Essay I

First Essay:

Good and Evil, Good and Bad.

1 —These English psychologists, to whom we also owe the only attempts so far to write a history of morality’s origins, pose no small riddle in their own persons; indeed, I confess that precisely as riddles in the flesh they have one substantial advantage over their books—they themselves are interesting! These English psychologists—what do they really want? Willingly or not, we always find them at the same task: pushing the shameful part of our inner world into the foreground and looking for what is truly effective, directive, decisive for development precisely where man’s intellectual pride would least wish to find it—for example, in the inertial force of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in some blind and accidental interlocking and machinery of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and thoroughly stupid. What really drives these psychologists always in this direction? Is it a secret, malicious, vulgar instinct to belittle humanity, perhaps an instinct they cannot admit even to themselves? Or perhaps a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disappointed idealists who have grown gloomy, poisonous, and green? Or a little underground hostility and rancor toward Christianity—and Plato—that may never even have crossed the threshold of consciousness? Or even a prurient taste for the strange, the painfully paradoxical, the questionable and senseless in existence? Or, finally—a little of everything: a little vulgarity, a little gloom, a little anti-Christianity, a little titillation and a need for spice?… But people tell me they are simply old, cold, boring frogs, crawling and hopping around on people and inside them, as though they were truly in their element there—in a swamp. I resist hearing this; more than that, I do not believe it. And if we may wish where we cannot know, then I wish with all my heart that the reverse might be true—that these investigators and microscopists of the soul are fundamentally brave, generous, and proud animals, who know how to rein in both their hearts and their pain, and have trained themselves to sacrifice everything desirable to truth, to every truth, even the plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth… For such truths exist.—

2 All honor, then, to the good spirits that may govern these historians of morality! Unfortunately, what is certain is that they lack the historical spirit itself: all the good spirits of history have deserted them! Like philosophers since time immemorial, they all think in an essentially unhistorical way; there is no doubt about that. The bungling of their genealogy of morals comes to light at the very beginning, where they set out to discover the origin of the concept and judgment “good.” “Originally”—so they decree—“unegoistic actions were praised and called good by those to whom they were done, and thus by those to whom they were useful. Later, people forgot where this praise originated, and simply because unegoistic actions had habitually always been praised as good, they also came to feel them as good—as though they were good in themselves.” We see at once that this first derivation already contains all the characteristic traits of the English psychologists’ idiosyncrasy: we have “utility,” “forgetting,” “habit,” and finally “error,” all as the foundation of a valuation in which the higher human being has until now taken pride as though it were a kind of privilege belonging to humanity itself. That pride is to be humbled, that valuation devalued: has this been achieved?… Now, to me it is first of all obvious that this theory seeks and locates the true birthplace of the concept “good” in the wrong place: the judgment “good” does not originate with those to whom “goodness” is shown! Rather, it was “the good” themselves—the noble, powerful, high-ranking, and high-minded—who felt and established themselves and their deeds as good, that is, as first in rank, in contrast to everything low, low-minded, common, and plebeian. Out of this pathos of distance they first claimed the right to create values, to coin names for values: what did they care about utility! Nothing could be more foreign and inappropriate than the viewpoint of utility to such a hot outpouring of the highest value judgments, which establish and distinguish ranks. Here feeling has reached the very opposite of that low temperature presupposed by all calculating prudence, by every reckoning of utility—and not just once, not for an exceptional hour, but permanently. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the enduring, dominant, pervasive, fundamental feeling of a higher, ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to a “below”—that is the origin of the opposition between “good” and “bad.” (The masters’ right to give names extends so far that we should allow ourselves to understand the origin of language itself as an expression of the rulers’ power: they say “this is such and such,” stamp every thing and event with a sound, and thereby take possession of it, as it were.) Given this origin, the word “good” is by no means necessarily attached from the outset to “unegoistic” actions, as those genealogists of morality superstitiously believe. Rather, only with the decline of aristocratic value judgments does this whole opposition between “egoistic” and “unegoistic” press itself more and more upon the human conscience. It is, to use my own language, the herd instinct that finally finds its voice—and its words—in this opposition. Even then it takes a long time for this instinct to gain such mastery that moral valuation gets stuck in that opposition and cannot move beyond it—as is the case in Europe today: the prejudice that treats “moral,” “unegoistic,” and “disinterested” as equivalent concepts already rules with the force of an “obsession” and a disease of the brain.

3 But secondly: quite apart from the historical untenability of that hypothesis about the origin of the value judgment “good,” it suffers from an internal psychological absurdity. The utility of the unegoistic action is supposed to be the source of its praise, and this source is supposed to have been forgotten—but how is such forgetting even possible? Did the utility of such actions perhaps cease at some point? Quite the reverse: this utility has been an everyday experience in every age, something continually underscored anew. Consequently, instead of vanishing from consciousness, instead of becoming forgettable, it must have impressed itself on consciousness with ever greater clarity. How much more reasonable is the opposite theory, held, for example, by Herbert Spencer—though it is no truer for that! He takes the concept “good” to be essentially identical with “useful” or “expedient,” so that in its judgments “good” and “bad” humanity has summed up and sanctioned precisely its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences of what is useful and expedient, harmful and inexpedient. According to this theory, good is what has always proved useful: it may therefore claim recognition as “valuable in the highest degree,” as “valuable in itself.” This avenue of explanation is also wrong, as I have said, but at least the explanation is internally reasonable and psychologically tenable.

4 —The question that pointed me toward the right path was what the terms coined for “good” in the various languages actually mean etymologically. I found that they all lead back to the same transformation of concepts: everywhere, “noble” and “aristocratic” in the social sense are the basic concept from which “good,” meaning “noble in soul,” “aristocratic,” meaning “high-born in soul,” “privileged in soul,” necessarily develops. This development always runs parallel to the other one that finally makes “common,” “plebeian,” and “low” pass into the concept “bad.” The most eloquent example of the latter is the German word “schlecht” itself: it is identical with “schlicht”—compare “schlechtweg” and “schlechterdings”—and originally designated the plain, common man simply in contrast to the noble, without any insinuation of suspicion. Around the time of the Thirty Years’ War—late enough, then—this sense shifted into the one now current.—This seems to me an essential insight for the genealogy of morals. That it was discovered so late is due to the inhibiting influence that democratic prejudice exerts in the modern world on all questions of origin. It reaches even into the seemingly most objective domains of natural science and physiology, as I will merely indicate here. But the notorious case of Buckle shows the havoc this prejudice, once unleashed into hatred, can wreak, especially in morality and history. The plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English descent, once again erupted there on its native soil, violently as a muddy volcano, with the oversalted, over-loud, vulgar eloquence with which all volcanoes have spoken until now.—

5 With regard to our problem, which for good reasons may be called a quiet problem and addresses itself selectively to only a few ears, it is of no small interest to establish that even in those words and roots that designate “good,” the principal shade of meaning often still glimmers through by which the noble felt themselves to be people of a higher rank. Admittedly, in perhaps the most frequent cases they name themselves simply after their superiority in power—as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the commanders”—or after the most visible sign of that superiority, for instance as “the rich,” “the possessors” (this is the meaning of arya, and correspondingly in Iranian and Slavic). But they also name themselves after a characteristic trait, and this is the case that concerns us here. They call themselves, for example, “the truthful”: above all the Greek nobility, whose spokesman is the Megarian poet Theognis. The word coined for this, ἐσθλός, means at its root someone who is, who has reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of the conceptual transformation it becomes the nobility’s slogan and watchword, and passes wholly into the sense “aristocratic,” distinguishing the noble from the lying common man as Theognis understands and portrays him—until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word remains as a designation of nobility of soul and becomes, as it were, ripe and sweet. In κακός, as in δειλός (the plebeian in contrast to the ἀγαθός), cowardice is emphasized: this may offer a hint as to the direction in which we should seek the etymological origin of the multiply interpretable ἀγαθός. In the Latin malus—beside which I set μέλας—the common man might be characterized as the dark-colored man, above all the black-haired man (“this man is black”), as the pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil whose color most clearly distinguished him from the blond—namely Aryan—race of conquerors that had become dominant. At least Gaelic offered me the precisely corresponding case: fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguishing word for the nobility, ultimately the good, noble, pure man, originally the blond head in contrast to the dark, black-haired indigenous inhabitants. The Celts, incidentally, were decidedly a blond race. It is a mistake to connect those strips of essentially dark-haired population noticeable on the more careful ethnographic maps of Germany with any Celtic origin or mingling of blood, as Virchow still does: rather, the pre-Aryan population of Germany resurfaces in those places. (The same holds for almost all of Europe: essentially the subjugated race has finally gained the upper hand there again, in color, shortness of skull, perhaps even in intellectual and social instincts. Who will guarantee that modern democracy, still more modern anarchism, and especially that inclination toward the “Commune,” toward the most primitive form of society, now shared by all the socialists of Europe, do not essentially signify an immense resurgence—and that the race of conquerors and masters, the Aryans, is not also being defeated physiologically?…) I believe I may interpret the Latin bonus as “the warrior,” provided I am right in tracing bonus back to an older duonus (compare bellum = duellum = duen-lum, in which that duonus seems to me preserved). Thus bonus as the man of strife, of division (duo), as the man of war: we see what constituted a man’s “goodness” in ancient Rome. Our German “gut” itself: might it not mean “the divine man,” the man “of divine descent”? And be identical with the tribal name—originally the name of the nobility—of the Goths? The grounds for this conjecture do not belong here.—

6 It is not yet an exception to this rule—that the concept of political precedence always resolves itself into a concept of precedence in the soul—when the highest caste is also the priestly caste and consequently favors, as its collective designation, a predicate recalling its priestly function, although this does give rise to exceptions. Here, for example, “pure” and “impure” first confront one another as signs of social rank; here too, a “good” and a “bad” later develop in a sense no longer tied to rank. For the rest, let us beware of taking these concepts “pure” and “impure” too heavily, too broadly, or even symbolically from the outset. All the concepts of earlier humanity were initially understood, to a degree we can scarcely imagine, in a coarse, clumsy, external, narrow, straightforward, and especially unsymbolic way. Originally, the “pure man” is merely someone who washes, who forbids himself certain foods that cause skin diseases, who does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower orders, who abhors blood—not more, not much more! On the other hand, the whole character of an essentially priestly aristocracy certainly makes clear why it was precisely here that oppositions of value could so early become internalized and sharpened in a dangerous way; indeed, through them chasms between one human being and another were finally torn open that even an Achilles of free-spiritedness will not leap across without shuddering. From the beginning there is something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies and in the habits prevailing there, averted from action, partly brooding and partly explosive with feeling, which seem to result in the intestinal infirmity and neurasthenia that cling almost inevitably to priests of every age. Yet what they themselves invented as a cure for their infirmity—must we not say that in its eventual aftereffects it has proved a hundred times more dangerous than the disease from which it was supposed to deliver them? Humanity itself is still sick from the aftereffects of these naive priestly cures! Consider, for example, certain forms of diet—avoiding meat—fasting, sexual abstinence, flight “into the desert” (isolation in the manner of Weir Mitchell, though without the subsequent fattening treatment and overfeeding in which the most effective antidote to all the hysteria of the ascetic ideal consists). Add to these the priests’ entire metaphysics, hostile to the senses, making people idle and overrefined; their self-hypnosis in the manner of fakirs and Brahmans—Brahman used as a glass button and an obsession—and their final, all too understandable weariness with everything, with its radical cure, nothingness (or God: the longing for mystical union with God is the Buddhist’s longing for nothingness, nirvana—and nothing more!). With priests, everything becomes more dangerous, not only remedies and healing arts, but also arrogance, revenge, acuity, debauchery, love, lust for power, virtue, sickness. In all fairness, though, we might also add that only on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, did man become an interesting animal at all; that only here did the human soul acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil—and these are, after all, the two fundamental forms of humanity’s superiority over the other animals so far!…

