nietzsche genealogy of morals essay 1 analysis

On the Genealogy of Morals

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887) is an analysis of the development of morality in human history. The renowned 19th-century philosopher wrote On the Genealogy of Morals to entice readers to his larger works. In it, he challenges traditional ideals about Christian morality and the origin of virtue and ethics. Nietzsche argues that moral values are products of social power. Qualities which society has deemed virtues—such as honesty, meekness, patience, and humility—were developed by oppressed peoples to project a false sense of superiority over those who champion power, domination, and wealth. The docility of what Nietzsche calls “slave morality” benefits the nobility by ensuring lower classes govern themselves through self-discipline. Nietzsche is a renowned philosopher whose radical and thought-provoking works have inspired a wide variety of readers, thinkers, and interest groups.

This guide uses the 2013 paperback edition by Penguin Classics translated by Michael A. Scarpitti.

Content Warning: The source text uses the terms “slave morality” and “master morality” throughout, which some readers may find offensive. These terms are reproduced in direct quotes to reflect use by author Friedrich Nietzsche and are subsequently defined in the Index of Terms .

On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic is a study of the origin and purpose of morality. Nietzsche applies his unique approach of historical genealogy and aphoristic writing to examine the prevalence of Christian morality and the causes of its stronghold in Western society. The philosopher determines that systems of values are always derived from expressions of power and the need for life to have purpose and meaning. Although Nietzsche expresses the viewpoint that life is meaningless and that the ascetic ideal is a reaction to the despair of this fact, he rejects nihilism . The philosopher argues that one must become a sovereign individual by developing one’s own personal set of values independent from the life-denying ethical structure that governs modern people. The text explores three major themes: Morality and Power , The Free, Untamed Man , and Ascetic Ideals and the Priest .

In the Preface, Nietzsche shares that he has always been inquisitive and skeptical of societal norms and accepted ideas. At the age of 13, he began to question the origin and meanings of concepts like “good” and evil.” As an adult and career philosopher, Nietzsche began to wonder whether human understandings of good and evil had caused harm. His inquiry in On the Genealogy of Morals is founded upon the desire to understand how morality developed over time and its inception. As the philosopher began to think about whether morality had caused harm, he began to challenge altruistic principles like self-pity and self-sacrifice. He saw these perceived virtues as detrimental to a person’s well-being.

In the first essay, Nietzsche traces the origins of “good” and “bad.” He examines language and the history of words to better understand how certain concepts became virtues and others became associated with sin. The philosopher determines that “good” and “bad” were developed according to their association with wealth and poverty. For example, the word “nobility” links ideas that are noble or morally good with high socioeconomic status. Nietzsche also uncovers the way the Church served the aristocracy by shaping morality to fit its needs. “Slave morality” emerged as a reaction to aristocratic morality . Oppressed peoples began to champion values like meekness, humility, and peacefulness as the antithesis to the power and domination exhibited by the wealthy classes. They believed that their self-sacrificing actions would earn them rewards in the afterlife. Their adherence to this alternative moral code ensured their passivity toward the actions and exertions of power of the upper class.

Nietzsche moves further back in history in the second essay and seeks to understand how morality developed in ancient humans. He proposes that responsibility was developed as soon as humans were able to engage with memory and forgetfulness. Their ability to make promises about the future also caused them to be beholden to one another, developing the statuses of creditor and debtor. Guilt and sin were developed from the idea that their actions caused pain and that they had a debt to pay.

In this essay Nietzsche also explains the difference between “good conscience” and “bad conscience .” “Good conscience” belongs to the sovereign individual. It affirms right action. The individual knows which action is best based upon the amount of pleasure the individual receives. “Bad conscience” is based upon guilt. The individual makes choices that are determined by the level of pain that may be caused.

The third essay examines the relationship between the Church and asceticism. Nietzsche criticizes philosophers and artists, including Arthur Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Richard Wagner (See: Key Figures ), for their advocation for the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche proposes that asceticism comes from the desire to make meaning out of a meaningless existence. However, asceticism is life-denying. It keeps people from living in accordance with their own pleasure and their own personal sets of values.

Nietzsche provides a comprehensive philosophical understanding of the history of morality and its relationship to power. He proposes that individuals should establish their own values and a personal code of morality that is independent from the social and historical context that currently governs actions. In doing so, Nietzsche argues that humans can live freely, uninhibited by the constraints of Christian asceticism.

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Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Simon May (ed.), Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality : A Critical Guide , Cambridge University Press, 2011, 345pp., $99.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521518802.

Reviewed by Martin Saar, Universität Hamburg, and Hannah Grosse Wiesmann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

This collection of essays belongs to a series dedicated to classical philosophical works that tries to document major trends in current scholarship. There has been an enormous amount of publication on Nietzsche's work recently, and the Genealogy of Morality from 1887 has in the last decade definitely emerged as the work most commented on. In the Anglophone world, there have been some excellent collections that continue to influence the discussion, and this new volume closely follows up on the most recent developments. 1  It definitely maintains the high standard and without exception presents excellent, accessible and thoroughly researched examples of state-of-the-art Nietzsche scholarship. It covers a wide range of interpretative and systematic questions arising from Nietzsche's critique of morality in general and the text of the Genealogy in particular. While Nietzsche spends some time in the preface explaining his intentions and methodological principles, his philosophical and historical arguments in the three sections of the work resist an easy grasp on the question of what genealogy (as a method or procedure) really is and how it amounts to, or at least contributes to, a " critique of moral values" ( GM , Pref., 6). 2

Peter Kail explores genealogy as a philosophical methodology, maintaining that it is "primarily an explanatory account of the emergence of some distinctive set of beliefs, practices and associated phenomena" (214), which involve agents with a particular psychology in a situation to which that psychology is responsive. Kail supports this claim by showing what Nietzsche has in common with those he dismissively calls the 'English psychologists'. He then discusses some of genealogy's consequences, arguing that it is a naturalistic but non-reductive form of understanding, which does not have normative effects simply in virtue of its being a genealogy. He rejects the idea that genealogy constitutes an 'internal' or 'immanent' critique of morality or a 'revaluation of values', and shows that the normative effect of genealogy consists in destabilizing moral values, which means that it has a merely preparatory function for the 'revaluation of values'.

Paul Katsafanas also is concerned with the form of critique Nietzsche is engaged in. Genealogy, he claims, is dependent on a view that gives power "a privileged normative status" (177) because of its link to agency. If it can be shown that morality undermines our power or agency because it "systematically obfuscates the connection between perceptions of power and actual power" (181), it has to be rejected. Nietzsche tries to show this for the traditional, Judeo-Christian interpretation of morality, and this project, Katsafanas claims has, for methodological reasons, to take a historical form: first, because only a perspective on the emergence and establishment of this interpretation can explain its long-lasting and persistent character; second, because Nietzsche "needs to employ competing perspectives on manifestations of power" (188).

Nadeem Hussain discusses the substantial function of the concept of life for Nietzsche's genealogy and shows how it structures his many critiques. Underlying his 'will to power' doctrine lies a substantive "doctrine about what is essential to life", namely "a tendency towards expansion, growth, domination, overcoming of resistance, increasing strength and so on" (153); and this is Nietzsche's standard or criterion for evaluating forms of life. Traditional morality denies these tendencies and is therefore denying life. The right 'natural' attitude to life then is to affirm this natural condition. Hussain adds that he doesn't think one can "philosophically defend this inference" [169], but that he has shown that this is the way Nietzsche, like many other nineteenth-century naturalists, thought.

Lawrence Hatab focuses on the relation between master and slave morality in the first part of GM , asking how it became possible that master morality surrendered its power and was supplanted by slave morality. Possible explanations for the decline of master morality in his view include the growing domestication of culture, an exhaustion of externalized forms of power, and the novel attractions of internalized power, such as Socratic dialectic. Hatab then fleshes out the ambiguities inherent to the master-slave-distinction, showing that the turn to slave morality in Nietzsche's view not only endangered but also enhanced cultural life by a creative redirection of power that brought about higher culture. Finally, he argues that what Nietzsche hopes for in overcoming the tradition's life-averse character "is not a return to master morality, but the self -overcoming of the tradition, a cultural renovation that is possible only by way of the tradition's overcoming of original master morality." (213)

Starting from a similar textual basis, R. Lanier Anderson gives a close reading of several crucial passages in GM , I, to prove that for Nietzsche it remains clear that the priests, however ambiguous their role in the "slave revolt in morality" (introduced in GM , I, 7), are themselves instances of the noble character type. Anderson refutes recent accounts that attribute them to an intermediary role or even take them to be some kinds of slaves. He presents textual evidence that Nietzsche (at least for the most part in this context) indeed insists that the values originating in the "slave revolt" are invented and put into use by the priests. They are "creator[s] of slave values" (41), but not slaves themselves, even if they, as Anderson has to admit, are those nobles who -- in Nietzsche's semi-fictional historical scenario -- lose out to the more brutal and initially more effective 'warrior nobles'.

Raymond Geuss makes yet another attempt to interpret Nietzsche's observations about the origin of our moral vocabulary in GM , I, and specifically the idea that the good/bad distinction was gradually 'moralized' and turned into a good/evil dichotomy. Geuss claims Nietzsche is implying that this was just one route history could take; there might be a different development, one making space for a "revaluation" or "post-Nietzschean concept of 'evil'" (22). The problem for Nietzsche lies not in the concept of "evil" as such but in the function it was and is playing in moral discourse, namely tapping into the desire to take revenge on those who do harm.

In his rich and densely written contribution Peter Poellner revisits the connection between morality and ressentiment , arguably the most basic element of Nietzsche's genealogical critique of morality, prominent in GM , II. Against many other readings he holds that ressentiment should be seen as an "intentional project" (125) and not as relying on subconscious motives, and that it essentially includes "object mastery" -- it seeks the active suppression of others. Morality, as Nietzsche sees it, then indeed relies on a specific kind of half-conscious self-misunderstanding or "intentional self-deception" (136); it only appears peaceful and benevolent. While this already seems enough to discredit morality, Nietzsche's ultimate rejection of it is even stronger: ressentiment is bad in itself since it ties the self to something it is not and undermines real or "authentic" acts of evaluation; it therefore not only contingently but "intrinsically aims at 'bad ends'" (141).

Bernard Reginster retraces the account of the origins of the feeling of guilt given by Nietzsche in the second essay. He argues that Nietzsche's inquiry focuses on the specifically Christian feeling of guilt and -- as opposed to the major line of interpretation -- holds the view that Nietzsche's objective is not "to challenge the non-naturalistic account of the feeling of guilt promoted by the Christian outlook (namely, guilt as a manifestation of 'the voice of God in man') but to show that the Christian representation of guilt is not an account of the ordinary feeling of guilt . . . but a perversion of it, which results from its exploitation as an instrument of self-directed cruelty" (57).  Reginster therefore considers Christian guilt to be a " rational passion " (57), that is, a passion which essentially exploits a rational being's responsiveness to reason, and which, "unlike other passions, not only overrides, but actually corrupts, this responsiveness" (57).

Brian Leiter approaches the figure of the "sovereign individual" ( GM , II, 2), asking who this figure is and what it has to do with Nietzsche's conceptions of free will, freedom, or the self. Leiter calls into question a recent scholarly consensus according to which the figure of the "sovereign individual" is connected with a positive theory of human freedom or autonomous selfhood. By contrast, he argues for the view that, first, Nietzsche denies that we ever act freely and that we are morally responsible for our actions; second, that the figure of the 'sovereign individual' in no way contradicts this first point; and, third, that Nietzsche engages in a 'persuasive definition' of 'freedom' and 'free will' that radically revises the content of these concepts while exploiting their positive emotive valence for the reader. More precisely, Leiter aims to show, as his earlier work has argued at length, that the figure of the 'sovereign individual' is consistent with the understanding of Nietzsche as a kind of fatalist.

In one of the most original essays of the volume, Simon May spars with Nietzsche's ideal of a world free of morality, claiming that the Genealogy 's success in overcoming morality is restrained by Nietzsche's conviction that suffering must be given a meaning. Although, in May's view, the new meaning for suffering that Nietzsche seeks is one no longer structured by the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche remains within morality and cannot attain a life-affirming stance as long as he even poses the question of the meaning of suffering. Against this background, May proposes that to genuinely affirm one's life is "to take joy in its 'there-ness' or quiddity as a whole -- a whole conceived as necessary (or fated) in all its elements and experienced as beautiful." (10) In tracing the development of Nietzsche's thought on the justification of suffering throughout his writings, May shows that Nietzsche moves towards such an attitude, especially with regard to the concept of amor fati , but that in GM he stops midway.

