its effect. The natural scientists do no better when they say "force moves, force causes" and the like — our whole science, for all its coolness, its freedom from passion, still stands under the seduction of language and has not gotten rid of the changelings smuggled in on it, the "subjects" (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, and so is Kant's "thing in itself"): no wonder, then, if the suppressed, secretly smoldering passions of revenge and hatred exploit this belief for themselves, and at bottom even hold no belief more fervently than the one that the strong man is free to be weak, and the bird of prey free to be a lamb: — for with that they win for themselves the right to hold it against the bird of prey that it is a bird of prey…
When the oppressed, the trampled, the violated tell themselves, out of the vengeful cunning of powerlessness: "let us be different from the evil ones, namely good! And good is everyone who does no violence, who injures no one, who does not attack, who does not pay back, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who stays out of the way of all evil and asks little of life in general, like us, the patient, the humble, the just" — then, listened to coldly and without prejudice, this really means nothing more than: "we weak ones are simply weak; it is good if we do nothing that we are not strong enough for" — but this bitter state of affairs, this cleverness of the lowest rank, which even insects have (they will play dead, when the danger is great, so as not to do "too much"), has, thanks to that counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, dressed itself up in the finery of renouncing, quiet, waiting virtue, just as if the weakness of the weak man himself — that is, after all, his essence, his effecting, his whole single unavoidable, undetachable reality — were a voluntary achievement, something willed, chosen, a deed, a merit. This kind of man needs the belief in the indifferent, free-choosing "subject" out of an instinct of self-preservation, of self-affirmation, in which every lie likes to sanctify itself. The subject (or, to speak more popularly, the soul) has perhaps been the best article of faith on earth so far because it made possible, for the majority of mortals, the weak and downtrodden of every kind, that sublime self-deception of interpreting weakness itself as freedom, their being this way or that as merit.
— Does anyone want to look down, a little way down, into the secret of how ideals are manufactured on this earth? Who has the courage for it?… Very well! Here is an open view into this dark workshop. Wait just one moment more, my dear Mr. Rash-and-Curious: your eye must first get used to this false, shimmering light… There! Enough! Now speak! What is going on down there? Say out loud what you see, man of the most dangerous curiosity — now I am the one who is listening. —
— "I see nothing, but I hear all the more. It is a careful, sly, quiet muttering and whispering together out of every corner and cranny. It seems to me that they are lying; a sugary mildness sticks to every sound. Weakness is to be lied into a merit, there is no doubt about it — it is just as you said." —
— Go on! Go on!
— "and the powerlessness that does not pay back, into 'goodness'; anxious lowness into 'humility'; submission to those one hates into 'obedience' (obedience, that is, to someone who they say commands this submission — they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak man, the very cowardice he has so much of, his standing at the door, his unavoidable having-to-wait, gets a good name here, 'patience,' and is even called the virtue; not-being-able-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, perhaps even forgiveness ('for they know not what they do — we alone know what they do!'). They also talk of 'love for one's enemies' — and sweat while they do it."
— Go on! Go on!
— "They are wretched, there is no doubt about it, all these mutterers and back-corner counterfeiters, even if they do squat warm together — but they tell me their wretchedness is a choosing and a mark of distinction from God, that one beats the dogs one loves best; perhaps this wretchedness is also a preparation, a test, a schooling, perhaps it is even more — something that will one day be made up for and paid out with enormous interest, in gold, no! in happiness. This they call 'bliss.'"
— Go on! Go on!
— "Now they give me to understand that they are not only better than the powerful, the masters of the earth, whose spittle they have to lick (not out of fear, not at all out of fear! but because God commands that all authority be honored) — that they are not only better, but are also 'better off,' or at any rate will be better off one day. But enough! enough! I cannot stand it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are manufactured — it seems to me it stinks of nothing but lies."
— No! One moment more! You have said nothing yet about the masterpiece of these black-magicians, who make white, milk and innocence out of any black you like: — have you not noticed what their highest refinement is, their boldest, finest, cleverest, most lie-filled trick of the trade? Pay attention! These cellar animals full of revenge and hatred — what exactly do they make out of revenge and hatred? Did you ever hear these words? Would you guess, if you trusted only their words, that you were among nothing but men of ressentiment?…
— "I understand, I am opening my ears again (oh! oh! oh! and holding my nose shut). Only now do I hear what they have said so often already: 'We good ones — we are the just' — what they demand, they do not call retribution but 'the triumph of justice'; what they hate is not their enemy, no! they hate 'injustice,' 'godlessness'; what they believe in and hope for is not the hope of revenge, the drunkenness of sweet revenge (— 'sweeter than honey,' Homer already called it), but the victory of God, of the just God over the godless; what is left for them to love on earth is not their brothers in hatred but their 'brothers in love,' as they say, all the good and just on the earth."
— And what do they call the thing that serves them as comfort against all the sufferings of life — their phantom show of a future bliss enjoyed in advance?
— "What? Do I hear right? They call it 'the Last Judgment,' the coming of their kingdom, of the 'kingdom of God' — but in the meantime they live 'in faith,' 'in love,' 'in hope.'"
— Enough! Enough!
In faith in what? In love of what? In hope of what? — These weak ones — for one day, you see, they too want to be the strong, there is no doubt about it, one day their "kingdom" too is to come — "the kingdom of God" is what they simply call it, as I said: they are so humble in everything, after all! Just to live to see that, they need to live a long time, past death — yes, they need eternal life, so that they can also take compensation, forever, in the "kingdom of God," for that earthly life "in faith, in love, in hope." Compensation for what? Compensation by what means?… Dante, it seems to me, made a gross blunder when, with a candor that makes the blood run cold, he set that inscription over the gate of his Hell: "Me too eternal love created": — over the gate of the Christian Paradise and its "eternal bliss" an inscription with far better right to stand there would in any case be "Me too eternal hatred created" — granted that a truth may stand over the gate to a lie at all! For what is the bliss of that Paradise?… We might well guess it already; but it is better to have it expressly confirmed for us by an authority not to be underestimated in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. "The blessed in the kingdom of heaven," he says, gentle as a lamb, "will see the punishments of the damned, so that their bliss may please them all the more."
Or would you rather hear it in a stronger key, say from the mouth of a triumphant Church Father, who warned his Christians against the cruel pleasures of the public shows — and why was that? "Faith offers us so much more — he says, in On the Spectacles, chapter 29 and following — something far stronger; thanks to the redemption, quite different joys are at our disposal; in place of the athletes we have our martyrs; if we want blood, well, we have the blood of Christ… But what awaits us, above all, on the day of his return, of his triumph!" — and now he goes on, the enraptured visionary: "But there are other spectacles still to come: that last and everlasting day of judgment, the day the nations never expected, the day they laughed at, when the whole old age of the world and all its generations will be swallowed up in one fire. What a vast spectacle that will be! What shall I marvel at! What shall I laugh at! Where shall I rejoice! Where shall I exult, as I watch so many and such mighty kings, who we were told had been received into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness together with Jove himself and with the very witnesses who said so! And the governors too (the provincial governors), the persecutors of the Lord's name, melting in flames crueler than any they themselves raged with against the Christians, and the flames jeering at them as they go! And whom else? Those wise philosophers, blushing red in front of their own students as they burn together with them — the students they taught that nothing is of any concern to God, the students they assured that souls either do not exist or will never return to their former bodies! And the poets too, trembling not before the judgment seat of Rhadamanthus or of Minos, but before that of Christ, whom they never expected! Then the tragic actors will be worth hearing more than ever, better voiced, of course (in better voice, even louder screamers), in their own catastrophe; then the comic actors will be worth recognizing, far looser-limbed in the fire; then the charioteer will be worth watching, glowing red all over on a wheel of flame; then the athletes will be worth gazing at, not in their gymnasiums but hurled into the fire — except that even then I would not care to see them, preferring to turn an insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord. 'This is he,' I shall say, 'the son of the carpenter or of the prostitute (as all that follows shows, and especially this name for the mother of Jesus, known from the Talmud, from here on Tertullian means the Jews), the sabbath-breaker, the Samaritan, the man with a demon in him. This is he whom you bought from Judas, this is he who was beaten with the reed and with fists, defiled with spittle, given gall and vinegar to drink. This is he whom his disciples secretly stole away, so that it could be said he had risen — or whom the gardener removed, so that his lettuces would not be trampled by the crowds of visitors.' To see such things, to exult in such things — what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will ever grant you that out of his generosity? And yet we already have these things, in a way, through faith, made present to us by the imagining spirit. Besides, what must those things be like which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have they entered into the heart of man? (1 Corinthians 2:9.) More pleasing, I believe, than the circus and both the theaters (the first and fourth tiers or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stage) and every stadium." — Through faith: that is how it is written.
Let us come to a conclusion. The two opposing values "good and bad," "good and evil" have fought a terrible battle on earth, thousands of years long; and though it is certain that the second value has long had the upper hand, there is still no shortage, even now, of places where the battle goes on undecided. One could even say that in the meantime it has been carried ever higher and, precisely by that, has become ever deeper, ever more spiritual: so that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the "higher nature," the more spiritual nature, than to be divided in that sense and to be, really and truly, still a battleground for those opposites. The symbol of this battle, written in a script that has stayed legible across the whole of human history so far, reads "Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome": — there has been no greater event so far than this battle, this way of posing the question, this contradiction between deadly enemies. Rome felt in the Jew something like anti-nature itself, its monstrous opposite, so to speak, from the other side of the world; in Rome the Jew stood "convicted of hatred against the whole human race": and rightly so, insofar as one has a right to tie the salvation and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, of Roman values. What, on the other hand, did the Jews feel toward Rome? We can guess it from a thousand signs; but it is enough to call to mind once more the Apocalypse of John, that wildest of all written outbursts that revenge has on its conscience. (And let no one underrate, by the way, the deep consistency of the Christian instinct when it wrote the name of the disciple of love over this very book of hatred — the same disciple to whom it handed that lovesick, rapturous Gospel —: there is a piece of truth in that, however much literary counterfeiting may have been needed for the purpose.) The Romans, after all, were the strong and the noble, stronger and nobler than anyone who had ever yet lived on earth, or had ever even been dreamed of; every remnant of them, every inscription is a delight, provided one can guess what it is that is writing there. The Jews, on the contrary, were that priestly people of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt a genius for popular morality without equal: just compare the similarly gifted peoples, say the Chinese or the Germans, with the Jews, to feel what is of the first rank and what is of the fifth.
Which of them has won, for the time being, Rome or Judea? But there is no doubt about it at all: just consider before whom people bow today, in Rome itself, as before the embodiment of all the highest values — and not only in Rome but over almost half the earth, everywhere that man has become tame or wants to become tame — before three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (before Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet-weaver Paul, and the mother of the first-named Jesus, called Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome has lost, beyond all doubt.
Admittedly, in the Renaissance there was a brilliant and uncanny reawakening of the classical ideal, of the noble way of valuing all things: Rome itself stirred, like a man presumed dead waking up, under the weight of the new, Judaized Rome built on top of it, which looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called "the Church": but at once Judea triumphed again, thanks to that thoroughly mob-like (German and English) movement of ressentiment which is called the Reformation, together with what had to follow from it, the restoration of the Church — and the restoration, too, of the old graveyard peace of classical Rome. In an even more decisive and deeper sense than back then, Judea won once more over the classical ideal with the French Revolution: the last political nobility there was in Europe, that of the seventeenth and eighteenth French centuries, collapsed under the popular instincts of ressentiment — never on earth was a greater jubilation, a noisier enthusiasm heard! It is true that in the middle of it the most monstrous, the most unexpected thing happened: the ancient ideal itself stepped in the flesh, and with unheard-of splendor, before the eyes and the conscience of humanity — and once more, stronger, simpler, more piercing than ever, against the old lying slogan of ressentiment, the privilege of the many, against the will to lowness, to abasement, to leveling, to the downhill and the sundown of man, there rang out the terrible and delightful counter-slogan of the privilege of the fewest! Like a last signpost toward the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most singular and latest-born human being there ever was, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh — consider well what kind of problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman and the overman…
— Was that the end of it? Was that greatest of all clashes of ideals filed away for all time? Or only adjourned, adjourned for a long time?… Would there not have to be, one day, a far more terrible flaring-up of the old fire, prepared far longer in advance? More than that: would not precisely that be something to wish for with all one's strength? even to will? even to help along?… Whoever begins at this point, like my readers, to reflect, to think further, will hardly come to the end of it soon — reason enough for me to come to an end myself, assuming it has long since become clear enough what I want, what I want precisely with that dangerous slogan written on the body of my last book: "Beyond Good and Evil"… At least this does not mean "Beyond Good and Bad." — —
Note. I take the opportunity this essay gives me to express, publicly and formally, a wish that I have so far voiced only in occasional conversation with scholars: namely, that some philosophical faculty might earn credit for advancing the study of the history of morality through a series of academic prize competitions: — perhaps this book will serve to give a strong push in exactly that direction. With a possibility of this kind in view, let the following question be proposed: it deserves the attention of philologists and historians just as much as that of the actual professional scholars of philosophy.
"What light does linguistics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the development of moral concepts?"
— On the other hand, it is of course just as necessary to win the interest of physiologists and doctors for these problems (of the value of the valuations held so far): and here the professional philosophers may be left to act as the advocates and go-betweens in this particular case too, once they have succeeded on the whole in transforming the originally so stiff, so distrustful relationship between philosophy, physiology and medicine into the friendliest and most fruitful exchange. In fact, all tables of goods, all the "you shall"s that history or ethnological research knows of, need first of all to be examined and interpreted in the light of physiology, at any rate before psychology gets its turn; and all of them alike are waiting for a critique from the side of medical science. The question "what is this or that table of goods and 'morality' worth?" needs to be asked from the most varied perspectives; above all, the "worth for what?" cannot be analyzed finely enough. Something, for example, that evidently had value with regard to the greatest possible durability of a race (or to raising its powers of adaptation to a particular climate, or to preserving the greatest number) would by no means have the same value if the point were, say, to breed a stronger type. The good of the many and the good of the fewest are opposite points of view on value: to hold the first to be the higher-ranking one in itself — that we will leave to the naivety of English biologists… All the sciences now have to do the groundwork for the philosopher's task of the future: that task understood as meaning that the philosopher has to solve the problem of value, that he has to determine the order of rank among values. —
To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises — is that not precisely the paradoxical task nature has set herself with regard to man? Is it not the real problem of man?… Anyone who can fully appreciate the force working against it, the force of forgetfulness, must find it all the more astonishing that this problem has been solved to a high degree. Forgetfulness is no mere force of inertia, as the shallow believe; it is rather an active capacity to hold things back, positive in the strictest sense of the word, and it is thanks to this capacity that whatever we merely live through, experience, take into ourselves, rises into our consciousness while we are digesting it (we might call the process "in-souling") no more than the whole thousandfold process of our bodily nourishment, the so-called "incorporation," does. To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; to stay undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which our underworld of serviceable organs works for and against one another; a little quiet, a little blank slate of consciousness, so that there is room again for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, foreseeing, deciding in advance (for our organism is arranged on oligarchic lines) — that is the use of this active forgetfulness, as I called it, a doorkeeper so to speak, a keeper of the order, the calm, the etiquette of the soul: and from this it is immediately clear how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness. The man in whom this holding-back apparatus is damaged and breaks down may be compared to a dyspeptic (and not only compared —) he is never "done" with anything… Now this very animal, which necessarily forgets, in which forgetting is a force, a form of strong health, has bred in itself an opposite capacity, a memory, with whose help forgetfulness is switched off in certain cases — namely the cases in which a promise is to be made: so this is by no means merely a passive inability to get rid of an impression once it is scratched in, not merely indigestion from a word once pledged that you cannot get over, but an active not-wanting-to-get-rid-of-it, a wanting on and on of what was once wanted, a real memory of the will: so that between the original "I will," "I shall do" and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a whole world of new, strange things, circumstances, even acts of will may safely be inserted without this long chain of the will snapping. But what all that presupposes! To dispose of the future in advance like this, how much must man first have learned: to separate the necessary from the accidental, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see what is distant as if it were present and anticipate it, to settle with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, to reckon, to calculate at all — how much must man himself first have become calculable, regular, necessary, even to himself, to his own idea of himself, so that at last he can vouch for himself as a future, the way someone making a promise does!
That is precisely the long history of the origin of responsibility. The task of breeding an animal that is entitled to make promises includes, as we have already grasped, a more immediate task as its condition and preparation: first making man, to a certain degree, necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable. The enormous labor of what I have called "the morality of custom" (compare "Daybreak," pp. 7, 13, 16) — the real labor of man on himself during the longest stretch of the human race's existence, his whole prehistoric labor, has its meaning here, its great justification, however much hardness, tyranny, dullness and idiocy it also contains: with the help of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket, man really was made calculable. Now let us put ourselves instead at the end of this enormous process, at the point where the tree at last bears its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally bring to light what they were merely the means to: there we find, as the ripest fruit on their tree, the sovereign individual, the individual who resembles only himself, who has broken loose again from the morality of custom, the autonomous individual who is above morality (for "autonomous" and "moral" exclude each other) — in short, the man of his own independent, long will, who is entitled to make promises — and in him a proud awareness, twitching in every muscle, of what has finally been won and made flesh in him, a real awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that man himself has been completed. This man who has become free, who really is entitled to make promises, this master of the free will, this sovereign — how could he fail to know what superiority this gives him over everything that is not entitled to make promises and vouch for itself, how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he awakens — he "deserves" all three — and how, along with this mastery over himself, mastery over circumstances, over nature and over all creatures of shorter and less reliable will is necessarily placed in his hands? The "free" man, the owner of a long, unbreakable will, in owning it also owns his measure of value: looking out from himself toward the others, he honors or he despises; and just as necessarily as he honors those who are his equals, the strong and the reliable (those who are entitled to make promises) — that is, everyone who promises the way a sovereign does, seldom, slowly, and only with difficulty, who is stingy with his trust, who confers a distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something that can be relied on because he knows himself strong enough to keep it even against accidents, even "against fate" —: just as necessarily will he keep his kick ready for the scrawny lightweights who make promises without being entitled to, and his rod for the liar who breaks his word the moment it is in his mouth. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the awareness of this rare freedom, this power over himself and over fate, has sunk down into his lowest depths and become an instinct, the dominant instinct: — what will he call it, this dominant instinct, supposing he needs a word for it? But there is no doubt about it: this sovereign man calls it his conscience…
His conscience?… It is easy to guess in advance that the concept "conscience," which we meet here in its highest, almost disconcerting form, already has a long history and many changes of shape behind it. To be entitled to vouch for oneself, and with pride, and therefore also to be entitled to say Yes to oneself — that is, as I said, a ripe fruit, but also a late fruit: — how long this fruit had to hang sour and bitter on the tree! And for a far longer time there was no such fruit to be seen at all — no one would have been entitled to promise it, however sure it is that everything on the tree was being prepared and was growing toward exactly this! — "How does one make a memory for the human animal? How does one stamp something into this partly dull, partly scatterbrained mind of the moment, this walking forgetfulness, so that it stays present?"… This ancient problem, as you can imagine, was not solved with exactly gentle answers and gentle means; perhaps there is nothing more terrible and more uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his technique of memory. "You burn something in so that it stays in the memory: only what never stops hurting stays in the memory" — that is a basic principle of the oldest (and unfortunately also the longest-lived) psychology on earth. We might even say that wherever on earth there is still solemnity, seriousness, secrecy, somber colors in the life of a man or a people, something lives on of the terror with which people once promised, pledged, and vowed all over the earth: the past, the longest, deepest, hardest past, breathes on us and wells up in us whenever we become "serious." Whenever man thought it necessary to make himself a memory, it never happened without blood, torture, and sacrifice; the most gruesome sacrifices and pledges (among them the sacrifice of the firstborn), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rituals of every religious cult (and all religions are, at the very bottom, systems of cruelty) — all of this has its origin in that instinct which guessed that pain was the most powerful aid to memory. In a certain sense the whole of asceticism belongs here: a few ideas are to be made inextinguishable, ever-present, unforgettable, "fixed," for the purpose of hypnotizing the whole nervous and intellectual system by means of these "fixed ideas" — and ascetic procedures and ways of life are the means of lifting those ideas out of competition with all other ideas, in order to make them "unforgettable." The worse humanity's memory was, the more terrible its customs always look; the harshness of the penal laws in particular gives a measure of how much trouble it took to win the victory over forgetfulness and keep a few primitive requirements of living together present to these slaves of the moment, of passion and desire.
