On the Genealogy of Morals

Good and Evil, Good and Bad

1

These English psychologists whom we have to thank for the only attempts up to this point to produce a history of the origins of morality - in themselves they serve up to us no small riddle. By way of a living riddle, they even offer, I confess, something substantially more than their books - they are interesting in themselves! These English psychologists - what do they really want? We find them, willingly or unwillingly, always at the same work, that is, hauling the partie honteuse [shameful part] of our inner world into the foreground, in order to look right there for the truly effective and operative factor which has determined our development, the very place where man's intellectual pride least wishes to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae [force of inertia]of habit or in forgetfulness or in a blind, contingent, mechanical joining of ideas or in something else purely passive, automatic, reflex, molecular, and fundamentally stupid) - what is it that really drives these psychologists always in this particular direction? Is it a secret, malicious, common instinct, perhaps one which cannot be acknowledged even to itself, for belittling humanity? Or something like a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of idealists who've become disappointed, gloomy, venomous, and green? Or a small underground hostility and rancour towards Christianity (and Plato), which perhaps has never once managed to cross the threshold of consciousness? Or even a lecherous taste for what is odd or painfully paradoxical, for what in existence is questionable and ridiculous? Or finally - a bit of all of these: a little vulgarity, a little gloominess, a little hostility to Christianity, a little thrill, and a need for pepper? . . . But I'm told that these men are simply old, cold, boring frogs, who creep and hop around and into people as if they were in their own proper element, that is, in a swamp. I resist that idea when I hear it. What's more, I don't believe it. And if one is permitted to hope where one cannot know, then I hope from my heart that the situation with these men might be reversed, that these investigators and the ones peering at the soul through their microscopes may be thoroughly brave, generous, and proud animals, who know how to control their hearts and their pain and who at the same time have educated themselves to sacrifice everything desirable for the sake of the truth, for the sake of every truth, even the simple, bitter, hateful, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth. . . . For there are such truths.

2

So all respect to the good spirits that may govern in these historians of morality! But it's certainly a pity that they lack the historical spirit itself, that they've been left in the lurch by all the good spirits of history! As a group they all think essentially unhistorically, in what is now the traditional manner of philosophers. Of that there is no doubt. The incompetence of their genealogies of morals reveals itself at the very beginning, where the issue is to determine the origin of the idea and of the judgment "good". "People," so they proclaim, "originally praised unegoistic actions and called them good from the perspective of those for whom they were done, that is, those for whom such actions were useful. Later people forgot how this praise began, and because unegoistic actions had, according to custom, always been praised as good, people then felt them as good - as if they were something inherently good". We perceive right away that this initial derivation already contains all the typical characteristics of the idiosyncrasies of English psychologists - we have "usefulness," "forgetting," "habit," and finally "error," all as the foundation for an evaluation in which the higher man up to this time has taken pride, as if it were a sort of privilege of men generally. This pride is to be humbled, this evaluation of worth emptied of value. Has that been achieved? . . . Now, first of all, it's obvious to me that from this theory the essential focus for the origin of the idea "good" has been sought for and established in the wrong place: the judgment "good" did not move here from those to whom "goodness" was shown! On the contrary, it was the "good people" themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and higher- thinking people who felt and set themselves and their actions up as good, that is to say, of the first rank, in opposition to everything low, low-minded, common, and vulgar. From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values, to stamp out the names for values. What did they care about usefulness! Particularly in relation to such a hot pouring out of the highest rank-ordering, rank-setting judgments of value, the point of view which considers utility is as foreign and inappropriate as possible. Here the feeling has reached the very opposite of that low level of warmth which is a condition for that calculating shrewdness, that reckoning by utility - and not just for a moment, not for an exceptional hour, but permanently. The pathos of nobility and distance, as mentioned, the lasting and domineering feeling, something total and fundamental, of a higher ruling nature in relation to a lower type, to a "beneath" - that is the origin of the opposition between "good" and "bad". (The right of the master to give names extends so far that we could permit ourselves to grasp the origin of language itself as an expression of the power of the rulers: they say "that is such and such"; they seal every object and event with a sound, and in the process, as it were, take possession of it). Given this origin, the word "good" is from the start in no way necessarily tied up with "unegoistic" actions, as it is in the superstition of those genealogists of morality. Rather, that occurs for the first time with the collapse of aristocratic value judgments, when this entire contrast between "egoistic" and "unegoistic" pressed itself ever more strongly into human awareness - it is, to use my own words, the instinct of the herd which, through this contrast, finally gets its word (and its words). And even then, it still takes a long time until this instinct in the masses becomes master, with the result that moral evaluation gets thoroughly hung up and bogged down on this opposition (as is the case, for example, in modern Europe: today the prejudice that takes "moralistic," "unegoistic," and "désintéressé" [disinterested] as equally valuable ideas already governs, with the force of a "fixed idea" and a disease of the brain).

3

Secondly, however, and quite separate from the fact that this hypothesis about the origin of the value judgment "good" is historically untenable, it suffers from an inherent psychological contradiction. The utility of the unegoistic action is supposed to be the origin of the praise it receives, and this origin has allegedly been forgotten: - but how is this forgetting even possible? Could the usefulness of such actions at some time or other perhaps just have stopped? The opposite is the case: this utility has rather been an everyday experience throughout the ages, and thus something that has always been constantly re-emphasized. Hence, instead of disappearing from consciousness, instead of becoming something forgettable, it must have pressed itself into the consciousness with ever-increasing clarity. How much more sensible is that contrasting theory (which is not therefore closer to the truth - ) which is advocated, for example, by Herbert Spencer: he proposes that the idea "good" is essentially the same as the idea "useful" or "functional," so that in judgments about "good" and "bad" human beings sum up and endorse the experiences they have not forgotten and cannot forget concerning the useful-functional and the harmful-useless. According to this theory, good is something which has always proved useful, so that it may assert its validity as "valuable in the highest degree," as "valuable in itself". This path to an explanation is, as mentioned, also false, but at least the account is inherently sensible and psychologically tenable.

4

I was given a hint of the right direction by the question: What, from an etymological perspective, do the meanings of "Good" as manifested in different languages really mean? There I found that all of them lead back to the same transformation of ideas - that everywhere "noble" and "aristocratic" in a social sense is the fundamental idea out of which "good" in the sense of "spiritually noble," "aristocratic," "spiritually high-minded," "spiritually privileged" necessarily develops, a process which always runs in parallel with that other one which finally transforms "common," "vulgar," and "low" into the concept "bad". The most eloquent example of the latter is the German word "schlect"[bad] itself, which is identical with the word "schlicht" [plain] - compare "schlectweg" [simply] and "schlechterdings" [simply] - and which originally designated the plain, common man, still without any suspicious side glance, simply in contrast to the noble man. Around the time of the Thirty Years War approximately, hence late enough, this sense changed into the one used now. As far as the genealogy of morals is concerned, this point strikes me as a fundamental insight; that it was first discovered so late we can ascribe to the repressive influence which democratic prejudice in the modern world exercises concerning all questions of origin. And this occurs in what appears to be the most objective realm of natural science and physiology, a point which I can only hint at here. But the sort of mischief this prejudice can cause, once it has become unleashed as hatred, particularly where morality and history are concerned, is revealed in the well- known case of Buckle: the plebeian nature of the modern spirit, which originated in England, broke out once again on its home turf, as violently as a muddy volcano and with that salty, over-loud, and common eloquence with which all previous volcanoes have spoken.

5

With respect to our problem - which for good reasons we can call a quiet problem, which addresses in a refined manner only a few ears, - there is no little interest in establishing the point that often in those words and roots which designate "good" there still shines through the main nuance of what made the nobility feel they were men of higher rank. It's true that in most cases they perhaps named themselves simply after their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "those in command") or after the most visible sign of their superiority, for example, as "the rich" or "the owners" (that is the meaning of arya [noble], and the corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic). But they also named themselves after a typical characteristic, and that is the case which is our concern here. For instance, they called themselves "the truthful," above all the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theogonis. The word developed for this characteristic, esthlos [fine, noble] , indicates, according to its root meaning, a man who is, who possesses reality, who really exists, who is true. Then, with a subjective transformation, it indicates the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of conceptual transformation it became the slogan and catch phrase for the nobility, and its sense shifted entirely over to "aristocratic," to mark a distinction from the lying common man, as Theogonis takes and presents him - until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word remains as a designation of spiritual nobility and becomes, as it were, ripe and sweet. In the word kakos [weak, worthless], as in the word deilos [cowardly] (the plebeian in contrast to the agathos [good] man), the cowardice is emphasized. This perhaps provides a hint about the direction in which we have to seek the etymological origin for the multiple meanings of agathos. In the Latin word malus [bad] (which I place alongside melas [black, dark]) the common man could be designated as the dark-coloured, above all as the dark-haired ("hic niger est" ["this man is dark"]), as the pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil, who stood out from those who became dominant, the blonds, that is, the conquering race of Aryans, most clearly through this colour. At any rate, Gaelic offers me an exactly corresponding example - the word fin (for example, in the name Fin-Gal), the term designating nobility and finally the good, noble, and pure, originally referred to the blond-headed man in contrast to the dusky, dark-haired original inhabitants. Incidentally, the Celts were a thoroughly blond race. People are wrong when they link those traces of a basically dark-haired population, which are noticeable on the carefully prepared ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic origin and mixing of blood, as Virchow still does. It is much rather the case that in these places the pre-Aryan population of Germany predominates. (The same is true for almost all of Europe: essentially the conquered races finally attained the upper hand for themselves once again in colour, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts. Who can confirm for us whether modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that preference for the "Commune," for the most primitive form of society, which all European socialists now share, does not indicate for the most part a monstrous counterattack - and that the ruling and master race, the Aryans, is not being defeated, even physiologically?). The Latin word bonus [good] I believe I can explicate as "the warrior," provided that I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older word duonus (compare bellum [war] = duellum [war] = duen-lum, which seems to me to contain that word duonus). Hence, bonus as a man of war, of division (duo), as a warrior. We see what constituted a man's "goodness" in ancient Rome. What about our German word "Gut" [good]itself? Doesn't it indicate "den Göttlichen" [the god-like man], the man of "göttlichen Geschlechts" ["the generation of gods]"? And isn't that identical to the people's (originally the nobles') name for the Goths? The reasons for this hypothesis do not belong here.

6

To this rule that the concept of political superiority always resolves itself into the concept of spiritual superiority, it is not really an exception (although there is room for exceptions), when the highest caste is also the priestly caste and consequently for its total range of meanings prefers a rating which recalls its priestly function. So, for example, for the first time the words "pure" and "impure" appear as contrasting marks of one's social position, and later a "good" and a "bad" also develop with a meaning which no longer refers to social position. Incidentally, people should be warned not to begin by taking these ideas of "pure" and "impure" too seriously, too broadly, or even symbolically. Instead they should understand from the start that all the ideas of ancient humanity, to a degree we can hardly imagine, are much more coarse, crude, superficial, narrow, blunt and, in particular, unsymbolic. The "pure man" is initially simply a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods which produce diseases of the skin, who doesn't sleep with the dirty women of the lower people, who has a horror of blood - no more, not much more! On the other hand, of course, from the very nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy it is clear enough how it's precisely here that early on the opposition between different evaluations could become dangerously internalized and sharpened. And, in fact, they finally ripped open fissures between man and man, over which even an Achilles of the free spirit could not cross without shivering. From the beginning there is something unhealthy about such priestly aristocracies and about the customary attitudes which govern in them, which turn away from action, sometimes brooding, sometimes exploding with emotion, as a result of which in the priests of almost all ages there have appeared almost unavoidably those debilitating intestinal illnesses and neurasthenia. But what they themselves came up with as a remedy for this pathological disease - surely we can assert that it has finally shown itself, through its effects, as even a hundred times more dangerous than the illness for which it was to provide relief. Human beings themselves are still sick from the after-effects of this priestly naivete in healing! Let's think, for example, of certain forms of diet (avoiding meat), of fasting, of celibacy, of the flight "into the desert" (Weir-Mitchell's isolation, but naturally without the fattening up cure and overeating which follow it, which constitutes the most effective treatment for all hysteria induced by the ascetic ideal): consider also the whole metaphysic of the priests, so hostile to the senses, making men lazy and sophisticated, the way they hypnotize themselves in the manner of fakirs and Brahmins - Brahmanism employed as a glass knob and a fixed idea - and finally the only too understandable and common dissatisfaction with its radical cure, with nothingness (or God - the desire for a unio mystica [mystical union] with God is the desire of the Buddhist for nothingness, nirvana - and nothing more!). Among the priests, everything simply becomes more dangerous - not only the remedies and arts of healing, but also pride, vengeance, mental acuity, excess, love, thirst for power, virtue, illness - although it's fair enough also to add that on the foundation of this fundamentally dangerous form of human existence, the priestly, for the first time the human being became, in general, an interesting animal, that here the human soul first attained depth in a higher sense and became evil - and, indeed, these are the two basic reasons for humanity's superiority, up to now, over other animals! . . .