7 —It will already have been guessed how easily the priestly manner of valuation can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic one and then develop into its opposite; a particular impetus is given whenever the priestly caste and the warrior caste confront one another jealously and refuse to agree about the prize. Knightly-aristocratic value judgments presuppose a powerful physique, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with what preserves it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, martial games, and in general everything that involves strong, free, joyful action. The priestly-noble manner of valuation has, as we have seen, different presuppositions: bad enough for it when it comes to war! Priests are, as everyone knows, the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most powerless. Out of their powerlessness their hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous forms. The greatest haters in world history have always been priests, and the most ingenious haters too: beside the spirit of priestly revenge, all other spirit scarcely counts. Human history would be far too stupid a thing without the spirit introduced into it by the powerless—let us turn at once to the greatest example. Everything done on earth against “the noble,” “the mighty,” “the masters,” “the rulers” is not worth mentioning beside what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people who finally knew how to gain satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors only through a radical revaluation of their values, thus through an act of the most spiritual revenge. That alone was fitting for a priestly people, the people of the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who dared, with terrifying consistency, to reverse the aristocratic equation of values (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = loved by God), and who held fast to that reversal with the teeth of the most abysmal hatred, the hatred of powerlessness: namely, “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, powerless, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, and ugly are also the only pious ones, the only blessed ones; for them alone is there salvation—whereas you, you noble and mighty ones, are to all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless, and eternally you will also be the unblessed, the accursed, and the damned!”… We know who inherited this Jewish revaluation… With regard to the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative the Jews took in this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the proposition I arrived at on another occasion (“Beyond Good and Evil,” p. 118): that the slave revolt in morality begins with the Jews, that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we have lost sight of today only because it—has been victorious…

8 —But you do not understand this? You have no eyes for something that took two millennia to achieve victory?… There is nothing surprising in that: all long things are hard to see, hard to take in at a glance. Yet this is what happened: out of the trunk of that tree of revenge and hatred, of Jewish hatred—the deepest and most sublime hatred, a hatred that creates ideals and transforms values, the like of which had never existed on earth—something equally incomparable grew: a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all kinds of love. And from what other trunk could it have grown?… But let no one suppose that it grew up as the actual negation of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred as its crown, as the triumphant crown spreading wider and wider in the purest brightness and fullness of sunlight. In the realm of light and height, as it were, it pursued the goals of that hatred—victory, plunder, seduction—with the same drive with which the roots of that hatred sank ever more deeply and greedily into everything that had depth and was evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, the gospel of love in the flesh, this “redeemer” bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinners—was he not precisely seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, seduction and a roundabout path to those very Jewish values and innovations of the ideal? Did Israel not reach the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely by the roundabout path of this “redeemer,” this seeming adversary and dissolver of Israel? Is it not part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge, a farsighted, subterranean, slowly grasping and calculating revenge, that Israel itself had to disown the very instrument of its revenge before the whole world as something mortally hostile and nail it to the cross, so that “the whole world,” namely all Israel’s enemies, could bite at this particular bait without hesitation? And on the other hand, could anyone, with all the refinements of the mind, devise a more dangerous bait? Something equal in its alluring, intoxicating, stupefying, ruinous power to that symbol of the “holy cross,” to that dreadful paradox of a “God on the cross,” to that mystery of an inconceivable, ultimate, utmost cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of humanity?… At least this much is certain: under this sign, Israel with its revenge and revaluation of all values has so far triumphed again and again over every other ideal, over every nobler ideal.— —

9 —“But why do you still speak of nobler ideals! Let us submit to the facts: the people have won—or ‘the slaves,’ or ‘the mob,’ or ‘the herd,’ or whatever you choose to call them. If this happened through the Jews, well then! No people ever had a more world-historical mission. ‘The masters’ have been disposed of; the morality of the common man has won. You may regard this victory as a poisoning of the blood as well—it has mingled the races—I do not object; but undoubtedly this intoxication has succeeded. The ‘redemption’ of the human race—namely from ‘the masters’—is well on its way; everything is visibly becoming Jewish or Christian or plebeian—what do words matter! The progress of this poisoning through the entire body of humanity seems unstoppable; from now on its tempo and pace may even grow ever slower, subtler, more inaudible, more deliberate—there is time enough… Does the Church still have a necessary task in this business today, any right to exist at all? Or could we do without it? That is the question. Does it not seem to obstruct and retard that progress rather than accelerate it? Well, that might be precisely its usefulness… Certainly it has by now become something crude and boorish, repellent to a more delicate intelligence, to a truly modern taste. Should it not at least refine itself a little?… Today it alienates more than it seduces… Which of us would be a free spirit if the Church did not exist? It is the Church that repels us, not its poison… Apart from the Church, we too love the poison…”—Such was the epilogue to my speech offered by a “free spirit,” an honest animal, as he had amply revealed, and a democrat besides. Until then he had listened to me and could not bear to hear me fall silent. For at this point there is much for me to be silent about.—

10 The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings denied the true reaction, that of deeds, who compensate themselves only through an imaginary revenge. While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant yes to itself, slave morality says no from the outset to an “outside,” an “other,” a “not-self”: and this no is its creative deed. This reversal of the value-positing gaze—this necessary direction outward instead of back toward itself—is precisely what belongs to ressentiment. In order to arise, slave morality always first needs an opposing, external world; physiologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble manner of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, seeking out its opposite only to say yes to itself still more gratefully, still more exultantly. Its negative concept “low,” “common,” “bad” is only a pale, belated contrasting image beside its positive fundamental concept, saturated through and through with life and passion: “we noble ones, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy ones!” When the noble manner of valuation errs and sins against reality, it does so with regard to the sphere it does not know well enough, indeed, the sphere it disdainfully resists knowing at all. In some circumstances it misjudges the sphere it despises, that of the common man, of the lower people. On the other hand, consider that even if the affect of contempt, of looking down, of looking from above, falsifies the image of the despised, this falsification will fall far short of the one with which repressed hatred, the revenge of the powerless, assaults its opponent—in effigy, of course. In fact, contempt contains too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking away and impatience, even too much of its own happiness, to be capable of turning its object into a genuine caricature and monster. Let us not fail to hear the almost benevolent nuances that the Greek nobility, for example, puts into all the words by which it distinguishes the lower people from itself: how a kind of pity, consideration, and indulgence continually mingles with them and sweetens them, until nearly all the words belonging to the common man have finally survived as expressions for “unhappy” and “pitiable” (compare δειλός, δείλαιος, πονηρός, μοχθηρός, the last two actually characterizing the common man as a laboring slave and beast of burden). And how, on the other hand, “bad,” “low,” and “unhappy” have never ceased to ring as a single note to the Greek ear, with a timbre in which “unhappy” predominates: this is an inheritance from the old, nobler aristocratic manner of valuation, which does not deny itself even in contempt. (Philologists should recall the sense in which οἰζυρός, ἄνολβος, τλήμων, δυστυχεῖν, ξυμφορά are used.) The “wellborn” simply felt themselves to be the “happy.” They did not first have to manufacture their happiness by glancing at their enemies, or on occasion persuade themselves into it, lie themselves into it, as all people of ressentiment habitually do. And likewise, as full human beings overloaded with strength and therefore necessarily active, they knew no way of separating action from happiness—being active necessarily counts as part of happiness for them (hence the origin of εὖ πράττειν). All this stands in sharp contrast to “happiness” at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, those festering with poisonous and hostile feelings, for whom it appears essentially as a narcotic, an anesthetic, rest, peace, a “Sabbath,” a relaxation of the mind and a stretching of the limbs—in short, passively. While the noble person lives before himself with trust and openness (γενναῖος, “nobly born,” emphasizes the nuance “sincere,” and perhaps also “naive”), the person of ressentiment is neither sincere nor naive, nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves hiding places, secret paths, and back doors; everything concealed strikes him as his world, his security, his refreshment. He understands silence, not forgetting, waiting, provisionally making himself small and humble. A race of such people of ressentiment will necessarily become cleverer in the end than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness in an entirely different measure: as a condition of existence of the first rank, whereas among noble people cleverness readily has a delicate savor of luxury and refinement. Here it is far less essential than the perfect reliability of the governing unconscious instincts, or even a certain lack of cleverness: a brave charge headlong into danger or against the enemy, or that rapturous suddenness of anger, love, reverence, gratitude, and revenge by which noble souls have recognized themselves in every age. When ressentiment does appear in the noble person, it fulfills and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction and therefore does not poison; on the other hand, it does not appear at all in countless cases where it is unavoidable among all the weak and powerless. To be unable to take one’s enemies, one’s misfortunes, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures possessing a surplus of formative, restorative, healing power, power that also makes one forget. A good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and acts of baseness committed against him, and who could not forgive simply because he—forgot. Such a person shakes off in a single movement many vermin that burrow into others; here alone is possible—assuming it is possible on earth at all—true “love of one’s enemies.” How much reverence a noble person already has for his enemies! And such reverence is already a bridge to love… He desires his enemy for himself, as his distinction; indeed, he can endure no enemy other than one in whom there is nothing to despise and a great deal to honor! By contrast, imagine “the enemy” as the person of ressentiment conceives him—and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” and as his fundamental concept, from which he then also devises, as its afterimage and counterpart, a “good one”—himself!…

