Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
[This document, which
has been prepared by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC,
has certain copyright restrictions. For information, please consult Copyright.
Editorial comments and translations in square brackets and italics are by Ian
Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from Nietzsche's text. Last
revised in February 2009]
Part Five
A Natural History of Morals
186
Moral feeling
in Europe is now just as refined, old, multifaceted, sensitive, and
sophisticated as the “Science of Morality” associated with it is still young,
amateurish, awkward, and fumbling:—an attractive contrast which now and then
even becomes visibly incorporated in the person of a moralist. Even the phrase
“Science of Morals” is, so far as what it designates is concerned, much too
arrogant and contrary to good taste, which tends always to prefer more
modest terms. We should in all seriousness admit to ourselves what we
have needed to do for a long time here and still need to do, the only thing
that is justified at this point, that is, to assemble materials, organize
conceptually, and set in order an immense realm of delicate feelings of value
and differences in values, which live, grow, reproduce, and die off—and, perhaps,
to attempt to clarify the recurring and more frequent forms of these living
crystallizations—as a preparation for a theory of types of morality.
Naturally, so far we have not been so modest. As soon as philosophers busied
themselves with morality as a science, they collectively have demanded from
themselves, with a formal seriousness which makes one laugh, something very
much higher, more ambitious, more solemn. They have been looking for the rational
basis of morality —and every philosopher so far has believed that he has
provided such a rational grounding for morality. But morality itself has been
considered something “given.” How distant from their stodgy pride lay that
apparently unspectacular task, left in the dust and mould, of a description,
although for that task the subtlest hands and senses could hardly be subtle
enough! The very fact that the moral philosophers had only a crude knowledge of
the moral facts, in an arbitrary selection or an accidental
abbreviation, something like the morality of their surroundings, their class,
their church, the spirit of their age, their climate and region of the
world—the very fact that they were poorly educated and not even very curious
with respect to peoples, ages, and past events—meant that they never confronted
at all the essential problems of morality—all of which come to the surface only
with a comparison of several moralities. In all the “science of
morality” up to this point what is still lacking, odd as it may sound,
is the problem of morality itself. What’s missing is the suspicion that here
there may be something problematic. What the philosophers have called a
“rational grounding of morality” and demanded from themselves was, seen in the
right light, only a scholarly version of good faith in the ruling
morality, some new way of expressing it, and thus itself an element in
the middle of a determined morality, even indeed, in the final analysis, a form
of denial that this morality could be grasped as a problem—and, at any
rate, the opposite of a test, analysis, questioning, or vivisection of this
particular belief. Listen, for example, to how even Schopenhauer presents his
own task with such an almost admirable innocence, and make your own conclusions
about the scientific nature of a “science” whose ultimate masters still talk
like children and little old women: “The principle,” he says (on p. 136 of The
Fundamental Problem of Morality), “the basic assumption whose meaning all ethicists
are essentially in agreement about—neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum
potes, juve [hurt no one, instead help everyone, as much as you can]—that
is essentially the principle which all teachers of morality struggle to
ground in reason . . . the essential foundation of ethics, which people
have been seeking for thousands of years as the philosopher’s stone.” The
difficulty of rationally grounding the principle quoted above may, of course,
be considerable—as we know, it’s not something even Schopenhauer was successful
in doing—and whoever has once thoroughly understood just how tastelessly false
and sentimental this principle is in a world whose essence is the will to power
may permit himself to recall that Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, actually—played
the flute. . . . Every day, after his meal: just read his biographer on this
point. And here’s an incidental question: a pessimist, a man who denies God and
the world, who stops in front of morality—who says yes to morality and
blows his flute, to the laede-neminem [hurt no one] morality—How’s that?
Is that essentially—a pessimist?
187
Even apart from
the value of such claims as “There is in us a categorical imperative,” we can
still always ask: What does such a claim express about the person making it?
There are moralities which are intended to justify their creators before other
people; other moralities are meant to calm him down and make him satisfied with
himself; with others he wants to nail himself to the cross and humiliate
himself; with others he wants to practise revenge; with others to hide himself;
with others to be transfigured and set himself above, high up and far away.
This morality serves its originator so that he forgets; that morality so that
he or something about him is forgotten; some moralists may want to exercise
their power and creative mood on humanity, some others, perhaps even Kant as
well, want us to understand with their morality: “What is respectable about me
is that I can obey—and things should be no different for you than they
are for me”—in short, moralities are also only a sign language of the
feelings.