7

You will have already guessed how easily the priestly way of evaluating can split from the knightly-aristocratic and then continue to develop into its opposite. Such a development receives a special stimulus every time the priestly caste and the warrior caste confront each other jealously and are not willing to agree amongst themselves about the winner. The knightly-aristocratic judgments of value have as their basic assumption a powerful physicality, a blooming, rich, even overflowing health, together with those things required to maintain these qualities - war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and, in general, everything which involves strong, free, happy action. The priestly-noble method of evaluating has, as we saw, other preconditions: these make it difficult enough for them when it comes to war! As is well known, priests are the most evil of enemies - but why? Because they are the most powerless. From their powerlessness, their hate grows among them into something huge and terrifying, to the most spiritual and most poisonous manifestations. The really great haters in world history and the most spiritual haters have always been priests - in comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are generally hardly worth considering. Human history would be a really stupid affair without that spirit which entered it from the powerless. Let us quickly consider the greatest example. Everything on earth which has been done against "the nobility," "the powerful," "the masters," "the possessors of power" is not worth mentioning in comparison with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people, who knew how to get final satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical transformation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge. This was appropriate only to a priestly people with the most deeply repressed priestly desire for revenge. In opposition to the aristocratic value equations (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = loved by god), the Jews, with a consistency inspiring fear, dared to reverse things and to hang on to that with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of the powerless), that is, to "only those who suffer are good; the poor, the powerless, the low are the only good people; the suffering, those in need, the sick, the ugly are also the only pious people; only they are blessed by God; for them alone there is salvation. - By contrast, you privileged and powerful people, you are for all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lecherous, the insatiable, the godless; you will also be the unblessed, the cursed, and the damned for all eternity!" . . . We know who inherited this Judaic transformation of values . . . In connection with that huge and immeasurably disastrous initiative which the Jews launched with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the sentence I wrote at another time (in Beyond Good and Evil, section 195) - namely, that with the Jews the slave rebellion in morality begins: that rebellion which has a two-thousand- year-old history behind it and which we nowadays no longer notice because it - has triumphed. . . .

8

But you fail to understand that? You have no eye for something that needed two millennia to emerge victorious? . . . That's nothing to wonder at: all lengthy things are hard to see, to assess. However, that's what took place: out of the trunk of that tree of vengeance and hatred, Jewish hatred - the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values, something whose like has never existed on earth - from that grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all the forms of love: - from what other trunk could it have grown? . . . However, one should not assume that this love arose essentially as the denial of that thirst for vengeance, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No. The reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred, as its crown, as the victorious crown unfolding itself wider and wider in the purest brightness and sunshine, which, so to speak, was seeking for the kingdom of light and height, the goal of that hate, aiming for victory, trophies, seduction, with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were sinking down ever deeper and more greedily into everything that was evil and possessed depth. This Jesus of Nazareth, the living evangelist of love, the "Saviour" bringing holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the sinners - was he not that very seduction in its most terrible and most irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Judaic values and innovations in ideals? Didn't Israel attain, precisely with the detour of this "Saviour," of this apparent enemy to and dissolver of Israel, the final goal of its sublime thirst for vengeance? Isn't it part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of vengeance, a farsighted, underground, slowly expropriating, and premeditated revenge, that Israel itself had to disown and nail to the cross, like some mortal enemy, the tool essential to its revenge before all the world, so that "all the world," that is, all Israel's enemies, could then swallow this particular bait without a second thought? On the other hand, could anyone, using the full subtlety of his mind, even imagine in general a more dangerous bait? Something to match the enticing, intoxicating, narcotizing, corrupting power of that symbol of the "holy cross," that ghastly paradox of a "god on the cross," that mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate final cruelty and self-crucifixion of god for the salvation of mankind? . . . At least it is certain that sub hoc signo [under this sign] Israel, with its vengeance and revaluation of the worth of all other previous values, has triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.

9

- "But what are you doing still talking about more noble ideals! Let's look at the facts: the people have triumphed - or 'the slaves,' or 'the rabble,' or 'the herd,' or whatever you want to call them - if this has taken place because of the Jews, then good for them! No people ever had a more world-historical mission. 'The masters' have been disposed of. The morality of the common man has won. We may also take this victory as a blood poisoning (it did mix the races up together) - I don't deny that. But this intoxication has undoubtedly been successful. The 'Salvation' of the human race (namely, from 'the masters') is well under way. Everything is visibly turning Jewish or Christian or plebeian (what do the words matter!). The progress of this poison through the entire body of humanity seems irresistible, although its tempo and pace may seem from now on constantly slower, more delicate, less audible, more circumspect - well, we have time enough. . . From this point of view, does the church today still have necessary work to do, does it generally still have a right to exist? Or could we dispense with it? Quaeritur [That's a question to be asked]. It seems that it rather obstructs and hinders the progress of that poison, instead of speeding it up? Well, that just might be what makes the church useful . . . Certainly the church is something positively gross and vulgar, which a more delicate intelligence, a truly modern taste, resists. Shouldn't the church at least be something more sophisticated? . . . Today the church alienates more than it seduces. . . . Who among us would really be a free spirit if the church were not there? The church repels us, not its poison. . . . Apart from the church, we even love the poison. . . ". - This is the epilogue of a "free thinker" to my speech, an honest animal, as he has richly revealed, and in addition he's a democrat. He listened to me up to this point and couldn't bear to hear my silence - since for me at this juncture there is much to be silent about.

10

The slave revolt in morality begins when the ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who are prevented from a genuine reaction, that is, something active, and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary vengeance. While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant affirmation of one's own self, slave morality from the start says "No" to what is "outside," "other," to "a not itself". And this "No" is its creative act. This transformation of the glance which confers value - this necessary projection towards what is outer instead of back onto itself - that is inherent in ressentiment. In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself. Psychologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all - its action is basically reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble method of valuing: it acts and grows spontaneously. It seeks its opposite only to affirm its own self even more thankfully, with even more rejoicing - its negative concept of "low," "common," "bad" is merely a pale contrasting image after the fact in relation to its positive basic concept, thoroughly intoxicated with life and passion, "We are noble, good, beautiful, and happy!" When the noble way of evaluating makes a mistake and abuses reality, this happens with reference to the sphere which it does not know well enough, indeed, the sphere it has strongly resisted learning the truth about: under certain circumstances it misjudges the sphere it despises, the sphere of the common man, of the low people. On the other hand, we should consider that even assuming that the feeling of contempt, of looking down, or of looking superior falsifies the image of the person despised, such distortions will fall short by a long way of the distortion with which the suppressed hatred, the vengeance of the powerless man, assaults his opponent - naturally, in effigy. In fact, in contempt there is too much negligence, too much dismissiveness, too much looking away and impatience, all mixed together, even too much of a characteristic feeling of joy, for it to be capable of converting its object into a truly distorted image and monster. For example, we should not fail to hear the almost benevolent nuances which for a Greek noble lay in all the words with which he set himself above the lower people - how a constant form of pity, consideration, and forbearance is mixed in there, sweetening the words, to the point where almost all words which refer to the common man finally remain as expressions for "unhappy," "worthy of pity" (compare deilos [cowardly], deilaios [lowly, mean], poneros [oppressed by toil, wretched], mochtheros [suffering, wretched] - the last two basically designating the common man as a slave worker and beast of burden) - and how, on the other hand, for the Greek ear the words "bad," "low," "unhappy" have never stopped echoing a single note, one tone colour, in which "unhappy" predominates. This is the inheritance of the old, noble, aristocratic way of evaluating, which does not betray its principles even in contempt. ( - Philologists should recall the sense in which oizuros [miserable], anolbos [unblessed], tlemon [wretched], dystychein [unfortunate], xymfora [misfortune] were used). The "well born" simply felt that they were "the happy ones"; they did not have to construct their happiness artificially first by looking at their enemies, or in some circumstance to talk themselves into it, to lie to themselves (the way all men of ressentiment habitually do). Similarly they knew, as complete men, overloaded with power and thus necessarily active, that they must not separate action from happiness - they considered being active necessarily associated with happiness (that's where the phrase eu prattein [do well, succeed] derives its origin) - all this is very much the opposite of "happiness" at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, those festering with poisonous and hostile feelings, among whom happiness comes out essentially as a narcotic, an anaesthetic, quiet, peace, "Sabbath," relaxing the soul, and stretching one's limbs, in short, as something passive. While the noble man lives for himself with trust and candour (gennaios, meaning "of noble birth," stresses the nuance "upright" and also probably "naive"), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive, nor honest and direct with himself. His soul squints. His spirit loves hiding places, secret paths, and back doors. Everything furtive attracts him as his world, his security, his refreshment. He understands about remaining silent, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily diminishing himself, humiliating himself. A race of such men of ressentiment will necessarily end up cleverer than any noble race. It will value cleverness to a completely different extent, that is, as a condition of existence of the utmost importance; whereas, cleverness among noble men easily acquires a delicate aftertaste of luxury and sophistication about it: - here it is simply less important than the complete functional certainty of the ruling unconscious instincts or even a certain lack of cleverness, something like brave recklessness, whether in the face of danger or of an enemy, or those wildly enthusiastic, sudden fits of anger, love, reverence, thankfulness, and vengeance, by which in all ages noble souls have recognized each other. The ressentiment of the noble man himself, if it comes over him, consumes and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction and therefore does not poison. On the other hand, in countless cases it just does not appear at all; whereas, in the case of all weak and powerless people it is unavoidable. Being unable to take one's enemies, one's misfortunes, even one's bad deeds seriously for very long - that is the mark of strong, complete natures, in whom there is a surplus of plastic, creative, healing power, as well as the power to forget (a good example for that from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory of insults and maliciousness people directed at him, and who therefore could not forgive, merely because he - forgot). Such a man with a single shrug simply throws off himself the many worms which eat into other men. Only here is possible - provided that it is at all possible on earth - the real "love for one's enemy". How much respect a noble man already has for his enemies! - and such a respect is already a bridge to love. . . . In fact, he demands his enemy for himself, as his mark of honour. Indeed, he has no enemy other than one in whom there is nothing to despise and a great deal to respect! By contrast, imagine for yourself "the enemy" as a man of ressentiment conceives him - and right here we have his action, his creation: he has conceptualized "the evil enemy," "the evil one," and as a fundamental idea, from which he now also thinks his way to an opposite image and counterpart, a "good man" - himself! . . .