11 Exactly the reverse, then, of the noble person, who conceives the fundamental concept “good” first and spontaneously, from himself, and only then creates a conception of “bad”! This “bad” of noble origin and that “evil” from the brewing vat of unsated hatred—the first an after-creation, an incidental thing, a complementary color, the second, by contrast, the original, the beginning, the true deed in the conception of a slave morality—how differently these two words “bad” and “evil” stand, though they appear opposed to the same concept “good”! But it is not the same concept “good”: rather, let us ask who is actually “evil” in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. Answered with all rigor: precisely the “good one” of the other morality, precisely the noble, the powerful, the ruler, only recolored, reinterpreted, seen differently through the poisonous eye of ressentiment. Here we would least of all deny one thing: anyone who came to know those “good ones” only as enemies came to know nothing but evil enemies. And those same people who are so strictly held in bounds by custom, reverence, usage, gratitude, still more by mutual surveillance and jealousy among equals, and who in their conduct toward one another show themselves so inventive in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship—outwardly, where the foreign, the foreign land begins, they are not much better than beasts of prey let loose. There they enjoy freedom from every social constraint; in the wilderness they compensate themselves for the tension produced by a long confinement and enclosure within the peace of the community. They return to the innocence of the predatory conscience, as exultant monsters who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murders, burnings, rapes, and tortures with the high spirits and inner equilibrium of students after a prank, convinced that the poets will now once again have something to sing and praise for a long time to come. At the bottom of all these noble races one cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast roaming in its lust for plunder and victory. This hidden foundation needs release from time to time; the animal must get out again, must return to the wilderness—Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—in this need they are all alike. It is the noble races that have left the concept “barbarian” on every trail they have traveled; even their highest culture betrays an awareness of this, and a pride in it as well—for example, when Pericles tells his Athenians in that famous funeral oration, “Our daring has forced a path to every land and sea, everywhere raising imperishable monuments to itself in good and ill.” This “daring” of noble races, mad, absurd, sudden in its expression, the incalculable, the improbable character of their undertakings—Pericles singles out the Athenians’ carefree ease for special praise—their indifference and contempt toward safety, body, life, comfort, their terrible cheerfulness and depth of pleasure in all destruction, in all the voluptuous joys of victory and cruelty: for those who suffered from it, all this came together in the image of the “barbarian,” the “evil enemy,” perhaps the “Goth,” the “Vandal.” The deep, icy mistrust the German arouses as soon as he comes to power, again even now, is still an aftershock of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe watched the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries—although there is scarcely a conceptual kinship, let alone a blood relationship, between the ancient Germanic peoples and us Germans. I once drew attention to Hesiod’s perplexity when he devised the succession of cultural ages and tried to express them in gold, silver, and bronze. He knew no other way to resolve the contradiction presented to him by Homer’s splendid but also so dreadful, so violent world than to make two ages out of one and place them in succession: first the age of the heroes and demigods of Troy and Thebes, as that world had remained in the memory of the noble lineages who had their own ancestors in it; then the bronze age, as that same world appeared to the descendants of the trampled, robbed, mistreated, carried away, and sold—a bronze age, as I have said, hard, cold, cruel, without feeling or conscience, crushing everything and coating it with blood. Suppose it were true, as is at any rate now believed to be “true,” that the meaning of all culture is to breed from the beast of prey “man” a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal. We would then undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment, with whose help the noble lineages and their ideals were finally disgraced and overpowered, as the true instruments of culture—which would certainly not yet mean that their bearers themselves also represented culture. Rather, the opposite would be not merely probable—no! it is plain to see today! These bearers of the oppressive instincts thirsting for repayment, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, of all pre-Aryan populations in particular—they represent the regression of humanity! These “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to humanity, and rather a reason for suspicion, an argument against “culture” itself! One may be entirely justified in never losing one’s fear of the blond beast at the bottom of every noble race and in remaining on guard. But who would not a hundred times rather be afraid if he could also admire, than not be afraid but remain unable to escape the disgusting sight of the malformed, diminished, stunted, poisoned? And is that not our fate? What arouses our revulsion toward “man” today?—for we suffer from man, there is no doubt.—Not fear; rather, that we have nothing more to fear from man; that the vermin “man” is in the foreground, swarming; that the “tame man,” the hopelessly mediocre and uninvigorating man, has already learned to feel himself the goal and summit, the meaning of history, the “higher man”—indeed, that he has a certain right to feel this way insofar as he feels himself at a distance from the profusion of the malformed, sickly, tired, worn-out things of which Europe is beginning to stink today, and thus as something at least relatively well-formed, at least still capable of life, at least saying yes to life…

12 —Here I will not suppress a sigh and a final hope. What is it that I, in particular, find quite unbearable? The one thing I cannot cope with, that suffocates me and makes me languish? Bad air! Bad air! That something malformed comes near me; that I must smell the entrails of a malformed soul!… What else will one not endure—distress, privation, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude? Fundamentally one manages everything else, born as one is to an underground, embattled existence. Again and again one comes back into the light, again and again experiences one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands there as one was born, unbreakable, taut, ready for something new, something still harder, more distant, like a bow that all hardship only draws tighter.—But from time to time, grant me—assuming there are heavenly patronesses, beyond good and evil—a glimpse; grant me just one glimpse of something perfect, fully realized, happy, powerful, triumphant, in which there is still something to fear! Of a human being who justifies the human being, a complementary, redeeming stroke of human good fortune for whose sake we may hold fast to faith in humanity!… For this is how things stand: the diminution and leveling of European man conceals our greatest danger, for this sight makes us weary… Today we see nothing that wants to grow greater; we sense that things are still going down, down, toward the thinner, more good-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian—man, there is no doubt, is becoming ever “better”… Here precisely lies Europe’s doom: with our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our reverence for him, our hope for him, indeed our will for him. The sight of man now makes us weary—what is nihilism today if it is not that?… We are weary of man…

13 —But let us return: the problem of the other origin of the “good,” of the good as the person of ressentiment has devised it, demands to be brought to a close.—That lambs bear a grudge against great birds of prey is no cause for surprise; only, it offers no reason to resent the great birds of prey for taking little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is as little a bird of prey as possible, rather its opposite, a lamb—should he not be good?” there is nothing to object to in this establishment of an ideal, even if the birds of prey will regard it a little mockingly and perhaps say to themselves, “We bear them no grudge at all, these good lambs; we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”—To demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a will to overpower, a will to overthrow, a will to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it express itself as strength. A quantum of force is precisely such a quantum of drive, will, activity—rather, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, acting itself, and only through the seduction of language, and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it, can it appear otherwise. Language understands and misunderstands all activity as conditioned by something that acts, by a “subject.” Just as the people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter to be an action, the effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength, as though behind the strong man there were an indifferent substratum that was free to express strength or not. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, acting, becoming; “the doer” is merely invented and added to the deed—the deed is everything. At bottom, the people double the deed when they make lightning flash: this is a doing-doing; they posit the same event once as cause and then again as its effect. Natural scientists do no better when they say “force moves, force causes” and the like. For all its coolness, its freedom from affect, our entire science still stands under the seduction of language and has not rid itself of the changelings foisted upon it, the “subjects”—the atom, for example, is such a changeling, as is Kant’s “thing in itself.” Is it any wonder that the repressed, secretly smoldering affects of revenge and hatred exploit this belief for themselves, and fundamentally uphold no belief more fervently than that the strong man is free to be weak, and the bird of prey to be a lamb?—for in this way they gain the right, in their own eyes, to hold the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey… When the oppressed, trampled, violated, out of the vengeful cunning of powerlessness, exhort themselves, “Let us be different from the evil ones, namely good! And good is everyone who does not violate, who harms no one, who does not attack, who does not repay, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids all evil and asks little of life in general, like us, the patient, humble, just”—heard coldly and without prejudice, this really means no more than: “We weak ones are simply weak; it is good if we do nothing for which we are not strong enough.” But this harsh fact, this prudence of the lowest order, possessed even by insects—which play dead in great danger to avoid doing “too much”—has, thanks to that counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, dressed itself in the splendor of renunciatory, quiet, waiting virtue, as though the weakness of the weak—that is, after all, his essence, his activity, his whole sole unavoidable, irremovable reality—were a voluntary achievement, something willed, chosen, a deed, a merit. This kind of person needs belief in the indifferent, freely choosing “subject” out of an instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie habitually sanctifies itself. The subject—or, to speak more popularly, the soul—has perhaps been the best article of faith on earth until now because it made possible for the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, that sublime self-deception of interpreting weakness itself as freedom, their being thus and thus as merit.

14 —Does anyone want to look down a little into the secret of how ideals are manufactured on earth? Who has the courage?… Well then! Here is an open view into that dark workshop. Wait another moment, Mr. Busybody and Daredevil: your eye must first grow used to this false, shimmering light… There! Enough! Now speak! What is happening down there? Tell me what you see, man of the most dangerous curiosity—now I am the one listening.—

—“I see nothing, but I hear all the more. There is a cautious, treacherous, quiet muttering and whispering together from every nook and corner. It seems to me that they are lying; a sugary mildness clings to every sound. Weakness is to be lied into merit, there is no doubt—it is just as you said.”—

—Go on!

—“And powerlessness that does not repay into ‘goodness’; anxious lowliness into ‘humility’; submission to those one hates into ‘obedience’—namely to someone whom they say commands this submission; they call him God. The weak man’s inoffensiveness, the very cowardice with which he abounds, his standing at the door, his inevitable need to wait, acquire good names here, as ‘patience’; they are also called virtue itself. Inability to take revenge is called unwillingness to take revenge, perhaps even forgiveness—‘for they do not know what they are doing—we alone know what they are doing!’ They also speak of ‘love of one’s enemies’—and sweat as they do so.”

—Go on!

—“They are wretched, there is no doubt, all these mutterers and counterfeiters in corners, although they huddle warmly together—but they tell me their wretchedness means God has chosen and distinguished them; one beats the dogs one loves best. Perhaps this wretchedness is also a preparation, a trial, a schooling; perhaps it is still more—something that will one day be compensated and paid out with enormous interest in gold—no! in happiness. They call that ‘blessedness.’”

—Go on!

—“Now they give me to understand that they are not merely better than the powerful, the masters of the earth whose spittle they must lick—not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God commands them to honor all authority—that they are not merely better, but also ‘better off,’ or at any rate will one day be better off. But enough! Enough! I cannot stand it anymore. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are manufactured—it seems to me it stinks of sheer lies.”

—No! One moment more! You have not yet said anything about the masterpiece of these black magicians, who make whiteness, milk, and innocence out of every blackness. Have you not noticed what perfects their refinement, their boldest, subtlest, most ingenious, most mendacious artistic trick? Pay attention! These cellar animals full of revenge and hatred—what is it they make of revenge and hatred? Have you ever heard those words? If you trusted only their words, would you suspect that you were among nothing but people of ressentiment?…

—“I understand; I open my ears once more—oh! oh! oh! and hold my nose. Only now do I hear what they have already said so often: ‘We good ones—we are the just.’ What they demand they do not call repayment but ‘the triumph of justice’; what they hate is not their enemy—no! they hate ‘injustice,’ ‘godlessness’; what they believe and hope for is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication of sweet revenge—Homer already called it ‘sweeter than honey’—but the victory of God, the just God, over the godless. What remains for them to love on earth is not their brothers in hatred but their ‘brothers in love,’ as they say, all the good and just on earth.”