188
Every morality
is—in contrast to laisser aller [letting go]—a part of tyranny against
“nature,” also against “reason”: that is, however, not yet an objection to it.
For to object, we would have to decree, once again on the basis of some
morality or other, that all forms of tyranny and irrationality are not
permitted. The essential and invaluable part of every morality is that it is a
lengthy compulsion: to understand Stoicism or Port Royal or Puritanism people
should remember the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved
strength and freedom—the metrical compulsion, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm.* In every people how much trouble poets and
orators have made for themselves!—not excepting some contemporary prose writers
in whose ears a relentless conscience dwells—“for the sake of some foolishness,”
as utilitarian fools say, who think that makes them clever, —“out of
obsequiousness to arbitrary laws,” as the anarchists say, who think that makes
them “free,” even free spirited. The strange fact, however, is that everything
there is or has been on earth to do with freedom, refinement, boldness, dance,
and masterly certainty, whether it is in thinking itself, or in governing, or
in speaking and persuading, in arts just as much as in morals, developed only
thanks to the “tyranny of such arbitrary laws,” and in all seriousness, the
probability is not insignificant that this is “nature” and “natural”—and not
that laisser aller! Every artist knows how far from the feeling of
letting himself go his “most natural” condition is, the free ordering, setting,
disposing, shaping in moments of “inspiration”—and how strictly and subtly he
obeys at that very moment the thousand-fold laws which make fun of all
conceptual formulations precisely because of their hardness and decisiveness
(even the firmest idea, by comparison, contains something fluctuating,
multiple, ambiguous—). The essential thing “in heaven and on earth,” so it
appears, is, to make the point again, that there is obedience for a long
time and in one direction: in the process there comes and always has come
eventually something for whose sake living on earth is worthwhile, for example,
virtue, art, virtue, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something or other
transfiguring, subtle, amazing, and divine. The long captivity of the spirit,
the mistrustful compulsion in our ability to communicate our thoughts, the
discipline which the thinker imposed on himself to think within the guiding
principles of a church or court or with Aristotelian assumptions, the long
spiritual will to interpret everything which happens according to a Christian
scheme and to discover and justify the Christian god once again in every
coincidence—all this powerful, arbitrary, hard, dreadful, anti-rational
activity has turned out to be the means by which the European spirit cultivated
its strength, its reckless curiosity, and its subtle flexibility. Admittedly by
the same token a great deal of irreplaceable force and spirit must have been
overwhelmed in the process, crushed, and ruined as well (for here as everywhere
“nature” reveals herself as she is, in her totally extravagant and indifferent
magnificence, which is an outrage, but something noble). The fact that for
thousands of years European thinkers only thought in order to prove something—nowadays,
by contrast, we distrust any thinker who “wants to prove something”—and the
fact that for them what was to emerge as the result of their strictest
thinking was always already clearly established, something like with the
Asiatic astrologers earlier, or like the harmless Christian moralistic
interpretation of the most intimate personal experience “for the honour of God”
or “for the salvation of the soul” still present today—this tyranny, this
arbitrariness, this strict and grandiose stupidity, has trained the
spirit. Apparently slavery is, in the cruder and more refined sense, the
indispensable means for disciplining and cultivating the spirit. We can examine
every morality in this way: “nature” in it is what teaches hatred of the laisser
aller, of that all-too-great freedom, and plants the need for limited
horizons, for work close at hand—it teaches the narrowing of perspective
and also, in a certain sense, stupidity as a condition of living and growth.
“You are to obey someone or other and for a long time: otherwise you
perish and lose final respect for yourself”—this seems to me to be the moral
imperative of nature, which, of course, is nether “categorical,” as old Kant
wanted the imperative to be (hence the “otherwise”), nor directed at the
individual (what does nature care about individuals!), but rather at peoples,
races, ages, classes, but above all at the whole animal “man,” at the
human beings.