11

We see exactly the opposite with the noble man, who conceives the fundamental idea "good" in advance and spontaneously, that is, from himself and from there first creates a picture of "bad" for himself! This "bad" originating from the noble man and that "evil" arising out of the stew pot of insatiable hatred - of these the first is a later creation, an afterthought, a complementary colour; by contrast, the second is the original, the beginning, the essential act of conception in slave morality - although the two words "bad" and "evil" both seem opposite to the same idea of "good," how different they are! But it is not the same idea of "good"; it is much rather a question of who the "evil man" really is, in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The strict answer to that is as follows: simply the "good man" of the other morality, the noble man, the powerful, the ruling man, only coloured over, only reinterpreted, only seen through the poisonous eyes of ressentiment. Here there is one thing we will be the last to deny: the man who gets to know these "good men" only as enemies, knows them also as nothing but evil enemies, and the same good men who are kept within strict limits by custom, honour, habit, thankfulness, even more by mutual protection, through jealousy inter pares [among equals] and who, by contrast, demonstrate in relation to each other such resourceful consideration, self-control, refinement, loyalty, pride, and friendship - towards the outside, where the strange world, the world of foreigners, begins, these men are not much better than beasts of prey turned loose. There they enjoy freedom from all social constraints. In the wilderness they make up for the tension which a long fenced-in confinement within the peace of the community brings about. They go back to the innocent consciousness of a wild beast of prey, as joyful monsters, who perhaps walk away from a dreadful sequence of murder, arson, rape, and torture with an exhilaration and spiritual equilibrium, as if they had merely pulled off a student prank, convinced that the poets now once again have something to sing about and praise for a long time to come. At the bottom of all these noble races we cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the blond beast splendidly roaming around in its lust for loot and victory. This hidden basis from time to time needs to be discharged: the animal must come out again, must go back into the wilderness, - Roman, Arab, German, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings - in this need they are all alike. It is the noble races which left behind the concept of the "barbarian" in all their tracks, wherever they went. A consciousness of and even a pride in this fact still reveals itself in their highest culture (for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians, in that famous Funeral Speech, "our audacity has broken a way through to every land and sea, putting up permanent memorials to itself for good and ill"). This "audacity" of the noble races, mad, absurd, sudden in the way it expresses itself, its unpredictability, even the improbability of its undertakings - Pericles emphatically praises the rayhumia [mental balance, freedom from anxiety] of the Athenians - their indifference to and contempt for safety, body, life, comfort, their fearsome cheerfulness and the depth of their joy in all destruction, in all the physical pleasures of victory and cruelty - everything summed up for those who suffer from such audacity in the image of the "barbarian," of the "evil enemy," of something like the "Goths" or the "Vandals". The deep, icy mistrust which the German evokes, as soon as he comes to power, once more again today - is always still an after-effect of that unforgettable terror with which for centuries Europe confronted the rage of the blond German beast (although there is hardly any idea linking the old Germanic tribes and we Germans, let alone any blood relationship). Once before I have remarked on Hesiod's dilemma when he thought up his sequence of cultural periods and sought to express them as Gold, Silver, and Bronze. But he didn't know what to do with the contradiction presented to him by the marvellous but, at the same time, horrifying and violent world of Homer, other than to make two cultural ages out of one and then place one after the other - first the age of Heroes and Demi-gods from Troy and Thebes, just as that world remained in the memories of the noble families who had their own ancestors in it, and then the Bronze age as that same world appeared to the descendants of the downtrodden, exploited, ill treated, those carried off and sold - a Bronze age, as mentioned: hard, cold, cruel, empty of feeling and scruples, with everything crushed and covered over in blood. Assuming as true what in any event is taken as "the truth" nowadays, that it is the purpose of all culture simply to breed a tame and civilized animal, a domestic pet, out of the beast of prey "man," then we would undoubtedly have to consider all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment with whose help the noble races and all their ideals were finally disgraced and overpowered as the essential instruments of culture - though to do that would not be to claim that the bearers of these instincts also in themselves represented culture. By contrast, the opposite would not only be probable - no! nowadays it is visibly apparent! These people carrying instincts of oppression and of a lust for revenge, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, of all pre-Aryan populations in particular - they represent the regression of mankind! These "instruments of culture" are a disgrace to humanity, and more a reason to be suspicious of or a counterargument against "culture" in general! We may well be right when we hang onto our fear of the blond beast at the base of all noble races and keep up our guard. But who would not find it a hundred times better to fear if he could at the same time be allowed to admire, rather than not fear but in the process no longer be able to rid himself of the disgusting sight of the failures, the stunted, the emaciated, the poisoned? Is not that our fate? Today what is it that constitutes our aversion to "man"? - For we suffer from man. There's no doubt of that. It's not a matter of fear. Rather it's the fact that we have nothing more to fear from man, that the maggot "man" is in the foreground swarming around, that the "tame man," the hopelessly mediocre and unpleasant man, has already learned to feel that he is the goal, the pinnacle, the meaning of history, "the higher man," - yes indeed, that he even has a certain right to feel that about himself, insofar as he feels separate from the excess of failed, sick, tired, spent people, who are nowadays beginning to make Europe stink, so that he feels at least relatively successful, at least still capable of life, of at least saying "Yes" to life.

12

- At this point I won't suppress a sigh and a final confidence. What is it exactly that I find so totally unbearable? Something which I cannot deal with on my own, which makes me choke and feel faint? Bad air! Bad air! It's when something which has failed comes close to me, when I have to smell the entrails of a failed soul! . . . Apart from that what can we not endure by way of need, deprivation, bad weather, infirmity, hardship, loneliness? Basically we can deal with all the other things, born as we are to an underground and struggling existence. We come back again and again into the light, we live over and over our golden hour of victory - and then we stand there, just as we were born, unbreakable, tense, ready for something new, for something even more difficult, more distant, like a bow which all troubles only serve always to pull still tighter. But if there are heavenly goddesses who are our patrons, beyond good and evil, then from time to time grant me a glimpse, just grant me a single glimpse into something perfect, something completely developed, happy, powerful, triumphant, from which there is still something to fear! A glimpse of a man who justifies humanity, of a complementary and redeeming stroke-of-luck of a man, for whose sake we can hang onto a faith in humanity! . . . For matters stand like this: the diminution and levelling of European man conceal our greatest danger, for at the sight of him we grow tired . . . We see nothing today which wants to be greater. We suspect that things are constantly still going down, down into something thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian - humanity, there is no doubt, is becoming constantly "better". . . . Europe's fate lies right here - with the fear of man we also have lost the love for him, the reverence for him, the hope for him, indeed, our will to him. A glimpse at man nowadays makes us tired - what is contemporary nihilism, if it is not that? . . .We are weary of man. . . .

13

- But let's come back: the problem with the other origin of the "good," of the good man, as the person of ressentiment has imagined it for himself, demands its own conclusion. - That the lambs are upset about the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and the fact that they snatch away small lambs provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey. And if the lambs say among themselves, "These predatory birds are evil, and whoever is least like a predatory bird, especially anyone who is like its opposite, a lamb - shouldn't that animal be good?" there is nothing to find fault with in this setting up of an ideal, except for the fact that the birds of prey might look down on them with a little mockery and perhaps say to themselves, "We are not at all annoyed with these good lambs. We even love them. Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb". To demand from strength that it does not express itself as strength, that it does not consist of a will to overpower, a will to throw down, a will to rule, a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumph, is just as unreasonable as to demand from weakness that it express itself as strength. A quantum of force is simply such a quantum of drive, will, action - rather, it is nothing but this very driving, willing, acting itself - and it cannot appear as anything else except through the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by something which causes actions, by a "Subject". For, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject, which is called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as if behind the strong person there were an indifferent substrate, which is free to express strength or not. But there is no such substrate; there is no "being" behind the doing, acting, becoming. "The doer" is merely made up and added into the action - the act is everything. People basically duplicate the action: when they see a lightning flash, that is an action of an action: they set up the same event first as the cause and then yet again as its effect. Natural scientists are no better when they say "Force moves, force causes," and so on - our entire scientific knowledge, for all its coolness, its freedom from feelings, still remains exposed to the seductions of language and has not gotten rid of the changelings foisted on it, the "Subjects" (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, like the Kantian "thing-in-itself"): it's no wonder that the repressed, secretly smouldering feelings of rage and hate use this belief for themselves and basically even maintain a faith in nothing more fervently than in the idea that the strong are free to be weak and that predatory birds are free to be lambs: - in so doing, they arrogate to themselves the right to blame the birds of prey for being birds of prey. When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the conquered say to each other, with the vengeful cunning of the powerless, "Let us be different from evil people, namely, good! And that man is good who does not overpower, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who does not retaliate, who hands revenge over to God, who keeps himself hidden, as we do, the man who avoids all evil and demands little from life in general, like us, the patient, humble, and upright" - what that amounts to, coolly expressed and without bias, is essentially nothing more than "We weak people are merely weak. It's good if we do nothing; we are not strong enough for that" - but this bitter state, this shrewdness of the lowest ranks, which even insects possess (when in great danger they stand as if they were dead in order not to do "too much"), has, thanks to that counterfeiting and self- deception of powerlessness, dressed itself in the splendour of a self-denying, still, patient virtue, just as if the weakness of the weak man himself - that means his essence, his actions, his entire single, inevitable, and irredeemable reality - is a voluntary achievement, something willed, chosen, an act, something of merit. This kind of man has to believe in the disinterested, freely choosing "subject" out of his instinct for self-preservation, self-approval, in which every falsehood is habitually sanctified. Hence, the subject (or, to use a more popular style, the soul) has up to now perhaps been the best principle for belief on earth, because, for the majority of the dying, the weak, and the downtrodden of all sorts, it makes possible that sublime self-deception which establishes weakness itself as freedom and their being like this or that as something meritorious.

14

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

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

- Keep talking!

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

- Keep talking!

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

- Go on!

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

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

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

- And what do they call what serves them as a consolation for all the suffering of life - their phantasmagoria of future blessedness which they are expecting? - "What's that? Am I hearing correctly? They call that 'the last judgment,' the coming of their kingdom, the coming of 'God's kingdom' - but in the meanwhile they live 'in faith,' 'in love,' 'in hope'".

- Enough! Enough!

15

In belief in what? In love with what? In hope for what? - There's no doubt that these weak people - at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their "kingdom" is to arrive - they call it simply "the kingdom of God," as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! Only to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death - in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can also win eternal recompense in the "kingdom of God" for that earthly life "in faith, in love, in hope". Recompense for what? Recompense through what? . . . In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity inspiring terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell: "Eternal love also created me". Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its "eternal blessedness" it would, in any event, be more fitting to let the inscription stand "Eternal hate also created me" - provided it's all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie! For what is the bliss of that paradise? . . . Perhaps we might have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: "In the kingdom of heaven" he says as gently as a lamb, "the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss". Or do you want to hear that message in a stronger tone, something from the mouth of a triumphant father of the church, who warns his Christians against the cruel sensuality of the public spectacles. But why? "Faith, in fact, offers much more to us," he says (in de Spectaculis, c. 29 ff), "something much stronger. Thanks to the redemption, very different joys are ours to command; in place of the athletes, we have our martyrs. If we want blood, well, we have the blood of Christ . . . But what awaits us on the day of his coming again, his triumph!" - and now he takes off, the rapturous visionary: "However there are other spectacles - that last eternal day of judgment, ignored by nations, derided by them, when the accumulation of the years and all the many things which they produced will be burned in a single fire. What a broad spectacle then appears! How I will be lost in admiration! How I will laugh! How I will rejoice! I will be full of exaltation then as I see so many great kings who by public report were accepted into heaven groaning in the deepest darkness with Jove himself and alongside those very men who testified on their behalf! They will include governors of provinces who persecuted the name of our Lord burning in flames more fierce than those with which they proudly raged against the Christians! And those wise philosophers who earlier convinced their disciples that God was irrelevant and who claimed either that there is no such thing as a soul or that our souls would not return to their original bodies will be ashamed as they burn in the conflagration with those very disciples! And the poets will be there, shaking with fear, not in front of the tribunal of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the Christ they did not anticipate! Then it will be easier to hear the tragic actors, because their voices will be more resonant in their own calamity" (better voices since they will be screaming in greater terror). "The actors will then be easier to recognize, for the fire will make them much more agile. Then the charioteer will be on show, all red in a wheel of fire, and the athletes will be visible, thrown, not in the gymnasium, but in the fire, unless I have no wish to look at their bodies then, so that I can more readily cast an insatiable gaze on those who raged against our Lord. 'This is the man,' I will say, 'the son of a workman or a prostitute'" (in everything that follows and especially in the well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talamud, Tertullian from this point on is referring to the Jews) "the destroyer of the Sabbath, the Samaritan possessed by the devil. He is the man whom you brought from Judas, the man who was beaten with a reed and with fists, reviled with spit, who was given gall and vinegar to drink. He is the man whom his disciples took away in secret, so that it could be said that he was resurrected, or whom the gardener took away, so that the crowd of visitors would not harm his lettuce.' What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will from his own generosity grant this to you so that may see such sights, so that you can exult in such things? And yet we already have these things to a certain extent through faith, represented to us by the imagining spirit. Besides, what sorts of things has the eye not seen or the ear not heard and what sorts of things have not arisen in the human heart?" (1. Cor. 2, 9). "I believe these are more pleasing than the race track and the circus and both enclosures" (first and fourth tier of seats or, according to others, the comic and tragic stages).Through faith: that's how it's written.