In a more general vein, Christine Swanton argues that the concern about Nietzsche's ideal of egoism, which, as is often suggested, makes him unattractive to modern moral sensibilities, is misplaced. Indeed, she challenges the view of Nietzsche as a proponent of an immoral form of egoism by reading his conception of virtues of character as those of the ' mature egoist'. In order to elaborate a proper understanding of the mature egoism endorsed by Nietzsche in GM , she reconstructs several virtues characteristic of this kind of egoism -- namely assertiveness, justice, objectivity, mature generosity, independence/self-sufficiency, discipline -- and their correlative vices.

Edward Harcourt discusses the question whether Nietzsche can be criticized for advocating 'aestheticism' or an 'aesthetics of character', supposedly an a-moral or anti-ethical commitment. Distinguishing several strategies to explain the aesthetic nature of such a position, Harcourt comes to a rather sobering conclusion: nothing Nietzsche seems to be committed to as valuable or excellent in a life or person seems to relate necessarily to anything aesthetic in the narrow sense. Not even his insistence on shape-giving or form qualifies Nietzsche's conception of a character, which definitely is most often articulated as an 'ideal of health', as distinctively aesthetic: "If we were to capture what, if anything, is special about Nietzsche's ideal of character, therefore, we are unlikely to help ourselves if we continue to reach for the 'aesthetic' label." (283)

Aaron Ridley follows the traces of Nietzsche's scattered remarks on beauty in GM , which mostly take the form of a rejection of Kant's, Schopenhauer's and Stendhal's visions of this value. Distinguishing between 'interested' (or impersonal) and 'disinterested' as well as between 'spectatorial-' and artist- or creator-oriented accounts of art, Nietzsche rejects the three alternative accounts. Ridley shows how this strategy relies on Nietzsche's more general conception of different 'noble' or 'slavish' types of valuation. But the "fully noble form of beauty" (316) then, Ridley concludes, would commit Nietzsche to understanding artistic creativity as "a peculiarly intense form of self-celebration" (321), solipsistic and monological. And this, he contends, is neither tenable, as Nietzsche himself seems to notice, nor systematically attractive.

In an essay that refreshingly differs in style from the other, more standard academic papers, Stephen Mulhall follows some hints Nietzsche has laid out in the opening section of GM . The enigmatic remarks that the different sections of the book can be read as interpretations of certain aphorisms in his other texts and the insistence on the conditions of readability show that Nietzsche was highly aware of the very language and linguistic acts in which the genealogical 'truths' may be presented. Mulhall argues for a reading that shows that this involves the reader's experiences as well as Nietzsche's own. Nietzsche, then, in the text somehow confronts his own current self, still in the grip of the very forces of morality to be overcome, with some future, possible, 'freer' self. The genealogy as a text therefore combines "at once modes of confession and modes of prophecy" (263).

As these summaries show, the range of topics is wide, and most issues central to GM are given a fair treatment. Not surprisingly, recent discussions are still circling around the question whether the genealogical mode of argumentation is essentially historical or not (compare Katsafanas and Geuss to Kail or Hussain), or whether Nietzsche provides us with substantial alternatives to the 'decadent' and 'weak' forms of life he is attacking, or whether his account remains more or less negative (compare Swanton to Leiter). Another question is whether Nietzsche tries to overcome morality as such or only its life-negating forms. In advocating the ideal of an affirmative stance free of any moral valuation (as May does), however, one might fall short of Nietzsche's conception of yes-saying as in itself an act of creation of values, which could lead to a new understanding of a different, 'higher' morality as a life-affirming attitude.

In general, Nietzsche here appears mainly as a sort of social psychologist with deep insights into the dynamics of social interaction (see Reginster or Poellner), performing some kind of ideology critique.  Interestingly, to explain this strategy, neither the 'will to power' doctrine nor the 'eternal recurrence' conception, arguably the most metaphysical elements of Nietzsche's thought, are given much weight, and this also distinguishes the more recent interpretations from earlier phases in the debate. There is a considerable dispute as to whether his methodology makes Nietzsche a real, whole-hearted naturalist or whether it leaves room for the irreducibility of interpretation and meaning (compare Leiter and Hussain to Kail and Reginster).

Despite the chapters on beauty and aesthetics, not much is said about Nietzsche's style and argumentation; and surprisingly quite a number of contributors really try to give a quite 'realist', psychological reading of Nietzsche's 'nobles' vs. 'slaves' scenario (see Anderson, Poellner and Hatab), which might be interpreted much more metaphorically or allegorically. Here it might have been productive to take into account the sources from which Nietzsche actually took his anthropological and historical views (from Jacob Burkhardt to W. E. H. Lecky).

Unfortunately, the volume might give the impression that Nietzsche scholarship is (almost) a men's world, which, of course, it isn't. And for better or for worse, there are not many references to non-Anglophone scholarship. This also sheds some light on what at first appears as a major strength of this collection, namely its reflection of a dense and vibrant discussion among the authors.  This can easily turn into a vice when the discussion appears slightly self-referential and essays start from minor points made by the other contributors in some recent text. But this might be excused given that Nietzsche himself was never shy of citing himself.

Which Nietzsche, then, are we left with for the next decade? This volume suggests it is not the metaphysician, the intellectual adventurer, visionary or advocate of a 'future philosophy' we should concentrate on, but the sober, quasi-naturalist, cold-blooded critic of culture, value and present self-(mis)understandings. One could imagine this not being the last word on Nietzsche's philosophical legacy, but for the time being it makes a strong case for a view of Nietzsche that still means trouble to most current forms of moral philosophy.

1 Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, History: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, University of California Press, 1994; Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality , Oxford University Press, 2007; Ken Gemes and Simon May (eds.), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy , Oxford University Press, 2009.

2 Quotations from Nietzsche are from the translation by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swenson, published as On the Genealogy of Morality , Hackett, 1998 (cited as " GM "), Latin numbers (I, II, III) refer to the "essays" or "treatises" and to the respective paragraphs.

The Satirist

America's Most Critical Journal since 1999

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

The Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche’s most sustained critique of morality, exhibits such an original approach to value theory that many readers feel lost in the whirlpool of his ideas, and grapple for some solid ground from which to evaluate him. Surely much if not most Nietzsche scholarship has suffered from misunderstandings about his work, due to a reliance on secondary sources, an ignorance of Nietzsche’s primary influences, the difficulty of the works, or a failure to see his innumerable, disparate insights in the context of the rest of his oeuvre .

Although Nietzsche is now hailed by many as the seminal thinker in post-modernist thought, for a long time serious philosophers considered Nietzsche a Nazi forbear, or even a mere sophomoric ranter, and so thorough criticism of Nietzsche remained scarce until after the Second World War [1] . Surely the efforts of Walter Kaufmann [2] and others to de-Nazify Nietzsche’s reputation have had some success, and there has been an inundation of Nietzsche scholarship ever since. It is often overlooked that Nietzsche exerted a decisive influence on many modernist writers–Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Henry Miller , among many, many others–none of whom took him for racist. In a sense, Nietzsche has been such a successful philosopher, that, much like Christianity’s grip on the society of his day, Nietzsche’s influence is so strong on the modern intellectual climate that it is often imperceptible, the very ocean we swim in.

These may seem like excessively strong claims, and it would be an error to give Nietzsche undue credit for the general rise of secular society in the West, a trend that would certainly have continued without him. Nietzsche’s legacy lies in his unique approach to that demise: his invocation of the Greeks as an ideal; his daring to turn the claims of Christianity on their head; to extol the virtues of strength; to mercilessly critique the shibboleths of pity, mercy, democracy, socialism; to brand the motivations of the clergy as wicked rather than merely misguided; to philosophize from an historical, etiologic perspective rather than a rationalistic void; to tackle the claims of science. Of course, Nietzsche’s influence extends far beyond the realm of value of theory, casting light on every field of philosophy, as well as many other disciplines.

The three essays comprising The Genealogy of Morals represent Nietzsche’s most sustained, cohesive work. Many of his other works [3] suffer from atomization, as Nietzsche’s superabundance of fresh insight spills into all crevices of human endeavor, emerging in frequent aphorisms, or short discursions on topics with little apparent transition between them. Nietzsche, as philosopher, indeed believed that truth was nearly impossible to convey intellectually, and this belief reveals itself in his style, which aims for penetrating yet disjointed insights often covering a staggering breadth of subject matter in a single, piquant phrase. Despite his valiant efforts to break completely free from traditional moral thought, even in his last works we find him violently struggling against the tides of Christianity in which he felt we were all awash. Asserting that critiquing Christianity and its secular vestiges remained Nietzsche’s primary enterprise in no way marginalizes his contributions to moral theory in general, nor psychology, the philosophy of language, aesthetics, metaphysics or epistemology. If a critique of Christianity provided Nietzsche’s starting point, and even his idée fixe , it certainly led him to analyses of nearly all regions of philosophy; as well as to new ground.

Critics of Nietzsche must contend with a philosopher who sometimes shows little desire to substantiate his claims; who approaches philosophical problems with the psychologist’s view (why do people think this way?) rather than the logician’s (does the conclusion follow from the premises? [4] ); who appeals equally to our intuition and our counter-intuition (he assumes that we concur that most of our moral assumptions are fundamentally misguided, and so we naturally want to explore and even embrace the opposite view); who assumes that we either see or can be convinced to see the same general traits that he sees in the Europe of his day. When we keep in mind that Nietzsche overtly addressed his writings to “free spirits,” the philosophers of the future, and even future Übermensch, the obscurity of Nietzsche during his own lifetime becomes understandable.

Nietzsche’s methodology, one of insight over orthodox scholarship, emerged in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music , a work which despite its focus on Greek mythology, drama, and philosophy, featured a complete lack of footnotes and little reference to the standard works of philology; Nietzsche’s rejection of traditional scholarly methodology contributed to the work’s scant scholarly reception. Later works fared no better for similar reasons, as well as for Nietzsche’s increasingly strident claims of philosophical greatness, reaching their early pinnacle in the perceived pretentiousness of Also Sprach Zarathustra . [5]

After efforts to convey his essential philosophy in a more readily digestible form (cf. Beyond Good and Evil ), Nietzsche’s most cogent work finally emerged in The Genealogy of Morals . Despite a continuing lack of scholarly apparatus, Nietzsche’s claims of grandeur are kept to a minimum, and the work’s three essays [6] are complete in themselves, and feature progressive critical exploration rather than merely his usual lightning insight, although there is much of that as well. The three essays–“‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad’; “‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like”; and “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?”–investigate closely related aspects of Nietzsche’s primary philosophical concern: the origins, persistence and increasingly ill effects of Christian morality on the psychic health of Europe.

II. First Essay: “Good and Bad”, “Good and Evil”

Nietzsche makes his approach clear early in the first essay, contrasting himself with certain “English philosophers,” who Nietzsche feels are completely misguided in their explanation that from the very beginning, altruistic acts were praised as “good” by those who benefited from them. Their thought, Nietzsche protests, is thoroughly “unhistorical”; it assumes that altruism predates value-judgments. For Nietzsche, value-judgments first arose from the original value-creators, the natural aristocracy. They first used the term to describe themselves , and employed antithetical terms for the weak slave classes. Only over the course of centuries, through deviously dishonest means, were the meanings of “good” and “evil” transvalued and the natural aristocracy subverted by the slave classes, a state of affairs Nietzsche believed still obtained in his day.

Already Nietzsche betrays his predilection for offering his own unprovable etiology of a pre-historical concept. [7] His claims for the aristocracy as value-creators are impossible to substantiate considering the meager historical record available to us (though in his defense his opponents claims are equally difficult to substantiate). Instead, we find ourselves relying on Nietzsche’s authority as a philologist; that if anyone knows the origins of value-judgments in ancient Greece, it must be the former Chair of Philology at Basel. Despite the lack of evidence, Nietzsche’s emphasis on an historical approach, rather than anachronistic methods of the utilitarians, seems a step in the right direction, as much as it points to overall weakness in Nietzsche’s critique.

