FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

From Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philosophy: Essential Selections, by James Fieser

© 2008, updated 1/1/2026, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

 

CONTENTS

Introduction

Apollonian and Dionysian Aspects of Art

Eternal Recurrence

Morality of Custom

Death of God

The Superman

Moralities of the Herd, Master, and Slave

Origin of Moral Concepts

Transvaluation of Christian Values

Nihilism, Perspectivism, and Power

Study Questions

 

INTRODUCTION

Born near Leipzig, in what is now Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was the son of a Lutheran minister who died when Nietzsche was around five. His extended family of five women moved, and Nietzsche was schooled in the classics with the aim of joining the ministry himself. He was a gifted student at the University of Bonn, where he abandoned theology and took up classical languages and philosophy. At 24 he was offered a professorship at the University of Basil before he even completed his dissertation. He befriended the charismatic composer Richard Wagner, who influenced Nietzsche's writings for some time. He was relieved from teaching duties at age 32 for health issues, including headaches, eye and digestive problems, and within two years resigned. During this time he broke free from Wagner and, frequently moving, composed a steady stream of works until when in 1899 his health deteriorated to the point that he could no longer write. For another decade he remained in a catatonic state, cared for by his sister, and died in 1900 at the age of 55.

          The selections below are from nine of Nietzsche's works, appearing in the order composed. Scholars group Nietzsche's writings into early, middle and late periods. During the early period (1869-1876) he focused on philology, cultural criticism, and aesthetics; the selection below from The Birth of Tragedy (1872) falls into this group. He argues in this that there are two sources of artistic inspiration, symbolized by the two Greek gods Dionysus and Apollo. The Dionysian influence involves wild impulse, elation, intoxication, and is seen predominantly in the non-visual art of music. The Apollonian influence, by contrast, involves dreams, visionary states, and is principally seen in visual art like painting or theatrical drama. Both are mystical and aim at a feeling of oneness within the artists and spectators. It was only Greek tragedy, he argues, that both the Dionysian and Apollonian elements were integrated within the musical chorus (Dionysus) and the dramatic story (Apollo). 

          During the middle period (1877-1882) Nietzsche composed in the style of aphorisms, that is, self-contained paragraphs on a specific theme that do not necessarily relate to the ones before or after them. The themes in these are varied, and several are developed more fully in his later writings. Three works from this period are included here, the first of which is "Notes on the Eternal Recurrence" (1881), an unpublished manuscript. He explores here a classical myth that the cosmos goes through an infinite number of cycles of creation and destruction, each of which is exactly the same, like an endless number of big bangs and big fizzles in contemporary cosmological theory. In this myth, each of us conduct our lives exactly the same way, over and over, forever. Nietzsche ask, if the myth was true, would it give you anxiety or regret about how you lived your life? He suggests that this should serve as a moral guideline for how we should conduct our lives. He also explores possible evidence for the reality of this eternal return, and how its message could prompt a change in a person's life.

          In the next selection, an aphorism from Dawn of the Day (1881), he explains how in primitive cultures moral actions were simply those that followed a society's social custom, and immoral ones the opposite. The excerpts from The Joyful Wisdom (1882) are three of his most famous aphorisms in that work. One describes a prophetic madman who announces the death of God to a crowd of people who ridicule him. The message is that the idea of God has been killed by modern science, but the shadow of the idea of God still lingers, and news of the death of God has not yet reached people. The second is his first published statement on the theory of the eternal recurrence, and the third describes the moral vacuum that has been created by the death of God and the need to fill it.

          Nietzsche's late period begins with one of the most unique works in the history of philosophy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), which is a book-length development of the prophetic madman in Joyful Wisdom, composed in the style of a religious scripture. The madman, Zarathustra, again announces the death of God to an unreceptive crowd of hecklers, and talks about the self-asserting morality of the Superman (Ubermensch) which will replace the prevailing religious one. He also describes the "Last Man" who, opposite to the Superman, is an underachiever of mediocrity. There are also "Higher Men" who are like Supermen in training. Zarathustra travels around with a select group of companions who are such Higher Men, preaching discourses along the way. The first discourse, presented below, describes three stages of progress towards becoming a Superman, using the metaphors of a camel, lion, and child respectively. Towards the end of the book Zarathustra gives a discourse to his companions describing how, as Higher Men, they must reject the views of the marketplace mob.

          Nietzsche's most complete presentation of his moral theory is presented in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), published a year after Zarathustra. The Preface opens attacking the misguided efforts of traditional dogmatic philosophy to discover truth, where the greatest damage had been done by Plato with his theory of the Forms and the Good. In Chapter 1 he criticizes a type of philosophical reasoning that emerges when we presume that truth-error, good-evil, exist as opposites, or "antitheses of value" as he calls it. This prompts philosophers to postulate a higher and hidden realm of existence that rises above these, such as God or the thing in itself. According to Nietzsche, we need to rethink the claim that values exists as pairs of opposites. Rather, the notions of good and evil are intertwined with each other to the point of being inseparable. In Chapter 5 he describes a "herd instinct" of obedience that people have which suppresses our ability to take command of our lives. This leads us into a never-ending system of "thou shalt" rules that govern all spheres of our social lives, from family to state. Current political ideologies, he argues, are just versions of this herd morality that panders to the masses. In Chapter 9 he describes two kinds of morality, that of the master and that of the slave. The master morality originated in the ruling class where goodness simply meant that which is noble. It despises the cowardly and reveres what is severe and hard. The slave morality, by contrast, is that of the common class of people, which advocates qualities that alleviate suffering, including sympathy, kindness, helpfulness. Nietzsche rejects the slave morality for its weakness, and applauds the master morality as that of the higher men, and he offers Napoleon as one such example.

          In Genealogy of Morals (1887) Nietzsche expands on the master and slave moralities, offering a linguistic and etymological history of how the notions of good and evil emerged. The term "good", he argues, historically originated from the aristocratic class and simply referred to the values that that class held. Concepts of altruism emerged from the herd instinct within the common class of the masses after the decline of aristocratic values. This decline was sparked by a revolt in Old Testament times by the Hebrews against the ruling aristocrats. They then shifted the value system from an aristocratic morality to a slave morality, with the opposite message that the poor, weak and lowly are alone the good. Such shifts from one value system to another Nietzsche calls the "transvaluation of values". The morality of Christian love then grew from this Hebrew slave morality. He concludes his discussion arguing that the subject of morality can and should be investigated from a variety of non-philosophical viewpoints, including linguistics and even physiology.

          Nietzsche develops further the notion of the transvaluation of values in The Antichrist, which he composed in 1888 but was withheld from publication until 1894 because of its controversial content. Just as the Hebrews and Christians shifted values away from the system of the ruling aristocrats, so too we need another transvaluation of values that overthrows the slave morality of Christianity and institutes the new aristocratic morality that Zarathustra preached. The morality of this higher type of person is that power is good, weakness is evil. Christianity has advocated weakness and rejected personal power, but this new morality of the higher person proposes the opposite by maintaining that power is good and weakness is evil. The Renaissance had attempted a transvaluation of Christian values and sought to replace it with more noble values, but Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation prevented this by rebelling against the Renaissance, thus restoring the church and its slave morality. Today, he argues, we need a new transvaluation of Christian values to put an end to it once and for all.

          The last selection is from Nietzsche's personal notebooks ("Nachlass" as scholars call it) written during the final years of his lucidity. A selection of these, constituting about one-third of the total notebook material, was published by Nietzsche's sister under the title The Will to Power in 1901, a year after Nietzsche's death. Scholars now hold that she and her publisher misleadingly presented it as Nietzsche's final work containing the completion of his philosophy. The reality, scholars argue, is that the notebooks are nothing like an unpolished book manuscript, but rather include false starts, abandoned ideas, and many stray thoughts, just as one would expect from private notebooks. Nevertheless, they argue, when understood in their proper context, they do add at least some valuable new material to Nietzsche's later period of writing. The selections from this below cover three major topics: nihilism, perspectivism, and the will to power. Nihilism for Nietzsche is a state of worthlessness that results when finding that there is no answer to the question "what is the purpose?" The cause of nihilism is that, after making the appropriate inquiry, we fail to find purpose, unity or truth. Nihilism, though, is only an intermediate stage on our quest for value, and the solution to nihilism is simply discovering that there is no real purpose, unity or truth within the nature of things, and they are just illusions.  Perspectivism is the view that there is no truth, but only differing perspectives that we might have of things. Thus, there are no "facts", but only interpretations, and indeed hundreds of differing interpretations of the world. The will to power is the process whereby we create truth. Similar to Schopenhauer's "will to life" Nietzsche sees the will to power embedded in everything that exists, including physical objects and biological life forms. Within human beings, it is our primary psychological motivation. The will to power is what we find expressed in the values of the aristocrats, and he describes an international race of new aristocrats that will ultimately rule the world.

 

APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN ASPECTS OF ART (Birth of Tragedy, 1872)

Apollo in Visual Art, Dionysus in Music

1. We will have gained much for the science of aesthetics, when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the visual art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly in conflict, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term "Art "; until eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy.

          In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us conceive them first of all as the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness; between which physiological phenomena a contrast may be observed analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. . . .

Apollo in Visual Dreams, Dionysus in Drunken Mysticism

2. Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis, the Dionysian, as artistic powers, which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist, and in which her art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way: first [with Apollo], as the pictorial world of dreams, the perfection of which has no connection whatever with the intellectual height or artistic culture of the unit man, and again [with Dionysus], as drunken reality, which likewise does not concern the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness. Regarding these immediate art-states of nature, every artist is either an "imitator," that is, either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an artist in ecstasies, or finally—as for instance in Greek tragedy—an artist in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him, as in his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, lonesome and apart from the reveling choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the primal source of the universe, reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream-picture. . . .

Apollonian Dreamland creates an Awareness of Primordial Unity

4. The analogy of dreams may enlighten us to some extent about the naive artist. The dreamer, in the midst of the illusion of the dream-world and without disturbing it, calls out to himself: "it is a dream, I will dream on". When we realize this, we must infer a deep inner joy in dream-contemplation. When, on the other hand, to be at all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, we must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible obtrusiveness, we may, under the direction of the dream-reading Apollo, interpret all these phenomena to ourselves somewhat as follows.