16

Let's bring this to a conclusion. The two opposing values "good and bad," "good and evil" have fought a fearful battle on earth for thousands of years. And if it's true that the second value has for a long time had the upper hand, even now there's still no lack of places where the battle goes on without a final decision. We could even say that in the intervening time the battle has been constantly drawn to greater heights and in the process to constantly greater depths and has become constantly more spiritual, so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a "higher nature," a more spiritual nature, than that it is split in that sense and is truly still a battleground for those opposites. The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called "Rome Against Judea, Judea Against Rome". To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, this contradiction between deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jew  was like something contrary to nature itself, its monstrous polar opposite, as it were. In Rome the Jew was considered "guilty of hatred against the entire human race". And that view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values. By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat ourselves again to the Apocalypse of John, that wildest of all written outbursts which vengeance has on its conscience. (Incidentally, we must not underestimate the deep consistency of the Christian instinct, when it ascribed this very book of hate to the name of the disciple of love, the same man to whom it attributed that enthusiastic amorous gospel - : there is some truth to this, no matter how much literary counterfeiting may have been necessary for this purpose). The Romans were indeed strong and noble men, stronger and nobler than any people who had lived on earth up until then or even than any people who had ever been dreamed up. Everything they left as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can guess what is doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par excellence that priestly people of ressentiment, who possessed an unparalleled genius for popular morality. Just compare people with related talents - say, the Chinese or the Germans - with the Jews, in order to understand what is ranked first and what is ranked fifth. Which of them has proved victorious for the time being, Rome or Judea? Surely there's not the slightest doubt. Just think of who it is people bow down to today in Rome itself as the personification of all the highest values - and not only in Rome, but in almost half the earth, all the places where people have become merely tame or want to become tame - in front of three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (in front of Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet maker Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable: without doubt Rome has been conquered. It is true that in the Renaissance there was an incredibly brilliant reawakening of the classical ideal, the noble way of evaluating everything. Rome itself behaved like someone who had woken up from a coma induced by the pressure of the new Jewish Rome built over it, which looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called "the church". But Judea immediately triumphed again, thanks to that basically vulgar (German and English) movement of ressentiment, which we call the Reformation, together with what had to follow as a result, the re-establishment of the church - as well as the re-establishment of the old grave-like tranquillity of classical Rome. In what is an even more decisive and deeper sense than that, Judea once again was victorious over the classical ideal at the time of the French Revolution. The last political nobility which there was in Europe, in seventeenth and eighteenth century France, broke apart under the instincts of popular ressentiment - never on earth has there been heard a greater rejoicing, a noisier enthusiasm! It's true that in the midst of all this the most dreadful and most unexpected events took place: the old ideal itself stepped physically and with unheard of splendour before the eyes and the conscience of humanity - and once again stronger, simpler, and more urgently than ever rang out, in opposition to the old lying slogan of ressentiment about the privileged rights of the majority, in opposition to that will for a low condition, for abasement, for equality, for the decline and extinguishing of mankind - in opposition to all that there rang out a fearsome and delightful counter-slogan about the rights of the very few! As a last signpost to a different road, Napoleon appeared, the most singular and late-born man there ever was, and in him the problem of the inherently noble ideal was made flesh - we should consider well what a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman. . . .

17

- Did that end it? Was that greatest of all opposition of ideals thus set ad acta [aside] for all time? Or was it merely postponed, postponed indefinitely? . . . Some day, after a much longer preparation, will an even more fearful blaze from the old fire not have to take place? More than that: wouldn't this be exactly what we should hope for with all our strength? Even will it? Even demand it? Anyone who, like my readers, begins to reflect on these points, to think further, will have difficulty coming to a quick conclusion - reason enough for me to come to a conclusion myself, provided that it has been sufficiently clear for a long time what I want, precisely what I want with that dangerous slogan which is written on the body of my last book: "Beyond Good and Evil" . . . At least this does not mean "Beyond Good and Bad". -

Note

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

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

- On the other hand, it is, of course, just as necessary to attract the participation of physiologists and doctors to this problem (of the value of all methods of evaluating up to now). Also for this task it might be left to the faculties of philosophers in this single case to become advocates and mediators, after they have completely succeeded in converting the relationship between philosophy, physiology, and medicine, originally so aloof, so mistrusting, into the most friendly and fruitful exchange. In fact, all the tables of value, all the "you should's" which history or ethnological research knows about, need, first and foremost, illumination and interpretation from physiology, in any case even before psychology. All of them similarly await a critique from the point of view of medical science. The question "What is this or that table of values and 'morality' worth?" will be set under the different perspectives. For we cannot analyze the question "Value for what?" too finely. Something, for example, that would have an apparent value with respect to the longest possible capacity for survival of a race (or for an increase in its power to adapt to a certain climate or for the preservation of the greatest number) would have nothing like the same value, if the issue were one of developing a stronger type. The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the fewest are opposing viewpoints for values. We wish to leave it to the naivete of English biologists to take the first as already the one of inherently higher value. . . . All the sciences from now on have to do the preparatory work for the future task of the philosopher, understanding that the philosopher's task is to solve the problem of value, that he has to determine the rank order of values

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche
This work is in the Public Domain.

Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters

1

To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises - is that not precisely the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn't that the real problem of human beings?... The fact that this problem has to a great extent been solved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a vis interiae [a force of inertia], as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense, to which we can ascribe the fact that while we are digesting what we alone live through and experience and absorb into ourselves (we could call the process mental ingestion [Einverseelung]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the entire thousand-fold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung]). The doors and windows of consciousness are shut temporarily; they remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our functional organs keeps working for and against one another; a little stillness, a little tabula rasa [blank slate] of the consciousness, so that there will again be room for something new, above all, for the nobler functions and officials, for ruling, thinking ahead, determining what to do (for our organism is arranged as an oligarchy) - that is, as I said, the use of active forgetfulness, a porter at the door, so to speak, a custodian of psychic order, quiet, etiquette. From that we can see at once how, if forgetfulness were not present, there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hoping, no pride, no present. The man in whom this repression apparatus is harmed and not working properly we can compare to a dyspeptic (and not just compare) - he is "finished" with nothing.... Now, this particular animal, which is necessarily forgetful, in which forgetfulness is present as a force, as a form of strong health, has had an opposing capability bred into it, a memory, with the help of which, in certain cases, forgetfulness will cease to function - that is, for those cases where promises are to be made. This is in no way a merely passive inability ever to be rid of an impression once it has been etched into the mind, nor is it merely indigestion over a word one has pledged at a particular time and which one can no longer be over and done with. No, it's an active wish not to be free of the matter again, an ongoing and continuing desire for what one willed at a particular time, a real memory of one's will, so that between the original "I will," "I will do," and the actual discharge of the will, its action, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of the will can be interposed without a second thought and not break this long chain of the will. But how much all that presupposes! In order to organize the future in this manner, human beings must have first learned to separate necessary events from chance events, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see distant events as if they were present, to anticipate them, to set goals and the means to reach them with certainty, to develop a capability for figures and calculations in general - and for that to occur, a human being must necessarily have first himself become something one could predict, something bound by regular rules, even in the way he imagined himself to himself, so that finally he is able to act like someone who makes promises - he can make himself into a pledge for the future!

2

Precisely that development is the long history of the origin of responsibility. That task of breeding an animal which is permitted to make promises contains within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the more precise task of first making a human being necessarily uniform to some extent, one among others like him, regular and consequently predictable. The immense task involved in this, what I have called the "morality of custom" (cf. Daybreak 9, 14, 16) - the essential work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his entire prehistorical work, derives its meaning, its grand justification, from the following point, no matter how much hardship, tyranny, monotony, and idiocy it also manifested: with the help of the morality of custom and the social strait jacket, the human being was made truly predictable. Let's position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree at last yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means: then we find, as the ripest fruit on that tree, the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which has broken loose again from the morality of custom, the autonomous individual beyond morality (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive terms), in short, the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled to make promises - and in him a consciousness quivering in every muscle, proud of what has finally been achieved and has become a living embodiment in him, a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally. This man who has become free, who really is entitled to make promises, this master of free will, this sovereign - how is he not to realize the superiority he enjoys over everything which is not permitted to make a promise and make pledges on its own behalf, knowing how much trust, how much fear, and how much respect he creates - he "is worthy" of all three - and how, with this mastery over himself, he has necessarily been given in addition mastery over his circumstances, over nature, and over all less reliable creatures with a shorter will? The "free" man, the owner of an enduring unbreakable will, by possessing this, also acquires his own standard of value: he looks out from himself at others and confers respect or contempt. And just as it will be necessary for him to honour those like him, the strong and dependable (who are entitled to make promises) - in other words, everyone who makes promises like a sovereign, seriously, rarely, and slowly, who is sparing with his trust, who honours another when he does trust, who gives his word as something reliable, because he knows he is strong enough to remain upright even when opposed by misfortune, even when "opposed by fate" - in just the same way it will be necessary for him to keep his foot ready to kick the scrawny unreliable men, who make promises without being entitled to, and to hold his cane ready for the liar, who breaks his word in the very moment it comes out of his mouth. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over oneself and destiny, has become internalized into the deepest parts of him and grown instinctual, has become an instinct, a dominating instinct: - what will he call it, this dominating instinct, assuming that he finds he needs a word for it? There's no doubt: the sovereign man calls this instinct his conscience.

3

His conscience?... To begin with, we can conjecture that the idea "conscience," which we are encountering here in its highest, almost perplexing form, has a long history and changing developmental process behind it already. To be entitled to pledge one's word, and to do it with pride, and also to be permitted to say "Yes" to oneself - that is a ripe fruit, as I have mentioned, but it is also a late fruit: - for what a long stretch of time this fruit must have hung tart and sour on the tree! And for an even much longer time it was impossible to see any such fruit - no one could have promised it would appear, even if everything about the tree was certainly getting ready for it and growing in that very direction! - "How does one create a memory for the human animal? How does one stamp something like that into this partly dull, partly flickering, momentary understanding, this living embodiment of forgetfulness, so that it stays current?"... This ancient problem, as you can imagine, was not resolved right away with tender answers and methods. Indeed, there is perhaps nothing more fearful and more terrible in the entire prehistory of human beings than the technique for developing his memory. "We burn something in so that it remains in the memory. Only something which never ceases to cause pain remains in the memory" - that is a leading principle of the most ancient (unfortunately also the longest) psychology on earth. We might even say that everywhere on earth nowadays where there is still solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colours in the lives of men and people, something of that terror continues its work, the fear with which in earlier times everywhere on earth people made promises, pledged their word, made a vow. The past, the longest, deepest, most severe past, breathes on us and surfaces in us when we become "solemn". When the human being considered it necessary to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, martyrs, and sacrifices, the most terrible sacrifices and pledges (among them the sacrifice of the first born), the most repulsive self-mutilations (for example, castration), the cruellest forms of ritual in all the religious cults (and all religions are in their deepest foundations systems of cruelty) - all that originates in that instinct which discovered in pain the most powerful means of helping to develop the memory. In a certain sense all asceticism belongs here: a couple of ideas are to be made indissoluble, omnipresent, unforgettable, "fixed," in order to hypnotize the entire nervous and intellectual system through these "fixed ideas" - and the ascetic procedures and forms of life are the means whereby these ideas are freed from jostling around with all the other ideas, in order to make them "unforgettable". The worse humanity's "memory" was, the more terrible its customs have always appeared. The harshness of the laws of punishment, in particular, provide a standard for measuring how much trouble people went to in order to triumph over forgetfulness and to maintain a present awareness of a few primitive demands of social living together for this slave of momentary feelings and desires. We Germans certainly do not think of ourselves as an especially cruel and hard-hearted people, even less as particularly careless people who live only in the present. But just take a look at our old penal code in order to understand how much trouble it takes on this earth to breed a "People of Thinkers" (by that I mean the European people among whom today we still find a maximum of trust, seriousness, tastelessness, and practicality, and who, with these characteristics, have a right to breed all sorts of European mandarins). These Germans have used terrible means to make themselves a memory in order to attain mastery over their vulgar basic instincts and their brutal crudity: think of the old German punishments, for example, stoning ( - the legend even lets the mill stone fall on the head of the guilty person), breaking on the wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty of the German genius in the realm of punishment!), impaling on a stake, ripping people apart or stamping them to death with horses ("quartering"), boiling the criminal in oil or wine (still done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the well-loved practice of flaying ("cutting flesh off in strips"), carving flesh out of the chest, and probably covering the offender with honey and leaving him to the flies in the burning sun. With the help of such images and procedures people finally retained five or six "I will not's" in the memory, and, so far as these precepts were concerned, they gave their word in order to live with the advantages of society - and it's true! With the assistance of this sort of memory people finally came to "reason"! - Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over emotions, this whole gloomy business called reflection, all these privileges and showpieces of human beings: how expensive they were! How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all "good things"!...

4

But then how did that other "gloomy business," the consciousness of guilt, the whole "bad conscience" come into the world? - And with this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I'll say it once more - or have I not said anything about it yet? - they are useless. With their own merely "modern" experience extending through only a brief period [fünf Spannen lange], with no knowledge of and no desire to know the past, even less a historical instinct, a "second sight" - something necessary at this very point - they nonetheless pursue the history of morality. That must justifiably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth. Have these genealogists of morality up to now allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, that major moral principle "guilt" [Schuld] derived its origin from the very materialistic idea "debt" [Schulden]? Or that punishment developed as a repayment, completely without reference to any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will? - and did so, by contrast, to the point where it always first required a high degree of human development so that the animal "man" began to make those much more primitive distinctions between "intentional," "negligent," "accidental," "responsible," and their opposites and bring them to bear when meting out punishment? That idea, nowadays so trite, apparently so natural, so unavoidable, which has even had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of justice in general came into existence on earth, "The criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise," this idea is, in fact, an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making. Anyone who moves this idea back to the beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of older humanity. For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished: - it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator - but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator. Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is, in general, as ancient as the idea of "legal subject" and which, for its part, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.