189
The industrious
races complain a great deal about having to tolerate idleness: it was a
masterpiece of the English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so
tedious, a form of cleverly invented and shrewdly introduced fasting,
that the Englishman, without being aware of the fact, became eager again for
weekdays and workdays. Things like it are frequently seen also in the ancient
world (even if, as is reasonable among southern people, not exactly connected
to work—). There must be fasts of several kinds, and in every place where
powerful impulses and habits rule, the lawgivers had to take care to insert
extra days in the calendar [Schalttage] in which such an impulse is
placed in chains and learns once again to go hungry. Seen from a higher
viewpoint, the periods when entire races and ages get afflicted with some moral
fanaticism or other look like such imposed times of compulsion and fasting,
during which an impulse learns to cower down and abase itself, but also to cleanse
itself and become sharper. Individual philosophical sects (for example
the Stoa in the midst of Hellenistic culture and its lecherous air heavy with
aphrodisiac scents) permit this sort of interpretation as well.—And with this
is also given a hint for an explanation of that paradox why it was precisely in
Europe’s Christian period and, in general, first under the pressure of
Christian value judgments that the sex drive sublimated itself into love (amour-passion).
190
There is
something in Plato’s morality which does not really belong to Plato, but is
found in his philosophy, one might say, only in spite of Plato, namely, the
Socratism for which Plato was essentially too noble. “No one will do harm to
himself; thus, everything bad happens unwillingly. For the bad man inflicts
damage on himself: he would not do that, if he knew that bad is bad. Thus, the
bad man is bad only from error. If we take his error away from him, we
necessarily make him— ‘good.’” This sort of conclusion stinks of the rabble,
which with bad actions fixes its eyes only the wretched consequences and really
makes the judgment “It is stupid to act badly,” while “good” it assumes
without further thought is identical to “useful and agreeable.” So far as every
utilitarianism of morality is concerned, we may guess from the start it had
this same origin and follow our noses: we will seldom go wrong.—Plato did
everything to interpret something refined and noble in the principle of his
teacher, above all, himself—Plato, the most daring of all interpreters, took
all of Socrates only like a popular tune and folk song from the alleys, in
order to vary it into something infinite and impossible, that is, into all his
own masks and multiplicities. To speak in jest—and one based on Homer: What is
the Platonic Socrates if not prosthe Platon opithen te Platon messe te
Chimera [Plato in front, Plato behind, and in the middle the Chimera]?*
191
The old theological
problem of “believing” and “knowing”—or, to put the matter more clearly—of
instinct and reason—and thus the question whether in assessing the value of
things instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants to assess
and act according to reasons, according to a “Why?”—according to expediency and
utility—it is still that old moral problem, as it first appeared in the person
of Socrates, which had already divided minds long before Christianity.
Socrates, in fact, set himself, with a taste for his talent—which was that of a
superior dialectical thinker—at first on the side of reason, and, in truth,
what did he do his whole life long but laugh at the awkward inability of his
noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and who could
never provide enough information about the reasons for their actions? Finally,
however, in stillness and secret he also laughed at himself. With his more
subtle conscience and self-enquiry he found in himself the same difficulty and
inability. But, he said to himself, does that mean releasing oneself from
instincts! We must give the instincts and reason the proper help. We
must follow the instincts but convince reason to assist in the process with
good reasons. This was the real falsehood of that great ironist, so rich
in secrets. He brought his conscience to the point where it was satisfied with
a kind of trick played on itself. Socrates basically had seen through the irrational
in moral judgments. Plato, who was more innocent in such things and without the
mischievousness of a common man, wanted to use all his power—the greatest power
which a philosopher up to that time had had at his command!—to prove that
reason and instinct inherently move to a single goal, to the good, to “God,”
and since Plato all the theologians and philosophers have been on the same
road—that is, in things concerning morality up to now, instinct, or as the
Christians call it “faith,” or as I call it, “the herd,” has triumphed. We must
grant that Descartes is an exception, the father of rationalism (and thus the
grandfather of the revolution), a man who conferred sole authority on reason.
But reason is only a tool, and Descartes was superficial.*
192
Anyone who has
followed the history of a particular science finds in its development a
textbook case for understanding the oldest and commonest events in all “knowing
and perceiving.” There, as here, the rash hypotheses, the fabrications, the
good, stupid will to “believe,” the lack of suspicion and of patience develop
first of all—our senses learn late and never learn completely to be subtle,
true, and cautious organs of discovery. With a given stimulus, our eye finds it
more comfortable to produce once more an image which has already been produced
frequently than to capture something different and new in an impression. To do
the latter requires more power, more “morality.” To listen to something new is
embarrassing and hard on our ears; we hear strange music badly. When we hear
some different language, we spontaneously try to reshape the sounds we hear
into words which sound more familiar and native to us: that’s how, for example,
in earlier times, when the German heard the word arcubalista he changed
it into Armbrust [arcubalista . . . Armbrust: crossbow].