—And what do they call the thing that consoles them against all the sufferings of life—their phantasmagoria of future blessedness anticipated?

—“What? Am I hearing correctly? They call it ‘the Last Judgment,’ the coming of their kingdom, the ‘kingdom of God’—but meanwhile they live ‘in faith,’ ‘in love,’ ‘in hope.’”

—Enough! Enough!

15 Faith in what? Love for what? Hope for what?—These weaklings—at some time or other, you see, they too want to be the strong, there is no doubt of it; at some time their “kingdom” too is to come—“the kingdom of God,” as they call it flatly, as I said: in everything one is so humble! To live to see that, one needs to live long, beyond death—indeed one needs eternal life, so that one may also be recompensed eternally in the “kingdom of God” for that earthly life “in faith, in love, in hope.” Recompensed for what? Recompensed by what?… Dante, it seems to me, grossly blundered when, with a terrifying ingenuousness, he set over the gate of his Hell that inscription “Eternal love created me too”:—over the gate of the Christian paradise and its “eternal blessedness” the inscription “Eternal hatred created me too” would in any case have had a better right to stand—assuming that a truth may stand over a gate above a lie! For what is the blessedness of that paradise?… We might perhaps already guess it; but it is better that an authority not to be underestimated in such matters expressly testifies to it for us, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven,” he says, gentle as a lamb, “will behold the punishments of the damned, so that their blessedness may please them the more.” Or would one rather hear it in a stronger key, perhaps from the mouth of a triumphant Church Father who dissuaded his Christians from the cruel voluptuousness of the public shows—why then? “Faith offers us much more,” he says, de spectac. c. 29 ss., “—much stronger things; thanks to redemption, quite other joys lie at our command; in place of the athletes we have our martyrs; if we want blood—well, then we have the blood of Christ… But what awaits us first on the day of his return, of his triumph!”—and then he goes on, the enraptured visionary: “For there remain other shows, that last and everlasting day of judgment, that day unforeseen by the nations, that day they laughed at, when so great an antiquity of the world and all its births shall be drunk up in one fire. What a breadth of spectacle then! What shall I admire! What shall I laugh at! Where shall I rejoice! Where exult, as I watch so many and such great kings, who were announced as received into heaven, groaning together with Jupiter himself and with his own witnesses in the lowest darkness! Likewise the governors” (the provincial governors) “the persecutors of the Lord’s name, melting in flames fiercer than those with which they themselves raged against the Christians! Whom besides, those wise philosophers, blushing before their disciples as they burn together with them, the men who persuaded them that nothing pertained to God, who affirmed that souls were either nothing or would not return into their former bodies! Even the poets, trembling not before Rhadamanthus or Minos but before the tribunal of the Christ they did not expect! Then shall the tragedians be heard the more, the more sonorous of voice, to be sure” (better at voice, still worse bawlers) “in their own calamity; then the actors shall be known, much more agile through the fire; then the charioteer is to be seen on his flaming wheel, all red; then the athletes are to be contemplated, hurled not in the gymnasia but in the fire—except that even then I would not have them alive, since I would rather direct my insatiable gaze at those who raged against the Lord. ‘This is he,’ I shall say, ‘the carpenter’s son or the whore’s’” (as everything that follows, and especially this designation of Jesus’s mother, known from the Talmud, shows, Tertullian means the Jews from here on) “‘the destroyer of the sabbath, the Samaritan, the one who has a demon. This is he whom you redeemed from Judas, this is he who was beaten with reeds and with fists, defiled with spittings, given gall and vinegar to drink. This is he whom the disciples secretly stole away, so that he might be said to have risen again, or the gardener took him down, lest his lettuces be damaged by the crowd of visitors.’ To see such things, to exult at such things, what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you out of his liberality? And yet we already have these things in a certain manner through faith, represented by the spirit that imagines them. But what are those things which neither eye has seen nor ear heard nor have ascended into the heart of man? (1. Cor. 2, 9.) I believe they are more pleasing than the circus and both caveae” (the first and fourth tier or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stage) “and every stadium.”—Through faith: so it stands written.

16 Let us come to the conclusion. The two opposed valuations “good and bad,” “good and evil” have fought a fearful, thousand-year-long battle on earth; and however certain it is that the second valuation has long been in the ascendant, even now there is no lack of places where the battle is still fought out undecided. One might even say that in the meantime it has been carried ever higher up and precisely thereby ever deeper, ever more spiritual: so that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the “higher nature,” of the more spiritual nature, than to be divided in that sense and truly still to be a battlefield for those opposites. The symbol of this battle, written in a script that has remained legible across all human history, is called “Rome against Judaea, Judaea against Rome”:—there has been no greater event so far than this battle, this way of posing the question, this deadly hostility. Rome felt in the Jew something like anti-nature itself, so to speak its antipodal monster; in Rome the Jew was held “convicted of hatred against the whole human race”: with right, insofar as one has a right to tie the salvation and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, of Roman values. What, by contrast, did the Jews feel against Rome? One guesses it from a thousand signs; but it is enough to bring once more to mind the Johannine Apocalypse, that wildest of all written outbursts that revenge has on its conscience. (One should not, incidentally, underestimate the deep consistency of the Christian instinct when it inscribed precisely this book of hatred with the name of the disciple of love, the same to whom it gave that amorous, rapturous gospel as its own—: there is a piece of truth in this, however much literary counterfeiting may have been necessary for the purpose.) The Romans were indeed the strong and the noble, as they had never been stronger and nobler on earth, had never even been dreamed of; every remnant of them, every inscription delights, provided one guesses what it is that writes there. The Jews, on the contrary, were that priestly people of ressentiment par excellence, which was possessed by a popular-moral genius without equal: one need only compare the kindredly gifted peoples, the Chinese or the Germans, say, with the Jews, in order to feel what is first and what fifth rank. Which of them has so far won, Rome or Judaea? But there is no doubt at all: consider before whom one bows today in Rome itself as before the epitome of all the highest values—and not only in Rome, but on almost half the earth, everywhere that man has become tame or wants to become tame—before three Jews, as is known, and one Jewess (before Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet-weaver Paul, and the mother of the first-named Jesus, called Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome has without any doubt been defeated. True, in the Renaissance there was a brilliant and uncanny reawakening of the classical ideal, of the noble way of valuing all things: Rome itself stirred like a wakeful seeming-dead under the pressure of the new Judaising Rome built over it, which presented the aspect of an ecumenical synagogue and was called “church”: but at once Judaea triumphed again, thanks to that thoroughly plebeian (German and English) ressentiment movement called the Reformation, plus what had to follow from it, the re-establishment of the church—the re-establishment too of the old grave-calm of classical Rome. In a sense even more decisive and deeper than then, Judaea came once more, with the French Revolution, to victory over the classical ideal: the last political nobility there was in Europe, that of the seventeenth and eighteenth French centuries, collapsed under the popular ressentiment instincts—there was never heard on earth a greater jubilation, a noisier enthusiasm! True, in the midst of it the most monstrous and most unexpected thing happened: the ancient ideal itself stepped in the flesh and with unheard-of splendor before the eyes and the conscience of humanity—and once more, stronger, simpler, more insistent than ever, rang out, against the old lying watchword of ressentiment concerning the prerogative of the many, against the will to the low, to the debasement, to the leveling, to the downward and eveningward of man, the fearful and delightful counter-watchword of the prerogative of the few! As a last signpost to the other way appeared Napoleon, the most singular and latest-born human being there has ever been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal in itself made flesh—one should well consider what a problem that is: Napoleon, that synthesis of inhuman and superhuman…

17 —Was it over with that? Was that greatest of all antitheses of ideals thereby laid ad acta for all time? Or only adjourned, adjourned for long?… Should there not, at some time or other, have to come a still much more fearful, much longer-prepared blazing-up of the old fire? More than that: should not precisely that be desirable with all one’s powers? even willed? even promoted?… Whoever begins at this point, like my readers, to think onward, to think further, will hardly come soon to the end of it—reason enough for me to come to the end myself, assuming that it has long since become clear enough what I want, what I want precisely with that dangerous watchword which is written on the body of my last book: “Beyond Good and Evil”… This means at the very least not “beyond good and bad.”— —

Note. I take the opportunity that this treatise gives me to express publicly and formally a wish that I have so far uttered only in occasional conversation with scholars: namely, that some philosophical faculty might earn merit for the promotion of moral-historical studies through a series of academic prize competitions:—perhaps this book may serve to give a vigorous impulse in precisely such a direction. With a view to a possibility of this kind, let the following question be proposed: it deserves the attention of philologists and historians as much as that of the actual professional scholars of philosophy.

“What hints does the science of language, in particular etymological research, give for the history of the development of moral concepts?”

—On the other hand it is, of course, just as necessary to win the participation of physiologists and physicians for these problems (concerning the value of the valuations that have prevailed so far): while it may be left to the professional philosophers to act as advocates and mediators in this single case too, after they have on the whole succeeded in transforming the originally so intractable, so mistrustful relation between philosophy, physiology and medicine into the friendliest and most fruitful exchange. Indeed, all tables of goods, every “you shall,” of which history or ethnological research knows, first need physiological illumination and interpretation, in any case still before the psychological; all of them likewise await a critique from the side of medical science. The question: what is this or that table of goods and “morality” worth? demands to be posed from the most various perspectives; one cannot, in particular, lay out the “value for what?” finely enough. Something, for instance, that would manifestly have value with a view to the greatest possible durability of a race (or to the increase of its capacities of adaptation to a particular climate, or to the preservation of the greatest number) would by no means have the same value if it were a matter of breeding up a stronger type. The well-being of the many and the well-being of the few are opposed value perspectives: we leave it to the naivety of English biologists to hold the former for the more valuable in itself… All sciences have now to do preparatory work for the philosopher’s future task: this task understood as meaning that the philosopher has to solve the problem of value, that he has to determine the order of rank of values.—

First Essay:

Good and Evil, Good and Bad.