We Germans certainly do not regard ourselves as an especially cruel and hard-hearted people, still less as especially frivolous and living for the day; but you need only look at our old penal codes to get an idea of how much trouble it takes on this earth to breed a "people of thinkers" (by which I mean: the people of Europe among whom even today the maximum of trustworthiness, seriousness, tastelessness and matter-of-factness is to be found, and who on the strength of these qualities have a right to breed every kind of mandarin for Europe). These Germans made themselves a memory with terrible means, in order to master their mob instincts and the brutal clumsiness of those instincts: think of the old German punishments, for instance stoning (— even the legend has the millstone fall on the guilty man's head), breaking on the wheel (the German genius's very own invention and specialty in the realm of punishment!), impaling on the stake, having a man torn apart or trampled by horses ("quartering"), boiling the criminal in oil or wine (still in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the popular flaying ("strap-cutting"), cutting the flesh out of the breast; and also, no doubt, smearing the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him to the flies under a burning sun. With the help of such images and procedures you finally keep five or six "I will nots" in your memory, things about which you have given your promise so as to live among the advantages of society — and really! with the help of this kind of memory people finally came "to reason"! — Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the passions, this whole gloomy business called reflection, all these privileges and showpieces of man: what a price they have exacted! how much blood and horror lies at the bottom of all "good things"!…
But how then did that other "gloomy business," the consciousness of guilt, the whole "bad conscience," come into the world? — And with this we return to our genealogists of morality. To say it once more — or have I not said it yet at all? — they are no good. Five hand-spans' worth of experience of their own, merely "modern"; no knowledge, no will to know the past; still less a historical instinct, a "second sight," which is exactly what is needed here — and yet they go in for the history of morality: that must, in all fairness, lead to results that are on worse than merely cool terms with the truth. Have these genealogists of morality so far ever dreamed, even dimly, that, for example, the central moral concept "Schuld," guilt, took its origin from the very material concept "Schulden," debts — in German the word for guilt is simply the word for what one owes? Or that punishment as retribution developed completely apart from any assumption about the freedom or unfreedom of the will? — and this to such a degree that, on the contrary, it always takes a high stage of humanization before the animal "man" begins to make those far more primitive distinctions "intentional," "negligent," "accidental," "accountable," and their opposites, and to take them into account when measuring out punishment. That thought which is now so cheap and seems so natural, so unavoidable, which has even had to serve as the explanation of how the feeling of justice ever came about on earth at all, "the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise," is in fact an extremely late, indeed sophisticated form of human judging and reasoning; anyone who puts it at the beginning lays coarse fingers on the psychology of earlier humanity. Through the longest period of human history punishment was not inflicted because the wrongdoer was held responsible for his deed, and so not on the assumption that only the guilty should be punished: — rather, it was the way parents still punish their children today, out of anger over some harm suffered, which vents itself on the one who caused it — but this anger held within limits and modified by the idea that every harm has its equivalent somewhere and really can be paid off, even if only by a pain suffered by the one who caused it. And where did this ancient, deep-rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea, the idea of an equivalence between harm and pain, get its power? I have already given it away: from the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the existence of "legal subjects" at all and which in turn points back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trade and traffic.
Admittedly, as you would expect after what was noted above, calling these contractual relationships to mind arouses all kinds of suspicion and resistance toward the earlier humanity that created or permitted them. Here, precisely, promises are made; here, precisely, the point is to make a memory for the one who promises; here, precisely, we may suspect, we will find a mine of hard, cruel, painful things. The debtor, in order to inspire trust in his promise of repayment, to give a guarantee of the seriousness and sanctity of his promise, to impress repayment on his own conscience as a duty, an obligation, pledges to the creditor by contract, in case he does not pay, something he still "possesses," something he still has power over — for example his body, or his wife, or his freedom, or even his life (or, under certain religious conditions, even his salvation, the welfare of his soul, in the end even his peace in the grave: so in Egypt, where the debtor's corpse found no rest from the creditor even in the grave — and it is true that among the Egyptians in particular this rest counted for something). Above all, though, the creditor could inflict every kind of indignity and torture on the debtor's body, for instance cutting off as much of it as seemed to fit the size of the debt: — and on this basis there were, early and everywhere, precise assessments with the force of law of the individual limbs and parts of the body, some of them going down into horrifyingly small, tiny details. I count it as progress already, as proof of a freer, larger-minded, more Roman conception of law, when Rome's law of the Twelve Tables decreed that it made no difference how much or how little the creditors cut off in such a case: "if they have cut off more or less, let it not be held a crime." Let us make the logic of this whole form of settlement clear to ourselves: it is strange enough. The equivalence lies in this: in place of an advantage that directly makes up for the harm (so in place of a settlement in money, land, property of any kind), the creditor is granted a kind of pleasant feeling as repayment and settlement — the pleasant feeling of being allowed to vent his power on someone powerless without a second thought, the thrill of "doing evil for the pleasure of doing it," the enjoyment of brute violence: an enjoyment prized all the more highly the deeper and lower the creditor stands in the order of society, and one that can easily appear to him as the most delicious morsel, indeed as a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the "punishment" of the debtor the creditor takes part in a master's right: at last he too, for once, gets to feel the uplifting sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat a being as something "beneath him" — or at least, if the actual power to punish, the carrying out of the punishment, has already passed to the "authorities," to see it despised and mistreated. The settlement, then, consists in a claim on cruelty and a right to draw on it. —
In this sphere, then, in the law of obligations, the moral world of concepts "guilt," "conscience," "duty," "sanctity of duty," has its breeding ground — its beginning, like the beginning of everything great on earth, was thoroughly and for a long time drenched in blood. And might one not add that this world has at bottom never again entirely lost a certain smell of blood and torture? (not even in old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty…) It was here, too, that the uncanny and perhaps by now inseparable tangle of ideas "guilt and suffering" was first knotted together. To ask once more: how can suffering be a settlement of "debts"? Insofar as making suffer felt good in the highest degree, insofar as the injured party exchanged his loss, plus the displeasure over the loss, for an extraordinary counter-pleasure: making suffer — a real festival, something that, as I said, rose in price the more it contradicted the rank and social standing of the creditor. I say this as a conjecture: for it is hard to see to the bottom of such underground things, and painful besides; and anyone who clumsily throws in the concept of "revenge" here has only blocked and darkened his view, not cleared it (— revenge itself leads straight back to the same problem: "how can making suffer be a satisfaction?"). It offends the delicacy, and still more the hypocrisy, of tame domestic animals (meaning modern men, meaning us), it seems to me, to picture with full force how much cruelty made up the great festival joy of earlier humanity, is in fact mixed in as an ingredient of almost every one of its joys; and on the other hand how naively, how innocently that humanity shows its need for cruelty, how as a matter of principle it takes precisely "disinterested malice" (or, to use Spinoza's term, malevolent sympathy) to be a normal property of man —: and so as something to which the conscience says a hearty Yes! A deeper eye could perhaps see enough of this oldest and most fundamental festival joy of man even now; in "Beyond Good and Evil," pp. 117ff. (and earlier in "Daybreak," pp. 17, 68, 102) I pointed with a cautious finger to the ever-growing spiritualization and "deification" of cruelty that runs through the whole history of higher culture (and, taken in an important sense, even makes it up). At any rate it is not so long ago that one could not imagine princely weddings and public festivals of the grandest style without executions, tortures, or perhaps a burning of heretics, and likewise no noble household without beings on whom one could vent one's malice and cruel teasing without a second thought (— remember, for instance, Don Quixote at the court of the Duchess: today we read the whole of "Don Quixote" with a bitter taste on the tongue, almost as a torture, and in doing so we would seem very strange, very puzzling to its author and his contemporaries — they read it with the clearest of consciences as the most cheerful of books; they nearly laughed themselves to death over it). Seeing suffering does you good; making suffer does you even more good — that is a hard saying, but an old, powerful, human-all-too-human basic principle, which, by the way, perhaps even the apes would sign their names to: for it is said that in thinking up bizarre cruelties they already richly foreshadow man and, so to speak, "rehearse him." No festival without cruelty: so teaches the oldest, longest history of man — and in punishment too there is so much that is festive! —
— With these thoughts, by the way, I have no intention at all of bringing grist to the jarring, creaking mills of our pessimists' weariness with life; on the contrary, let it be stated expressly that back then, when humanity was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now, when there are pessimists. The darkening of the sky over man has always grown in step with the growth of man's shame before man. The tired pessimistic gaze, the distrust of the riddle of life, the icy No of disgust with life — these are not the marks of the most evil ages of the human race: rather, like the swamp plants they are, they only come up once their swamp is there — I mean the morbid pampering and moralizing by which the animal "man" finally learns to be ashamed of all its instincts. On the way to becoming an "angel" (not to use a harsher word here) man has bred in himself that spoiled stomach and coated tongue which have made not only the joy and innocence of the animal disgusting to him but life itself distasteful: — so that at times he stands before himself holding his nose and, with Pope Innocent the Third, draws up a disapproving catalogue of his own repulsive features ("unclean begetting, disgusting feeding in the mother's womb, the badness of the stuff out of which man develops, hideous stench, the secretion of saliva, urine and excrement"). Now, when suffering must always march at the head of the arguments against existence, as its worst question mark, we do well to remember the times when people judged the other way around, because they could not do without making others suffer, and saw in it a magic of the first rank, a real bait that lured people toward life.
Perhaps in those days — this is said to comfort the delicate — pain did not hurt as much as it does today; at least a doctor may conclude as much if he has treated Black Africans (taking them as representatives of prehistoric man —) for severe cases of internal inflammation which drive even the best-constituted European nearly to despair; — in Black Africans they do not. (The curve of the human capacity for pain does in fact seem to drop extraordinarily and almost suddenly once we leave behind the upper ten thousand or ten million of over-refined culture; and for my own part I have no doubt that, set against a single painful night of one single hysterical little cultured woman, the sufferings of all the animals put together that have so far been questioned with the knife for the sake of scientific answers simply do not count.) Perhaps we may even allow that this pleasure in cruelty need not really have died out either: only, in proportion as pain hurts more today, it would need a certain sublimation and refinement; above all it would have to appear translated into the imaginative and the spiritual, and decked out with names so entirely harmless that even the most tender hypocritical conscience suspects nothing ("tragic pity" is one such name; another is "the longings for the cross"). What really outrages us about suffering is not suffering in itself but the senselessness of suffering: but neither for the Christian, who has read a whole secret machinery of salvation into suffering, nor for the naive man of older times, who knew how to interpret all suffering in terms of its spectators or of those who inflicted it, was there any such senseless suffering at all. In order to banish hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering from the world and deny it honestly, people back then were almost forced to invent gods and intermediate beings of every height and depth — in short, something that roams even in hidden places, that sees even in the dark, and that does not easily let an interesting, painful spectacle escape it. For it was with the help of such inventions that life back then managed the trick it has always managed, of justifying itself, of justifying its "evil"; today it might need other inventions to help it (life as a riddle, for example, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil is justified if a god is edified by the sight of it": so ran the logic of feeling in primitive times — and really, was it only primitive times? The gods thought of as lovers of cruel spectacles — oh how far this ancient notion still reaches into our European humanizing! you might consult Calvin and Luther about it, for instance. It is certain, at any rate, that even the Greeks could think of no more pleasant relish to add to their gods' happiness than the joys of cruelty. With what eyes do you think Homer let his gods look down on the fates of men? What was the final meaning, at bottom, of Trojan wars and similar tragic horrors? There can be no doubt about it: they were meant as festival plays for the gods: and, insofar as the poet is more "godlike" in nature than other men, as festival plays for the poets as well… It was no different later, when the moral philosophers of Greece imagined the eyes of God still looking down on the moral struggle, on the heroism and self-torment of the virtuous: the "Heracles of duty" was on a stage, and he knew it; virtue without witnesses was something quite unthinkable for this nation of actors. That invention of the philosophers, so reckless, so fateful, first made for Europe back then — the invention of "free will," of man's absolute spontaneity in good and in evil — was it not made above all to give them a right to the idea that the gods' interest in man, in human virtue, could never be exhausted? On this earthly stage there was never to be any lack of the truly new, of truly unheard-of tensions, entanglements, catastrophes: a world conceived as perfectly deterministic would have been predictable for gods and therefore, before long, tiresome as well — reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to impose such a deterministic world on their gods! The whole of ancient humanity, an essentially public, essentially visible world that could not imagine happiness without spectacles and festivals, is full of tender consideration for "the spectator." — And, as I have already said, even in great punishment there is so much that is festive!…
The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation — to pick up the thread of our inquiry again — had its origin, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: here, for the first time, person confronted person; here, for the first time, person measured himself against person. No grade of civilization has been found, however low, in which something of this relationship is not already noticeable. Setting prices, measuring values, thinking up equivalents, exchanging — this preoccupied the very earliest thinking of man to such a degree that in a certain sense it is thinking: here the oldest kind of shrewdness was bred; here too, we may suspect, is the first beginning of human pride, of man's feeling of superiority over other animals. Perhaps our very word for man, "Mensch" (from manas, an ancient word for mind), still expresses something of precisely this self-feeling: man called himself the being that measures values, that values and measures, the "appraising animal as such." Buying and selling, with all their psychological trappings, are older than even the beginnings of any form of social organization or association: it was rather from the most rudimentary form of personal right that the budding feeling of exchange, contract, debt, right, obligation, settlement was first carried over to the crudest and earliest community complexes (in their relations to similar complexes), together with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating. The eye was now set to this perspective once and for all: and with that lumbering consistency which is the mark of the thinking of earlier humanity — slow to get moving, but then going relentlessly on in the same direction — people soon arrived at the great generalization "every thing has its price; everything can be paid off" — the oldest and most naive moral canon of justice, the beginning of all "good-naturedness," all "fairness," all "good will," all "objectivity" on earth. Justice at this first stage is the good will among people of roughly equal power to come to terms with one another, to "reach an understanding" again through a settlement — and, where the less powerful are concerned, to force them to reach a settlement among themselves. —
Still measuring by the standard of earliest times (and that earliest time, by the way, exists at all times, or is possible again at any time): the community, too, stands to its members in that important basic relationship, the creditor's to his debtors. You live in a community, you enjoy the advantages of a community (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today), you live protected, spared, in peace and trust, untroubled by certain injuries and hostilities to which the man outside, the "peaceless" man, is exposed — a German knows what "Elend," misery, originally meant: êlend, being out of one's own land, exile —, since you have pledged and bound yourself to the community precisely with regard to these injuries and hostilities. What happens in the other case? The community, the cheated creditor, will get itself paid as best it can; you may count on that. The direct damage the wrongdoer has caused is the least of it here: quite apart from that, the criminal is above all a "breaker," someone who has broken his contract and his word against the whole, with regard to all the goods and comforts of life in common that he has shared in until now. The criminal is a debtor who not only fails to repay the advantages and advances shown to him but actually lays hands on his creditor: so from now on, as is only fair, he not only loses all these goods and advantages — he is now, rather, reminded what these goods are really worth. The anger of the injured creditor, the community, hands him back to the wild and outlawed condition from which he had been sheltered until then: it thrusts him away — and now every kind of hostility may vent itself on him. "Punishment," at this stage of civilized life, is simply the copy, the mimicry, of the normal treatment of the hated, disarmed, beaten-down enemy, who has lost not only every right and protection but every mercy as well; and so it is the law of war and the victory feast of "woe to the conquered!" in all its mercilessness and cruelty: — which explains why war itself (the warlike cult of sacrifice included) has supplied all the forms in which punishment appears in history.
As its power grows stronger, a community no longer takes the individual's offenses so seriously, because they can no longer count as dangerous and subversive to the existence of the whole in the same measure as before: the wrongdoer is no longer "declared peaceless" and cast out, the general anger may no longer vent itself on him as unrestrainedly as before — rather, from now on the wrongdoer is carefully defended and sheltered by the whole against this anger, especially the anger of those directly injured. The compromise with the anger of those first struck by the wrongdoing; an effort to localize the case and head off any wider or even general involvement and unrest; attempts to find equivalents and settle the whole affair (the compositio, the settlement); above all the ever more definite will to treat every offense as in some sense payable, and so, at least to a certain degree, to isolate the criminal from his deed — these are the features stamped ever more clearly on the further development of criminal law. As the power and self-confidence of a community grow, its criminal law always softens as well; every weakening and deeper endangering of the community brings its harsher forms back to light. The "creditor" has always become more humane to the degree that he has become richer; in the end it is the very measure of his wealth, how much injury he can bear without suffering from it. It is not unthinkable that a society might reach such a consciousness of power that it could allow itself the noblest luxury there is for it — letting its injurer go unpunished. "What do my parasites really matter to me?" it might then say. "Let them live and thrive: I am still strong enough for that!"… Justice, which began with "everything is payable, everything must be paid," ends by looking the other way and letting the one who cannot pay go free — it ends, like every good thing on earth, by overcoming itself. This self-overcoming of justice: we know the fine name it gives itself — mercy; it remains, it goes without saying, the privilege of the most powerful, or better still, his place beyond the law.
— Here a word to reject attempts that have lately come forward to look for the origin of justice on quite different ground — namely, that of ressentiment. First, a word in the psychologists' ear, in case they should feel like studying ressentiment itself up close for once: this plant now blooms most beautifully among anarchists and antisemites, though in the way it has always bloomed, in hiding, like the violet, if with a different scent. And since like must always come from like, it will be no surprise to see attempts coming out of exactly such circles again, as they have often enough before — compare Essay One, section XIV, above — to sanctify revenge under the name of justice — as though justice were at bottom just a further development of the feeling of having been injured — and along with revenge to bring the reactive affects in general, all of them together, belatedly into honor. To this last point in itself I would object least: with regard to the whole biological problem (in relation to which the value of those affects has so far been underrated) it would even seem to me a merit. I draw attention only to this: it is out of the spirit of ressentiment itself that this new shade of scientific fairness (in favor of hatred, envy, ill will, suspicion, rancor, revenge) grows. For this "scientific fairness" stops at once and makes way for accents of deadly enmity and prejudice as soon as it is a matter of another group of affects which, it seems to me, are of a far higher biological value than those reactive ones, and consequently deserve all the more to be scientifically appraised and prized: namely the genuinely active affects, such as the lust to rule, greed and the like. (E. Dühring, "The Value of Life"; "Course in Philosophy"; basically everywhere.)
So much against this tendency in general: but as for Dühring's particular proposition that the home of justice is to be sought on the ground of reactive feeling, we must, for the sake of truth, confront him with a blunt reversal, this other proposition: the last ground to be conquered by the spirit of justice is the ground of reactive feeling! If it really happens that the just man stays just even toward those who injure him (and not merely cold, measured, distant, indifferent: being just is always a positive bearing), if even under the assault of personal injury, mockery and slander the high, clear objectivity of the just, the judging eye, as deep as it is mild in its gaze, does not cloud over — well, that is a piece of perfection and the highest mastery on earth — even something we would be wise not to expect here, and should at any rate not believe in too easily. On average it is certain that even in the most upright people a small dose of attack, malice, insinuation is enough to drive the blood into their eyes and the fairness out of them. The active, the attacking, the encroaching man still stands a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive one; he simply has no need, as the reactive man has, to appraise his object falsely and with prejudice. That is why in fact the aggressive man, as the stronger, braver, nobler man, has at all times had the freer eye, the better conscience on his side: conversely, you can already guess who has the invention of the "bad conscience" on his conscience — the man of ressentiment!
Finally, just look around in history: in what sphere, up to now, has the whole administration of law, and the real need for law on earth, been at home? In the sphere of reactive men, perhaps? Not at all: rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive. Seen historically, law on earth — let it be said to the annoyance of the agitator just named (who once confesses this about himself: "the doctrine of revenge has run like the red thread of justice through all my works and efforts") — represents the struggle against the reactive feelings, the war on them by active and aggressive powers, which spent part of their strength on calling a halt to the excesses of reactive passion, imposing a measure on it and forcing a settlement. Wherever justice is practiced, wherever justice is upheld, we see a stronger power looking for means to put an end, among the weaker powers under it (whether groups or individuals), to the senseless raging of ressentiment: partly by pulling the object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge, partly by putting in the place of revenge its own struggle against the enemies of peace and order, partly by inventing, proposing and in some cases imposing settlements, partly by raising certain equivalents for injuries to the status of a norm, to which ressentiment is from now on referred once and for all. The most decisive thing, though, that the supreme power does and pushes through against the predominance of the feelings of retaliation and lingering grudge — it always does it, as soon as it is in any way strong enough — is the setting up of the law, the imperative declaration of what, in its eyes, is to count as permitted, as right, and what as forbidden, as wrong: once the law is set up, it treats encroachments and arbitrary acts of individuals or whole groups as outrages against the law, as rebellion against the supreme power itself, and so it turns the feelings of its subjects away from the immediate damage done by such outrages and in the long run achieves the opposite of what all revenge wants, which sees only the injured party's point of view and lets only that count —: from now on the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal appraisal of the deed, even the eye of the injured party himself (though this comes last of all, as noted above). — Accordingly, there is "right" and "wrong" only from the setting up of the law onward (and not, as Dühring would have it, from the act of injury onward). To speak of right and wrong in themselves makes no sense at all; in themselves, of course, injuring, violating, exploiting, destroying can be nothing "wrong," since life essentially — that is, in its basic functions — works by injuring, violating, exploiting, destroying, and cannot even be imagined without this character. We must admit something even more troubling: that from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of law can only ever be exceptional conditions, partial restrictions on the real will of life, which is out for power, subordinate as particular means to its overall purpose: namely as means of creating larger units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle of power complexes but as a means against all struggle whatsoever, somewhat along the lines of Dühring's communist cliché that every will has to treat every other will as equal, would be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of man, an attack on the future of man, a sign of exhaustion, a secret path to nothingness. —
Here one more word on the origin and the purpose of punishment — two problems that are distinct, or ought to be kept distinct: unfortunately they are usually thrown together as one. And how do the genealogists of morality we have had so far go about it in this case? Naively, as they have always gone about everything —: they track down some "purpose" in punishment, revenge, say, or deterrence, then innocently set this purpose at the beginning, as the cause that brought punishment into being, and — they are done. But the "purpose in law" is the very last thing to use in explaining how law came to be: on the contrary, for history of every kind there is no more important proposition than the one that was won with such effort, and really ought to have been won by now — namely this: the cause of a thing's coming into being and its eventual usefulness, its actual use and its place in a system of purposes, lie a whole heaven away. Whatever exists, having somehow come about, is again and again reinterpreted toward new ends by some power superior to it, seized afresh, remade and redirected to a new use. Everything that happens in the organic world is an overpowering, a becoming master; and in turn all overpowering and becoming master is a reinterpreting, a fitting-to-purpose, in which the previous "meaning" and "purpose" must necessarily be obscured or wiped out altogether. However well you have understood the usefulness of some physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, a form in the arts or in religious worship), you have understood nothing yet about how it came to be: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to older ears — for from time immemorial people believed that in the demonstrable purpose of a thing, a form, an institution, in its usefulness, they could also grasp the reason it came to be, the eye as made for seeing, the hand as made for grasping. In the same way people pictured punishment as invented for punishing.