Something new finds our senses hostile and reluctant, and in general, even with
the “simplest” perceptual processes, the emotions like fear, love, hate,
including the passive feeling of idleness, are in control.—Just as a
reader nowadays hardly reads the individual words (let alone the syllables) on
a page—he’s much more likely to take about five words out of twenty at random
and “guess” on the basis of these five words the presumed sense they contain—so
we hardly look at a tree precisely and completely, considering the leaves,
branches, colour, and shape; we find it so very much easier to imagine an
approximation of the tree. Even in the midst of the most peculiar experiences
we still act in exactly the same way: we make up the greatest part of
experience for ourselves and are hardly ever compelled not to look upon
any event as “inventors.” What all this adds up to is that basically from time
immemorial we have been accustomed to lie. Or to express the matter more
virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: we are much more the
artist than we realize. In a lively conversation I often see in front of me the
face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined
according to the idea which he expresses or which I think has been brought out
in him that this degree of clarity far exceeds the power of my ability
to see:—thus, the delicacy of the play of muscles and of the expression in his
eyes must be something I have made up out of my own head. The person
probably had a totally different expression or none at all.
193
Quidquid luce
fuit, tenebris agit [What goes on in the light, acts in the darkness], but the other
way around as well. What we experience in a dream, provided we experience it
frequently, finally is as much a part of the collective household of our souls
as anything “truly” experienced. Thanks to this, we are richer or poorer, have
one more need or one less, and finally in the bright light of day and even in
the happiest moments of our waking spirit we are ordered around a little by the
habits of our dreams. Suppose that an individual in his dreams has often flown
and, finally, as soon as he dreams, becomes aware of the power and art of
flying as his privilege and also as his own enviable happiness; such a man who
believes he is capable of realizing every kind of curving or angled flight with
the easiest impulse, who knows the feeling of a certain godlike carelessness,
an “upward” without tension and compulsion, a “downward” without condescension
and without humiliation—without gravity!—how should a man with such
dream experiences and dream habits not also finally discover in his waking day
that the word “happiness” has a different colour and definition! How could he
not want a different happiness? “A swing upward,” as described by poets,
for him must be, in comparison with that “flying,” too earthbound, too
muscular, too forceful, even too “heavy.”
194
The difference
between men does not manifest itself only in the difference between the tables
of the goods they possess but also in the fact that they consider different
goods worth striving for and that they are at odds among themselves about what
is more or less valuable, about the rank ordering of the commonly acknowledged
goods—the difference becomes even clearer in what counts for them as really having
and possessing something. So far as a woman is concerned, for example, a
more modest man considers having at his disposal her body and sexual
gratification as a satisfactory and sufficient sign of having, of possession.
Another man, with his more suspicious and more discriminating thirst for
possessions sees the “question mark,” the fact that such a possession is only
apparent, and wants a more refined test, above all, to know whether the woman
not only gives herself to him but also for his sake gives up what she has or
would like to have. Only then does he consider her “possessed.” A third man,
however, is at this point not yet finished with his suspicion and desire to
possess. He asks himself if the woman, when she gives up everything for him, is
not doing this for something like a phantom of himself: he wants to be well
known first, fundamentally, even profoundly, in order to be able, in general,
to be loved. He dares to allow himself to be revealed.—Only then does he feel
that the loved one is fully in his possession, when she is no longer deceived
about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden
insatiability as for his kindness, patience, and spirituality. One man wants to
possess a people: and all the higher arts of Cagliostro and Cataline he thinks
appropriate for this purpose.* Another, with a more refined thirst for possession,
tells himself “One is not entitled to deceive where one wants to possess.”—He
is irritable and impatient at the idea that a mask of him rules the hearts of
his people: “Hence I must let myself be known and, first of all, learn
about myself!” Among helpful and charitable men one finds almost regularly that
crude hypocrisy which first prepares the person who is to be helped, as if, for
example, he “earns” help, wants precisely their help, and would show
himself deeply thankful, devoted, and obsequious to them for all their
help—with these fantasies they dispose of the needy as if they were property,
as if they were, in general, charitable and helpful people out of a demand for
property. One finds them jealous if one crosses them or anticipates them in
their helping. With their child, parents involuntarily act something like these
helpers—they call it “an upbringing”—no mother doubts at the bottom of her
heart that with a child she has given birth to a possession; no father denies
himself the right to be allowed to subjugate the child to his ideas and
value judgments. In fact, in earlier times it seemed proper for fathers to
dispose of the life and death of newborns at their own discretion (as among the
ancient Germans). And like the father, even today the teacher, the state, the
priest, and the prince still see in each new man a harmless opportunity for a
new possession. And from that follows . . . .