1 These English psychologists, whom we also have to thank for the only attempts so far to write a history of how morality arose, are quite a puzzle themselves. I admit that, as puzzles in the flesh, they even have an important advantage over their books—they themselves are interesting! What do these English psychologists really want? Willingly or not, we always find them doing the same work: pushing the shameful side of our inner world into the foreground. They look for what really works, guides us, and determines our development precisely where human intellectual pride would least want to find it—for example, in the inertia of habit, in forgetfulness, in a blind and accidental tangling and mechanical linking of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and thoroughly stupid. What keeps driving these psychologists in this particular direction? Is it a secret, spiteful, petty instinct to belittle human beings, an instinct they may not admit even to themselves? Or is it a pessimistic suspicion, the distrust of disappointed idealists who have grown gloomy, poisonous, and green with bitterness? Or a small underground hostility and grudge against Christianity (and Plato), which may not even have crossed the threshold of consciousness? Or perhaps a lustful taste for what is strange, painfully paradoxical, questionable, and senseless in existence? Or finally—a bit of everything: a little pettiness, a little gloom, a little hostility to Christianity, a little craving for a tickle and some spice? … But people tell me they are simply old, cold, boring frogs, crawling and hopping around on human beings and into them, as if they were entirely in their element there—in a swamp. I resist this description when I hear it; more than that, I don't believe it. And if we may wish where we cannot know, I sincerely wish the opposite were true of them. I wish these researchers and microscopists of the soul were fundamentally brave, generous, proud animals who know how to keep both their hearts and their pain in check. I wish they had trained themselves to sacrifice everything they might wish for to the truth, to every truth, even the plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth … Because such truths exist.

2 So all respect to whatever good spirits may be at work in these historians of morality! Unfortunately, one thing is certain: they lack the historical spirit itself. All the good spirits of history have abandoned them! Like philosophers traditionally do, they all think in an essentially unhistorical way. There is no doubt about that. Their botched genealogy of morality shows itself right at the start, when they try to establish where the concept and judgment “good” came from. “Originally,” they decree, “unselfish actions were praised and called good by those who received them, those to whom they were useful. Later, people forgot where this praise came from. Because unselfish actions had habitually always been praised as good, people also came to feel that they were good—as if they were good in themselves.” We can see at once that this first explanation already contains all the typical quirks of English psychologists. Here we have “usefulness,” “forgetting,” “habit,” and finally “error,” all serving as the basis for a way of valuing things that higher human beings have so far taken pride in, as a kind of privilege of humanity itself. This pride is supposed to be humbled, this valuation devalued. Has that been achieved? … First, it seems obvious to me that this theory looks for and locates the actual birthplace of the concept “good” in the wrong place. The judgment “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Instead, it was “the good” themselves—the noble, powerful, highly placed, and high-minded—who felt and decided that they and their actions were good, meaning first-rate. They set themselves against everything low, low-minded, common, and vulgar. Their feeling of rank and distance was what first led them to claim the right to create values and coin names for them. What did they care about usefulness! The viewpoint of usefulness could hardly be more foreign or inappropriate to this hot outpouring of supreme value judgments that establish and distinguish ranks. Here feeling has reached the opposite of that low temperature required by all calculating prudence, all calculations of usefulness—not just once, not for an exceptional hour, but permanently. As I said, the feeling of nobility and distance, the lasting, dominant, basic and overall feeling that a higher ruling kind has toward a lower kind, toward a “below”—that is where the contrast between “good” and “bad” comes from. (The rulers' right to give names goes so far that we should allow ourselves to see the origin of language itself as an expression of the rulers' power. They say, “This is such and such.” They stamp every thing and event with a sound and in doing so take possession of it, as it were.) Because of this origin, the word “good” is certainly not necessarily attached to “unselfish” actions from the start, as those genealogists of morality superstitiously believe. Only when aristocratic value judgments decline does the whole contrast between “selfish” and “unselfish” force itself more and more on the human conscience. In my terms, it is the herd instinct that finally finds a voice—and words—in this contrast. Even then, it takes a long time before this instinct becomes so dominant that moral valuation gets caught and stuck in that contrast. This is the case in Europe today, for example. The prejudice that treats “moral,” “unselfish,” and “disinterested” as equivalent concepts now rules with the force of an “obsession,” a disease of the mind.

3 But second, quite apart from being historically indefensible, that hypothesis about the origin of the value judgment “good” contains a psychological absurdity. The usefulness of an unselfish action is supposed to be the source of the praise it receives, and that source is supposed to have been forgotten. How is such forgetting even possible? Did the usefulness of such actions ever stop? Quite the opposite. Their usefulness has been an everyday experience in every age, something constantly being underlined all over again. So instead of disappearing from consciousness, instead of becoming forgettable, it must have impressed itself on consciousness with increasing clarity. How much more reasonable is the opposite theory, upheld by Herbert Spencer, for example—though that doesn't make it any truer. He takes “good” to mean essentially the same thing as “useful” or “fit for a purpose.” On this account, in the judgments “good” and “bad,” humanity has summed up and endorsed its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences of what is useful and suited to a purpose, and what is harmful and unsuited to a purpose. According to this theory, what has always proved useful is good. It can therefore claim recognition as “valuable to the highest degree,” as “valuable in itself.” As I said, this explanation is wrong too. But at least the explanation itself is internally reasonable and psychologically defensible.

4 What pointed me toward the right path was asking what the names for “good” coined in different languages actually mean in terms of their word origins. I found that they all lead back to the same change in concepts. Everywhere, “noble” and “aristocratic” in the social sense are the basic concept from which “good,” meaning “noble in soul,” “aristocratic” in the sense of “having a high-quality soul,” “privileged in soul,” necessarily develops. This development always runs alongside another: “common,” “vulgar,” and “low” finally become the concept “bad.” The clearest example of the latter is the German word “schlecht” itself. It is identical with “schlicht”—compare “schlechtweg” and “schlechterdings”—and originally meant the plain, common man, without any suspicious sidelong glance, simply in contrast to the noble man. Around the time of the Thirty Years' War, quite late, then, this meaning shifted to the one now in use. This seems to me an essential insight for the genealogy of morality. It was discovered so late because democratic prejudice has a restraining influence in the modern world on every question of origins. That influence reaches even into the apparently most objective fields of natural science and physiology, as I will only suggest here. But the notorious case of Buckle shows what damage this prejudice can do, especially to morality and history, once it is unleashed as hatred. Here the plebeian character of the modern mind, which is English in origin, erupted once again on its native soil, as violently as a muddy volcano, and with the over-seasoned, over-loud, vulgar eloquence with which all volcanoes have spoken so far.

5 For our problem, which can be called a quiet problem for good reasons and speaks selectively to only a few ears, one finding is of considerable interest. In many of the words and roots that mean “good,” we can still glimpse the main quality that made the nobles feel they were people of higher rank. Perhaps most often they name themselves simply after their greater power—as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the commanders”—or after its most visible sign, for example as “the rich,” “the owners.” That is the meaning of arya, with corresponding meanings in Iranian and Slavic. But they also name themselves after a typical character trait, and that is the case that concerns us here. For example, they call themselves “the truthful.” The Greek nobility leads the way here, with the poet Theognis of Megara as its spokesman. The word coined for this, ἐσθλός, at its root means someone who is, who has reality, who is real, who is true. Then, with a turn toward the person, it means the true person as the truthful person. At this stage in the change of concepts it becomes the nobility's slogan and catchword, and takes on the full meaning “aristocratic.” It marks them off from the lying common man as Theognis sees and describes him. Finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word remains as a name for nobility of soul, becoming ripe and sweet, so to speak. In κακός, as in δειλός—the commoner as opposed to the ἀγαθός—cowardice is emphasized. This may suggest where to look for the word origin of ἀγαθός, which allows several interpretations. In the Latin malus, which I place alongside μέλας, the common man might have been identified as the dark-colored man, above all as the black-haired man (“this man is black”), the pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil. His color most clearly distinguished him from the blond—namely Aryan—conquering race that had become the rulers. At least Gaelic gave me an exactly corresponding case: fin, for example in the name Fin-Gal, is the word marking out the nobility. Eventually it meant the good, noble, pure person; originally it meant the blond head, as opposed to the dark, black-haired original inhabitants. The Celts, incidentally, were a thoroughly blond race. It is a mistake to connect those stretches of mostly dark-haired people that stand out on more careful ethnographic maps of Germany with any Celtic origins or mixing of blood, as Virchow still does. Instead, the pre-Aryan population of Germany reappears in these places. (The same is true of almost all Europe. Essentially, the conquered race has finally regained the upper hand there—in color, in the shortness of the skull, perhaps even in intellectual and social instincts. Who can guarantee that modern democracy, still more modern anarchism, and especially that leaning toward the “commune,” the most primitive form of society, now shared by all Europe's socialists, do not mainly signify an enormous throwback—and that the conquering, ruling race, the Aryans, is not losing out physiologically as well? …) I believe I can interpret the Latin bonus as “the warrior,” assuming I am right to trace bonus back to an older duonus. Compare bellum = duellum = duen-lum, in which that duonus seems to me to have survived. So bonus means a man of conflict, of division (duo), a man of war. We can see what made up a man's “goodness” in ancient Rome. And our German “gut” itself—might it not mean “the divine one,” the man “of divine descent”? And might it not be identical with the name of the Goths as a people—originally as a nobility? The reasons for this guess do not belong here.

6 If the highest caste is also the priestly caste, this does not yet break the rule that political superiority always develops into superiority of soul, though it does give rise to exceptions. Such a caste will naturally prefer a name for itself that recalls its priestly function. Here, for example, “pure” and “impure” first stand opposed as signs of social rank. Here too, “good” and “bad” later develop in a sense no longer tied to rank. But we should be warned against giving these concepts “pure” and “impure” too much weight, too wide a scope, or even a symbolic meaning from the start. All the concepts of early humanity were originally understood in ways we can scarcely imagine: crude, clumsy, outward, narrow, direct, and especially not symbolic. At first, the “pure” man is simply someone who washes, who forbids himself certain foods that cause skin diseases, who does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower classes, who is disgusted by blood—nothing more, not much more! On the other hand, the whole character of an essentially priestly aristocracy makes it clear why contrasts in valuation could become internal and sharpen dangerously at such an early stage here. In fact, they eventually tore open gulfs between people that even an Achilles of free thinking could not leap across without shuddering. From the beginning there is something unhealthy in these priestly aristocracies and in their prevailing habits, which turn away from action and alternate between brooding and emotional explosions. These habits seem to result in the intestinal sickness and nervous exhaustion that almost inevitably cling to priests of every age. But the remedies they themselves invented for their sickness—mustn't we say that their aftereffects have ultimately proved a hundred times more dangerous than the disease they were supposed to cure? Humanity itself still suffers from the aftereffects of these naive priestly cures! Think, for example, of certain diets (avoiding meat), fasting, sexual abstinence, and flight “into the desert”—isolation in the manner of Weir Mitchell, though without the subsequent fattening treatment and overfeeding, which are the most effective remedy for all the hysteria of the ascetic ideal. Add the priests' whole metaphysics, which is hostile to the senses and makes people lazy and over-refined; their self-hypnosis in the manner of fakirs and Brahmins—Brahman used as a glass button to stare at and an obsession—and the eventual, all too understandable disgust with everything, with its radical cure, nothingness. Or God: the longing for mystical union with God is the Buddhist's longing for nothingness, Nirvana—and nothing more! With priests, everything becomes more dangerous, not just remedies and healing practices, but also pride, revenge, sharp thinking, excess, love, the desire to rule, virtue, and sickness. In fairness, we could also add that only on the ground of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, did the human being become an interesting animal at all. Only here did the human soul acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil. And those are the two basic forms of human superiority over other animals so far! …

