Preface
Original German
ZurGenealogie der Moral.
Eine Streitschrift
von
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Dem letztveröffentlichten „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“ zur Ergänzung und Verdeutlichung beigegeben.
VORREDE.
1 Wir sind uns unbekannt, wir Erkennenden, wir selbst uns selbst: das hat seinen guten Grund. Wir haben nie nach uns gesucht, — wie sollte es geschehn, dass wir eines Tags uns fänden? Mit Recht hat man gesagt: „wo euer Schatz ist, da ist auch euer Herz“; unser Schatz ist, wo die Bienenkörbe unsrer Erkenntniss stehn. Wir sind immer dazu unterwegs, als geborne Flügelthiere und Honigsammler des Geistes, wir kümmern uns von Herzen eigentlich nur um Eins — Etwas „heimzubringen“. Was das Leben sonst, die sogenannten „Erlebnisse“ angeht, — wer von uns hat dafür auch nur Ernst genug? Oder Zeit genug? Bei solchen Sachen waren wir, fürchte ich, nie recht „bei der Sache“: wir haben eben unser Herz nicht dort — und nicht einmal unser Ohr! Vielmehr wie ein Göttlich-Zerstreuter und In-sich-Versenkter, dem die Glocke eben mit aller Macht ihre zwölf Schläge des Mittags in’s Ohr gedröhnt hat, mit einem Male aufwacht und sich fragt „was hat es da eigentlich geschlagen?“ so reiben auch wir uns mitunter hinterdrein die Ohren und fragen, ganz erstaunt, ganz betreten „was haben wir da eigentlich erlebt? mehr noch: wer sind wir eigentlich?“ und zählen nach, hinterdrein, wie gesagt, alle die zitternden zwölf Glockenschläge unsres Erlebnisses, unsres Lebens, unsres Seins — ach! und verzählen uns dabei... Wir bleiben uns eben nothwendig fremd, wir verstehn uns nicht, wir müssen uns verwechseln, für uns heisst der Satz in alle Ewigkeit „Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste“, — für uns sind wir keine „Erkennenden“...
2 — Meine Gedanken über die Herkunft unserer moralischen Vorurtheile — denn um sie handelt es sich in dieser Streitschrift — haben ihren ersten, sparsamen und vorläufigen Ausdruck in jener Aphorismen-Sammlung erhalten, die den Titel trägt „Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister“, und deren Niederschrift in Sorrent begonnen wurde, während eines Winters, welcher es mir erlaubte, Halt zu machen wie ein Wandrer Halt macht und das weite und gefährliche Land zu überschauen, durch das mein Geist bis dahin gewandert war. Dies geschah im Winter 1876—77; die Gedanken selbst sind älter. Es waren in der Hauptsache schon die gleichen Gedanken, die ich in den vorliegenden Abhandlungen wieder aufnehme: — hoffen wir, dass die lange Zwischenzeit ihnen gut gethan hat, dass sie reifer, heller, stärker, vollkommner geworden sind! Dass ich aber heute noch an ihnen festhalte, dass sie sich selber inzwischen immer fester an einander gehalten haben, ja in einander gewachsen und verwachsen sind, das stärkt in mir die frohe Zuversichtlichkeit, sie möchten von Anfang an in mir nicht einzeln, nicht beliebig, nicht sporadisch entstanden sein, sondern aus einer gemeinsamen Wurzel heraus, aus einem in der Tiefe gebietenden, immer bestimmter redenden, immer Bestimmteres verlangenden Grundwillen der Erkenntniss. So allein nämlich geziemt es sich bei einem Philosophen. Wir haben kein Recht darauf, irgend worin einzeln zu sein: wir dürfen weder einzeln irren, noch einzeln die Wahrheit treffen. Vielmehr mit der Nothwendigkeit, mit der ein Baum seine Früchte trägt, wachsen aus uns unsre Gedanken, unsre Werthe, unsre Ja’s und Nein’s und Wenn’s und Ob’s — verwandt und bezüglich allesammt unter einander und Zeugnisse Eines Willens, Einer Gesundheit, Eines Erdreichs, Einer Sonne. — Ob sie euch schmecken, diese unsre Früchte? — Aber was geht das die Bäume an! Was geht das uns an, uns Philosophen!...
