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On the
Genealogy of Morals
A Polemical Tract
by
Friedrich Nietzsche
[This translation by Ian Johnston
of Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC (now Vancouver Island University),
has certain copyright restrictions. For information please use the
following link: Copyright.
For comments or question please contact Ian Johnston.
Editorial comments, translations in square brackets and italics, and endnotes
are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from Nietzsche’s
text. This text was last revised in
January 2009]
[Table of Contents for Genealogy
of Morals]
Prologue
Prologue
1
We don’t know ourselves, we knowledgeable people —we are personally
ignorant about ourselves. And there’s good reason for that. We’ve never tried
to find out who we are—how could it happen that one
day we’d discover ourselves? With justice it’s been said, “Where your
treasure is, there shall your heart be also.”* Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge
stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as born winged creatures and
collectors of spiritual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with
only one thing—to “bring something home.” As far as the rest of life is
concerned, what people call “experience,”—which of us is serious enough for
that? Or has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we’ve been “missing the
point.” Our hearts have simply not been
engaged with that—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We’ve been much more
like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has
just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once
wakes up and asks himself “What exactly
did that clock strike?”—so now and then we rub our ears afterwards and
ask, totally surprised and completely embarrassed “What have we really just
experienced?” And more: “Who are we really?” Then, as I’ve mentioned, we
count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our
experience, of our lives, of our being — alas! in
the process we keep losing the count . . . So we remain simply and necessarily
strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must be
confused about ourselves. For us this law holds for all eternity: “Each man is
furthest from himself”—where we ourselves are concerned, we are not
“knowledgeable people” . . .
2
My thoughts about the origin of our moral prejudices—for this
polemical tract is concerned about that origin—had their first brief,
provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms which carried the title Human,
All-too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, which I started to write in
Sorrento, during a winter when I had the chance to pause, just as a traveller
stops, and to look over the wide and dangerous land through which my spirit had
wandered up to that point. This happened in the winter 1876-77, but the ideas
themselves are older. In the main points, they were the same ideas which I am
taking up again in these present essays:—let’s hope that the long interval of
time has done them some good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger,
and more complete! But the fact that today I still stand by these ideas,
that in the intervening time they themselves have constantly become more
strongly associated with one another, in fact, have grown into each other and
intertwined, that reinforces in me the joyful confidence that they may not have
originally developed in me as single, random, or sporadic ideas, but up out of
a common root, out of some fundamental will for knowledge ruling from
deep within, always speaking with greater clarity, always demanding greater
clarity. For that’s the only thing appropriate to a philosopher. We have no
right to be scattered in any way: we are not permitted to make isolated
mistakes or to run into isolated truths. By contrast, our ideas, our values,
our affirmations and denials, our if’s and whether’s,
grow out of us from the same necessity which makes a tree bear its
fruit—totally related and interlinked amongst each other, witnesses of one
will, one health, one soil, one sun.—As for the question whether these fruits
of ours taste good to you —what does that matter to the trees! What
concern is that to us, we philosophers! . . .
3
Because of a doubt peculiar to my own nature, which I am reluctant to
confess—for it concerns itself with morality, with everything which up
to the present has been celebrated on earth as morality—a doubt which came into
my life so early, so uninvited, so irresistibly, in such contradiction to my
surroundings, my age, the examples around me, and my origin, that I would
almost have the right to call it my “a priori” [before experience]—because
of this, my curiosity as well as my suspicions had to pause early on at the
question about where our good and evil really originated. In fact,
already as a thirteen-year-old lad, my mind was occupying itself with the
problem of the origin of evil. At an age when one has “half childish play, half
God in one’s heart,” I devoted my first childish literary trifle, my first
written philosophical exercise, to this problem—and so far as my “solution” to
it at that time is concerned, well, I gave that honour to God, as is
reasonable, and made him the father of evil. Is that precisely
what my “a priori” demanded of me, that new immoral, at the very least
unmoral “a priori” and the cryptic “categorical imperative” which spoke
out from it, alas, so anti-Kantian, which I have increasingly listened to ever
since—and not just listened to? . . .* Luckily at an early stage I learned to separate theological
prejudices from moral ones, and I no longer sought the origin of evil behind
the world. Some education in history and philology, along with an inherently
refined sense concerning psychological questions in general, quickly changed my
problem into something else: Under what conditions did man invent for himself
those value judgments good and evil? And what value do they inherently
possess? Have they hindered or fostered human well-being up to now? Are
they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying life? Or is
it the other way around? Do they
indicate fullness, power, a will for living, courage, confidence, his future?— After that I came across and proposed all sorts of
answers for myself. I distinguished between ages, peoples, different ranks of
individuals. I kept refining my problem. Out of the answers arose new
questions, investigations, assumptions, probabilities, until at last I had my
own country, my own soil, a totally secluded, flowering, blooming world, a
secret garden, as it were, of which no one had the slightest inkling. O how lucky
we are, we knowledgeable people, provided only that we know how to stay silent
long enough! . . .
