______________________________________________________
Friedrich
Nietzsche
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
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[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 December 2013]
[Table of Contents for Beyond Good and Evil]
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 morality” 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 still need to do at this point and for a
long time to come, the only thing that is justified at the
moment, that is, to assemble materials, to 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 wanted a rational basis for morality—and every philosopher so far has
believed that he has provided such a rational grounding. 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 work the subtlest hands and senses could hardly
be subtle enough! The very fact that moral philosophers had only a crude
knowledge of the moral facta [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 emerge 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 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
draw 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 Problems 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, like the philosophers’ 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
might like 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, to the laede-neminem [hurt
no one] morality, and blows his flute—How’s that? Is that really—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 creator 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 carry out
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 moods 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 no forms of tyranny and irrationality are permitted.
The essential and invaluable part of every morality is that it is a lengthy
compulsion: to understand Stoicism or Port Royal or Puritanism we should remember
the compulsion under which every language so far has acquired 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.1 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 the
arts just as much as in morals, has developed only thanks to the “tyranny of
such arbitrary laws,” and in all seriousness, the probability is not insignificant
that it is precisely this that 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, and 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
eventually there comes and always has come something for whose sake living on
earth is worthwhile, for example, virtue, art, virtue, music, dance, reason,
spirituality—something or other transfiguring, subtle, fantastic, 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 has 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 that for them what was to emerge
as the result of their strictest thinking was always already clearly established,
as in something like Asiatic astrology earlier or the harmless Christian
moralistic interpretation of the most intimate personal experience “for the
glory 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 also, in the cruder and more refined sense, the
indispensable means for disciplining and cultivating the spirit. We should
examine every morality in the following way: “nature” in it is what teaches
hatred of the laisser aller, of that all-too-great freedom, and what 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 the 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 being.
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 have to take care to insert extra days
in the calendar 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
inserted times of compulsion and fasting, during which an impulse learns to cower
down and abase itself, but also to cleanse and sharpen itself.
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 we are also
given a hint for an explanation of that paradox why it was precisely in
Europe’s Christian period and, in general, only under the pressure of Christian
value judgments that the sex drive sublimated itself into love (amour-passion
[passionate love]).
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 wants to injure 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 argument stinks of the rabble, which in the case of
bad actions fixes its eyes only on 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
that it had an origin like this and follow our noses: we will seldom go
wrong.—Plato did everything to interpret something refined and noble in the
proposition 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 change it into infinite and impossible variations, 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]?2
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 and had already divided minds
long before Christianity. Socrates, in fact, with a taste for his talent—which
was that of a superior dialectical thinker—set himself 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 in 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, why does that mean releasing oneself from the 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 arguments.
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
towards a single goal, towards the good, towards “god,” and since Plato all
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.3
192
Anyone who has followed the history of a single science finds in
its development a text-book case for understanding the oldest and commonest
events in all “knowing and perceiving.” In the former, as in the latter, the
rash hypotheses, the fabrications, the good, stupid will to “believe,” the lack
of suspicion and 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 disconcerting 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 also
finds our senses hostile and reluctant, and generally, even with the “simplest”
perceptual processes, the emotions—like fear, love, hate, as well as the
passive feeling of idleness—are in control.—Just as a reader nowadays
hardly reads all 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 unusual experiences
we still act in the same way: we make up the greatest part of the 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
went 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 desire happiness in different way?
“Soaring 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, in other words, only
in the fact that they consider different goods worth striving for and 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
good. So far as a woman is concerned, for example, a more modest man considers
having her body at his disposal and sexual gratification 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 still not
finished with his suspicion and desire to possess. He asks himself if the woman,
when she gives up everything for him, is not perhaps doing this for a phantom
of himself: he wants to be well known first,
fundamentally, even profoundly, in order to be able to be loved at all. 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 Catiline he thinks appropriate
for this purpose.4 Another,
with a more refined thirst for possession, tells himself “One is not entitled
to deceive where one wants to possess.”—He is irritated 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
people we find almost routinely 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 are
property, as if they are, in general, charitable and helpful people out of a
demand for property. We find them jealous if we cross them or anticipate them
in their helping. Parents unwittingly make their child into something that resembles
them—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 values. 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 class, the priest,
and the prince still see in each new human being 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 say, “the chosen people among nations,” as they themselves say
and believe—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.5 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 the 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 signs, something that allows a great deal to
remain concealed.
