_____________________________________________
Friedrich Nietzsche
On the Genealogy of Morals
A Polemical Tract
[This translation by Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University,
Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright restrictions. For information please
use the following link: Copyright. For comments or question please contact Ian Johnston. Editorial comments, translations in square brackets and italics,
and endnotes are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from
Nietzsche’s text. This text (2014) is a revised version of an earlier
translation (2009).
[Table of Contents for Genealogy of
Morals]
Prologue
1
We don’t know
ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant about ourselves.
And there’s good reason for that. We’ve never looked for ourselves—how could it
happen that one day we’d discover
ourselves? With justice it’s been said, “Where your treasure is,
there shall your heart be also.”1 Our treasure
lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our
knowledge, as born winged creatures and collectors of intellectual honey. In
our hearts we are concerned with really only one thing—to “bring something
home.” As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call
“experiences,”—who of us is serious enough for that? Or has enough time? In
these matters, I fear, we’ve been “missing the point.” Our hearts
have simply not been engaged with that—nor, for that matter, have our ears!
Instead we’ve been more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into
whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its
force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself “What exactly
did that clock strike?”—so now and then we even rub our ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised
and completely embarrassed— “What have we really just experienced?” And more:
“Who are we really?” Then, as I’ve
mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the
clock of our experience, of our lives, of our being—alas! in the process we keep losing count . . . We remain simply
and necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves,
we must be confused about ourselves. For us this proposition
holds for all eternity: “Each man is furthest from himself”—where we ourselves
are concerned, we are not “knowledgeable people” . . .
2
My thoughts
about the origin of our moral prejudices—for this polemical
tract is concerned about that origin—had their first brief, provisional
expression in that collection of aphorisms which carried the title Human,
All-too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, which I started to write in
Sorrento, during a winter when I had the chance to pause, just as a traveller
stops, and to look over the wide and dangerous land through which my spirit had
wandered up to that point. This happened in the winter of 1876-77, but the
ideas themselves are older. In the main points, they were already the same
ideas which I am taking up again in the present essays:—let’s hope that the
long interval of time has done them some good, that they have become riper,
brighter, stronger, and more complete! But the fact that today
I still stand by these ideas, that in the intervening time they themselves have
constantly become more strongly associated with one another, in fact, have
grown into each other and intertwined, that reinforces in me the joyful
confidence that they may not have originally developed in me as single, random,
or sporadic ideas, but up out of a common root, out of a fundamental
will for knowledge ruling from deep within, always speaking with
greater clarity, always demanding greater clarity. For that’s the only thing
appropriate to a philosopher. We have no right to be isolated in
any way: we are not permitted either to make isolated mistakes or to run into
truths in isolation. By contrast, our ideas, our values, our affirmations and
denials, our if’s and whether’s
grow out of us from the same necessity which makes a tree bear its fruit—totally
related and interlinked amongst each other, witnesses of one will, one health,
one soil, one sun.—As for the question whether these fruits of ours taste good
to you—what does that matter to the trees! What concern is that
to us, we philosophers!
3
Because of a
doubt peculiar to my own nature, which I am reluctant to confess—for it
concerns itself with morality, with everything which up to the
present has been celebrated on earth as morality—a doubt which came into my life
so early, so uninvited, so irresistibly, in such contradiction to my
surroundings, my age, precedent, and my origin, that I would almost have the
right to call it my “a priori”[before experience]—because of this, my
curiosity as well as my suspicion had to pause early on at the question of
where our good and evil really originated. In fact, already as a
thirteen-year-old lad, my mind was occupying itself with the problem of the
origin of evil. At an age when one has “half children’s play, half God in one’s
heart,” I devoted my first childish literary trifle, my first written
philosophical exercise, to this problem—and so far as my “solution” to it at
that time is concerned, well, I gave the honour to God, as is reasonable, and
made him the father of evil. Is that precisely
what my “a priori” demanded of me, that new immoral, at the very least
unmoral “a priori” and the “categorical imperative” which spoke out from
it, alas, so anti-Kantian and so cryptic, which I have
increasingly listened to ever since—and not just listened to?2 Luckily at an
early stage I learned to separate theological prejudices from moral ones, and I
no longer sought the origin of evil behind the
world. Some education in history and philology, along with an inherently
refined sense concerning psychological questions in general, quickly changed my
problem into something else: Under what conditions did people invent for
themselves those value judgments good and evil? And what value do they
inherently possess? Have they hindered or fostered human wellbeing up to
now? Are they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying
life? Or is it the other way around? Do they indicate fullness, power, a
will for life, its courage, its confidence, its future? To these questions I
came across and proposed all sorts of answers for myself. I distinguished
between ages, peoples, and different ranks of individuals. I kept refining my
problem. Out of the answers arose new questions, investigations, assumptions,
and probabilities, until at last I had my own country, my own soil, a totally
secluded, flowering, blooming world, a secret garden, as it were, of which no
one could have the slightest inkling. O how lucky we are, we
knowledgeable people, provided only that we know how to stay silent long
enough!