195
The Jews—a
people “born for slavery,” as Tacitus and the entire ancient world said, “the
chosen people among peoples,” as they themselves said and believed—the Jews
achieved the amazing feat of inverting values, thanks to which life on earth
for two millennia has possessed a new and dangerous appeal.*
Their prophets fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” and
“sensuous” into a unity and for the first time coined the word “world” as a
word connoting shame. In this inversion of values (to which belongs the use of
the word for “poor” as a synonym for “holy” and “friend”) lies the significance
of the Jewish people: with them begins the slave rebellion in morality.
196
We can conclude
that there are countless dark bodies in the region of our sun—bodies we will
never see. Between us, that’s a parable, and a psychologist of morality reads
the entire writing in the stars only as a language of parable and sign language
which allows a great deal to remain silent.
197
We fundamentally
misunderstand predatory animals and predatory men (for example, Cesare Borgia),
and we misunderstand “Nature,” so long as we still look for a “pathology” at
the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths or even for
some “Hell” born in them—as almost all moralists so far have done.* It seems that among moralists there is a
hatred for the primaeval forest and the tropics? And that the “tropical man”
must at any price be discredited, whether as a sickness and degeneration of
human beings or as his own hell and self-torture? But why? For the benefit of
the “moderate zones”? For the benefit of the moderate human beings? For the
“moral human beings”? For the mediocre? This for the chapter “morality as
timidity.”
198
All these
moralities that direct themselves at the individual person, for the sake of his
“happiness,” as people say—what are they except proposals about conduct in
relation to the degree of danger in which the individual person lives
with himself, recipes against his passions, his good and bad inclinations, to
the extent that they have a will to power and would like to play the master;
small and great clever sayings and affectations, afflicted with the musty enclosed
smell of ancient household remedies or old women’s wisdom, all baroque and
unreasonable in form—because they direct themselves to “all,” because they generalize
where we should not generalize—all speaking absolutely, taking themselves
absolutely, all spiced with more than one grain of salt, and much more
bearable, sometimes even seductive, only when they learn to smell over-seasoned
and dangerous, above all “of the other world.” By any intellectual standard,
all that is worth little and still a far cry from “science,” to say nothing of
“wisdom,” but, to say it again and to say it three times: prudence, prudence,
prudence, mixed in with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity—whether it is now that
indifference and coldness of a metaphorical statute against the hot-headed
foolishness of the emotions, which the Stoics recommended and applied as a
cure; or even that no-more-laughing and no-more-crying of Spinoza, his excessively
naive support for the destruction of the emotions through analysis and
vivisection; or that repression of the emotions to a harmless mean, according
to which they should be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morality; even
morality as the enjoyment of emotions in a deliberate dilution and
spiritualization through artistic symbolism, something like music or the love
of God and of man for God’s sake—for in religion the passions have civil rights
once more, provided that . . . ; finally even that accommodating and wanton
dedication to the emotions, as Hafis and Goethe taught, that daring permission
to let go of the reins, that physical-spiritual licentia morum [freedom in
behaviour] in the exceptional examples of wise old owls and drunkards, for
whom it “has little danger any more.” This also for the chapter “morality as
timidity.”*
199
Given that at
all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds
of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches)
and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those
issuing orders—and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been
better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience,
we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in
each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states “You are to
do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else
without conditions,” in short, “Thou shalt.” This need seeks to satisfy itself
and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience,
and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a
coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands—parents,
teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion—shouts in people’s ears. The
curiously limitation of human development—the way it hesitates, takes so long,
often regresses, and turns around on itself—is based on the fact that the herd
instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of
commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its
ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and
independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find
it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to
command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in
fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in
command. They don’t know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience
except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from
ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow
herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as “the first servant
of their people” or as “tools of the common good.” On the other hand, the herd
man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human
being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he
is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues,
that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence,
moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where
people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make
attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections
of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for
example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a
release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an
absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the
appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:—the
history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness
which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
200
The man from an
age of dissolution, which mixes the races all together, such a man has an
inheritance of a multiple ancestry in his body, that is, conflicting and
frequently not merely conflicting drives and standards of value which war among
themselves and rarely give each other rest—such a man of late culture and
disturbed lights will typically be a weaker man. His most basic demand is that
the war which constitutes him should finally end. Happiness seems to
him, in accordance with a calming medicine and way of thinking (for example,
Epicurean or Christian), principally as the happiness of resting, of having no
interruptions, of surfeit, of the final unity, as the “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to
use the words of the saintly rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man.