5

It's true that recalling this contractual relationship arouses, as we might initially expect from what I have observed above, all sorts of suspicion of and opposition to older humanity, which established or allowed it. It's at this particular moment that people make promises. At this very point the pertinent issue is to create a memory for the person who makes a promise, so that precisely here, we can surmise, there will exist a place for harshness, cruelty, and pain. In order to inspire trust in his promise to pay back, in order to give his promise a guarantee of its seriousness and sanctity, in order to impress on his own conscience the idea of paying back as a duty, an obligation, the debtor, by virtue of a contract, pledges to the creditor, in the event that he does not pay, something else that he still "owns," something else over which he still exercises power, for example, his body or his woman or his freedom or even his life (or, under certain religious conditions, even his blessedness, the salvation of his soul, finally even his peace in the grave, as was the case in Egypt, where the dead body of the debtor even in the tomb found no peace from the creditor - and among the Egyptians, in particular, such peace certainly mattered). That means that the creditor could inflict all kinds of ignominy and torture on the body of the debtor, for instance, slice off the body as much as seemed appropriate for the size of the debt: - and this point of view early on and everywhere gave rise to precise, sometimes horrific estimates going into the smallest detail, legally established estimates about individual limbs and body parts. I consider it already a step forward, as evidence of a freer conception of the law, something which calculates more grandly, a more Roman idea of justice, when Rome's Twelve Tables of Laws decreed it was all the same, no matter how much or how little the creditor cut off in such cases: "let it not be thought a crime if they cut off more or less". Let us clarify for ourselves the logic of this whole method of compensation - it is weird enough. The equivalency is given in this way: instead of an advantage making up directly for the harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land, possessions of some sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation - the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in "de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire" [doing wrong for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the creditor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to him a delicious mouthful, in fact, a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the "punishment" of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters. Finally he also for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone "beneath him," as someone he is entitled to mistreat - or at least, in the event that the real force of punishment, of executing punishment, has already been transferred to the "authorities," the feeling of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consists of an order for and a right to cruelty.

6

In this area, that is, in the laws of obligation, the world of the moral concepts "guilt," "conscience," "duty," and "sanctity of obligation" has its origin - its beginning, like the beginning of everything great on earth, was watered thoroughly and for a long time with blood. And can we not add that this world deep down has never again been completely free of a certain smell of blood and torture - (not even with old Kant whose categorical imperative stinks of cruelty)? In addition, here that weird knot linking the ideas of "guilt and suffering," which perhaps has become impossible to undo, was first knit together. Let me pose the question once more: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for "debts"? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering - a real celebration, something that, as I've said, was valued all the more, the greater it contradicted the rank and social position of the creditor. I have been speculating here, for it's difficult to see through to the foundations of such subterranean things, quite apart from the fact that it's embarrassing. And anyone who crudely throws into the middle of all this the idea of "revenge" has buried and dimmed his insights rather than illuminated them ( - revenge itself, in fact, simply takes us back to the same problem: "How can making someone suffer give us a feeling of satisfaction?"). It seems to me that the delicacy and, even more, the Tartufferie [hypocrisy] of tame house pets (I mean modern man, I mean us) resist imagining with all our power how much cruelty contributes to the great celebratory joy of older humanity, as, in fact, an ingredient mixed into almost all their enjoyments and, from another perspective, how naive, how innocent, their need for cruelty appears, how they fundamentally think of its particular "disinterested malice" (or to use Spinoza's words, the sympathia malevolens [malevolent sympathy]) as a normal human characteristic: - and hence as something to which their conscience says a heartfelt Yes! A more deeply penetrating eye might still notice, even today, enough of this most ancient and most fundamental celebratory human joy. In Beyond Good and Evil, 229 (even earlier in Daybreak, 18, 77, 113), I pointed a cautious finger at the constantly growing spiritualization and "deification" of cruelty, which runs through the entire history of higher culture (and, in a significant sense, even constitutes that culture). In any case, it's not so long ago that people wouldn't think of an aristocratic wedding and folk festival in the grandest style without executions, tortures, or something like an auto-da-fé [burning at the stake], and similarly no noble household lacked creatures on whom people could vent their malice and cruel taunts without a second thought ( - remember, for instance, Don Quixote at the court of the duchess; today we read all of Don Quixote with a bitter taste on the tongue; it's almost an ordeal. In so doing, we would become very foreign, very obscure to the author and his contemporaries - they read it with a fully clear conscience as the most cheerful of books. They almost died laughing at it). Watching suffering makes people feel good; creating suffering makes them feel even better - that's a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle, which, by the way, even the apes might perhaps agree with as well. For people say that, in thinking up bizarre cruelties, the apes already anticipate a great many human actions and are, as it were, an "audition". Without cruelty there is no celebration: that's what the oldest and longest human history teaches us - and with punishment, too, there is so much celebration!

7

With these ideas, by the way, I have no desire whatsoever to give our pessimists grist for their discordant mills grating with weariness of life. On the contrary, I want to state very clearly that in that period when human beings had not yet become ashamed of their cruelty, life on earth was happier than it is today, now that we have our pessimists. The darkening of heaven over men's heads has always increased alarmingly in proportion to the growth of human beings' shame before human beings. The tired, pessimistic look, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy denial stemming from disgust with life - these are not the signs of the wickedest eras of human beings. It's much more the case that they first come to light as the swamp plants they are when the swamp to which they belong is there - I mean the sickly mollycoddling and moralizing, thanks to which the animal "man" finally learns to feel shame about all his instincts. On his way to becoming an "angel" (not to use a harsher word here), man cultivated for himself that upset stomach and that furry tongue which not only made the joy and innocence of the animal repulsive but also made life itself distasteful: - so that now and then he stands there before himself, holds his nose, and with Pope Innocent III disapproves and makes a catalogue of his nastiness ("conceived in filth, disgustingly nourished in his mother's body, developed out of evil material stuff, stinking horribly, a secretion of spit, urine, and excrement"). Now, when suffering always has to march out as the first among the arguments against existence, as its most serious question mark, it's good for us to remember the times when people judged things the other way around, because they couldn't do without making people suffer and saw a first-class magic in it, a really tempting enticement for living. Perhaps, and let me say this as a consolation for the delicate, at that time pain did not yet hurt as much as it does nowadays. That at least could be the conclusion of a doctor who had treated a Negro (taking the latter as a representative of prehistorical man) for a bad case of inner inflammation, which drives the European, even one with the best constitution, almost to despair, but which does not have the same effect on the Negro. (The graph of the human sensitivity to pain seems in fact to sink down remarkably and almost immediately after one has moved beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the top members of the higher culture. And I personally have no doubt that, in comparison with one painful night of a single hysterical well-educated female, the total suffering of all animals which up to now have been interrogated by the knife in search of scientific answers is simply not worth considering). Perhaps it is even permissible to concede the possibility that that pleasure in cruelty does not really need to have died out. It would only require a certain sublimation and subtlety, in proportion to the way pain hurts more nowadays; in other words, it would have to appear translated into the imaginative and spiritual and embellished with nothing but names so unobjectionable that they arouse no suspicion in even the most delicate hypocritical conscience ("tragic pity" is one such name; another is "les nostalgies de la croix" [nostalgia for the cross]). What truly enrages people about suffering is not the suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering. But neither for the Christian, who has interpreted into suffering an entire secret machinery for salvation, nor for the naive men of older times, who understood how to interpret all suffering in relation to the spectator or to the person inflicting the suffering, was there generally any such meaningless suffering. In order for the hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering to be removed from the world and for people to be able to deny it honestly, they were then almost compelled to invent gods and intermediate beings at all levels, high and low - briefly put, something that also roamed in hidden places, that also looked into the darkness, and that would not readily permit an interesting painful spectacle to escape its attention. For with the help of such inventions life then understood and has always understood how to justify itself by a trick, how to justify its "evil". Nowadays perhaps it requires other helpful inventions for that purpose (for example, life as riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil a glimpse of which edifies a god is justified": that's how the prehistorical logic of feeling rang out - and was that really confined only to prehistory? The gods conceived of as friends of cruel spectacle - O how widely this primitive idea still rises up even within our European humanity! We might well seek advice from, say, Calvin and Luther on this point. At any rate it is certain that even the Greeks knew of no more acceptable snack to offer their gods to make them happy than the joys of cruelty. With what sort of expression, do you think, did Homer allow his gods to look down on the fates of men? What final sense was there basically in the Trojan War and similar tragic terrors? We cannot entertain the slightest doubts about this: they were intended as celebrations for the gods: and, to the extent that the poet is in these matters more "godlike" than other men, as festivals for the poets as well.... Later the Greek moral philosophers in the same way imagined the eyes of god no differently, still looking down on the moral struggles, on heroism and the self-mutilation of the virtuous: the "Hercules of duty" was on a stage, and he knew he was there. Without someone watching, virtue for this race of actors was something entirely inconceivable. Surely such a daring and fateful philosophical invention, first made for Europe at that time, the invention of the "free will," of the absolutely spontaneous nature of human beings in matters of good and evil, was created above all to justify the idea that the interest of gods in men, in human virtue, could never run out? On this earthly stage there was never to be any lack of really new things, really unheard of suspense, complications, catastrophes. A world conceived of as perfectly deterministic would have been predictable to the gods and therefore also soon boring for them - reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to ascribe such a deterministic world to their gods! All of ancient humanity is full of sensitive consideration for "the spectator," for a truly public, truly visible world, which did not know how to imagine happiness without dramatic performances and festivals. And, as I have already said, in great punishment there is also so much celebration!

8

To resume the path of our enquiry, the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation has, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things - that preoccupied man's very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it's what thinking itself is. Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume are the first beginnings of man's pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word "man" (manas) continues to express directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the "inherently calculating animal". Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relationships with similar social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating. The eye was now adjusted to this perspective, and with that awkward consistency characteristic of thinking in more ancient human beings, hard to get started but then inexorably moving forward in the same direction, people soon reached the great generalization: "Each thing has its price, everything can be paid off" - the oldest and most naive moral principle of justice, the beginning of all "good nature," all "fairness," all "good will," all "objectivity" on earth. Justice at this first stage is good will among those approximately equal in power to come to terms with each other, to "come to an agreement" again with each other by compensation - and in relation to those less powerful, to compel them to arrive at some settlement among themselves. -

9

Always measured by the standard of prehistory (a prehistory which, by the way, is present at all times or is capable of returning), the community also stands in relation to its members in that important basic relationship of the creditor to his debtor. People live in a community. They enjoy the advantages of a community (and what advantages they are! Nowadays we sometimes underestimate them); they live protected, cared for, in peace and trust, without worries concerning certain injuries and enmities from which the man outside the community, the "man without peace," is excluded - a German understands what "misery" [Elend] or êlend [other country] originally means - and how people pledged themselves to and entered into obligations with the community bearing in mind precisely these injuries and enmities. What will happen with an exception to this case? The community, the defrauded creditor, will see that it gets paid as well as it can - on that people can rely. The issue here is least of all the immediate damage which the offender has caused. Setting this to one side, the lawbreaker [Verbrecher] is above all a "breaker" [Brecher], a breaker of contracts and a breaker of his word against the totality, with respect to all the good features and advantages of the communal life in which, up to that point, he has had a share. The lawbreaker is a debtor who does not merely not pay back the benefits and advances given to him, but who even attacks his creditor. So from this point on not only does he forfeit, as is reasonable, all these good things and benefits - but he is also now reminded what these good things are all about. The anger of the injured creditor, the community, gives him back again to the wild outlawed condition, from which he was earlier protected. It pushes him away from itself - and now every form of hostility can vent itself on him. At this stage of cultural behaviour "punishment" is simply the copy, the mimus, of the normal conduct towards the hated, disarmed enemy who has been thrown down, who has forfeited not only all legal rights and protection but also all mercy; hence it is a case of the rights of war and the victory celebration of vae victis [woe to the conquered] in all its ruthlessness and cruelty: - which accounts for the fact that war itself (including the warlike cult of sacrifice) has given us all the forms in which punishment has appeared in history.