But all purposes, all usefulnesses, are only signs that a will to power has become master over something less powerful and has stamped on it, out of itself, the meaning of a function; and the whole history of a "thing," an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous chain of signs made up of ever new interpretations and fittings-to-purpose, whose causes need not even be connected with one another, but may in some cases merely follow and replace one another by chance. The "development" of a thing, a custom, an organ is accordingly anything but its progress toward a goal, still less a logical progress by the shortest route, reached with the least outlay of force and cost — rather it is the sequence of more or less deep, more or less independent processes of overpowering that play out on it, together with the resistances put up against them each time, the attempted changes of form for the sake of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions, too. The form is fluid, but the "meaning" is even more so… Even inside each individual organism it is no different: with every essential growth of the whole, the "meaning" of the individual organs shifts as well — in some cases their partial perishing, their reduction in number (for example by the destruction of intermediate members) can be a sign of growing strength and perfection. I meant to say: even partial loss of usefulness, withering and degeneration, the loss of meaning and purpose, in short death, belongs to the conditions of real progress: which always appears in the form of a will and a way to greater power and is always carried through at the expense of numerous smaller powers. The greatness of an "advance" is even measured by the mass of everything that had to be sacrificed to it; humanity as a mass sacrificed to the flourishing of one single stronger species of man — that would be an advance…
— I stress this main point of historical method all the more because at bottom it runs against the instinct and the taste that happen to be in charge of our age, which would sooner put up with the absolute randomness, even the mechanical senselessness, of all that happens than with the theory of a will to power playing itself out in everything that happens. The democratic aversion to everything that rules and wants to rule, the modern misarchism, hatred of rule (to coin a bad word for a bad thing), has gradually translated and disguised itself into the things of the mind, the most intellectual things, to such a degree that today, step by step, it is already penetrating the strictest, apparently most objective sciences — is allowed to penetrate them; indeed, it seems to me already to have become master over the whole of physiology and the science of life, to their harm, it goes without saying, since it has conjured away one of their basic concepts, that of genuine activity. Under the pressure of that aversion, "adaptation" is pushed into the foreground instead — that is, an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity; indeed, life itself has been defined as an ever more purposeful inner adaptation to outer circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But that misjudges the essence of life, its will to power; that overlooks the fundamental priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, encroaching, reinterpreting, redirecting and shaping forces, which act first, with "adaptation" only following after; that denies, within the organism itself, the ruling role of the highest functionaries, in whom the will of life appears active and form-giving. Remember what Huxley held against Spencer — his "administrative nihilism": but what is at stake is more than "administering"…
— So, to come back to the matter at hand, namely to punishment, we have to distinguish two things in it: on the one hand what is relatively lasting in it, the custom, the act, the "drama," a certain strict sequence of procedures; on the other hand what is fluid in it, the meaning, the purpose, the expectation attached to the carrying out of such procedures. Here, by analogy and in line with the main point of historical method just developed, we assume without further ado that the procedure itself will be something older, earlier than its use for punishment. The use for punishment was only put into the procedure, read into it (a procedure long in existence, but customary in another sense). In short, things are not as our naive genealogists of morality and law have assumed until now, every one of whom imagined the procedure invented for the purpose of punishment, just as people once imagined the hand invented for the purpose of grasping.
As for that other element in punishment, the fluid one, its "meaning": in a very late state of culture (today's Europe, for example) the concept "punishment" in fact no longer presents one meaning at all, but a whole synthesis of "meanings": the entire history of punishment so far, the history of its exploitation for the most varied purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is hard to dissolve, hard to analyze and — this must be stressed — altogether undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say definitely why punishment is actually inflicted: all concepts in which a whole process is bundled up into a sign escape definition; only what has no history can be defined.) At an earlier stage, by contrast, that synthesis of "meanings" still looks easier to dissolve, and easier to shift; we can still see how, in each individual case, the elements of the synthesis change their weight and rearrange themselves accordingly, so that now this element, now that one steps forward and dominates at the expense of the rest — indeed, in some cases one element (the purpose of deterrence, say) seems to cancel out the whole remainder. To give at least some idea of how uncertain, how belated, how accidental "the meaning" of punishment is, and how one and the same procedure can be used, interpreted, fitted to fundamentally different intentions, here is the scheme that emerged for me from a relatively small and random body of material. Punishment as rendering harmless, as the prevention of further harm. Punishment as repayment of the damage to the one damaged, in some form or other (including the form of a compensation in feeling). Punishment as the isolation of a disturbance of the balance, to keep the disturbance from spreading further. Punishment as instilling fear of those who determine and carry out the punishment. Punishment as a kind of settling of accounts for the advantages the criminal has enjoyed up to then (for example, when he is put to use as a slave in the mines). Punishment as the weeding out of a degenerating element (in some cases of a whole branch, as under Chinese law: thus as a means of keeping the race pure or of holding fast to a social type). Punishment as a festival, namely as the violation and mockery of an enemy finally thrown down. Punishment as the making of a memory, whether for the one who suffers the punishment — the so-called "improvement" — or for the witnesses of the execution. Punishment as the payment of a fee, stipulated by the power that protects the wrongdoer from the excesses of revenge. Punishment as a compromise with the natural state of revenge, insofar as the latter is still kept up by powerful clans and claimed as a privilege. Punishment as a declaration of war and a measure of war against an enemy of peace, of law, of order, of authority, who is fought as a danger to the community, as a breaker of the contract on which it rests, as a rebel, a traitor and a breaker of the peace, with the very means that war puts into our hands. —
This list is certainly not complete; obviously punishment is overloaded with usefulnesses of every kind. All the more reason to subtract from it one supposed usefulness, which admittedly counts in the popular mind as its most essential one — the belief in punishment, which today is wobbling for several reasons, still finds its strongest support precisely there. Punishment is supposed to have the value of awakening the feeling of guilt in the guilty party; people see in it the real instrument of that reaction of the soul called "bad conscience," "the sting of conscience." But in saying so they do violence to reality and to psychology even for today: and how much more for the longest history of man, his prehistory! The genuine sting of conscience is something extremely rare precisely among criminals and convicts; prisons and penitentiaries are not the breeding grounds where this species of gnawing worm prefers to thrive: — on that all conscientious observers agree, though in many cases they give this verdict reluctantly enough and against their own dearest wishes. By and large, punishment hardens and chills; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance. If it happens that it breaks a man's energy and brings about a miserable prostration and self-abasement, such a result is surely even less refreshing than the average effect of punishment: which is characterized by a dry, gloomy seriousness.
But if we think at all of those thousands of years before the history of man, we may judge without hesitation that it was precisely through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt was most powerfully held back — at least with regard to the victims on whom the punishing power vented itself. For let us not underestimate how far precisely the sight of the judicial and executive procedures themselves keeps the criminal from feeling his deed, the kind of act it was, as in itself blameworthy: for he sees exactly the same kind of acts committed in the service of justice and then approved, committed with a good conscience: namely spying, outwitting, bribery, setting traps, the whole tricky and cunning art of policemen and prosecutors, and then the robbing, overpowering, insulting, imprisoning, torturing, murdering that is done on principle, not even excused by passion, as it takes shape in the various kinds of punishment — all of them, then, acts by no means rejected and condemned by his judges in themselves, but only in a certain respect and application. The "bad conscience," this most uncanny and most interesting plant of our earthly vegetation, did not grow on this soil — in fact, for the longest time the consciousness of those judging and punishing expressed nothing of the idea that they were dealing with a "guilty party." Rather with someone who had caused damage, with an irresponsible piece of fate. And the man himself, on whom the punishment afterward fell, again like a piece of fate, felt no more "inner pain" from it than he would at the sudden arrival of something unforeseen, a terrible natural event, a boulder crashing down to crush him, against which there is no more fighting.
This once dawned on Spinoza in a compromising way (to the annoyance of his interpreters, who really go to some trouble to misunderstand him on this point, Kuno Fischer for example), one afternoon when, chafing at who knows what memory, he pursued the question of what was actually left, for him personally, of the famous sting of conscience — he who had banished good and evil to the realm of human imaginings, and had defended with fury the honor of his "free" God against those blasphemers whose claim came down to saying that God does everything for the sake of the good ("but that would mean subjecting God to fate, and would truly be the greatest of all absurdities" —). For Spinoza the world had stepped back into that innocence in which it lay before the invention of the bad conscience: what, then, had become of the sting of conscience? "The opposite of joy," he said to himself at last — "a sadness, accompanied by the idea of a past thing that turned out contrary to all expectation." "Ethics," Part III, proposition XVIII, scholium I and II. For thousands of years the wrongdoers overtaken by punishment have felt no differently from Spinoza about their "offense": "here something has unexpectedly gone wrong," not: "I should not have done that" — they submitted to punishment as one submits to a sickness or a misfortune or death, with that stout-hearted fatalism without revolt which, for example, still gives the Russians an advantage over us Westerners in the handling of life. If there was a critique of the deed in those days, it was prudence that criticized the deed: without question we must look for the real effect of punishment above all in a sharpening of prudence, in a lengthening of memory, in a will to go to work more carefully, more suspiciously, more secretly from then on, in the insight that you are simply too weak for many things once and for all, in a kind of improvement in self-assessment. What can be achieved by punishment on the whole, in man and animal, is an increase of fear, a sharpening of prudence, mastery of the desires: in this way punishment tames man, but it does not make him "better" — you could more justly claim the opposite. ("Harm makes a man smart," as the people say: insofar as it makes him smart, it also makes him bad. Fortunately, it often enough makes him stupid.)
At this point I can no longer avoid giving my own hypothesis on the origin of the "bad conscience" a first, provisional expression: it is not easy to get a hearing for it, and it wants to be thought over, watched over and slept on for a long time. I take the bad conscience to be the deep sickness that man was bound to fall into under the pressure of the most fundamental of all the changes he has ever lived through — the change that came when he finally found himself locked inside the spell of society and peace. These half-animals, happily adapted to the wilderness, to war, to roaming, to adventure, must have fared no differently from the sea animals when they were forced either to become land animals or to perish — all at once every one of their instincts was devalued and "unhinged." From now on they were to walk on their feet and "carry themselves," where until then the water had carried them: a terrible heaviness lay on them. They felt clumsy at the simplest tasks; for this new, unknown world they no longer had their old guides, the regulating drives that led them unconsciously and surely — they were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, combining causes and effects, these unhappy creatures, reduced to their "consciousness," their poorest and most error-prone organ! I believe there has never on earth been such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort — and meanwhile those old instincts had not all at once stopped making their demands! Only it was hard, and seldom possible, to give them what they wanted: in the main they had to look for new and, so to speak, underground satisfactions.
All instincts that are not discharged outward turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: only now does there grow on man what will later be called his "soul." The whole inner world, originally thin, as if stretched between two skins, has spread apart and opened up, has gained depth, breadth, height, in the same measure as man's discharge outward has been checked. Those terrible bulwarks with which the organized state protected itself against the old instincts of freedom — punishments belong above all among these bulwarks — brought it about that all those instincts of the wild, free, roaming man turned backward, turned against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, the pleasure in persecution, in attack, in change, in destruction — all of that turning against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the "bad conscience." The man who, for lack of outer enemies and resistances, squeezed into an oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom, impatiently tore himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed at himself, harried himself, mistreated himself, this animal that people want to "tame," rubbing itself raw on the bars of its cage, this deprived creature, consumed by homesickness for the wilderness, who had to make out of himself an adventure, a torture chamber, an unsafe and dangerous wilderness — this fool, this longing and desperate prisoner became the inventor of the "bad conscience." But with it the greatest and uncanniest sickness was ushered in, from which humanity has not recovered to this day: the suffering of man from man, from himself: as the consequence of a violent severing from his animal past, of a leap and a fall, so to speak, into new situations and conditions of existence, of a declaration of war against the old instincts on which, until then, his strength, his pleasure and his terribleness had rested.
Let us add at once that, on the other hand, with an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, something so new, deep, unheard-of, puzzling, contradictory and full of future had come into the world that the look of the earth was essentially changed by it. Indeed, it took divine spectators to appreciate the spectacle that began with it, and whose end is still by no means in sight — a spectacle too fine, too wonderful, too paradoxical to be allowed to play itself out senselessly and unnoticed on some ridiculous star! Since then man too counts among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the game played by the "great child" of Heraclitus, call it Zeus or chance — he awakens an interest in himself, a suspense, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something were being announced with him, something being prepared, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an incident, a bridge, a great promise…
Among the presuppositions of this hypothesis on the origin of the bad conscience is, first, that this change was not gradual, not voluntary, and did not present itself as an organic growing into new conditions, but as a break, a leap, a compulsion, an inescapable fate, against which there was no fighting and not even any ressentiment. Second, though, that the fitting of a population, until then unchecked and unshaped, into a fixed form was brought to its end by nothing but acts of violence, just as it began with an act of violence — that the oldest "state" accordingly appeared and went on working as a terrible tyranny, as a crushing and ruthless machinery, until such a raw material of people and half-animal was at last not only thoroughly kneaded and pliable but also formed.
I used the word "state": it goes without saying who is meant by it — a pack of blond beasts of prey, a conquering master race, which, organized for war and with the strength to organize, without a second thought lays its terrible paws on a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers but still shapeless, still roaming. That is how the "state" begins on earth: I think we are done with the daydream that had it begin with a "contract." Whoever can command, whoever is "master" by nature, whoever comes on the scene violent in deed and bearing — what does he have to do with contracts! You do not reckon with such beings; they come like fate, without reason, cause, consideration, pretext; they are there as lightning is there, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too "different" even to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creating of forms, stamping of forms; they are the most involuntary, most unconscious artists there are: — in short order something new stands where they appear, a structure of rule that lives, in which parts and functions are marked off and related to one another, in which nothing at all finds a place unless a "meaning" with respect to the whole has first been put into it. They do not know what guilt is, what responsibility is, what consideration is, these born organizers; in them rules that terrible artist's egoism that has the gaze of bronze and knows itself justified in advance, to all eternity, in its "work," like a mother in her child. It is not in them that the "bad conscience" grew, that much is clear from the start — but it would not have grown without them, this ugly growth; it would be missing if an enormous quantity of freedom had not been driven out of the world, or at least out of sight, under the pressure of their hammer blows, their artist's violence, and made, as it were, latent. This instinct of freedom forcibly made latent — we have already grasped it — this instinct of freedom pushed back, driven under, locked up inside and in the end discharging and venting itself only on itself: that, that alone, is the bad conscience in its beginnings.
Let no one think less of this whole phenomenon just because it is ugly and painful from the start. At bottom it is the very same active force that is at work, on a grander scale, in those artists of violence and organizers who build states; here, inside, on a smaller and pettier scale, pointed backward, in the "labyrinth of the breast," to use Goethe's phrase, it creates the bad conscience and builds negative ideals. It is that same instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power) — only here the material on which this force spends its form-giving, violating nature is man himself, his whole old animal self — and not, as in that larger and more eye-catching phenomenon, the other man, the other men. This secret violation of oneself, this artist's cruelty, this pleasure in giving oneself a form, as if one were a heavy, resisting, suffering material; in burning into oneself a will, a criticism, a contradiction, a contempt, a No; this uncanny and horribly pleasurable work of a soul willingly at odds with itself, which makes itself suffer for the pleasure of making suffer — this whole active "bad conscience" has in the end — as you will already have guessed — also brought to light, as the true womb of ideal and imaginative events, a wealth of new and strange beauty and affirmation, and perhaps, for the very first time, the beautiful… For what would "beautiful" even be, if contradiction had not first come to consciousness of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: "I am ugly"?… At the very least, after this hint, the riddle will be less of a riddle: how an ideal, a beauty, can be hinted at in self-contradictory concepts like selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice; and from now on we know one thing, I have no doubt of it — namely what kind of pleasure the selfless man, the self-denying man, the self-sacrificing man feels from the very beginning: this pleasure belongs to cruelty. — So much, for now, on the origin of the "unegoistic" as a moral value, and on marking out the ground from which that value grew: only the bad conscience, only the will to mistreat oneself, provides the precondition for the value of the unegoistic. —
It is a sickness, the bad conscience; there is no doubt about that. But it is a sickness the way pregnancy is a sickness. Let us look for the conditions under which this sickness reached its most terrible and most sublime peak: — we will see what first came into the world with it. But that needs a long breath — and first we have to go back once more to an earlier point of view. The relationship in private law between a debtor and his creditor, which we have already discussed at length, has been read, once again, and in a way that is historically very strange and very questionable, into a relationship where we modern people perhaps understand it least of all: into the relationship of the living to their ancestors. Inside the original tribal community — we are talking about the earliest times — each living generation acknowledges a legal obligation toward the earlier one, and above all toward the earliest, the one that founded the clan (and by no means a mere obligation of feeling: we might even, not without reason, deny that any such feeling existed at all for the longest stretch of the human race's history). Here the conviction rules that the clan exists only through the sacrifices and achievements of the ancestors — and that these have to be paid back to them with sacrifices and achievements. So a debt is acknowledged, and it keeps on growing, because these ancestors, living on as powerful spirits, never stop granting the clan new advantages and advances out of their power. For nothing, perhaps? But there is no "for nothing" in those crude and "soul-poor" ages. What can be given back to them? Sacrifices (at first as food, in the crudest sense), feasts, shrines, tributes of honor, above all obedience — for all customs, being the works of the ancestors, are also their statutes and commands —: does anyone ever give them enough? That suspicion remains and grows: from time to time it forces a great wholesale settlement, some enormous repayment to the "creditor" (the notorious sacrifice of the firstborn, for example; blood, human blood, in any case).
The fear of the ancestor and his power, the consciousness of owing him a debt, grows by this kind of logic, necessarily, in exact proportion as the power of the clan itself grows — as the clan itself stands more and more victorious, independent, honored, feared. Not the other way around! Every step toward the clan's decline, every miserable accident, every sign of degeneration and approaching dissolution rather lessens the fear of its founder's spirit, and gives an ever lower idea of his wisdom, his foresight and the presence of his power. If you follow this crude kind of logic through to its end, then the ancestors of the most powerful clans must in the end have grown, in the imagination of a growing fear, into something enormous, and been pushed back into the darkness of a divine uncanniness, beyond all picturing: — in the end the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god. Perhaps this is the very origin of the gods — an origin, then, out of fear!… And whoever thinks it necessary to add, "but out of reverence too!" will hardly be right about that for the longest age of the human race, its earliest age. All the more right, admittedly, for the middle age, in which the noble clans take shape: — clans that did, in fact, pay back to their originators, the ancestors (heroes, gods), with interest, all the qualities that had meanwhile come to light in themselves, the noble qualities. We will take another look later at the ennobling and refining of the gods (which is certainly not the same as their "sanctification"): for now, let us just follow the whole course of this development of the consciousness of guilt, of owing, to its provisional end.