          Certainly, of the two halves of life, the waking and the dreaming, the former appeals to us as by far the more preferred, important, excellent and worthy of being lived, indeed, as the only way to live. However (with reference to that mysterious ground of our being of which we are the phenomenon), paradoxical as it may seem, I am more inclined to maintain the very opposite assessment of the value of dream life. For the more clearly I perceive those all-powerful natural art impulses, and in them a fervent longing for illusion, and to be redeemed through this illusion, the more I feel driven to the metaphysical assumption that the truly-existent and primordial unity (the eternally suffering and self-contradictory) requires the rapturous vision, the joyful illusion, for its continuous salvation. While we are completely wrapped in this illusion and composed of it, we must consider it as the truly non-existent, that is, as a perpetual unfolding in time, space and causality, that is, as empirical reality. However, if we temporarily set aside the consideration of our own "reality", if we conceive of our empirical existence, and that of the world generally, as a representation of the Primordial Unity generated every moment, we shall then have to regard the dream as an appearance of appearance, hence as a still higher gratification of the primordial desire for appearance. It is for this same reason that the innermost heart of Nature experiences that indescribable joy in the naive artist and in the naïve work of art, which is likewise only "an appearance of appearance." . . .

The World is an Aesthetic Creation by the World's Primordial Artist

This one thing must especially be clear to us, to our humiliation and exaltation, that the entire comedy of art is not at all performed, say, for our betterment and culture, and that we are just as little the true authors of this art-world: rather we may assume with regard to ourselves, that its true author uses us as pictures and artistic projections, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified:—while of course our consciousness of this our specific significance hardly differs from the kind of consciousness which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon. Hence all our knowledge of art is at bottom quite illusory. For, as knowing persons, we are not one and identical with the [thoughtless and non-moral] Being who, as the sole author and spectator of this comedy of art, prepares a perpetual entertainment for himself. Only in so far as the genius in the act of artistic production coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he get a glimpse of the eternal essence of art, for in this state he is, in a marvelous manner, like the weird picture of the fairy-tale which can at will turn its eyes and observe itself; he is now at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.

Origin of Tragedy: Dionysius in the Chorus, Apollo in Drama Itself

8. . . . According to this view, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, which always disburdens itself anew in an Apollonian world of pictures. The choric parts, therefore, with which tragedy is interlaced, are in a manner the mother-womb of the entire so-called dialogue, that is, of the whole stage-world, of the drama proper. In several successive outbursts does this primordial basis of tragedy beam forth the vision of the drama, which is a dream-phenomenon throughout, and, as such, epic in character: on the other hand, however, as objectivation of a Dionysian state, it does not represent the Apollonian redemption in appearance, but, conversely, the dissolution of the individual and his unification with primordial existence. Accordingly, the drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian perceptions and influences, and is thereby separated from the epic as by an immense gap.

Two Sources of Art, not One

16. Many are intent on deriving the arts from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of every work of art. In contrast to this, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living and prominent representatives of two worlds of art [i.e., visual art and music] which differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the principle of individuation [i.e., Schopenhauer's notion of the a priori forms of space and time] through which alone the redemption in appearance is to be truly attained. At the same time, through the mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being [i.e., a mystical real in Goethe's Faust], to the innermost heart of things. This extraordinary antithesis, which opens up yawningly between visual art as the Apollonian and music as the Dionysian art, has become manifest to only one of the great thinkers [i.e., Schopenhauer], to such an extent that, even without this key to the symbolism of the Hellenic divinities, he allowed to music a different character and origin in advance of all the other arts, because, unlike them, it is not a copy of the phenomenon, but a direct copy of the will itself and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon.

Christianity Negates Aesthetics, no Dionysian or Apollonian Elements

24. My friends, you who believe in Dionysian music, you know also what tragedy means to us. There we have tragic myth, born anew from music, and in this latest birth you can hope for everything and forget what is most afflicting. What is most afflicting to all of us, however, is the prolonged degradation in which the German genius has lived estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs [i.e., Christian priests]. You understand my allusion as you will also, in conclusion, understand my hopes. . . .

          Appendix of 1888. Throughout the whole book [there is] a deep hostile silence on Christianity: it is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it negatives all aesthetic values (the only values recognized by the Birth of Tragedy), it is in the widest sense nihilistic, whereas in the Dionysian symbol the highest limit of affirmation is reached. Once or twice the Christian priests are alluded to as a "malignant kind of dwarfs", as "subterraneans."

ETERNAL RECURRENCE ("Notes on the Eternal Recurrence", 1881)

Eternal Recurrence Explained by Physics

...

25. The world of energy suffers no diminution: otherwise with eternal time it would have grown weak and finally have perished altogether. The world of energy suffers no stationary state, otherwise this would already have been reached, and the clock of the universe would be at a standstill. The world of energy does not therefore reach a state of equilibrium; for no instant in its career has it had rest; its energy and its movement have been the same for all time. Whatever state this world could have reached must before now have been attained, and not only once but an incalculable number of times. This applies to this very moment. It has already been here once before, and several times, and will recur in the same way, with all forces distributed as they are today: and the same holds good of the moment of time which bore the present and of that which shall be the child of the present. Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, - a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. Then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. In every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon.

The Moral Consequences of the Eternal Recurrence

26. How can we give weight to our inner life without making it evil and fanatical towards people who think otherwise. Religious belief is declining and man is beginning to regard himself as temporary and unessential, a point of view which is making him weak; he does not exercise so much effort in striving or enduring. What he wants is momentary enjoyment He would make things light for himself, - and a good deal of his spirit gets squandered in this endeavor.

          27. The political mania which I smile at (just as merrily as my contemporaries smile at the religious mania of former times) is especially Materialism, a belief in the world, and the repudiation of a "Beyond," of a "back-world." The object of those who believe in the latter is the well-being of the temporary individual: that is why Socialism is its fruit; for with Socialism temporary individuals wish to secure their happiness by means of socialization. They have no reason to wait, as those men had who believed in eternal souls, in eternal development and eternal amelioration. My doctrine is: Live so that you may desire to live again, — that is your duty, — for in any case you will live again! He to whom striving is the greatest happiness, let him strive; he to whom peace is the greatest happiness, let him rest; he to whom subordination, following, obedience, is the greatest happiness, let him obey. All that is necessary is that he should know what it is that gives him the highest happiness, and to fight for it without restraint. Eternity is at stake!

Exercising Freedom in the Face of the Eternal Recurrence

28."But if everything is necessary, what control have I over my actions?" Thought and faith are a form of ballast which burden you in addition to other burdens you may have, and which are even weightier than the latter. You say that nutrition, the land of your birth, air, and society change you and determine you. Well, your opinions do this to a much greater degree, for they even advise your nourishment, your land of adoption, your atmosphere, and your society for you. — If you ever assimilate the thought of the thoughts it will also alter you. The best ballast is the question which you will have to answer before every action that you perform: "is this an action that I am prepared to perform an incalculable number of times?"

          29. The mightiest of all thoughts absorbs a good deal of energy which formerly stood at the disposal of other aspirations, and in this way it exercises a modifying influence; it creates new laws of motion in energy, though no new energy. But it is precisely in this respect that there lies some possibility of determining new emotions and new desires in men.

          30. Let us try and discover how the thought that something gets repeated has affected mankind hitherto (the year, for instance, or periodical illnesses, waking and sleeping, etc.). Even supposing the recurrence of the cycle is only a probability or a possibility, even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter us and transform us. It is not only feelings and definite expectations to do this! See what effect the thought of eternal damnation has had!

How the Doctrine will Transform the World

31. From the moment when this thought begins to prevail all colors will change their hue and a new history will begin.

          32. The history of the future: this thought will tend to triumph ever more and more, and those who disbelieve in it will be forced, according to their nature, ultimately to die out.

          He, alone, who will regard his existence as capable of eternal recurrence will remain over: but among such as these a state will be possible of which the imagination of no utopist has ever dreamt!

          33. You imagine that you will have a long rest before your second birth takes place, —  but do not deceive yourselves! Between your last moment of consciousness and the first ray of the dawn of your new life no time will elapse, — as a flash of lightning will the space go by, even though living creatures think it is billions of years, and are not even able to reckon it. Timelessness and immediate rebirth are compatible, once intellect is eliminated!

          34. You feel that you must soon take your leave perhaps - and the sunset glow of this feeling pierces through your happiness. Give heed to this sign: it means that you love life and yourself, and life as it has hitherto affected you and molded you, — and that you crave for its eternity - Non alia sed haec vita sempiterna [i.e., "no other but this everlasting life]!

          Know also, that transiency sings its short song forever afresh and that at the sound of the first verse you wilt almost die of longing when you think that it might be for the last time.

          35. Let us stamp the impress of eternity upon our lives! This thought contains more than all the religions which taught us to condemn this life as a temporary thing, and told us to squint upwards to another and indefinite existence.

          36. We must not strive after distant and unknown states of bliss and blessings and acts of grace, but we must live so that we would gladly live again and live forever so, to all eternity! - Our duty is present with us every instant.

The Doctrine as a Moral Code and Religion

37. The leading tendencies: (1) We must implant the love of life, the love of every man's own life in every conceivable way! However each individual may understand this love of self his neighbor will acquiesce, and will have to learn great tolerance towards it: however much it may often run counter to his taste, — provided the individual in question really helps to increase his joy in his own life!

          (2) We must all be one in our hostility towards everything and everybody who tends to cast a slur upon the value of life: towards all gloomy, dissatisfied and brooding natures. We must prevent these from procreating! But our hostility itself must be a means to our joy! Thus we shall laugh; we shall mock and we shall eliminate without bitterness! Let this be our mortal combat.

          This life is your eternal life!

          38. What was the cause of the downfall of the Alexandrian culture? With all its useful discoveries and its desire to investigate the nature of this world, it did not know how to lend this life to its ultimate importance, the thought of a Beyond was more important to it! To teach anew in this regard is still the most important thing of all; — perhaps if metaphysics are applied to this life in the most emphatic way, — as in the case of my doctrine!

          39. This doctrine is lenient towards those who do not believe in it. It speaks of no hells and it contains no threats. He who does not believe in it has but a fleeting life in his consciousness.

          40. It would be terrible if we still believed in sin, but whatever we may do, however often we may repeat it, it is all innocent. If the thought of the eternal recurrence of all things does not overwhelm you, then it is not your fault: and if it does overwhelm you, this does not stand to your merit either. — We think more leniently of our forebears than they themselves thought of themselves; we mourn over the errors which were to them constitutional; but we do not mourn over their evil.

          41. Let us guard against teaching such a doctrine as if it were a suddenly discovered religion! It must percolate through slowly, and whole generations must build on it and become fruitful through it, — in order that it may grow into a large tree which will shelter all posterity. What are the two thousand years in which Christianity has maintained its sway? For the mightiest thought of all many millenniums will be necessary, — long, long, long will it have to remain puny and weak!