Still, the audacity of Nietzsche’s claims more than holds our attention. Accustomed to viewing the rise of morality as concurrent with the rise of world religions, Nietzsche’s claim of primacy for aristocratic values succeeds in turning our preconceptions on their head. Having “established” the primacy of aristocratic values, (and perhaps unconsciously invoking our predilection for the primal purity of (especially Greek) “noble savage” culture), Nietzsche is able to depict any change from the “original” value system as a corruption. Here is the hinge of his entire thesis, not only for The Genealogy of Morals, but for much of his entire philosophy. For Nietzsche, since the golden age of the Greeks man has experienced inexorable decline; a loss of animalism, of feeling at home in nature, or instinct and strength. In its stead has come arid intellectualism, petty utility over aesthetic grandeur, the debasement of the natural aristocracy at the hands of the herd-like multitude.

And the catalyst for this cataclysm began with the general rise of the priestly caste, especially in Palestine and India, but occurring in some form everywhere. The Jews, slaves in Egypt for centuries, managed to turn the original, aristocratic morality on its head. They created a God who favored them, the vanquished, as the chosen race; who saw their race as clean and others unclean; who promised eventual deliverance. The Jewish wish for revenge on their many oppressors eventually manifested itself as the Christian belief in a calamitous Judgment Day on the proud, the strong, and the rich–the exact attributes of Nietzsche’s “original” value-creators, who are now, ironically, seen as evil. [8] Similarly, the rise of the caste system in India signaled the rule of the weak, the Brahmin, who had learned how to make the strong feel ashamed and unclean. With the rise of the priestly caste in India and elsewhere began the first, sinister transvaluation of values, from which, Nietzsche insists we still suffer.

But Nietzsche is more at home in the West than the East, and the first essay follows the historical thread of his argument from prehistoric times to his own day. In however sketchy a form, Nietzsche provides an original and alternative view of history. Having never fully escaped the ghost of the Hegelian dialectic [9] , Nietzsche traces the gargantuan battle of opposing value systems over two millennia: Christ as apotheosis of Jewish transvaluation of values; Christianity’s eventual triumph of Rome, despite Rome’s military victory [10] ; the brief rebirth of the original, aristocratic morality in the Renaissance only to be snuffed out by the forces of German and English populism, which also breathed life into the dying carcass of Christianity; further defeats for the aristocracy during the French Revolution; the inexplicable rise of Napoleon, the last world-figure of consequence for Nietzsche.

Lending such colossal drama to history is exciting stuff, but relies on appeals to our intuition tantamount to a suspension of disbelief. More often than not, Nietzsche eschews treating specific, historically pivotal events or figures (except when convenient, and especially if there is little historical record against which to check his utterances); he is more at home as psychologist, explaining the motivations of the “ascetic priest” (a psychological type rather than an individual) in his sinister attempts to subvert the primacy of the original aristocratic values.

It is here that Nietzsche is most original and convincing. He depicts an abstract struggle (no less abstract and unhistorical than the Social Contract theorists’ State of Nature, which he lambastes) between the honest, strong, proud aristocrat who is defeated by the cunning, vengeful, but essentially wretched and weak ascetic priest. First the priest manufactures the illusion of the moral agent, making weak and strong alike responsible for their state, a matter of choice , rather than a manifestation of natural accident and breeding. Nietzsche argues against the ascetic priest by claiming that strength flows from superabundance of strength, and weakness is similarly a kind of natural state; in fact the notion of a “doer” is itself an illusion; only actions exist–a supposition that Heidegger would later embellish considerably. Yet the original aristocratic duality of “good and bad”–“good” being akin to virtù : strength; “bad” meaning “weak”, “untrue”, “petty”, “mean”–is transplanted by the ascetic’s conception of “good and evil”: we are moral agents responsible to others for our actions and the state of downtrodden. Instead of supposed natural generosity of aristocrats to their own, we now have the onus of responsibility to others regardless of our estimation of their worth. [11]

Despite my belief that Nietzsche’s depiction of the original conflict of value-systems is equally as fanciful (and rhetorical) as, say, the Hobbesian State of Nature, the Garden of Eden, or Utopia, it compels us to think about values in a novel way. Perhaps having rejected the notion that values come from on high, we still must explain their origin; for without divine sanction it is at least possible that (traditional) values do not serve mankind well (as Nietzsche asks, “what is the value of values?”); what were the motivations of the “original” value-creators and their opponents? do we have sufficient evidence to answer such a question?; if not, perhaps asking what are the motivations of contemporary purveyors of values can shed light on the subject. Perhaps exploring the contemporary effects of morality on mankind can equally expose their effects on ancient man, for whom morality was perhaps not inevitable, at least in its familiar form.

III. Second Essay: “Guilt, Bad Conscience and the Like”

Having established his “historical” depiction of the origins of values in the first essay, Nietzsche turns again to his strength, psychological interpretation, for the second and third essays. To support his case, Nietzsche must dissuade us from our conception of conscience, as well as our views toward the underlying motivations of pity, kindness, meekness and other attributes of the ascetic priest, who, despite being seen as increasingly misguided by Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers alike, was usually not depicted as being evil incarnate. [12] The notion of conscience has often been used to buttress the validity of morality, and even the existence of God [13] . Preachers avow that our notions of right and wrong “which we all have,” must have come from somewhere, presumably hot-wired into us by the Creator. Certainly St. Paul claims as much in saying that all peoples have “the law written on their hearts.” In this view, the existence of good suggests the existence of God.

Thus, Nietzsche must expose the “true” origin of conscience, which he nearly always ironically calls “bad conscience,” a conception that bears strong parallels to Freud’s superego. To achieve this end, Nietzsche portrays a time when ancient man held no moral views, lived in his glorious animal nature, and had not yet been subverted by the wicked priestly caste. [14] At first the honorable man, the “supermoral” autonomous individual, conceived the necessity of carrying out promises , an activity that both assumes his continued existence, his future, as well as sets him above the beasts. In this early state, promises existed only between equals, a responsibility toward immediate family and perhaps fellow warriors, certainly not toward the downtrodden.

All of this presupposes memory, yet Nietzsche feels he is even qualified to offer us an explanation of the origins of memory: “awful and sinister” (II, 3); only excruciating pain could brand the first few moral laws into men’s memories. [15] Conscience itself is “a late fruit of the memory tree” (II, 3) (an interesting echo of Edenic imagery). [16] At first, however, “morality” consisted of keeping promises, of personal honor, with no suggestion of obligation to those to whom no promises were given.

Relying again on etymology, Nietzsche asserts that the very notion of “ought” sprung from the notion of “owe,” logically, since the relationship of buyer and seller is among the oldest of relationships, certainly predating the establishment of the state in any form. The notion of punishment originated as retaliation for broken contracts and failure of repayment, and has none of its later righteous tincture. Creditors were simply given the “sweet power” to exact violence on their debtors, who now “owed” them in more ways than one. Thus “guilt” and “conscience” spring ultimately from the creditor/debtor relationship. This relationship becomes the very model for other social relations (shockingly, Nietzsche does not treat marriage here), with the notion that “everything has its price; all can be paid for” soon following. With this key conception in place, justice is soon conceived as the means to exact comparable revenge from debtors; a table of punishments can be drawn up, now that acts can be evaluated in terms of their damage to the creditor. Not only is justice born of this realization, but also according to Nietzsche, “kindness,” “equity,” “goodwill,” and “objectivity” as well. Mutuality and commensurateness replace the former individuality of all persons and actions.

Comparing what are ultimately unique actions to a newly drawn standard becomes an entirely new basis for social behavior; prior to this, action and reaction, especially in regards to retaliation, were probably governed more by animal instinct than primeval standards of justice like “an eye for an eye.” Unfortunately, Nietzsche fails to elaborate on his claim that herein are found the origins of kindness and goodwill; a more telling attack on these notions would have more thoroughly undermined others’ claims of the innate goodness of man, and that conscience and morality are somehow innate.

Instead, Nietzsche anxiously presses on to a critique of the State, asserting that it emerged in much the same position as the early creditor. Since members of a community owe their security and much else to the community [17] , a criminal (German “Verbrecker”) has broken the contract with the state, which now can exact “sweet revenge” against the ungrateful outcast. Always eager to extol the virtues of the state, courts of law exist as much to remind law-breakers of the benefits the state has given them as to punish them. As societies grow in power, offenses are taken less seriously; offenders as seen more as pesky insects. As the state’s authority weakens, the brutality of punishment intensifies. [18]

From his depiction of the State as supreme creditor, Nietzsche offers an analysis of justice. Remember that earlier Nietzsche claimed that the rise of the belief that “everything has its price” is the true origin of justice, presumably because before that man did not compare other men’s actions to a standard, a table of punishments. For Nietzsche, this already represents a degeneration in the notion of justice, which Nietzsche believes degenerates pari passu to the extent that it is a reactive feeling–Nietzsche attaching greater value to proactive behavior of any sort. “The active man, the attacking, aggressive man is always a hundred degrees nearer to justice than the man who merely reacts; he certainly has no need to adopt the tactics necessary in the case of the reacting man, of making false and biased valuations of his object .” (II, 11, my italics.) For Nietzsche, the fact that before responding to aggression the reactive man must first consult a table of punishments–implicit or explicit–means that he is somehow false and counter-instinctual.

In fact the reader often gets the notion that Nietzsche’s ideal justice, seemingly divorced as it is from intellectual notions of any kind [19] , is nothing more or less than the proto-Darwinian “war of Every Man against Every Man” which Hobbes believed made the Leviathan State imperative. Nietzsche finds any consultation with prescribed intellectual standards as a deviation from man’s true self. At this point, one might agree with early critics and characterize Nietzsche’s thought as essentially an interesting spin on Darwinism, yet Nietzsche is quick to dissociate himself from the Darwinians. The “whole problem of biology” (II, 12) is that proactive emotions have been woefully underestimated. Consider this extraordinary passage:

The democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and wishes to rule, the modern misarchism (to coin a bad word for a bad thing), has gradually but so thoroughly transformed itself into the guise of intellectualism, the most abstract intellectualism, that even nowadays it penetrates and has the right to penetrate step by step into the most exact and apparently the most objective sciences: this tendency has, in fact, in my view already dominated the whole of physiology and biology, and to their detriment, as is obvious, in so far as it has spirited away a radical idea, the idea of true activity . The tyranny of this idiosyncrasy, however, results in the theory of “adaptation” being pushed forward into the van of the argument, exploited; adaptation–that means to say, a second-class activity, a mere capacity for “reacting”; in fact, life itself has been defined (by Herbert Spencer) as an increasingly effective internal adaptation to external circumstances. (II, 12)

Thus, Nietzsche, while tackling the problems of man-as-animal explicitly rejects the Darwinian vision, and strives for his own original depiction of man-as-animal. Man is innately proactive, spontaneous, exhibits “spontaneous play throughout all phenomena” (II, 12). That is to say, before the sinister transvaluation of values weakens the strong. [20]

Law, presumably a mechanism for justice, represents a war against reactive feelings, an attempt by the state to control them, to enjoy a monopoly of force. But the idea that law or morality can represent any absolute good is absurd; the war of the wills still rages. “To talk of intrinsic right and intrinsic wrong is absolutely nonsensical….life is essentially (that is, in its cardinal function) something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without such a character” (II, 11). The establishment of the State signifies that the old war of wills will continue to be waged through different channels and apparatuses, but continue nonetheless. The power of the State to punish should in no way be confused as a bulwark of the State’s authority , as much as it is a facet of the State’s power.

For Nietzsche, punishment, like any custom, undergoes such a dramatic transmogrification over time that its final end is often a diametric opposite of its original intention. [21] Nietzsche reasserts that at one time punishment was scarcely distinguishable from retaliation, and with no moral component. Again, the procedures of certain punishments existed long before they were put to use in the name of the State or a moral code. But now the application of punishment is sometimes justified as a mechanism to induce guilt in the victim of the punishing power–as if pain or solitude will somehow awaken the sleeping conscience. Nietzsche doubts the effectiveness of such means, believing that what is taken for “bad conscience” in a criminal is really anguish born of foreknowledge of the State’s imminent wrath. Again, Nietzsche shows his tendency to view things from a physical, visceral level, and treats traditional morality as a horrible lie that we all need to overcome.

