Part V — On the Natural History of Morality

Part Five:

On the Natural History of Morality.

186 Moral feeling in Europe today is as subtle, late-developed, manifold, sensitive, and refined as the corresponding “science of morality” is still young, unpracticed, clumsy, and ham-fisted—an appealing contrast that sometimes becomes visible and takes flesh in the person of a moralist himself. Even the phrase “science of morality,” considering what it denotes, is much too presumptuous and offends good taste, which generally shows itself in a preference for more modest words. In all strictness, we ought to admit what will still be needed here for a long time to come, what alone is justified for now: namely, collecting the material, grasping in concepts and arranging an immense realm of delicate feelings of value and distinctions of value that live, grow, reproduce, and perish—and perhaps attempting to make the recurrent, more frequent shapes of this living crystallization clearly visible—as preparation for a typology of morality. To be sure, no one has been so modest up to now. Whenever philosophers have concerned themselves with morality as a science, all of them have demanded something very much higher, more ambitious, more solemn of themselves, with a stiff seriousness that makes one laugh: they wanted to supply the foundation of morality—and every philosopher so far has believed he had founded morality; morality itself, however, was taken as “given.” How far removed from their clumsy pride was that seemingly inconspicuous task of description, left lying in dust and mold, although scarcely the subtlest hands and senses could be subtle enough for it! Precisely because moral philosophers knew the moral facts only crudely, in an arbitrary selection or an accidental abridgment, perhaps as the morality of their surroundings, their class, their church, the spirit of their age, their climate and region—precisely because they were poorly informed about peoples, eras, and past ages, and had little curiosity themselves—they never even caught sight of the real problems of morality, which emerge only from comparing many moralities. Strange as it may sound, all “science of morality” until now has still lacked the problem of morality itself: it lacked the suspicion that there was anything problematic here. What philosophers called the “foundation of morality” and demanded of themselves was, seen in the right light, merely a learned form of good faith in the prevailing morality, a new means of expressing it, hence itself a fact within a particular morality—indeed, at bottom, a kind of denial that this morality may be taken as a problem—and in any case the opposite of an examination, dissection, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith. Listen, for example, to the almost venerable innocence with which Schopenhauer still presents his own task, and draw your conclusions about the scientific character of a “science” whose latest masters still talk like children and little old women: “The principle,” he says (p. 136 of The Fundamental Problems of Morality), “the basic proposition on whose content all ethicists actually agree: harm no one; rather, help everyone as much as you can—that is really the proposition all teachers of morality labor to establish… the actual foundation of ethics, which people have sought for millennia like the philosopher’s stone.”—The difficulty of establishing that proposition may indeed be great—as everyone knows, Schopenhauer did not succeed either—and anyone who has once felt to the depths how tastelessly false and sentimental that proposition is in a world whose essence is will to power may be reminded that Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, actually—played the flute… Every day, after dinner: read his biographer on this. And to ask in passing: a pessimist, a denier of God and the world, who stops short before morality—who says Yes to morality and plays the flute, to the morality of “harm no one”: what? Is that really—a pessimist?

187 Quite apart from the value of assertions such as “there is a categorical imperative within us,” one can always ask: what does such an assertion say about the person asserting it? There are moralities meant to justify their author before others; other moralities are meant to soothe him and leave him satisfied with himself; with others he wants to nail himself to the cross and humble himself; with others to take revenge, with others to conceal himself, with others to transfigure himself and place himself far away, on high; this morality serves its author as a means of forgetting, that one as a means of making himself, or something about himself, forgotten; many a moralist would like to exercise power and creative caprice upon humanity; many another, perhaps Kant among them, gives us to understand through his morality: “What is respectable about me is that I can obey—and things ought to be no different with you than with me!”—In short, moralities, too, are only a sign language of the affects.

188 Every morality, as opposed to letting things go, is a piece of tyranny against “nature,” against “reason” as well; but this is not yet an objection to it, unless one were already decreeing, from the standpoint of some other morality, that every kind of tyranny and unreason is impermissible. What is essential and invaluable in every morality is that it is a prolonged constraint: to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism, recall the constraint under which every language has so far attained strength and freedom—the constraint of meter, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm. How much trouble poets and orators in every nation have taken!—not excluding some prose writers today, whose ears house an inexorable conscience—“for the sake of a piece of folly,” as utilitarian blockheads say, imagining themselves clever—“out of submission to arbitrary laws,” as anarchists say, imagining themselves “free,” even free spirits. The curious fact, however, is that everything on earth that exists or has existed in the way of freedom, subtlety, daring, dance, and masterly assurance, whether in thinking itself or in governing, in speaking and persuading, in the arts as in ethical conduct, has developed only by virtue of the “tyranny of such arbitrary laws”; and in all seriousness, it is not at all unlikely that precisely this is “nature” and “natural”—and not that letting go! Every artist knows how far his “most natural” condition is from the feeling of letting himself go: that free ordering, placing, disposing, shaping in moments of “inspiration”—and how strictly and subtly, at precisely those moments, he obeys a thousand laws that defy all formulation in concepts, precisely because of their hardness and definiteness (even the firmest concept, held against them, has something wavering, manifold, ambiguous about it—). What is essential “in heaven and on earth,” it seems, is, to say it once again, that there should be obedience for a long time and in one direction: in the long run, something always comes, and has always come, of this for whose sake it is worth living on earth—for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, refined, mad, and divine. The prolonged unfreedom of the spirit, the suspicious constraint upon the communication of thoughts, the discipline the thinker imposed on himself, thinking within a churchly and courtly rule or under Aristotelian presuppositions, the prolonged spiritual will to interpret everything that happens according to a Christian scheme and to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident—all this violence, arbitrariness, hardness, horror, and opposition to reason has proved the means by which the European spirit was bred to its strength, its ruthless curiosity, and subtle agility: granted that an irreplaceable amount of strength and spirit also had to be crushed, stifled, and ruined in the process (for here, as everywhere, “nature” shows itself as it is, in all its prodigal, indifferent grandeur, which outrages us but is noble). That for millennia European thinkers thought only in order to prove something—today, conversely, we suspect every thinker who “wants to prove something”—that they always knew in advance what was supposed to emerge as the result of their most rigorous reflection, much as in Asian astrology in former times, or even today in the harmless Christian-moral interpretation of the most immediate personal events “to the glory of God” and “for the salvation of the soul”: this tyranny, this arbitrariness, this stern and magnificent stupidity has educated the spirit; slavery, it seems, is the indispensable means, in both the grosser and the subtler sense, of disciplining and breeding the spirit as well. Look at every morality in this light: it is “nature” in it that teaches hatred of letting go, of too much freedom, and plants the need for limited horizons, for the tasks nearest at hand—that teaches the narrowing of perspective, and thus, in a certain sense, stupidity, as a condition of life and growth. “You shall obey someone, and for a long time: otherwise you will perish and lose the last of your self-respect”—this seems to me nature’s moral imperative, which is admittedly neither “categorical,” as old Kant demanded of it (hence the “otherwise”—), nor addressed to the individual (what does she care about the individual!), but rather to peoples, races, ages, classes, and above all to the entire animal “human being,” to humanity.