          For this thought we do not require thirty years of glory with drums and fifes, and thirty years of grave-digging followed by an eternity of morbid stillness, as is the case with so many other famous thoughts.

          Simple and nearly barren as it is, this thought must not even require eloquence to uphold it.

          43. Are you now prepared? You must have experienced every form of skepticism and you must have wallowed with voluptuousness in ice-cold baths, — otherwise you have no right to this thought; I wish to protect myself against those who are over-ready to believe, likewise against those who gush over anything! I would defend my doctrine in advance. It must be the religion of the freest, most cheerful and most sublime souls, a delightful pastureland somewhere between golden ice and pure heaven!

MORALITY OF CUSTOM (Dawn of the Day, 1881)

In Primitive Cultures, Immoral Actions were Those that Violated Custom

9. Conception of the Morality of Custom.—In comparison with the way of life which prevailed among men for thousands of years, we men of the present day are living in a very immoral age: the power of custom has been weakened to a remarkable degree, and the sense of morality is so refined and elevated that we might almost describe it as volatilized. That is why we late comers experience such difficulty in obtaining a fundamental conception of the origin of morality: and even if we do obtain it, our words of explanation stick in our throats, so coarse would they sound if we uttered them! or to so great an extent would they seem to be a slander upon morality! Thus, for example, the fundamental clause: morality is nothing else (and, above all, nothing more) than obedience to customs, of whatsoever nature they may be. But customs are simply the traditional way of acting and valuing. Where there is no tradition there is no morality; and the less life is governed by tradition, the narrower the circle of morality. The free man is immoral, because it is his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition: in all the primitive states of humanity "evil" is equivalent to "individual," "free," "arbitrary," "unaccustomed," "unforeseen," "incalculable." In such primitive conditions, always measured by this standard,  any action performed—not because tradition commands it, but for other reasons (e.g. because of its individual utility), even for the same reasons as had been formerly established by custom—is termed immoral, and is felt to be so even by the very man who performs it, for it has not been done out of obedience to the tradition.

          What is tradition? A higher authority, which is obeyed, not because it commands what is useful to us, but merely because it commands. In what way can this feeling for tradition be distinguished from a general feeling of fear? It is the fear of a higher intelligence which commands, the fear of an incomprehensible power, of something that is more than personal—there is superstition in this fear. In primitive times the domain of morality included education and hygienics, marriage, medicine, agriculture, war, speech and silence, the relationship between man and man, and between man and the gods—morality required that a man should observe her prescriptions without thinking of himself as individual. Everything, therefore, was originally custom, and whoever wished to raise himself above it, had first of all to make himself a kind of lawgiver and medicine-man, a sort of demi-god—in other words, he had to create customs, a dangerous and fearful thing to do!—

People who Followed the Law to their own Detriment were Considered the Most Moral

Who is the most moral man? On the one hand, he who most frequently obeys the law: e.g. he who, like the Brahmins, carries a consciousness of the law about with him wherever he may go, and introduces it into the smallest divisions of time, continually exercising his mind in finding opportunities for obeying the law. On the other hand, it is he who obeys the law in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who makes the greatest sacrifices to morality; but what are the greatest sacrifices? In answering this question several different kinds of morality will be developed: but the distinction between the morality of the most frequent obedience and the morality of the most difficult obedience is of the greatest importance. Let us not be deceived as to the motives of that moral law which requires, as an indication of morality, obedience to custom in the most difficult cases! Self-conquest is required, not by reason of its useful consequences for the individual; but that custom and tradition may appear to be dominant, in spite of all individual counter desires and advantages. The individual shall sacrifice himself—so demands the morality of custom.

Some Moral Reformers are Considered Evil by Peers

On the other hand, those moralists who, like the followers of Socrates, recommend self-control and sobriety to the individual as his greatest possible advantage and the key to his greatest personal happiness, are exceptions. If we ourselves do not think so, this is simply due to our having been brought up under their influence. They all take a new path, and thereby bring down upon themselves the greatest disapproval of all the representatives of the morality of custom. They sever their connection with the community, as immoralists, and are, in the fullest sense of the word, evil ones. In the same way, every Christian who "sought his salvation more than anything," must have seemed evil to a virtuous Roman of the old school.

Divine Punishment upon the Community when a Member Violates Custom

Wherever a community exists, and consequently also a morality of custom, there is a feeling that any punishment for the violation of a custom is inflicted, especially on the community. This punishment is a supernatural punishment, the manifestations and limits of which are so difficult to understand, and are investigated with such superstitious fear. The community can compel any one member of it to make good, either to an individual or to the community itself, any ill consequences which may have followed upon such a member's action. It can also call down a sort of vengeance upon the head of the individual by endeavoring to show that, as the result of his action, a storm of divine anger has burst over the community,—but, more than anything it considers the guilt of the individual more particularly as its own guilt, and bears the punishment of the isolated individual as its own punishment—"Morals," they bewail in their innermost heart, "morals have grown lax, if such deeds as these are possible." And every individual action, every individual mode of thinking, causes dread. It is impossible to determine how much the more select, rare, and original minds must have suffered in the course of time by being considered as evil and dangerous, indeed, because they even looked upon themselves as such. Under the dominating influence of the morality of custom, originality of every kind came to acquire a bad conscience; and even now the sky of the best minds seems to be more overcast by this thought than it need be.

THE DEATH OF GOD (Joyful Wisdom, 1882)

The Death of God Announced by a Madman

108.  After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. And we, we have still to overcome his shadow! . . .

          125. Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As there were many people standing around who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. "Why, is he lost?" said one. "Has he strayed away like a child?" said another. "Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a sea voyage? Has he emigrated?" the people cried out laughingly, all in a clamor.

          The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where has God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? To where does it now move? To where do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? For even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife, who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums [i.e. purification period], what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event, and because of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history previously!"

          Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. "I came too early," he then said, "I am not yet at the right time. This extraordinary event is still on its way, and is travelling, it has not yet reached men's ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star, — and yet they have done it!''

          It is further stated that the madman made his way into different churches on the same day, and there chanted his Requiem aeternam deo [i.e., "eternal rest to God"]. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply: "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?"

Eternal Recurrence: All Events will Repeat Forever

341. What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you: "This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence — and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!" — Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him:" You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you. The question with regard to all and everything: "Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity! Or, how would you have to become favorably inclined to yourself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing? 

The Difficulty of Accepting Death of God and What Comes Next

343. The most important of more recent events — that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief — already begins to cast its first shadows over Europe. To the few at least whose eye, whose suspecting glance is strong enough and subtle enough for this drama, some sun seems to have set, some old, profound confidence seems to have changed into doubt: our old world must seem to them daily more darksome, distrustful, strange and "old." On the whole, however, one may say that the event itself is far too great, too remote, too much beyond most people's power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them; not to speak of many who already knew what had taken place, and what must all collapse now that this belief had been undermined. For, so much was built upon it,  so much rested on it, and had become one with it: for example, our entire European morality.

          This lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of crumbling, destruction, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent: who has realized it sufficiently today to have to stand up as the teacher and herald of such a tremendous logic of terror, as the prophet of a period of gloom and eclipse, the like of which has probably never taken place on earth before? Even we, the born riddle-readers, who wait as it were on the mountains posted between today and tomorrow, and encircled by their contradiction, we, the first-born and premature children of the coming century, into whose sight especially the shadows which must forthwith envelop Europe should already have come — how is it that even we, without genuine sympathy for this period of gloom, contemplate its advent without any personal solicitude or fear? Are we still, perhaps, too much under the immediate effects of the event — and are these effects, especially as regards ourselves, perhaps the reverse of what was to be expected — not at all sad and depressing, but rather like a new and indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, enlivenment, encouragement, and dawning day?  In fact, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel ourselves illumined as by a new dawn by the report that the "old God is dead"; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright. Our ships can finally be put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an "open sea" exist.

THE SUPERMAN (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1885)

The Mob rejects the Doctrine of the Superman (Prologue)

Zarathustra Announces the Superman and the Death of God

3. When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoins the forest, he found many people assembled in the marketplace; for it had been announced that a tightrope walker would give a performance. Zarathustra spoke thus to the people:

          I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass man?

          All beings formerly have created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?

          What is the ape to man? A laughingstock, a thing of shame. Just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughingstock, a thing of shame.

          You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were you apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

          Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I tell you to become phantoms or plants?

          Behold, I teach you the Superman!

          The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!

          I summon you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak to you of super-earthly hopes! They are Poisoners, whether they know it or not.

          They are Despisers of life, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

          Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and then also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

          Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: — the soul wished the body meager, ghastly, and famished. So it thought to escape from the body and the earth.

          Oh, that soul was itself meager, ghastly, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of that soul!

          But you, also, my brothers, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency?

          To be sure, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

          So you see, I teach you the Superman: he is that sea; in him can your great contempt be submerged.

          What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue.

          The hour when you say: "What good is my happiness! It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!"

          The hour when you say: "What good is my reason! Does it long for knowledge as the lion for his food? It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!"

          The hour when you say: "What good is my virtue! As yet it has not made me passionate. How weary I am of my good and my bad! It is all poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!"

          The hour when you say: "What good is my justice! I do not see that I am fervor and fuel. The just, however, are fervor and fuel!"

          The hour when you say: "What good is my pity! Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man? But my pity is not a crucifixion."

          Have you ever spoken so? Have you ever cried so? Ah! would that I had heard you crying so!

          It is not your sin — it is your self-satisfaction that cries to heaven; your very sparingness in sin cries to heaven!

          Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated?

          So you see, I teach you the Superman: he is that lightning, he is that frenzy!

          When Zarathustra had so spoken, one of the people called out: "We have now heard enough of the tightrope walker; it is time now for us to see him!" And all the people laughed at Zarathustra. But the tightrope walker, who thought the words applied to him, began his performance. 

Humans as a Bridge to the Superman, who Advance towards and Retreat from the Superman by "Going-Over" (transforming) and "Down-Going" (downfalling)

4. Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spoke:

          Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over an abyss.

          A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

          What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.

          I love those that do not know how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.

          I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

          I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.

          I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus, he seeks his own down-going.

          I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus he seeks his own down-going.

          I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing. . . .

The Last Man who is Content with Mediocrity

5. When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he again looked at the people, and was silent. "There they stand," said he to his heart; "there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.

          Must one first bang their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammerer?

          They have something of which they are proud. What do they call it, that which makes them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguishes them from the goatherds.

          They dislike, therefore, to hear of 'contempt' of themselves. So I will appeal to their pride.