3 Bei einer mir eignen Bedenklichkeit, die ich ungern eingestehe — sie bezieht sich nämlich auf die Moral, auf Alles, was bisher auf Erden als Moral gefeiert worden ist —, einer Bedenklichkeit, welche in meinem Leben so früh, so unaufgefordert, so unaufhaltsam, so in Widerspruch gegen Umgebung, Alter, Beispiel, Herkunft auftrat, dass ich beinahe das Recht hätte, sie mein „A priori“ zu nennen, — musste meine Neugierde ebenso wie mein Verdacht bei Zeiten an der Frage halt machen, welchen Ursprung eigentlich unser Gut und Böse habe. In der That gieng mir bereits als dreizehnjährigem Knaben das Problem vom Ursprung des Bösen nach: ihm widmete ich, in einem Alter, wo man „halb Kinderspiele, halb Gott im Herzen“ hat, mein erstes litterarisches Kinderspiel, meine erste philosophische Schreibübung — und was meine damalige „Lösung“ des Problems anbetrifft, nun, so gab ich, wie es billig ist, Gott die Ehre und machte ihn zum Vater des Bösen. Wollte es gerade so mein „A priori“ von mir? jenes neue, unmoralische, mindestens immoralistische „A priori“ und der aus ihm redende ach! so anti-Kantische, so räthselhafte „kategorische Imperativ“, dem ich inzwischen immer mehr Gehör und nicht nur Gehör geschenkt habe?... Glücklicher Weise lernte ich bei Zeiten das theologische Vorurtheil von dem moralischen abscheiden und suchte nicht mehr den Ursprung des Bösen hinter der Welt. Etwas historische und philologische Schulung, eingerechnet ein angeborner wählerischer Sinn in Hinsicht auf psychologische Fragen überhaupt, verwandelte in Kürze mein Problem in das andre: unter welchen Bedingungen erfand sich der Mensch jene Werthurtheile gut und böse? und welchen Werth haben sie selbst? Hemmten oder förderten sie bisher das menschliche Gedeihen? Sind sie ein Zeichen von Nothstand, von Verarmung von Entartung des Lebens? Oder umgekehrt, verräth sich in ihnen die Fülle, die Kraft, der Wille des Lebens, sein Muth, seine Zuversicht, seine Zukunft? — Darauf fand und wagte ich bei mir mancherlei Antworten, ich unterschied Zeiten, Völker, Ranggrade der Individuen, ich specialisirte mein Problem, aus den Antworten wurden neue Fragen, Forschungen, Vermuthungen, Wahrscheinlichkeiten: bis ich endlich ein eignes Land, einen eignen Boden hatte, eine ganze verschwiegene wachsende blühende Welt, heimliche Gärten gleichsam, von denen Niemand Etwas ahnen durfte... Oh wie wir glücklich sind, wir Erkennenden, vorausgesetzt, dass wir nur lange genug zu schweigen wissen!...
4 Den ersten Anstoss, von meinen Hypothesen über den Ursprung der Moral Etwas zu verlautbaren, gab mir ein klares, sauberes und kluges, auch altkluges Büchlein, in welchem mir eine umgekehrte und perverse Art von genealogischen Hypothesen, ihre eigentlich englische Art, zum ersten Male deutlich entgegentrat, und das mich anzog — mit jener Anziehungskraft, die alles Entgegengesetzte, alles Antipodische hat. Der Titel des Büchleins war „der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen“; sein Verfasser Dr. Paul Rée; das Jahr seines Erscheinens 1877. Vielleicht habe ich niemals Etwas gelesen, zu dem ich dermaassen, Satz für Satz, Schluss für Schluss, bei mir Nein gesagt hätte wie zu diesem Buche: doch ganz ohne Verdruss und Ungeduld. In dem vorher bezeichneten Werke, an dem ich damals arbeitete, nahm ich gelegentlich und ungelegentlich auf die Sätze jenes Buchs Bezug, nicht indem ich sie widerlegte — was habe ich mit Widerlegungen zu schaffen! — sondern, wie es einem positiven Geiste zukommt, an Stelle des Unwahrscheinlichen das Wahrscheinlichere setzend, unter Umständen an Stelle eines Irrthums einen andern. Damals brachte ich, wie gesagt, zum ersten Male jene Herkunfts-Hypothesen an’s Tageslicht, denen diese Abhandlungen gewidmet sind, mit Ungeschick, wie ich mir selbst am letzten verbergen möchte, noch unfrei, noch ohne eine eigne Sprache für diese eignen Dinge und mit mancherlei Rückfälligkeit und Schwankung. Im Einzelnen vergleiche man, was ich Menschliches Allzumenschliches S. 51 über die doppelte Vorgeschichte von Gut und Böse sage (nämlich aus der Sphäre der Vornehmen und der der Sklaven); insgleichen S. 119 ff. über Werth und Herkunft der asketischen Moral; insgleichen S. 78. 82. II, 35 über die „Sittlichkeit der Sitte“, jene viel ältere und ursprünglichere Art Moral, welche toto coelo von der altruistischen Werthungsweise abliegt (in der Dr. Rée, gleich allen englischen Moralgenealogen, die moralische Werthungsweise an sich sieht); insgleichen S. 74. Wanderer S. 29. Morgenröthe S. 99 über die Herkunft der Gerechtigkeit als eines Ausgleichs zwischen ungefähr Gleich-Mächtigen (Gleichgewicht als Voraussetzung aller Verträge, folglich alles Rechts); insgleichen über die Herkunft der Strafe Wanderer S. 25. 34., für die der terroristische Zweck weder essentiell, noch ursprünglich ist (wie Dr. Rée meint: — er ist ihr vielmehr erst eingelegt, unter bestimmten Umständen, und immer als ein Nebenbei, als etwas Hinzukommendes).
