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brackets and italics, and endnotes are by
Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets
are from Nietzsche's text. This text was
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Prologue
1
We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable
people -we are personally ignorant about
ourselves. And there's good reason for that.
We've never tried to find out who we are-how
could it happen that one day we'd discover
ourselves? With justice it's been said, "Where
your treasure is, there shall your heart
be also."* Our treasure lies where the
beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always
busy with our knowledge, as born winged creatures
and collectors of spiritual honey. In our
hearts we are basically concerned with only
one thing-to "bring something home."
As far as the rest of life is concerned,
what people call "experience,"-which
of us is serious enough for that? Or has
enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've
been "missing the point." Our hearts
have simply not been engaged with that-nor,
for that matter, have our ears! We've been
much more like someone divinely distracted
and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock
has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon
with all its force and who all at once wakes
up and asks himself "What exactly did
that clock strike?"-so now and then
we rub our ears afterwards and ask, totally
surprised and completely embarrassed "What
have we really just experienced?" And
more: "Who are we really?" Then,
as I've mentioned, we count-after the fact-all
the twelve trembling strokes of the clock
of our experience, of our lives, of our being
- alas! in the process we keep losing the
count . . . So we remain simply and necessarily
strangers to ourselves, we do not understand
ourselves, we must be confused about ourselves.
For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each
man is furthest from himself"-where
we ourselves are concerned, we are not "knowledgeable
people" . . .
2
My thoughts about the origin of our moral
prejudices-for this polemical tract is concerned
about that origin-had their first brief,
provisional expression in that collection
of aphorisms which carried the title Human,
All-too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, which
I started to write in Sorrento, during a
winter when I had the chance to pause, just
as a traveller stops, and to look over the
wide and dangerous land through which my
spirit had wandered up to that point. This
happened in the winter 1876-77, but the ideas
themselves are older. In the main points,
they were the same ideas which I am taking
up again in these present essays:-let's hope
that the long interval of time has done them
some good, that they have become riper, brighter,
stronger, and more complete! But the fact
that today I still stand by these ideas,
that in the intervening time they themselves
have constantly become more strongly associated
with one another, in fact, have grown into
each other and intertwined, that reinforces
in me the joyful confidence that they may
not have originally developed in me as single,
random, or sporadic ideas, but up out of
a common root, out of some fundamental will
for knowledge ruling from deep within, always
speaking with greater clarity, always demanding
greater clarity. For that's the only thing
appropriate to a philosopher. We have no
right to be scattered in any way: we are
not permitted to make isolated mistakes or
to run into isolated truths. By contrast,
our ideas, our values, our affirmations and
denials, our if's and whether's, grow out
of us from the same necessity which makes
a tree bear its fruit-totally related and
interlinked amongst each other, witnesses
of one will, one health, one soil, one sun.-As
for the question whether these fruits of
ours taste good to you -what does that matter
to the trees! What concern is that to us,
we philosophers! . . .
3
Because of a doubt peculiar to my own nature,
which I am reluctant to confess-for it concerns
itself with morality, with everything which
up to the present has been celebrated on
earth as morality-a doubt which came into
my life so early, so uninvited, so irresistibly,
in such contradiction to my surroundings,
my age, the examples around me, and my origin,
that I would almost have the right to call
it my "a priori" [before experience]-because
of this, my curiosity as well as my suspicions
had to pause early on at the question about
where our good and evil really originated.
In fact, already as a thirteen-year-old lad,
my mind was occupying itself with the problem
of the origin of evil. At an age when one
has "half childish play, half God in
one's heart," I devoted my first childish
literary trifle, my first written philosophical
exercise, to this problem-and so far as my
"solution" to it at that time is
concerned, well, I gave that honour to God,
as is reasonable, and made him the father
of evil. Is that precisely what my "a
priori" demanded of me, that new immoral,
at the very least unmoral "a priori"
and the cryptic "categorical imperative"
which spoke out from it, alas, so anti-Kantian,
which I have increasingly listened to ever
since-and not just listened to? . . .* Luckily
at an early stage I learned to separate theological
prejudices from moral ones, and I no longer
sought the origin of evil behind the world.
Some education in history and philology,
along with an inherently refined sense concerning
psychological questions in general, quickly
changed my problem into something else: Under
what conditions did man invent for himself
those value judgments good and evil? And
what value do they inherently possess? Have
they hindered or fostered human well-being
up to now? Are they a sign of some emergency,
of impoverishment, of an atrophying life?
Or is it the other way around? Do they indicate
fullness, power, a will for living, courage,
confidence, his future?- After that I came
across and proposed all sorts of answers
for myself. I distinguished between ages,
peoples, different ranks of individuals.
I kept refining my problem. Out of the answers
arose new questions, investigations, assumptions,
probabilities, until at last I had my own
country, my own soil, a totally secluded,
flowering, blooming world, a secret garden,
as it were, of which no one had the slightest
inkling. O how lucky we are, we knowledgeable
people, provided only that we know how to
stay silent long enough! . . .