          I will speak to them about the most contemptible thing: that, however, is the Last Man!"

          Thus spoke Zarathustra to the people:

          It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope.

          Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow upon it.

          Ah! There comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!

          I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.

          Ah! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Ah! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

          Behold! I show you the Last Man.

          "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" So ask the last man and blink.

          The earth has then become small, and on it there hops the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man lives longest.

          "We have discovered happiness", say the last men, and blink thereby.

          They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.

          Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk cautiously. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!

          A little poison now and then: that makes pleasant dreams. Much poison at last for a pleasant death.

          One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful so that the pastime will not hurt one.

          One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

          No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is equal: he who hath other sentiments goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

          "Formerly all the world was insane,"—say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.

          They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled—otherwise it spoils their stomachs.

          They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

          "We have discovered happiness,"—say the last men, and blink thereby.—

          Here ended the first discourse of Zarathustra, which is also called "The Prologue": for at this point the shouting and mirth of the multitude interrupted him.

          "Give us this last man, O Zarathustra," they called out, "turn us into these last men! Then we will give you the Superman as a gift!" All the people rejoiced and snickered their lips. Zarathustra, however, became sad, and said to his heart:

          "They do not understand me: I am not the mouth for these ears."

Three Stages of Progress Towards the Superman: Camel, Lion, Child. (Discourse 1: The Three Metamorphoses)

The Camel: Renounce Comfort, Practice Self-Discipline, Accept Difficulty

Three metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion finally a child.

          Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwells: but its strength yearns for heavy things and even the heaviest.

          What is heavy? asks the load-bearing spirit; it then kneels down like the camel, and wants to be over packed.

          What is the heaviest thing, you heroes? asks the load-bearing spirit, that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength.

          Is it not this: To humiliate oneself in order to lessen one's pride? To exhibit one's folly in order to mock one's wisdom?

          Or is it this: To abandon our cause when it celebrates its triumph? To climb high mountains to tempt the tempter?

          Or is it this: To feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge, and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger of the soul?

          Or is it this: To be sick and dismiss comforters, and make friends of the deaf, who never hear thy requests?

          Or is it this: To go into stormy water when it is the water of truth, and not disclaim cold frogs and hot toads?

          Or is it this: To love those who despise us, and give one's hand to the phantom when it is going to frighten us?

          All these heaviest things the load-bearing spirit takes upon itself: and like the camel, which, when loaded, rushes into the wilderness, so rushes the spirit into its wilderness.

The Lion: Assert Independence from Outside Influences

But in the loneliest wilderness occurs the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becomes a lion; freedom will capture it, and become master in its own wilderness.

          It seeks its last master here: it will be hostile to him, and to its last god; it will struggle with the great dragon for victory.

          What is the great dragon which the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God? The great dragon called is called "Thou-shalt". But the spirit of the lion says, "I will."

          "Thou-shalt," lies in its path, sparkling with gold—a scale-covered beast; and on every scale glitters a golden "Thou shalt!"

          The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales, and thus the mightiest of all dragons speaks:

"All the values of things—glitter on me.

          All values have already been created, and all created values—do I represent. Truly, there will be no 'I will' anymore. Thus speaks the dragon.

          My brothers, why is there need for the lion in the spirit? Why isn't the beast of burden [i.e., the camel] sufficient, which renounces and is reverent?

          To create new values—that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating—that the might of the lion can do.

          To create itself freedom, and give a holy No even to duty: for that, my brothers, there is need for the lion.

          To assume the right to new values—that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Truly, to such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey.

          It once loved "Thou-shalt" as its holiest: now it is forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, so that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this capture.

The Child: Act of New Creation

But tell me, my brothers, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why does the preying lion still need to become a child?

          The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yes.

          Ah, for the game of creating, my brothers, there is needed a holy Yes to life: its own will, wills now the spirit; his own world wins the world's outcast.

          I have told you about three metamorphoses of the spirit" how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and finally the lion a child. Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Zarathustra's Companions are Higher Men that must Reject the Marketplace Mob (Section 73: "The Higher Man")

The Mob Accepts Equality and Rejects the Individuality of the Superman

1. When I came to men for the first time, I committed the folly of a recluse, the great folly: I appeared in the marketplace.

          When I spoke to everyone, I spoke to no one. In the evening, however, tightrope walkers were my companions, and corpses; and I myself almost a corpse.

          With the new morning, however, a new truth came to me, for I learned to say: "Of what relevance to me are the marketplace, the mob, the mob-noise, and the long mob-ears!"

          You higher men, learn this from me: In the marketplace no one believes in higher men. But if you will speak there, very well! The mob, however, blinks: "We are all equal."

          "You higher men," so blinks the masses, "there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God we are all equal!"

          Before God! Now, however, this God has died. Before the mob, however, we will not be equal. You higher men, away from the marketplace!

Only with the Death of God can Higher Men Emerge

          2. Before God! Now however this God has died! You higher men, this God was your greatest danger.

          Only since he's been laid in the grave have you again arisen. Now only comes the great noontide, now only does the higher man become master!

          Have you understood this word, my brothers? You are frightened: do your hearts tremble? Does the abyss here yawn for you? Does the hell-hound here bark at you?

          Well! Take heart, you higher men! The only labor now is the mountain of the human future. God has died: now we desire the Superman to live.

          3. The most careful ask today: "How is humanity to be maintained?" However, Zarathustra asks, as the first and only one: "How is humanity to be surpassed?"

          It is the Superman that I have at heart; that is the first and only thing to me, and not humanity: not the neighbor, not the poorest, not the sorriest, not the best.

          My brothers, what I can love in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. Also in you there is much that makes me love and hope.

          To the extent that you are despised, you are higher men, and that makes me hope. For the great despisers are the great admirers.

          To the extent that you have despaired, there is much to honor. For you have not learned to submit yourselves, you have not learned petty policy.

          For today the petty people have become master: they all preach submission and humility and policy and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues.

MORALITIES OF THE HERD, MASTER, AND SLAVE (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)

The Failure of Dogmatic Philosophy (Preface)

Dogmatic Philosophy Built upon Some Error

Suppose that Truth is a woman; what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women? That the terrible seriousness and clumsy persistence with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and crude methods for winning a woman? Certainly, she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged appearance, if, indeed, it stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground, even more, that it is at its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided appearances it has assumed, may have been only a noble immaturity and amateurishness; and probably the time is near when it will be once and again understood what has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto nurtured. It is perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human (all-too-human) facts.

Plato's Invention of Pure Spirit and the Good was the Most Damaging Dogmatic Philosophy

The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labor, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its "super-terrestrial" pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors so far has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it has been defeated, when Europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the perspective—the fundamental condition—of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: "How did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all a corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock?"

Efforts to Undo the Damage of Platonism

But the struggle against Plato, or—to speak plainer, and for the "people"—the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity (for Christianity is Platonism for the "people"), produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals. As a matter of fact, the European feels this tension as a state of distress, and two attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow: once by means of Jesuitism [i.e., education of the masses], and the second time by means of democratic enlightenment—which, with the aid of liberty of the press and newspaper-reading, might, in fact, bring it about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in "distress"! (The Germans invented gunpowder—all credit to them! but they again made things square—they invented printing.) But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we good Europeans, and free, very free spirits—we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! Perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? the goal to aim at. . . .

Against Antitheses of Value (Chapter 1: Prejudices of Philosophers)

Metaphysical Reasoning: Opposition of Values implies an Objective Truth

2. "How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, in fact, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of their own—in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and greed, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself'—there must be their source, and nowhere else!"

Opposition of Values is a Doubtful Assumption

This method of reasoning reveals the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this method of valuation is behind all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for something that is in the end solemnly christened "the Truth." The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antitheses of values. It never occurred even to the most suspicious of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, "everything must be doubted." For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular appraisals and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some corner, perhaps from below—"frog perspectives," as it were, to borrow an expression current among painters.

Values may be Inseparably Intertwined with their Opposites

Despite all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretense, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and greed. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous "Perhapses"! For that investigation one must await the arrival of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent—philosophers of the dangerous "Perhaps" in every sense of the term. To speak in all seriousness, I see such new philosophers beginning to appear.

Herd Morality (Chapter 5: Natural History of Morals)

The Problem of Morality requires Comparing Many Kinds of Morality

186. . . . All the philosophers, with a pedantic and ridiculous seriousness, demanded of themselves something very much higher, more pretentious, and ceremonious, when they concerned themselves with morality as a science: they wanted to give a basic to morality—and every philosopher hitherto has believed that he has given it a basis; morality itself, however, has been regarded as something "given." How far from their awkward pride was the seemingly insignificant problem—left in dust and decay—of a description of forms of morality, notwithstanding that the finest hands and senses could hardly be fine enough for it! It was precisely owing to moral philosophers' knowing the moral facts imperfectly, in an arbitrary epitome, or an accidental abridgement—perhaps as the morality of their environment, their position, their church, their Zeitgeist, their climate and zone—it was precisely because they were badly instructed with regard to nations, eras, and past ages, and were by no means eager to know about these matters, that they did not even come in sight of the real problems of morals—problems which only disclose themselves by a comparison of many kinds of morality. In every previous "Science of Morals", strange as it may sound, the problem of morality itself has been omitted: there has been no suspicion that there was anything problematic there!

Moral Systems merely reflect the Emotions of Those who Hold them

187. Apart from the value of such assertions as "there is a categorical imperative in us," one can always ask: What does such an assertion [about morality] indicate about him who makes it? There are systems of morals which are meant to justify their author in the eyes of other people; other systems of morals are meant to tranquilize him, and make him self-satisfied; with other systems he wants to crucify and humble himself, with others he wishes to take revenge, with others to conceal himself, with others to glorify himself and gave superiority and distinction,—this system of morals helps its author to forget, that system makes him, or something of him, forgotten, many a moralist would like to exercise power and creative arbitrariness over mankind, many another, perhaps, Kant especially, gives us to understand by his morals that "what is estimable in me, is that I know how to obey—and with you it shall not be otherwise than with me!" In short, systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions.

          188. In contrast to unchecked freedom [laisser-aller], every system of morals is a sort of tyranny against "nature" and also against "reason", that is, however, no objection, unless one should again decree by some system of morals, that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonableness are unlawful. What is essential and invaluable in every system of morals, is that it is a long constraint. . . .