After devoting the first fifteen sections of the second essay to brief descriptions of the origins of promises, memory, justice, the state, obligation, punishment, and conscience, Nietzsche turns to the ill effects of conscience on mankind. To do so, he contrasts the hallowed, pre-moral era, with the time immediately after the establishment of the state. In this view, conscience is actually a “serious illness” born of “man’s reaction” toward his new, peaceful, societal home (II, 16). Once the machinery of society had violently broken man from his animal past, all of man’s old impulses now turned inward on himself; this is the disease of modern man, and Nietzsche will devote significant time to the prognosis, especially in relation to the role of the ascetic priest.

But first he returns to embellish his theory of the origin of the state. Paradoxically, the origin of bad conscience lies in a violent state set up by the “blonde beasts,” the ultimate “artist-tyrants,” the like of whom has not yet been seen since. Yet bad-conscience did not originate with the “blonde beasts,” but by inaugurating the State, they made it possible. It should be noted, in Nietzsche’s “defense,” that the “blonde beasts” do not refer to any specifically Aryan or Teutonic group or to any specific racial group at all. For Nietzsche, the term refers to “the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings….,” (I, 11) all of who exhibited great virtù and power. For critic Walter Kaufmann, blond beast is simply an “ideogram for the conception of unsublimated animal passion.” [22]

In the early state, ancestors assumed a place of preeminent authority, and in some cases were even worshipped because of their role in creating the existing social structure. Nietzsche posits that in the fear of such ancestors may lay the origin of gods themselves–significantly, from fear , still a primary motivation in belief. [23] Further support for this claim is Nietzsche’s assertion that:

Progress towards universal empires invariably means progress towards universal deities; despotism, with its subjugation of the independent nobility, always paves the way for some system or other of monotheism. (II, 21)

By digging into the grisly roots of Western cultural history, Nietzsche has offered his own account of the origins of the state, and later, of religion, as an offshoot thereof.

Still aiming for the knockout blow, Nietzsche offers another scalding explanation for the rise of Christianity. As belief in a God tends to wane or ossify (as in 1st Century B.C.E. Palestine) there grows the belief that the debt to God cannot be paid (as with the state, the relationship between God and man is that of creditor and debtor). At first this realization brings horrible guilt; later man turns against his creditor (God, or nature, or even existence [24] ); eventually man finds alleviation in the unique claims of Christianity: that God, the creditor, has sacrificed himself out of love for his debtor! Tamed man, following Christian dictums, turns his natural instinct for cruelty against himself, and psychologically impales himself on the opposing horns of God and the devil. Or he completely eschews the pleasures of this life, mortifying his flesh in hopes of pleasure and reward in the next.

And this for Nietzsche highlights the horrors of Christianity, the reason for his ceaseless critique: that many otherwise strong spirits, as well as entire eras, have had their strong natural instincts trod underfoot and repressed by Christian dogma. Nietzsche ends the second essay with his hope that an Antichrist, Antinihilist redeemer will appear to rediscover dogma-free reality, and dissolve man’s foolish hopes for transcendence.

IV. Third Essay: “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?”

In the final essay, Nietzsche devotes much of his energy to a psychological evaluation of the ascetic priest; the evolution of the idea of the asceticism; various philosophers’ accounts of aesthetics and its relation to asceticism; and its detrimental effects on mankind. As he stated in the second essay, Nietzsche’s primary objection to ascetic ideals is that ascetics must deny the value of this life, portray it as a mere bridge to the next life, rather than as an end in itself. For Nietzsche, refining and exercising our wills in this life is the ultimate end, and any dogma that inhibits this process is a manifestation of sickness.

In depicting this dogma as all-intrusive, Nietzsche attempts to show first how even artists and philosophers–usually considered free-thinkers–are themselves afflicted by this dogma, as manifested in their works, which often exude the sickly smells of morality and asceticism. Nietzsche seems especially prescient of twentieth century trends in literature in stating that man has a need for some will, some goal, even the will for nothingness–a statement that seems to anticipate existentialism, and the literature of the absurd, as much as it is a critique of nineteenth century nihilism.

Nietzsche’s first artistic target remains Wagner, whom Nietzsche always felt took an abrupt aesthetic turn for the worst at the moment their short, intimate friendship ceased. [25] For Nietzsche, Parsifal is but a parody of tragedy (III, 3), and shows that Wagner was by then overcome by the ascetic dogma.

But aside from Wagner, Nietzsche aims to show that asceticism is a common (but by no means necessary) trait of the artist. The artist’s will to action is in some way vitiated by the struggles of his life, else he be not an artist but a doer himself. The artist himself shows a reluctance to fully engage reality. “Homer would not have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust” (III, 4). True artists do not consider themselves to be worthy objects of art. [26] And yet, true artists, for Nietzsche, rarely have the courage to stand alone, needing the “milk of some orthodoxy” to stand upon.

Still implicitly and explicitly critiquing Wagner, Nietzsche turns toward an examination of Schopenhauer’s view of art, as Nietzsche believes that Schopenhauer’s philosophy had an indelible imprint on the thought of the 1870s, including Wagner’s. Schopenhauer, who exerted a decisive influence on Nietzsche himself by portraying the world as largely a struggle of wills, embraced ascetic ideals as a means of escape from his own tortured soul. Schopenhauer (like Kant before him) viewed the contemplation of pure beauty as the means to escape the life-will, and to counteract sexual interest (III, 6), betraying his predilection to view art from the perspective of the viewer rather than from that of the creator (as presumably Nietzsche does). Much like an ascetic, Schopenhauer needed enemies (the will, women, Hegel) in order to keep his own will going; Schopenhauer, too, was primarily a reactive force, and this is manifested in his philosophy.

Yet for Nietzsche, this is true of philosophers in general, not just Schopenhauer. Philosophers see asceticism as a bridge to independence; a way of achieving their purest intellectuality; a way of affirming their own (and only their own) existence. [27] Philosophers do not see asceticism so much as virtuous but as the means to the best, most rarified, existence. The denial of sensory joy underscores the contrived “importance” of sheer intellectual pursuits.

Picking up the torch, Nietzsche quickly offers an historical sketch of the relationship between philosophy and asceticism. Appealing again to an unnamable, Ur-philosophical time, Nietzsche portrays the first philosophers as showing shame about any softness, much as they show shame (inspired by Christianity) for any hardness they show today. Early philosophers knew how to depict themselves as a continuation in the tradition of wise men, wizards, priests, and soothsayers in order to make others fear them; and the early ascetics behaved no differently.

Ascetics too sought power; power over life itself; power over the very sources of power (III, 11). The ascetic priest became the “real representative of seriousness,” characterized chiefly by a boundless resentment at those who enjoy health, strength, joy, and power. He sought to convince others of his formula: that this life is but a bridge to the next. (Nietzsche, in an unintentionally hilarious generalization, characterizes earth as “the ascetic planet” (III, 11).) Yet paradoxically, Nietzsche concedes that “Life itself must certainly have an interest in the continuance of such a type of self-contradiction. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction…” (III, 11). Yet, since “Life itself” always grows and thrives despite the hostility of the ascetic priest, life, Nietzsche implies, must somehow strengthen itself through the conflict with asceticism. [28]

The philosophy of the ascetic priest bears strong resemblance to that of certain secular philosophers, who similarly detect errors what in the healthy soul takes for reality; who treat pain, multiplicity, the subject/object distinction as errors. Ascetics scorn reason, and demand that we see the absurd, the impossible, and the counter-intuitive (and take it on faith; its very ineffability is often the reason we should believe in it). Since reason, according to this view, leads to so many errors, we should divorce our wills from reason, employing it only as a crude tool when absolutely necessary. Such a view came to influence even Kant’s epistemology, in that Kant championed “disinterested knowledge”.

Philosophical objectivity, then, is another fallacious spin-off from asceticism. It is unnatural to view things from an abstract bird’s-eye view; for Nietzsche, divorcing our wills from our perception is “intellectual castration” (III, 12). True objectivity, then, is the ability to see the pros and cons of a thing, “the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations” (III, 12). Consider Nietzsche’s theory of objectivity and its ramifications for our views of objectivity in such diverse fields as science, journalism, philosophy:

There is only seeing from a perspective, only a “knowing” from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our “idea” of that thing, our “objectivity.” But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration ? (III, 12)

Quickly turning back to the ascetic priest, we now find Nietzsche telling us that the ascetic’s contradiction of Life against Life is only an apparent contradiction; that psychologically asceticism represents a motivation for the preservation of life, the wish for another life; and yet, all the wounds he inflicts upon himself (and others) spurs the ascetic priest to live. Considering how prevalent are the sick among us, we should be all the more grateful for the rare cases, the “windfalls of humanity,” who, despite the debilitating presence of the weak, manage to strengthen themselves. For the “sick are the greatest danger for the healthy” (III, 14) [29] and “the weak strive for union, as the strong strive for isolation” (III, 18).

But indeed the sick manage to infect the strong; the infection of asceticism spreads so widely, that society develops a need for “doctors and nurses who themselves are sick ” (III, 15). Unfortunately, the ascetic’s prescription–more self-mortification, guilt, etc.–will not bring about a true healing; the priest will only successfully channel the course of resentment in the sufferer, offering the drowsy syrup of faith in the afterlife. Of course Nietzsche disputes the priest’s diagnosis that “sinfulness” is to blame; for Nietzsche, sinfulness is not real but merely the interpretation of a fact, probably springing ultimately from a physiological discomfort. In contrast, the “well-constituted” soul will easily digest even his negative experiences, remaining unsaddled with guilt or bad-conscience (III, 16).

For Nietzsche, there is simply no end to the evils of the ascetic priest. After aiding and abetting the slaves in their revolt against the natural aristocracy, wounding the strong through the introduction of bad-conscience into the human psyche, the priests’ medications for diseased man simply exacerbate the disease. For the disease of fatigue, nausea with this life, Christianity and Buddhism alike preach the annihilation of all wants, joys, emotion, and the will. To effect such a repression of the will, ascetics must be rigorously trained, their spirits honed through mindless repetition (cf. mantras, the routine of work) and fasting, which invites hallucinations that tend to reinforce their world-views, taken as they are for divine revelation. Others are encouraged to follow these practices, lest they stay mired in the unreal, sinful, temporal world.

Turning away from the ascetic priest as a psychological type, Nietzsche returns to his ill effects on nineteenth century thought. Nietzsche lambastes the “innocent lying” of current intellectuals in their predilection to smear everything with moral judgments, subconsciously parroting the views of the ascetic, who, nominally, is rejected by these thinkers. Where then lays the opposition to the ascetic world-view, that contains but one aim…

this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretations, any other end; it repudiates, denies, affirms, confirms, only in the sense of its own interpretation (and was there ever a more thoroughly elaborated system of interpretation?); it subjects itself to no power, rather does it believe in its own precedence over every power–it believes that nothing powerful exists in the world that has not first got to receive from “it” a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as being an instrument in its work, a way and means to its end, to one end. (III, 23)

The strongest, apparent opposition to asceticism that Nietzsche can detect lies with modern science. It would seem to counter asceticism with its own “will”, its strong focus on the temporal universe at the expense of the transcendent. And yet, science remains rhetorically unconvincing for Nietzsche (“these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices do not come from the deeps with sufficient audibility” (III, 23)). Consider, he says, the apparent temperamental similarities between the ascetic priest and the ideal scientist, their dispassion, their fixation with the routine of work. Science, with rare yet exquisite exceptions, is a “ hiding-place for every kind of cowardice, disbelief, remorse, despectio sui , bad conscience–it is the very anxiety that springs from having no ideal, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent with an enforced moderation” (III, 23). These scientists fear “ coming to consciousness ” (III, 23). Science’s right to exist springs ultimately from its faith in its hypotheses or some philosophy. In fact, the first hypothesis of any science asserts the existence of a world different than our own, a world that needs must circumscribe and negate our world to some extent in order to capture it conceptually (III, 24). Or earlier, Nietzsche writes off science as “a dupe of the tricks of language” [30] . In short, scientists, like scholars, are usually not “free spirits,” and still suffer from the faith of the ascetic, insofar as they still believe in truth (III, 24).