4
The initial
stimulus to publish something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of
morality was given to me by a lucid, tidy, clever, even precocious little book,
in which for the first time I clearly ran into a topsy-turvy, perverse type of
genealogical hypotheses—a genuinely English
style. It drew me with that power of attraction that everything opposite,
everything antipodal, contains. The title of this booklet was The Origin of the Moral Feelings, its author was Dr Paul Rée, and it appeared in the year 1877.3 I have
perhaps never read anything which I would have denied, statement by statement,
conclusion by conclusion, as I did with this book, but entirely without any
annoyance or impatience. In the work I mentioned above, with which I was
engaged at the time, I made opportune and inopportune references to statements
in Dr. Rée’s book, not in order to prove them
wrong—what have I to do with preparing refutations!—but, as is appropriate to a
positive spirit, to put in the place of something unlikely something more
likely and, in some circumstances, in the place of some error another error. In
that period, as I said, for the first time I brought into the light of day
those hypotheses about genealogy to which these essays have been dedicated—but
clumsily, as I myself would be the last to deny, still fettered, still without
my own language for these concerns of mine, and with all sorts of retreating
and vacillating. For particular details, you should compare what I say in Human,
All-too Human, p. 51 [Section 45],
about the double nature of the prehistory of good and evil (that is, in the
spheres of the nobility and the slaves); similarly, pages 119 ff. [Section 136], concerning the worth and
origin of ascetic morality, as well as pages 78, 82, and II, 35 [Sections 96, 99, and Volume II, Section 89]
concerning the “Morality of Custom,” that much older and more primitive style
of morality, which lies toto coelo [by all the heavens, i.e., absolutely] from
the altruistic way of valuing (which Dr. Rée, like
all English genealogists of morality, sees as the very essence of
moral evaluation); similarly, page 74 [Section
1.92]; Wanderer, page
29 [Section 26]; and Daybreak, page 99 [Section 112], concerning the origin of justice
as a compromise between approximately equal powers (equality as precondition of
all contracts and therefore of all law); likewise concerning the origin of
punishment in Wanderer, pages
25 and 34 [Sections 22 and 33], for
which an intent to terrify is neither essential nor original (as Dr. Rée claims:—it is far more likely first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something incidental,
something additional).4
5
Basically at
that point the real concern for me at heart was something much more important
than coming up with the nature of hypotheses about the origin of morality,
either my own or from other people (or, more precisely stated—this latter issue
was important to me only for the sake of a goal to which it is one way out of
many). For me the issue was the value of morality—and in that
matter I had to take issue almost alone with my great teacher Schopenhauer, the
one to whom, as if to a contemporary, that book, with its passion
and hidden contradiction, addresses itself (—for it, too, was a “polemical
tract”).5 The most
specific issue was the worth of the “unegoistic,” of
the instincts for pity, for self-denial, and for self-sacrifice, of things
which Schopenhauer himself had painted with gold, deified, and projected into
another world [verjenseitigt]
for so long that they finally remained for him “value as such” and the reason
why he said No to life and even to himself, as well. But a
constantly more fundamental suspicion of these very instincts
voiced itself in me, a scepticism which always dug deeper! It was precisely
here that I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime
temptation and seduction.—But in what direction? To
nothingness?—It was precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standing
still, the backward-glancing exhaustion, the will turning itself against
life, the final illness tenderly and sadly announcing itself. I understood the
morality of pity, which was always seizing more and more around it and which
gripped even the philosophers and made them sick, as the most sinister symptom
of our European culture, which itself had become sinister, as its detour to a new
Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to—nihilism?
. . . This modern philosophical preference for and overvaluing of pity is
really something new. Concerning the worthlessness of pity,
philosophers up to now have been in agreement. I cite only Plato, Spinoza, La
Rochefoucauld, and Kant—four spirits as different from one
another as possible, but united in one thing, in the low value they set on
pity.—6
6
This problem of
the value of pity and of the morality of pity (—I’m an opponent
of the disgraceful modern effeminacy of feeling—) appears at first to be only
something isolated, a detached question mark. But anyone who remains here for a
while and learns to ask questions will experience what
happened to me:—a huge new vista opens up before him, a possibility grips him
like an attack of dizziness, every kind of mistrust, suspicion, and fear
springs up, his belief in morality, in all morality, totters—and finally he
recognizes a new demand. Let’s proclaim this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, we
must first question the very value of these values—and for that we need a
knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which these values grew,
under which they have developed and changed (morality as consequence, as
symptom, as mask, as Tartufferie
[hypocrisy], as illness, as misunderstanding, but also morality as
cause, as means of healing, as stimulant, as scruple, as poison), a knowledge
of a sort that has not been there up to this point, that has not even been wished
for. We have taken the worth of these “values” as given, as
self-evident, as beyond all dispute. Up until now people have not even had the
slightest doubts about or wavered in setting up “the good man” as more valuable
than “the evil man,” of higher worth in the sense of improvement, usefulness,
and prosperity with respect to mankind in general (along with the future of
humanity). What about this? What if the truth were the other way around? Well?