Herd Instinct of Obedience to a "Thou Shalt" Command

199. Inasmuch as in all ages, as long as mankind has existed, there have also been human herds (family alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always a great number who obey in proportion to the small number who command. Therefore, in view of the fact that obedience has been most practiced and fostered among mankind previously, one may reasonably suppose that, generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in everyone, as a kind of formal conscience which gives the command "Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something", in short, "Thou shalt". This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a content, according to its strength, impatience, and eagerness, it at once seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders — parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion. The extraordinary limitation of human development, the hesitation, delay, frequent retrogression, and turning thereof, is attributable to the fact that the herd-instinct of obedience is transmitted best, and at the cost of the art of command.

Hypocrisy of the Current Commanding Class: Being only Executors of Older Values

If one imagine this instinct increasing to its greatest extent, commanders and independent individuals will finally be absent altogether, or they will suffer inwardly from a bad conscience, and will have to impose a deception on themselves in the first place in order to be able to command just as if they also were only obeying. This condition of things actually exists in Europe at present — I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanding class. They know no other way of protecting themselves from their bad conscience than by playing the role of executors of older and higher orders (of predecessors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law, or of God himself), or they even justify themselves by maxims from the current opinions of the herd, as "first servants of their people," or "instruments of the public weal".

          On the other hand, the sociable European man nowadays assumes an air as if he were the only kind of man that is allowable, he glorifies his qualities, such as public spirit, kindness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy, by virtue of which he is gentle, endurable, and useful to the herd, as the peculiarly human virtues. In cases, however, where it is believed that the leader and bellwether cannot be dispensed with, attempt after attempt is made nowadays to replace commanders by the summing together of clever sociable men all representative constitutions, for example, are of this origin. In spite of all, what a blessing, what a deliverance from a weight becoming unendurable, is the appearance of an absolute ruler for these sociable Europeans — of this fact the effect of the appearance of Napoleon was the last great proof the history of the influence of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness to which the entire century has attained in its worthiest individuals and periods.

The Herding-Animal Morality in European Socialism

202 . . . . Morality in Europe at present is herding-animal morality, and therefore, as we understand the matter, only one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, and after which many other moralities, and especially higher moralities, are or should be possible. Against such a "possibility," against such a "should be," however, this morality defends itself with all its strength, it says obstinately and inexorably "I am morality itself and nothing else is morality!" Indeed, with the help of a religion which has humored and flattered the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things have reached such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this morality even in political and social arrangements. The democratic movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement. That its tempo, however, is much too slow and sleepy for the more impatient ones, for those who are sick and distracted by the herding-instinct, is indicated by the increasingly furious howling, and always less disguised teeth-gnashing of the anarchist dogs, who are now roving through the highways of European culture.

          The socialists appear to be in opposition to the peacefully industrious democrats and Revolution-ideologues, and still more so to the awkward dabblers in philosophy and brotherhood fanatics who call themselves Socialists and want a "free society." But the socialists are really at one in their thorough and instinctive hostility to every form of society other than that of the autonomous herd (to the extent even of repudiating the notions "master" and "servant"— "neither God nor master", says a socialist formula); at one in their tenacious opposition to every special claim, every special right and privilege (this means ultimately opposition to every right, for when all are equal, no one needs "rights" any longer); at one in their distrust of punitive justice (as though it were a violation of the weak, unfair to the necessary consequences of all former society). . . .

          203 . . . The universal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the "man of the future"—as idealized by the socialistic fools and simpletons — this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely herding animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this animalizing of man into a dwarf animal with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly possible! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows another loathing unknown to the rest of mankind — and perhaps also a new mission!

Master Morality vs. Slave Morality (Chapter 9: What is Noble)

Slaves Exist for the Benefit of the Aristocracy

258. Corruption—as the indication that anarchy threatens to break out among the instincts, and that the foundation of the emotions, called "life," is convulsed—is something radically different according to the organization in which it manifests itself. When, for instance, an aristocracy like that of France at the beginning of the Revolution, flung away its privileges with sublime disgust and sacrificed itself to an excess of its moral sentiments, it was corruption:—it was really only the closing act of the corruption which had existed for centuries, by virtue of which that aristocracy had abdicated step by step its lordly prerogatives and lowered itself to a function of royalty (in the end even to its decoration and parade-dress). The essential thing, however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the significance and highest justification thereof—that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a higher existence: like those sun-seeking climbing plants in Java—they are called Sipo Matador,—which encircle an oak so long and so often with their arms, until at last, high above it, but supported by it, they can unfold their tops in the open light, and exhibit their happiness.

To Kinds of Morality: Master and Slave

260. In a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities which have previously prevailed or still prevail on the earth, I found certain traits recurring regularly together, and connected with one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves to me, and a radical distinction was brought to light. There is master-morality and slave-morality. I would at once add, however, that in all higher and mixed civilizations, there are also attempts at the reconciliation of the two moralities, but one finds still oftener the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of them, indeed sometimes their close association — even in the same man, within one soul. The distinctions of moral values have either originated in a ruling caste, pleasantly conscious of being different from the ruled — or among the ruled class, the slaves and dependents of all sorts.

Master Morality: Good means Noble, Bad means Despicable

In the first case, when it is the rulers who determine the conception "good," it is the exalted, proud disposition which is regarded as the distinguishing feature, and that which determines the order of rank. The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself he despises them. Let it at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis "good" and "bad" means practically the same as "noble" and "despicable", — the antithesis "good" and "evil" is of a different origin. The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also, the distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self- abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let themselves be abused, the mendicant flatterers, and especially the liars: — it is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful. "We truthful ones" — the nobility in ancient Greece called themselves.

          It is obvious that everywhere the designations of moral value were at first applied to men [i.e., human character]; and were only derivatively and at a later period applied to actions; it is a gross mistake, therefore, when historians of morals start with questions like, "Why have sympathetic actions been praised?" The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: "What is injurious to me is injurious in itself;" he knows that it is he himself only who confers honor on things; he is a creator of values. He honors whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would gladly give and bestow: — the noble man also helps the unfortunate, but not — or scarcely — out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the super-abundance of power.

          The noble man honors in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. "Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast," says an old Scandinavian Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is even proud of not being made for sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: "He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one." The noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from the morality which sees precisely in sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in desinteressement, the characteristic of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical hostility and irony towards "selflessness," belong as definitely to noble morality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in presence of sympathy and the "warm heart."

          It is the powerful who know how to honor, it is their art, their domain for invention. The profound reverence for age and for tradition — all law rests on this double reverence, —  the belief and prejudice in favor of ancestors and unfavorable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the powerful; and if, reversely, men of "modern ideas" believe almost instinctively in "progress" and the "future," and are more and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of these "ideas" has complacently betrayed itself thereby.

          A morality of the ruling class, however, is more especially foreign and irritating to present-day taste in the sternness of the ruling class's principle that one has duties only to one's equals; that one may [if he so chooses] act towards beings of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign, just as seems good to one, or "as the heart desires," and in any case "beyond good and evil": it is here that sympathy and similar sentiments can have a place. The ability and obligation to exercise prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge — both only within the circle of equals, —  artfulness in retaliation, raffinement [i.e., refinement] of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance — in fact, in order to be a good friend): all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality, which, as has been pointed out, is not the morality of "modern ideas," and is therefore at present difficult to relate to, and also to unearth and reveal.

Slave Morality: Emphasizes Sympathy, but Distrust the Honorable

It is otherwise with the second type of morality, slave-morality. Supposing that the abused, the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of themselves should moralize, what will be the common element in their moral estimates? Probably a pessimistic suspicion with regard to the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man, together with his situation. The slave has an unfavorable eye for the virtues of the powerful; he has a skepticism and distrust, a refinement of distrust of everything "good" that is there honored — he would gladly persuade himself that the very happiness there is not genuine. On the other hand, those qualities which serve to alleviate the existence of sufferers are brought into prominence and flooded with light; it is here that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain to honor; for here these are the most useful qualities, and almost the only means of supporting the burden of existence. Slave-morality is essentially the morality of utility. Here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis "good" and "evil": power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being despised. According to slave-morality, therefore, the "evil" man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the "good" man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being.

          The contrast attains its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences of slave-morality, a shade of depreciation — it may be slight and well-intentioned — at last attaches itself to the "good" man of this morality; because, according to the servile mode of thought, the good man must in any case be the safe man: he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un bonhomme. Everywhere that slave- morality gains the ascendancy, language shows a tendency to approximate the significations of the words "good" and "stupid."- -A last fundamental difference: the desire for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the refinements of the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slave-morals and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence and devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of thinking and estimating. —  Hence we can understand without further detail why love as a passion — it is our European specialty — must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

ORIGIN OF MORAL CONCEPTS (Genealogy of Morals, 1887, Essay 1: Good and Evil, Good and Bad)

The Term "Good" Historically Originated from the Aristocratic Class

"Good" Originally Meant the Values of the Aristocratic

2. Now the first argument that comes to mind is that the real homestead of the concept "good" is sought and located in the wrong place: the judgment "good" did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Instead, it has been the good themselves, that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good, that is to say of the first order, in contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the ordinary. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values for their own profit, and to coin the names of such values: what had they to do with utility? The standpoint of utility is as alien and as inapplicable as it could possibly be, when we have to deal with so volcanic an effervescence of supreme values, creating and demarcating as they do a hierarchy within themselves: it is at this juncture that one arrives at an appreciation of the contrast to that tepid temperature, which is the presupposition on which every combination of worldly wisdom and every calculation of practical expediency is always based—and not for one occasional, not for one exceptional instance, but chronically. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the chronic and despotic esprit de corps and fundamental instinct of a higher dominant race coming into association with a meaner race, an "under race," this is the origin of the antithesis of good and bad.

Concepts of Altruism emerged from the Herd Instinct after the Decline of Aristocratic Values

(The masters' right of giving names goes so far that it is permissible to look upon language itself as the expression of the power of the masters: they say "this is that, and that," they seal finally every object and every event with a sound, and thereby at the same time take possession of it.) It is because of this origin that the word "good" is far from having any necessary connection with altruistic acts, in accordance with the superstitious belief of these moral philosophers. On the contrary, it is on the occasion of the decay of aristocratic values, that the antitheses between "egoistic" and "altruistic" presses more and more heavily on the human conscience—it is, to use my own language, the herd instinct which finds in this antithesis an expression in many ways. And even then it takes a considerable time for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant, for the valuation to be inextricably dependent on this antithesis (as is the case in contemporary Europe); for to-day that prejudice is predominant, which, acting even now with all the intensity of an obsession and brain disease, holds that "moral," "altruistic," and "disinterested" (désintéressé) are concepts of equal value.