189 Industrious races find it a great hardship to endure idleness: it was a masterstroke of English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so boring that the Englishman imperceptibly begins to long again for his weekday and working day—a kind of cleverly devised, cleverly inserted fast, such as can also be observed in abundance in the ancient world (though, as is only fitting among southern peoples, not precisely with regard to work—). There must be many kinds of fasting; and wherever powerful drives and habits prevail, legislators must take care to insert intercalary days on which such a drive is put in chains and learns once again to go hungry. Seen from a higher vantage, entire generations and ages, when they appear afflicted with some moral fanaticism, look like such inserted periods of constraint and fasting, during which a drive learns to bow down and abase itself, but also to purify and sharpen itself; individual philosophical sects, too (for example, the Stoa amid Hellenistic culture and its air, grown lascivious and overloaded with aphrodisiac fragrances), admit of such an interpretation.—This also offers a hint toward explaining the paradox of why the sexual drive sublimated itself into love (amour-passion) precisely in Europe’s most Christian period, and indeed only under the pressure of Christian value judgments.

190 There is something in Plato’s morality that does not really belong to Plato but is merely found in his philosophy, one might say despite Plato: namely, Socratism, for which he was really too noble. “No one wants to harm himself; therefore everything bad happens involuntarily. For the bad man harms himself: he would not do this if he knew that the bad is bad. Accordingly, the bad man is bad only through an error; take away his error and you necessarily make him—good.”—This manner of reasoning smells of the rabble, who see nothing in acting badly but its disagreeable consequences and really judge that “it is stupid to act badly”; while they simply take “good” as identical with “useful and pleasant.” With every moral utilitarianism one may guess this same origin in advance and follow one’s nose: one will seldom go wrong.—Plato did everything he could to read something subtle and noble into his teacher’s proposition—above all himself—he, the most audacious of all interpreters, who took the whole of Socrates merely as a popular theme and a street song, to vary it into infinity and impossibility: namely, into all his own masks and multiplicities. To put it jokingly, and in Homeric language at that: what is the Platonic Socrates, then, if not “Plato in front and Plato behind, and Chimera in the middle.”

191 The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge”—or, more clearly, of instinct and reason—thus the question whether, in valuing things, instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants valuation and action to proceed on grounds, on a “Why?”, that is, on expediency and usefulness—it is still that old moral problem as it first appeared in the person of Socrates and divided minds long before Christianity. Socrates himself, following the taste of his talent—that of a superior dialectician—had at first sided with reason; and in truth, what did he do all his life but laugh at the awkward ineptitude of his noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble people, and could never give an adequate account of the grounds of their actions? In the end, however, quietly and in secret, he also laughed at himself: subjected to his subtler conscience and self-interrogation, he found the same difficulty and ineptitude in himself. But why, he told himself, break free of the instincts on that account! One must do justice to them and also to reason—one must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to come to their aid with good grounds. This was the real duplicity of that great, mysterious ironist; he brought his conscience to the point of being satisfied with a kind of self-outwitting: at bottom he had seen through the irrational element in moral judgment.—Plato, more innocent in such matters and without the plebeian’s slyness, wanted to expend all his strength—the greatest strength a philosopher has yet had to expend!—on proving to himself that reason and instinct converge of themselves on one goal, the good, “God”; and since Plato all theologians and philosophers have followed the same track—that is, in matters of morality, instinct has so far triumphed, or, as Christians call it, “faith,” or, as I call it, “the herd.” Unless one were to make an exception for Descartes, the father of rationalism (and consequently grandfather of the Revolution), who granted authority to reason alone: but reason is only a tool, and Descartes was superficial.

192 Anyone who has followed the history of an individual science finds in its development a thread leading to an understanding of the oldest and most common processes of all “knowing and understanding”: there, as here, premature hypotheses, inventions, the good, stupid will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience develop first—our senses learn late, and never learn entirely, to be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of knowledge. Given an occasion, our eye finds it more convenient to reproduce an image it has often produced before than to hold on to what is different and new in an impression: the latter takes more strength, more “morality.” Hearing something new is painful and difficult for the ear; we hear unfamiliar music badly. Involuntarily, when hearing another language, we try to shape the sounds we hear into words that sound more familiar and homelike: thus, for example, the German once fashioned the word Armbrust out of the arcubalista he heard. What is new encounters hostility and reluctance even in our senses; and in general, even the “simplest” processes of sense perception are ruled by affects such as fear, love, hatred, including the passive affects of laziness.—A reader today no more reads every individual word (let alone syllable) on a page—rather, out of twenty words he picks perhaps five at random and “guesses” the meaning presumably belonging to these five words—than we see a tree exactly and completely in its leaves, branches, color, and shape; we find it so very much easier to fantasize an approximation of a tree. Even amid the strangest experiences we still do the same: we invent the greatest part of the experience and can scarcely be compelled not to watch some event as its “inventors.” All this means: from the ground up, from ancient times, we are—accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.—In a lively conversation I often see the face of the person I am speaking with so clearly and in such fine detail, according to the thought he expresses or that I believe I have called up in him, that this degree of clarity far exceeds the power of my sight: the subtle play of muscles and expression of the eyes must therefore have been invented and added by me. The person was probably making quite a different face, or no face at all.

193 Whatever happened in the light acts in the dark: but the reverse is also true. What we experience in dreams, provided we experience it often, eventually belongs to the total economy of our soul just as much as anything “really” experienced: by virtue of it we are richer or poorer, have one need more or less, and in the end, in bright daylight, even in the most serene moments of our waking spirit, are led about a little by the habits of our dreams. Suppose someone has often flown in his dreams and at last, as soon as he dreams, becomes conscious of a power and art of flying as his prerogative, and also as his own most personal, enviable happiness: someone who believes he can realize every kind of curve and angle with the slightest impulse, who knows the feeling of a certain divine lightness of movement, an “upward” without strain or compulsion, a “downward” without condescension or abasement—without heaviness!—how could a man with such dream experiences and dream habits not eventually find the word “happiness” differently colored and defined even for his waking day! How could he not—desire happiness differently? “Soaring,” as poets describe it, must already seem to him, compared with that “flying,” too earthly, muscular, violent, already too “heavy.”

194 The diversity of human beings shows itself not only in the diversity of their tables of goods, hence in their considering different goods worth striving for and disagreeing over the greater or lesser value, the order of rank, of goods they all acknowledge: it shows itself still more in what they count as really having and possessing a good. In the case of a woman, for example, the more modest man takes command over her body and sexual enjoyment as a sufficient and satisfying sign of having, of possessing; another, with his more suspicious and demanding thirst for possession, sees the “question mark,” the merely apparent character of such having, and wants subtler proofs, above all to know whether the woman not only gives herself to him but also gives up for him what she has or would like to have—only then does he count her as “possessed.” A third, however, has still not reached the end of his mistrust and desire to have: he asks himself whether, when the woman gives up everything for him, she might not be doing so for a phantom of him: before he can be loved at all, he wants to be known thoroughly well, indeed down to the abyss; he dares to let himself be divined.—Only then does he feel his beloved wholly in his possession, when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him for his devilry and hidden insatiability as much as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality. That man would like to possess a people: and all the higher arts of Cagliostro and Catiline are welcome to him for this purpose. Another, with a subtler thirst for possession, tells himself, “One must not deceive where one wants to possess”—he is irritated and impatient at the thought that a mask of him commands the people’s heart: “So I must let myself be known, and first of all know myself!” Among helpful and charitable people one almost invariably finds that clumsy cunning which first reshapes the person to be helped to suit itself: as though, for example, he “deserved” help, wanted precisely their help, and would prove deeply grateful, devoted, and submissive to them for all help—with these imaginings they dispose of the needy person as of a piece of property, just as it is from a desire for property that they are charitable and helpful people in the first place. One finds them jealous if one crosses their path in helping or gets there ahead of them. Parents involuntarily make the child into something like themselves—they call this “education”—at the bottom of her heart no mother doubts that in her child she has given birth to a possession; no father disputes his right to subject it to his concepts and valuations. Indeed, in former times fathers thought it just to dispose of a newborn’s life and death as they saw fit (as among the ancient Germans). And like the father, the teacher, the class, the priest, the prince still see in every new human being an unquestioned opportunity for a new possession. From which it follows…

195 The Jews—a people “born for slavery,” as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say, “the chosen people among the peoples,” as they themselves say and believe—the Jews accomplished that miraculous feat of reversing values thanks to which life on earth acquired a new and dangerous fascination for a couple of millennia: their prophets fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” “sensual” into one, and for the first time minted the word “world” as a term of disgrace. The significance of the Jewish people lies in this reversal of values (which includes using the word for “poor” as synonymous with “holy” and “friend”): with them begins the slave revolt in morality.