But if the opposition and war in such a nature work like one more charm
or thrill in life—and bring along, in addition to this nature’s powerful and
irreconcilable drives, also the real mastery and refinement in waging war with
itself, and thus transmit and cultivate self-ruling and outwitting of the self,
then arise those delightfully amazing and unimaginable people, those enigmatic
men predestined for victory and temptation, whose most beautiful expressions
are Alcibiades and Caesar (—in their company I’d like to place the first
European, according to my taste, the Hohenstaufer Frederick II), and, among
artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci.* They
appear precisely in the same ages when that weaker type, with its demands for
quiet, steps into the foreground: both types belong with one another and arise
from the same causes.
201
As long as the
utility which rules in moral value judgments is merely the utility of the herd,
as long as our gaze is directed only at the preservation of the community and
what is immoral is precisely and conclusively sought in what appears dangerous
to the survival of the community, there can be no “morality of loving one’s
neighbour.” Assuming there existed in society already a constant small habit of
consideration, pity, fairness, kindness, and mutual assistance, assuming also
that in this condition of society all those drives were already active which
later were described with honourable names as “virtues” and which finally were
almost synonymous with the idea “morality,” at that time they are not at all
yet in the realm of moral value judgments— they are still outside morality.
For example, a compassionate action in the best Roman period was called neither
good nor evil, neither moral nor immoral. And even if it was praised, this
praise brought with it at best still a kind of reluctant disdain, as soon as it
was compared with some action which served the demands of the totality, of the res
publica [republic]. Ultimately the “love of one’s neighbour” is always something
of minor importance, partly conventional, arbitrary, and apparent in relation
to the fear of one’s neighbour. After the structure of society in its
entirety is established and appears secure against external dangers, it is this
fear of one’s neighbour which creates once again new perspectives of moral
value judgments. Certain strong and dangerous instincts, like a love of
enterprise, daring, desire for revenge, shiftiness, rapacity, desire for
mastery, which up to this point not only were honoured in a sense useful to the
community, under different names, of course, from those just chosen here, but
had to be enormously inculcated and cultivated (because people constantly
needed them for the dangers to the totality, against the enemies of that
totality)—these are now strongly experienced as doubly dangerous—now that there
is a lack of diversionary channels for them—and they are gradually abandoned,
branded as immoral and slanderous. Now the opposing impulses and inclinations
acquire moral honour. The herd instinct draws its conclusions, step by step.
How much or how little something is dangerous to the community, dangerous to
equality, in an opinion, in a condition and emotion, in a will, in a talent,
that is now the moral perspective. Here also fear is once again the mother of
morality. When the highest and strongest drives break out passionately and
impel the individual far above and beyond the average and low level of the
herd’s conscience, the feeling of commonality in the community is destroyed;
its belief in itself, its spine, as it were, breaks: as a result people brand
these very drives and slander them most of all. The high independent
spirituality, the will to stand alone, even powerful reasoning, are experienced
as a danger. Everything which lifts the individual up over the herd and creates
fear of one’s neighbour from now on is called evil. The proper, modest,
conforming faith in equality, the happy medium in desires take on the
names of morality and honour. Finally, under very peaceful conditions, there is
an increasing lack of opportunity and need to educate the feelings in strength
and hardness. Now every severity, even in justice, begins to disrupt the
conscience. A high and hard nobility and self-responsibility are almost an
insult and awaken mistrust; “the lamb” and even more “the sheep” acquire
respect. There is a point of morbid decay and decadence in the history of
society when it itself takes sides on behalf of the person who harms it, the criminal,
and does so, in fact, seriously and honestly. Punishment: that seems to society
somehow or other unreasonable. What’s certain is that the idea of “punishment”
and “We should punish” causes it distress, makes it afraid. “Is it not enough
to make him un-dangerous? Why still punish? To punish is itself
dreadful!”—with this question the morality of the herd, the morality of
timidity, draws its final conclusion. Assuming people could, in general, do
away with the danger, the basis of the fear, then people would have done away with
this morality as well: it would no longer be necessary; it would no longer consider
itself necessary! Whoever tests the conscience of the contemporary European
will always have to pull out from the thousand moral folds and hiding places
the same imperative, the imperative of the timidity of the herd: “Our wish is
that at some point or other there is nothing more to fear!” At some
point or other—nowadays the will and the way to that place everywhere in
Europe are called “progress.”