5 Im Grunde lag mir gerade damals etwas viel Wichtigeres am Herzen als eignes oder fremdes Hypothesenwesen über den Ursprung der Moral (oder, genauer: letzteres allein um eines Zweckes willen, zu dem es eins unter vielen Mitteln ist). Es handelte sich für mich um den Werth der Moral, — und darüber hatte ich mich fast allein mit meinem grossen Lehrer Schopenhauer auseinanderzusetzen, an den wie an einen Gegenwärtigen jenes Buch, die Leidenschaft und der geheime Widerspruch jenes Buchs sich wendet (— denn auch jenes Buch war eine „Streitschrift“). Es handelte sich in Sonderheit um den Werth des „Unegoistischen“, der Mitleids-, Selbstverleugnungs-, Selbstopferungs-Instinkte, welche gerade Schopenhauer so lange vergoldet, vergöttlicht und verjenseitigt hatte, bis sie ihm schliesslich als die „Werthe an sich“ übrig blieben, auf Grund deren er zum Leben, auch zu sich selbst, Nein sagte. Aber gerade gegen diese Instinkte redete aus mir ein immer grundsätzlicherer Argwohn, eine immer tiefer grabende Skepsis! Gerade hier sah ich die grosse Gefahr der Menschheit, ihre sublimste Lockung und Verführung — wohin doch? in’s Nichts? — gerade hier sah ich den Anfang vom Ende, das Stehenbleiben, die zurückblickende Müdigkeit, den Willen gegen das Leben sich wendend, die letzte Krankheit sich zärtlich und schwermüthig ankündigend: ich verstand die immer mehr um sich greifende Mitleids-Moral, welche selbst die Philosophen ergriff und krank machte, als das unheimlichste Symptom unsrer unheimlich gewordnen europäischen Cultur, als ihren Umweg zu einem neuen Buddhismus? zu einem Europäer-Buddhismus? zum — Nihilismus?... Diese moderne Philosophen-Bevorzugung und Überschätzung des Mitleidens ist nämlich etwas Neues: gerade über den Unwerth des Mitleidens waren bisher die Philosophen übereingekommen. Ich nenne nur Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld und Kant, vier Geister so verschieden von einander als möglich, aber in Einem Eins: in der Geringschätzung des Mitleidens. —
6 Dies Problem vom Werthe des Mitleids und der Mitleids-Moral (— ich bin ein Gegner der schändlichen modernen Gefühlsverweichlichung —) scheint zunächst nur etwas Vereinzeltes, ein Fragezeichen für sich; wer aber einmal hier hängen bleibt, hier fragen lernt, dem wird es gehn, wie es mir ergangen ist: — eine ungeheure neue Aussicht thut sich ihm auf, eine Möglichkeit fasst ihn wie ein Schwindel, jede Art Misstrauen, Argwohn, Furcht springt hervor, der Glaube an die Moral, an alle Moral wankt, — endlich wird eine neue Forderung laut. Sprechen wir sie aus, diese neue Forderung: wir haben eine Kritik der moralischen Werthe nöthig, der Werth dieser Werthe ist selbst erst einmal in Frage zu stellen — und dazu thut eine Kenntniss der Bedingungen und Umstände noth, aus denen sie gewachsen, unter denen sie sich entwickelt und verschoben haben (Moral als Folge, als Symptom, als Maske, als Tartüfferie, als Krankheit, als Missverständniss; aber auch Moral als Ursache, als Heilmittel, als Stimulanz, als Hemmung, als Gift), wie eine solche Kenntniss weder bis jetzt da war, noch auch nur begehrt worden ist. Man nahm den Werth dieser „Werthe“ als gegeben, als thatsächlich, als jenseits aller In-Frage-Stellung; man hat bisher auch nicht im Entferntesten daran gezweifelt und geschwankt, „den Guten“ für höherwerthig als „den Bösen“ anzusetzen, höherwerthig im Sinne der Förderung, Nützlichkeit, Gedeihlichkeit in Hinsicht auf den Menschen überhaupt (die Zukunft des Menschen eingerechnet). Wie? wenn das Umgekehrte die Wahrheit wäre? Wie? wenn im „Guten“ auch ein Rückgangssymptom läge, insgleichen eine Gefahr, eine Verführung, ein Gift, ein Narcoticum, durch das etwa die Gegenwart auf Kosten der Zukunft lebte? Vielleicht behaglicher, ungefährlicher, aber auch in kleinerem Stile, niedriger?... So dass gerade die Moral daran Schuld wäre, wenn eine an sich mögliche höchste Mächtigkeit und Pracht des Typus Mensch niemals erreicht würde? So dass gerade die Moral die Gefahr der Gefahren wäre?...
7 Genug, dass ich selbst, seitdem mir dieser Ausblick sich öffnete, Gründe hatte, mich nach gelehrten, kühnen und arbeitsamen Genossen umzusehn (ich thue es heute noch). Es gilt, das ungeheure, ferne und so versteckte Land der Moral — der wirklich dagewesenen, wirklich gelebten Moral — mit lauter neuen Fragen und gleichsam mit neuen Augen zu bereisen: und heisst dies nicht beinahe so viel als dieses Land erst entdecken?... Wenn ich dabei, unter Anderen, auch an den genannten Dr. Rée dachte, so geschah es, weil ich gar nicht zweifelte, dass er von der Natur seiner Fragen selbst auf eine richtigere Methodik, um zu Antworten zu gelangen, gedrängt werden würde. Habe ich mich darin betrogen? Mein Wunsch war es jedenfalls, einem so scharfen und unbetheiligten Auge eine bessere Richtung, die Richtung zur wirklichen Historie der Moral zu geben und ihn vor solchem englischen Hypothesenwesen in’s Blaue noch zur rechten Zeit zu warnen. Es liegt ja auf der Hand, welche Farbe für einen Moral-Genealogen hundert Mal wichtiger sein muss als gerade das Blaue: nämlich das Graue, will sagen das Urkundliche, das Wirklich-Feststellbare, das Wirklich-Dagewesene, kurz die ganze lange, schwer zu entziffernde Hieroglyphenschrift der menschlichen Moral-Vergangenheit! — Diese war dem Dr. Rée unbekannt; aber er hatte Darwin gelesen: — und so reichen sich in seinen Hypothesen auf eine Weise, die zum Mindesten unterhaltend ist, die Darwin’sche Bestie und der allermodernste bescheidene Moral-Zärtling, der „nicht mehr beisst“, artig die Hand, letzterer mit dem Ausdruck einer gewissen gutmüthigen und feinen Indolenz im Gesicht, in die selbst ein Gran von Pessimismus, von Ermüdung eingemischt ist: als ob es sich eigentlich gar nicht lohne, alle diese Dinge — die Probleme der Moral — so ernst zu nehmen. Mir nun scheint es umgekehrt gar keine Dinge zu geben, die es mehr lohnten, dass man sie ernst nimmt; zu welchem Lohne es zum Beispiel gehört, dass man eines Tags vielleicht die Erlaubniss erhält, sie heiter zu nehmen. Die Heiterkeit nämlich oder, um es in meiner Sprache zu sagen, die fröhliche Wissenschaft — ist ein Lohn: ein Lohn für einen langen, tapferen, arbeitsamen und unterirdischen Ernst, der freilich nicht Jedermanns Sache ist. An dem Tage aber, wo wir aus vollem Herzen sagen: „vorwärts! auch unsre alte Moral gehört in die Komödie!“ haben wir für das dinoysische Drama vom „Schicksal der Seele“ eine neue Verwicklung und Möglichkeit entdeckt —: und er wird sie sich schon zu Nutze machen, darauf darf man wetten, er, der grosse alte ewige Komödiendichter unsres Daseins!...