196 The existence of countless dark bodies beside the sun must be inferred—bodies we shall never see. This, between ourselves, is a parable; and a moral psychologist reads the entire script of the stars only as a language of parables and signs through which much can be left unsaid.

197 One thoroughly misunderstands the beast of prey and the predatory human being (Cesare Borgia, for example), one misunderstands “nature,” as long as one still looks for some “sickness” at the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even for a “hell” innate in them—as almost all moralists have done until now. Is there, it seems, a hatred of the primeval forest and the tropics among moralists? And must the “tropical human being” be discredited at any price, whether as human sickness and degeneration or as his own hell and self-torture? Why, though? For the benefit of the “temperate zones”? For the benefit of temperate people? The “moral”? The mediocre?—This for the chapter “Morality as Timidity.”—

198 All these moralities that address the individual person for the sake of his “happiness,” as the saying goes—what are they but proposals for conduct in relation to the degree of danger in which the individual lives with himself; prescriptions against his passions, his good and bad inclinations insofar as they possess the will to power and would like to play the master; little and great pieces of prudence and contrivance, tainted with the musty smell of old home remedies and old women’s wisdom; all of them baroque and irrational in form—because they address “everyone,” because they generalize where generalization is forbidden—all speaking unconditionally, taking themselves unconditionally, all seasoned with not just one grain of salt, but becoming tolerable, and sometimes even seductive, only when they learn to give off an overspiced and dangerous smell, above all of “the other world”: measured intellectually, all this is worth little and is far from being “science,” let alone “wisdom,” but is, to say it again and say it three times, prudence, prudence, prudence, mixed with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity—whether it is that indifference and statuesque coldness toward the heated folly of the affects which the Stoics advised and sought to inculcate; or Spinoza’s no-longer-laughing and no-longer-weeping, his so naively advocated destruction of the affects through their analysis and vivisection; or that tuning down of the affects to a harmless middle level at which they may be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morality; even morality as enjoyment of the affects deliberately diluted and spiritualized through the symbolism of art, as music, say, or as love of God and of humanity for God’s sake—for in religion the passions regain their rights of citizenship, provided that…; finally, even that accommodating and high-spirited surrender to the affects as Hafiz and Goethe taught it, that bold dropping of the reins, that spiritual-bodily licentia morum in the exceptional case of old wise eccentrics and drunkards with whom there is “little danger left.” This, too, for the chapter “Morality as Timidity.”

199 Inasmuch as there have always been human herds for as long as there have been human beings (kinship groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always very many who obey in relation to the small number who command—considering, then, that obedience has so far been practiced and bred among human beings most thoroughly and for the longest time—one may reasonably assume that, on average, the need for it is now innate in everyone, as a kind of formal conscience that commands: “You shall unconditionally do something, unconditionally leave something undone,” in short, “You shall.” This need seeks to satisfy itself and fill its form with content; in keeping with its strength, impatience, and tension, it reaches out with little discrimination, like a crude appetite, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by anyone who commands—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, public opinions. The strange limitation of human development, its hesitation, its protracted course, its frequent backtracking and going in circles, rests on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is inherited most thoroughly and at the expense of the art of commanding. Imagine this instinct proceeding to its ultimate excesses: in the end, commanders and independent people will simply be lacking; or they suffer inwardly from a bad conscience and first need to practice a deception on themselves in order to command: namely, that they too are merely obeying. This condition actually exists in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those who command. They know no other way to protect themselves from their bad conscience than to behave as executors of older or higher commands (those of ancestors, the constitution, justice, the laws, or even God), or to borrow herd maxims from the herd’s own way of thinking, presenting themselves, for example, as “the first servants of their people” or as “instruments of the common good.” On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today gives himself the appearance of being the only permissible kind of human being, and glorifies the qualities through which he is tame, agreeable, and useful to the herd as the truly human virtues: namely, public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industry, moderation, modesty, forbearance, compassion. But for those cases in which leaders and bellwethers are thought indispensable, attempt after attempt is now made to replace commanders by adding clever herd people together: all representative constitutions, for example, have this origin. What a blessing, what a release from a pressure becoming intolerable, the appearance of an unconditional commander nevertheless is for these herd-animal Europeans was last given great testimony by the effect of Napoleon’s appearance: the history of Napoleon’s effect is almost the history of the higher happiness this entire century achieved in its most valuable human beings and moments.

200 The human being of an age of dissolution that mingles the races, who as such bears in his body the inheritance of manifold origins—that is, opposing drives and standards of value, often not even merely opposing, which fight one another and seldom give one another peace—such a human being of late cultures and refracted lights will, on average, be a weaker human being: his deepest longing is for the war that he himself is to come to an end at last; in keeping with a soothing medicine and way of thinking (Epicurean or Christian, for example), happiness appears to him chiefly as the happiness of rest, of being undisturbed, of satiety, of final unity, as the “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to speak with the holy rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a man.—But if the opposition and war in such a nature act as one more stimulus and enticement to life—and if, on the other hand, alongside its powerful and irreconcilable drives, an actual mastery and subtlety in waging war with itself, hence self-control, self-outwitting, has also been inherited and bred into it—then there arise those magical, incomprehensible, inconceivable beings, those enigmatic people predestined for victory and seduction, whose most beautiful expressions are Alcibiades and Caesar (to whom I would gladly add that first European after my own taste, Frederick the Second of Hohenstaufen), and among artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear at precisely the same times as that weaker type, with its longing for rest, comes to the fore: the two types belong together and spring from the same causes.