202
Let us state
right away one more time what we have already said a hundred times, for today’s
ears don’t listen willingly to such truths—to our truths. We know well
enough how insulting it sounds when an individual reckons human beings in
general plainly and simply and unmetaphorically among the animals, but one
thing will make people consider us almost guilty, the fact that we, so
far as men of “modern ideas” are concerned, constantly use the terms “herd,”
“herd instincts,” and the like. What help is there? We cannot do anything else:
for precisely here lies our new insight. We have found that in all major moral
judgments Europe, together with those countries where Europe’s influence
dominates, has become unanimous. People in Europe apparently know what
Socrates thought he didn’t know and what that famous old snake once promised to
teach—today people “know” what good and evil are. Now, it must ring hard and
badly on their ears when we keep claiming all the time that what here thinks it
knows, what here glorifies itself with its praise and censure and calls itself
good, is the instinct of the herd animal man, which has come to break through,
to overpower, and to dominate other instincts and continues increasingly to do
so, in accordance with the growing physiological assimilation and homogeneity,
whose symptom it is. Morality today in Europe is the morality of the herd
animal—thus only, as we understand the matter, one kind of human morality,
alongside which, before which, and after which there are many other possible
moralities, above all higher ones, or there should be. Against such a
“possibility,” in opposition to such a “should be,” however, this morality
defends itself with all its forces: it says stubbornly and relentlessly, “I am
morality itself, and nothing outside me is moral”—in fact, with the help of a
religion which indulged and catered to the most sublime desires of the herd
animal, it has reached the point where we find even in the political and social
arrangements an always visible expression of this morality: the democratic
movement has come into the inheritance of the Christian movement. But the fact
is that its tempo is still much too slow and drowsy for the impatient, the
sick, and those addicted to the above-mentioned instincts—evidence for that
comes from the wailing, which grows constantly more violent, the increasingly
open snarling fangs of the anarchist hounds who now swarm through the alleys of
European culture, apparently in contrast to the peacefully industrious
democrats and ideologues of the revolution, even more to the foolish
pseudo-philosophers and those ecstatic about brotherhood, who call themselves
socialists and want a “free society.” But in reality these anarchists are at
one with all of them in their fundamental and instinctive hostility to every
other form of society than the autonomous herd (all the way to the
rejection of the very ideas of “master” and “servant”—ni dieu ni maître
[neither god nor master] is the way one socialist formula goes—); at one in
their strong resistance to all special claims, all special rights and
privileges (that means, in the last analysis, against every right, for
when all people are equal, then no one needs “rights” any more—); at one in
their mistrust of a justice which punishes (as if it were a violation of the
weaker people, a wrong against the necessary consequence of all earlier
society—); and equally at one in the religion of pity, of sympathy, wherever
there is mere feeling, living, and suffering (right down to the animals, right
up to “God”:— the excessive outpouring of “pity with God” belongs to a
democratic age—); at one collectively in their cries for and impatience in
their pity, in their deadly hatred for suffering generally, in their almost
feminine inability to stand there as spectators, to let suffering
happen; at one in their involuntary gloom and softness, under whose spell
Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism; at one in their faith in the
morality of mutual pity, as if that was morality in and of itself, as
the height, the attained height of humanity, the sole hope of the
future, the means of consolation for the present, the great absolution from the
guilt of earlier times;—altogether at one in their belief in the community as
the saviour, thus in the herd, in themselves . . .