10

As it acquires more power, a community no longer considers the crimes of the single individual so serious, because it no longer is entitled to consider him as dangerous and unsettling for the existence of the totality as much as it did before. The wrongdoer is no longer "outlawed" and thrown out, and the common anger is no longer permitted to vent itself on him without restraint to the same extent as earlier - instead the wrongdoer from now on is carefully protected by the community against this anger, especially from that of the immediately injured person, and is taken into protective custody. The compromise with the anger of those particularly affected by the wrong doing, and thus the effort to localize the case and to avert a wider or even a general participation and unrest, the attempts to find equivalents and to settle the whole business (the compositio), above all the desire, appearing with ever-increasing clarity, to consider every crime as, in some sense or other, capable of being paid off, and thus, at least to a certain extent, to separate the criminal and his crime from each other - those are the characteristics stamped more and more clearly on the further development of criminal law. If the power and the self-confidence of a community keep growing, the criminal law also grows constantly milder. Every weakening and deeper jeopardizing of the community brings its harsher forms of criminal law to light once again. The "creditor" has always became proportionally more humane as he has become richer. Finally the amount of his wealth even becomes measured by how much damage he can sustain without suffering from it. It would not be impossible to imagine a society with a consciousness of its own power which allowed itself the most privileged luxury which it can have - letting its criminals go without punishment. "Why should I really bother about my parasites?" it could then say. "May they live and prosper; for that I am still sufficiently strong!"... Justice, which started with "Everything is capable of being paid for; everything must be paid off" ends at that point, by shutting its eyes and letting the person incapable of payment go free - it ends, as every good thing on earth ends, by doing away with itself. This self-negation of justice: we know what a beautiful name it calls itself - mercy. It goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or even better, his beyond the law.

11

A critical comment here about a recently published attempt to find the origin of justice in a completely different place - that is, in ressentiment. But first a word in the ear of the psychologists, provided that they have any desire to study ressentiment itself up close for once: this plant grows most beautifully nowadays among anarchists and anti- Semites; in addition, it blooms, as it always has, in hidden places, like the violet, although it has a different fragrance. And since like always has to emerge necessarily from like, it is not surprising to see attempts coming forward again from just such circles, as they have already done many times before - see above, Section 14 [First Essay] - to sanctify revenge under the name of justice - as if justice were basically only a further development of a feeling of being injured - and to bring belated honour to reactive emotions generally, all of them, using the idea of revenge. With this last point I personally take the least offence. It even seems to me a service, so far as the entire biological problem is concerned (in connection with which the worth of those emotions has been underestimated up to now). The only thing I am calling attention to is the fact that it is the very spirit of ressentiment out of which this new emphasis on scientific fairness grows (which favours hate, envy, resentment, suspicion, rancour, and revenge). This "scientific fairness," that is, ceases immediately and gives way to tones of mortal enmity and prejudice as soon as it deals with another group of emotions which, it strikes me, have a much higher biological worth than those reactive ones and which therefore have earned the right to be scientifically assessed and respected first - namely, the truly active emotions, like desire for mastery, acquisitiveness, and so on (E. Dühring, The Value of Life: A Course in Philosophy, the whole book really). So much against this tendency in general. But in connection with Dühring's single principle that we have to seek the homeland of justice in the land of the reactive feeling, we must, for love of the truth, rudely turn this around by setting out a different principle: the last territory to be conquered by the spirit of justice is the land of the reactive emotions! If it is truly the case that the just man remains just even towards someone who has injured him (and not merely cold, moderate, strange, indifferent: being just is always a positive attitude), if under the sudden attack of personal injury, ridicule, and suspicion, the gaze of the lofty, clear objectivity of the just and judging eye, as profound as it is benevolent, does not itself grow dark, well, that's a piece of perfection and the highest mastery on earth - even something that it would be wise for people not to expect here; in any event, they should not believe in it too easily. It's certainly true that, on average, among the most just people themselves even a small dose of hostility, malice, and insinuation is enough to make them see red and chase fairness out of their eyes. The active, aggressive, over-reaching human being is still placed a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive person. For him it is simply not necessary in the slightest to estimate an object falsely and with bias, the way the reactive man does and must do. Thus, as a matter of fact, at all times the aggressive human being, as the stronger, braver, more noble man, has had on his side a better conscience as well as a more independent eye; by contrast, we can already guess who generally has the invention of "bad conscience" on his conscience - the man of ressentiment! Finally, let's look around in history: up to now in what area has the whole implementation of law in general as well as the essential need for law been at home on earth? Could it be in the area of the reactive human beings? That is entirely wrong. It is much more the case that it's been at home with the active, strong, spontaneous, and aggressive men. Historically considered, the law on earth - let me say this to the annoyance of the above-mentioned agitator (who once even confessed about himself "The doctrine of revenge runs through all my work and efforts as the red thread of justice") - represents that very struggle against the reactive feelings, the war with them on the part of active and aggressive powers, which have partly used up their strength to put a halt to or to restrain the excess of reactive pathos and to compel some settlement with it. Wherever justice is practised, wherever justice is upheld, we see a stronger power in relation to a weaker power standing beneath it (whether with groups or individuals), seeking ways to bring an end among the latter to the senseless rage of ressentiment, partly by dragging the object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge, partly by setting in the place of revenge a battle against the enemies of peace and order, partly by coming up with compensation, proposing it, under certain circumstances making it compulsory, partly by establishing certain equivalents for injuries as a norm, into which from now on ressentiment is directed once and for all. The most decisive factor, however, which the highest power carries out and sets in place against the superior numbers of the feelings of hostility and animosity - something that power always does as soon as it is somehow strong enough to do it - is to set up law, the imperative explanation of those things which, in its own eyes, are generally considered allowed and legal and things which are considered forbidden and illegal, while after the establishment of the law, the authorities treat attacks and arbitrary acts of individuals or entire groups as an outrage against the law, as rebellion against the highest power itself, and they steer the feeling of those beneath them away from the immediate damage caused by such outrages and thus, in the long run, achieve the reverse of what all revenge desires, which sees only the viewpoint of the injured party and considers only that valid. From now on, the eye becomes trained to evaluate actions always impersonally, even the eye of the harmed party itself (although this would be the very last thing to occur, as I have remarked earlier). - Consequently, only with the setting up of the law is there a "just" and "unjust" (and not, as Dühring will have it, from the time of the injurious action). To talk of just and unjust in themselves has no sense whatsoever; it's obvious that in themselves harming, oppressing, exploiting, destroying cannot be "unjust," inasmuch as life essentially works that way, that is, in its basic functions it harms, oppresses, exploits, and destroys, and cannot be conceived at all without this character. We have to acknowledge something even more disturbing: the fact that from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of justice must always be only exceptional conditions, partial restrictions on the basic will to live, which is set on power; they are subordinate to the total purpose of this will as individual means, that is, as means to create larger units of power. A legal system conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle of power complexes, but as a means against all struggles in general, something along the lines of Dühring's communist cliché in which each will must be considered as equal to every will, that would be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of human beings, an assassination attempt on the future of human beings, a sign of exhaustion, a secret path to nothingness. -

12

Here one more word concerning the origin and purpose of punishment - two problems which are separate or should be separate. Unfortunately people normally throw them together into one. How do the previous genealogists of morality deal with this issue? Naively - the way they have always worked. They find some "purpose" or other for punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then in a simple way set this purpose at the beginning as the causa fiendi [creative cause] of punishment and - they're finished. The "purpose in law," however, is the very last idea we should use in the history of the emergence of law. It is much rather the case that for all forms of history there is no more important principle than that one which we reach with such difficulty but which we also really should reach - namely that what causes a particular thing to arise and the final utility of that thing, its actual use and arrangement in a system of purposes, are separate toto coelo [by all the heavens, i.e., absolutely] from each other, that something existing, which has somehow come to its present state, will again and again be interpreted by the higher power over it from a new perspective, appropriated in a new way, reorganized for and redirected to new uses, that all events in the organic world involve overpowering, acquiring mastery and that, in turn, all overpowering and acquiring mastery involve a new interpretation, a readjustment, in which the "sense" and "purpose" up to then must necessarily be obscured or entirely erased. No matter how well we have understood the usefulness of some physiological organ or other (or a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, some style in the arts or in a religious cult), we have still not, in that process, grasped anything about its origin - no matter how uncomfortable and unpleasant this may sound in elderly ears. From time immemorial people have believed that in demonstrable purposes, in the usefulness of a thing, a form, or an institution, they could also understand the reason it came into existence - the eye as something made to see, the hand as something made to grasp. So people also imagined punishment as invented to punish. But all purposes, all uses, are only signs that a will to power has become master over something with less power and has stamped on it its own meaning of some function, and the entire history of a "thing," an organ, a practice can by this process be seen as a continuing chain of signs of constantly new interpretations and adjustments, whose causes do not even need to be connected to each other - in some circumstances they rather follow and take over from each other by chance. Consequently, the "development" of a thing, a practice, or an organ has nothing to do with its progressus [progress] towards a single goal, even less is it the logical and shortest progressus reached with the least expenditure of power and resources - but rather the sequence of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of overpowering which take place on that thing, together with the resistance which arises against that overpowering each time, the changes of form which have been attempted for the purpose of defence and reaction, as well as the results of successful counter-measures. Form is fluid; the "meaning," however, is even more so.... Even within each individual organism things are no different: with every essential growth in the totality, the "meaning" of the individual organ also shifts - in certain circumstances its partial destruction, a reduction of its numbers (for example, through the obliteration of intermediate structures) can be a sign of growing power and perfection. What I wanted to say is this: the partial loss of utility, decline, and degeneration, the loss of meaning, and purposiveness, in short, death, also belong to the conditions of a real progressus [progress], which always appears in the form of a will and a way to a greater power and always establishes itself at the expense of a huge number of smaller powers. The size of a "step forward" can even be estimated by a measure of everything that had to be sacrificed to it. The humanity as mass sacrificed for the benefit of a single stronger species of man - that would be a step forward.... I emphasize this major point of view about historical methodology all the more since it basically runs counter to the very instinct which presently rules and to contemporary taste, which would rather still go along with the absolute contingency, even the mechanical meaninglessness, of all events rather than with the theory of a will to power playing itself out in everything that happens. The democratic idiosyncrasy of being hostile to everything which rules and wants to rule, the modern hatred of rulers [Misarchismus] (to make up a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually transformed itself into and dressed itself up as something spiritual, of the highest spirituality, to such an extent that nowadays step by step it is already infiltrating the strictest, apparently most objective scientific research, and is allowed to infiltrate it. Indeed, it seems to me already to have attained mastery over all of physiology and the understanding of life, to their detriment, as is obvious, because it has conjured away from them their fundamental concept, that of real activity. By contrast, under the pressure of this idiosyncrasy we push "adaptation" into the foreground, that is, a second-order activity, a mere reactivity; in fact, people have defined life itself as an always purposeful inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But that simply misjudges the essence of life, its will to power. That overlooks the first priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, over-reaching, re-interpreting, re-directing, and shaping powers, after whose effects the "adaptation" then follows. Thus, the governing role of the highest functions in an organism itself, the ones in which the will for living appear active and creative, are denied. People should remember the criticism Huxley directed at Spencer for his "administrative nihilism". But the issue here concerns much more than "administration"....

13

Returning to the business at hand, that is, to punishment, we have to differentiate between two aspects of it: first its relative duration, the way it is carried out, the action, the "drama," a certain strict sequence of procedures and, on the other hand, its fluidity, the meaning, the purpose, the expectation linked to the implementation of such procedures. In this matter, we can here assume, without further comment, per analogium [by analogy], in accordance with the major viewpoints about the historical method we have just established, that the procedure itself will be somewhat older and earlier than its use as a punishment, that the latter was only first injected and interpreted into the procedure (which had been present for a long time but was a custom with a different meaning), in short, that it was not what our naive genealogists of morality and law up to now have assumed, who collectively imagined that the procedure was invented for the purpose of punishment, just as people earlier thought that the hand was invented for the purpose of grasping. Now, so far as that other element in punishment is concerned, the fluid element, its "meaning," in a very late cultural state (for example in contemporary Europe) the idea of "punishment" actually presents not simply one meaning but a whole synthesis of "meanings". The history of punishment up to now, in general, the history of its use for different purposes, finally crystallizes into a sort of unity, which is difficult to untangle, difficult to analyze, and, it must be stressed, totally incapable of definition. (Today it is impossible to say clearly why we really punish; all ideas in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition. Only something which has no history is capable of being defined). At an earlier stage, by contrast, that synthesis of "meanings" still appears easier to untangle, as well as even easier to adjust. We can still see how in every individual case the elements in the synthesis alter their valence and rearrange themselves accordingly, so that soon this or that element steps forward and dominates at the expense of the rest; indeed, under certain circumstances one element (say, the purpose of deterrence) appears to rise above all the other elements. In order to give at least an idea of how uncertain, how belated, how accidental "the meaning" of punishment is and how one and the same procedure can be used, interpreted, or adjusted for fundamentally different purposes, let me offer here an example which presented itself to me on the basis of relatively little random material: punishment as a way of rendering someone harmless, as a prevention from further harm; punishment as compensation for the damage to the person injured, in some form or other (also in the form of emotional compensation); punishment as isolation of some upset to an even balance in order to avert a wider outbreak of the disturbance; punishment as way of inspiring fear of those who determine and carry out punishment; punishment as a sort of compensation for the advantages which the law breaker has enjoyed up until that time (for example, when he is made useful as a slave working in the mines); punishment as a cutting out of a degenerate element (in some circumstances an entire branch, as in Chinese law, and thus a means to keep the race pure or to sustain a social type); punishment as festival, that is, as the violation and humiliation of some enemy one has finally thrown down; punishment as a way of making a conscience, whether for the man who suffers the punishment - so- called "reform" - or whether for those who witness the punishment being carried out; punishment as the payment of an honorarium, set as a condition by those in power, which protects the wrong doer from the excesses of revenge; punishment as a compromise with the natural condition of revenge, insofar as the latter is still upheld and assumed as a privilege by powerful families; punishment as a declaration of war and a war measure against an enemy to peace, law, order, and authority, which people fight with the very measures war makes available, as something dangerous to the community, as a breach of contract with respect to its conditions, as a rebel, traitor, and breaker of the peace.