4
The first stimulus to publish something of
my hypothesis concerning the origin of morality
was given to me by a lucid, tidy, clever,
even precocious little book, in which for
the first time I clearly ran into a topsy-
turvy, perverse type of genealogical hypothesis-a
genuinely English style. It drew me with
that power of attraction which everything
opposite, everything antipodal, contains.
The title of this booklet was The Origin
of the Moral Feelings. Its author was Dr
Paul Rée, and it appeared in the year 1877.*
I have perhaps never read anything which
I would have denied, statement by statement,
conclusion by conclusion, as I did with this
book, but without any sense of annoyance
or impatience. In the work I mentioned above,
on which I was working at the time, I made
opportune and inopportune references to statements
in Dr. Rée's book, not in order to prove
them wrong-what have I to do with preparing
refutations!-but, as is appropriate to a
positive spirit, to put in the place of something
unlikely something more likely and possibly
in the place of some error a different error.
In that period, as I said, for the first
time I brought into the light of day that
hypotheses about genealogy to which these
essays have been dedicated-but clumsily,
as I will be the last to deny, still fettered,
still without my own language for these concerns
of mine, and with all sorts of retreating
and vacillating. For particular details,
you should compare what I said in Human,
All-too Human, 45, about the double nature
of the prehistory of good and evil
(that is, in the spheres of the nobility
and the slaves); similarly, section 136,
concerning the worth and origin of ascetic
morality, as well as sections 96, 99, and
2.89 concerning the "Morality of Custom,"
that much older and more primitive style
of morality, which lies toto coelo [an enormous
distance] from the altruistic way of valuing
(which Dr. Rée, like all English genealogists
of morality, sees as the very essence of
moral evaluation); similarly, 1.92, Wanderer
section 26, and The Dawn 112, concerning
the origin of justice as a compromise between
approximately equal powers (equality as a
precondition of all contracts and therefore
of all justice); likewise concerning the
origin of punishment in Wanderer 22, 33,
for which an intent to terrify is neither
the essential thing nor the origin (as Dr.
Rée claims:-it is far more likely first brought
in under a specific set of conditions and
always as something incidental, something
additional).*
5
Basically even then the real concern for
me at heart was something much more important
than coming up with hypotheses about the
origin of morality, either my own or from
other people (or, more precisely stated-this
latter issue was important to me only for
the sake of a goal to which it was one path
out of many). For me the issue was the value
of morality-and in that matter I had to take
issue almost alone with my great teacher
Schopenhauer, the one to whom, as if to a
contemporary, that book, with its passion
and hidden contradiction, addresses itself
(-for that book was also a "polemical
tract").* The most specific issue was
the worth of the "unegoistic,"
the instinct for pity, self-denial, self-sacrifice,
something which Schopenhauer himself had
painted with gold, deified, and projected
into the next world for so long that it finally
remained for him "value in itself"
and the reason why he said No to life and
even to himself. But a constantly more fundamental
suspicion of these very instincts voiced
itself in me, a scepticism which always dug
deeper! It was precisely here that I saw
the great danger to humanity, its most sublime
temptation and seduction.-But in what direction?
To nothingness?-It was precisely here I saw
the beginning of the end, the standing still,
the backward-glancing exhaustion, the will
turning itself against life, the final illness
tenderly and sadly announcing itself. I understood
the morality of pity, which was always seizing
more and more around it and which gripped
even the philosophers and made them sick,
as the most sinister symptom of our European
culture, which itself had become sinister,
as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a European
Buddhism? to-nihilism? . . . This modern
philosophical preference for and overvaluing
of pity is really something new. Concerning
the worthlessness of pity philosophers up
to now have been in agreement. I name only
Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant-four
spirits as different from one another as
possible, but united in one thing, in the
low value they set on pity.*-
6
This problem of the value of pity and of
the morality of pity (-I'm an opponent of
the disgraceful modern immaturity of feelings-)
appears at first to be only something isolated,
a detached question mark. But anyone who
remains there for a while and learns to ask
questions will experience what happened to
me:-a huge new vista opens up before him,
a possibility grips him like an attack of
dizziness, all sorts of mistrust, suspicion,
and fear spring up, his belief in morality,
in all morality, starts to totter-and finally
he hears a new demand. Let's proclaim this
new demand: we need a critique of moral values,
we must first question the very value of
these values -and for that we need a knowledge
of the conditions and circumstances out of
which these values grew, under which they
have developed and changed (morality as consequence,
as symptom, as mask, as Tartufferie [hypocrisy],
as illness, as misunderstanding, but also
morality as cause, as means of healing, as
stimulant, as scruple, as poison), a knowledge
of the sort which has not been there up this
point, something which has not even been
wished for. We have taken the worth of these
"values" as something given, as
self-evident, as beyond all dispute. Up until
now people have also not had the slightest
doubts about or wavered in setting up "the
good man" as more valuable than "the
evil man," of higher worth in the sense
of the improvement, usefulness, and prosperity
with respect to mankind in general (along
with the future of humanity). What about
this? What if the truth were the other way
around? Well? What if in the "good"
there even lay a symptom of regression, something
like a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic,
something which makes the present live at
the cost of the future? Perhaps something
more comfortable, less dangerous, but also
on a smaller scale, something more demeaning?