The consciousness of having debts to the deity did not, as history teaches, come to an end with the decline of the "community" organized by blood kinship — by no means. Just as humanity inherited the concepts "good and bad" from the clan nobility (along with its basic psychological tendency to set up orders of rank), so, along with the inheritance of the clan and tribal gods, it also took on the pressure of debts still unpaid, and the longing to be released from them. (The transition is made by those broad populations of slaves and serfs who adapted themselves to the worship of their masters' gods, whether by force or by submissiveness and mimicry: from them this inheritance then overflows in every direction.) For several thousand years the feeling of guilt toward the deity never stopped growing, and it grew always in the same proportion as the concept of God and the feeling for God grew on earth and were raised ever higher. (The whole history of ethnic fighting, conquering, reconciling and merging — everything that precedes the final order of rank among all the elements of a people in every great synthesis of races — is mirrored in the tangle of their gods' genealogies, in the legends of their gods' fights, victories and reconciliations; the advance toward universal empires is always the advance toward universal deities as well, and despotism, overpowering the independent nobility, always clears the way for some kind of monotheism.) The arrival of the Christian God, as the maximum god reached so far, therefore also brought the maximum feeling of guilt on earth into view. Supposing that we have by now entered the reverse movement, we might with no small probability deduce, from the unstoppable decline of faith in the Christian God, that there is already a considerable decline in man's consciousness of guilt as well; indeed, we cannot dismiss the prospect that the complete and final victory of atheism might release humanity from this whole feeling of owing a debt to its beginning, to its first cause. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together. —
So much, briefly and roughly, for now, on how the concepts "guilt" and "duty" hang together with religious assumptions. I have deliberately left aside, until now, the real moralization of these concepts (their being pushed back into the conscience, or more precisely, the entangling of the bad conscience with the concept of God), and at the end of the last section I even talked as if this moralization did not exist at all — as if, therefore, these concepts were now necessarily finished, once their precondition had fallen: the faith in our "creditor," in God. The facts are terribly different. With the moralization of the concepts guilt and duty, with their being pushed back into the bad conscience, what we actually have is the attempt to reverse the direction of the development just described, or at least to bring its movement to a standstill. Now the prospect of a final release, once and for all, is supposed to close itself off in pessimism; now the eye is supposed to bounce back, to recoil in despair, from an iron impossibility; now those concepts "guilt" and "duty" are supposed to turn backward — against whom, then? There can be no doubt: first against the "debtor," in whom the bad conscience now settles in, eats its way in, spreads out and grows like a polyp into every breadth and depth, until at last, together with a guilt that can never be discharged, the idea of a penance that can never be discharged is conceived too, the thought that it can never be paid off ("eternal punishment") —; and finally even against the "creditor," whether we think here of the first cause of man, of the beginning of the human race, of its ancestor, who is now saddled with a curse ("Adam," "original sin," "unfree will"), or of nature, from whose womb man comes, and into which the evil principle is now placed ("the demonizing of nature"), or of existence in general, which is left standing as worthless in itself (the nihilistic turning away from it, the longing for nothingness or the longing for its "opposite," for some other way of being — Buddhism and the like) — until all at once we stand before that paradoxical and horrifying expedient in which tortured humanity found a temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for man's guilt, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can pay off for man what man himself can no longer pay off — the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love (would you believe it? —), out of love for his debtor!…
You will already have guessed what actually happened with all this and underneath all this. There was that will to torment oneself, that cruelty driven back inward, in the animal-man who had been made inward and scared back into himself, shut up in the "state" so that he could be tamed, who invented the bad conscience in order to hurt himself, once the more natural outlet for this wish to hurt was stopped up — and this man of the bad conscience seized on the religious assumption in order to drive his self-torture to its most dreadful hardness and sharpness. A debt to God: this thought becomes his instrument of torture. In "God" he grasps the last and most extreme opposites he can find to his real and inescapable animal instincts; he reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as guilt toward God (as enmity, rebellion, revolt against the "Lord," the "Father," the first ancestor and beginning of the world); he stretches himself out across the contradiction "God" and "devil"; every No that he says to himself, to the nature, the naturalness, the actual facts of his own being, he projects out of himself as a Yes, as something that exists, that has a body, that is real, as God, as the holiness of God, as God the judge, as God the executioner, as the beyond, as eternity, as torment without end, as hell, as punishment and guilt beyond all measure. In this cruelty of the soul there is a kind of madness of the will that simply has no equal: man's will to find himself guilty and reprehensible to the point where no atonement is possible; his will to think of himself as punished without the punishment ever being able to equal the guilt; his will to infect the deepest ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt and poison it, so as to cut off, once and for all, his own way out of this labyrinth of "fixed ideas"; his will to set up an ideal — that of the "holy God" — so that, face to face with it, he can be palpably certain of his own absolute worthlessness.
Oh, this insane, sad beast, man! What ideas come to it, what unnaturalness, what fits of nonsense, what bestiality of the idea breaks out at once, the moment it is prevented, even a little, from being a beast of the deed!… All of this is interesting beyond measure, but also of a black, gloomy, unnerving sadness, so that you have to force yourself not to look too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, there is no doubt of it, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man: — and anyone who can still hear (but people no longer have the ears for it today! —) how, in this night of torment and absurdity, the cry love rang out, the cry of the most longing rapture, of redemption in love, will turn away, seized by an unconquerable horror… There is so much in man that is horrifying!… The earth has been a madhouse for too long!…
Let this be enough, once and for all, on the origin of the "holy God." — That the conception of gods does not, in itself, have to lead to this corruption of the imagination, which for a moment we could not avoid picturing; that there are nobler ways of using the invention of gods than this self-crucifixion and self-defiling of man, at which Europe's last few thousand years have been masters — that, luckily, can still be gathered from any glance at the Greek gods, those reflections of noble and self-governing men, in whom the animal in man felt itself deified and did not tear itself apart, did not rage against itself! For the longest time these Greeks used their gods precisely to keep the "bad conscience" at arm's length, so that they could go on enjoying their freedom of soul: that is, in the opposite sense from the use Christianity has made of its God. They went very far in this, these magnificent, lionhearted overgrown children; and no lesser authority than Homer's Zeus himself lets them know, now and then, that they are making it too easy for themselves. "Astonishing!" he says once — it concerns the case of Aegisthus, a very bad case —
"Astonishing, how the mortals keep complaining against the gods! "Only from us comes evil, they suppose; but they themselves "Bring misery on themselves by their own folly, even against fate."
And yet you hear and see at the same time that even this Olympian spectator and judge is far from holding it against them or thinking evil of them: "how foolish they are!" is what he thinks about the misdeeds of mortals — and "folly," "lack of sense," a little "something wrong in the head," that much even the Greeks of the strongest, bravest age allowed in themselves as the cause of much that was bad and disastrous: — folly, not sin! do you understand that?… But even this something-wrong-in-the-head was a problem — "yes, how is it even possible? where could it really have come from, in heads like ours, we men of noble descent, of good fortune, who turned out so well, of the best society, of nobility, of virtue?" — so the noble Greek asked himself for centuries, in the face of every baffling atrocity and outrage with which one of his own kind had stained himself. "It must have been a god that befuddled him," he said to himself in the end, shaking his head… This way out is typical of the Greeks… In those days, then, the gods served to justify man to a certain degree even in what was bad; they served as causes of evil — in those days they did not take the punishment upon themselves but, as is nobler, the guilt…
— I close with three question marks, as you can see. "Is an ideal actually being set up here, or torn down?" people may ask me… But have you ever asked yourselves well enough how high a price the setting-up of every ideal on earth has exacted? How much reality had to be slandered and misjudged for it every time, how many lies sanctified, how much conscience disturbed, how much "God" sacrificed? For a sanctuary to be set up, a sanctuary must be torn down: that is the law — show me the case where it has not been fulfilled!… We modern men, we are the heirs of thousands of years of vivisecting the conscience and torturing the animal in ourselves: in this we have our longest practice, our artistry perhaps, in any case our refinement, our spoiled taste. For far too long man has looked at his natural inclinations with an "evil eye," so that in the end they have become twinned, in him, with the "bad conscience." The reverse attempt would be possible in itself — but who is strong enough for it? — namely, to twin the unnatural inclinations with the bad conscience: all those aspirations toward the beyond, toward what runs against the senses, against instinct, against nature, against the animal — in short, all the ideals we have had so far, which are, every one of them, ideals hostile to life, ideals that slander the world. To whom could we turn today with such hopes and demands?… We would have precisely the good people against us; and, as is only fair, the comfortable, the reconciled, the vain, the gushing, the tired as well… What offends more deeply, what cuts us off more completely, than letting anyone notice something of the strictness and height with which we treat ourselves? And again — how obliging, how loving the whole world shows itself toward us, as soon as we do as the whole world does and "let ourselves go" like the whole world!… That goal would need a different kind of spirit than is likely in this particular age: spirits strengthened by wars and victories, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, even pain, have become a need; it would need the habit of sharp, high air, of winter journeys, of ice and mountains in every sense; it would need a kind of sublime malice itself, a last, most self-assured mischief of knowledge, which belongs to great health; it would need, in short and bad enough, precisely this great health!… Is that even possible today?…
But some day, in a stronger age than this rotten, self-doubting present, he must come to us after all, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose driving strength keeps pushing him out of every place apart, every beyond, whose solitude is misunderstood by the people, as if it were a flight from reality —: whereas it is only his sinking down, his burying himself, his going deeper into reality, so that one day, when he comes back to the light, he can bring home from it the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the ideal we have had so far has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us from the ideal we have had so far just as much as from what had to grow out of it — from the great disgust, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism — this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision, which makes the will free again, which gives the earth back its goal and man his hope, this Antichrist and antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness — he must come one day…
— But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point only one thing is fitting for me: to keep silent. Otherwise I would lay hands on what is open only to someone younger, someone "more of the future," someone stronger than I am — what is open only to Zarathustra, Zarathustra the godless…
Carefree, mocking, violent — that is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, she only ever loves a warrior.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? — For artists, nothing, or too many things; for philosophers and scholars, something like a nose and an instinct for the conditions most favorable to a high spirituality; for women, at best, one more charm of seduction, a little languid softness on beautiful flesh, the angelic look of a pretty, fat animal; for the physiologically botched and the out-of-sorts (for the majority of mortals), an attempt to feel "too good" for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief weapon in the fight against slow pain and boredom; for priests, the real priestly faith, their best tool of power, and also the "very highest" permission to have power; for saints, finally, an excuse for hibernation, their lust for glory in its last and newest form, their rest in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness. But the fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man at all — that expresses the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui, its horror of a vacuum: he needs a goal — and he would rather will nothingness than not will. — Do you understand me?… Have I been understood?… "Not in the least, sir!" — Then let us start again from the beginning.
What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? — Or, to take one single case, about which I have been asked for advice often enough: what does it mean, for example, when an artist like Richard Wagner, in his old age, pays homage to chastity? In a certain sense, of course, he always did; but only at the very end in an ascetic sense. What does this change of "sense" mean, this radical reversal of sense? — for that is what it was: with it Wagner leapt straight over into his own opposite. What does it mean when an artist leaps over into his own opposite?… Here, assuming we are willing to pause a little over this question, we are at once reminded of the best, strongest, most cheerful, bravest time there perhaps ever was in Wagner's life: that was the time when he was inwardly and deeply occupied with the idea of Luther's wedding. Who knows what accidents actually decided that today we have the Meistersinger instead of that wedding music? And how much of the one may still echo in the other? But there is no doubt that this "Luther's Wedding" too would have been in praise of chastity. Admittedly also in praise of sensuality: — and that is just how it would seem right to me, that is just how it would also have been "Wagnerian." For between chastity and sensuality there is no necessary opposition; every good marriage, every real love affair of the heart, is beyond this opposition. Wagner would have done well, it seems to me, to bring this pleasant fact home to his Germans once again with the help of a graceful and brave Luther comedy, for among the Germans there are and always have been many slanderers of sensuality; and perhaps Luther's merit is nowhere greater than right here: he had the courage of his sensuality (— in those days they called it, delicately enough, "evangelical freedom"…). But even where that opposition between chastity and sensuality really does exist, it luckily need not be a tragic opposition, not by a long way. That should hold at least for all those mortals who have turned out better and are in better spirits, who are far from simply counting their shaky balance between "animal and angel" as one of the arguments against existence — the finest and brightest, like Goethe, like Hafiz, have even seen in it one more charm of life. Such "contradictions" are exactly what seduce us into existence… On the other hand, it goes without saying that once the swine who have turned out badly are brought to worship chastity — and there are such swine! — they will see and worship in it only their own opposite, the opposite of the botched swine — oh, with what tragic grunting and zeal! one can imagine it — that embarrassing and superfluous opposition which Richard Wagner, undeniably, still wanted to set to music and put on the stage at the end of his life. What for, though? as we may fairly ask. For what did the swine matter to him, what do they matter to us? —
Along the way, of course, that other question cannot be avoided: what did he actually have to do with that manly (ah, so unmanly) "simpleton from the country," that poor devil and child of nature, Parsifal, whom he finally makes a Catholic by such slippery means — what? was this Parsifal even meant seriously? One might be tempted to guess the opposite, even to wish it — that Wagner's Parsifal was meant cheerfully, as a closing piece and satyr play, so to speak, with which Wagner the tragedian wanted to take his leave of us, of himself, and above all of tragedy, in a way fitting and worthy of him in particular: namely with an excess of the highest and most willful parody of the tragic itself, of the whole dreadful earthly seriousness and earthly misery of former days, of the crudest form of the ascetic ideal's unnaturalness, overcome at last. That, as I said, would have been exactly worthy of a great tragedian: for a tragedian, like every artist, reaches the last summit of his greatness only when he knows how to see himself and his art beneath him — when he knows how to laugh at himself. Is Wagner's "Parsifal" his secret laugh of superiority at himself, the triumph of the final, highest artistic freedom, artistic otherworldliness, that he had won at last? We would like to wish it, as I said: for what would a Parsifal meant seriously be? Do we really have to see in it (as someone put it, against me) "the monstrous offspring of a hatred of knowledge, spirit and sensuality gone mad"? A curse on the senses and the spirit in one hatred and one breath? A falling-away and a turning back to ideals that are Christian, sickly and afraid of the light? And in the end even a denial of himself, a crossing-out of himself, on the part of an artist who until then had aimed with all the power of his will at the opposite, namely at the highest spiritualization and sensualization of his art? And not only of his art: of his life too. Remember how enthusiastically Wagner in his day walked in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach: Feuerbach's phrase about "healthy sensuality" — in the thirties and forties that rang in Wagner's ears, as in those of many Germans (— they called themselves the "young Germans"), like the word of redemption. Did he in the end learn otherwise on this point? It seems, at the very least, that in the end he had the will to teach otherwise on it… And not only with the Parsifal trombones blaring down from the stage: — in the murky writings of his last years, as unfree as they are helpless, there are a hundred places where a secret wish and will betrays itself, a faint-hearted, uncertain, unconfessed will to preach, quite literally, turning back, conversion, denial, Christianity, the Middle Ages, and to tell his disciples "it is nothing! Seek salvation elsewhere!" Even the "blood of the Redeemer" is invoked at one point…
If I am to say what I think in such a case, which has much that is embarrassing about it — and it is a typical case —: we certainly do best to separate an artist from his work far enough that we do not take him as seriously as his work. He is, after all, only the precondition of his work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the dung and manure on which, out of which, it grows — and so, in most cases, something we have to forget if we want to enjoy the work itself. Insight into the origin of a work is the business of the physiologists and vivisectors of the spirit: never, ever of the aesthetic people, the artists! The poet and shaper of Parsifal could no more be spared a deep, thorough, even terrible immersion in the contrasts of the medieval soul, a climb down into them, a hostile withdrawal from all height, rigor and discipline of the spirit, a kind of intellectual perversity (if you will forgive me the word), than a pregnant woman can be spared the disgusting and strange things of pregnancy: things which, as I said, we have to forget in order to enjoy the child. We should guard against the confusion that an artist himself falls into only too easily, out of what the English call psychological contiguity, things lying side by side in the mind: as if he himself were what he is able to portray, think up, express. In fact the situation is this: if he were just that, he would simply never portray it, think it up, express it; a Homer would not have written an Achilles, a Goethe no Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles and if Goethe had been a Faust. A complete and whole artist is separated for all eternity from the "real," from what is actual; on the other hand we can understand how he might at times grow tired of this eternal "unreality" and falseness of his innermost existence, tired to the point of despair — and that he then very likely tries, for once, to reach over into what is most forbidden to him of all, into the actual, to actually be. With what success? You can guess… It is the typical half-wish of the artist: the same half-wish to which the aging Wagner also fell victim, and which he had to pay for so dearly, so disastrously (— through it he lost the valuable part of his friends). But in the end, quite apart from this half-wish, who would not wish altogether, for Wagner's own sake, that he had taken leave of us and his art differently, not with a Parsifal, but more victoriously, more sure of himself, more Wagnerian — less misleading, less ambiguous about what he wanted as a whole, less Schopenhauerian, less nihilistic?…
— So what is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the case of an artist, we are beginning to see it: nothing at all!… Or so many things that it is as good as nothing at all!… Let us first eliminate the artists: they are nowhere near independent enough in the world and against the world for their valuations, and the changes in them, to deserve any interest in themselves! At all times they have been the valets of some morality or philosophy or religion; quite apart from the fact that, unfortunately, they have often enough been the all-too-pliant courtiers of their followers and patrons, and keen-nosed flatterers of old powers or of powers just coming up. At the very least they always need a bulwark, a backing, an authority already established: artists never stand on their own, standing alone goes against their deepest instincts. So, for example, Richard Wagner took the philosopher Schopenhauer, "when the time had come," as his front man, as his bulwark: — who would think it even conceivable that he could have had the courage for an ascetic ideal without the backing that Schopenhauer's philosophy offered him, without the authority of Schopenhauer, which in the seventies was gaining the upper hand in Europe? (and that is without even reckoning whether, in the new Germany, an artist would have been possible at all without the milk of a pious, Reich-pious way of thinking).
— And with that we have arrived at the more serious question: what does it mean when a real philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal, a spirit who really stands on his own, like Schopenhauer, a man and a knight with a gaze of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows how to stand alone and does not wait first for front men and nods from above? — Let us consider right away Schopenhauer's remarkable position on art, which some kinds of people even find fascinating: for it was plainly this that first brought Richard Wagner over to Schopenhauer (talked into it, as everyone knows, by a poet, by Herwegh), and so completely that a full-blown theoretical contradiction tore open between his earlier and his later aesthetic creed — the former expressed, for example, in "Opera and Drama," the latter in the writings he published from 1870 on. In particular, and this is perhaps the strangest thing, from then on Wagner ruthlessly changed his judgment on the value and place of music itself: what did he care that until then he had made music into a means, a medium, a "woman," which absolutely needed a purpose, a man, in order to thrive — namely drama! He grasped all at once that more could be made of Schopenhauer's theory and innovation to the greater glory of music — namely with the sovereignty of music as Schopenhauer understood it: music set apart from all the other arts, the independent art in itself, not, like them, offering images of the world of appearances, but speaking the language of the will itself, straight out of the "abyss," as its most personal, most original, least derivative revelation. With this extraordinary rise in the value of music, as it seemed to grow out of Schopenhauer's philosophy, the musician himself also went up in price all at once, as never before: he now became an oracle, a priest, indeed more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the "in itself" of things, a telephone from the beyond — from then on he talked not only music, this ventriloquist of God — he talked metaphysics: what wonder that one day he finally talked ascetic ideals?…
Schopenhauer made use of Kant's version of the aesthetic problem — though he certainly did not look at it with Kant's eyes. Kant meant to do art an honor when, among the predicates of the beautiful, he favored and put in the foreground those that make up the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity. This is not the place to argue whether that was not, in the main, a mistake; all I want to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of approaching the aesthetic problem from the experiences of the artist (the creator), thought about art and the beautiful only from the "spectator's" side, and in doing so, without noticing it, got the "spectator" himself into the concept "beautiful." If only the philosophers of the beautiful had at least known this "spectator" well enough! — known, that is, as a great personal fact and experience, as a wealth of their own strong experiences, desires, surprises, raptures in the field of the beautiful! But the opposite, I fear, was always the case: and so from the very start we get from them definitions in which, as in that famous definition Kant gives of the beautiful, the lack of any finer self-experience sits in the shape of a fat worm of basic error. "Beautiful," Kant said, "is what pleases without interest." Without interest! Compare with this definition that other one, made by a real "spectator" and artist — Stendhal, who once calls the beautiful a promise of happiness. Here, at any rate, the very thing Kant singles out as the one mark of the aesthetic state is rejected and struck out: disinterestedness. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? — If, of course, our aestheticians never tire of throwing into the scales, in Kant's favor, that under the spell of beauty one can look even at unclothed female statues "without interest," then we may be allowed to laugh a little at their expense: — the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are "more interesting," and Pygmalion, at any rate, was not necessarily an "unaesthetic man." Let us think all the better of the innocence of our aestheticians, which is mirrored in such arguments; let us count it to Kant's credit, for example, what he has to teach, with the naivety of a country parson, about the peculiarities of the sense of touch!
— And here we come back to Schopenhauer, who stood far closer to the arts than Kant did and yet never got out from under the spell of Kant's definition: how did that happen? The circumstance is strange enough: he interpreted the words "without interest" for himself in the most personal way, out of an experience that must have been one of the most regular in his life. On few things does Schopenhauer speak as confidently as on the effect of aesthetic contemplation: he says of it that it counteracts precisely sexual "interestedness," rather like lupulin and camphor; he never tired of glorifying this getting free of the "will" as the great advantage and use of the aesthetic state. Indeed one might be tempted to ask whether his basic conception of "will and representation," the thought that there can be a redemption from the "will" only through "representation," did not take its origin from a generalization of that sexual experience. (In all questions about Schopenhauer's philosophy, by the way, we should never lose sight of the fact that it is the conception of a young man of twenty-six; so that it shares not only in what is specific to Schopenhauer but in what is specific to that season of life.) Let us hear, for example, one of the most explicit passages among the countless ones he wrote in honor of the aesthetic state ("The World as Will and Representation," I, 231); let us hear the tone in it, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude with which such words were spoken. "This is the painless state that Epicurus praised as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for that moment we are rid of the vile pressure of the will, we keep the Sabbath from the prison labor of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still"… What vehemence of words! What images of torment and of long weariness! What an almost pathological setting of "that moment" against the rest of time, the usual "wheel of Ixion," the "prison labor of willing," the "vile pressure of the will"! — But suppose Schopenhauer were right a hundred times over for his own person, what would that do for insight into the nature of the beautiful? Schopenhauer described one effect of the beautiful, the will-calming one — is it even the regular one? Stendhal, as I said, a nature no less sensual than Schopenhauer but one that turned out happier, stresses another effect of the beautiful: "the beautiful promises happiness"; to him it is precisely the arousing of the will (of "interest") by the beautiful that seems to be the fact of the matter. And could we not, in the end, object to Schopenhauer himself that he is quite wrong to think himself a Kantian here, that he did not understand Kant's definition of the beautiful in a Kantian way at all — that the beautiful pleased him too out of an "interest," even out of the very strongest, most personal interest of all: that of the tortured man who gets free of his torture?… And to come back to our first question, "what does it mean when a philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal?", here we at least get a first hint: he wants to get free of a torture. —
Let us not pull long faces right away at the word "torture": precisely in this case there is enough to set against it, enough to subtract — there is even something to laugh at. Let us not underestimate, above all, the fact that Schopenhauer, who really did treat sexuality as a personal enemy (its tool included, woman, this "instrument of the devil"), needed enemies in order to stay in good spirits; that he loved grim, bilious, black-green words; that he raged for the sake of raging, out of passion; that he would have fallen ill, would have become a pessimist (— for he was not one, however much he wished to be) without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality and the whole will to exist, to stay on. Otherwise Schopenhauer would not have stayed on, you can bet on that, he would have run away: but his enemies held him fast, his enemies seduced him back into existence again and again, his anger was, just as with the ancient Cynics, his balm, his recreation, his wages, his remedy against disgust, his happiness.