This belief in truth is born of the ascetic ideal, or more precisely the Platonic, and eventually Christian belief that truth is divine. This suggests a belief in a timeless, objective reality that corresponds to the divine; the importance of the ever-mutable sensory world is minimized by such a view, paving the way for asceticism and much else. Even agnostics suffer from this conception of reality; and in their approach to an objective, godless reality, they “worship their very query as God” (III, 25). Modern history, as championed by Ranke, suffers from a similar malaise in that it asserts little, it describes; historians show little overt will to interpret, to be value-creators. [31] Other strange transmogrifications of the ascetic include the prevalent belief in teleology (which presumably afflicts even Darwinism, in its belief in the inexorable improvement of the species), and the common belief in personal Fate, that things happen for a happen for a reason–echoing Nietzsche’s comment in Beyond Good and Evil that most of us are afraid of “looking into the abyss” of a teleologically free reality.

In closing his essay, Nietzsche grants that the ascetic ideal filled a void in the whole problem of man; that man, who often wills to suffer, needed a reason of suffer (which appears counter-intuitive), and that man would rather will ascetic suffering, than to will nothing at all. Paradoxically (except for Nietzsche), asceticism, which is characterized by a denial of the will, saved the will by preserving in us a warped counter-will to suffer.

Toward an Evaluation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy

Much of this essay necessarily degenerated into a summary of the Genealogy , because it remains especially difficult to evaluate Nietzsche without a sketch of his ideas fresh in mind. Nietzsche successfully preempted any valid reduction of his ideas into formulae, although many critics still rendered Nietzsche formulaically, rather than evaluated his philosophy in all its nuanced suppleness. As Kaufmann suggests [32] , Nietzsche remains essentially “our greatest miniaturist,” as he said of Wagner, “who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of meaning” but fails, modern man being what he is, to create a sweeping, integrated vision like the handful of greatest Western writers.

Kaufmann, in his chapter on Nietzsche’s methodology, suggests that the “anarchy of atoms” that comprises his work are “perhaps integrated into a larger design” (Kaufmann, 74). His style:

might be called monadologic to crystallize the tendency of each aphorism to be self-sufficient while yet throwing light on almost every other aphorism. We are confronted with a “pluralistic universe” in which each aphorism is itself a microcosm. Almost as often as not, a single passage is equally relevant to ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, theory of value, psychology, and perhaps half a dozen other fields (Kaufmann, 75).

Kaufmann also mentions how the philosopher Karl Jaspers suggested not being satisfied that one understood Nietzsche’s view on any issue until one also found a passage that contradicted it; Jaspers saw “a virtue in Nietzsche’s bold attempt to face such contradictions squarely” (Kaufmann, 75).

For some philosophers, this points to a fundamental problem with Nietzsche’s thought: he did not feel bound by the traditional rules of logic, believing them largely irrelevant outside of mathematics, which itself had little to do with manifold reality. Logicians, scientists and others who possess more faith in logic’s usefulness in apprehending reality resist Nietzsche’s flouting of the rules. Ultimately, however, these more rational minded folk must agree that no rule of logic or mathematics can support the meta-logical assertion that logic or mathematics bring us closer to “truth.”

Indeed, in the discussion of the third essay, Nietzsche claims not to believe in ultimate truth–in essence undermining the whole scientific and intellectual enterprise (unless of course one believes that the real purpose of science has become to control nature, with a discovery but a necessary means to this end). Nietzsche believed truth still existed in most people’s minds as a kind of overarching Platonic Form, and hence a false abstraction. As much as Nietzsche’s criticisms do much to undermine the assumptions of science and metaphysics, “truth” in some form, must still be the standard to which he, Nietzsche, as philosopher, must struggle to achieve. Without any standard of truth, all remarks are equally valid, and thus we have no more reason to listen to Nietzsche’s doom rather than the drowsy syrup of the ascetic priest.

Having avowedly freed himself from the standards of Truth and logic, Nietzsche’s work appears more as rhetoric, in the benighted sense of the Sophists–an attempt to convince us through appeals to our intuition. Nietzsche’s fighting ground almost always becomes psychology–or psychologically compelling portraits of the principal players in the formation of morality: the natural aristocracy; the ascetic priest; the early philosophers; the ancient Greeks; Wagner, etc. A fundamental charge that can be levied against Nietzsche, however, is that his appeals to our intuition are in actuality appeals to our cynicism. The persuasiveness of his method, one of rhetoric and psychology instead of systems or appeals to deductive logic, must be determined by individual readers.

Aside from these possible objections, critics could object to Nietzsche’s passionate espousal of his beliefs; he often lacks the cold, detached stance of the philosopher to which we are accustomed. Nietzsche’s response to such an objection can be found in third essay of the Genealogy : that cold, dispassionate quests for truth are too redolent of asceticism; a divorce of one’s will from one’s perspective; the laughable pretense of bird’s-eye objectivity.

In the final analysis, Nietzsche’s influence will be seen as primarily heuristic: rather than embracing Nietzsche’s theories as they are, philosophers benefit from the wide tracts of previously unchartered ground that Nietzsche opened up for exploration. His approach to the origins of morality is singularly original, and anticipates, indeed exerted a decisive influence on twentieth century developments in value theory. Nietzsche himself, at times, would appear satisfied by this; rather than seeking disciples, he encouraged his readers above all to think for themselves. He sought merely to alter the locus of debate; in that, for those who have digested his works, he more than succeeded.

The Psychoanalytic Movement by Ernest Gellner. Gellner posits Nietzsche as the truly original thinker behind the “Nietzschean Minimum,” a set of ideas that Freud made more palatable and respectable and fostered a movement.

The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom. Bloom calls Nietzsche a prophet of the anxiety of influence.

[Google Search this site for Nietzsche]

     [1] Philosophers’ attitude toward Nietzsche before the war is perhaps typified by Bertrand Russell’s entry on Nietzsche in his History of Western Philosophy (1945). Russell simply posits a direct link between Nietzsche and Hitler, and then betrays such an appalling ignorance of Nietzsche’s work that his entry degenerates quickly into a fictional dialogue between Nietzsche and the Buddha–a humorous effort, but one that assumes we will take the Buddha’s side unquestioningly, which is exactly what Nietzsche diagnosed as the problem of the West. Russell also places Nietzsche in the nineteenth century “Romantic” tradition, a highly dubious contention, and dependent on an indefinable term.

    [2] See especially Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, AntiChrist, Prologue, “The Nietzsche Legend,” for the  rise of the myth of Nietzsche as Nazi forbear. Kaufmann establishes the complete lack of anti-Semitism in Nietzsche’s writings. Nietzsche’s views on both the Jews and Germans were both extremely ambivalent: he does believe the Jews furthered the rise of the “slave morality,” but no more so than the Buddha, Jesus, Paul, the early Christians, medieval monks, British utilitarian philosophers, and countless others; the Germans are often written off as “sausage-eaters” and other epithets. Nietzsche despised the nationalism of the Second Reich (1871-1918), and called himself the first “good European.” Sensing that his writings would be appropriated and misused by his domineering sister, Nietzsche bemoaned that he should have written both Zarathustra and The Will to Power in French (!), so that these books would in no way be associated with the burgeoning nationalism of the Second Reich (Kaufmann, The Will to Power, introduction). Finally, Nietzsche’s notion of a master race was multi-racial; it comprises all good “artist-tyrants” everywhere, and, when put in context of Nietzsche’s love for all things (Classical) Greek, is seen as a transparent descendant of Plato’s “philosopher-kings.”

    [3] Nietzsche wrote over twenty volumes of philosophy during his writing years (1872-1890), most of which are divided into short sections dealing with a particular, usually original, idea or insight. Although sometimes divided into chapters (as in Beyond Good and Evil) or presented as poetry (Thus Spake Zarathustra), this form usually obtains, and so Nietzsche does not have to be read straight through like more thesis-oriented philosophers like Kant or Spengler.

    [4] By appealing to a prescribed standard, logicians too invoke a silent “should” that one “ought” to think a certain way. Logicians, however, must deal only with form at the expense of content, and so can do little in the face of Nietzsche’s works other than cry “Contradiction!”, which Nietzsche himself often does for us without flinching.

    [5] For the sheer audacity of self-praise, it is hard to top the late Nietzsche. See especially Ecce Homo, where, despite Nietzsche’s echoes of Socrates’ claim to be the wisest living man, he cannot be taken only at an ironic level.

    [6] My references to the Genealogy will include essay number and section number. Thus “(II, 15)” will mean second essay, section 15.

    [7] Readers of The Birth of Tragedy encounter a similar problem with Nietzsche’s confident assertions about the early Greek’s notion of drama. As carried away as we are by Nietzsche’s thesis, many times we wonder what sources he is drawing from.

Nietzsche, however, may be using history as grounds for higher symbols, higher types. Kaufmann writes:

Nietzsche, from his first book to his last, considered historical events and figures less with an eye to literal accuracy or correctness than “to circumscribe . . . an everyday symbol . . . , to elevate it, to intensify it into a comprehensive symbol” (Kaufmann, 153).

It may well be that Nietzsche’s perspective was more poetical than historical in his frequent historical accounts; but then, is it fair to characterize his philosophical opponents as “unhistorical”, if he himself is weaving a typology rather than offering a literal account? Such a debate naturally leads to the relative strengths of the literal and the metaphorical in the quest for truth; and though there is no doubt which side Nietzsche would favor, this issue is beyond the scope of this footnote.

    [8] Nietzsche points out with juicy irony that even the weak dream of being strong, and fashion their beliefs in the afterlife accordingly. “These weaklings! –they also, forsooth, wish to be strong some time; there is no doubt about it, some time their kingdom also must come–“the kingdom of God” is their name for it…” (I, 15).

    [9] Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, freely admits that The Birth of Tragedy suffered from Hegelian tendencies (positing the Dionysian and the Apollonian as the overarching thesis and antithesis of world history). But even as late as the Genealogy he has failed to divest himself of the quest of identifying the principal elements in the world-historical dialectic. In this work, it is essentially the Greek versus the Jew, or the pagan versus the Christian. Perhaps it is this impulse, one of wanting to replace existing overarching philosophical visions with his own, that leads him down the road of unsupported generalization and the unprovable. For all his claims of historical acuity, Nietzsche’s various dialectics suffer from the same Achilles heel as Hegel and Marx’s dialectic, or Freud’s tripartite division of mind: they are unempirical, and bear as many resemblances to religion as science or philosophy.

    [10] “Which of them has been provisionally victorious, Rome or Judea? but there is not a shadow of doubt; just consider to whom in Rome itself nowadays you bow down, as though before the quintessence of all the highest values–and not only in Rome, but almost over half the world, everywhere where man has been tamed or is about to be tamed–to three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (to Jesus of Nazareth, to Peter the fisher, to Paul the tentmaker, and to the mother of the aforesaid Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable; Rome is undoubtedly defeated” (I, 16).

    [11] In Nietzsche’s defense, his portrayal of this original conflict of opposing value systems is supported by (Nietzsche’s interpretation of) etymological evidence–rather than simply posited. He cites original usages for such encompassing words as “good” and “evil”, and appears to have confidence in his interpretation of how ancient speakers used language. Here again, without a sturdy background in linguistics or classical languages, one is forced to either accept or reject Nietzsche’s etymological insights, which provide the scant historical evidence for his “theory of history.” Again, much of the problem lies in the subject matter itself–there is simply not much documentation–so the claims of both Nietzsche and his opponents lack an historical standard on which to be evaluated.

    [12] Even Nietzsche’s view of the ascetic priest is, at times, ambivalent. Although he rants at the tragedy of man being “tamed” by the asceticism of the weak, his own philosophy of the individual entails restraining wild animal impulses, in order to channel them to higher ends (such as art and philosophy). In this sense, asceticism, insofar as it teaches us to at least train our impulses (to harness them for positive ends), is not beyond the pale. Indeed, in his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche considered “the philosophers, artists, and saints” as the highest types of humanity.

    [13] C.S. Lewis uses such an argument in his Mere Christianity.