Etymological Evidence that "Good" Originally meant "Aristocratic"

4. The guidepost which first put me on the right track was this question: what is the true etymological significance of the various symbols for the idea "good" which have been coined in the various languages? I then found that they all led back to the same evolution of the same idea—that everywhere "aristocrat," "noble" (in the social sense), is the root idea, out of which have necessarily developed "good" in the sense of "with aristocratic soul," "noble," in the sense of "with a soul of high caliber," "with a privileged soul"—a development which invariably runs parallel with that other evolution by which "vulgar," "ordinary," "low," are made to change finally into "bad." The most eloquent proof of this last contention is the German word "schlecht" itself: this word is identical with "schlicht"—(compare "schlechtweg" and "schlechterdings")—which, originally and as yet without any sinister innuendo, simply denoted the ordinary man in contrast to the aristocratic man. It is at the sufficiently late period of the Thirty Years' War that this sense becomes changed to the sense now current. From the standpoint of the Genealogy of Morals, this discovery seems to be substantial: the lateness of it is to be attributed to the hindering influence exercised in the modern world by democratic prejudice in the sphere of all questions of origin. This extends, as will shortly be shown, even to the province of natural science and physiology, which, prima facie is the most objective. The extent of the mischief which is caused by this prejudice (once it is free of all trammels except those of its own malice), particularly to Ethics and History, is shown by the notorious case of Buckle: it was in Buckle that that plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English origin, broke out once again from its malignant soil with all the violence of a slimy volcano, and with that salted, rampant, and vulgar eloquence with which up to the present time all volcanoes have spoken.

Hebrew Slave-Morality Revolt against Aristocratic Values

Hebrew Transvaluation: "Good" means the Poor and Weak

7. All the world's efforts against the "aristocrats," the "mighty," the "masters," the "holders of power," are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realized that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical     uation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, "the wretched are alone the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation—but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity the evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!" We know who it was who reaped the heritage of this Jewish transvaluation [i.e., Christianity]. In the context of the monstrous and inordinately fateful initiative which the Jews have exhibited in connection with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I remember the passage which came to my pen on another occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 195)—that it was, in fact, with the Jews that the revolt of the slaves begins in the sphere of morals; that revolt which has behind it a history of two millennia, and which at the present day has only moved out of our sight, because it—has achieved victory.

Christian Love Grew from Hebrew Slave Morality

8. But you understand this not? You have no eyes for a force which has taken two thousand years to achieve victory?—There is nothing wonderful in this: all lengthy processes are hard to see and to realize. But this is what took place: from the trunk of that tree of revenge and hate [against the aristocrats], Jewish hate,—that most profound and sublime hate, which creates ideals and changes old values to new creations, the like of which has never been on earth,—there grew a phenomenon which was equally incomparable, a new love, the most profound and sublime of all kinds of love;—and from what other trunk could it have grown? But beware of supposing that this love has soared on its upward growth, as in any way a real negation of that thirst for revenge, as an antithesis to the Jewish hate! No, the contrary is the truth! This love grew out of that hate, as its crown, as its triumphant crown, circling wider and wider amid the clarity and fulness of the sun, and pursuing in the very kingdom of light and height its goal of hatred, its victory, its spoil, its strategy, with the same intensity with which the roots of that tree of hate sank into everything which was deep and evil with increasing stability and increasing desire. This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this "Redeemer" bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinful—was he not really temptation in its most sinister and irresistible form, temptation to take the tortuous path to those very Jewish values and those very Jewish ideals? Has not Israel really obtained the final goal of its sublime revenge [against aristocratic values], by the tortuous paths of this "Redeemer," for all that he might pose as Israel's adversary and Israel's destroyer? Is it not due to the black magic of a really great policy of revenge, of a far-seeing, burrowing revenge, both acting and calculating with slowness, that Israel himself must repudiate before all the world the actual instrument of his own revenge and nail it to the cross, so that all the world—that is, all the enemies of Israel—could nibble without suspicion at this very bait? Could, moreover, any human mind with all its elaborate ingenuity invent a bait that was more truly dangerous? Anything that was even equivalent in the power of its seductive, intoxicating, defiling, and corrupting influence to that symbol of the holy cross, to that awful paradox of a "god on the cross," to that mystery of the unthinkable, supreme, and utter horror of the self-crucifixion of a god for the salvation of man? It is at least certain that under this sign (sub hoc signo) Israel, with its revenge and transvaluation of all values, has up to the present always triumphed again over all other ideals, over all more aristocratic ideals.

Importance of Non-Philosophical Explanations of the Origin of Moral Values

Note: I take advantage of the opportunity offered by this treatise to express, openly and formally, a wish which up to the present has only been expressed in occasional conversations with scholars, namely, that some [university] Faculty of philosophy should, by means of a series of prize essays, gain the glory of having promoted the further study of the history of morals—perhaps this book may serve to give forcible impetus in such a direction. With regard to a possibility of this character, the following question deserves consideration. It merits quite as much the attention of philologists and historians as of actual professional philosophers.

"What indication of the history of the evolution of the moral ideas is afforded by philology, and especially by etymological investigation?"

On the other hand, it is of course equally necessary to induce physiologists and doctors to be interested in these problems (of the value of the valuations which have prevailed up to the present): in this connection the professional philosophers may be trusted to act as the spokesmen and intermediaries in these particular instances, after, of course, they have quite succeeded in transforming the relationship between philosophy and physiology and medicine, which is originally one of coldness and suspicion, into the most friendly and fruitful reciprocity. In point of fact, all tables of values, all the "thou shalts" known to history and ethnology, need primarily a physiological, at any rate in preference to a psychological, elucidation and interpretation; all equally require a critique from medical science. The question, "What is the value of this or that table of 'values' and morality?" will be asked from the most varied standpoints. For instance, the question of "valuable for what" can never be analyzed with sufficient nicety. That, for instance, which would evidently have value with regard to promoting in a race the greatest possible powers of endurance (or with regard to increasing its adaptability to a specific climate, or with regard to the preservation of the greatest number) would have nothing like the same value, if it were a question of evolving a stronger species. In gauging values, the good of the majority and the good of the minority are opposed standpoints: we leave it to the naivete of English biologists to regard the former standpoint as intrinsically superior. All the sciences have now to pave the way for the future task of the philosopher; this task being understood to mean, that he must solve the problem of value, that he has to fix the hierarchy of values.

TRANSVALUATION OF CHRISTIAN VALUES (The Antichrist, 1884)

The Message of Transvaluation only for People like Zarathustra

Preface. This book belongs to the rarest of people. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my "Zarathustra": how could I mistake myself for those who are now sprouting ears? First, the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

          The conditions under which anyone understands me, and necessarily understands me—I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him. He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth.  The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner, to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm. Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self. . . .

          Very well, then! Of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest? The rest are merely humanity. One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul, in contempt.

The Value to Achieve: Power is Good, Weakness is Evil

2. What is good? Whatever enlarges the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

          What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness.

          What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome.

          Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

          The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. One should help them to it.

          What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity.

We must Create Higher People,  and Cannot Count on Evolution to Do it

3. The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (man is an end): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.

          This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;—and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man, the Christian.

          4.  Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress" is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.

          True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.

Christianity advocates Weakness, and Opposes the Power of the Higher Person

5. We should not dress up and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts—the strong man as the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!

          6. It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain to expose the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used—and I wish to emphasize the fact again—without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of decadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are decadence-values.

          I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"—and it is possible that I'll have to write it—would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied from this will—that the values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.

Christian Pity Opposes Power and Natural Selection

7. Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousand fold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. . . .

The Scientific Spirit Today is a Transvaluation of Previous Values

13. Let us not underestimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a "transvaluation of all values," a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of "true" and "not true." The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent" people—he passed as "an enemy of God," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed." As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala [i.e., untouchable Hindu caste].

Renaissance Transvaluation of Christianity Thwarted by Protestantism

61. Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,—an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values. This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance—it is my question too—; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to insinuate them into the  instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there. I see before me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:—it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter—Cæsar Borgia as pope! Am I understood?

          Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today— by it Christianity would have been swept away!—What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome. Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital—instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself.—Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale [i.e., original sin] Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things! And Luther restored the church: he attacked it. The Renaissance—an event without meaning, a great futility!—Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility—that has always been the work of the Germans.—The Reformation; Leibniz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire—every time a futile substitute for something that once existed, for something irrecoverable. These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of,—they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructible—Protestantism. If mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame.

A New Transvaluation of Christian Values is Needed

62. With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal. For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!—The "equality of souls before God"—this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order —this is Christian dynamite. The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the "humanitarianism" of Christianity!—Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its anemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself.

          This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.

          Time is measured by the Roman Calendar, when this fatality began, from the first day of Christianity! Why not instead measure time from Christianity's last day? From today? The transvaluation of all values!

NIHILISM, PERSPECTIVISM, AND POWER (The Will to Power, 1885-1889 Notebooks)

Nihilism: A Transitional Stage of Worthlessness Triggered by Metaphysical Pessimism

The Highest Values lose Significance after Exposing their Lowly Origins

2. What does Nihilism mean?—That the highest values are losing their value. There is no aim. There is no answer to the question: "to what purpose?"

          3. Thorough Nihilism is the conviction that life is absurd, in the light of the highest values already discovered; it also includes the view that we have not the smallest right to assume the existence of transcendental objects or things in themselves, which would be either divine or morality incarnate.

          This view is a result of fully developed "truthfulness": therefore a consequence of the belief in morality.

          7. The highest values in the service of which man ought to live, more particularly when they oppressed and constrained him most—these social values, owing to their tone-strengthening tendencies, were built over men's heads as though they were the will of God or "reality," or the actual world, or even a hope of a world to come. Now that the lowly origin of these values has become known, the whole universe seems to have been transvalued and to have lost its significance—but this is only an intermediate stage.

          8. The consequence of Nihilism (disbelief in all values) as a result of a moral valuation:—We have grown to dislike egotism (even though we have realised the impossibility of altruism);—we have grown to dislike what is most necessary (although we have recognised the impossibility of a liberum arbitrium and of an "intelligible freedom"[1]). We perceive that we do not reach the spheres in which we have set our values—at the same time those other spheres in which we live have not thereby gained one iota in value. On the contrary, we are tired, because we have lost the main incentive to live. "All in vain hitherto!"

          11. The logic of Pessimism leads finally to Nihilism: what is the force at work? The notion that there are no values, and no purpose: the recognition of the part that moral valuations have played in all other lofty values.