So much for what is most personal in the case of Schopenhauer; on the other hand there is also something typical about him — and only here do we come back to our problem. It is undeniable that as long as there are philosophers on earth, and everywhere there have been philosophers (from India to England, to take the opposite poles of the gift for philosophy), there exists a genuine philosophers' irritability and grudge against sensuality — Schopenhauer is only its most eloquent and, if one has the ear for it, also its most thrilling and delightful outburst —; there exists likewise a genuine philosophers' bias and warmth toward the whole ascetic ideal; we should not fool ourselves about that, or talk ourselves out of it. Both belong, as I said, to the type; if a philosopher lacks both, then he is — you may be sure of it — never anything but a "so-called" one. What does that mean? For this state of affairs has first to be interpreted: in itself it just stands there, dumb for all eternity, like every "thing in itself." Every animal, and so also the philosophical beast, strives instinctively for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can let its strength out completely and reach its maximum in the feeling of power; every animal just as instinctively, and with a fineness of scent that is "higher than all reason," abhors every kind of troublemaker and obstacle that lies or could lie across this path to the optimum (— it is not its path to "happiness" that I am talking about, but its path to power, to action, to the most powerful doing, and in most cases, in fact, its path to unhappiness). In this way the philosopher abhors marriage, together with whatever might talk him into it — marriage as an obstacle and a disaster on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher has been married so far? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer — they were not; more than that, one cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates — the malicious Socrates got married, it seems, ironically, precisely in order to demonstrate this proposition. Every philosopher would speak as Buddha once spoke when the birth of a son was announced to him: "Râhula is born to me, a fetter is forged for me" (Râhula here means "a little demon"); every "free spirit" would have to come to a thoughtful hour, assuming he has had a thoughtless one before it, like the hour that once came to this same Buddha — "cramped and crowded, he thought to himself, is life in the house, a place of impurity; freedom is in leaving the house": "and because he thought this, he left the house." The ascetic ideal points out so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot hear the story of all those resolute men who one day said No to all unfreedom and went off into some desert without rejoicing inwardly and clapping his hands: even granting that they were merely strong donkeys and the very opposite of a strong spirit. So what does the ascetic ideal mean in the case of a philosopher? My answer is — you will have guessed it long ago: at the sight of it the philosopher smiles, as at an optimum of the conditions for the highest and boldest spirituality — he does not deny "existence" with it, rather he affirms in it his existence and only his existence, and perhaps to the point where the wicked wish is not far from his mind: let the world perish, let there be philosophy, let there be the philosopher, let there be me!…
You can see it: these philosophers are no incorruptible witnesses and judges of the value of the ascetic ideal! They are thinking of themselves — what do they care about "the saint"! What they think of, in the ascetic ideal, is whatever they happen to be least able to do without: freedom from pressure, disturbance, noise, from business, duties, worries; a clear head; the dance, the leap and the flight of thoughts; good air — thin, clear, free, dry, the air of the heights, in which everything animal in a being grows more spiritual and gets wings; quiet in all the cellars; every dog neatly on its chain; no barking of hostility and shaggy old grudges; no gnawing worms of wounded ambition; modest, obedient innards, busy as mill-wheels but far away; the heart a stranger, beyond, in the future, posthumous — all in all, what they think of when they think of the ascetic ideal is the cheerful asceticism of an animal that has become a god and grown its wings, and that hovers over life more than it rests on it.
Everyone knows the three grand showpiece words of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility, chastity. Now take a close look, for once, at the lives of all the great, fruitful, inventive spirits — you will always find all three there again, to a certain degree. Not, it goes without saying, as if these were somehow their "virtues" — what does this kind of man have to do with virtues! — but as the truest and most natural conditions of their best existence, their finest fruitfulness. It is quite possible, at that, that their dominant spirituality first had to put a bridle on an unruly and touchy pride, or on a wanton sensuality; or that it had a hard enough time holding its will to the "desert" against a taste for luxury and for the choicest things, and likewise against an extravagant generosity of heart and hand. But it did it, precisely as the dominant instinct, the one that pushed its demands through against all the other instincts — and it does it still; if it did not, it simply would not be dominant. So there is nothing of "virtue" in this.
As for the desert I just mentioned, by the way, the one that the strong, independent-natured spirits withdraw into and go lonely in — oh, how different it looks from the desert the cultured dream of! — in some cases, in fact, they are the desert themselves, these cultured people. And one thing is certain: none of the actors of the spirit could stand it in there for a moment — for them it is nowhere near romantic and Syrian enough, nowhere near enough of a stage desert! Admittedly there is no shortage of camels in it either; but that is where the whole resemblance ends. A chosen obscurity, perhaps; a way of avoiding even oneself; a shyness of noise, of admiration, of newspapers, of influence; a small post, a daily routine, something that hides more than it puts on display; now and then the company of harmless, cheerful animals and birds, the sight of which is restful; a mountain range for society, but not a dead one, one with eyes (that is, with lakes); in some cases even a room in a crowded, anybody's hotel, where you can be sure of being taken for someone else and can talk to anyone and get away with it — that is "desert" here: oh, it is lonely enough, believe me! When Heraclitus withdrew into the open courts and colonnades of the enormous temple of Artemis, that "desert" was a worthier one, I admit: why do we lack such temples? (— perhaps we do not lack them: I am thinking just now of my finest study, the Piazza di San Marco, spring assumed, and likewise morning, the hours between 10 and 12.) But what Heraclitus was escaping is the same thing we still steer clear of now: the noise and the democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their news from the "empire" (Persia, you understand me), their market-stall junk of "today" — for we philosophers need peace from one thing before all else: from everything "today." We revere what is still, cold, noble, far-off, past — anything at all whose sight does not force the soul to defend itself and lace itself up tight — something you can talk with without talking out loud.
Just listen to the sound a spirit makes when it speaks: every spirit has its sound, loves its sound. That one over there, for instance, must be an agitator, which is to say a hollow head, a hollow pot: whatever goes into him, every single thing comes back out dull and thick, weighed down with the echo of the great emptiness. That one there rarely speaks except hoarsely: has he perhaps thought himself hoarse? That would be possible — ask the physiologists — but whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it gives away that at bottom he is not thinking about things, not thinking objectively, but only with things in view; that what he is really thinking about is himself and his listeners). This third one talks pushily, he comes too close to us, his breath blows in our face — without meaning to we shut our mouths, even though it is a book he is speaking to us through: the sound of his style tells the reason — that he has no time, that he has little faith in himself, that he gets his say today or never again. But a spirit that is sure of itself speaks softly; it seeks hiddenness, it lets itself be waited for. You can recognize a philosopher by this: he keeps out of the way of three glittering, loud things — fame, princes, and women. Which is not to say that they do not come to him. He shies away from too bright a light: that is why he shies away from his own age and its "day." In this he is like a shadow: the lower his sun sinks, the bigger he grows.
As for his "humility": just as he puts up with the dark, he also puts up with a certain dependence and obscurity. More than that, he is afraid of being disturbed by lightning; he shrinks from the exposed position of a tree too isolated and too much left to the elements, on which all bad weather vents its temper, and every temper its bad weather. His "maternal" instinct, the secret love for what is growing inside him, points him toward situations where he is spared having to think of himself — just as the instinct of the mother in woman has, until now, kept woman as a whole in her dependent position. In the end they ask for little enough, these philosophers; their motto is "whoever possesses is possessed" —: not, as I must say again and again, out of a virtue, out of some praiseworthy will to frugality and simplicity, but because their supreme master so demands it of them, demands it shrewdly and relentlessly — a master who has a sense for one thing only, and who gathers everything, time, strength, love, interest, for that alone, saves it up for that alone. This kind of man does not like being disturbed by enmities, nor by friendships either: he forgets easily, or despises easily. He thinks it bad taste to play the martyr; "to suffer for the truth" — he leaves that to the ambitious and to the stage heroes of the spirit, and to whoever else has time enough for it (— they themselves, the philosophers, have something to do for the truth). They are sparing in their use of big words; it is said that even the word "truth" goes against their grain: it sounds like showing off…
Finally, as for the "chastity" of philosophers: this kind of spirit clearly has its fruitfulness somewhere other than in children; and perhaps the survival of its name, its little immortality, lies somewhere else too (among the philosophers of ancient India they put it even less modestly: "what use are offspring to him whose soul is the world?"). There is nothing in this of chastity out of some ascetic scruple or hatred of the senses — no more than it is chastity when an athlete or a jockey keeps away from women. It is rather what their dominant instinct wants, at least for the times of the great pregnancy. Every artist knows how harmful sexual intercourse is in states of great spiritual tension and preparation; for the most powerful among them, the ones surest in their instincts, it does not even take experience, bad experience, to know it — it is precisely their "maternal" instinct that, for the sake of the work in the making, takes ruthless charge here of every other store and supply of strength, of the vigor of animal life: the greater force then uses up the smaller. — Apply this interpretation, by the way, to the case of Schopenhauer discussed above: in him the sight of the beautiful evidently worked as a trigger on the main force of his nature (the force of reflection and of the deepened gaze), so that this force then exploded and all at once became master of his consciousness. This is by no means meant to rule out the possibility that the peculiar sweetness and fullness that belong to the aesthetic state might come precisely from the ingredient "sensuality" (just as that "idealism" typical of girls of marriageable age comes from the same source) — so that sensuality is not canceled when the aesthetic state sets in, as Schopenhauer believed, but only transfigured, and no longer enters consciousness as sexual excitement. (I will come back to this point of view another time, in connection with the still more delicate problems of the physiology of aesthetics, so untouched and so unexplored until now.)
A certain asceticism, as we saw — a hard and cheerful self-denial, willingly embraced — is among the favorable conditions of the highest spirituality, and among its most natural consequences too: so it will come as no surprise, from the outset, that the philosophers, of all people, have never treated the ascetic ideal without a certain bias. Do a serious historical reckoning, and the bond between the ascetic ideal and philosophy turns out to be far tighter and stricter still. One could say that it was only on the leading strings of this ideal that philosophy learned to take its first steps and toddles on earth at all — oh, still so clumsy, oh, with such a sulky face, oh, so ready to fall over and lie on its belly, this shy little lump of a child, this tender thing on crooked legs! In the beginning philosophy fared as all good things do — for a long time they had no courage to be themselves, they kept looking around to see whether someone would come to their aid; more than that, they were afraid of everyone who watched them. Count off the individual drives and virtues of the philosopher, one after another — his drive to doubt, his drive to deny, his drive to wait and hold back (his "ephectic" drive), his drive to analyze, his drive to investigate, search, dare, his drive to compare and to balance, his will to neutrality and objectivity, his will to do everything "without anger or partisanship" —: has anyone yet grasped that for the longest time every one of them ran against the first demands of morality and conscience? (to say nothing of reason itself, which Luther still liked to call Mistress Clever, the clever whore). That a philosopher, had he ever become conscious of himself, would have had to feel himself the living embodiment of "we strive for the forbidden" — and consequently took care not to "feel himself," not to become conscious of himself?… As I said, it is no different with all the good things we are proud of today; measured even by the standard of the ancient Greeks, our whole modern existence, insofar as it is not weakness but power and the consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and godlessness: for it is precisely the things opposite to those we revere today that for the longest time had conscience on their side and God for their guardian. Hubris is our whole stance toward nature today, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the inventiveness of technicians and engineers, who never stop to think twice; hubris is our stance toward God, that is, toward some supposed spider of purpose and morality behind the great trap-net of cause and effect — we might say, like Charles the Bold in his struggle with Louis the Eleventh, "I fight the universal spider" —; hubris is our stance toward ourselves — for we experiment on ourselves as we would never allow ourselves to do with any animal, and cheerfully, curiously, slit open our own soul while the body is still alive: what do we care anymore about the "salvation" of the soul! Afterward we heal ourselves: being sick is instructive, we have no doubt of it, more instructive even than being healthy — the makers of sickness seem to us today more necessary than any medicine men and "saviors." We do violence to ourselves now, there is no doubt of it, we nutcrackers of the soul, we questioners and questionable ones, as if life were nothing but cracking nuts; and by that very fact we must necessarily become, day by day, ever more questionable, ever worthier to question — and by that, perhaps, worthier too — to live?…
All good things were once bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue. Marriage, for example, long looked like a sin against the rights of the community; once upon a time a man paid a penalty for being so immodest as to claim a woman for himself (that is where the "right of the first night" belongs, for instance — to this day in Cambodia the privilege of the priests, those guardians of "good old customs"). The gentle, kindly, yielding, pitying feelings — by now rated so high that they are almost "the values in themselves" — for the longest time had self-contempt against them, of all things: people were ashamed of mildness the way people today are ashamed of hardness (compare "Beyond Good and Evil," p. 232). Submission to the law: — oh, with what resistance of conscience the noble clans everywhere on earth, for their part, gave up the blood feud and granted the law power over themselves! "Law" was for a long time a forbidden thing, an outrage, an innovation; it came on the scene with force, as force, something people submitted to only with shame in their own eyes. Every smallest step on earth was once fought for with torments of mind and body: this whole point of view, "that not only stepping forward, no! stepping at all, movement, change, has needed its countless martyrs," sounds so strange to us today, of all times — I brought it to light in "Daybreak," pp. 17ff. "Nothing has been bought more dearly," it says there on p. 19, "than the little bit of human reason and feeling of freedom that now makes up our pride. But it is this very pride that now makes it almost impossible for us to feel our way into those immense stretches of time, the 'morality of custom,' which lie before 'world history' as the real and decisive main history that fixed the character of humanity: a time when suffering counted as virtue, cruelty as virtue, dissembling as virtue, revenge as virtue, the denial of reason as virtue, and on the other hand well-being counted as danger, the thirst for knowledge as danger, peace as danger, pity as danger, being pitied as disgrace, work as disgrace, madness as divinity, and change as the very essence of the immoral and of everything pregnant with ruin — everywhere!" —
The same book, p. 39, sets out how the oldest breed of contemplative men were judged, and under what pressure of judgment they had to live — despised exactly as far as they were not feared! Contemplation first appeared on earth in disguise, with an ambiguous look about it, with an evil heart and often a frightened head: there is no doubt of that. The inactive, brooding, unwarlike element in the instincts of contemplative men long surrounded them with a deep mistrust: against that there was no other remedy than to arouse a decided fear of themselves. And the old Brahmins, for example, knew how to do that! The oldest philosophers knew how to give their existence and their appearance a meaning, a footing and a background, on the strength of which people learned to fear them — or rather, looked at more closely, they did it out of a still more fundamental need: to win fear and reverence in their own eyes. For they found all the value judgments inside them turned against themselves; they had to fight down every kind of suspicion and resistance against "the philosopher in themselves." Being men of terrible ages, they did this with terrible means: cruelty toward themselves, inventive self-torment — that was the chief means of these power-thirsty hermits and innovators of thought, who first needed to do violence to the gods and to tradition inside themselves in order to be able to believe in their own innovation. I recall the famous story of King Vishvamitra, who from a thousand years of self-torture gained such a feeling of power and such confidence in himself that he set about building a new heaven: the uncanny symbol of the oldest and the newest history of philosophers on earth — everyone who has ever built a "new heaven" anywhere found the power to do it first in his own hell…
Let us sum up the whole situation in short formulas: the philosophical spirit has always, at first, had to disguise itself and wrap itself up like a chrysalis in the previously established types of the contemplative man — as priest, magician, soothsayer, as a religious man in general — in order to be possible at all, to any degree: the ascetic ideal served the philosopher for a long time as his outward form, as the precondition of his existence — he had to represent it in order to be able to be a philosopher, and he had to believe in it in order to be able to represent it. The peculiar stand-apart attitude of philosophers — world-denying, hostile to life, disbelieving in the senses, stripped of the senses — which has been held onto right up to the most recent times and has thereby almost come to count as the philosopher's attitude as such: it is above all a consequence of the emergency conditions under which philosophy came into being and survived at all. For the longest time, that is, philosophy would have been simply impossible on earth without an ascetic covering and costume, without an ascetic misunderstanding of itself. To put it vividly and visibly: right up to the most recent times, the ascetic priest has supplied the repulsive, gloomy caterpillar form that was the only one in which philosophy was allowed to live and creep about… Has that really changed? Has the gaudy and dangerous winged creature, that "spirit" which this caterpillar hid inside it, really, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, brighter world, been unhooded at last and let out into the light? Is there already enough pride, daring, bravery, self-certainty, will of the spirit, will to responsibility, freedom of the will in the world today for "the philosopher" to be — truly, now, on earth — possible?…
Only now, with the ascetic priest in sight, do we close in on our problem in earnest — what is the meaning of the ascetic ideal? — only now does it get "serious": for now we have standing opposite us the real representative of seriousness as such. "What is the meaning of all seriousness?" — this still more fundamental question is perhaps already on our lips here: a question for physiologists, fairly enough, but one we slip past for the time being. The ascetic priest has in that ideal not only his faith but also his will, his power, his interest. His right to exist stands and falls with that ideal: no wonder we run up against a terrible opponent here — assuming, that is, that we are opponents of that ideal — an opponent who is fighting for his very existence against those who deny it?… On the other hand, it is unlikely from the start that so interested a stance toward our problem will do the problem much good; the ascetic priest will hardly make a very good defender even of his own ideal, for the same reason a woman usually fails when she sets out to defend "woman as such" — let alone the most objective assessor and judge of the controversy stirred up here. So we are more likely to have to help him — this much is already obvious — to defend himself well against us than to have to fear being refuted too well by him…
The idea being fought over here is the ascetic priests' valuation of our life: they set this life (together with everything it belongs to — "nature," "the world," the whole sphere of becoming and passing away) in relation to an existence of an entirely different kind, which it stands opposed to and shuts out — unless it should turn against itself and deny itself: in that case, the case of an ascetic life, life counts as a bridge to that other existence. The ascetic treats life as a wrong road, which we must finally walk back along to the point where it began; or as an error which we refute by our deeds — ought to refute: for he demands that we go along with him; wherever he can, he forces his valuation of existence on people. What does that mean? Such a monstrous way of valuing is not written into the history of man as an exception and a curiosity: it is one of the broadest and longest facts there are. Read from a distant star, the capital letters of our life on earth might well tempt one to conclude that the earth is the truly ascetic star, a corner of sullen, arrogant and repulsive creatures who cannot shake off a deep disgust with themselves, with the earth, with all life, and who hurt themselves as much as they possibly can, for the pleasure of hurting: — probably their only pleasure. Just consider how regularly, how universally, on how nearly every side the ascetic priest makes his appearance; he belongs to no single race; he thrives everywhere; he grows out of every class. Not that he breeds his way of valuing and passes it on by heredity: the opposite is the case — on the whole, a deep instinct actually forbids him to reproduce. It must be a necessity of the first rank that makes this life-hostile species grow and thrive again and again — it must be an interest of life itself that such a type of self-contradiction does not die out. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here a ressentiment without equal is in charge, the ressentiment of an unsatisfied instinct and will to power that wants to be master not over something in life but over life itself, over its deepest, strongest, most basic conditions; here an attempt is made to use strength to stop up the sources of strength; here the eye turns green and spiteful against physiological flourishing itself, and especially against its expression — beauty, joy; while pleasure is felt, and sought, in failure, in withering, in pain, in accident, in ugliness, in self-chosen loss, in the unselfing, the self-scourging, the self-sacrifice. All this is paradoxical in the highest degree: we are standing here before a split that wants itself split, that enjoys itself in this very suffering and even grows more and more self-assured and triumphant the more its own precondition, the body's capacity to live, declines. "Triumph precisely in the final agony": under this sign of all superlatives the ascetic ideal has fought from the beginning; in this riddle of seduction, in this picture of rapture and torment it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its final victory. Crux, nux, lux — cross, nut, light — for the ascetic ideal these belong together as one. —
Suppose that a will to contradiction and anti-nature like this, a will made flesh, is brought to philosophize: on what will it vent its innermost willfulness? On whatever is felt most certainly of all to be true, to be real: it will look for error precisely where the real instinct of life most unconditionally locates truth. It will, for instance, as the ascetics of the Vedanta philosophy did, demote the body to an illusion, and pain along with it, and multiplicity, and the whole conceptual opposition of "subject" and "object" — errors, nothing but errors! To refuse to believe in your own self, to deny yourself your own "reality" — what a triumph! — and no longer merely over the senses, over what is in plain sight, but a far higher kind of triumph, an act of violence and cruelty against reason: a lust that reaches its peak when the ascetic self-contempt, the self-mockery of reason, decrees: "there is a realm of truth and of being, but reason, of all things, is shut out of it!"… (Let me say in passing: even in Kant's concept of the "intelligible character of things" something of this lecherous ascetic double-dealing survives, this love of turning reason against reason: for "intelligible character," in Kant, means a kind of property of things about which the intellect grasps just this much: that for the intellect it is — completely and utterly ungraspable.) — Finally, as seekers of knowledge, of all people, let us not be ungrateful for such resolute reversals of the familiar perspectives and valuations, with which the spirit has raged against itself for all too long, to all appearances wantonly and uselessly: to see differently for once in this way, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its eventual "objectivity" — not "objectivity" understood as "disinterested contemplation" (which is a non-concept and an absurdity), but as the ability to have your For and Against under your control and to switch them in and out: so that you know how to use precisely the difference of perspectives and of the interpretations our feelings make, in the service of knowledge. For from now on, my dear philosophers, let us guard better against the dangerous old conceptual fairy tale that set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us be on guard against the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself": — these always demand that we conceive of an eye that cannot be conceived at all, an eye that is supposed to have no direction whatsoever, in which the active and interpreting forces are supposed to be tied off, to be missing, though it is only through them that seeing becomes a seeing of something; so what is demanded here is always an absurdity and a non-concept of an eye. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival "knowing"; and the more feelings we allow to have their say about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on the same thing, the more complete our "concept" of that thing, our "objectivity," will be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to unhook the feelings one and all, supposing we could do it: what? would that not mean castrating the intellect?…