201 As long as the utility ruling in moral value judgments is solely utility to the herd, as long as the gaze is directed only toward preserving the community, and the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the community’s survival, there can as yet be no “morality of love of one’s neighbor.” Suppose there already exists even then a constant minor practice of consideration, compassion, fairness, gentleness, mutual assistance; suppose even at this stage of society all those drives are already active that will later receive honorable names as “virtues” and finally almost merge with the concept of “morality”: at that time they still do not belong at all to the realm of moral valuations—they are still extramoral. A compassionate action, for example, is called neither good nor evil, neither moral nor immoral, in Rome’s best period; and even when it is praised, a kind of resentful disdain is still perfectly compatible with this praise, as soon as it is compared with any action that serves the advancement of the whole, the res publica. Ultimately, “love of one’s neighbor” is always something secondary, partly conventional and partly a willful show, in relation to fear of one’s neighbor. Once the fabric of society as a whole seems established and secured against external dangers, it is this fear of one’s neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and dangerous drives, such as the spirit of enterprise, recklessness, vindictiveness, cunning, rapacity, the lust to rule, which until then had to be not only honored in a publicly useful sense—under different names, as is only fitting, from those just chosen—but nurtured and bred to greatness (because they were constantly needed when the whole was in danger, against the enemies of the whole), are now felt to be doubly dangerous—now that the outlets for them are lacking—and are gradually branded immoral and handed over to slander. Now the opposing drives and inclinations attain moral honor; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusion. How much or how little danger to the community, danger to equality, lies in an opinion, in a condition and affect, in a will, in a talent: that is now the moral perspective; here again fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives burst out passionately, driving the individual far beyond and above the average and the lowlands of the herd conscience, the community’s feeling of self-worth perishes; its faith in itself, its backbone as it were, breaks: consequently these very drives will be branded and slandered most thoroughly. Lofty, independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even great reason are felt as dangers; everything that raises the individual above the herd and frightens his neighbor is henceforth called evil; the fair-minded, modest, accommodating, equalizing disposition, mediocrity of desires, acquires moral names and honors. Finally, under very peaceable conditions, the occasion and necessity for educating one’s feelings to severity and hardness become ever rarer; and now every severity, even in justice, begins to trouble consciences; a lofty and hard nobility and self-responsibility almost offend and arouse suspicion; “the lamb,” still more “the sheep,” gains in esteem. There is a point of sickly softening and overdelicacy in the history of society at which it takes the side even of the person who harms it, the criminal, and does so seriously and honestly. Punishing seems to it somehow unfair—what is certain is that the idea of “punishment” and “having to punish” hurts it, frightens it. “Isn’t it enough to make him harmless? Why punish as well? Punishing itself is terrible!”—With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its final consequence. Suppose one could abolish danger altogether, the reason for fear: one would thereby also have abolished this morality; it would no longer be needed, would no longer consider itself needed!—Anyone who examines the conscience of the European today will always have to pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hiding places, the imperative of herd timidity: “We want there to be nothing left to fear someday!” Someday—the will and the way to get there are now called “progress” everywhere in Europe.

202 Let us say it again at once, what we have already said a hundred times: for ears today are not well disposed toward such truths—toward our truths. We know well enough how offensive it sounds when someone counts the human being among the animals at all, without disguise or metaphor; but it will almost be held against us as a fault that, precisely with regard to the people of “modern ideas,” we constantly use expressions such as “herd,” “herd instincts,” and the like. What good does it do! We cannot do otherwise: for this is precisely where our new insight lies. We found that Europe has become unanimous in all its principal moral judgments, including the countries where Europe’s influence prevails: evidently people in Europe know what Socrates thought he did not know, and what that famous old serpent once promised to teach—they “know” today what good and evil are. Now it must sound harsh and grate on the ears when we insist over and over: what believes it knows here, what glorifies itself with its praise and blame, calls itself good, is the instinct of the human herd animal: an instinct that has broken through, gained predominance and supremacy over other instincts, and is doing so more and more, in keeping with the growing physiological convergence and assimilation of which it is a symptom. Morality in Europe today is herd-animal morality—hence, as we understand things, only one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, after which many others, above all higher moralities, are possible or ought to be possible. But this morality fights such a “possibility,” such an “ought,” with all its strength: it says stubbornly and inexorably, “I am morality itself, and nothing else is morality!”—Indeed, with the aid of a religion that complied with and flattered the most sublime herd-animal desires, things have reached the point where we find an increasingly visible expression of this morality even in political and social institutions: the democratic movement is inheriting the Christian movement’s estate. But that its pace is still far too slow and drowsy for the more impatient, for the sick and addicted of the instinct in question, is shown by the increasingly frenzied howling, the increasingly undisguised baring of teeth by the anarchist dogs now roaming the streets of European culture: apparently opposed to the peaceably industrious democrats and ideologues of revolution, still more to the clumsy philosophizing dabblers and enthusiasts of brotherhood who call themselves socialists and want the “free society,” but in truth at one with them all in their deep and instinctive hostility to every form of society other than that of the autonomous herd (extending even to the rejection of the concepts “master” and “servant”—“neither god nor master” is a socialist formula—); at one in their stubborn resistance to every special claim, every special right and privilege (that is, ultimately, to every right: for when everyone is equal, no one needs “rights” anymore—); at one in their mistrust of punitive justice (as though it were an act of violence against the weaker, an injustice to the necessary consequence of all previous society—); but equally at one in the religion of compassion, in fellow feeling wherever there is feeling, living, suffering (down to the animal, up to “God”—the extravagance of “compassion for God” belongs to a democratic age—); all at one in the cry and impatience of compassion, in their mortal hatred of suffering in general, in their almost feminine inability to remain spectators of it, to let anyone suffer; at one in that involuntary gloom and overdelicacy under whose spell Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism; at one in their faith in the morality of shared compassion, as though it were morality in itself, as the summit, the attained summit of humanity, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of those now living, the great absolution from all guilt of the past—all at one in their faith in the community as redeemer, thus in the herd, in “themselves”…

203 We who are of another faith—we for whom the democratic movement counts not merely as a form of decay in political organization, but as a form of decay, namely diminution, of the human being, his reduction to mediocrity and lowering of value: where must we reach with our hopes?—Toward new philosophers, there is no choice; toward spirits strong and original enough to initiate opposing valuations and revalue, reverse “eternal values”; toward forerunners, toward human beings of the future who in the present tie the constraint and knot that will force the will of millennia onto new paths. To teach humanity that its future is its will, dependent on a human will, and to prepare great ventures and comprehensive experiments in discipline and breeding, in order thereby to put an end to that horrifying dominion of nonsense and chance which until now was called “history”—the nonsense of the “greatest number” is only its latest form—for this a new kind of philosopher and commander will someday be needed, beside whose image everything that has existed on earth in the way of hidden, terrible, and benevolent spirits might look pale and dwarfed. It is the image of such leaders that hovers before our eyes: may I say it aloud, you free spirits? The circumstances one would partly have to create and partly exploit for their emergence; the probable paths and trials by virtue of which a soul would grow to such height and power that it felt the compulsion toward these tasks; a revaluation of values under whose new pressure and hammer a conscience would be tempered, a heart transformed into bronze, so that it could bear the weight of such responsibility; on the other hand, the necessity of such leaders, the appalling danger that they might fail to appear, or turn out badly and degenerate—these are our real cares and darkenings, do you know that, you free spirits? These are the heavy, distant thoughts and thunderstorms passing over the sky of our lives. Few pains are as keen as once having seen, divined, felt with another how an extraordinary human being strayed from his course and degenerated: but anyone who has the rare eye for the overall danger that “the human being” itself may degenerate, anyone who, like us, has recognized the monstrous chance that has so far played its game with humanity’s future—a game in which no hand, not even a “finger of God,” had a part!—anyone who divines the doom concealed in the idiotic innocence and trusting credulity of “modern ideas,” still more in the whole of Christian-European morality, suffers from an anxiety with which no other can compare—for in a single glance he grasps everything that, given a favorable gathering and heightening of forces and tasks, could still be bred from the human being; he knows, with all the knowledge of his conscience, how humanity’s greatest possibilities still remain unexhausted, and how often the human type has already stood before mysterious decisions and new paths: he knows still better, from his most painful memory, on what wretched things something of the highest rank in the making has usually shattered, broken off, sunk down, become wretched. The wholesale degeneration of humanity, down to what today appears to the socialist blockheads and shallow minds as their “human being of the future”—as their ideal!—this degeneration and diminution of humanity into the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, into the human being of the “free society”), this animalization of humanity into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims is possible, there is no doubt! Anyone who has once thought this possibility through to the end knows one more disgust than other people—and perhaps also a new task!…

Fifth Main Part:

On the Natural History of Morality.