    [14] To belabor a point, Nietzsche’s depiction of pre-moral ancient man is no more “historical” than the Social Contract theorists’ State of Nature, or others who have posited the origins of morality or law. In the necessary absence of a pre-historical history, Nietzsche’s position will stand or fall on the basis of its psychological credibility vis-à-vis other conceptions. Although I find Nietzsche’s scenario more compelling, more “realistic” than the Social Contract or the Garden of Eden, his approach still suffers from the weakness that its cogency depends on convincing modern readers, living in what I sometimes like to call The Age of Psychology, that he has accurately described what he himself admits is essentially a pre-psychological state–what indeed was first written upon the historical tabula rasa of the mind?

    [15] For Nietzsche on the origins of memory see II, 3. Highlights include: “…perhaps there is nothing more awful and sinister in the early history of man than his system of mnemonics. ‘Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory.’ This is the axiom of the oldest (unfortunately also the longest) psychology in the world….When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a memory, he never accomplishes it without blood, tortures and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures (among them the sacrifice of the first-born), the most loathsome mutilation (for instance, castration), the most cruel rituals of all the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom systems of cruelty)–all these things originate from that instinct which found in pain its most potent mnemonic.”

    [16] Perhaps wisely, Nietzsche avoids a full etiology of memory, a task worthy of more than book-length treatment. But I leave Nietzsche’s account of the origins of conscience unsure of the relationship between conscience and morality. If indeed such cruelty was necessary to brand a few moral laws (noble ones, like keeping promises) into men’s souls, where did the morality exist in the minds of those who envisioned and were now branding moral laws into others, if not in memory?

    [17] Compare Hobbes’ famous dictum from the Leviathan that prior to the State life was “poor, nasty, mean, brutish, and short.”

    [18] To our cynical eyes, Nietzsche’s depiction of the relationship between the state and the individual as one of creditor and debtor seems more convincing than Locke’s State of Nature, where the Original Compact giving rise to the state is born of glorious mutuality.

    [19] As often the case with Nietzsche, he first appears virulent, proud, instinctual, and animalistic; later we as readers are shocked by his sensitivity, bookishness, loneliness, weakness.

    [20] The fact that the original aristocrats, the strong, are eventually vanquished by the “bungled and the botched” would, from a sheerly Darwinian perspective imply that, since the latter survived and won power, they were really stronger all along! Nietzsche, however, must reject this notion. His original aristocracy was not invincible; but it was true, honorable, spontaneous, warlike, and in possession of supreme aesthetic grandeur; only through the “sugary softness of lies” from the mouths of the proto-ascetic priests and his evil ilk did they fall from power. Nietzsche would not deny that industrialists and leading politicians of his day possessed far more “power” (control of men and matter) than most members of the original aristocracy; but their fall from their original state is (much like the fall from Eden!) irreversible and woeful, something that all later men should bemoan.

    [21] “It is only that which has no history, which can be defined” (II, 13). This gem of a quotation encapsulates Nietzsche’s emphasis on the living, breathing, historical evolution of a concept, as well as its practical implementation, instead of the fool’s quest for perfect definitions (including those of mathematics and science; why are they any different?), a goal rendered palpably foolish long ago by the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues.

    [22] See Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 225.

    [23] This is a compelling theory of the origins of religion, and is supported by examination of ancient literature. Greek heroes, such as Hercules, were at least partially of divine extraction, and the gods themselves were often depicted as the gods of the Greeks alone, as if only ancestral Greeks were truly divine. In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh is most certainly a patriarchal god, “the God of our Fathers,” of “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” of the Jews–again showing a tribalist bent, rather than universalist claims.

    [24] This passage handsomely adumbrates the existentialism of Sartre.

    [25] Nietzsche’s obsession with Wagner remains one of the more disquieting aspects of his writings, and is present from first to last. Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, dealt mainly with the origin of tragedy as religious expression in ancient Greece, and remains a masterpiece of aesthetics and philosophy. Why then the long digression (forming the final third of the work) on Wagner’s role as a renascent, true tragedian? Nietzsche later devoted two works to Wagner (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and The Case of Wagner), and references to him and his circle appear throughout Nietzsche’s work. Here too, in the Genealogy, Nietzsche expends a disproportionate amount of space, in this, perhaps his most cohesive work, on Wagner’s failings, especially his succumbing to traditional morality. It remains one more “aesthetic” fault that one must forgive of Nietzsche, that his obsession with Wagner did something to undermine the effectiveness of his writings.

    [26] This is an interesting critique of much twentieth century fiction, which features a thinly veiled first person autobiographical narrator. While as Emerson (whom Nietzsche respected) anticipated that future literature would be composed of autobiographical accounts, Nietzsche believed such gross self-obsession to be counter-artistic. And yet, do his works (especially Ecce Homo) withstand such a critique?

    [27] Confer Descartes’ famous dictum: “I think therefore I am.”

    [28] Nietzsche’s statement that “this species, hostile, as it is, to life, always grow again and always thrive again” contradicts his other depictions of history, which often posit an inexorable decline since the time of the Greeks, usually because of the sinister spread of asceticism. Here again, Nietzsche, in approaching his target from so many angles, generates self-contradictions in his own position. Yet it does echo his statement from the first essay (I, 16) that in this day it is a “sign of the higher nature,” that they are self-contradictory; at least they are still struggling against the slave morality, and presumably the subtle permeations of asceticism as well.

    [29] This comment supports Nietzsche’s depiction of the aristocrats being subverted by the slaves.

    [30] “Our whole science is ‘moves, force causes,’ and so on. Our whole science is still, in spite of all its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious changeling ‘the subject’ (the atom, to give another instance, is such a changeling, just as the Kantian ‘Thing-in-itself’)” (I, 13).

    [31] Interestingly, Nietzsche does not flex his Greek here by pointing out that in the Greek, “history” meant to narrate, and springs ultimately from the verb “histor,” to judge!

    [32] See Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 73.

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Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals: The First Essay Explained

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On the Genealogy of Morals A Polemical Tract by Friedrich Nietzsche

[This document, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, is in the public domain and may be used by anyone, in whole or in part, without permission and without charge, provided the source is acknowledged. Editorial comments and translations in square brackets and italics are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from Nietzsche's text] 

[ Table of Contents for Genealogy of Morals ]

Second Essay Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters

To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—surely that is the essence of 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 largely been resolved 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.

We can ascribe to forgetfulness the fact what while we are digesting what we live through and experience and then absorb (we might call the process mental ingestion [Einverseeling] ), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the thousand-fold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung] ). The doors and windows of consciousness are shut from time to time, so that it stays undisturbed from the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our functional organs keeps them working for and against one another—a small quiet place, 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 (our organism is arranged as an oligarchy)—that is, as I said, the use of active forgetfulness, like some porter at the door, a maintainer of psychic order, quiet, and 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 necessarily forgetful animal 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, its 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's been etched into the mind, nor is it merely indigestion over a word one has pledged at a particular time. No, it's an active wish not to be free of the matter, a continuing desire for what one willed at a particular time, a real memory of one's will, so that between the original "I will" or "I will do" and the actual discharge of the will, its real action, without thinking about it, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of the will can intervene, without breaking this long chain of the will.

But consider what 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 safely, to develop a capability for figures and calculations in general—and for that to occur, a human being must necessarily have first 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—who makes himself into a pledge for the future!

Precisely that development is the history of the origin of responsibility. The task of breeding an animal with a right to make promises contains within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the more urgent prior task of making a human being necessarily uniform to some extent, one among many other like him, regular and consequently predictable. The immense task in what I have called the "morality of custom" (cf. Daybreak , p. 7, 13, 16), the essential work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his entire pre-historical 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 rendered truly predictable.

Now, let's position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree finally yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means. 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 proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved and given 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 has the right to make promises, this master of free will, this sovereign—how can he not realize the superiority he enjoys over everyone who does not have the right to make a promise and make pledges on his 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 creatures with a shorter and less reliable 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 withholds it. 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 when opposed by misfortune, even when "opposed by fate," so 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 hold his cane ready to punish 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, this power over oneself and destiny have become internalized into the deepest parts of him and grown instinctual, have now become a dominating instinct. What will he call it, this dominating instinct, given that he finds he needs a word for it? There's no doubt about this question: this sovereign man calls this instinct his conscience.

His conscience? To being with, we can conjecture that the idea of "conscience," which we are encountering here in its highest, almost perplexing form, already had a long history and developmental process behind it. To be entitled to pledge one's word, to do it with pride, and also to say "yes" to oneself—that right 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 longer time it was impossible to see any such fruit. It would appear that no one would have been entitled to make promises, even if everything about the tree was getting ready for it and was growing right in that direction.

"How does one create a memory for the human animal? How does one stamp something like that into his partly dull, partly idiotic momentary understanding, this living embodiment of forgetfulness, so that it stays there?" This ancient problem, as you can imagine, was not resolved right away with tender answers and methods. Perhaps there is nothing more fearful and more terrible in the entire pre-history 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 stays in the memory"—that is a leading principle of the most ancient (and unfortunately the most recent) psychology on earth.

We might even say that everywhere on earth nowadays where there is still solemnity, seriousness, mystery, gloomy colours in the lives of men and people, something of that terror is still at work, the fear with which in earlier times on earth people made promises, pledged their word, or praised something. 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 at bottom systems of cruelty)—all that originates in that instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful means of helping to develop the memory.

In a certain sense all asceticism belongs here: a couple of ideas need 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 the human's "memory" was, the more terrible his customs have always appeared. The harshness of the laws of punishment provide a special standard for measuring how much trouble people went to in order to triumph over forgetfulness and to maintain the 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 a particularly cruel and hard-hearted people, even less as particularly careless people who live only in the present. But have a look at our old penal code in order to understand how much trouble it took on this earth to breed a "People of Thinkers" (by that I mean the peoples of Europe, 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 and brutally crude basic instincts. Think of the old German punishments, for example, stoning (even the legend lets the mill stone fall on the head of the guilty person), breaking on the wheel (the unique invention and specialty of the German genius in the area 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, along with, of course, 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 their memory, and so far as these precepts were concerned they gave their word in order to live with the advantages of society—and that was that! With the assistance of this sort of memory people finally came to "reason"! Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over emotions, the whole gloomy business called reflection, all these privileges and ceremonies of human beings—how expensive they were! How much blood and horror is the basis for all "good things."

But then how did that other "gloomy business," the consciousness of guilt, the whole "bad conscience" come into the world? With this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I'll say it once more—or perhaps I haven't said it at all yet—they are useless. With their own purely "modern" experience extending only through five periods, with no knowledge of or any desire to know the past, and even less historical insight, a "second perspective"—something so necessary at this point—they nonetheless pursue the history of morality. That must inevitably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth.

Have these genealogists of morality up to this point allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, the major moral principle "guilt" [Schuld] derives its origin from the very materialistic idea "debt" [Schulden] or that punishment developed entirely as repayment, without reference to any assumption about the freedom or lack of freedom of the will—and did so to the point where it first required a high degree of human development [Vermenschlichung] so that the animal "man" began to make those much more primitive distinctions between "intentional," "negligent," "accidental," "of sound mind," and their opposites and bring them to bear when handing out punishment? That unavoidable idea, nowadays so trite and apparently natural, which has really 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, in fact, is an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making.

Anyone who moves this idea back to the very beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of primitive humanity. For the most extensive period of human history punishment was not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, nor was it assumed that only the guilty party should be punished. It was much more the case, as it still is now when parents punish their children, of anger over some harm which people have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator. But this anger was restrained and modified through the idea that every injury had some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that was 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 as ancient as the idea of "someone subject to law" and which, in itself, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.

It's true that recalling this contractual relationship arouses, as we might expect from what I have observed above, all sorts of suspicion of and opposition to primitive humanity which established or allowed it. It's precisely at this point that people make promises. Here the pertinent issue is that the person who makes a promise has to have a memory created for him, so that precisely at this point, we can surmise, there exists a site for what is hard, cruel, and painful. 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 the contract, pledges to the creditor, in the event that he does not pay, something that he still "owns," something over which he still exercises power, for example, his body or his wife or his freedom or even his life (or, under certain religious conditions, even his blessedness, the salvation of his soul, or finally his peace in the grave, as was the case in Egypt, where the dead body of the debtor even in the grave found no peace from the creditor—and it's certain that with the Egyptians such peace was particularly important). That means that the creditor could inflict all kinds of ignominy and torture on the body of the debtor—for instance, slicing 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, horrific estimates going into finer and finer details, 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, something more Roman, 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: " si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto " [let it not be thought a crime if they cut off more or less].