But let us come back. A self-contradiction like the one the ascetic seems to present, "life against life," is — this much is obvious at first sight — simply nonsense, once you reckon it physiologically and no longer psychologically. It can only be apparent; it must be a kind of provisional expression, an interpretation, a formula, an arrangement, a psychological misunderstanding of something whose real nature could not be understood for a long time, could not for a long time be named as it is in itself — a mere word, wedged into an old gap in human knowledge. And let me set the facts against it, briefly: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instinct of a degenerating life, a life that tries by every means to hold itself together and fights for its existence; it points to a partial physiological blockage and exhaustion, against which the deepest instincts of life, the ones still intact, fight on without pause, with ever new means and inventions. The ascetic ideal is one such means: so the truth is exactly the reverse of what the worshippers of this ideal believe — in it and through it, life wrestles with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is a trick for the preservation of life. That it could rule over man and grow so powerful, to the degree history shows, and especially wherever the civilizing and taming of man was carried through — that expresses a great fact, the sickliness of the type of man we have had so far, or at least of the tamed man: the physiological wrestling of man with death (more precisely: with weariness of life, with exhaustion, with the wish for the "end"). The ascetic priest is the wish to be otherwise, to be elsewhere, made flesh — indeed the highest degree of that wish, its real fervor and passion: but it is precisely the power of his wishing that is the chain binding him here; precisely through it he becomes a tool that must work to create more favorable conditions for being here and being human — precisely with this power he keeps them clinging to existence, the whole herd of those who turned out badly, the out-of-sorts, the shortchanged, the failures, the sufferers from themselves of every kind, by instinctively going ahead of them as their shepherd. You understand me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier — he, of all people, belongs among the very great conserving and Yes-creating powers of life…
What is that sickliness rooted in? For man is sicker, less certain, more changeable, less settled than any other animal, no doubt of it — he is the sick animal: where does that come from? Certainly he has also dared more, innovated more, defied more, challenged fate more than all the other animals put together: he, the great experimenter on himself, the unsatisfied, the unsated, who wrestles with animal, nature and gods for the final mastery — he, the still unconquered, the eternally future one, who can no longer find any rest from his own pressing strength, so that his future digs into the flesh of every present, relentless as a spur: — how could such a brave and rich animal not also be the most endangered, the longest and most deeply sick of all sick animals?… Man is sick of it, often enough; there are whole epidemics of this being sick of it (— around 1348, for instance, the time of the Dance of Death): but even this disgust, this weariness, this vexation with himself — all of it bursts out of him so powerfully that it immediately becomes a new chain. The No he says to life brings to light, as if by magic, an abundance of more tender Yeses; indeed, when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction — afterward it is the wound itself that forces him to live…
The more normal sickliness is in man — and we cannot deny this normality — the higher we should honor the rare cases of strength in soul and body, the lucky strokes of man, and the more strictly we should guard those who turned out well from the worst air of all, the air of the sickroom. Do we do that?… The sick are the greatest danger to the healthy; disaster for the strong comes not from the strongest but from the weakest. Does anyone know that?… On the whole, it is not at all the fear of man that we should wish to see lessened: for that fear forces the strong to be strong, and sometimes terrible — it keeps the well-turned-out type of man upright. What is to be feared, what works its doom like no other doom, would be not the great fear but the great disgust with man; likewise the great pity for man. Suppose these two were to mate one day: something of the uncanniest kind would at once and inevitably come into the world, the "last will" of man, his will to nothingness, nihilism. And in fact: much has been prepared for it. Anyone who has not only a nose to smell with but eyes and ears too will sense, almost everywhere he so much as sets foot today, something like the air of a madhouse, of a hospital — I am speaking, as is only fair, of the cultural regions of man, of every kind of "Europe" there now is on earth. The sickly are man's great danger: not the evil, not the "beasts of prey." Those who are failures from the start, the beaten-down, the broken — they are the ones, it is the weakest, who most undermine life among men, who most dangerously poison and call into question our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. Where can we escape it, that veiled look that leaves you carrying a deep sadness away with you, that backward-turned look of the one misborn from the beginning, which betrays how such a man talks to himself — that look which is a sigh. "If only I were someone else! that is what this look sighs: but there is no hope. I am what I am: how could I get free of myself? And yet — I am sick of myself!"… On such a soil of self-contempt, a real swamp soil, every weed grows, every poisonous plant, and all of it so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so sickly-sweet. Here the worms of revenge and rancor teem; here the air stinks of secrets and of things that cannot be admitted; here the web of the most malicious conspiracy is constantly being spun — the conspiracy of the suffering against those who turned out well and victorious; here the very sight of the victorious is hated. And what dishonesty, not to admit this hatred as hatred! What an outlay of big words and poses, what an art of "upright" slander! These failures: what noble eloquence flows from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble devotion swims in their eyes! What do they actually want? At least to act out justice, love, wisdom, superiority — that is the ambition of these "lowest ones," these sick ones! And how clever such an ambition makes them! Admire above all the counterfeiter's skill with which the stamp of virtue, even the ring, the golden ring of virtue, is imitated here. They have now taken out a lease on virtue entirely for themselves, these weak and hopelessly sickly people, no doubt about it: "we alone are the good, the just," so they say, "we alone are the men of good will." They walk around among us as living reproaches, as warnings to us — as if health, turning out well, strength, pride, the feeling of power were in themselves vicious things, for which one would someday have to atone, bitterly atone: oh how ready they are, at bottom, to make others atone, how they thirst to be hangmen!
Among them there are plenty of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly carry the word "justice" in their mouths like poisonous spit, lips always pursed, always ready to spit at everything that does not look discontented and goes its way in good spirits. Nor is that most disgusting species of the vain missing among them: the lying freaks who are out to act out "beautiful souls" and to bring, say, their botched sensuality to market, wrapped in verses and other diapers, as "purity of heart": the species of moral onanists and "self-gratifiers." The will of the sick to act out some form of superiority, their instinct for the crooked paths that lead to a tyranny over the healthy — where would it not be found, this will to power of the very weakest! The sick woman in particular: no one outdoes her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannizing. Nor does the sick woman spare anything living, anything dead; she digs up the most deeply buried things again (the Bogos of East Africa say: "woman is a hyena"). Look into the background of every family, every corporate body, every community: everywhere the struggle of the sick against the healthy — a quiet struggle, mostly, with little poison powders, with pinpricks, with the sly play of a martyr's face, but sometimes also with that sick-person's Pharisaism of the loud gesture, which likes best to play "noble indignation." It would like to make itself heard even in the consecrated halls of science, this hoarse indignant barking of sickly dogs, the snapping dishonesty and rage of such "noble" Pharisees (— I remind readers who have ears, once again, of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen Dühring, who makes the most indecent and repulsive use of the big moral drum in Germany today: Dühring, the first moral bigmouth there now is, even among his own kind, the antisemites). These are all men of ressentiment, these physiologically botched, these worm-eaten people, a whole quivering ground of underground revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in outbursts against the happy and just as much in masquerades of revenge, in pretexts for revenge: when would they actually reach their last, finest, most sublime triumph of revenge? Without a doubt, when they succeeded in shoving their own misery, all misery whatsoever, onto the conscience of the happy: so that one day the happy began to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps said to one another: "it is a disgrace to be happy! there is too much misery!"… But there could be no greater and more fatal misunderstanding than if the happy, those who turned out well, the powerful in body and soul, began in this way to doubt their right to happiness. Away with this "world turned upside down"! Away with this shameful softening of feeling! That the sick should not make the healthy sick — and that is what such a softening would amount to — that should surely be the highest point of view on earth: — but for that it is above all necessary that the healthy stay separated from the sick, guarded even from the sight of the sick, so that they do not mistake themselves for the sick. Or would it perhaps be their task to be nurses or doctors?… But they could not misjudge and deny their task worse than that — the higher should not degrade itself into a tool of the lower; the pathos of distance should keep the tasks apart too, for all eternity! Their right to exist, the privilege of the bell with a full ring over the jangling, cracked one, is a thousand times greater, after all: they alone are the guarantors of the future, they alone are under obligation to the future of man. What they can do, what they should do, no sick person could ever be allowed to do or asked to do: but so that they can do what only they should do, how could they still be free to play the doctor, the comforter, the "Savior" of the sick (the German word is Heiland, which means the healer as well as the one who saves)?… And therefore good air! good air! And away, in any case, from the neighborhood of all the madhouses and hospitals of culture! And therefore good company, our company! Or solitude, if it must be! But away, in any case, from the foul fumes of inner rot and of the secret worm-eating of the sick!… So that we, my friends, may defend ourselves at least a while longer against the two worst plagues, which may have been saved up precisely for us — against the great disgust with man! against the great pity for man!…
If you have grasped in all its depth — and I demand that here, of all places, you reach deep, grasp deeply — why it absolutely can not be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick, to make the sick healthy, then you have also grasped one more necessity — the necessity of doctors and nurses who are themselves sick: and now we have the meaning of the ascetic priest and hold it with both hands. The ascetic priest has to count for us as the predestined Savior, shepherd and advocate of the sick herd: only then do we understand his enormous historical mission. Rule over the suffering is his kingdom; his instinct points him to it; in it he has his very own art, his mastery, his kind of happiness. He must be sick himself, he must be related from the ground up to the sick and the shortchanged, in order to understand them — in order to get along with them; but he must also be strong, more master of himself even than of others, undamaged above all in his will to power, so that he has the trust and the fear of the sick, so that he can be for them a hold, a resistance, a support, a constraint, a taskmaster, a tyrant, a god. He has to defend them, his herd — against whom? Against the healthy, no doubt, and also against envy of the healthy; he must be the natural opponent and despiser of all rough, stormy, unbridled, hard, violent, beast-of-prey health and power. The priest is the first form of the more delicate animal, the one that despises more readily than it hates. He will not be spared having to wage war on the beasts of prey, a war of cunning (of "spirit") more than of force, as goes without saying — for that he will sometimes find it necessary to develop almost a new type of beast of prey in himself, or at least to signify one — a new animal terribleness in which the polar bear, the supple, cold, waiting tiger-cat and not least the fox seem bound into a unity as attractive as it is frightening. Suppose need forces him to it: then he steps, bear-solemn, venerable, clever, cold, deceptively superior, as herald and mouthpiece of more mysterious powers, right into the midst of the other kind of beast of prey itself, resolved to sow suffering, discord, self-contradiction on this ground wherever he can and, only too sure of his art, to become master over the suffering at any time. He brings ointments and balm with him, no doubt; but first he needs to wound in order to be a doctor; and then, as he stills the pain the wound makes, he poisons the wound at the same time — for that above all is what he is good at, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, in whose circle everything healthy necessarily becomes sick and everything sick necessarily becomes tame. He defends his sick herd well enough, in fact, this strange shepherd — he defends it against itself too, against the badness, spite, malice smoldering in the herd itself and whatever else all addicts and invalids have in common among themselves; he fights cleverly, hard and secretly against the anarchy and the ever-beginning self-dissolution within the herd, in which that most dangerous blasting powder and explosive, ressentiment, constantly piles up and piles up. To discharge this explosive so that it blows up neither the herd nor the shepherd — that is his real feat, his highest usefulness too; if we wanted to sum up the value of the priestly existence in the shortest formula, we would have to say straight out: the priest is the one who changes the direction of ressentiment.
For every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his suffering; more precisely, for a doer; more precisely still, for a guilty doer who is capable of suffering — in short, for something living on which he can discharge his emotions, in fact or in effigy, on any pretext at all: for the discharge of emotion is the sufferer's greatest attempt at relief, that is to say at numbing, the narcotic he involuntarily craves against torment of any kind. Here alone, I suspect, is where we find the real physiological cause of ressentiment, of revenge and of their relatives: in a craving, that is, for the numbing of pain through emotion: — people usually look for it, quite wrongly as it seems to me, in the defensive counter-blow, a mere protective measure of reaction, a "reflex movement" in the event of some sudden injury or danger, of the kind a frog without a head still carries out to get rid of a corrosive acid. But the difference is fundamental: in the one case you want to prevent further damage; in the other, you want to numb a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unbearable, by means of a more violent emotion of some kind, and to get it out of consciousness at least for the moment — for that you need an emotion, the wildest emotion possible, and to stir it up, the first pretext that comes along. "Someone must be to blame for my feeling bad" — this way of reasoning is characteristic of all sickly people, and all the more so the more the true cause of their feeling bad, the physiological one, stays hidden from them (— it may lie, say, in a disease of the sympathetic nerve, or in an excessive secretion of bile, or in a shortage of potassium sulphate and phosphate in the blood, or in pressure in the abdomen that dams up the circulation of the blood, or in degeneration of the ovaries and the like). All sufferers are frighteningly ready and inventive with pretexts for painful emotions; they enjoy their very suspicion, their brooding over wrongs and apparent slights; they root through the entrails of their past and present for dark, questionable stories where they are free to wallow in a tormenting suspicion and get drunk on their own poison of malice — they tear open the oldest wounds, they bleed from scars healed long ago, they make wrongdoers out of friend, wife, child and whatever else is nearest to them. "I am suffering: someone must be to blame for this" — so thinks every sickly sheep. But its shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to it: "Quite right, my sheep! someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for it — you yourself are to blame for yourself, and no one else!"… That is bold enough, false enough: but one thing at least is achieved by it; by it, as I said, the direction of ressentiment is — changed.
We can now guess what, as I picture it, life's instinct as a healer has at least attempted through the ascetic priest, and what purpose the temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and paralogical concepts as "guilt," "sin," "sinfulness," "corruption," "damnation" had to serve: to make the sick harmless up to a certain point, to destroy the incurable by their own hand, to give the more mildly ill a strict direction toward themselves, a backward direction for their ressentiment ("one thing is needful" —), and in this way to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, self-overcoming. It goes without saying that with a "medication" of this kind, a mere medication of the emotions, there can be absolutely no question of a real cure of the sick in the physiological sense; we could not even claim that the instinct of life had in any way had a cure in view, or in mind. A kind of crowding together and organization of the sick on the one hand (— the word "church" is the most popular name for it), a kind of provisional safeguarding of those who turned out healthier, the more abundantly endowed, on the other, and so the tearing open of a gulf between healthy and sick — for a long time that was everything! And it was a great deal! it was a very great deal!…
(In this essay, as you can see, I am starting from an assumption that, for readers of the kind I need, I do not first have to justify: that "sinfulness" in man is not a fact but only the interpretation of a fact, namely of a physiological low mood — the latter seen from a moral-religious perspective that no longer has any binding force for us. — That someone feels "guilty," "sinful," is absolutely no proof yet that he is right to feel so; any more than someone is healthy merely because he feels healthy. Just remember the famous witch trials: in those days the most sharp-sighted and humane judges had no doubt that guilt was present here; the "witches" themselves had no doubt about it — and yet the guilt was missing. — To put that assumption in a broader form: "pain of the soul" itself does not count for me as a fact at all, but only as an interpretation (a causal interpretation) of facts that so far cannot be stated exactly: and so as something that still hangs completely in the air and has no scientific standing — a fat word, really, put in the place of a question mark that is downright spindle-thin. When someone cannot cope with a "pain of the soul," the fault, to put it crudely, is not in his "soul"; more probably in his belly (crudely put, as I said: which by no means expresses a wish to be heard crudely, understood crudely, as well…). A strong, well-turned-out man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds included) the way he digests his meals, even when he has tough morsels to swallow. If he "cannot cope" with an experience, this kind of indigestion is just as physiological as the other kind — and often, in fact, only one of the consequences of the other. — With a view like this, between ourselves, you can still be the strictest opponent of all materialism…)
But is he really a physician, this ascetic priest? — We have already seen why we can hardly call him a physician, however much he likes to think of himself as a "Savior" and to have himself worshipped as a "Savior." He fights only the suffering itself, the displeasure of the sufferer, not its cause, not the actual being-sick — and that has to be our most fundamental objection to priestly medication. But once you take up the perspective that only the priest knows and has, there is no easy end to your admiration for everything he has seen, sought and found from there. The easing of suffering, "consoling" of every kind — that turns out to be his very genius: how inventively he has understood his task as consoler, how unhesitatingly and boldly he has chosen his means for it! Christianity in particular might be called one great treasure-house of the most ingenious means of consolation: so much that refreshes, soothes and numbs has been piled up inside it, so much of the most dangerous and daring has been risked for this purpose, and it has guessed with such finesse, such refinement, such southern refinement, which stimulant passions can conquer, at least for a time, the deep depression, the leaden fatigue, the black sadness of the physiologically inhibited. For, speaking generally, what every great religion has chiefly been about is fighting a certain weariness and heaviness that had become an epidemic. We can assume from the start that, from time to time and in certain places on earth, a physiological feeling of inhibition is almost bound to take hold of broad masses of people — a feeling which, for lack of physiological knowledge, does not enter consciousness as what it is, so that its "cause" and its remedy can only be sought and tried in psychological and moral terms (— and this, in fact, is my most general formula for what is commonly called a "religion").
Such a feeling of inhibition can have the most varied origins: perhaps the result of crossing races too foreign to one another (or classes — classes always express differences of descent and race as well: the European "world-weariness," the "pessimism" of the nineteenth century, is essentially the result of an absurdly sudden mixing of classes); or brought on by a mistaken migration — a race that has ended up in a climate it lacks the power to adapt to (the case of the Indians in India); or the aftereffect of age and fatigue in a race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 on); or of a wrong diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages; the nonsense of the vegetarians, who admittedly have the authority of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Shakespeare on their side); or of blood poisoning, malaria, syphilis and the like (the German depression after the Thirty Years' War, which infected half of Germany with foul diseases and so prepared the ground for German servility, German faintheartedness). In every such case a fight against the feeling of displeasure is attempted in the grandest style; let us take a brief look at its most important practices and forms. (I leave entirely aside here, as is only fair, the philosophers' own fight against the feeling of displeasure, which usually goes on at the same time — it is interesting enough, but too absurd, too irrelevant in practice, too cobwebby and idle, as when pain is supposed to be proved an error, on the naive assumption that pain must disappear once the error in it is recognized — and look! it took good care not to disappear…)
First, that dominant displeasure is fought with means that bring the feeling of life as a whole down to its lowest point. If possible no willing at all, no wish anymore; avoid everything that stirs passion, that makes "blood" (eat no salt: the hygiene of the fakir); do not love; do not hate; equanimity; do not take revenge; do not get rich; do not work; beg; if possible no woman, or as little woman as possible: in matters of the mind, Pascal's principle "il faut s'abêtir" — one must make oneself stupid. The result, expressed in psychological and moral terms: "un-selfing," "sanctification"; expressed in physiological terms: hypnotization — the attempt to achieve for human beings something close to what winter sleep is for some kinds of animals and summer sleep for many plants in hot climates, a minimum of consumption and metabolism at which life just barely goes on without really entering consciousness anymore. An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent on this goal — for nothing, perhaps?… We must not doubt for a moment that such sportsmen of "holiness," whom every age and almost every people has in abundance, really did find a real redemption from what they fought with so rigorous a training — in countless cases, with the help of their system of hypnotizing means, they really did get free of that deep physiological depression: which is why their method counts among the most universal facts of ethnology. Nor do we have any right at all to count such a plan of starving out the body and its desires as in itself a symptom of madness (as a clumsy sort of roast-beef-eating "free spirits" and Sir Andrew Aguecheeks like to do). It is all the more certain that it opens, and can open, the road to every sort of mental disturbance — to "inner lights," for example, as with the hesychasts of Mount Athos, to hallucinations of sound and shape, to voluptuous overflowings and ecstasies of sensuality (the story of Saint Teresa).