186 Moral feeling in Europe today is as fine, late-developed, complex, sensitive, and refined as its accompanying “science of morality” is still young, inexperienced, clumsy, and heavy-handed. An attractive contrast, which sometimes becomes visible and takes bodily form in a moralist himself. Even the term “science of morality” is much too arrogant for what it describes, and offends good taste, which usually has a preference for more modest words. We should admit to ourselves, in all strictness, what will still be needed here for a long time, and what alone is justified for now: collecting material; finding concepts for, and arranging, an enormous realm of delicate value feelings and differences in value that live, grow, reproduce, and perish. And perhaps attempts to make the recurring, more frequent forms of this living crystallization clear to the eye—as preparation for a study of the types of morality. Admittedly, people have not been so modest until now. Whenever philosophers dealt with morality as a science, all of them, with a stiff seriousness that makes us laugh, demanded something much higher, more ambitious, more solemn of themselves. They wanted to establish the foundation of morality—and every philosopher so far has believed he has established it. Morality itself, however, was taken as “given.” How far their clumsy pride was from that seemingly insignificant task of description, left lying in dust and mold, although even the finest hands and senses could hardly be fine enough for it! Moral philosophers knew moral facts only crudely, in an arbitrary selection or an accidental abridgment: perhaps as the morality of their surroundings, their class, their church, the spirit of their age, their climate and region. They were poorly informed about peoples, ages, and past times, and not very curious themselves. Precisely for those reasons, they never even caught sight of morality’s real problems, which all emerge only when we compare many moralities. Strange as it may sound, all “science of morality” so far has still lacked the problem of morality itself: it lacked the suspicion that there might be something problematic here. What philosophers called “establishing the foundation of morality,” and demanded of themselves, was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly form of good faith in the prevailing morality, a new means of expressing it. It was therefore itself a fact within a particular morality—indeed, at bottom, a kind of denial that this morality may be treated as a problem. In any case, it was the opposite of examining, taking apart, questioning, or dissecting that very faith alive. Listen, for example, to the almost venerable innocence with which Schopenhauer still presents his own task, and draw your conclusions about the scientific character of a “science” whose latest masters still talk like children and little old women: “The principle,” he says (p. 136 of The Fundamental Problems of Morality), “the basic rule about whose content all ethical thinkers are really agreed: harm no one; rather, help everyone as much as you can—this is really the proposition that all teachers of morality struggle to establish… the true foundation of ethics, which people have sought for millennia like the philosopher’s stone.”—The difficulty of establishing that proposition may indeed be great; as everyone knows, Schopenhauer did not succeed either. And anyone who has once thoroughly felt how tastelessly false and sentimental this proposition is in a world whose essence is will to power may be reminded that Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, actually—played the flute… Every day, after dinner: read his biographer about it. And a question in passing: a pessimist, a denier of God and the world, who stops at morality—who says Yes to morality and plays the flute, to the harm-no-one morality: what? Is that really—a pessimist?

187 Quite apart from the value of claims such as “there is a categorical imperative within us,” we can still ask: what does such a claim tell us about the person making it? Some moralities are meant to justify their author before others. Others are meant to calm him and make him satisfied with himself. With some he wants to crucify and humiliate himself; with others he wants revenge, with others to hide, with others to transfigure himself and place himself beyond, on high and far away. This morality serves its author as a way to forget, that one as a way to make himself, or something about himself, forgotten. Many a moralist wants to exercise power and creative whim on humanity. Many another, perhaps even Kant in particular, uses his morality to say: “What is respectable about me is that I can obey—and things should be no different for you than they are for me!” In short, moralities too are only a sign language of the emotions.

188 Every morality, as opposed to letting things go, is a piece of tyranny against “nature,” and also against “reason.” But that is not yet an objection to it, unless you are already decreeing, on the basis of some other morality, that all tyranny and unreason are forbidden. The essential, priceless thing about every morality is that it is a long constraint. To understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism, recall the constraint under which every language has so far grown strong and free: the constraint of meter, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm. How much trouble poets and speakers in every people have made for themselves! That includes some prose writers today, in whose ears an unforgiving conscience lives. “For the sake of a foolish thing,” as utilitarian bunglers say, thinking themselves clever—“out of submission to arbitrary laws,” as anarchists say, imagining themselves “free,” even free-spirited. But the strange fact is that everything that exists or has existed on earth of freedom, subtlety, daring, dance, and masterly confidence has developed only through the “tyranny of such arbitrary laws.” This holds for thinking itself, governing, speaking and persuading, for the arts as well as for moral conduct. And in all seriousness, there is a considerable likelihood that this, precisely, is “nature” and “natural”—not that letting things go! Every artist knows how far his “most natural” state is from the feeling of letting himself go: that free arranging, placing, commanding, shaping in moments of “inspiration.” And he knows how strictly and finely he obeys a thousand laws at just that moment, laws that defy any formulation in concepts precisely because of their hardness and precision. Even the firmest concept, measured against them, has something wavering, multiple, ambiguous about it. The essential thing, “in heaven and on earth,” it seems, is, to say it again, that there should be obedience for a long time and in one direction. In the long run this always produces, and has produced, something that makes life on earth worthwhile: virtue, for example, art, music, dance, reason, intellectual life—something transfiguring, refined, mad, and divine. The mind’s long lack of freedom; the suspicious constraint on communicating thoughts; the discipline thinkers imposed on themselves to think within churchly and courtly guidelines or Aristotelian assumptions; the long intellectual will to interpret everything that happens according to a Christian scheme, and rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident—all this violent, arbitrary, hard, terrible, unreasonable activity has proved the means by which the European mind was bred to its strength, its ruthless curiosity and subtle agility. Granted, in the process an irreplaceable amount of strength and intelligence also had to be crushed, suffocated, and ruined. For here, as everywhere, “nature” shows itself as it is, in all its wasteful and indifferent magnificence, which is outrageous but noble. For millennia European thinkers thought only in order to prove something—today, by contrast, we suspect every thinker who “wants to prove something.” What was supposed to come out as the result of their strictest thinking was always already settled for them, much as it once was in Asian astrology, or still is today in the harmless Christian-moral interpretation of the latest personal events “to the glory of God” and “for the salvation of the soul.” This tyranny, this arbitrariness, this strict and magnificent stupidity has educated the mind. Slavery, in both the coarser and the subtler sense, seems to be the indispensable means of intellectual discipline and breeding too. Look at every morality in this light: it is the “nature” within it that teaches hatred of letting things go, of too much freedom, and plants the need for limited horizons and immediate tasks. It teaches the narrowing of perspective, and thus stupidity in a certain sense, as a condition of life and growth. “You must obey someone, and for a long time; otherwise you will perish and lose your last respect for yourself”—this seems to me nature’s moral imperative. It is certainly neither “categorical,” as old Kant demanded of it—hence the “otherwise”—nor addressed to the individual. What does nature care about the individual! Rather, it is addressed to peoples, races, ages, classes, but above all to the whole animal “human,” to humanity.