8 — Wenn diese Schrift irgend Jemandem unverständlich ist und schlecht zu Ohren geht, so liegt die Schuld, wie mich dünkt, nicht nothwendig an mir. Sie ist deutlich genug, vorausgesetzt, was ich voraussetzte, dass man zuerst meine früheren Schriften gelesen und einige Mühe dabei nicht gespart hat: diese sind in der That nicht leicht zugänglich. Was zum Beispiel meinen „Zarathustra“ anbetrifft, so lasse ich Niemanden als dessen Kenner gelten, den nicht jedes seiner Worte irgendwann einmal tief verwundet und irgendwann einmal tief entzückt hat: erst dann nämlich darf er des Vorrechts geniessen, an dem halkyonischen Element, aus dem jenes Werk geboren ist, an seiner sonnigen Helle, Ferne, Weite und Gewissheit ehrfürchtig Antheil zu haben. In andern Fällen macht die aphoristische Form Schwierigkeit: sie liegt darin, dass man diese Form heute nicht schwer genug nimmt. Ein Aphorismus, rechtschaffen geprägt und ausgegossen, ist damit, dass er abgelesen ist, noch nicht „entziffert“; vielmehr hat nun erst dessen Auslegung zu beginnen, zu der es einer Kunst der Auslegung bedarf. Ich habe in der dritten Abhandlung dieses Buchs ein Muster von dem dargeboten, was ich in einem solchen Falle „Auslegung“ nenne: — dieser Abhandlung ist ein Aphorismus vorangestellt, sie selbst ist dessen Commentar. Freilich thut, um dergestalt das Lesen als Kunst zu üben, Eins vor Allem noth, was heutzutage gerade am Besten verlernt worden ist — und darum hat es noch Zeit bis zur „Lesbarkeit“ meiner Schriften —, zu dem man beinahe Kuh und jedenfalls nicht „moderner Mensch“ sein muss: das Wiederkäuen...
Sils-Maria, Oberengadin,
im Juli 1887.
Musean translation
Complete machine-assisted Musean translation of the Preface and all three essays with every numbered section, made directly from the German of the 1892 second edition (C. G. Naumann, Leipzig) as collated against the page images of the Internet Archive scan. Emphasis, the author's own note and the printed citation forms are retained.
Onthe Genealogy of Morals.
A Polemic
by
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Offered as a supplement and clarification to the most recently published “Beyond Good and Evil.”
PREFACE.
1 We are unknown to ourselves, we who know, we ourselves to ourselves: there is good reason for that. We have never looked for ourselves—how could it happen that one day we should find ourselves? It has rightly been said: “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also”; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always on our way there, born winged creatures and honey-gatherers of the spirit; at heart we truly care about only one thing—“bringing something home.” As for the rest of life, the so-called “experiences”—which of us has enough seriousness even for those? Or enough time? In such matters, I fear, we were never quite “there”: our heart simply is not in them—and not even our ear! Rather, just as someone divinely distracted and sunk in himself, into whose ear a bell has just thundered its twelve strokes of noon with all its might, suddenly wakes and asks himself, “What actually struck just now?”—so we too sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly amazed, utterly disconcerted, “What have we actually experienced just now? More than that: who are we, really?” And afterward, as I said, we count back over all twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being—alas! and get the count wrong… We necessarily remain strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must misidentify ourselves; for us the saying holds for all eternity: “Everyone is farthest from himself”—where we ourselves are concerned, we are no “knowers”…
2 —My thoughts on the origin of our moral prejudices—for these are the subject of this polemic—first found their expression, spare and provisional, in that collection of aphorisms entitled “Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits,” which I began writing in Sorrento, during a winter that allowed me to pause as a wanderer pauses and survey the vast and dangerous country through which my spirit had traveled until then. This was in the winter of 1876–77; the thoughts themselves are older. In the main, they were already the same thoughts I take up again in the essays before us: let us hope the long interval has done them good, that they have grown riper, clearer, stronger, more complete! But that I still hold fast to them today, that in the meantime they have held ever faster to one another, indeed have grown into one another and become intertwined—this strengthens my joyful confidence that from the beginning they arose in me not separately, not arbitrarily, not sporadically, but from a common root, from a fundamental will to knowledge commanding in the depths, speaking ever more distinctly, demanding ever more definite things. For this alone is fitting in a philosopher. We have no right to be isolated in anything: we may neither err in isolation nor hit upon the truth in isolation. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit, our thoughts, our values, our yeses and nos and ifs and whethers grow out of us—all related and bound to one another, witnesses to one will, one health, one soil, one sun.—Whether you like the taste of these fruits of ours?—But what does that matter to the trees! What does that matter to us, to us philosophers!…