The Cause of Nihilism: The Failure to Find Purpose, Unity or Truth

12. The collapse of cosmological values.

          A. Nihilism will have to manifest itself as a psychological condition, first when we have sought in all that has happened a purpose which is not there: so that the seeker will ultimately lose courage. Nihilism is therefore the coming into consciousness of the long waste of strength, the pain of "futility," uncertainty, the lack of an opportunity to recover in some way, or to attain to a state of peace concerning anything—shame in one's own presence, as if one had cheated oneself too long. The purpose above-mentioned might have been achieved: in the form of a "realization" of a most high canon of morality in all worldly phenomena, the moral order of the universe; or in the form of the increase of love and harmony in the traffic of humanity; or in the nearer approach to a general condition of happiness; or even in the march towards general nonentity—any sort of goal always constitutes a purpose. The common factor to all these appearances is that something will be attained, through the process itself: and now we perceive that Becoming has been aiming at nothing, and has achieved nothing. Hence the disillusionment in regard to a so-called purpose in existence, as a cause of Nihilism; whether this be in respect of a very definite purpose, or generalized into the recognition that all the hypotheses are false which have hitherto been offered as to the object of life, and which relate to the whole of "Evolution" (man no longer an assistant in, let alone the culmination of, the evolutionary process).

          Nihilism will manifest itself as a psychological condition, in the second place, when man has fixed a totality, a systematization, even an organization in and behind all phenomena, so that the soul thirsting for respect and admiration will wallow in the general idea of a highest ruling and administrative power (if it be the soul of a logician, the sequence of consequences and perfect reasoning will suffice to conciliate everything). A kind of unity, some form of "monism":' and as a result of this belief man becomes obsessed by a feeling of profound relativity and dependence in the presence of an All which is infinitely superior to him, a sort of divinity. "The general good demands the surrender of the individual ..." but alas, there is no such general good! At bottom, man loses the belief in his own worth when no infinitely precious entity manifests itself through him—that is to say, he conceived such an All, in order to be able to believe in his own worth.

          Nihilism, as a psychological condition, has yet a third and last form. Admitting these two points of view: that no purpose can be assigned to Becoming, and that no great entity rules behind all Becoming, in which the individual may completely lose himself as in an element of superior value; there still remains the subterfuge which would consist in condemning this whole world of Becoming as an illusion, and in discovering a world which would lie beyond it, and would be a real world. The moment, however, that man perceives that this world has been devised only for the purpose of meeting certain psychological needs, and that he has no right whatsoever to it, the final form of Nihilism comes into being, which comprises a denial of a metaphysical world, and which forbids itself all belief in a real world. From this standpoint, the reality of Becoming is the only reality that is admitted: all bypaths to back-worlds and false godheads are abandoned—but this world is no longer endured, although no one wishes to disown it.

          What has actually happened? The feeling of worthlessness was realized when it was understood that neither the notion of "Purpose" nor that of "Unity" nor that of "Truth" could be made to interpret the general character of existence. Nothing is achieved or obtained thereby; the unity which intervenes in the multiplicity of events is entirely lacking: the character of existence is not "true," it is false; there is certainly no longer any reason to believe in a real world. In short, the categories, "Purpose," "Unity," "Being," by means of which we had lent some worth to life, we have once more divorced from it—and the world now appears worthless to us.

The Solution to Nihilism: Rejecting the Categories of Purpose, Unity and Truth and their False Sense of Value

B. Admitting that we have recognized the impossibility of interpreting world by means of these three categories, and that from this standpoint the world begins to be worthless to us; we must ask ourselves from where did we derived our belief in these three categories. Let us see if it is possible to refuse to believe in these three categories. If we can deprive them of their value, the proof that they cannot be applied to the world, is no longer a sufficient reason for depriving that world of its value.

          Result: The belief in the categories of reason is the cause of Nihilism—we have measured the worth of the world according to categories which can only be applied to a purely fictitious world.

          Conclusion: All values with which we have tried, hitherto, to lend the world some worth, from our point of view, and with which we have therefore deprived it of all worth (once these values have been shown to be inapplicable)—all these values, are, psychologically, the results of certain views of utility, established for the purpose of maintaining and increasing the dominion of certain communities: but falsely projected into the nature of things. It is always man's exaggerated ingenuousness to regard himself as the sense and measure of all things.

Perspectivism: There is no Truth, Only Differing Perspectives

Knowledge not Absolute, but only an Instrument of Preservation and Power

480. There are no such things as "mind," reason, thought, consciousness, soul, will, or truth: they all belong to fiction, and can serve no purpose. It is not a question of " subject and object," but of a particular species of animal which can prosper only by means of a certain exactness, or, better still, regularity in recording its perceptions (in order that experience may be capitalized). . . .

          Knowledge works as an instrument of power. It is therefore obvious that it increases with each advance of power. . . . The purpose of "knowledge": in this case, as in the case of "good" or "beautiful," the concept must be regarded strictly and narrowly from an anthropocentric and biological standpoint. In order that a particular species may maintain and increase its power, its conception of reality must contain enough which is calculable and constant to allow of its formulating a scheme of conduct. The utility of preservation — and not some abstract or theoretical need to eschew deception — stands as the motive force behind the development of the organs of knowledge; . . . they evolve in such a way that their observations may suffice for our preservation. In other words, the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the extent to which the Will to Power grows in a certain species: a species gets a grasp of a given amount of reality, in order to master it in order to enlist that amount in its service.

Perspectivism means No Facts, only Interpretations

481. Positivism stops at phenomena and says, "These are only facts and nothing more." In opposition to this I would say: No, facts are precisely what is lacking, all that exists consists of interpretations. We cannot establish any fact "in itself": it may even be nonsense to desire to do such a thing. "Everything is subjective" you say; but that in itself is interpretation. The "subject" is nothing given, but something superimposed by imagination, something introduced behind. Is it necessary to set an interpreter behind the interpretation already to hand? Even that would be fantasy, hypothesis.

          To the extent to which knowledge has any sense at all, the world is knowable. But it may be interpreted differently, it has not one sense behind it, but hundreds of senses. "Perspectivity."

          It is our needs that interpret the world; our instincts and their impulses for and against. Every instinct is a sort of thirst for power; each has its point of view, which it would gladly impose upon all the other instincts as their norm.

No Such Thing as Truth

494. It is unlikely that our "knowledge" extends farther than is exactly necessary for our self-preservation. Morphology shows us how the senses and the nerves as well as the brain evolve in proportion as the difficulties of acquiring sustenance increase.

          498. To what extent is our intellect also a result of the conditions of life?—We should not have it did we not need to have it, and we should not have it as we have it, if we did not need it as we need it—that is to say, if we could live otherwise.

The Will to Power as the Force behind Physics, Biology and Psychology

The Will to Power as the Process of Creating Truth

552. . . . From a moral standpoint the world is false. But inasmuch as morality itself is a part of this world, morality also is false. The will to truth is a process of establishing things, it is a process of making things true and lasting, a total elimination of that false character, a transvaluation of it into being. Thus, "truth" is not something which is present and which has to be found and discovered; it is something which has to be created and which gives its name to a process, or, better still, to the Will to overpower, which in itself has no purpose: to introduce truth is a processus in infinitum, an active determining—it is not a process of becoming conscious of something, which in itself is fixed and determined. It is merely a word for "The Will to Power."

          Life is based on the hypothesis of a belief in stable and regularly recurring things, the mightier it is, the more vast must be the world of knowledge and the world called being. Logicizing, rationalizing, and systematizing are of assistance as means of existence.

          Man projects his instinct of truth, his "aim," to a certain extent beyond himself, in the form of a metaphysical world of Being, a "thing-in-itself," a world already to hand. His requirements as a creator make him invent the world in which he works in advance; he anticipates it: this anticipation (this faith in truth) is his mainstay.

          Theses: The apparent conformity of means to end ("the conformity of means to end which far surpasses the art of man) is merely the result of that "Will to Power" which manifests itself in all phenomena:—To become stronger involves a process of ordering, which may well be mistaken for an attempted conformity of means to end:—The ends which are apparent are not intended but, as soon as a superior power prevails over an inferior power, and the latter proceeds to work as a function of the former, an order of rank is established, an organization which must give rise to the idea that there is an arrangement of means and ends. . . .

The Will to Power involves Interpretations that Enable us to Survive (Perscpectivity)

616. These doctrines lie scattered through all my works: That the worth of the world lies in our interpretations (that perhaps yet other interpretations are possible somewhere, besides humankind's); that the interpretations made up till now were perspective valuations, by means of which we were able to survive in life, i.e. in the Will to Power and in the growth of power; that every elevation of man involves the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every higher degree of strength or power attained, brings new views in its train, and teaches a belief in new horizons. The world that concerns us at all is false—that is to say, is not a fact; but a romance, a piece of human sculpture, made from a meagre sum of observation. It is "in flux"; it is something that evolves, a great revolving lie continually moving onwards and never getting any nearer to truth—for there is no such thing as "truth."

The Will to Power in Physical Objects

619. The triumphant concept "energy" with which our physicists created God and the world, needs yet to be completed: it must be given an inner will which I characterize as the "Will to Power"—that is to say, as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or the application and exercise of power as a creative instinct, etc. Physicists cannot get rid of the "actio in distans" in their principles; any more than they can a repelling force (or an attracting one). There is no help for it, all movements, all "appearances," all "laws" must be understood as symptoms of an inner phenomenon, and the analogy of man must be used for this purpose. It is possible to trace all the instincts of an animal to the will to power; as also all the functions of organic life to this one source.

Perspectivity in Theories of Physics

636. The physicists believe in a "true world" after their own kind; a fixed systematizing of atoms to perform necessary movements, and holding good equally of all creatures, — so that, according to them, the "world of appearance" reduces itself to the side of general and generally-needed Being, which is accessible to everyone according to his kind (accessible and also adjusted, — made "subjective"). But here they are in error. The atom which they postulate is arrived at by the logic of that perspective of consciousness; it is in itself therefore a subjective fiction. This picture of the world which they project is in no way essentially different from the subjective picture: the only difference is, that it is composed simply with more extended senses, but certainly with our senses. . . . In the end, without knowing it, they left something out of the constellation: precisely the necessary perspective factor by means of which every center of power — and not man alone — constructs the rest of the world from its point of view — that is to say, measures it, feels it, and molds it according to its degree of strength. . . . They forgot to include with this perspective-fixing power, in "true being," — or, in school-terms, subject- being. They suppose that this was "evolved" and added; — but even the chemical investigator needs it: it is indeed specific Being, which determines action and reaction according to circumstances.