189 Hardworking races find it a great hardship to endure idleness. It was a masterpiece of English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so boring that, without noticing it, the Englishman begins longing again for his weekdays and working days. It is a kind of cleverly invented, cleverly inserted fast. We can observe plenty of such things in the ancient world too, though, as we would expect among southern peoples, not precisely in relation to work. There must be fasts of many kinds. Wherever powerful drives and habits rule, lawmakers must make sure to insert extra days on which such a drive is put in chains and learns to hunger again. Seen from a higher vantage point, entire generations and ages, when they appear afflicted with some moral fanaticism, look like such inserted periods of constraint and fasting. During them a drive learns to crouch and submit, but also to purify and sharpen itself. Individual philosophical sects also allow this interpretation—for example, the Stoics amid Hellenistic culture, with its air overloaded with aphrodisiac scents and turned lustful. This also offers a hint toward explaining that paradox: why the sexual drive was refined into love—passionate love—precisely during Europe’s most Christian period, and only under the pressure of Christian value judgments.

190 There is something in Plato’s morality that does not really belong to Plato but is merely found in his philosophy—one might say, despite Plato. This is Socratism, for which he was really too noble. “No one wants to harm himself; therefore everything bad happens involuntarily. For a bad person harms himself: he would not do so if he knew that the bad is bad. Accordingly, a bad person is bad only through an error. Take away his error, and you necessarily make him—good.” This way of reasoning smells of the rabble, who see only the unpleasant consequences of acting badly and really judge that “it is stupid to act badly,” while taking “good” to mean exactly the same as “useful and pleasant,” without further question. In every moral utilitarianism, we may guess at this same origin from the start and follow our noses: we will rarely go wrong. Plato did everything to read something subtle and noble into his teacher’s proposition—above all, himself. He was the boldest of all interpreters: he took the whole of Socrates merely as a popular theme, a folk song from the street, to vary into the infinite and impossible—into all his own masks and many-sidedness. To put it as a joke, and in Homer’s manner at that: what is the Platonic Socrates, if not “Plato in front and Plato behind, with a Chimera in the middle.”

191 The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge”—or, more clearly, of instinct and reason—is still that old moral problem which first appeared in Socrates’s person and divided minds long before Christianity. The question is whether, in valuing things, instinct deserves more authority than rational thought, which wants people to value and act according to reasons, according to a “Why?”—that is, according to fitness for a purpose and usefulness. Socrates himself initially took reason’s side, in keeping with the taste of his talent: that of a superior dialectician. And truly, what did he do all his life but laugh at the awkward inability of his noble Athenians, who were people of instinct like all noble people and could never adequately account for the reasons for their actions? But in the end, quietly and secretly, he also laughed at himself. In himself, before his subtler conscience and self-questioning, he found the same difficulty and inability. But why, he told himself, break away from the instincts on that account! We must give them and also reason their due. We must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to help them along with good reasons. This was the real dishonesty of that great, mysterious ironist. He brought his conscience to be satisfied with a kind of self-deception: at bottom, he had seen through the irrational element in moral judgment. Plato, more innocent in such things and lacking the commoner’s slyness, wanted to use all his strength—the greatest strength any philosopher has yet had to use!—to prove to himself that reason and instinct naturally move toward one goal, toward the good, toward “God.” Since Plato, all theologians and philosophers have followed the same track. That means that in moral matters instinct—or, as Christians call it, “faith,” or, as I call it, “the herd”—has won so far. Unless we were to make an exception for Descartes, the father of rationalism, and consequently the grandfather of the Revolution, who recognized the authority of reason alone. But reason is only a tool, and Descartes was superficial.

192 Anyone who has traced the history of a particular science finds in its development a guide to understanding the oldest and most ordinary processes in all “knowing and understanding.” In both cases, hasty hypotheses, inventions, the good, stupid will to “believe,” and a lack of distrust and patience develop first. Our senses learn late, and never learn fully, to be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of knowledge. Our eye finds it easier, on a given occasion, to reproduce an image it has often produced before than to hold on to what is different and new in an impression. The latter needs more strength, more “morality.” Hearing something new is painful and difficult for the ear; we hear unfamiliar music poorly. When listening to another language, we involuntarily try to shape the sounds we hear into words that sound more familiar and homelike to us. In this way, for example, Germans once fashioned the word Armbrust out of the arcubalista they heard. Our senses too meet anything new with hostility and reluctance. And even in the “simplest” processes of sense experience, emotions rule: fear, love, hatred, including the passive emotions of laziness. A reader today does not read every individual word, or even syllable, on a page. Rather, he picks out roughly five words at random from twenty and “guesses” the meaning that probably belongs with those five words. Just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely in its leaves, branches, color, and shape. We find it so much easier to imagine something approximately like a tree. Even amid the strangest experiences, we still do the same thing: we invent most of the experience, and can hardly be made not to act as its “inventor” while watching any event. All this means that fundamentally, from ancient times, we are—used to lying. Or, to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: we are much more artistic than we know. In a lively conversation I often see the face of the person I am talking to, according to the thought he expresses or that I believe I have aroused in him, so clearly and precisely before me that this degree of clarity far exceeds the power of my eyesight. So I must have invented the fine movements of muscles and the expression of the eyes and added them in. The person was probably making a completely different face, or no face at all.

193 Whatever happened in the light goes on in the dark—but also the reverse. What we experience in dreams, provided we experience it often, eventually belongs to our soul’s overall economy just as much as anything “really” experienced. Through it we become richer or poorer, have one more need or one less, and finally, in broad daylight, even in our waking mind’s brightest moments, we are led a little by the habits of our dreams. Suppose someone has often flown in his dreams and eventually, as soon as he dreams, becomes aware of a power and skill of flying as his privilege, and also as his own most personal, enviable happiness. Someone like this believes he can make every kind of curve and angle with the slightest impulse. He knows the feeling of a certain divine lightheartedness, an “upward” without strain or force, a “downward” without condescension or humiliation—without heaviness! How could a person with such dream experiences and dream habits not eventually find that the word “happiness” has a different color and meaning in his waking day too! How could he not long for happiness differently? “Soaring,” as poets describe it, must already seem to him, compared with that “flying,” too earthbound, muscular, violent, already too “heavy.”

194 Differences between people show not only in their different tables of goods: in their considering different goods worth pursuing, and also disagreeing about greater and lesser value, about the ranking of goods they all recognize. These differences show even more in what they count as actually having and possessing a good. With a woman, for example, a more modest man considers control over her body and sexual enjoyment sufficient and satisfying signs of having, of possessing her. Another man, with a more suspicious and demanding thirst for possession, sees the “question mark,” the merely apparent character of such having, and wants subtler tests. Above all, he wants to know whether the woman not only gives herself to him but also gives up for him what she has or would like to have. Only then does he count her as “possessed.” But a third man has not reached the end of his distrust and desire to have even here. He asks himself whether, when the woman gives up everything for him, she might be doing so for a phantom of him. Before he can be loved at all, he first wants to be known thoroughly, indeed to his depths. He dares to let himself be guessed at. Only then does he feel his beloved fully in his possession: when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his goodness, patience, and intelligence. One man would like to possess a people, and all the higher arts of Cagliostro and Catiline suit him for that purpose. Another, with a subtler thirst for possession, tells himself: “You must not deceive where you want to possess.” He is irritated and impatient at the thought that a mask of him commands the people’s heart: “So I must let myself be known, and first of all know myself!” Among helpful and charitable people we almost always find that clumsy cunning which first reshapes the person to be helped in imagination: supposing, for example, that he “deserves” help, wants precisely their help, and will prove deeply grateful, devoted, submissive to them for all their help. With these imaginings they dispose of the needy person as their property, just as it is probably from a desire for property that they are charitable and helpful people at all. We find them jealous when we cross their path in helping or get there first. Parents involuntarily make their child into something like themselves—they call this “education.” No mother doubts in the depths of her heart that in her child she has given birth to a possession; no father denies himself the right to subject it to his concepts and valuations. Indeed, fathers once thought it right to decide a newborn’s life or death at their own discretion, as among the ancient Germans. And like the father, the teacher, the social class, the priest, and the prince still see every new person as an unquestionable opportunity for a new possession. From which it follows…

195 The Jews—a people “born for slavery,” as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say, “the chosen people among peoples,” as they themselves say and believe—the Jews accomplished that marvel of a reversal of values through which life on earth acquired a new and dangerous attraction for a couple of millennia. Their prophets fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” and “sensual” into one, and for the first time coined the word “world” as a term of disgrace. The significance of the Jewish people lies in this reversal of values, which includes using the word for “poor” as a synonym for “holy” and “friend.” With them begins the slave revolt in morality.