3 With a scrupulous doubt peculiar to me, which I am reluctant to confess—for it concerns morality, everything that has been celebrated on earth as morality until now—a doubt that appeared in my life so early, so unbidden, so irresistibly, so at odds with my surroundings, my age, the examples set me, my origins that I would almost be entitled to call it my “a priori,” my curiosity as well as my suspicion was bound to pause early on at the question of what origin our good and evil really have. In fact, the problem of the origin of evil was already haunting me as a boy of thirteen: to it, at an age when one has “half children's games, half God in the heart,” I devoted my first literary child's play, my first philosophical writing exercise—and as for my “solution” to the problem at the time, well, I gave God the honor, as was only fitting, and made him the father of evil. Was this precisely what my “a priori” wanted of me? That new, unmoral, or at least immoralist “a priori,” and the—alas!—so anti-Kantian, so enigmatic “categorical imperative” speaking out of it, to which I have since lent more and more of my ear, and not only my ear?… Fortunately, I learned early to separate theological prejudice from moral prejudice and no longer sought the origin of evil behind the world. Some historical and philological schooling, together with an inborn discriminating sense in psychological questions generally, soon transformed my problem into another: under what conditions did the human being invent those value judgments, good and evil? And what value do they themselves have? Have they hindered or furthered human flourishing until now? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or, conversely, do life's fullness, strength, and will reveal themselves in them, its courage, its confidence, its future?—To these questions I found and ventured various answers of my own; I distinguished periods, peoples, degrees of rank among individuals; I narrowed my problem into specific questions; the answers became new questions, investigations, conjectures, probabilities: until at last I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, a whole silent, growing, flowering world, secret gardens, as it were, of which no one was to suspect a thing… Oh, how happy we are, we who know, provided only that we know how to keep silent long enough!…
4 My first impulse to make some of my hypotheses about the origin of morality public came from a clear, tidy, and clever little book—precociously clever, too—in which I first distinctly encountered an inverted and perverse kind of genealogical hypothesis, its characteristically English kind, and which attracted me—with that attraction exerted by everything contrary, everything antipodal. The little book's title was “The Origin of Moral Sensations”; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year it appeared, 1877. Perhaps I have never read anything to which, sentence by sentence, inference by inference, I said No within myself to such a degree as I did to this book: yet entirely without annoyance or impatience. In the work mentioned earlier, on which I was then engaged, I referred to the propositions of that book, in season and out of season, not by refuting them—what have I to do with refutations!—but, as befits an affirmative spirit, by putting the more probable in place of the improbable, sometimes one error in place of another. As I said, that was when I first brought into daylight those hypotheses of origin to which these essays are devoted: clumsily, as I would be the last to conceal from myself, still unfree, still without a language of my own for these things of my own, and with many relapses and vacillations. For particulars, compare what I say in “Human, All Too Human,” p. 51 about the twofold prehistory of good and evil (namely, in the sphere of the nobles and in that of the slaves); likewise pp. 119 ff. on the value and origin of ascetic morality; likewise pp. 78, 82, and II, 35 on the “morality of custom,” that much older and more original kind of morality which lies a whole heaven apart from the altruistic mode of valuation (in which Dr. Rée, like all the English genealogists of morality, sees the moral mode of valuation as such); likewise p. 74; “The Wanderer,” p. 29; “Daybreak,” p. 99 on the origin of justice as a settlement between parties of approximately equal power (a balance of power as the precondition of all contracts, hence of all law); likewise, on the origin of punishment, “The Wanderer,” pp. 25, 34., for which the purpose of terrorizing is neither essential nor original (as Dr. Rée thinks: rather, it was only introduced into punishment later, under certain circumstances, and always as something incidental, something added).