7 We will already have guessed how easily the priestly way of valuing things can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic way and then develop into its opposite. This gets a particular push whenever the priestly caste and the warrior caste face each other jealously and refuse to agree on the prize. Knightly-aristocratic value judgments rest on a powerful body, a flourishing, rich, even overflowing health, together with what keeps it that way: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, competitive games, and everything else involving strong, free, cheerful action. The priestly-noble way of valuing things rests, as we have seen, on different conditions. So much the worse for it when it comes to war! Priests, as we know, are the most evil enemies. But why? Because they are the most powerless. Their powerlessness makes their hatred grow to monstrous and sinister proportions, to its most spiritual and poisonous form. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests, and so have the most brilliant haters. Against the spirit of priestly revenge, all other spirit scarcely counts. Human history would be a thoroughly stupid affair without the spirit that the powerless have brought into it. Let's take the greatest example right away. Everything done on earth against “the nobles,” “the mighty,” “the masters,” “those in power,” is not worth mentioning beside what the Jews have done against them. The Jews, that priestly people, ultimately knew how to get satisfaction against their enemies and conquerors only by radically overturning their values, by an act of the most spiritual revenge. This was the only way suited to a priestly people, the people of the most deeply repressed priestly thirst for revenge. It was the Jews who dared, with terrifying consistency, to reverse the aristocratic equation of values (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = loved by God). They held on to that reversal with the teeth of the deepest hatred, the hatred of powerlessness: “Only the miserable are good; only the poor, powerless, and lowly are good. The suffering, deprived, sick, and ugly are also the only pious people, the only ones blessed by God. Happiness in heaven belongs to them alone. But you, you nobles and mighty ones, you are forever the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless. You will also forever be the unhappy, the cursed, and the damned!” … We know who inherited this Jewish overturning of values … In connection with the immense, immeasurably fateful initiative the Jews took with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall a statement I reached on another occasion (“Beyond Good and Evil,” p. 118): with the Jews, the slave revolt in morality begins. That revolt has a history of two thousand years behind it. We have lost sight of it today only because it—won …

8 But you don't understand this? You have no eyes for something that took two thousand years to win? … That is no surprise. All long things are hard to see, hard to take in at a glance. But this is what happened. From the trunk of that tree of revenge and hatred, Jewish hatred—the deepest and most sublime hatred, a hatred that creates ideals and transforms values, the like of which had never existed on earth—something equally unmatched grew: a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all kinds of love. And what other trunk could it have grown from? … But don't imagine it grew as the actual denial of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No, the reverse is true! This love grew out of that hatred as its crown, its triumphant crown, spreading wider and wider in the purest light and fullest sunshine. In the realm of light and height, it was driven toward the goals of that hatred—victory, plunder, seduction—with the same force that drove the roots of that hatred deeper and more greedily into everything deep and evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, the gospel of love in the flesh, this “redeemer” bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—wasn't he precisely seduction in its most sinister and irresistible form? Wasn't he the seductive detour to those very Jewish values and new ideals? Didn't Israel reach the final goal of its sublime thirst for revenge by the detour of this “redeemer,” this apparent opponent and dissolver of Israel? Doesn't it belong to the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge—a far-seeing, underground revenge that takes effect slowly and calculates ahead—that Israel itself had to deny the actual instrument of its revenge before the whole world, as if it were a mortal enemy, and nail it to the cross? This allowed “the whole world,” meaning all Israel's opponents, to take that very bait without hesitation. And on the other hand, could the most refined mind possibly devise a more dangerous bait? Anything to match the tempting, intoxicating, numbing, corrupting power of that symbol, the “holy cross,” that horrifying paradox of a “God on the cross,” that mystery of a final, ultimate, unimaginable cruelty, of God's self-crucifixion for the salvation of humanity? … At least this is certain: under this sign, Israel, with its revenge and overturning of all values, has so far triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all more noble ideals.

9 “But why do you still talk about more noble ideals! Let's accept the facts: the people have won—or ‘the slaves,’ or ‘the rabble,’ or ‘the herd,’ or whatever you like to call them. If the Jews brought this about, then good! No people ever had a more world-historical mission. ‘The masters’ have been disposed of; the morality of the common man has won. We may also see this victory as blood poisoning—it has mixed the races together. I don't object. But there is no doubt that this poisoning has succeeded. The ‘redemption’ of the human race—from ‘the masters,’ that is—is well under way. Everything is visibly becoming Jewish, Christian, or vulgar—what do words matter! The progress of this poisoning through the whole body of humanity seems unstoppable. From now on its tempo and pace may even become slower, subtler, less audible, more deliberate all the time. There is plenty of time … Does the church still have a necessary task to perform toward this end today? Does it still have any right to exist at all? Or could we do without it? That is the question. Doesn't it seem to obstruct and hold back that progress rather than speed it up? Well, that could be exactly what makes it useful … It has certainly become something coarse and peasant-like that offends a more delicate intelligence, a truly modern taste. Shouldn't it at least refine itself a little? … Today it drives more people away than it seduces … Which of us would be a free thinker if the church didn't exist? The church offends us, not its poison … Quite apart from the church, we too love the poison …” That was a “free thinker's” epilogue to my speech—an honest animal, as he had amply revealed, and a democrat besides. He had listened to me up to that point and couldn't bear to hear me fall silent. For me, however, there is much to be silent about here.

10 The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values. This is the resentment of beings who are denied the real reaction, the reaction of action, and who make up for it only through imaginary revenge. Every noble morality grows out of a triumphant yes to itself. But slave morality says no from the start to an “outside,” an “other,” a “not itself.” And this no is its creative act. This reversal of the gaze that sets values—this necessary turn outward instead of back toward itself—is part of ressentiment. To come into being, slave morality always first needs an opposing, external world. In physiological terms, it needs outside stimuli to act at all. Its action is fundamentally reaction. The noble way of valuing things does the opposite. It acts and grows spontaneously. It looks for its opposite only to say yes to itself with still more gratitude and joy. Its negative concept, “low,” “common,” “bad,” is only a pale contrasting image born later, beside its positive basic concept, soaked through with life and passion: “We nobles, we good, beautiful, happy people!” When the noble way of valuing things goes wrong and does violence to reality, it does so in a sphere it does not know enough about, indeed one it stubbornly resists really knowing. It may misjudge the sphere it despises, that of the common man, the lower classes. On the other hand, consider this: even if the feeling of contempt, of looking down from above, distorts the image of what is despised, that distortion will fall far short of the falsification with which repressed hatred, the revenge of the powerless, attacks its opponent—in a picture, of course. There is too much carelessness, too much taking things lightly, too much looking away and impatience in contempt, even too much of one's own happiness, for it to turn its object into a real caricature and monster. Don't miss the almost benevolent shades of meaning that the Greek nobility, for example, puts into all the words by which it sets the lower classes apart from itself. A kind of regret, consideration, and indulgence constantly mixes in and sweetens them. In the end, almost all the words applied to the common man survive as expressions for “unhappy” and “pitiable.” Compare δειλός, δείλαιος, πονηρός, μοχθηρός; the last two actually identify the common man as a working slave and beast of burden. And on the other hand, “bad,” “low,” and “unhappy” have never stopped blending into a single note for the Greek ear, with a tone in which “unhappy” predominates. This is an inheritance from the older, more noble, aristocratic way of valuing things, which stays true to itself even in contempt. (Philologists should recall the sense in which οἰζυρός, ἄνολβος, τλήμων, δυστυχεῖν, ξυμφορά are used.) The “well-born” simply felt they were the “happy.” They didn't have to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies, or sometimes talk themselves into it, lie themselves into it, as all people of ressentiment usually do. As full human beings overflowing with strength, and therefore necessarily active, they also knew not to separate happiness from action. Being active necessarily counted as part of their happiness—that is where εὖ πράττειν comes from. All this is very different from “happiness” at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, those festering with poisonous and hostile feelings. For them, happiness mainly appears as a narcotic, a numbing, rest, peace, a “Sabbath,” relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs—in short, as something passive. Noble people live openly and trustingly with themselves: γενναῖος, “of noble birth,” emphasizes the shade of meaning “sincere,” and probably also “naive.” But people of ressentiment are neither sincere nor naive, neither honest nor straightforward with themselves. Their souls look sideways. Their minds love hiding places, secret paths, and back doors. Everything hidden appeals to them as their world, their safety, their comfort. They know how to keep silent, not forget, wait, make themselves small and humble for the time being. A race of such people of ressentiment will necessarily end up cleverer than any noble race. It will also honor cleverness to a completely different degree: as a condition of survival of the first rank. Among noble people, cleverness easily takes on a subtle flavor of luxury and refinement. Here it is nowhere near as essential as the completely reliable functioning of the governing unconscious instincts, or even a certain lack of cleverness. Think of boldly charging ahead, whether at danger or at an enemy, or of those sudden, passionate bursts of anger, love, reverence, gratitude, and revenge in which noble souls have always recognized themselves. When ressentiment does arise in noble people, it acts itself out and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction. So it does not poison them. In countless cases it never arises at all, when it would be unavoidable in anyone weak and powerless. Not being able to take one's enemies, one's misfortunes, even one's own misdeeds seriously for long—that is the sign of strong, full natures. They have a surplus of shaping, restoring, healing power, a power that also makes them forget. A good modern example is Mirabeau, who had no memory for the insults and mean acts committed against him, and who could not forgive only because he—forgot. With a single shake, such a person throws off many pests that burrow into others. Only here is true “love of one's enemies” possible—assuming it is possible on earth at all. How much respect noble people already have for their enemies! And that respect is already a bridge to love … They want their enemies for themselves, as a mark of distinction. They cannot stand any enemy except one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! Now contrast this with “the enemy” as people of ressentiment conceive him. This is precisely their act, their creation: they have conceived “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” as the basic concept. Starting from that, they then invent a “good one” as his copy and opposite—themselves! …