196 We must infer the existence of countless dark bodies besides the sun—ones we will never see. Between ourselves, this is a parable; and a moral psychologist reads the entire writing of the stars only as a language of parables and signs with which much can be left unsaid.

197 We fundamentally misunderstand the beast of prey and the predatory human being—Cesare Borgia, for example—we misunderstand “nature,” as long as we still look for some underlying “sickness” in these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even for a “hell” born within them, as almost all moralists have done until now. It seems that moralists have a hatred of the primeval forest and the tropics? And that the “tropical human being” must be discredited at any price, whether as a sickness and degeneration of humanity or as his own hell and self-torture? But why? For the sake of the “temperate zones”? For the sake of moderate people? The “moral”? The mediocre?—This belongs to the chapter “Morality as Timidity.”—

198 All these moralities addressed to the individual for the sake, as they say, of his “happiness”—what are they but suggestions for conduct in relation to the danger in which the individual lives with himself? Prescriptions against his passions, his good and bad inclinations, insofar as they have the will to power and want to play the master. Small and large devices of cleverness and contrivance, carrying the musty smell of old home remedies and old women’s wisdom. All of them bizarre and unreasonable in form, because they address “everyone,” because they generalize where generalization is not allowed. All of them speaking unconditionally, taking themselves unconditionally. All of them seasoned with not just one grain of salt—rather, they become bearable, and sometimes even seductive, only when they learn to smell overseasoned and dangerous, above all “of the other world.” Measured intellectually, all this is worth little and is still far from “science,” let alone “wisdom.” Rather, to say it again and three times over, it is cleverness, cleverness, cleverness, mixed with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity. Whether it is that indifference and statue-coldness toward the emotions’ heated foolishness which the Stoics advised and treated people with; or Spinoza’s no-more-laughing and no-more-crying, his so naively recommended destruction of the emotions by analyzing and dissecting them alive; or that reduction of emotions to a harmless middle level at which they may be satisfied, the Aristotelian approach to morality; even morality as enjoyment of the emotions deliberately diluted and made spiritual through the symbolism of art, perhaps as music, or as love for God and for humanity for God’s sake—for in religion the passions regain their civil rights, provided that…; finally, even that accommodating, high-spirited surrender to the emotions taught by Hafiz and Goethe, that bold dropping of the reins, that freedom of conduct in mind and body in the exceptional case of wise old fellows and drunkards, for whom there is “little danger left.” This too belongs to the chapter “Morality as Timidity.”

199 As long as human beings have existed, there have also always been human herds: family groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches. There have always been very many who obey compared with the small number who command. Considering, then, that obedience has so far been practiced and bred most thoroughly and longest among human beings, we can reasonably assume that, on average, everyone now has an inborn need for it. It is a kind of formal conscience that commands: “You must unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something,” in short, “You must.” This need tries to satisfy itself and fill its form with content. According to its strength, impatience, and tension, it grabs with little discrimination, like a crude appetite, and accepts whatever any commander shouts into its ear: parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, public opinions. Human development’s strange limitations, its hesitations, its slowness, its frequent retreats and circling, rest on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is inherited most effectively, at the expense of the art of command. Imagine this instinct advancing to its ultimate excesses: finally commanders and independent people are simply absent. Or they suffer inwardly from a bad conscience and first need to deceive themselves in order to command—as if they too were only obeying. This condition actually exists in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those who command. They know no way to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by acting as executors of older or higher commands—those of the ancestors, the constitution, justice, the laws, or even God. Or else they borrow herd maxims from the herd’s own way of thinking, presenting themselves, for example, as the “first servants of their people” or “instruments of the common good.” On the other hand, the herd person in Europe today puts on the appearance of being the only permissible kind of human being. He glorifies the qualities that make him tame, agreeable, and useful to the herd as the truly human virtues: public spirit, goodwill, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, forbearance, pity. But for cases where leaders and lead rams are thought indispensable, people today make attempt after attempt to replace commanders by adding clever herd people together. All representative constitutions, for example, have this origin. Despite all this, the appearance of someone who commands unconditionally is a blessing, a release from a pressure becoming unbearable, for these European herd animals. The effect of Napoleon’s appearance gave the last great testimony to this. The history of Napoleon’s effect is almost the history of the higher happiness that this entire century has achieved in its most valuable people and moments.

200 A person from an age of dissolution that throws the races together carries in his body the inheritance of many origins. That means opposing drives and standards of value—and often drives that are more than merely opposed—which fight one another and rarely give one another peace. Such a person of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a weaker person. His deepest desire is that the war that he himself is should finally end. In agreement with a soothing medicine and way of thinking—Epicurean or Christian, for example—happiness appears to him chiefly as the happiness of rest, of being undisturbed, of having enough, of final unity, as the “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to use the words of the holy rhetorician Augustine, who was himself such a person. But suppose opposition and war in such a nature act as one more stimulus and excitement to life. And suppose that, alongside its powerful, irreconcilable drives, it has also inherited and developed a true mastery and subtlety in waging war with itself—that is, self-control, self-outwitting. Then there arise those magically elusive and unfathomable people, those human riddles destined for victory and seduction. Their finest expression is Alcibiades and Caesar—alongside whom I would gladly place that first European to my taste, Frederick the Second of Hohenstaufen—and, among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear at exactly the same times when that weaker type, with its desire for rest, comes to the foreground. Both types belong together and arise from the same causes.