5 At bottom, precisely then, something far more important lay close to my heart than hypotheses, my own or anyone else's, about the origin of morality (or, more precisely: these concerned me only for the sake of an end for which they are one means among many). What concerned me was the value of morality—and on this I had to come to terms almost exclusively with my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom, as though he were present, that book, the passion and the secret opposition of that book, addresses itself (—for that book too was a “polemic”). What concerned me in particular was the value of the “unegoistic,” of the instincts of pity, self-denial, self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer in particular had gilded, deified, and transported into the beyond for so long that at last they alone remained for him as “values in themselves,” on the strength of which he said No to life, and to himself as well. But it was precisely against these instincts that an ever more fundamental suspicion, a skepticism digging ever deeper, spoke out of me! Precisely here I saw humanity's great danger, its most sublime lure and seduction—but toward what? Into nothingness?—precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standstill, the weariness looking backward, the will turning against life, the final sickness announcing itself tenderly and mournfully: I understood the morality of pity, which was spreading ever more widely, seizing and sickening even the philosophers, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture, now itself grown uncanny, as its detour toward a new Buddhism? A Buddhism for Europeans? Toward—nihilism?… For this predilection for pity, this overvaluation of it among modern philosophers, is something new: until now it was precisely on the worthlessness of pity that philosophers had agreed. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant, four minds as different from one another as possible, but at one in one thing: in their low opinion of pity.—
6 This problem of the value of pity and the morality of pity (—I am an opponent of the disgraceful modern softening of feeling—) seems at first to be merely an isolated matter, a question mark on its own; but whoever once gets caught here, whoever learns to ask questions here, will fare as I have fared: an immense new vista opens before him, a possibility seizes him like vertigo, every kind of mistrust, suspicion, fear leaps forth, faith in morality, in all morality, begins to sway—at last a new demand makes itself heard. Let us voice it, this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values must itself first be called into question—and for that we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances from which they grew, under which they developed and shifted (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartuffe-like hypocrisy, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as inhibition, as poison), a knowledge such as has never existed until now, nor even been desired. The value of these “values” was taken as given, as fact, as beyond all questioning; until now there has not been the faintest doubt or hesitation about assigning “the good man” a higher value than “the evil man,” a higher value in the sense of furthering, benefiting, fostering the human being in general (including humanity's future). What? What if the opposite were true? What? What if in “the good man” there also lay a symptom of decline, likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic through which the present might live at the expense of the future? More comfortably, perhaps, less dangerously, but also on a smaller scale, at a lower level?… So that morality itself would be to blame if the human type never attained the utmost power and splendor that were in principle possible for it? So that morality itself would be the danger of dangers?…
7 Enough to say that ever since this vista opened before me, I myself have had reason to look around for learned, daring, and industrious companions (I am still doing so today). The task is to travel through the vast, remote, and so well-hidden land of morality—morality that really existed, that was really lived—with entirely new questions and, as it were, new eyes: and does this not amount almost to discovering that land for the first time?… If, among others, I also had the aforementioned Dr. Rée in mind, it was because I had no doubt at all that the very nature of his questions would drive him toward a sounder method of arriving at answers. Was I mistaken in this? In any event, my wish was to give so sharp and disinterested an eye a better direction, the direction of the actual history of morality, and to warn him, while there was still time, against such English blue-sky hypothesizing. Surely it is obvious which color must be a hundred times more important to a genealogist of morality than precisely blue: namely, gray, by which I mean what is documented, what can actually be established, what actually existed—in short, the whole long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of humanity's moral past!—This was unknown to Dr. Rée; but he had read Darwin: and so, in his hypotheses, in a manner that is entertaining to say the least, Darwin's beast and the most up-to-date, unassuming moral softie, who “no longer bites,” politely shake hands, the latter with a certain good-natured, refined indolence on his face, into which even a grain of pessimism, of weariness, is mixed: as though it were really not worth taking all these things—the problems of morality—so seriously. To me, on the contrary, there seem to be no things more worth taking seriously; among the rewards for doing so, for example, is that one day we may be granted permission to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness—or, to put it in my own language, the joyful science—is a reward: a reward for a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness, which is, to be sure, not everyone's affair. But on the day when we say with all our hearts, “Forward! Our old morality, too, belongs in comedy!” we have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of the “fate of the soul”—and he will know how to turn it to his advantage, you may bet on that, he, the great, old, eternal comic playwright of our existence!…
8 —If anyone finds this work unintelligible and grating on the ear, the fault, it seems to me, does not necessarily lie with me. It is clear enough, assuming what I have assumed: that one has first read my earlier writings and has taken some pains over them—for they are indeed not readily accessible. As for my “Zarathustra,” for example, I recognize no one as a connoisseur of it unless every one of its words has at some time wounded him deeply and at some time delighted him deeply: only then may he enjoy the privilege of sharing reverently in the halcyon element out of which that work was born, in its sunlit clarity, distance, spaciousness, and certainty. In other cases the aphoristic form creates difficulties: the reason is that today this form is taken nowhere near seriously enough. An aphorism, properly stamped and cast, is not yet “deciphered” merely because it has been read off; rather, only then must its interpretation begin, and this requires an art of interpretation. In the third essay of this book I have offered a specimen of what I call “interpretation” in such a case: that essay is prefaced by an aphorism; the essay itself is its commentary. Of course, to practice reading as an art in this way, one thing above all is needed, something that nowadays has been unlearned more thoroughly than anything else—and so there is still time to pass before my writings become “readable”—something for which one must be almost a cow and in any event not a “modern human being”: rumination…
Sils-Maria, Oberengadin,
in July 1887.
Plain English translation
Complete machine-assisted Plain English translation made independently and directly from the same German text, with the same scope, numbering and emphasis.
On theGenealogy of Morals.
A Polemic
by
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Added to the most recently published “Beyond Good and Evil” to supplement and clarify it.
Preface.