203
We, the ones
with a different belief—we, who consider the democratic movement not merely a
degenerate form of political organization but a degenerate form of humanity,
that is, something that diminishes humanity, makes it mediocre and of lesser
worth, where do we have to reach out to with our hopes? There’s no
choice: we must reach for new philosophers, for spirits strong and
original enough to provide the stimuli for an opposing way of estimating value
and to re-evaluate and invert “eternal values,” for those sent out as
forerunners, for men of the future who at the present time take up the
compulsion and the knot which forces the will of millennia into new
paths. To teach man the future of humanity as his will, as dependent on
a man’s will, and to prepare for great exploits and comprehensive attempts at
discipline and cultivation, so as to put an end to that horrifying domination
of nonsense and contingency which up to now has been called “history”—the
nonsense of the “greatest number” is only its latest form:—for that a new type
of philosophers and commanders will at some point be necessary, at the sight of
which all hidden, fearsome, and benevolent spirits on earth may well look pale
and dwarfish. The image of such a leader is what hovers before our
eyes:—may I say that out loud, you free spirits? The conditions which we must
partly create and partly exploit for the origin of these leaders, the presumed
ways and trials thanks to which a soul might grow to such height and power to
feel the compulsion for these tasks, a revaluation of value under whose
new pressure and hammer a conscience would be hardened, a heart transformed to
bronze, so that it might endure the weight of such responsibility and, on the
other hand, the necessity for such leaders, the terrifying danger that they
might not appear or could fail and turn degenerate—those are our real
worries, the things that make us gloomy. Do you know that, you free spirits?
Those are the heavy, distant thoughts and thunderstorms which pass over the
heaven of our life. There are few pains as severe as having once seen,
guessed, and felt how an extraordinary man goes astray and degenerates, but
someone who has the rare eye for the overall danger that “man” himself is degenerating,
someone who, like us, has recognized the monstrous accident which has played
its game up to this point with respect to the future of humanity—a game in
which there was no hand, not even a “finger of god,” playing along!—someone who
guesses the fate which lies hidden in the idiotic innocence and the blissful
trust in “modern ideas,” and even more in the entire Christian-European
morality, such a man suffers from an anxiety which cannot be compared with any
other—with one look, in fact, he grasps everything that still might be
cultivated in man, given a favourable combination and increase of powers
and tasks; he knows with all the knowledge of his conscience how the greatest
possibilities for man are still inexhaustible and how often the type man has
already stood up to mysterious decisions and new paths:—he knows even better,
from his own most painful memory, what wretched things have so far usually
broken apart a developing being of the highest rank, shattered him, sunk him,
and made him pathetic. The overall degeneration of man, down to what nowadays
shows up in the socialist fools and flat heads, as their “man of the future”—as
their ideal!—this degeneration and diminution of man to a perfect herd animal
(or, as they say, to a man of “free society”), this beastialization of man into
a dwarf animal of equal rights and claims is possible—no doubt of that!
Anyone who has once thought this possibility through to the end understands one
more horror than the remaining men—and perhaps a new task, as well! . .
. .
Notes
. .
Stoicism:
a Greek school of philosophy from the third century BC. It stressed the
importance of overcoming one’s destructive emotions. Port Royal: a
convent which became the centre of Jansenism, a challenge within the Catholic
Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jansenism came close to
preaching the predestination of Calvinism. [Back to Text]
The
Greek alphabet in Nietzsche’s phrase (προσθε
Πλατων οπιθεν
τε Πλατων
μεσση τε
Χιμαιρα) has here been transliterated into the Roman
alphabet Chimera: a fabulous Greek monster, with the head of a lion, the
mid-section of a goat, and a dragon’s tail. [Back to Text]
. . . Descartes: René Descartes (1596-1650), extremely important French philosopher and mathematician, one of the most important figures in the development of modern science and philosophy. [Back to Text]
. . . Cagliostro and Cataline: Cagliostro (1743-1795),
a notorious Italian fraud; Cataline: Lucius Sergius Catilina (108-62 BC), a
contemporary of Julius Caesar, famous as a devious political conspirator. [Back to Text]
. . . Tacitus : Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56-117), famous Roman
historian. [Back to Text]
. . . Cesare Borgia (1475-1507), Italian statesman and general well known for his ruthlessness and duplicity. [Back to Text]
. . . Goethe: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: German’s greatest literary
figure. Hafis: Hafiz (c. 1325-1389), Persian poet and theologian. [Back to Text]
. . . Alcibiades: (450-404 BC), charismatic Athenian politician and general. Caesar: Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), prominent Roman politician and general. Frederick II (1194-1250), Holy Roman Emperor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, an extraordinarily gifted and powerful medieval figure. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), an Italian painter, engineer, and inventor, one of the most amazing geniuses of the Renaissance. [Back to Text]
[Back
to johnstonia Home Page]