4
The first stimulus to publish something of my hypothesis concerning the
origin of morality was given to me by a lucid, tidy, clever, even precocious
little book, in which for the first time I clearly ran into a topsy-turvy,
perverse type of genealogical hypothesis—a genuinely English style. It drew me
with that power of attraction which everything opposite, everything antipodal,
contains. The title of this booklet was The Origin of the Moral Feelings.
Its author was Dr Paul Rée, and it appeared in the
year 1877.* I have perhaps never
read anything which I would have denied, statement by statement, conclusion by
conclusion, as I did with this book, but without any sense of annoyance or
impatience. In the work I mentioned above, on which I was working at the time,
I made opportune and inopportune references to statements in Dr. Rée’s book, not in order to prove them wrong—what have I to
do with preparing refutations!—but, as is appropriate to a positive spirit, to
put in the place of something unlikely something more likely and possibly in
the place of some error a different error. In that period, as I said, for the
first time I brought into the light of day that hypotheses about genealogy to
which these essays have been dedicated—but clumsily, as I will be the last to
deny, still fettered, still without my own language for these concerns of mine,
and with all sorts of retreating and vacillating. For particular details, you
should compare what I said in Human, All-too Human, 45, about the double
nature of the prehistory of good and evil (that is, in the spheres of the
nobility and the slaves); similarly, section 136, concerning the worth and
origin of ascetic morality, as well as sections 96, 99, and 2.89 concerning the
“Morality of Custom,” that much older and more primitive style of morality,
which lies toto coelo
[an enormous distance] from the altruistic way of valuing (which Dr. Rée, like all English genealogists of morality, sees as the
very essence of moral evaluation); similarly, 1.92, Wanderer section
26, and The Dawn 112, concerning the origin of justice as a compromise
between approximately equal powers (equality as a precondition of all contracts
and therefore of all justice); likewise concerning the origin of punishment in Wanderer
22, 33, for which an intent to terrify is neither the essential thing nor the
origin (as Dr. Rée claims:—it is far more likely
first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something
incidental, something additional).*
5
Basically even then the real concern for me at heart was something much
more important than coming up with hypotheses about the origin of morality,
either my own or from other people (or, more precisely stated—this latter issue
was important to me only for the sake of a goal to which it was one path out of
many). For me the issue was the value of morality—and in that matter I
had to take issue almost alone with my great teacher Schopenhauer, the one to
whom, as if to a contemporary, that book, with its passion and hidden
contradiction, addresses itself (—for that book was also a “polemical tract”).* The most specific
issue was the worth of the “unegoistic,” the instinct for pity, self-denial,
self-sacrifice, something which Schopenhauer himself had painted with gold,
deified, and projected into the next world for so long that it finally remained
for him “value in itself” and the reason why he said No to life and even
to himself. But a constantly more fundamental suspicion of these very
instincts voiced itself in me, a scepticism which always dug deeper! It was
precisely here that I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime
temptation and seduction.—But in what direction? To
nothingness?—It was precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standing
still, the backward-glancing exhaustion, the will turning itself against
life, the final illness tenderly and sadly announcing itself. I understood the
morality of pity, which was always seizing more and more around it and which
gripped even the philosophers and made them sick, as the most sinister symptom
of our European culture, which itself had become sinister, as its detour to a
new Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to—nihilism? . . . This modern philosophical
preference for and overvaluing of pity is really something new. Concerning the worthlessness
of pity philosophers up to now have been in agreement. I name only Plato,
Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant—four spirits as
different from one another as possible, but united in one thing, in the low
value they set on pity.*—
6
This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity
(—I’m an opponent of the disgraceful modern immaturity of feelings—) appears at
first to be only something isolated, a detached question mark. But anyone who
remains there for a while and learns to ask questions will experience
what happened to me:—a huge new vista opens up before him, a possibility grips