1 We who know are unknown to ourselves. We ourselves do not know ourselves, and for good reason. We have never looked for ourselves—how could we ever find ourselves one day? Someone rightly said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is too.” Our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always on our way there, born winged creatures and gatherers of the mind’s honey. At heart we really care about only one thing: “bringing something home.” As for the rest of life, the so-called “experiences”—who among us even takes them seriously enough? Or has enough time for them? In such matters, I’m afraid, we have never really “paid attention.” Our hearts simply aren’t there—and neither are our ears! Think of someone divinely distracted and absorbed in himself. A bell has just thundered its twelve midday strokes into his ear at full force. Suddenly he wakes up and asks, “What hour did it actually strike?” In the same way, we too sometimes rub our ears afterward. Completely amazed and embarrassed, we ask, “What did we actually experience just now? More than that: who are we, really?” And afterward, as I said, we count back over all twelve trembling bell strokes of our experience, our life, our being—ah, and we miscount … We necessarily remain strangers to ourselves. We don’t understand ourselves; we have to mistake ourselves for something else. For us, the saying holds for all eternity: “Everyone is farthest from themselves.” When it comes to ourselves, we are not “people who know” …
2 —My thoughts about the origin of our moral prejudices—for that is what this polemic deals with—first received a brief, tentative expression in the collection of aphorisms called “Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits.” I began writing it in Sorrento, during a winter that let me stop, as a traveler stops, and look over the wide and dangerous country my mind had traveled through up to then. This was in the winter of 1876–77; the thoughts themselves are older. In the main, they were already the same thoughts I take up again in these essays. Let’s hope the long time in between has done them good, that they have become riper, clearer, stronger, more complete! I still hold to them today. Meanwhile, they have held ever more firmly to one another; in fact, they have grown into one another and grown together. This strengthens my happy confidence that they did not arise in me from the start as separate, random, scattered thoughts. Instead, they grew from a common root, from an underlying will to know that commands from deep within, speaks ever more clearly, and demands ever more definite things. That alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to be isolated in anything. We must not make mistakes in isolation or arrive at the truth in isolation. Instead, our thoughts, our values, our yeses and nos, our ifs and our questions of whether grow out of us as inevitably as a tree bears its fruit. They are all related and connected to one another, and all testify to one will, one state of health, one soil, one sun.—Do you like the taste of these fruits of ours? But what do the trees care! What do we care, we philosophers! …
3 I have a skeptical streak of my own that I don’t like to admit. It concerns morality, everything that has so far been celebrated as morality on earth. It appeared so early in my life, so uninvited, so unstoppable, and so much at odds with my surroundings, age, examples, and background that I would almost have the right to call it my “a priori.” Because of it, both my curiosity and my suspicion had to settle early on the question of where our good and evil actually came from. In fact, the problem of the origin of evil was already haunting me as a thirteen-year-old boy. At an age when “your heart is half full of children’s games, half of God,” I devoted my first childish literary game, my first practice piece of philosophical writing, to it. As for my “solution” to the problem back then—well, as was only fair, I gave God the credit and made him the father of evil. Was this just what my “a priori” wanted from me? That new, immoral—or at least morality-rejecting—“a priori,” and the mysterious “categorical imperative” speaking through it, oh, so very anti-Kantian! Have I not since listened to it more and more—and done more than listen? … Luckily, I learned early to separate theological prejudice from moral prejudice, and I stopped looking for the origin of evil behind the world. Some training in history and the study of language and texts, along with an inborn selectiveness about psychological questions in general, soon turned my problem into a different one. Under what conditions did human beings invent those value judgments, good and evil, for themselves? And what value do these judgments themselves have? Have they held back human flourishing so far, or helped it along? Are they a sign of distress, impoverishment, degeneration of life? Or do they instead reveal life’s fullness, strength, and will, its courage, confidence, and future? I found and ventured all sorts of answers for myself. I distinguished between periods, peoples, and ranks among individuals. I broke my problem down into more specific questions. The answers led to new questions, investigations, guesses, probabilities. Finally, I had a country of my own, a ground of my own, a whole silent, growing, flowering world, like secret gardens whose existence no one was allowed to suspect … Oh, how happy we who know are, as long as we know how to stay silent long enough! …
4 My first push to make some of my hypotheses about the origin of morality public came from a clear, neat, clever little book, with a precocious air of wisdom too. In it, I first clearly encountered a backward, perverse kind of hypothesis about origins: the specifically English kind. It attracted me with the attraction that everything opposite, everything at the other pole, has. The little book’s title was “The Origin of Moral Feelings”; its author was Dr. Paul Rée; it was published in 1877. Perhaps I have never read anything to which I inwardly said no so completely, sentence by sentence, conclusion by conclusion, as I did to this book. Yet I felt no annoyance or impatience at all. In the work mentioned earlier, which I was writing at the time, I referred to that book’s claims both when the occasion called for it and when it didn’t. I did not refute them—what do refutations have to do with me! Instead, as someone with a constructive mind should, I replaced what was unlikely with what was more likely, sometimes replacing one error with another. As I said, that was when I first brought to light the hypotheses about origins to which these essays are devoted. I did so clumsily—I would be the last to hide that from myself—still constrained, still without a language of my own for these things of my own, and with many relapses and waverings. For specifics, compare what I say in “Human, All Too Human,” p. 51 about the twofold prehistory of good and evil, namely in the world of the nobles and in that of the slaves. Likewise, pp. 119 ff. on the value and origin of ascetic morality. Likewise, pp. 78, 82, and II, 35 on the “morality of custom,” that much older and more original kind of morality. It is a whole world apart from the altruistic way of assigning value, which Dr. Rée, like all English genealogists of morality, sees as the moral way of assigning value as such. Likewise, p. 74; “The Wanderer,” p. 29; “Daybreak,” p. 99 on the origin of justice as a settlement between people of roughly equal power. A balance of power is the precondition of all agreements and therefore of all law. Likewise, on the origin of punishment, “The Wanderer,” pp. 25, 34. The purpose of terrorizing is neither essential nor original to punishment, contrary to what Dr. Rée thinks. Instead, this purpose was only attached to it later, under certain circumstances, and always as something incidental, something added on.