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.6 Among
moralists does it not appear that there is hatred for the primeval 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 “temperate zones”? For the
benefit of the temperate 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, 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 an ornamental column 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 love of man for the sake of God—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 [moral licentiousness] in the exceptional
examples of wise old owls and drunkards, for whom it “has little
danger anymore.”7 This
also for the chapter “morality as timidity.”
199
Given that at all times, as 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 that 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 curious 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 do
not 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, easy
going, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public
spiritedness, benevolence, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty,
forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they
cannot do without a leader and bellwether, nowadays 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 for these European herd
animals, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance
of an absolute commander. 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 broken 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 and thrill in life—and
if, on the other hand, in addition to that nature’s powerful and irreconcilable
drives it has also inherited and cultivated a real mastery and refinement in
waging war with itself—in other words, controlling and outwitting the self,
then arise those delightfully amazing and inexplicable people, those enigmatic
men predestined for victory and seduction, whose most beautiful expressions are
Alcibiades and Caesar (—in their company I’d like to place the first European,
according to my taste, the Hohenstaufen Frederick II), and,
among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci.8 They
appear in precisely 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 we look for what is immoral precisely and
exclusively in what appears dangerous to the survival of the community, there
can be no “morality of loving one’s neighbour.” Assuming there already exists
in society a constant small habit of consideration, pity, fairness, kindness,
and mutual assistance, assuming also that in this condition of society all
those drives are already active which are later described with honourable names
as “virtues” and which finally are 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 resentful 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 secondary
importance, partly conventional, arbitrary, and apparent, in relation to fear
of one’s neighbour. After the structure of society in its entirety is
established and seems 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, and thirst for power, which up to
this point not only were honoured as useful to the
community, under different names, of course, from those just chosen here, but
had to be powerfully inculcated and cultivated (because people constantly
needed them to cope with the dangers to the totality, against the enemies of
that totality)—these are now experienced as doubly dangerous—now that there is
a lack of diversionary channels for them—and they are gradually abandoned,
slandered, and branded as immoral. 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 in his
neighbour from now on is called evil. The proper, modest, conforming
faith in equality, the happy medium in desires—these acquire
honorable moral names. 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 stern nobility and self-responsibility is almost an insult and
awakens mistrust; “the lamb” and even more “the sheep” gain 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 punish him as well? 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 examines
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
everywhere in Europe the will as well as the way to that point is
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, so far as men of “modern ideas” are concerned, we constantly use
the terms “herd,” “herd instincts,” and the like. What is the point of that? 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 evidently know what
Socrates thought he did not know and what that famous old snake once promised
to teach—today people “know” what good and evil are. Now, it must sound harsh
and be hard 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 managed to
break through, overpower, and 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 ever more 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 instinct—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 form of society other than one of 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 against 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 longer—); 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, in their sympathy for whatever merely feels,
lives, or suffers (right down to the animals, right up to “God”:— the excessive
outpouring of “suffering vicariously with God” belongs to a democratic age—);
at one collectively in their cries for and impatience in their pity, in their
deadly hatred of 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 were morality in and of itself, as the height, the attained height
of humanity, the sole hope of the future, a consolation for those now alive,
the great absolution from all 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 is no choice: we must reach for new
philosophers, for spirits strong and original enough to provide the impetus
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 establish the compulsion and the knot that 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, whose image will make all hidden, fearsome, and benevolent
spirits on earth appear pale and dwarfish. The image of such leaders 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 values 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
degenerate—these are our real worries, the things that make us
gloomy. Do you know that, you free spirits? These 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 has gone astray and degenerated, 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 divines 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 have not yet been exhausted 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 its conclusion understands one more horror
than other people do—and perhaps a new task, as well! . . .
NOTES
1Stoicism: 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. [Back to Text]
2The Greek alphabet in Nietzsche’s
phrase (προσθε Πλατων οπιθεν 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]
3René Descartes (1596-1650),
French philosopher and mathematician, one of the most important figures in the
development of modern science and philosophy. [Back to Text]
4Cagliostro
(1743-1795), a notorious Italian fraud; Catiline: Lucius Sergius Catilina (108-62
BC), a contemporary of Julius Caesar, famous as a devious political conspirator. [Back to Text]
5Publius Cornelius
Tacitus (56-117), famous Roman historian. [Back to Text]
6Cesare Borgia
(1475-1507), Italian statesman and general well known for his ruthlessness and
duplicity. [Back to Text]
7Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
German’s greatest literary figure; Hafiz (c. 1325-1389), Persian poet and
theologian. [Back to Text]
8Alcibiades: (450-404 BC),
charismatic Athenian politician and general; 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]
[Table of Contents for Beyond Good and Evil]
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