. . . So that this very morality would be
guilty if the inherently possible highest
power and magnificence of the human type
were never attained? So that this very morality
might be the danger of all dangers? . . .
7
Suffice it to say that once this insight
revealed itself to me, I had reasons to look
around for learned, bold, and hard-working
comrades (today I'm still searching). It's
a matter of travelling through the immense,
distant, and so secretive land of morality-morality
which has really existed, which has really
been lived-with nothing but new questions
and, as it were, new eyes. Isn't that almost
like discovering this land for the first
time? . . . In this matter, it so happened
I thought of, among others, the above-mentioned
Dr. Rée, because I had no doubts at all that
by the very nature of his questions he would
be driven to a more correct methodology in
order to arrive at any answers. Did I deceive
myself in this? At any rate, my desire was
to provide a better direction for such a
keen and objective eye as his, a direction
leading to a true history of morality and
to advise him in time against the English
way of making hypotheses by staring off into
the blue. For, indeed, it's obvious which
colour must be a hundred times more important
for a genealogist of morality than this blue:
namely, gray, in other words, what has been
documented, what can be established as the
truth, what really took place, in short,
the long and difficult-to- decipher hieroglyphic
writing of the past in human morality.-This
was unknown to Dr. Rée. But he had read Darwin:-and
so to some extent in his hypotheses the Darwinian
beast and the most modern modest and tender
moral sensibility, which "no longer
bites," politely extend their hands
to each other in a way that is at least entertaining
-with the latter bearing a facial expression
revealing a certain good- natured and refined
indolence, in which is even mixed a grain
of pessimism, of exhaustion, as if it is
really not worth taking all these things
-the problems of morality-so seriously.*
But for me things appear reversed: there
are no issues which are more worth taking
seriously; among the rewards, for example,
is the fact that one day perhaps people will
be permitted to take them cheerfully. For
cheerfulness, or, to say it in my own language,
the gay science, is a reward, a reward for
a lengthy, brave, hard-working, and underground
seriousness, which, of course, is not something
for everyone. But on that day when, from
full hearts, we say "Forward! Our old
morality also belongs in a comedy!"
we'll have discovered a new complication
and possibility for the Dionysian drama of
"the fate of the soul": - and we
can bet that he will put it to good use,
the grand old immortal comic poet of our
existence! . . .
8
If this writing is incomprehensible to someone
or other and hurts his ears, the blame for
that, it strikes me, is not necessarily mine.
The writing is sufficiently clear given the
conditions I set out-that you have first
read my earlier writings and have taken some
trouble to do that, for, in fact, these works
are not easily accessible. For example, so
far as my Zarathustra is concerned, I don't
consider anyone knowledgeable about it who
has not at some time or another been deeply
wounded by and profoundly delighted with
every word in it.* For only then can he enjoy
the privilege of sharing with reverence in
the halcyon element out of which that work
was born, in its sunny clarity, distance,
breadth, and certainty. In other cases the
aphoristic form creates difficulties. These
stem from the fact that nowadays people don't
take this form seriously enough. An aphorism,
properly stamped and poured, has not yet
been "deciphered" simply by being
read. It's much more the case that only now
can one begin to explicate it, and that requires
an art of interpretation. In the third essay
of this book I have set out a model of what
I call an "interpretation" for
such a case.-In this essay an aphorism is
presented, and the essay itself is a commentary
on it. Of course, in order to practice this
style of reading as art, one thing is above
all essential, something that today has been
thoroughly forgotten-and so it will require
still more time before my writings are "readable"-
something for which one almost needs to be
a cow, at any rate not a "modern man"-rumination.
Sils-Maria, Oberengadin July 1887
Notes
. . . heart be also: The quotation come from
the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6.
a priori: This phrase refers to some idea
or capacity one possesses inherently, something
not provided by experience. The phrase is
associated with the theories of Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804) the great German philosopher;
categorical imperative: the key phrase in
Kant's morality, the idea that moral action
consists of acting upon a principle which
could become a rational moral principle without
creating a moral contradiction ("Act
so that the maxim [which determines your
will] may be capable of becoming a universal
law for all rational beings"). [Back
to Text]
Paul Rée (1849-1901): German philosopher
and friend of Nietzsche's. His The Origin
of the Moral Sensations was published in
1877.
Wanderer was published in 1880 and Daybreak
(or Dawn) in 1881. In these references to
Nietzsche's earlier works the page numbers
he gives in his text have been replaced with
section numbers.
Schophenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860),
German philosopher, whose work exercised
a significant influence on Nietzsche, especially
his emphasis on the importance of the human
will.
Plato (428-348 BC), the most important of
the classical Greek philosophers; Spinoza:
Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), Dutch philosopher;
La Rochefoucauld: Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(1613-1680), French author, famous for his
maxims.
Darwin: Charles Darwin (1809-1882), English
scientist whose Origin of Species was published
in 1859.
Zarathustra: Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra
was written between 1883 and 1885.
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