11 So this is exactly the opposite of what the noble person does: first, spontaneously, starting from himself, he conceives the basic concept “good,” and only then forms an idea of “bad.” This “bad” of noble origin and that “evil” from the brewing vat of unsatisfied hatred—the first a later creation, an incidental thing, a complementary color; the second the original, the beginning, the actual act in the conception of a slave morality—how different the two words “bad” and “evil” are, though both seem to oppose the same concept “good”! But it is not the same concept “good.” Ask instead who is actually “evil” in the morality of ressentiment. The strict answer is: precisely the “good one” of the other morality, precisely the noble, powerful, ruling person, only recolored, reinterpreted, seen differently through the poisonous eye of ressentiment. Here there is one thing we least want to deny: anyone who knew those “good people” only as enemies knew nothing but evil enemies. Those same people are so strictly kept within limits by custom, respect, established practice, gratitude, and still more by watching one another, by jealousy among equals. In dealing with one another, they show such inventiveness in consideration, self-control, sensitivity, loyalty, pride, and friendship. But outside, where foreign people and foreign lands begin, they are not much better than wild beasts let loose. There they enjoy freedom from every social restraint. In the wilderness they make up for the tension of being shut and fenced for so long within the peace of the community. They return to the innocent conscience of a beast of prey, as jubilant monsters. They may walk away from a hideous series of murders, burnings, rapes, and tortures in high spirits and with their inner balance intact, as if they had only played a student prank. They are convinced that the poets will now have something to sing about and praise for a long time again. At the bottom of all these noble races, there is no mistaking the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast roaming hungrily for plunder and victory. This hidden foundation needs release from time to time; the animal must come out again, must return to the wilderness. Roman, Arab, Germanic, and Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—they all share this need. Wherever the noble races have gone, they have left behind the concept “barbarian.” Even at the height of their culture they show an awareness of this, and even pride in it. For example, in his famous funeral speech Pericles tells his Athenians, “Our daring has forced its way into every land and sea, setting up lasting monuments everywhere, for good and ill.” The “daring” of noble races, mad, absurd, and sudden in its expression; the unpredictable, even improbable character of their undertakings—Pericles singles out the Athenians' ῥαθυμία for praise; their indifference and contempt toward safety, body, life, and comfort; their terrible cheerfulness and deep pleasure in every kind of destruction, in all the delights of victory and cruelty—all this came together for those who suffered from it in the image of the “barbarian,” the “evil enemy,” perhaps the “Goth” or the “Vandal.” The deep, icy distrust aroused by the German as soon as he comes to power, again today, is still an aftershock of that unforgettable horror with which Europe watched the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries. This is so even though there is scarcely any relationship in concept between the ancient Germanic peoples and us Germans, let alone any relationship in blood. I once pointed out Hesiod's difficulty when he thought up the sequence of cultural ages and tried to express it in gold, silver, and bronze. Homer's world, magnificent but also so horrifying and violent, confronted him with a contradiction. He could deal with it only by making two ages out of one and placing them in sequence. First came the age of the heroes and demigods of Troy and Thebes, as that world had survived in the memory of the noble families who traced their own ancestors to it. Then came the bronze age, as that same world appeared to the descendants of those who had been trampled down, robbed, abused, dragged away, and sold: an age of bronze, as I said, hard, cold, cruel, without feeling or conscience, crushing everything and coating it with blood. Suppose it were true, as people now certainly believe it to be “true,” that the purpose of all culture is to breed a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, from the beast of prey called “human.” Then we would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment, with whose help the noble families and their ideals were finally disgraced and overcome, as the actual tools of culture. That would not mean, however, that the bearers of those instincts also represented culture themselves. The opposite would not merely be likely—no! Today it is plain to see! These bearers of oppressive instincts hungry for revenge, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, of all pre-Aryan populations in particular—they represent humanity's decline! These “tools of culture” are a disgrace to humanity, and rather a reason to suspect “culture” in general, an argument against it! We may have every right to remain afraid of the blond beast at the bottom of all noble races and keep on our guard. But who wouldn't a hundred times rather be afraid while also being able to admire than feel no fear and yet never escape the disgusting sight of what has failed, been made small, stunted, and poisoned? And isn't that our fate? What causes our disgust with “humanity” today? For there is no doubt that we suffer from humanity. It isn't fear. Rather, it is that we no longer have anything to fear in people; that the vermin called “human” is swarming in the foreground; that the “tame human being,” hopelessly mediocre and dreary, has already learned to see itself as the goal and peak, the meaning of history, the “higher human being.” Indeed, it has a certain right to see itself this way. It feels removed from the overflowing mass of failures, the sick, tired, worn-out people whose stink is beginning to fill Europe today. So it sees itself as something that has at least turned out relatively well, that is at least still able to live, that at least says yes to life …

12 Here I won't suppress a sigh and one last hope. What is it that I, in particular, find completely unbearable? The one thing I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and waste away? Bad air! Bad air! That something badly formed comes near me; that I have to smell the guts of a badly formed soul! … What else can't we endure—hardship, deprivation, bad weather, chronic sickness, hard work, isolation? At bottom we cope with everything else, born as we are to an underground, struggling existence. We keep coming back up into the light; we keep experiencing our golden hour of victory. And then we stand there, as we were born, unbreakable, taut, ready for something new, something still harder and further away, like a bow that every hardship only draws tighter. But from time to time, if there are heavenly patronesses beyond good and evil, grant me a glimpse, just one glimpse, of something perfect, fully successful, happy, powerful, triumphant—something still to be feared! Of a human being who justifies humanity, a lucky human exception who completes and redeems it, for whose sake we may hold on to faith in humanity! … This is how things stand: making the European human being smaller and leveling everyone out conceals our greatest danger, because the sight makes us tired … Today we see nothing that wants to grow greater. We sense that things are still going down, down, toward what is thinner, more good-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian. There is no doubt: humanity is becoming “better” all the time … Here lies Europe's fate. With our fear of human beings we have also lost our love for them, our respect for them, our hope for them, indeed our will to have them. The sight of humanity now makes us tired. What is nihilism today if it isn't that? … We are tired of humanity …

13 But let's return. We need to finish with the problem of the other origin of the “good,” of the good as people of ressentiment have imagined it. There is nothing strange about lambs disliking large birds of prey. But that gives us no reason to blame large birds of prey for taking little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, “These birds of prey are evil, and whoever is as little like a bird of prey as possible—its opposite, a lamb—mustn't that be good?” there is nothing to object to in this setting up of an ideal. The birds of prey may look a little amused by it and perhaps say to themselves, “We don't dislike them at all, these good lambs. We even love them. Nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.” To demand that strength not express itself as strength, that it not be a desire to overpower, to throw down, to become master, a thirst for enemies, resistance, and triumphs, is just as absurd as demanding that weakness express itself as strength. A quantity of force is the same quantity of drive, will, activity—indeed, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, activity itself. It can seem otherwise only under the spell of language and the basic errors of reason hardened into it. Language understands and misunderstands all activity as depending on an actor, a “subject.” Ordinary people separate lightning from its flash and treat the flash as the act, the effect, of a subject called lightning. In the same way, popular morality separates strength from its expressions, as if behind the strong person there were some neutral underlying thing that was free to express strength or not. But there is no such underlying thing. There is no “being” behind doing, acting, becoming. “The doer” is merely invented and added to the deed—the deed is everything. Basically, people double the deed when they make lightning flash: this is a doing-doing. They posit the same event once as cause and then again as its effect. Natural scientists do no better when they say, “Force moves, force causes,” and the like. Despite all its coolness and freedom from emotion, our whole science is still under the spell of language. It has not got rid of these “subjects,” these changelings slipped in under false pretenses. The atom, for example, is one such changeling, as is Kant's “thing in itself.” So is it any wonder that the repressed, secretly smoldering emotions of revenge and hatred exploit this belief? Indeed, at bottom there is no belief they uphold more passionately than the belief that the strong person is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb. This gives them the right, in their own eyes, to blame the bird of prey for being a bird of prey … When the oppressed, the downtrodden, those subjected to violence, use the vengeful cunning of powerlessness to tell themselves, “Let's be different from the evil ones: let's be good! And everyone is good who does no violence, who hurts no one, who doesn't attack, doesn't retaliate, leaves revenge to God, stays hidden like us, avoids all evil, and asks little of life in general, like us patient, humble, righteous people”—if we listen coolly and without prejudice, this really means nothing more than: “We weak people are simply weak. It is good if we do nothing we aren't strong enough to do.” But this harsh fact, this lowest kind of prudence, which even insects possess—they may play dead in great danger so as not to do “too much”—has dressed itself in the splendor of a virtue that renounces, stays quiet, and waits. It has done so thanks to the counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, as if the weak person's weakness itself—meaning his nature, his activity, his entire, sole, unavoidable, inseparable reality—were a voluntary achievement, something willed and chosen, a deed, a merit. This kind of person needs the belief in a neutral “subject” free to choose. The need comes from an instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation through which every lie usually makes itself holy. The subject—or, to put it more popularly, the soul—may have been the best article of faith on earth so far for this reason: it made possible for most mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, that sublime self-deception of interpreting weakness itself as freedom, and their being as they are as a merit.

14 Does anyone want to look down a little into the secret of how people manufacture ideals on earth? Who has the courage? … All right! Here is an open view into this dark workshop. Wait another moment, Mr. Nosy Daredevil. Your eyes first have to adjust to this false, shimmering light … There! Enough! Now speak! What is going on down there? Tell us what you see, man of the most dangerous curiosity. Now I am the one listening.

“I see nothing, but I hear all the more. There is a cautious, treacherous, quiet muttering and whispering together from every corner and hiding place. It seems to me that they are lying. A sugary mildness sticks to every sound. There is no doubt that weakness is being lied into a merit. It is just as you said.”

Go on!

“And powerlessness that doesn't retaliate is being turned into ‘goodness’; fearful lowliness into ‘humility’; submission to those one hates into ‘obedience’—obedience to someone they say commands this submission; they call him God. The weak person's harmlessness, the very cowardice he has so much of, his standing at the door, his unavoidable need to wait, acquire good names here, such as ‘patience.’ It may even be called virtue itself. Not being able to take revenge is called not wanting to take revenge, perhaps even forgiveness: ‘For they don't know what they are doing—we alone know what they are doing!’ They also speak of ‘loving one's enemies’—and sweat as they do.”

Go on!

“They are miserable, there is no doubt, all these mutterers and back-corner counterfeiters, even though they huddle warmly together. But they tell me their misery is a sign that God has chosen and singled them out. People beat the dogs they love best. Perhaps this misery is also a preparation, a test, a schooling. Perhaps it is even more—something that will one day be compensated for and paid out with enormous interest in gold—no! In happiness. They call that ‘blessedness.’”

Go on!

“Now they are giving me to understand that they are not just better than the powerful, the masters of the earth whose spit they have to lick—not from fear, absolutely not from fear! But because God commands them to honor all authority. They are not just better; they are also ‘better off,’ or at least will be better off one day. But enough! Enough! I can't stand it anymore. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where they manufacture ideals—it seems to me it stinks of nothing but lies.”