          Perspectivity is only a complex form of specificness. My idea is that every specific body strives to become master of all space, and to extend its power (its will to power), and to thrust back everything that resists it. But inasmuch as it is continually meeting the same endeavors on the part of other bodies, it concludes by coming to terms with those (by "combining" with those) which are sufficiently related to it — and thus they conspire together for power. The process continues.

          637. Even in the inorganic world all that concerns an atom of energy is its immediate neighborhood: distant forces balance each other. Here is the root of perspectivity, and it explains why a living organism is "egoistic" to the core.

The Will to Power in Biology

644. Greater complexity, sharp differentiation, the contiguity of the developed organs and functions, with the disappearance of intermediate members—if that is perfection, then there is a Will to Power apparent in the organic process by means of whose dominating, shaping, and commanding forces it is continually increasing the sphere of its power, and persistently simplifying things within that sphere, it grows imperatively.

          "Spirit" is only a means and an instrument in the service of higher life, in the service of the elevation of life.

          658. (1) The organic functions shown to be but forms of the fundamental will, the will to power,—and outgrowths of it.

          (2) The will to power specializes itself as will to nutrition, to property, to tools, to servants (obedience), and to rulers: the body as an example.—The stronger will directs the weaker. There is no other form of causality than that of will to will. It is not to be explained mechanically.

          (3) Thinking, feeling, willing, in all living organisms. What is a desire if it be not: a provocation of the feeling of power by an obstacle (or, better still, by rhythmical obstacles and resisting forces)—so that it surges through it? Thus in all pleasure pain is understood.—If the pleasure is to be very great, the pains preceding it must have been very long, and the whole bow of life must have been strained to its limit.

          (4) Intellectual functions. The will to shaping, forming, and making like, etc.

The Will to Power in Human Psychology as the Primary Motivation

688. The unitary view of psychology. We are accustomed to regard the development of a vast number of forms as compatible with one single origin.

          My theory would be: that the will to power is the primitive motive force out of which all other motives have been derived;

          That it is exceedingly illuminating to substitute power for individual "happiness" (after which every living organism is said to strive): "It strives after power, after more power";—happiness is only a symptom of the feeling of power attained, a consciousness of difference (it does not strive after happiness: but happiness steps in when the object is attained, after which the organism has striven: happiness is an accompanying, not an actuating factor);

          That all motive force is the will to power; that there is no other force, either physical, dynamic, or psychic.

          In our science, where the concept cause and effect is reduced to a relationship of complete equilibrium, and in which it seems desirable for the same quantum of force to be found on either side, all idea of a motive power is absent: we only apprehend results, and we call these equal from the point of view of their content of force....

          It is a matter of mere experience that change never ceases: at bottom we have not the smallest grounds for assuming that any one particular change must follow upon any other. On the contrary, any state which has been attained would seem almost forced to maintain itself intact if it had not within itself a capacity for not desiring to maintain itself.... Spinoza's proposition concerning "self-preservation" ought as a matter of fact to put a stop to change. But the proposition is false; the contrary is true. In all living organisms it can be clearly shown that they do everything not to remain as they are, but to become greater.

An International Race of New Aristocrats will Rule the World

960. From now forward, there will be such favorable first conditions for greater ruling powers as have never yet been found on earth. This is by no means the most important point. The establishment has been made possible of international race unions which will set themselves the task of rearing a ruling race, the future "lords of the earth"—a new, vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years: a higher species of men which, thanks to their preponderance of will, knowledge, riches, and influence, will take advantage of democratic Europe as the most suitable and supple instrument they can have for taking the fate of the earth into their own hands, and working as artists upon man himself. Enough! The time is coming for us to transform all our views on politics.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. In Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy", what are the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of art?

2. In Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy", what is Nietzsche's view of the world's primordial artist?

3. In Nietzsche's "Notes on The Eternal Recurrence", what is the eternal recurrence and what is the moral code that follows from it?

4. In Nietzsche's "Dawn of the Day", what are the main features of his view on morality and custom?

5. In Nietzsche's "Joyful Wisdom" what is his notion of the Death of God?

6. In Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", what are the main features of the Superman?

7.  In Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", what are the main features of the higher men?

8. In Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", explain the features of the camel, lion and child that represent the stages of becoming a superman.

9. In Nietzsche's Preface to "Beyond Good and Evil", what are the main problems with philosophy and with Plato in particular?

10. In Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", what does he mean by "antithesis of value" and why does he reject the notion?

11. In Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", explain Nietzsche's view of the herd mentality and the hypocrisy of the current ruling class.

12. In Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", what is the master-slave morality?

13. In Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals" explain the historical origin of the word "good".

14. In Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals" describe how the anti-aristocratic slave morality emerged with Judaism and Christianity.

15. In Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals" describe the importance of non-philosophical explanations of the origin of moral values.

16. In Nietzsche's "The Anti-Christ", what is the transvaluation of values and the role of higher people in bringing it about?

17. In Nietzsche's "The Anti-Christ", explain Christian weakness, and the Renaissance attempt to transvalue Christianity.

18. In Nietzsche's "The Will to Power", what is nihilism, its causes and the solution to it?

19. In Nietzsche's "The Will to Power", what is perspectivism?

20. In Nietzsche's "The Will to Power" how is the will to power evident in physics, biology and psychology?

21. Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

          a. William James makes the following criticism of Nietzsche's contrast between the higher-man morality of the aristocrat, and the lower-man morality of the saint: "he expresses well the clash between the two Ideals. The carnivorous-minded 'strong man,' the adult male and cannibal, can see nothing but moldiness and morbidness in the saint's gentleness and self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?" (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, Lecture 16). In each of these questions, Nietzsche goes with the first option, and James with the second. Which side is better and why?

          b. George Santayana made the following criticism of Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power: "Nietzsche confuses his biological insight, that all life is the assertion of some sort of power -- the power to breathe, for instance -- with the admiration he felt for a masterful egotism. But even if we identify life or any kind of existence with the exertion of strength, the kinds of strength exerted will be heterogeneous and not always compatible. The strength of Lucifer does not ensure victory in war; it points rather to failure in a world peopled by millions of timid, pious, and democratic persons" (Egotism in German Philosophy, 1915). Discuss Santayana's criticism and discuss how Nietzsche might respond.

          c. Frank Thilly makes the following criticism of Nietzsche's philosophy: "He exaggerates the will to power, he exaggerates the fierce aspects of life, he exaggerates the value of self-assertion, he exaggerates the harmfulness of pity. Life is not the noisy, furious, bloody battlefield described by him, and it is certainly not in such an environment that we look for the "higher" types of men. No doubt the " robustious periwigpated fellows " set up by him as ideals are satisfied with themselves and value themselves alone, but it is not to be expected that the rest of us should make footstools of our- selves for their glorification" (review "Beyond Good and Evil" 1908). Discuss Thilly's point and how Nietzsche might respond.

          d. Heidegger criticizes Nietzsche's theory of the eternal return: "Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is captured in his doctrine of the eternal return of the same. . . . Its arid and oppressive quality leaps immediately to our eyes. We therefore reject it as soon as we hear it. We close ourselves off from it all the more when we learn that nobody can 'prove' it in in the way we generally like to have our 'proofs' demonstrated" (Nietzsche, Vol. 2, 1936-1940). Discuss Heidegger's criticism and how Nietzsche might respond.

          e. Bertrand Russell criticizes Nietzsche's rejection of human universal love: "He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear: I am afraid my neighbour may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him. If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly display the contempt for him which of course I feel. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His "noble" man who is himself in day-dreams is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power" (History of Western Philosophy, 1945, "Nietzsche"). Discuss Russell's criticism and how Nietzsche might respond.

          f. Bertrand Russell criticizes Nietzsche's moral theory for being merely a statement about the kind of world that Nietzsche himself desires: "Nietzsche's doctrine might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici. But this is not a philosophy; it is a biographical fact about a certain individual. The word 'desirable' is not synonymous with 'desired by me'; it has some claim, however shadowy, to legislate universally. A theist may say that what is desirable is what God desires, but Nietzsche cannot say this. He could say that he knows what is good by an ethical intuition, but he will not say this, because it sounds too Kantian. What he can say, as an expansion of the word "desirable," is this: 'If men will read my works, a certain percentage of them will come to share my desires as regards the organization of society'" (History of Western Philosophy, 1945, "Nietzsche"). Discuss Russell's criticism and how Nietzsche might respond.

          g. Nietzsche has a recurring theme of ideal persons: the superman, the higher man, the master, the absolute ruler, the aristocrat, the will to power. Discuss whether there is a common theme to all of these and what it might be.

          h. Richard Rorty makes the following criticism of Nietzsche's view of Christianity and the slave mentality: "I am most offended by the passages in which Nietzsche expresses contempt for weakness, and especially by the passages which argue that there is something wrong with Christianity because it originated among slaves. So it did, but those slaves had a good idea: namely, that the ideal human community would be one in which love is the only law. So it would. One can separate this Christian ideal from the ressentiment characteristic of the ascetic priests, but Nietzsche never made that distinction" (Eurozine.com). Discuss Rorty's criticism and how Nietzsche might respond.

          i. Peter Bergman makes the following comment on Nietzsche's notion of the Death of God: "Nietzsche's atheism was couched in the language of regret: God is dead; we have killed him; nihilism, alas, is our fate; let us be strong and go forward, etc. It was coupled with the sense that the eclipse of Christian culture was creating a vacuum that would breed new fanaticisms" (Eurozine.com). Develop and discuss Bergman's comment.

          j. Teodor Münz criticizes Nietzsche's view of conception of morality as follows: "I cannot identify with his emphasis on physical violence, ruthlessness, lies, systematic selection of humanity, with his thesis that the 'majority of people have no right to existence, but are a burden for the higher', or with his racism and with other 'virtues' such as the means for achieving the power of strong individuals over the weak. I think that these views are key to, and representative of, his conception of morality and politics" (Eurozine.com). Discuss Münz's criticism and how Nietzsche might respond.

          k. Jan Sokol defends Nietzsche against charges of that he is nihilistic: "To regard Nietzsche as a nihilist is a mistake, an unobservant reading. He was rather an excessively sensitive person horrified by a world where nothing has rules and stands for nothing. Indeed, a 'nihilist' is a curse word thrown at others. Nietzsche occasionally calls even himself a nihilist, but for an entirely different reason: everybody has a mouth full of values, but in reality they all behave like cattle, like a well-fed 'herd'" (Eurozine.com). Discuss Sokol's view and whether he accurately depicts Nietzsche's view of nihilism.

          l. In "Birth of Tragedy" Nietzsche talks about the world's primordial artist, and in "Will to Power" he describes the commanding force that is found throughout nature. Assuming that Nietzsche was an atheist, discuss should we understand these references.