The people afflicted with such states have always interpreted them as wildly and falsely as possible, that goes without saying: but do not miss the tone of utterly convinced gratitude that already rings out in the very will to this kind of interpretation. The highest state, redemption itself, that total hypnotization and stillness finally reached, always counts for them as the mystery in itself, which even the highest symbols are not enough to express, as an entering and homecoming into the ground of things, as a getting free of all delusion, as "knowledge," as "truth," as "being," as a release from every goal, every wish, every deed, as a beyond even of good and evil. "Good and evil," says the Buddhist, "— both are fetters: the perfected one became master over both"; "what is done and what is left undone," says the believer of the Vedanta, "gives him no pain; being wise, he shakes good and evil off him; his kingdom suffers no more through any deed; he has gone beyond good and evil, beyond both": — an all-Indian conception, then, as much Brahmanist as Buddhist. (Neither in the Indian nor in the Christian way of thinking does that "redemption" count as attainable through virtue, through moral improvement, however high they set the hypnotizing value of virtue: hold on to this — and by the way, it simply fits the facts. That they stayed true on this point may perhaps be regarded as the best piece of realism in the three greatest religions, otherwise so thoroughly moralized through and through. "For the one who knows there is no duty"… "Redemption does not come about through the adding on of virtues: for it consists in being one with Brahman, which is capable of no addition of perfection; and just as little through the shedding of faults: for Brahman, to be one with which is what makes up redemption, is eternally pure" — these passages from the commentary of Shankara, quoted by the first real expert in Indian philosophy in Europe, my friend Paul Deussen.)
So let us hold the "redemption" of the great religions in honor; on the other hand we find it a little hard to keep a straight face at the esteem in which these same people, so weary of life that they are too tired even to dream, hold deep sleep all by itself — deep sleep, that is, as already an entering into Brahman, as achieved mystical union with God. "When he has then fallen fully asleep" — so the oldest and most venerable "scripture" says of it — "and come completely to rest, so that he no longer sees any dream image, then, O dear one, he is united with what is, he has entered into himself — embraced by the self that is made of knowledge, he no longer has any consciousness of what is outside or inside. This bridge is not crossed by day and night, nor by age, nor by death, nor by suffering, nor by good work, nor by evil work." "In deep sleep," say likewise the believers of this deepest of the three great religions, "the soul lifts itself out of this body, enters into the highest light and thereby steps forth in its own shape: there it is the highest spirit itself, which wanders about, jesting and playing and enjoying itself, whether with women or with chariots or with friends; there it no longer thinks back to this appendage of a body, to which the prana (the breath of life) is harnessed like a draft animal to the cart." All the same, here too, as in the case of "redemption," let us keep in mind that at bottom, for all the splendor of its oriental exaggeration, this expresses only the same valuation as that of the clear, cool, Greek-cool, but suffering Epicurus: the hypnotic feeling of nothingness, the stillness of deepest sleep, freedom from suffering in short — sufferers and the thoroughly out-of-sorts may well take this for the highest good, as the value of values; it must be rated by them as positive, be felt as the positive itself. (By the same logic of feeling, in all pessimistic religions nothingness is called God.)
Much more often than such a hypnotic total damping of sensibility, of the capacity for pain — which already presupposes rarer powers, above all courage, contempt for opinion, "intellectual stoicism" — a different training is tried against states of depression, one that is at any rate easier: mechanical activity. It is beyond all doubt that this relieves a suffering existence to no small degree: today this fact is called, somewhat dishonestly, "the blessing of work." The relief consists in this, that the sufferer's interest is systematically turned away from the suffering — that consciousness is constantly filled with doing and only ever doing, so that little room is left in it for suffering: for it is narrow, this chamber of human consciousness! Mechanical activity and what belongs to it — such as absolute regularity, punctual unthinking obedience, the once-and-for-all of a way of life, the filling up of time, a certain permission for, indeed a discipline in "impersonality," in self-forgetting, in "incuria sui," not caring about oneself —: how thoroughly, how finely the ascetic priest has known how to use it in the fight with pain! Precisely when he had to deal with sufferers of the lower classes, with work-slaves or prisoners (or with women: who after all are mostly both at once, work-slaves and prisoners), it took little more than a little skill at renaming and rechristening to make them see from then on a benefit, a relative happiness, in things they hated: — the slave's dissatisfaction with his lot was in any case not invented by the priests. —
An even more valued means in the fight with depression is the prescribing of a small pleasure that is easily within reach and can be made into a rule; this medication is often used together with the one just discussed. The most common form this prescribed cure of pleasure takes is the pleasure of giving pleasure (as doing good, giving gifts, relieving, helping, encouraging, consoling, praising, honoring); when the ascetic priest prescribes "love of the neighbor," he is at bottom prescribing an arousal of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, even if in the most cautious dosage — the will to power. The happiness of the "smallest superiority," which all doing good, being useful, helping and honoring bring with them, is the most abundant means of consolation that the physiologically inhibited habitually use, provided they are well advised: otherwise they hurt one another, in obedience, naturally, to the same basic instinct. If you look for the beginnings of Christianity in the Roman world, you find associations for mutual support, societies for the poor, for the sick, for burials, grown up on the lowest soil of the society of that day, in which that chief means against depression, the small pleasure, the pleasure of doing good to one another, was deliberately cultivated — perhaps this was something new at the time, a real discovery? In a "will to mutuality" called up in this way — a will to form a herd, to "community," to the "cenacle" where the faithful gather — the will to power that this aroused, if only in the smallest degree, must now in turn break out anew and much more fully: the forming of a herd is an essential step and victory in the fight with depression. As the community grows, the individual too gains a new and stronger interest, which often enough lifts him above the most personal part of his ill humor, his aversion to himself (the "despectio sui," the self-contempt, of Geulincx). All the sick, all the morbid strive instinctively, from a longing to shake off their dull displeasure and feeling of weakness, for a herd organization: the ascetic priest guesses this instinct and promotes it; wherever there are herds, it is the instinct of weakness that wanted the herd, and the cleverness of the priest that organized it. For do not overlook this: the strong strive apart from one another just as naturally and necessarily as the weak strive toward one another; when the former join together, it happens only with a view to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of their will to power, and with much resistance from the individual conscience; the latter, on the contrary, arrange themselves together, taking pleasure in this very arrangement — their instinct is as satisfied by it as the instinct of the born "masters" (that is, of the solitary beast-of-prey species, man) is at bottom irritated and disturbed by organization. Beneath every oligarchy there always lies hidden — the whole of history teaches it — the tyrannical craving; every oligarchy trembles constantly with the strain each of its members needs to stay master of this craving. (That, for example, is how it was with the Greeks: Plato testifies to it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his own kind — and himself…)
The means of the ascetic priest that we have come to know so far — the total damping of the feeling of life, mechanical activity, the small pleasure, above all that of "love of the neighbor," the herd organization, the awakening of the community's feeling of power, through which the individual's vexation with himself is drowned out by his pleasure in the thriving of the community — these are, measured by a modern standard, his innocent means in the fight with displeasure: let us turn now to the more interesting ones, the "guilty" ones. With all of them it comes to one thing: some kind of orgy of feeling — used against the dull, paralyzing, long-drawn-out painfulness as the most effective means of numbing; which is why priestly inventiveness in thinking through this one question has been downright inexhaustible: "how does one bring about an orgy of feeling?"… That sounds harsh: obviously it would sound sweeter and perhaps go down better if I said something like "the ascetic priest has always made use of the enthusiasm that lies in all strong passions." But why go on stroking the softened ears of our modern weaklings? Why should we, for our part, yield even one step to their hypocrisy of words? For us psychologists that would already be a hypocrisy of the deed; quite apart from the fact that it would disgust us. For if a psychologist today shows his good taste in anything (— others may say: his integrity), it is in this: he resists the shamefully moralized way of talking that by now slimes over all modern judgment of man and things. For make no mistake about this: the most essential mark of modern souls, modern books, is not the lie but the ingrained innocence of their moralistic falseness. Having to rediscover this "innocence" everywhere — that is perhaps the most repulsive part of all the work, not without its own dangers, that a psychologist has to take on today; it is a piece of our great danger — it is a road that leads perhaps precisely us to the great disgust… I have no doubt what modern books alone would be good for (supposing they last, which admittedly there is no need to fear, and supposing likewise that one day there is a posterity with a stricter, harder, healthier taste) — what everything modern in general would be good for, could be good for, in the hands of this posterity: as emetics — and that by virtue of its moral sugariness and falseness, its innermost womanishness, which likes to call itself "idealism" and at any rate believes it is idealism. Our educated people of today, our "good people," do not lie — that is true; but it does not do them honor! The real lie, the genuine, resolute, "honest" lie (on whose value you should listen to Plato) would be something far too severe, too strong for them; it would demand what one may not demand of them, that they open their eyes to themselves, that they know how to tell "true" from "false" in their own case. Only the dishonest lie befits them; everyone who feels himself a "good man" today is perfectly incapable of taking any position on anything except a dishonest and false one, false to the very bottom, but innocently false, good-heartedly false, blue-eyed false, virtuously false. These "good people" — all of them are now moralized down to the ground and, as far as honesty goes, disgraced and botched for all eternity: which of them could still stand a truth "about man"!… Or, to ask it more tangibly: which of them could bear a true biography!…
A few indications: Lord Byron set down some of the most personal things about himself, but Thomas Moore was "too good" for that: he burned his friend's papers. Dr. Gwinner, Schopenhauer's executor, is said to have done the same: for Schopenhauer too had set down some things about himself and perhaps also against himself (eis heauton, "to himself"). The capable American Thayer, Beethoven's biographer, stopped his work all at once: having reached some point or other in this venerable and naive life, he could not stand it anymore… Moral: what clever man today would still write one honest word about himself? — he would have to belong to the order of holy foolhardiness. We are promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner: who doubts that it will be a clever autobiography?… Let us also recall the comic horror that the Catholic priest Janssen stirred up in Germany with his picture of the German Reformation movement, a picture square and harmless beyond all belief; what would people do if someone told us this movement differently for once, if for once a real psychologist told us about a real Luther, no longer with the moralistic simplicity of a country parson, no longer with the sugary and considerate bashfulness of Protestant historians, but, say, with the fearlessness of a Taine, out of a strength of soul and not out of a clever indulgence toward strength?… (The Germans, by the way, have at last produced the classic type of the latter handsomely enough — they may well count him as theirs, chalk him up to their credit: namely in their Leopold Ranke, this born classic advocate of every stronger cause, this cleverest of all the clever "men of fact.")
But I will have been understood already: — reason enough, is it not, all in all, why we psychologists today cannot shake off a certain mistrust of ourselves?… Probably we too are still "too good" for our trade, probably we too are still the victims, the prey, the sick of this moralized taste of the age, however much we feel ourselves its despisers — probably it infects even us. What was it that diplomat warned against, speaking to his own kind? "Let us mistrust our first impulses above all, gentlemen! he said, they are almost always good"… That is how every psychologist today should speak to his own kind… And with that we come back to our problem, which in fact demands some severity from us, some mistrust in particular toward "first impulses." The ascetic ideal, aiming at an orgy of feeling: — anyone who remembers the previous essay will already guess, in essence, what is now to be set out, packed into these nine words. To unhinge the human soul for once from all its joints, to plunge it into terrors, chills, fevers and raptures so thoroughly that it gets free, as if by a lightning strike, of everything small and petty in displeasure, dullness, ill humor: which roads lead to this goal? And which of them most surely?… At bottom all the great passions have a capacity for it, provided they discharge suddenly — anger, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and in fact the ascetic priest has unhesitatingly taken the whole pack of wild dogs in man into his service, letting loose now this one, now that, always for the same purpose, to wake man out of his slow sadness, to put his dull pain, his lingering misery to flight at least for a time, and always, too, under a religious interpretation and "justification." Every orgy of feeling of this kind has to be paid for afterward, that goes without saying — it makes the sick sicker —: and that is why this kind of remedy for pain, measured by a modern standard, is a "guilty" kind.
Yet fairness demands that we insist all the more that it was applied with a good conscience, that the ascetic priest prescribed it in the deepest belief in its usefulness, indeed its indispensability — and often enough nearly breaking himself over the misery he created; likewise, that the violent physiological revenges of such excesses, perhaps even mental disturbances, do not really contradict the whole sense of this kind of medication: which, as was shown before, was not aimed at curing sicknesses but at fighting the displeasure of depression, at relieving it, at numbing it. This goal was reached this way too. The master stroke the ascetic priest allowed himself, in order to make every kind of tearing and ecstatic music ring out on the human soul, consisted — everyone knows this — in making use of the feeling of guilt. The previous essay briefly indicated its origin — as a piece of animal psychology, as nothing more: there the feeling of guilt met us, as it were, in its raw state. Only in the hands of the priest, this true artist in feelings of guilt, did it take on form — oh, what a form! "Sin" — for that is the priestly reinterpretation of the animal "bad conscience" (cruelty turned backward) — has so far been the greatest event in the history of the sick soul: in it we have the most dangerous and most fateful trick of religious interpretation. Man, suffering from himself, somehow, at any rate physiologically, rather like an animal shut in a cage, unclear why, what for? greedy for reasons — reasons bring relief —, greedy also for means and narcotics, consults at last with someone who knows hidden things too — and there it is! he gets a hint, he gets from his magician, the ascetic priest, the first hint about the "cause" of his suffering: he is to look for it in himself, in a guilt, in a piece of the past, he is to understand his suffering itself as a state of punishment… He has heard, he has understood, the unhappy man: now he is like the hen around which a line has been drawn. He never gets out of this circle of lines again: the sick man has been made into "the sinner"… And now there is no getting rid of the sight of this new sick man, "the sinner," for a couple of thousand years — will we ever be rid of him again? — wherever you look, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of the sinner, always moving in the one direction (in the direction of "guilt," as the only cause of suffering); everywhere the evil conscience, this "gruesome beast," as Luther puts it; everywhere the past chewed over again, the deed twisted, the envious "green eye" for everything one does; everywhere the will to misunderstand suffering, made the content of a life, its reinterpretation into feelings of guilt, fear and punishment; everywhere the scourge, the hair shirt, the starving body, the contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the wheel, on the cruel wheelwork of a restless, morbidly lustful conscience; everywhere the mute torment, the extreme fear, the agony of the tortured heart, the convulsions of an unknown happiness, the cry for "redemption." In fact, with this system of procedures the old depression, heaviness and weariness were thoroughly overcome, life became very interesting again: awake, eternally awake, sleepless, glowing, charred, exhausted and yet not tired — that is how man looked, "the sinner," who was initiated into these mysteries. This great old magician in the fight with displeasure, the ascetic priest — he had plainly won, his kingdom had come: already people no longer complained against pain, they thirsted for pain; "more pain! more pain!" so cried the longing of his disciples and initiates for centuries. Every orgy of feeling that hurt, everything that broke, overturned, crushed, transported, enraptured, the secret of the torture chambers, the inventiveness of hell itself — all of it was now discovered, guessed, put to use, all of it stood at the magician's service, all of it from then on served the victory of his ideal, the ascetic ideal… "My kingdom is not of this world" — he said, as before: did he really still have the right to speak so?… Goethe claimed there were only thirty-six tragic situations: from that we could guess, if we did not already know, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He — knows more…
Where this whole kind of priestly medicine is concerned, the "guilty" kind, every word of criticism is one word too many. That such an orgy of feeling, of the kind the ascetic priest likes to prescribe for his patients in this case (under the holiest of names, it goes without saying, and just as thoroughly soaked in the holiness of his purpose), has ever really done good to any sick person — who would have the stomach to defend a claim like that? At the very least we ought to agree on what the word "do good" means. If what is meant is that such a system of treatment has improved man, I do not object: only I add what "improved" means when I say it — exactly as much as "tamed," "weakened," "discouraged," "refined," "made delicate," "unmanned" (in other words, almost as much as damaged…). But when the people in question are mainly the sick, the out-of-sorts, the depressed, then such a system, even granting that it made the sick person "better," under all circumstances makes him sicker; just ask the doctors of the insane what a methodical course of penance-torments, fits of contrition and convulsions of redemption always brings with it. Ask history too: everywhere the ascetic priest has pushed through this treatment of the sick, sickness has every time grown deeper and wider with uncanny speed. What was always the "success"? A shattered nervous system, on top of whatever was already sick; and that on the largest scale as on the smallest, in individuals as in masses. In the wake of the training in penance and redemption we find enormous epidemics of epilepsy, the greatest history knows of, like those of the St. Vitus and St. John dancers of the Middle Ages; as another form of its aftermath we find terrible paralyses and lasting depressions, by which the temperament of a people or a city (Geneva, Basel) is sometimes turned once and for all into its opposite; — here belongs the witch-hysteria too, something related to sleepwalking (eight great epidemic outbreaks of it between 1564 and 1605 alone) —; in its wake we likewise find those mass deliriums hungry for death, whose dreadful cry, "evviva la morte," long live death, was heard across the whole of Europe, interrupted now by lustful, now by destruction-crazed quirks of temper: just as the same swing of feeling, with the same breaks and reversals, is still observed everywhere today, in every case where the ascetic doctrine of sin once again scores a great success (the religious neurosis appears as a form of "evil being": of that there is no doubt. What it is? That is the question.)
Seen on the grand scale, the ascetic ideal and its sublime moral cult, this most ingenious, most unscrupulous and most dangerous systematizing of every means of emotional excess under the protection of holy intentions, has written itself into the whole history of man in a terrible and unforgettable way; and unfortunately not only into his history… I could hardly name anything else that has done such destructive harm to the health and racial vigor of Europeans in particular as this ideal has; we may, without any exaggeration, call it the real disaster in the history of the health of European man. At most, one influence might be set beside it: the specifically Germanic one, I mean the alcohol poisoning of Europe, which so far has kept strict pace with the political and racial dominance of the Germanic peoples (— wherever they injected their blood, they injected their vice too). — Third in the series would be syphilis — next in line, but at a great distance.
The ascetic priest has ruined the health of the soul wherever he has so much as come to power; consequently he has also ruined taste in the arts and in letters — and he is ruining it still. "Consequently"? — I hope you will simply grant me that "consequently"; at any rate I do not intend to prove it first. A single pointer: it concerns the foundation book of Christian literature, its real model, its "book in itself." Even in the midst of the Greek and Roman splendor, which was a splendor of books as well, face to face with an ancient world of writings that had not yet withered and been smashed to pieces, at a time when one could still read certain books for which we would now trade half of whole literatures, the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators — they are called the Church Fathers — already dared to decree: "we too have our classical literature, we do not need that of the Greeks" — and with that they pointed proudly to books of legends, letters of apostles and little apologetic tracts, roughly the way the English "Salvation Army" fights its fight against Shakespeare and other "heathens" today with a literature of the same kind.
I do not love the "New Testament," you will have guessed it already; it almost unsettles me to stand so alone with my taste as regards this most valued, most overvalued piece of writing (the taste of two thousand years is against me): but what can I do! "Here I stand, I can do no other" — I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament — yes, that is something else altogether: all honor to the Old Testament! In it I find great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest on earth, the incomparable naivety of the strong heart; more than that, I find a people. In the New, by contrast, nothing but the small business of little sects, nothing but rococo of the soul, nothing but curlicues, crooked corners and oddities, nothing but the stale air of the prayer meeting, not to forget an occasional whiff of pastoral sweetness that belongs to the period (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic. Humility and self-importance side by side; a chattiness of feeling that almost numbs you; passionateness, no passion; painful posturing; good breeding was plainly missing here altogether. How can anyone make such a fuss over his little failings as these pious little men do! Nobody gives a hoot about it; let alone God. In the end they even want "the crown of eternal life," all these little people of the provinces: but what for? in return for what? Immodesty can go no further. An "immortal" Peter: who could stand him! They have an ambition that makes you laugh: that crowd chews over its most private concerns, its stupidities, its sadnesses and its street-corner worries, as if the in-itself of things were obliged to care about them; that crowd never tires of wrapping God himself up in the smallest misery they happen to be stuck in. And this constant being on first-name terms with God, in the worst possible taste! This Jewish, and not merely Jewish, pawing at God with snout and paw!…
There are small despised "heathen peoples" in eastern Asia from whom these first Christians could have learned something essential, some tact in reverence; those peoples, as Christian missionaries testify, do not permit themselves to take the name of their god into their mouths at all. That strikes me as delicate enough; what is certain is that it is too delicate not only for "first" Christians: to feel the contrast, just remember Luther, that "most eloquent" and most immodest peasant Germany has ever had, and the Lutheran tone of voice, which he liked best of all precisely in his conversations with God. Luther's resistance to the mediating saints of the Church (and in particular to "the devil's sow, the pope") was, there is no doubt about it, at bottom the resistance of a lout who was annoyed by the good etiquette of the Church, that etiquette of reverence belonging to priestly taste, which admits only the more consecrated and the more silent into the holy of holies and shuts it against the louts. These were to have no say here, precisely here, once and for all — but Luther the peasant flatly wanted it otherwise, that was not German enough for him: above all he wanted to speak directly, to speak himself, to speak "without ceremony" with his God… Well, he did it. — The ascetic ideal, as you can guess, was never and nowhere a school of good taste, still less of good manners — at best it was a school of priestly manners —: the reason is that it has something in its very body that is the deadly enemy of all good manners — a lack of measure, a hatred of measure, it is itself a "non plus ultra," an extreme nothing goes beyond.