14

Of course, this list is not complete. Obviously punishment is overloaded with all sorts of useful purposes, all the more reason why people can infer from it an alleged utility, which, in the popular consciousness at least, is considered its most essential one - faith in punishment, which nowadays for several reasons is getting shaky, still finds its most powerful support in precisely that. Punishment is supposed to be valuable in waking the feeling of guilt in the guilty party. In punishment people are looking for the actual instrument for that psychic reaction called "bad conscience," "pangs of conscience". But in doing this, people are misappropriating reality and psychology, even for today, and how much more for the longest history of man, his prehistory! Real pangs of conscience are something extremely rare, especially among criminals and prisoners. Prisons and penitentiaries are not breeding grounds in which this species of gnawing worm particularly likes to thrive: - on that point all conscientious observers agree, in many cases delivering such a judgment with sufficient unwillingness, going against their own desires. In general, punishment makes people hard and cold. It concentrates. It sharpens the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens powers of resistance. If it comes about that punishment shatters a man's energy and brings on a wretched prostration and self-abasement, such a consequence is surely even less pleasant than the typical result of punishment, characteristically a dry, gloomy seriousness. However, if we consider those thousands of years before the history of humanity, without a second thought we can conclude that the very development of a feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered by punishment - at least with respect to the victims onto whom this force of punishment was vented. For let us not underestimate just how much the criminal is prevented by the very sight of judicial and executive procedures themselves from sensing that his act, the nature of his action, is something inherently reprehensible, for he sees exactly the same kind of actions committed in the service of justice, then applauded and practised in good conscience, like espionage, lying, bribery, entrapment, the whole tricky and sly art of the police and prosecution, as it manifests itself in the various kinds of punishment - the robbery, oppression, abuse, imprisonment, torture, murder, all done, moreover, as a matter of principle, without even any emotional involvement as an excuse - all these actions are in no way rejected or condemned in themselves by his judges, but only in particular respects when used for certain purposes. "Bad conscience," this most creepy and most interesting plant among our earthly vegetation, did not grow in this soil - in fact, for the longest period in the past nothing about dealing with a "guilty party" penetrated the consciousness of judges or even those doing the punishing. By contrast, they were dealing with someone who had caused harm, with an irresponsible piece of fate. And even the man on whom punishment later fell, once again like a piece of fate, experienced in that no "inner pain," other than what might have come from the sudden arrival of something unpredictable, a terrible natural event, a falling, crushing boulder against which there is no way to fight any more.

15

At one point Spinoza became aware of this issue in an incriminating way (something which irritates his interpreters, like Kuno Fischer, who really go to great lengths to misunderstand him on this matter), when one afternoon, he came up against some memory or other (who knows what?) and pondered the question about what, as far as he was concerned, was left of the celebrated morsus conscientiae [the bite of conscience] - for him, the man who had expelled good and evil into human fantasies and had irascibly defended the honour of his "free" God against those blasphemers who claimed that in everything God worked sub ratione boni [with good reason] ("but that means that God would be subordinate to Fate, a claim which, in truth, would be the greatest of all contradictions"). For Spinoza the world had gone back again into that state of innocence in which it had existed before the invention of bad conscience. So with that what, then, had become of the morsus conscientiae? "The opposite of gaudium [joy]," Spinoza finally told himself "is sorrow, accompanied by the image of something over and done with which happened contrary to all expectation" (Ethics III, Proposition XVIII, Schol. I. II). In a manner no different from Spinoza's, those instigating evil who incurred punishment have for thousands of years felt, so far as their "crime" is concerned, "Something has unexpectedly gone awry here," not "I should not have done that" - they submitted to their punishment as people submit to a sickness or some bad luck or death, with that brave fatalism free of revolt which, for example, even today gives the Russians an advantage over us westerners in coping with life. If back then there was some criticism of the act, such criticism came from prudence: without question we must seek the essential effect of punishment above all in an increase of prudence, in an extension of memory, in a will to go to work from now on more carefully, more mistrustfully, more secretly, with the awareness that we are in many things definitely too weak, in a kind of improved ability to judge ourselves. In general, what can be achieved through punishment, in human beings and animals, is an increase in fear, a honing of prudence, control over desires. In the process, punishment tames human beings, but it does not make them "better" - people could with more justification assert the opposite. (Popular wisdom says "Injury makes people prudent," but to the extent that it makes them prudent, it also makes them bad. Fortunately, often enough it makes people stupid).

16

At this point, I can no longer avoid setting out, in an initial, provisional statement, my own hypothesis about the origin of "bad conscience". It is not easy to get people to attend to it, and it requires them to consider it at length, to guard it, and to sleep on it. I consider bad conscience the profound illness which human beings had to come down with under the pressure of that most fundamental of all the changes which they ever experienced - that change when they finally found themselves locked within the confines of society and peace. Just like the things water animals must have gone though when they were forced either to become land animals or to die off, so events must have played themselves out with this half-beast so happily adapted to the wilderness, war, wandering around, adventure - suddenly all its instincts were devalued and "disengaged". From this point on, these animals were to go on foot and "carry themselves"; whereas previously they had been supported by the water. A terrible heaviness weighed them down. In performing the simplest things they felt ungainly. In dealing with this new unknown world, they no longer had their old leaders, the ruling unconscious drives which guided them safely - these unfortunate creatures were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, bringing together cause and effect, reduced to their "consciousness," their most impoverished and error-prone organ! I believe that never on earth has there been such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort - while at the same time those old instincts had not all of a sudden stopped imposing their demands! Only it was difficult and seldom possible to do their bidding. For the most part, they had to find new and, as it were, underground satisfactions for themselves. All instincts which are not discharged to the outside are turned back inside - this is what I call the internalization [Verinnerlichung] of man. From this first grows in man what people later call his "soul". The entire inner world, originally as thin as if stretched between two layers of skin, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, width, and height, to the extent that what a person discharged out into the world was obstructed. Those frightening fortifications with which the organization of the state protected itself against the old instincts for freedom - punishments belong above all to these fortifications - brought it about that all those instincts of the wild, free, roaming man turned themselves backwards, against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, joy in pursuit, in attack, in change, in destruction - all those turned themselves against the possessors of such instincts. That is the origin of "bad conscience". The man who, because of a lack of external enemies and opposition, was forced into an oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom impatiently tore himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed away at himself, grew upset, and did himself damage - this animal which scraped itself raw against the bars of its cage, which people want to "tame," this impoverished creature, consumed with longing for the wild, which had to create out of its own self an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness - this fool, this yearning and puzzled prisoner, became the inventor of "bad conscience". But with him was introduced the greatest and weirdest illness, from which humanity up to the present time has not recovered, the suffering of man from man, from himself, a consequence of the forcible separation from his animal past, a leap and, so to speak, a fall into new situations and living conditions, a declaration of war against the old instincts, on which, up to that point, his power, joy, and ability to inspire fear had been based. Let us at once add that, on the other hand, the fact that there was on earth an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, meant there was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of the future, that with it the picture of the earth was fundamentally changed. In fact, it required divine spectators to appreciate the dramatic performance which then began and whose conclusion is by no means yet in sight - a spectacle too fine, too wonderful, too paradoxical, to be allowed to play itself out senselessly and unobserved on some ridiculous star or other! Since then man has been included among the most unexpected and most thrillingly lucky rolls of the dice in the game played by Heraclitus' "great child," whether he's called Zeus or chance. For himself he arouses a certain interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something is announcing itself with him, something is preparing itself, as if the human being were not the goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise...

17

Inherent in this hypothesis about the origin of bad conscience is, firstly, the assumption that the change was not gradual or voluntary and did not manifest itself as an organic growth into new conditions, but as a break, a leap, something forced, an irrefutable disaster, against which there was no struggle nor even any ressentiment. Secondly, however, it assumes that the adaptation of a populace hitherto unchecked and shapeless into a fixed form, just as it was initiated by an act of violence, was carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence - that consequently the oldest "State" emerged as a terrible tyranny, as an oppressive and inconsiderate machinery, and continued working until such raw materials of people and half-animals finally were not only thoroughly kneaded and submissive but also given a shape. I used the word "State": it is self-evident who is meant by that term - some pack of blond predatory animals, a race of conquerors and masters, which, organized for war and with the power to organize, without thinking about it, sets its terrifying paws on a subordinate population which may perhaps be vast in numbers but is still without any form, is still wandering about. That is, in fact, the way the "State" begins on earth. I believe that fantasy has been done away with which sees the beginning of the state in a "contract". The man who can command, who is by nature a "master," who comes forward with violence in his actions and gestures - what has he to do with making contracts! We do not negotiate with such beings. They come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration, or pretext. They are present as lightning is present, too fearsome, too sudden, too convincing, too "different" even to become merely hated. Their work is the instinctive creation of forms, the imposition of forms. They are the most involuntary and most unconscious artists in existence: - where they appear something new is soon present, a power structure which lives, something in which the parts and functions are demarcated and coordinated, in which there is, in general, no place for anything which does not first derive its "meaning" from its relationship to the totality. These men, these born organizers, have no idea what guilt, responsibility, and consideration are. In them that fearsome egotism of the artist is in charge, which stares out like bronze and knows how to justify itself for all time in the "work," just as a mother does in her child. They are not the ones in whom "bad conscience" grew - that point is obvious from the outset. But this hateful plant would not have grown without them. It would have failed if an immense amount of freedom had not been driven from the world under the pressure of their hammer blows, their artistic violence, or at least had not been driven from sight and, as it were, made latent. This powerful instinct for freedom, once made latent - we already understand how - this instinct for freedom driven back, repressed, imprisoned inside, and finally still able to discharge and direct itself only against itself - that and that alone is what bad conscience is in its beginning.

18

We need to be careful not to entertain a low opinion of this entire phenomenon simply because it is from the start nasty and painful. In fact, it is basically the same active force which is at work on a grander scale in those artists of power and organizers and which builds states. Here it is inner, smaller, more mean spirited, directing itself backwards, into "the labyrinth of the breast," to use Goethe's words, and it creates bad conscience for itself and builds negative ideals, just that instinct for freedom (to use my own language, the will to power). Only the material on which the shaping and violating nature of this force directs itself here is simply man himself, his entire old animal self - and not, as in that greater and more striking phenomenon, on another man or on other men. This furtive violation of the self, this artistic cruelty, this pleasure in giving a shape to oneself as a tough, resisting, suffering material, to burn into it a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a denial, this weird and horribly pleasurable work of a soul willingly divided against itself, which makes itself suffer for the pleasure of creating suffering, all this active "bad conscience," as the essential womb of ideal and imaginative events, finally brought to light - we have already guessed - also an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation and perhaps for the first time the idea of the beautiful in general.... For what would be "beautiful," if its opposite had not yet come to an awareness of itself, if ugliness had not already said to itself, "I am ugly"? At least, after this hint the paradox will be less puzzling, the extent to which in contradictory ideas, like selflessness, self- denial, self-sacrifice, an ideal can be indicated, something beautiful. And beyond that, one thing we do know - I have no doubt about it - namely, the nature of the pleasure which the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person experiences from the beginning: this pleasure belongs to cruelty. So much for the moment on the origin of the "un- egoistic" as something of moral worth and on the demarcation of the soil out of which this value has grown: only bad conscience, only the will to abuse the self, provides the condition for the value of the un-egoistic.