Let's clarify 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 debtor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious mouthful, even 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 himself for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone "below himself," as someone he is entitled to mistreat—or at least, in the event that the real force of punishment, of inflicting punishment, has already been transferred to the "authorities," the feeling of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consist of a permission for and right to cruelty.

In this area, that is, in the laws of obligation, the world of moral concepts "guilt," "conscience," and "sanctity of obligations" was conceived. Its beginnings, just like the beginnings of everything great on earth, were 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 the 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 and for the distress caused by the injury, got an offsetting pleasure—making someone suffer—a real feast, something that, as I've said, was valued all the more, the greater the difference between him and the rank and social position of the creditor. I have been speculating here, for it's difficult to see such subterranean things from the surface, quite apart from the fact that it's an embarrassing subject.

Anyone who crudely throws into the middle of all this the idea of "revenge" has merely buried and dimmed his insights rather than illuminated them (revenge itself takes us back to the very same problem "How can making someone suffer give us a feeling of satisfaction?"). It seems to me that the delicacy and even more the hypocrisy of tame house pets (I mean modern man, I mean us) resist a really powerful understanding of just how much cruelty contributes to the great celebratory joy of primitive humanity, as an ingredient mixed into almost all their enjoyments and, from another perspective, how naïve and innocent their need for cruelty appears, how they basically accept "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 basic celebratory human joy. In Beyond Good and Evil , p. 117 ff. (even earlier in Daybreak , p. 17, 68, 102), 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 a grand style without executions, tortures, or something like an auto-da-fé [ burning at the stake ], and no noble household lacked creatures on whom people could vent their malice and cruel taunts without a second thought (remember 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 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, making someone suffer makes them feel even better—that is a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle, which, by the way, even the apes might agree with. For people say that, in thinking up bizarre cruelties, the apes already anticipate a great many human actions and, as it were, act them out. Without cruelty there is no celebration: that's what the oldest and longest era of human history teaches us—and with punishment, too, there is so much celebration!—

With these ideas, by the way, I have no desire whatsoever to give our pessimists grist for their discordant mills grating with the 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 now, now that we have our pessimists. The darkening of heaven over men's heads always increased quickly in proportion to the growth of human beings' shame at 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 in the history of human beings. It's 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 developed an upset stomach and a furry tongue which made him not only fight against the joy and innocence of the animal but even lose his taste for life, so that now and then he stands there, holds his nose, and with Pope Innocent III disapproves of himself 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, discharging spit, urine, and excrement"). Now, when suffering always has to march out as the first argument against existence, as its most serious question mark, it's good for us to remember the times when people saw 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, let me say this as a consolation for the delicate, at that time pain didn't hurt as much as it does nowadays. At least that could be the conclusion of a doctor who had treated a Negro (taking the latter as a representative of pre-historical man) for a bad case of inner inflammation, which drives the European with the best constitution to despair but which doesn't have the same effect on the Negro. (The graph of the human capacity for pain seems in fact to sink down remarkably and almost immediately after 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 of science is really insignificant).

Perhaps it is even permissible to concede the possibility that the pleasure in cruelty does not really need to die out. Since today pain does more harm, the relevant pleasure needed only to be sublimated and made more subtle—in other words, it had 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 really enrages people about suffering is not the suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering. But neither for the Christian, who sees in suffering an entire secret machinery for salvation, nor for the naïve 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. Hence, 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 example, life as riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil which is uplifting in the eyes of God is justified": that's how the pre-historical logic of feeling rang out—and was that really confined to pre-history? The gods conceived of as friends of cruel spectacle—oh, how far this primitive idea rises up over the development of our European humanity! We might well seek advice from 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 for their happiness that the joys of cruelty. With what sort of expression, do you think, did Homer allow his gods to look down on the fate of men? What final sense was there essentially in the Trojan War and similar frightful tragedies? 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 looking down on the moral struggles, on heroism and the self-mutilation of the virtuous: the "Hercules of duty" was on stage, and he knew he was there. Without someone watching, virtue for this race of actors was something entirely inconceivable.

Surely that daring and fateful philosophical invention, first made for Europe at that time, the "free will," 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 and 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, complication, catastrophe. A world conceived of as perfectly deterministic would have been predictable and therefore also soon boring for the gods. That was 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 the great punishments there is also so much celebration!

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 and has been—in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person encountered another person and measured himself against him. We have not yet found a civilization at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible. To set prices, measure values, 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 is.

The very oldest form of astuteness was bred here—here, too, we can assume are the first beginnings of human pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word "man" [ Mensch ] ( 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 "calculating animal as such." Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organization and grouping. It is much rather the case that out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal right the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, compensation were 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 at any rate adjusted to this perspective, and with that awkward consistency characteristic of the thinking in ancient human beings, hard to get started but then inexorably moving forward in the same direction, people soon reached the great generalization "Everything has its price, everything can be paid off"—the oldest and most naïve 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 "understand" each other again by compensation—and in relation to those less powerful, to compel them to arrive at some settlement among themselves.

Still measuring by the standard of pre-history (a pre-history 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 debtors. People live in a community. They enjoy the advantages of a community (and what fine 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 meant—and how people pledge themselves to and enter 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 for the benefits and advances given to him, but who even attacks his creditor. So from this point on not only does he lose, as is reasonable, all these good things and benefits, but he is also more pertinently reminded what these good things are all about.

The anger of the injured creditor, the community, gives him back the wild condition, as free as a bird, from which he was earlier protected. It pushes him away from it, 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 lost not only all 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 ways in which punishment has appeared in history.

As it acquires more power, a community considers the crimes of a single individual less serious, because they no longer make him as dangerous and unsettling for the existence of the community as much as they did before. The wrong doer is no longer "left without peace" and thrown out, and the common anger can no longer vent itself on him without restraint to the same extent it did before. It is rather the case that the wrong doer from now on is carefully protected by the community against this anger, particularly from that of the injured person, and is taken into protective custody. The compromise with the anger of those most immediately 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, 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 some 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 keeps growing, the criminal law grows constantly milder. Every weakening and profound jeopardizing of the community brings the harsher forms of criminal law to light once more. The "creditor" always became proportionally more human as he became richer. Finally the amount of his wealth itself establishes 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 free without punishment. "Why should I really bother about my parasites," it would then say. "May they live and prosper—for that I am still sufficiently strong!" . . . Justice, which started by stating "Everything is capable of being paid for, everything must be paid off" ends at that point, by covering 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 call itself—mercy. It goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or even better, his movement beyond the law.

Now a critical word about a recently published attempt to find the origin of justice in quite a different place—that is, in resentment. But first let me speak a word in the ear of the psychologists, provided that they have any desire to study resentment 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 from like, it is not surprising to see attempts coming forward from just such circles (see above, p. 30 [ First Essay ]) to sanctify revenge under the name of justice, as if justice were basically simply a further development of a feeling of being injured [ Verletzt-seins ], and to bring belated respect to emotional reactions 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 these emotions has been underestimated up to now). The only thing I'm calling attention to is the fact that it is the very idea of resentment itself 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 given a high value—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 must 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 just 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, deep, and benevolent objectivity of the just and judging eye does not 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 and certainly not to believe in too easily.

It's certainly true that, on average, even among the most just people 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 always placed a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive. For him it is not even 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—the stronger, braver, more noble man—has always had on his side a better conscience as well as a more independent eye. And by contrast, we can already guess who generally has the invention of "bad conscience" on his conscience—the man of resentment!

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? 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 himself once made the confession "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 restrain reactive pathos and to compel some settlement with it.

Everywhere where justice is practised, where justice is upheld, we see a power stronger in relation to a weaker power standing beneath it (whether with groups or individuals) seeking a means to bring an end among the latter to the senseless rage of resentment, partly by dragging the object of resentment 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, sometimes establishing certain equivalents for injuries as a norm, which from now on resentment has to deal with once and for all.

The most decisive factor, however, which the highest power carries out and sets in place against the superior power of the feelings of hostility and animosity—something that power always does as soon as it feels itself strong enough—is to set up laws, the imperative explanation of those things which, in its own eyes, are considered allowed and legal and which are considered forbidden and illegal. In the process, 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 feelings of those beneath them away from the immediate damage done 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," insofar 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 these characteristics. We must acknowledge something even more alarming—the fact that from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of law must always be 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 its individual means, that is, as means to create a larger unit 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.

Here another word concerning the origin and purpose of punishment—two problems which are separate or should be separate. Unfortunately people normally throw them together. How do the previous genealogists of morality deal with this problem? Naively—the way they always work. 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 then that's it—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 that the 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 ], that something existing, which has somehow come to its present state, will again and again be interpreted by the higher powers 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 re-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 art or in religious cults), we have 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, the usefulness of a thing, a form, or an institution they could understand the reasons 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 need not be connected to each other—they rather follow and take over from each other under merely contingent circumstances.

Consequently, the "development" of a thing, a practice, or an organ has nothing to do with its progress towards a single goal, even less is it the logical and shortest progress 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 transformations of form which have been attempted for the purpose of defence and reaction, the results of successful countermeasures. 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 an individual organ also shifts—in certain circumstances its partial destruction, a reduction of its numbers (for example, through the destruction of intermediate structures) can be a sign of growing power and perfection.

Let me say this: the partial loss of utility, decline, and degeneration, the loss of meaning, and purposelessness, in short, death, belong to the conditions of a real progress, which always appears in the form of a will and a way to greater power always establishing 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 mass of humanity 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 present ruling instinct and contemporary taste, which would rather 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 ruler-hatred [ Misarchismus ] (to make up a bad word for a bad thing), has gradually transformed itself and dressed itself up in intellectual activity, the most intellectual activity, to such an extent that nowadays step by step it infiltrates 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 re-activity—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" first follows. Thus, the governing role of the highest functions in an organism, 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" . . .

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 injected and interpreted into the procedure (which had been present for a long time but was a tradition with a different meaning), in short, that it was not what our naïve genealogists of morality and law up to now 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 have punishment—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" appears much easier to untangle, as well as easier to adjust. We can still see how in every individual case the elements in the synthesis alter their valence and rearrange themselves to such an extent 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 small and 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 bringing fear to 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 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 contract breaker with respect to its conditions, as a rebel, traitor, and breaker of the peace.

Of course, this list is not complete. Obviously punishment is overloaded with all sorts of useful purposes—all the more reason why people infer from it an alleged utility, which in the popular consciousness at least is considered the most essential one. Faith in punishment, which nowadays for several reasons is getting very shaky, always finds its most powerful support in precisely this: Punishment is supposed to be valuable in waking a feeling of guilt in the guilty party. In punishment people are looking for the actual instrument for that psychic reaction called "bad conscience" and "pangs of conscience." In doing this, people still apply reality and psychology incorrectly to present issues—and how much more incorrectly to the greater part of man's history, his prehistory!

Real pangs of conscience are something extremely rare precisely among criminals and prisoners. Prisons and penitentiaries are not breeding grounds in which this species of gnawing worm particularly thrives—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 and 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 ordinary results of punishment—characteristically a dry and gloomy seriousness.

However, if we consider the millennia 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 sight of judicial and executive processes from sensing the nature of his action as something reprehensible in itself, for he sees exactly the same kind of actions undertaken in the service of justice, applauded and practised in good conscience, like espionage, lying, bribery, entrapment, the whole tricky and sly art of the police and prosecution, as it develops in the various kinds of punishment—the robbery, oppression, abuse, imprisonment, torture, murder (all done as a matter of principle, without any emotional involvement as an excuse). Such 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 interesting plant among our earthly vegetation, did not grow in this soil. In fact, for the longest period in the past no notion of dealing with a "guilty party" penetrated the consciousness of judges or even those doing the punishing.. They were dealing with someone who had caused harm, with an irresponsible piece of fate. And the man on whom punishment later fell, once again like a piece of fate, experienced in that no "inner pain," other than what came from the sudden arrival of something unpredictable, a terrible natural event, a falling, crushing boulder against which there is no way to fight.