The ascetic ideal has ruined not only health and taste; it has ruined a third thing, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth — I will take care not to say what else (when would I ever finish!). It is not what this ideal has done that I mean to bring to light here; rather, solely and entirely what it means, what it lets us guess at, what lies hidden behind it, beneath it, inside it, what it is the provisional, indistinct expression of, loaded down with question marks and misunderstandings. And it was only with this purpose in view that I had the right not to spare my readers a glance at the monstrousness of its effects, including its disastrous effects: to prepare them, that is, for the last and most terrible aspect the question of the meaning of that ideal has for me. What does the power of that ideal itself mean, the monstrousness of its power? Why has it been given room to this extent? why has it not been better resisted? The ascetic ideal expresses a will: where is the opposing will in which an opposing ideal would express itself? The ascetic ideal has a goal — and it is general enough that all the other interests of human existence, measured against it, look petty and narrow; it interprets ages, peoples, human beings without mercy in the light of this one goal, it allows no other interpretation, no other goal, it rejects, denies, affirms, confirms only in the sense of its interpretation (— and was there ever a system of interpretation thought through more completely to the end?); it submits to no power, it believes instead in its precedence over every power, in its unconditional distance of rank with regard to every power — it believes that no power on earth exists that does not first have to receive from it a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as a tool for its work, as a way and means to its goal, to one goal… Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal and interpretation? Why is the counterpart missing?… Where is the other "one goal"?…
But I am told that it is not missing, that it has not only fought a long and successful fight against that ideal but has actually, in all the main things, already become master over it: our whole modern science is the witness for this, I am told — this modern science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, plainly believes in itself alone, plainly possesses the courage to be itself and the will to be itself, and has gotten along well enough so far without God, without a beyond and without the virtues of denial. But with noise like that and agitators' chatter you get nowhere with me: these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices, audibly enough, do not come from the depths, it is not the abyss of the scientific conscience that speaks out of them — for today the scientific conscience is an abyss —, in such trumpeters' mouths the word "science" is simply an indecency, an abuse, a piece of shamelessness. The exact opposite of what is claimed here is the truth: science today has absolutely no faith in itself, let alone an ideal above itself — and wherever it is still passion, love, fire, suffering, there it is not the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and most noble form itself. Does that sound strange to you?…
There are plenty of honest and modest working folk among the scholars of today too, who like their little corner and who, precisely because they like it in there, now and then get a little immodestly loud with the demand that people ought to be content today in general, and especially in science — there is so much useful work to be done there. I do not disagree; least of all would I want to spoil these honest workers' pleasure in their craft: for I take pleasure in their work. But the fact that rigorous work is now being done in science and that there are contented workers proves absolutely nothing about whether science as a whole has a goal today, a will, an ideal, a passion of great faith. The opposite, as I said, is the case: where science is not the most recent form in which the ascetic ideal appears — and those are cases too rare, too noble, too select for the general verdict to be bent by them — science today is a hiding place for every kind of ill humor, unbelief, gnawing worm, self-contempt, bad conscience — it is the restlessness of having no ideal itself, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the dissatisfaction with an unwilling contentment. Oh, what does science not hide today! how much, at the very least, it is meant to hide! The competence of our best scholars, their mindless industry, their heads smoking day and night, their very mastery of the craft — how often the real meaning of all that lies in no longer letting themselves see something or other! Science as a means of numbing oneself: do you know that?… You wound them — everyone who deals with scholars has the experience — sometimes to the bone with a harmless word, you turn your scholarly friends bitter against you at the very moment you mean to honor them, you drive them beside themselves, merely because you were too coarse to guess whom you were really dealing with: with sufferers who refuse to admit to themselves what they are, with people numbed and senseless who fear only one thing: coming to consciousness…
— And now, by contrast, look at those rarer cases I spoke of, the last idealists there are today among philosophers and scholars: do we perhaps have in them the opponents of the ascetic ideal we were looking for, its counter-idealists? Indeed, they believe themselves to be that, these "unbelievers" (for that is what they all are); being opponents of this ideal seems to be precisely their last scrap of faith, so serious are they on this point, so passionate do their words and gestures become right here: — but does that already mean that what they believe has to be true?… We "seekers of knowledge" have by now grown suspicious of believers of every kind; our suspicion has gradually trained us to conclude the reverse of what people used to conclude: namely, wherever the strength of a belief pushes itself far into the foreground, to infer a certain weakness in its provability, even the improbability of what is believed. We too do not deny that faith "makes blessed": that is exactly why we deny that faith proves anything — a strong faith that makes blessed is a reason to suspect the thing it believes in; it does not establish "truth," it establishes a certain probability — of deception. How do things stand in this case, then? — These deniers and outsiders of today, these people who are unconditional in one thing, in their claim to intellectual cleanliness, these hard, strict, abstinent, heroic spirits who make up the honor of our age, all these pale atheists, antichrists, immoralists, nihilists, these skeptics, these "ephectics" who hold back from every judgment, these hectics of the spirit, wasting as if with fever (and hectics they are, one and all, in some sense or other), these last idealists of knowledge, in whom alone the intellectual conscience dwells and has taken flesh today — they believe themselves, in fact, as detached as possible from the ascetic ideal, these "free, very free spirits": and yet, let me reveal to them what they cannot see for themselves — for they stand too close to themselves — this ideal is precisely their ideal too, they themselves represent it today, and perhaps no one else does, they themselves are its most spiritualized offspring, its most advanced troop of warriors and scouts, its most insidious, most tender, most elusive form of seduction: — if I am a guesser of riddles in anything, let it be with this sentence!… These are far from being free spirits: for they still believe in truth…
When the Christian crusaders in the East ran into that invincible order of Assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest ranks lived in an obedience that no order of monks has ever matched, they also picked up, by one route or another, a hint about that symbol and password which was reserved for the highest ranks alone, as their secret: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted"… Well now, that was freedom of the spirit, with that the faith in truth itself had been given notice… Has a European, a Christian free spirit ever yet strayed into this sentence and its labyrinthine consequences? does he know the Minotaur of this cave from experience?… I doubt it; more than that, I know otherwise: — nothing is more foreign to these people who are unconditional in one thing, these so-called "free spirits," than freedom and release from chains in that sense; in no respect are they more firmly bound, and in their faith in truth in particular they are firm and unconditional as no one else is. I know all this perhaps from too close by: that venerable philosophers' abstinence to which such a faith commits a person, that stoicism of the intellect which in the end forbids itself the No just as strictly as the Yes, that wanting to stand still before the factual, before the brute fact, that fatalism of the "little facts" (this little fact-alism, as I call it) in which French science now seeks a kind of moral precedence over German, that renouncing of interpretation altogether (of forcing, adjusting, shortening, leaving out, padding, inventing, falsifying and whatever else belongs to the essence of all interpreting) — all that, reckoned on the grand scale, expresses asceticism of virtue just as well as any denial of the senses does (at bottom it is only one mode of that denial). But what compels them to it, that unconditional will to truth, is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as its unconscious command — make no mistake about it — it is the faith in a metaphysical value, a value of truth in itself, such as is guaranteed and certified in that ideal alone (it stands and falls with that ideal).
Strictly judged, there is no such thing as a science "without presuppositions"; the idea of one is unthinkable, a fallacy: a philosophy, a "faith," must always be there first, so that from it science can gain a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist. (Whoever understands it the other way around, whoever sets out, for instance, to put philosophy "on a strictly scientific foundation," must first turn not only philosophy but truth itself on its head: the worst breach of decency there can be toward two such venerable ladies!) Yes, there is no doubt about it — and here I let my "gay science" have its say, compare its fifth book, p. 263 — "the truthful man, in that daring and final sense which faith in science presupposes, thereby affirms another world than that of life, nature and history; and insofar as he affirms this 'other world,' what? must he not by that very act deny its counterpart, this world, our world?… It is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests — we seekers of knowledge of today too, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too still take our fire from the blaze that a faith thousands of years old has lit, that Christian faith which was Plato's faith too, that God is truth, that truth is divine… But what if precisely this is becoming less and less believable, if nothing proves to be divine any longer except error, blindness, the lie — if God himself proves to be our longest lie?" — —
At this point it is necessary to stop and think for a long time. Science itself now needs a justification (which is not yet to say that there is one for it). Look, on this question, at the oldest and the newest philosophies: none of them shows any awareness of how far the will to truth itself first needs a justification; here is a gap in every philosophy — where does it come from? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been master over all philosophy, because truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest court of appeal itself, because truth was not allowed to be a problem at all. Is this "allowed" understood? — From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is also a new problem: that of the value of truth. — The will to truth needs a critique — let us define our own task with these words — for once, as an experiment, the value of truth must be called into question… (Anyone who finds this too briefly said is advised to read over that section of "The Gay Science" which bears the title "How far we too are still pious," pp. 260ff., best of all the whole fifth book of that work, and likewise the preface to "Daybreak.")
No! Do not come to me with science when I am looking for the natural opponent of the ascetic ideal, when I ask: "where is the opposing will in which its opposing ideal finds expression?" Science does not stand nearly firmly enough on its own feet for that. In every respect it first needs an ideal of value, a value-creating power, in whose service it may believe in itself — science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is in itself by no means hostile yet; in the main, it is more like the driving force in that ideal's inner development. Look more closely, and its contradiction and struggle are not aimed at the ideal itself at all, but only at its outer defenses, its costume, its play of masks, its temporary hardening, stiffening, turning into dogma — science sets the life in it free again by denying what is merely on the surface. These two, science and the ascetic ideal, stand on one and the same ground — I have already hinted as much —: namely, on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth cannot be assessed, cannot be criticized), and for that very reason they are necessarily allies — so that, if they are to be fought, they can only ever be fought and called into question together. Any assessment of the value of the ascetic ideal unavoidably drags an assessment of science along with it: open your eyes to that, prick up your ears, and in good time! (Art — I say it in advance, for I shall come back to it at some length one day — art, in which the lie itself is made holy, in which the will to deception has a good conscience on its side, is far more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than science is: Plato's instinct felt this, Plato, the greatest enemy of art that Europe has produced so far. Plato against Homer: that is the whole, the real antagonism — on one side the "otherworldly" man with the best of intentions, the great slanderer of life; on the other, life's involuntary deifier, the golden nature. An artist's serving the ascetic ideal is therefore the most genuine corruption of an artist there can be, and unfortunately one of the most common: for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.)
In physiological terms too, science rests on the same ground as the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the precondition here as there — the affects grown cool, the tempo slowed down, dialectic in place of instinct, seriousness stamped on the faces and gestures (seriousness, that most unmistakable badge of a more laborious metabolism, of a life that struggles and works harder). Look at the ages in a people's history when the scholar steps into the foreground: they are ages of weariness, often of evening, of decline — the overflowing strength, the certainty of life, the certainty of the future are gone. The dominance of the mandarin never means anything good: no more than the rise of democracy, of peace tribunals in place of wars, of equal rights for women, of the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of sinking life there are. (Science grasped as a problem; what does science mean? — compare on this the Preface to "The Birth of Tragedy.")
— No! this "modern science" — just open your eyes to it! — is for the time being the best ally of the ascetic ideal, and precisely because it is the most unconscious, the most involuntary, the most secret and the most underground ally of all! Until now they have been playing the same game, the "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that ideal (be careful, by the way, not to think that these opponents are the opposite of the poor in spirit, say the rich in spirit: — they are not, I have called them the consumptives of the spirit). These famous victories of the latter: no doubt about it, they are victories — but over what? The ascetic ideal was not defeated in them at all; if anything it was made stronger by them, which is to say harder to grasp, more spiritual, more insidious, every time some wall, some outer defense that had been built onto it and coarsened its appearance was ruthlessly pulled off and broken down by science. Does anyone really think that the defeat of theological astronomy, say, meant a defeat of that ideal?… Has man perhaps become less in need of an otherworldly solution to his riddle of existence, now that this existence looks more arbitrary, more of an idle bystander, more dispensable in the visible order of things than ever? Is not precisely the self-belittling of man, his will to belittle himself, in unstoppable progress since Copernicus? Alas, the belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplaceability in the ranking of beings is gone — he has become an animal, an animal, not as a figure of speech, without discount or reservation, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "God-man")… Since Copernicus man seems to have landed on a slope — he rolls faster and faster now, away from the center — toward what? into nothingness? into the "piercing feeling of his nothingness"?… Well then! that would be exactly the straight road — into the old ideal?…
All science (and by no means only astronomy, about whose humbling and lowering effect Kant made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my importance"…), all science, the natural as much as the unnatural — that is my name for the self-criticism of knowledge — is out today to talk man out of the respect he has had for himself until now, as if that respect had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you could even say that science has its own pride, its own bitter form of stoic calm, in keeping up this hard-won self-contempt of man as his last, most serious claim to respect in his own eyes (and rightly so, in fact: for the one who despises is still someone who "has not unlearned respect"…). Is that actually working against the ascetic ideal? Does anyone really still think, in all seriousness (as the theologians imagined for a while), that Kant's victory over the dogmatic theological concepts ("God," "soul," "freedom," "immortality") did that ideal any damage? — and for the moment it need not concern us at all whether Kant himself ever so much as intended anything of the kind. What is certain is that since Kant every kind of transcendentalist holds a winning hand again — they are emancipated from the theologians: what luck! — he showed them the secret path on which they may now, on their own account and with the best scientific propriety, go after the "wishes of their heart." Likewise: who could now blame the agnostics if, as worshipers of the unknown and the mysterious as such, they pray to the question mark itself as God? (Xaver Doudan speaks somewhere of the ravages that "the habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of simply staying in the unknown" has wrought; he thinks the ancients did without it.) Supposing that everything man "knows" does not satisfy his wishes, but rather contradicts them and makes him shudder, what a divine way out, to be allowed to put the blame for this not on "wishing" but on "knowing"!… "There is no knowing: therefore — there is a God": what a new and elegant piece of logic! what a triumph of the ascetic ideal! —
— Or does the whole of modern historical writing perhaps show an attitude more certain of life, more certain of its ideal? Its noblest claim now is to be a mirror; it rejects all teleology; it no longer wants to "prove" anything; it scorns to play the judge, and has its good taste in that — it affirms as little as it denies, it establishes facts, it "describes"… All this is ascetic to a high degree; but at the same time it is nihilistic to a still higher degree, let no one fool himself about that! What we see is a sad, hard, but resolute gaze — an eye that looks outward, the way a lonely polar explorer looks outward (perhaps so as not to look inward? so as not to look back?…). Here is snow, here life has fallen silent; the last crows that make themselves heard here are called "What for?", "In vain!", "Nada!" — here nothing grows or flourishes any more, at most Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoyan "pity."
But as for that other kind of historian, a perhaps even "more modern" kind, a pleasure-loving, lecherous kind, flirting with life and with the ascetic ideal in equal measure, which uses the word "artist" as a glove and has today taken out a lease on the whole praise of contemplation for itself alone: oh what a thirst these sweet clever people stir up, even for ascetics and winter landscapes! No! the devil take this "contemplative" crowd! How much rather would I wander through the gloomiest gray cold fogs with those historical nihilists! — yes, supposing I had to choose, I would not even mind lending an ear to someone thoroughly unhistorical, anti-historical (like that Dühring, whose tones are making a still shy, still unconfessed species of "beautiful souls" in today's Germany drunk: the anarchist species inside the educated proletariat). A hundred times worse are the "contemplatives" —: I know of nothing that makes me so sick as one of those "objective" armchairs, one of those perfumed little sensualists in front of history, half priest, half satyr, scent of Renan, who already betrays with the high falsetto of his applause what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case the Fate has worked her cruel shears, ah! all too surgically! That goes against my taste, and against my patience too: let whoever has nothing to lose by it keep his patience at such sights — a sight like that makes me furious, such "spectators" embitter me against the "spectacle" more than the spectacle itself does (history itself, you understand me), and before I know it Anacreontic moods come over me. This nature, which gave the bull its horn and the lion its chasm' odonton, its gaping jaws — what did nature give me a foot for?… For kicking, by holy Anacreon! and not just for running away: for kicking to pieces the rotten armchairs, the cowardly contemplativeness, the lecherous eunuchdom in front of history, the flirting with ascetic ideals, the hypocrisy about justice that is really impotence!
All my reverence to the ascetic ideal, as long as it is honest! as long as it believes in itself and plays no tricks on us! But I do not like all these coquettish bedbugs whose insatiable ambition is to smell of the infinite, until at last the infinite smells of bedbugs; I do not like the whitewashed tombs that play-act life; I do not like the tired and used-up who wrap themselves in wisdom and look "objective"; I do not like the agitators dressed up as heroes, who wear an ideal as a cloak of invisibility around their wisp-of-straw heads; I do not like the ambitious artists who would like to pass for ascetics and priests and are at bottom only tragic clowns; and I do not like them either, these latest speculators in idealism, the antisemites, who today roll their eyes in a Christian-Aryan-bourgeois manner and try to stir up all the horned-cattle elements of the people by an abuse, past all patience, of the cheapest means of agitation, the moral pose (— the fact that every kind of swindling spiritualism in today's Germany meets with success is bound up with the by now undeniable and already palpable desolation of the German spirit, whose cause I look for in an all too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer and Wagnerian music, together with what provides the precondition for this diet: first the national confinement and vanity, the strong but narrow principle "Germany, Germany above all," and then the shaking palsy of "modern ideas").
Europe today is rich and inventive above all in means of excitement; it seems to need nothing so much as stimulants and strong liquor: hence also the enormous forging of ideals, those strongest liquors of the spirit, hence also the repulsive, foul-smelling, lying, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. I would like to know how many shiploads of imitation idealism, of hero costumes and the tin rattle of big words, how many barrels of sugared, spirituous fellow-feeling (brand name: the religion of suffering), how many stilts of "noble indignation" to help along the spiritually flat-footed, how many comedians of the Christian-moral ideal would have to be exported from Europe today for its air to smell clean again… Clearly this overproduction opens up a new trade opportunity; clearly there is a new "business" to be done in little idol-ideals and the "idealists" that go with them — do not miss this broad hint! Who has courage enough for it? — we have it in our hands to "idealize" the whole earth!… But what am I saying about courage: only one thing is needed here, precisely the hand, an unembarrassed, a very unembarrassed hand…
— Enough! Enough! Let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the most modern spirit, in which there is as much to laugh at as to be annoyed by: precisely our problem can do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal — what does that have to do with yesterday and today! I will take those matters in hand more thoroughly and more harshly in another context (under the title "On the History of European Nihilism"; for that I refer to a work I am preparing: The Will to Power: An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values). All that matters to me here is to point out this: even in the most spiritual sphere, the ascetic ideal still has, for the time being, only one kind of real enemies and damagers: those are the comedians of this ideal — for they awaken mistrust. Everywhere else, wherever the spirit is at work today strictly, powerfully and without counterfeiting, it now does without an ideal altogether — the popular expression for this abstinence is "atheism" —: except for its will to truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, that ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, esoteric through and through, stripped of all its outer defenses, and so not so much its remnant as its core. Unconditional, honest atheism (— and its air alone is what we breathe, we more spiritual men of this age!) is accordingly not opposed to that ideal, as it appears to be; it is rather only one of the ideal's last phases of development, one of its final forms and inner consequences — it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truth, which in the end forbids itself the lie involved in believing in God. (The same course of development in India, in complete independence, and therefore proving something; the same ideal forcing its way to the same conclusion; the decisive point reached five centuries before the European calendar begins, with Buddha, or more exactly: already with the Sankhya philosophy, which Buddha then popularized and made into a religion.)
What, if we ask in all strictness, has actually triumphed over the Christian God? The answer stands in my "Gay Science," p. 290: "Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken ever more strictly, the confessor's subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To look at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a God; to interpret history in honor of a divine reason, as constant testimony to a moral world order and moral final purposes; to explain one's own experiences the way pious people explained them for long enough, as if everything were providence, everything a sign, everything thought out and sent for the sake of the soul's salvation: that is now over, that has conscience against it, every finer conscience counts that as indecent, dishonest, as lying, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice — with this strictness, if with anything, we are good Europeans and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-overcoming"…
All great things perish through themselves, by an act of self-cancellation: so the law of life wills it, the law of the necessary "self-overcoming" in the nature of life — in the end the call always goes out to the lawgiver himself: "submit to the law you yourself have made." In this way Christianity as dogma perished, by its own morality; in this way Christianity as morality must now perish in its turn — we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after another, it draws at last its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; but this happens when it asks the question "what does all will to truth mean?"… And here I touch my problem again, our problem, my unknown friends (— for as yet I know of no friend): what meaning would our whole being have, if not this, that in us that will to truth has come to consciousness of itself as a problem?… From now on — there is no doubt about it — morality perishes of this coming-to-consciousness of the will to truth: that great spectacle in a hundred acts which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles…
Leave the ascetic ideal aside: then man, the animal man, has had no meaning until now. His existence on earth contained no goal; "what is man for at all?" — was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was missing; behind every great human destiny there sounded, as a refrain, a still greater "In vain!" That is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was missing, that an immense gap surrounded man — he did not know how to justify himself, explain himself, affirm himself, he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered in other ways too, he was in the main a sickly animal: but not suffering itself was his problem, but that there was no answer to the cry of the question "what for, this suffering?" Man, the bravest animal and the one most used to suffering, does not in himself say No to suffering: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided someone shows him a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering, was the curse that lay spread over humanity until now — and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning! It was until now the only meaning; any meaning is better than no meaning at all; the ascetic ideal was in every respect the "for want of anything better" par excellence that there had been so far. In it suffering was interpreted; the immense emptiness seemed filled; the door was shut against all suicidal nihilism. The interpretation — no doubt about it — brought new suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, gnawing harder at life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of guilt… But in spite of all that — man was saved by it, he had a meaning, from then on he was no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense, of "no-sense," he could now will something — never mind, to begin with, what he willed, or what for, or with what: the will itself was saved. We simply cannot hide from ourselves what all that willing really expresses, once it has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, longing itself — all that means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, a will against life, a revolt against the most fundamental preconditions of life, but it is and remains a will!… And, to say once more at the end what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will…