19

Bad conscience is a sickness - there's no doubt about that - but a sickness the way pregnancy is a sickness. Let's look for the conditions in which this illness has arrived at its most terrible and most sublime peak: - in this way we'll see what really brought about its entry into the world at the start. But that requires a lot of endurance - and we must first go back once more to an earlier point of view. The relationship in civil law between the debtor and his creditor, which I have reviewed extensively already, has been interpreted once again in an extremely remarkable and dubious historical manner into a relationship which we modern men are perhaps least capable of understanding, namely, into the relationship between those people presently alive and their ancestors. Within the original tribal cooperatives - we're talking about primeval times - the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations, and especially to the earliest one which had founded the tribe (and this was in no way merely a sentimental obligation: the latter is something we could even reasonably claim was, in general, absent for the longest period of the human race). Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe exists at all only because of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors - and that people have to pay them back with sacrifices and achievements. In this people recognize a debt which keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them their power. Do they do this gratuitously? But there is no "gratuitously" for those raw and "spiritually destitute" ages. What can people give back to them? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely), festivals, chapels, signs of honour, above all, obedience - for all customs, as work of one's ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows. From time to time it forcefully requires a huge wholesale redemption, something immense as a repayment to the "creditor" (the notorious sacrifice of the first born, for example, blood, human blood in any case). The fear of ancestors and their power, the awareness of one's debt to them, according to this kind of logic, necessarily increases directly in proportion to the increase in the power of the tribe itself, as the tribe finds itself constantly more victorious, more independent, more honoured, and more feared. It's not the other way around! Every step towards the decline of the tribe, all conditions of misery, all indications of degeneration, of approaching dissolution, rather lead to a constant lessening of the fear of the spirit of its founder and give a constantly smaller image of his wisdom, providence, and powerful presence. If we think this crude form of logic through to its conclusion, then the ancestors of the most powerful tribes must, because of the fantasy of increasing fear, finally have grown into something immense and have been pushed back into the darkness of a divine mystery, something beyond the powers of imagination, so that finally the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god. Here perhaps lies even the origin of the gods, thus an origin out of fear!... And the man to whom it seems obligatory to add "But also out of piety" could hardly claim to be right for the longest period of the human race, for his primaeval age. Of course, he would be all the more correct for the middle period, in which the noble tribes developed - those who in fact paid back to their founders, their ancestors (heroes, gods), with interest, all the characteristics which in the meantime had become manifest in themselves, the noble qualities. Later we will have another look at the process by which the gods were ennobled and exalted (which is naturally not at all the same thing as their becoming "holy"). But now, for the moment, let's follow the path of this whole development of the consciousness of guilt to its conclusion.

20

As history teaches us, the consciousness of being in debt to the gods did not in any way come to an end after the downfall of the organization of the "community" based on blood relationships. Just as humanity inherited the ideas of "good and bad" from the nobility of the tribe (together with its fundamental psychological tendency to set up orders of rank), in the same way people also inherited, as well as the divinities of the tribe and of the extended family, the pressure of as yet unpaid debts and the desire to be relieved of them. (The transition is made with those numerous slave and indentured populations which adapted themselves to the divine cults of their masters, whether through compulsion or through obsequiousness and mimicry; from them this inheritance then overflowed in all directions). The feeling of being indebted to the gods did not stop growing for several thousands of years, always, in fact, in direct proportion to the extent to which the idea of god and the feeling for god grew on earth and were carried to the heights. (The entire history of ethnic fighting, victory, reconciliation, mergers, everything which comes before the final rank ordering of all the elements of a people in every great racial synthesis, is mirrored in the tangled genealogies of its gods, in the sagas of their fights, victories, and reconciliations. The progress towards universal empires is always also the progress toward universal divinities. In addition, despotism, with its overthrow of the independent nobility always builds the way to some variety of monotheism). The arrival of the Christian god, as the greatest[Maximal] god which has yet been reached, thus brought about the maximum feeling of indebtedness on earth. Assuming that we have gradually set out in the reverse direction, we can infer with no small probability that, given the inexorable decline of faith in the Christian god, even now there may already be a considerable decline in the human consciousness of guilt. Indeed, we cannot dismiss the idea that the complete and final victory of atheism could release humanity from this entire feeling of being indebted to its origin, its causa prima [prime cause]. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together. -

21

So much for a brief and rough preface concerning the connection between the ideas "guilt" and "obligation" with religious assumptions. Up to this point I have deliberately set aside the actual moralizing of these ideas (the repression of them into the conscience, or more precisely, the complex interaction of the bad conscience with the idea of god). At the end of the previous section I even talked as if there were no such thing as this moralizing and thus as if those ideas were now necessarily coming to an end after the collapse of their presuppositions, the faith in our "creditor," in God. But to a terrifying extent the facts indicate something different. The moralizing of the ideas of debt and duty, with their repression into the bad conscience, actually gave rise to the attempt to reverse the direction of the development I have just described, or at least to bring its motion to a halt. Now, in a fit of pessimism, the prospect of a final installment must once and for all be denied; now, our gaze must bounce and ricochet back despairingly off an iron impossibility, now those ideas of "debt" and "duty" must turn back. But against whom? There can be no doubt: first of all against the "debtor," in whom from this point on bad conscience sets itself firmly, gnaws away, spreads out, and, like a polyp, grows wide and deep to such an extent that finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people also come up with the notion that it is impossible to remove the penance, the idea that it cannot be paid off ("eternal punishment"): - finally however, those ideas of "debt" and "duty" turn back even against the "creditor". People should, in this matter, now think about the causa prima [first cause] of humanity, about the beginning of the human race, about their ancestor who from now on is loaded down with a curse ("Adam," "original sin," "no freedom of the will") or about nature from whose womb human beings arose and into which the principle of evil is now inserted ("the demonizing of nature") or about existence in general, which remains something inherently without value (nihilistic turning away from existence, longing for nothingness, or a desire for its "opposite," in an alternate state of being, Buddhism and things like that) - until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem - the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor!...

22

You will already have guessed what really went on with all this and under all this: that will to self-torment, that repressed cruelty of animal man pushed inward and forced back into himself, imprisoned in the "state" to make him tame, who invented bad conscience in order to lacerate himself, after the more natural discharge of this will to inflict pain had been blocked - this man of bad conscience seized upon religious assumptions to drive his self-torment to its most horrifying hardship and ferocity. Guilt towards God: this idea becomes his instrument of torture. In "God" he seizes on the ultimate contrast he is capable of discovering to his real and indissoluble animal instincts. He interprets these animal instincts themselves as a crime against God (as enmity, rebellion, revolt against the "master," the "father," the original ancestor and beginning of the world). He grows tense with the contradiction of "God" and "devil". He hurls from himself every "No" which he says to himself, to nature, naturalness, the factual reality[Tatsächlichkeit] of his being as a "Yes," as something existing, as living, as real, as God, as the blessedness of God, as God the Judge, as God the Hangman, as something beyond him, as eternity, as perpetual torment, as hell, as punishment and guilt beyond measure. In this spiritual cruelty there is a kind of insanity of the will which simply has no equal: a man's will finding him so guilty and reprehensible that there is no atonement, his will to imagine himself punished, but in such a way that the punishment could never be adequate for his crime, his will to infect and poison the most fundamental basis of things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order to cut himself off once and for all from any exit out of this labyrinth of "fixed ideas," his will to erect an ideal - that of the "holy God" - in order to be tangibly certain of his own absolute worthlessness when confronted with it.

O this insane, sad beast man! What ideas it has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought breaks from it as soon as it is prevented, if only a little, from being a beast in deed!... All this is excessively interesting, but there's also a black, gloomy, unnerving sadness about it, so that man must forcefully hold himself back from gazing too long into these abysses. Here we have illness - no doubt about that - the most terrifying illness that has raged in human beings up to now: - and anyone who can still hear (but nowadays people no longer have the ear for that! - ) how in this night of torment and insanity the cry of love has resounded, the cry of the most yearning delight, of redemption through love, turns away, seized by an invincible horror. .. In human beings there is so much that is terrible!... The world has already been a lunatic asylum for too long!

23

These remarks should be sufficient, once and for all, concerning the origin of the "holy God". - The fact that conceiving gods does not necessarily, in itself, have to lead to this degraded imagination, that's something we could not excuse ourselves from recalling for a moment, the point that there are more uplifting ways to use the invention of the gods than for this human self-crucifixion and self-laceration, in which Europe in the last millennia has become an expert - fortunately that's something we can still infer with every glance we cast at the Greek gods, these reflections of nobler men, more rulers of themselves, in whom the animal in man felt himself deified and did not tear himself apart, did not rage against himself! These Greeks for the longest time used their gods for the very purpose of keeping that "bad conscience" at a distance, in order to be permitted to continue enjoying their psychic freedom. Hence, their understanding was the opposite of how Christianity used its God. In this matter the Greeks went a very long way, these splendid and lion-hearted Greeks, with their child-like minds. And no lesser authority than that of Homer's Zeus himself now and then lets them understand that they are making things too easy for themselves. "It's strange," he says at one point in relation to the case of Aegisthus, a very bad case -

But at the same time we hear and see that even this Olympian spectator and judge is far from being irritated and from thinking them evil because of this: "How foolish they are," he thinks in relation to the bad deeds of mortal men - and even the Greeks of the strongest and bravest times conceded that much about themselves - the "foolishness," "stupidity," a little "disturbance in the head" were the basis for many bad and fateful  things - foolishness, not sin! Do you understand that?... But even this disturbance in the head was a problem, "Indeed, how is this even possible? Where could this have really come from in heads like the ones we have, we men of noble descent, happy, successful, from the best society, noble, and virtuous?" - for hundreds of years the aristocratic Greek posed this question to himself in relation to every horror or outrage incomprehensible to him which had defiled one of his peers. "Some god must have deluded him," he finally said, shaking his head... This solution is typical of the Greeks. .. In this way, the gods then served to justify men to a certain extent, even in bad things. They served as the origins of evil - at that time the gods took upon themselves, not punishment, but, what is nobler, the guilt...

24

- I'll conclude with three question marks - that's clear enough. You may perhaps ask me, "Is an ideal actually being built up here or shattered?"... But have you ever really asked yourself enough how high a price has been paid on earth for the construction of every ideal? How much reality had to be constantly vilified and misunderstood for that to happen, how many lies had to be consecrated, how many consciences corrupted, how much "god" had to be sacrificed every time? In order to enable a shrine to be built, a shrine must be destroyed: that is the law - show me the case where it has not been fulfilled! We modern men, we are the inheritors of thousands of years of vivisection of the conscience and self-inflicted animal torture. That's what we have had the longest practice doing, that is perhaps our artistry; in any case, it's something we have refined, the corruption of our taste. For too long man has looked at his natural inclinations with an "evil eye," so that finally in him they have become twinned with "bad conscience". An attempt to reverse this might, in itself, be possible - but who is strong enough for it, that is, to link as siblings bad conscience and the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations for what lies beyond, those things which go against our senses, against our instincts, against nature, against animals - in short, the earlier ideals, all the ideals which are hostile to life, ideals of those who vilify the world? To whom can we turn to today with such hopes and demands?... In this we would have precisely the good people against us, as well, of course, as the comfortable, the complacent, the vain, the enthusiastic, the tired.... But what is more deeply offensive, what cuts us off so fundamentally, as letting them take some note of the severity and loftiness with which we deal with ourselves? And, by contrast, how obliging, how friendly all the world is in relation to us, as soon as we act as all the world does and "let ourselves go" just like all the world! To attain the goal I'm talking about requires a different sort of spirit from those which are likely to exist at this particular time: spirits empowered by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become a need. That would require getting acclimatized to keen, high air, winter wanderings, to ice and mountains in every sense. That would require even a kind of sublime maliciousness, an ultimate self- conscious wilfulness of knowledge, which comes with great health. Simply and seriously put, that would require just this great health!... Is this even possible today?... But at some time or other, in a more powerful time than this mouldy, self-doubting present, he must nonetheless come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit, constantly pushed again and again away from every sideline or from the beyond by his own driving power, whose isolation is misunderstood by people as if it were a flight from reality - whereas it is only his immersion, burial, and absorption in reality, so that once he comes out of it into the light again, he brings home the redemption of this reality, its redemption from the curse which the previous ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will release us from that earlier ideal just as much as from what had to grow from it, from the great loathing, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism - that stroke of noon and of the great decision which makes the will free once again, who gives back to the earth its purpose and to the human being his hope, this anti-Christ and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness - at some point he must come...

25

But what am I talking about here? Enough, enough! At this stage there's only one thing appropriate for me to do: keep quiet. Otherwise, I'll make the mistake of arrogating to myself something which only someone younger is free to do, someone "more of the future," someone more powerful than I am - something which only Zarathustra is free to do, Zarathustra the Godless....