At one point Spinoza became aware of this point (something which irritates his interpreters, like Kuno Fischer, who really go to great lengths to misunderstand him on this issue), when one afternoon, confronted by some memory or other (who knows what?), he pondered the question about what, as far as he was concerned, was left of the celebrated morsus conscientiae [ the bite of conscience ]—for he had expelled good and evil into the human imagination 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, if true, would be the greatest of all contradictions"). For Spinoza the world had gone back again into that state of innocence in which it existed before the fabrication of the idea of a bad conscience. So what, then, had happened to 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). Just like Spinoza, those instigating evil who incurred punishment have for thousands of years felt in connection with their crime "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, 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 a extension of memory, in a will to go to work from now on more carefully, mistrustfully, and secretly, with the awareness that we are in many things 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 might be more justified in asserting 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.)

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 the most fundamental of all the changes which they experienced—that change when they 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 leader, 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 on earth there has never been such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort—while at the same time those old instincts had not all at once 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 them.

All instincts which are not discharged to the outside are turned back inside. This is what I call the internalization 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 the discharge of human instinct out into the world was obstructed. Those frightening fortifications with which the organization of the state protected itself against the old instincts for freedom—punishment belongs above all to these fortifications—made all those instincts of the wild, free, roaming man turn 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 lacked external enemies and opposition and 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, had to create in itself an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness, this fool, this yearning and puzzled prisoner, was the inventor of "bad conscience." With him was introduced the greatest and weirdest illness, from which human beings today have not recovered, the suffering of man from his humanness, 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 now an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, provided this earth with something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and portentous [ Zukunftsvolles ], that the picture of the earth was fundamentally changed. In fact, it required divine spectators to approve the dramatic performance which then began and whose conclusion is not 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 thrilling lucky rolls of the dice in the game played by Heraclitus' "great child," whether he's called Zeus or chance. In himself he arouses a certain interest, tension, hope, almost a certainty, as if something is announcing itself in him, is preparing itself, as if the human being were not the goal but only the way, an episode, a great promise . . .

Inherent in this hypothesis about the origin of bad conscience is, firstly, the assumption that this change was not gradual or voluntary and did not manifest an organic growth into new conditions, but was a break, a leap, something forced, an irrefutable disaster, against which there was no struggle nor any resentment. Secondly, it assumes that the adaptation of a populace which had hitherto been unchecked and shapeless into a fixed form was initiated by an act of violence and was carried to its conclusion by nothing but sheer acts of violence, that consequently the very oldest "State" emerged as a terrible tyranny, as an oppressive and inconsiderate machinery and continued working until such a 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 shape, is still wandering about. That's surely the way the "State" begins on earth. I believe that that fantasy has been done away with which sees the beginning of the state in some "contract." The man who can command, who is naturally a "master," who comes forward with violence in his actions and gestures—what has a man like that to do with making contracts! We cannot 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 hated. Their work is the instinctive creation of forms, the imposition of forms. They are the most involuntary and unconscious artists in existence. Where they appear something new is soon present, a living power structure, 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 like a mother with her child. They are not the ones in whom "bad conscience" grew—that point is obvious. 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—or at least driven from sight and, as it were, had become latent. This powerful instinct for freedom, once made latent (we already understand how), this instinct driven back, repressed, imprisoned inside, and finally able to discharge and direct itself only against itself—that and that alone is what bad conscience is in its beginnings.

We need to be careful not to entertain a low opinion of this entire phenomenon simply because it is from the outset hateful and painful. Basically it is the same active force which is at work on a grander scale in those artists of power and organization 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 builds bad conscience and negative ideals for itself, that very instinct for freedom (to use my own language, the will to power). But the material on which the shaping and violating nature of this force directs itself is man himself, all his 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 if to 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 voluntarily divided against itself, which makes itself suffer for the pleasure of creating suffering, all this active "bad conscience," as the womb of ideal and imaginative events, finally brought to light—we have already guessed—also an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation, perhaps for the first time the idea of the beautiful. . . . 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 one paradox will be less puzzling—how contradictory ideas, like selflessness, self-denial, and self-sacrifice, can connote an ideal, 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 start: this pleasure belongs to cruelty.

So much for the moment on the origin of the "unegoistic" 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 unegoistic.

Bad conscience is a sickness—there's no doubt about that—but a sickness as 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 first brought about its entry into the world. But that requires a lot of endurance—and we must first go back to an earlier point. The relationship in civil law between the debtor and the creditor, which I have reviewed extensively already, has been reinterpreted 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 reasonably claim was absent for the longest period of the human race). Here the reigning conviction was that the tribe exists only because of the sacrifices and achievements of their ancestors, and that people must 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 these 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, and, 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 wholesale redemption, something huge as a payment back to the "creditor" (the notorious sacrifice of the first born, for example, blood, human blood in any case).

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 dissolution, always lead to a diminution in the fear of the spirit of its founder and give a constantly smaller image of his wisdom, providence, and present power.

If we think this crude 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 into the darkness of a divine mystery, something beyond the powers of imagination, so 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 human history, for his pre-history. 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 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.

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 communities organized on the basis of 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), so people also inherited, as well as the divinities of the tribe and 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 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 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 that 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 kingdoms is at the same time always also the progress toward universal divinities. In addition, despotism, with its overthrow of the independent nobles always builds the way to some variety of monotheism).

The arrival of the Christian god, as the greatest god which has yet been reached, thus brought a manifestation of the greatest 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 already may 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 origins, its causa prima [ prime cause ]. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.

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 between a bad conscience and the idea of god). At the end of the previous section I even talked as if there was no such thing as this moralizing and thus as if now these ideas had necessarily come to an end after the collapse of their presuppositions, the faith in our "creditor," in God. But to a terrible extent the facts indicate something different. The moralizing of the ideas of debt and duty, with their repression into 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 is to bounce off and ricochet back despairingly off an iron impossibility, now those ideas of "debt" and "duty" are supposed to turn back. But against whom?

There can be no doubt: first of all against the "debtor," in whom from this point on bad conscience, firmly set in him, eating into him and spreading out like a polyp, grows wide and deep, until finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people think up the idea of the impossibility of removing the penance, the idea that the debt 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 for the will,") or about nature from whose womb human beings arose and into whom from now on the principle of evil is inserted ("the demonizing of nature") or about existence in general, which remains something without value in itself (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's sacrifice of 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 sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! . . .

You will already have guessed what went on with all this and behind 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 with a bad conscience seized upon religious assumptions to drive his self-torment into something most horrifying—hard and sharp. Guilt towards God: this idea becomes his instrument of torture.

He sees in "God" the ultimate contrast he is capable of discovering to his real and indissoluble animal instincts. He interprets these very animal instincts 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," from himself he hurls every denial which he says to himself, his nature, his naturalness, the reality of his being as an affirmative 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 all measure.

In this mental cruelty there is a kind of insanity of the will, which simply has no equal: the human 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 can 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. Oh this insane, sad beast man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought breaks from him as soon as he 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 an 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 ears for this) 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! . . . For too long the world has been a lunatic asylum! . . .

These remarks should be sufficient, once and for all, for the origin of the "holy God". The fact that conceiving gods does not necessarily, in itself, lead to a degraded imagination—that's something we have to consider 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 something we can infer if we take a look 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 able to continue to enjoy their psychic freedom. Hence, their understanding was the opposite of how Christianity used its God. In this matter the Greeks went a 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 tells them 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—

It's strange how these mortal creatures complain about the gods! Evil comes only from us, they claim, but they themselves Stupidly make themselves miserable, even contrary to fate.

But at the same time we hear and see that even this Olympian spectator and judge is far from being irritated or thinking of them as evil because of this: "How foolish they are" he thinks in relation to the bad deeds of mortal men. And the Greeks of the strongest and bravest times conceded that much about themselves—the "foolishness," "stupidity," a little "disturbance in the head" were as far as the basis for many bad and fateful things are concerned—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 noble Greek posed this question to himself in relation to any incomprehensible horror or outrage 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 origin of evil—at that time the gods took upon themselves, not punishment, but, what is nobler, the guilt.

I'll conclude with three question marks—that's clear enough. You may perhaps ask me, "Is an ideal being built up here or shattered?" . . . But have you ever really asked yourself 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, how many lies had to be consecrated, how many consciences corrupted, how much "god" had to be sacrificed every time? That is the law—show me the case where it has not been fulfilled! . . .

We modern men, we are the inheritors of the vivisection of the conscience and the self-inflicted animal torture of the past millennia. That's what we have had the most practice doing, that is perhaps our artistry—in any case it is something we have refined to spoil 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 be possible, but who is strong enough for that, that is, to interrelate with bad conscience the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations for what lies beyond us, which goes against our senses, our instincts, nature, animals—in short, the earlier ideals, all the ideals which are anti-life and have vilified the world.

To whom can we turn to today with such hopes and demands? . . . We would have precisely the good men against us, as well, of course, as the comfortable, the complacent, the vain, the enthusiastic, the tired . . . But what is more offensive, what cuts us off more fundamentally from these others, than 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 everyone else! . . .

To attain the goal I'm talking about requires a different sort of spirit that those which really exist at this time: spirits empowered by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have even 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 willfulness of knowledge, which comes with great health. Briefly put, that would unfortunately require 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 away from the sidelines 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 his immersion, burial, and absorption into nothing but reality, so that once he comes out of it into the light again, he brings back the redemption of this reality, its redemption from the curse which the previous ideal had laid upon it. This man of the future, who will release us from that earlier ideal and, in so doing, from those things which 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 human beings their hope, this anti-Christ and Anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness—at some point he must come . . .

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 with a greater future, someone more powerful than I—something which only Zarathustra is free to do, Zarathustra the Godless. . .

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On the Genealogy of Morality 58681st Edition

This new edition is the product of a collaboration between a Germanist and a philosopher who is also a Nietzsche scholar. The translation strives not only to communicate a sense of Nietzsche’s style but also to convey his meaning accurately―and thus to be an important advance on previous translations of this work. A superb set of notes ensures that Clark and Swensen's Genealogy will become the new edition of choice for classroom use.

• ISBN-10 9780872202832
• ISBN-13 978-0872202832
• Edition 58681st
• Publisher Hackett Publishing
• Publication date October 1, 1998
• Language English
• Dimensions 5.25 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Print length 177 pages
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Hackett's On the Genealogy of Morality (we now have even the correct title!) may very well change the entire climate for reading Nietzsche in English--especially if read in conjunction with their equally splendid Twilight of the Idols . . . . Competing translations of Nietzsche’s late, utterly influential masterpieces have often made them a chore, rather than a delight, to read; and their introductions generally obscure, rather than illuminate, the texts’ situations. Clark and Swensen (and Polt and Strong) have made the Genealogy and Twilight accessible and exhilarating--while leaving them, as they are, enigmatic and problematic. Finally, readers of Nietzsche in English can--begin!--William Arctander O'Brien, University of California, San Diego

This unique collaboration of an internationally renowned Nietzsche commentator and a scholar of German language and literature has yielded the finest existing edition of Nietzsche’s book in English. The translation itself strikes an intelligent balance between fidelity to the German and readability in English. It is especially welcome for bringing an historically and philosophically sensitive appreciation of Nietzsche to bear on translation issues. (The decision to translate Mitleid consistently as 'compassion,’ instead of 'pity'--thus emphasizing for the English-language reader Nietzsche’s opposition to Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy--is but one of many examples.) The Introduction is the most philosophically substantial guide to the Genealogy in any edition, and will be of value to both student and specialist. Most remarkable of all are the notes on the text: the wealth of biographical, historical, philosophical, and literary detail makes the volume the most informative and reader-friendly edition of Nietzsche's work to date. The notes will also prove fascinating for the scholar, as the editors have tracked down the numerous contemporary scholarly sources on which Nietzsche relied in writing the Genealogy.--Brian Leiter, University of Texas at Austin

This is an excellent translation. The copious and detailed endnotes will make it easy for a beginner to grasp Nietzsche's thought--Fred Clark, Colorado State University

About the Author

Maudemarie Clark is Professor of Philosophy, Colgate University. Alan J. Swensen is Associate Professor of German, Colgate University.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0872202836
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hackett Publishing; 58681st edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 177 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780872202832
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0872202832
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• #58 in Genealogy (Books)
• #120 in Modern Western Philosophy
• #330 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality

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