No! One more moment! You haven't said anything yet about the masterpiece of these black magicians who produce white, milk, and innocence out of everything black. Haven't you noticed the height of their refinement, their boldest, subtlest, most ingenious, most deceitful artistic trick? Pay attention! These cellar animals, full of revenge and hatred—what do they make of that very revenge and hatred? Did you ever hear those words? If you trusted only their words, would you suspect you were among nothing but people of ressentiment? …

“I understand. I'm opening my ears again—oh! Oh! Oh!—and holding my nose. Only now do I hear what they have already said so often: ‘We good people—we are the righteous.’ What they demand they do not call retaliation, but ‘the triumph of justice.’ What they hate is not their enemy—no! They hate ‘injustice,’ ‘godlessness.’ What they believe and hope is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication of sweet revenge—Homer already called it ‘sweeter than honey’—but God's victory, the just God's victory over the godless. What remains for them to love on earth is not their brothers in hatred but their ‘brothers in love,’ as they say, all the good and righteous people on earth.”

“And what do they call the thing that comforts them against all life's suffering—their imagined spectacle of future blessedness enjoyed in advance?”

“What? Am I hearing right? They call it ‘the Last Judgment,’ the coming of their kingdom, the ‘kingdom of God.’ Meanwhile, though, they live ‘in faith,’ ‘in love,’ ‘in hope.’”

Enough! Enough!

15 Faith in what? Love for what? Hope for what? These weak people—there is no doubt that someday they want to be the strong ones too. Someday their “kingdom” is supposed to come too. As I said, they simply call it “the kingdom of God”—they are so humble in everything! Just to live to see that, they need a long life, a life extending beyond death. In fact, they need eternal life, so that they can keep compensating themselves forever in the “kingdom of God” for that earthly life “in faith, in love, in hope.” Compensation for what? Compensation by what means? … Dante, I think, made a serious mistake when, with a terrifying innocence, he put this inscription over the gate of his hell: “Eternal love made me too.” The words “Eternal hatred made me too” would have a better right to stand over the gate of the Christian paradise and its “eternal blessedness”—assuming a truth could be allowed over the entrance to a lie! For what is the blessedness of that paradise? … We might already guess. But it is better to have explicit testimony from an authority not to be underrated in such matters: Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. “The blessed in the heavenly kingdom,” he says, gentle as a lamb, “will see the punishments of the damned, so that their own blessedness will please them more.” Or would you like to hear it in a more forceful key? Perhaps from the mouth of a triumphant Church Father, who advised his Christians against the cruel pleasures of public shows—why, exactly? “Faith offers us much more,” he says, de spectac. c. 29 ss., “something much stronger. Thanks to redemption, quite different joys are available to us. In place of athletes we have our martyrs. If we want blood, well, we have Christ's blood … But what is waiting for us on the day of his return, his triumph!” And now this delighted visionary continues: “But there are still other shows to come: that last, unending day of judgment, that day the nations did not expect, that day they mocked, when the world's immense age and all the generations it has produced will be swallowed by a single fire. What a vast spectacle then! What will I marvel at! What will I laugh at! Where will I find joy! Where will I celebrate, as I watch so many kings, such great kings, who were reported to have been received into heaven, groaning together in the deepest darkness with Jupiter himself and the very witnesses to their ascent! And the governors (the provincial governors), persecutors of the Lord's name, melting in flames fiercer than those with which they themselves raged and taunted the Christians! What else? Those wise philosophers, blushing before their students as they burn together—the students they persuaded that nothing concerned God, whom they assured that souls either did not exist or would not return to their former bodies! And the poets too, trembling not before the judgment seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but before that of the Christ they never expected! Then the tragic actors will be more worth hearing, with more powerful voices, of course (in better voice, screaming still louder), in their own personal catastrophe. Then the actors will be worth a look, moving much more freely because of the fire. Then the chariot driver will be worth watching, all red on his wheel of flame. Then the athletes will be worth looking at, hurled not in gymnasiums but in fire. Except that even then I would not want them alive: I would rather turn my insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord. ‘This is the one,’ I will say, ‘the son of the carpenter or the prostitute (as everything that follows shows, and especially this description of Jesus' mother, also known from the Talmud, Tertullian means the Jews from this point on), the Sabbath-breaker, the Samaritan with a demon. This is the one you bought from Judas; this is the one beaten with a reed and with fists, disgraced with spit, given gall and vinegar to drink. This is the one his disciples secretly stole away so that he could be said to have risen again—or whom the gardener removed so that the crowds passing through would not damage his lettuces.’ What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest, in all his generosity, will provide you with the chance to watch such things, to celebrate such things? And yet, in a way, we already have them through faith, brought before us by the mind's imagination. Besides, what must those things be like that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart has conceived? (1. Cor. 2, 9.) More pleasing, I believe, than the circus, both tiers of seats (the first and fourth tiers, or, according to others, the comic and tragic stages), and any stadium.” Per fidem: that is what is written.

16 Let's bring this to a close. The two opposing sets of values, “good and bad” and “good and evil,” have fought a terrible battle on earth for thousands of years. The second has certainly had the upper hand for a long time. Even so, there are still places where the battle goes on without a decision. We could even say that in the meantime it has been carried higher and higher, and in that very process has become deeper, more and more a matter of the mind. Perhaps today there is no more decisive sign of a “higher nature,” a more spiritual nature, than being divided in this sense and still actually serving as a battlefield for those opposites. The symbol of this battle, written in a script that has stayed readable throughout human history so far, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome.” No event has yet been greater than this battle, this posing of the question, this deadly opposition. In the Jew, Rome sensed something like the unnatural itself, a monster that was its exact opposite. In Rome, the Jew was considered “convicted of hatred of the whole human race.” Rightly so, insofar as one has a right to tie the well-being and future of the human race to the absolute rule of aristocratic values, Roman values. What, on the other hand, did the Jews feel toward Rome? A thousand signs let us guess. But it is enough to take another look at John's Apocalypse, that wildest of all written outbursts for which revenge bears the blame. (By the way, don't underestimate the deep consistency of the Christian instinct when it put the name of the disciple of love on precisely this book of hatred—the same disciple to whom it assigned that lovestruck, rapturous Gospel. There is a piece of truth in this, however much literary counterfeiting may have been needed to achieve it.) The Romans were the strong and noble: no one stronger or nobler had ever existed on earth, or even been dreamed of. Every remnant of them, every inscription, delights us, provided we can guess what is writing there. The Jews, on the other hand, were the priestly people of ressentiment above all others. They had an unequaled genius for popular morality. Just compare peoples with related gifts, such as the Chinese or the Germans, with the Jews, to get a feeling for what belongs to the first rank and what to the fifth. Which has won so far, Rome or Judea? There is really no doubt. Just consider whom people bow before today in Rome itself as the embodiment of all the highest values—and not only in Rome, but over almost half the earth, wherever human beings have become tame or want to become tame. As we know, it is before three Jews and one Jewish woman (Jesus of Nazareth, Peter the fisherman, Paul the carpet weaver, and the mother of the Jesus named first, called Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome has undoubtedly been defeated. Admittedly, the Renaissance saw a brilliant and unsettling reawakening of the classical ideal, the noble way of valuing all things. Rome itself stirred like someone thought dead who had woken up, under the weight of the new, Judaized Rome built over it, which looked like a worldwide synagogue and was called “the church.” But Judea immediately triumphed again, thanks to that thoroughly vulgar movement of ressentiment, German and English, called the Reformation. Add to this what had to follow from it: the restoration of the church—and the restoration of classical Rome's old silence of the grave. With the French Revolution, Judea once again defeated the classical ideal, in an even more decisive and deeper sense than before. The last political nobility left in Europe, that of the seventeenth and eighteenth French centuries, collapsed under the people's instincts of ressentiment. No greater rejoicing, no noisier enthusiasm, had ever been heard on earth! Yet in the middle of it all, something utterly extraordinary, utterly unexpected happened. The ancient ideal itself appeared in the flesh, with unheard-of splendor, before humanity's eyes and conscience. And once more, more powerfully, simply, and urgently than ever, the terrible and delightful opposing slogan rang out: privilege for the very few! It challenged ressentiment's old lying slogan of privilege for the majority. It challenged the will to bring humanity down, to lower it, level it, move it downward and toward its sunset. Napoleon appeared like a last sign pointing toward the other road—that most singular, latest-born human being who ever existed. In him appeared the problem of the noble ideal itself, made flesh. Think carefully about what a problem that is: Napoleon, this combination of inhuman monster and superhuman …

17 Was that the end of it? Was that greatest of all clashes between ideals filed away for all time? Or only postponed, postponed for a long time? … Won't the old fire have to flare up again someday, much more terribly, after much longer preparation? More than that: shouldn't we wish for precisely this with all our strength? Even will it? Even work to bring it about? … Anyone who, like my readers, starts thinking at this point, thinking further, will hardly be finished anytime soon. That is reason enough for me to finish, provided it has long since become clear enough what I want, what I want with that dangerous slogan written across the body of my last book: “Beyond Good and Evil” … At the very least, this does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad.”

Author's note. I am taking the opportunity this essay gives me to state a wish publicly and formally. Until now, I have expressed it only in occasional conversations with scholars. I would like some university philosophy faculty to help advance studies in the history of morality by offering a series of academic prize competitions. Perhaps this book can give a strong push in just that direction. With such a possibility in mind, I propose the following question. It deserves the attention of philologists and historians just as much as that of professional scholars of philosophy itself.

“What pointers does linguistics, especially the study of word origins, provide for the history of how moral concepts develop?”

On the other hand, it is just as necessary to interest physiologists and physicians in these problems—the problems of the value of our valuations up to now. Professional philosophers can be left to serve as advocates and go-betweens in this particular case too. After all, they have generally succeeded in changing the relationship between philosophy, physiology, and medicine, originally so stiff and distrustful, into the friendliest and most productive exchange. In fact, all lists of what is good, all the “you must” commands known to history or ethnological research, first need to be examined and interpreted in physiological terms, even before psychological ones. All of them are also waiting for a critical assessment from medical science. The question “What is this or that list of what is good, this or that ‘morality,’ worth?” needs to be looked at from the widest range of perspectives. Above all, we cannot make careful enough distinctions when asking “Worth for what?” Something, for example, that clearly had value in making a race last as long as possible—or in increasing its ability to adapt to a particular climate, or in preserving the greatest number—would by no means have the same value if the aim were to develop a stronger type. The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the very few are opposing standards of value. Let's leave it to the naivety of English biologists to regard the first as more valuable in itself … From now on, all sciences have to do the groundwork for the philosopher's future task. By that task I mean that the philosopher has to solve the problem of value, has to determine the ranking of values.