What if in the “good man” there even lay a symptom of regression,
like a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, something which, for example,
made the present live at the cost of the future? Perhaps
in greater comfort and less danger, but also on a smaller scale and in a more
demeaning way? . . . So that morality itself would be guilty if the
inherently possible highest power and magnificence of the
human type were never attained? So that morality itself might be the danger of
dangers? . . .
7
Suffice it to
say that once this insight revealed itself to me, I
had reasons to look around me for learned, bold, and hard-working comrades
(today I’m still searching). It’s a matter of travelling through the immense,
distant, and so secretive land of morality—morality which has really existed,
which has really been lived—with nothing but new questions and, as it were,
with new eyes. Isn’t that almost like discovering
this land for the first time? . . . In this matter, it so happened that, among
others I thought of, the above-mentioned Dr. Rée,
because I had no doubts at all that by the very nature of his questions he
would be driven on his own to a more correct methodology in order to arrive at
any answers. Did I deceive myself in this? At any rate, my desire was to
provide a better direction for such a keen and objective eye as his, a
direction leading to a true history of morality, and to advise him
in time against such an English way of making hypotheses into the blue.
For, indeed, it’s obvious which colour must be a hundred times more important
for a genealogist of morality than this blue: namely, gray, in other words, what has been documented, what can be
established as the truth, what really took place, in short, the long and
difficult-to-decipher hieroglyphic writing of the past in human morality.—This was
unknown to Dr. Rée. But he had read Darwin:—and so to
some extent in his hypotheses the Darwinian beast and the most modern modest
and tender moral sensibility, which “no longer bites,” politely extend their
hands to each other in a way that is at least entertaining—with the latter
bearing a facial expression revealing a certain good-natured and refined
indolence, in which is even mixed a grain of pessimism and exhaustion, as if it is really not worth taking all these things—the problems of
morality—so seriously.7 But for
me things appear reversed: there are no issues at all which provide more incentives to take them seriously;
among the rewards, for example, is the fact that one day perhaps people will be
permitted to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness, or, to say it
in my own language, the gay science, is a reward, a reward for a
lengthy, brave, hard-working, and underground seriousness, which, of course, is
not something for everyone. But on that day when, from full hearts, we say
“Forward! Our old morality also belongs in a comedy!” we’ll have
discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of “the
fate of the soul”:—and we can bet that he will put it to good use, the grand
old immortal comic poet of our existence! . . .
8
If this writing
is incomprehensible to someone or other and hurts his ears, the blame for that,
it strikes me, is not necessarily mine. The writing is sufficiently clear given
the conditions I assume—that people have first read my earlier writings and
have taken some trouble to do so, for, in fact, these works are not easily
accessible. For example, so far as my Zarathustra is
concerned, I don’t consider anyone knowledgeable about it who
has not at some time or another been deeply wounded by and
profoundly delighted with every word in it.8
For only then
can he enjoy the privilege of sharing with reverence the halcyon element out of
which that work was born, its sunny clarity, distance, breadth, and certainty.
In other cases the aphoristic form creates difficulties. These stem from the
fact that nowadays people do not take
this form seriously enough. An aphorism, properly stamped and
poured, has not yet been “deciphered” simply by being read. It’s much more the case that only now can one begin to explicate it,
and that requires an art of interpretation. In the third essay of this book I
have set out a model of what I call an “interpretation” for such a case.—In this essay an aphorism is presented, and the essay itself
is a commentary on it. Of course, in order to practice this style of reading as art,
one thing is above all essential, something that today especially has been
preferably forgotten—and so it will require still more time before my writings
are “readable”—something for which one almost needs to be a cow, at any
rate not a “modern man”—rumination.
Sils-Maria, Oberengadin
July 1887
ENDNOTES
1The
quotation is from Matthew 6.21. [Back to Text]
2a
priori: This phrase refers
to some idea or capacity one possesses inherently, something not provided by
experience (like the ability to reason without taking the senses into account).
The phrase is commonly associated with the theories of Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) the great German philosopher; categorical imperative: the key
phrase in Kant’s morality, the idea that moral action consists of acting upon a
principle which could become a rational moral principle without creating a
moral contradiction (“Act so that the maxim [which determines your will] may be
capable of becoming a universal law for all rational beings”). [Back to Text]
3Paul Rée
(1849-1901): a German philosopher and friend of Nietzsche’s. [Back to Text]
4Human,
All-too Human was published in 1878, Wanderer in 1880 and Daybreak
(or Dawn) in 1881. [Back to Text]
5Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860): German
philosopher, whose work exercised a significant influence on Nietzsche,
especially his emphasis on the importance of the human will. [Back to Text]
6Plato (428-348 BC): the most important of
the classical Greek philosophers; Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677): Dutch
philosopher; Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680): French author, famous
for his maxims. [Back to Text]
7Charles Darwin (1809-1882): English natural
scientist whose Origin of Species was
published in 1859. [Back to Text]
8Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was written
between 1883 and 1885. [Back to Text]
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