201 As long as the usefulness that rules moral value judgments is only usefulness to the herd; as long as people look only to preserving the community and seek the immoral precisely and exclusively in whatever seems dangerous to the community’s continued existence, there can still be no “morality of love for one’s neighbor.” Suppose there is already a steady little practice of consideration, pity, fairness, gentleness, mutual help. Suppose that even at this stage of society, all those drives are already active which will later receive honorable names as “virtues” and finally almost merge with the concept of “morality.” At that time they still do not belong to the realm of moral valuations at all: they are still outside morality. An act of pity, for example, is called neither good nor evil, neither moral nor immoral, in Rome’s best period. And even if it is praised, this praise can still coexist perfectly well with a kind of irritated contempt, whenever the act is compared with one that serves the advancement of the whole, the res publica. In the end, “love of one’s neighbor” is always something secondary, partly conventional, partly a show put on at will, in relation to fear of one’s neighbor. Once society’s structure as a whole seems established and secured against outside dangers, this fear of one’s neighbor creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and dangerous drives—enterprise, recklessness, desire for revenge, cunning, greed for plunder, hunger for rule—previously had to be not only honored in the interest of the community—naturally under names different from those just chosen—but cultivated and bred up. For whenever the whole was in danger, they were constantly needed against its enemies. Now their dangerousness is felt twice as strongly, now that they have no outlets, and step by step they are branded immoral and handed over to slander. Now the opposite drives and inclinations gain moral honors; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusion. How much or how little danger to the community, danger to equality, lies in an opinion, a state or emotion, a will, a talent—this is now the moral perspective. Here again, fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives break out passionately and carry the individual far beyond and above the average, above the low ground of the herd conscience, the community’s self-confidence collapses. Its faith in itself, its backbone as it were, breaks. Consequently, these very drives are what people will most thoroughly brand and slander. High, independent intellectual life, the will to stand alone, even great reason are felt as dangers. From now on, everything that lifts the individual above the herd and frightens his neighbor is called evil. A fair, modest, conforming, equalizing disposition, a moderate level of desire, gains moral names and honors. Finally, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less opportunity or need to train one’s feelings in strictness and hardness. Now every kind of strictness, even in justice, begins to trouble consciences. A high, hard nobility and responsibility for oneself almost offend people and arouse distrust; “the lamb,” still more “the sheep,” gains respect. There is a point of sickly softening and overindulgence in society’s history when it even takes the side of the person harming it, the criminal—and does so seriously and honestly. Punishment seems somehow unfair to it. What is certain is that the idea of “punishment” and “having to punish” hurts and frightens it. “Isn’t it enough to make him harmless? Why punish as well? Punishment itself is terrible!” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its final conclusion. Suppose we could abolish danger altogether, the reason for fear: then we would also have abolished this morality. It would no longer be needed; it would no longer think itself needed! Anyone examining the conscience of today’s European will have to draw the same imperative from a thousand moral folds and hiding places, the imperative of herd timidity: “We want there to be nothing left to fear, someday!” Someday—the will and the path toward it are called “progress” everywhere in Europe today.

202 Let us immediately say once again what we have already said a hundred times: ears today are not well disposed toward such truths—toward our truths. We know well enough how offensive it sounds when someone counts human beings among the animals at all, without dressing it up or treating it as a metaphor. But people will almost hold it against us as a fault that we constantly use expressions like “herd,” “herd instincts,” and so on precisely in relation to the people of “modern ideas.” What can we do! We cannot do otherwise, for this is exactly where our new insight lies. We have found that Europe has become unanimous in all its main moral judgments, including the countries where European influence prevails. Evidently people in Europe know what Socrates thought he did not know, and what that famous old snake once promised to teach: today people “know” what good and evil are. So it must sound harsh and unpleasant when we insist again and again: what believes it knows here, what glorifies itself through its praise and blame and calls itself good, is the instinct of the human herd animal. This instinct has broken through, gained the upper hand and predominance over other instincts, and is doing so more and more, in keeping with the increasing physiological convergence and assimilation of which it is a symptom. Morality in Europe today is herd-animal morality. That is, as we understand things, only one kind of human morality, alongside, before, and after which many others, above all higher moralities, are possible or should be possible. But this morality resists such a “possibility,” such a “should,” with all its strength. It says stubbornly and unrelentingly: “I am morality itself, and nothing else is morality!” Indeed, with the help of a religion that catered to and flattered the most sublime herd-animal desires, things have reached the point where even our political and social institutions give increasingly visible expression to this morality: the democratic movement is inheriting the Christian movement’s legacy. But its pace is still far too slow and sleepy for the more impatient, for those sick with and addicted to that instinct. Evidence of this is the increasingly frantic howling, the increasingly open baring of teeth by the anarchist dogs now roaming the streets of European culture. They seem opposed to the peaceful, hardworking democrats and revolutionary ideologues, and still more to the bungling would-be philosophers and enthusiasts for brotherhood who call themselves socialists and want a “free society.” In truth, though, they are at one with all of them in their thorough, instinctive hostility toward every form of society other than the autonomous herd—even to the point of rejecting the very concepts “master” and “servant”; “neither god nor master” is a socialist formula. They are at one in their stubborn resistance to every special claim, every special right and privilege—which ultimately means every right, for when everyone is equal, no one needs “rights” anymore. At one in their distrust of punitive justice, as though it were an act of violence against the weaker person, a wrong done to the necessary consequence of all earlier society. But equally at one in the religion of pity, in sympathy wherever there is feeling, life, suffering—down to the animal, up to “God”: the extravagance of “pity for God” belongs to a democratic age. All at one in the cry and impatience of pity, in deadly hatred of suffering altogether, in the almost womanly inability to remain a spectator, to let suffering happen. At one in the involuntary darkening and softening under whose spell Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism. At one in their faith in the morality of shared pity, as though it were morality itself, the summit, humanity’s achieved summit, the only hope for the future, the comfort of those alive now, the great release from all past guilt. All at one in their faith in the community as savior—in the herd, then, in “themselves”…

203 We who hold a different faith—we to whom the democratic movement is not merely a form of political organization’s decay, but a form of humanity’s decay, its diminishment, its reduction to mediocrity and lowering in value—where must we reach with our hopes? Toward new philosophers; there is no choice left. Toward minds strong and original enough to prompt opposite valuations and to revalue, to reverse “eternal values.” Toward people sent ahead, people of the future who in the present tie the binding knot that forces the will of millennia onto new paths. To teach humanity that humanity’s future is its own will, depends on a human will; to prepare great risks and collective experiments in discipline and breeding, and thereby end that terrible rule of meaninglessness and chance that has so far been called “history”—the meaninglessness of the “greatest number” is only its latest form—for this a new kind of philosopher and commander will someday be needed. Beside their image, everything that has ever existed on earth of hidden, terrible, and well-meaning minds might look pale and dwarfed. It is the image of such leaders that hovers before our eyes—may I say it aloud, you free spirits? The conditions we would have partly to create and partly to use for their emergence; the likely paths and tests by which a soul would grow to such height and power that it felt the compulsion toward these tasks; a revaluation of values under whose new pressure and hammer a conscience would be steeled, a heart turned to bronze, so that it could bear the weight of such responsibility; on the other hand, the need for such leaders, the frightening danger that they might fail to appear, or turn out badly and degenerate—these are our real worries and dark thoughts, you know it, you free spirits? These are the heavy, distant thoughts and thunderstorms that pass across the sky of our lives. Few pains cut as deeply as having once seen, guessed, and shared the feeling of an extraordinary person straying from his course and degenerating. But someone with the rare eye for the overall danger that “humanity” itself might degenerate; someone who, like us, has recognized the monstrous chance that has so far played its game with humanity’s future—a game in which no hand, not even a “finger of God,” has played a part!—someone who guesses the disaster hidden in the mindless innocence and trusting confidence of “modern ideas,” and still more in the whole Christian-European morality, suffers an anxiety beyond all comparison. For he grasps in a single glance everything that could still be bred from humanity through a favorable gathering and intensifying of strengths and tasks. He knows, with all the knowledge of his conscience, how humanity is still unexhausted for the greatest possibilities, and how often the human type has already stood at mysterious decisions and new paths. He knows still better, from his most painful memory, what pitiful things have usually caused something of the highest rank, still taking shape, to shatter, break off, sink down, become pitiful. The overall degeneration of humanity, down to what today appears to socialist bunglers and shallow minds as their “human being of the future”—as their ideal!—this degeneration and diminishment of humanity into the perfect herd animal, or, as they say, into the person of “free society,” this transformation of humanity into a dwarf animal of equal rights and claims is possible; there is no doubt! Anyone who has once thought this possibility through to the end knows one more disgust than other people—and perhaps also a new task!…