5 At bottom, even then, something much more important was close to my heart than my own or anyone else’s hypotheses about the origin of morality. More precisely, I cared about those hypotheses only for the sake of a goal for which they are one means among many. What mattered to me was the value of morality. On that question, I had to argue almost entirely with my great teacher Schopenhauer. That book addresses him as if he were present; so do its passion and its secret opposition—for that book too was a “polemic.” What mattered in particular was the value of the “unselfish,” of the instincts of pity, self-denial, and self-sacrifice. Schopenhauer in particular had gilded them, made them divine, and placed them in a world beyond this one for so long that they finally remained for him as the “values in themselves.” On their basis, he said no to life and to himself as well. But a suspicion that increasingly challenged their very basis, a skepticism that dug ever deeper, spoke out through me against precisely these instincts! This was exactly where I saw humanity’s great danger, its most sublime temptation and seduction—but to where? Into nothingness? This was exactly where I saw the beginning of the end: coming to a standstill, weariness looking backward, the will turning against life, the final illness announcing itself tenderly and sadly. The morality of pity was spreading more and more, even seizing philosophers and making them sick. I understood it as the most disturbing symptom of our European culture, which had become disturbing itself. Was it that culture’s roundabout route to a new Buddhism? To a European Buddhism? To—nihilism? … This preference and overvaluation of pity among modern philosophers is something new. Until now, philosophers had agreed precisely on pity’s worthlessness. I’ll name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant: four minds as different from one another as possible, but united on one thing—their low opinion of pity.—
6 This problem of the value of pity and the morality of pity—I oppose the shameful sentimental softness of modern times—at first seems to be just an isolated issue, a question mark on its own. But once someone gets stuck here and learns to ask questions here, they will have the same experience I did. An immense new view opens up. A possibility seizes them like a dizzy spell. Every kind of distrust, suspicion, and fear springs out. Belief in morality, in all morality, shakes. Finally, a new demand makes itself heard. Let’s state this new demand: we need a critique of moral values; the value of these values must itself first be called into question. To do that, we need to know the conditions and circumstances from which they grew, under which they developed and shifted. Morality can be a result, a symptom, a mask, pious hypocrisy, a disease, a misunderstanding. But it can also be a cause, a remedy, a stimulant, a restraint, a poison. This kind of knowledge has never existed before, or even been desired. People took the value of these “values” as given, as a fact, as beyond all questioning. Until now, they have not had the slightest doubt or hesitation about assigning a higher value to “the good person” than to “the evil person.” Higher, that is, in terms of helping, benefiting, and promoting the flourishing of human beings in general, including their future. What if the truth were the other way around? What if “the good person” also contained a sign of decline, as well as a danger, a temptation, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present might live at the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also on a smaller scale, at a lower level? … So that morality itself would be to blame if the human type never achieved the greatest power and splendor it was otherwise capable of? So that morality itself would be the danger of dangers? …
7 Enough to say that once this view opened up to me, I had reason to look around for learned, bold, hardworking companions. I still do. We need to travel through the immense, distant, well-hidden country of morality—the morality that actually existed, that people actually lived—with entirely new questions and, so to speak, new eyes. And doesn’t that almost amount to discovering this country for the first time? … If, among others, I also thought of the Dr. Rée mentioned above, it was because I had no doubt that the nature of his own questions would push him toward a more correct method of reaching answers. Was I mistaken about that? In any case, I wanted to turn such a sharp, detached eye in a better direction—toward the real history of morality—and to warn him in time against that sort of English blue-sky speculation. It is obvious what color must matter a hundred times more to a genealogist of morality than blue: gray. I mean documented evidence, what can actually be established, what actually existed—in short, the whole long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic writing of humanity’s moral past! This was unknown to Dr. Rée. But he had read Darwin. And so, in his hypotheses, Darwin’s beast and the most up-to-date, modest moral softie, who “no longer bites,” politely shake hands in a way that is entertaining, at the very least. The latter has a certain good-natured, refined laziness on his face, mixed with even a grain of pessimism and weariness. It is as if taking all these things—the problems of morality—so seriously were really not worth the trouble. To me, on the contrary, nothing seems more worth taking seriously. One reward for doing so is that one day we may get permission to take these things cheerfully. Cheerfulness—or, to put it in my language, joyful science—is a reward. It is a reward for a long, brave, hardworking seriousness, working underground, which admittedly is not for everyone. But on the day when we say with all our hearts, “Forward! Our old morality belongs in the comedy too!” we will have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of the “fate of the soul.” And he will certainly make use of it—you can bet on that—he, the great, old, eternal writer of the comedy of our existence! …
8 —If anyone can’t understand this work and finds that it grates on their ears, I don’t think the fault necessarily lies with me. It is clear enough, provided, as I assumed, that the reader has first read my earlier writings and put some effort into doing so. They really aren’t easy to get into. Take my “Zarathustra,” for example. I will not accept anyone as knowing it unless every one of its words has, at some time, wounded them deeply and, at some time, delighted them deeply. Only then may they enjoy the privilege of sharing, with reverence, in the calm, peaceful element from which that work was born—in its sunny brightness, distance, breadth, and certainty. In other cases, the aphoristic form causes difficulty. The problem is that people today do not take this form seriously enough. An aphorism that has been properly stamped and cast has not been “deciphered” just because it has been read. Instead, that is when its interpretation must begin, and that requires an art of interpretation. In the third essay of this book, I have given an example of what I call “interpretation” in such a case. An aphorism is placed at the beginning of that essay; the essay itself is its commentary. To practice reading as an art in this way, one thing above all is needed. It is precisely what people today have most thoroughly unlearned, which is why it will still be a while before my writings become “readable.” To do it, you almost have to be a cow, and certainly not a “modern human being”: chewing the cud …
Sils-Maria, Oberengadin,
in July 1887.
About this section
Preface is part of On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is essay 1 of 4 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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