him like an attack of dizziness, all sorts of mistrust, suspicion, and fear
spring up, his belief in morality, in all morality, starts to totter—and
finally he hears a new demand. Let’s proclaim this new demand: we need a
critique of moral values, we must first question the very value of
these values —and for that we need a knowledge of the conditions and
circumstances out of which these values grew, under which they have developed
and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartufferie [hypocrisy], as illness, as
misunderstanding, but also morality as cause, as means of healing, as
stimulant, as scruple, as poison), a knowledge of the sort which has not been
there up to this point, something which has not even been wished for. We have
taken the worth of these “values” as something given, as self-evident,
as beyond all dispute. Up until now people have also
not had the slightest doubts about or wavered in setting up “the good man” as
more valuable than “the evil man,” of higher worth in the sense of the
improvement, usefulness, and prosperity with respect to mankind in general
(along with the future of humanity). What about this? What if the truth were
the other way around? Well? What if in the “good” there even lay a symptom of
regression, something like a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic,
something which makes the present live at the cost of the future? Perhaps something more comfortable, less dangerous, but also on a
smaller scale, something more demeaning? . . . So that this very
morality would be guilty if the inherently possible highest power and
magnificence of the human type were never attained? So
that this very morality might be the danger of all dangers? . . .
7
Suffice it to say that once this insight revealed itself to me, I had reasons to look around for learned, bold, and
hard-working comrades (today I’m still searching). It’s a matter of travelling
through the immense, distant, and so secretive land of morality—morality which
has really existed, which has really been lived—with nothing but new questions
and, as it were, new eyes. Isn’t that almost like discovering this land
for the first time? . . . In this matter, it so happened I thought of, among
others, the above-mentioned Dr. Rée, because I had no
doubts at all that by the very nature of his questions he would be driven to a
more correct methodology in order to arrive at any answers. Did I deceive
myself in this? At any rate, my desire was to provide a better direction for
such a keen and objective eye as his, a direction leading to a true history
of morality and to advise him in time against the English way of making
hypotheses by staring off into the blue. For, indeed, it’s obvious which
colour must be a hundred times more important for a genealogist of morality
than this blue: namely, gray, in other words, what has been documented, what
can be established as the truth, what really took place, in short, the long and
difficult-to- decipher hieroglyphic writing of the past in human morality.—This
was unknown to Dr. Rée. But he had read Darwin:—and
so to some extent in his hypotheses the Darwinian beast and the most modern
modest and tender moral sensibility, which “no longer bites,” politely extend
their hands to each other in a way that is at least entertaining —with the
latter bearing a facial expression revealing a certain good- natured and
refined indolence, in which is even mixed a grain of pessimism, of exhaustion,
as if it is really not worth taking all these things —the problems of
morality—so seriously.*
But for me things appear reversed: there are no issues which are more worth
taking seriously; among the rewards, for example, is the fact that one day
perhaps people will be permitted to take them cheerfully. For
cheerfulness, or, to say it in my own language, the gay science, is a
reward, a reward for a lengthy, brave, hard-working, and underground
seriousness, which, of course, is not something for everyone. But on that day
when, from full hearts, we say “Forward! Our old morality also belongs in a
comedy!” we’ll have discovered a new complication and possibility for the
Dionysian drama of “the fate of the soul”: — and we can bet that he will put it
to good use, the grand old immortal comic poet of our existence! . . .
8
If this writing is incomprehensible to someone or other and hurts his
ears, the blame for that, it strikes me, is not necessarily mine. The writing
is sufficiently clear given the conditions I set out—that you have first read
my earlier writings and have taken some trouble to do that, for,
in fact, these works are not easily accessible. For example, so far as my Zarathustra
is concerned, I don’t consider anyone knowledgeable about it who
has not at some time or another been deeply wounded by and profoundly delighted
with every word in it.*
For only then can he enjoy the privilege of sharing with reverence in the
halcyon element out of which that work was born, in its sunny clarity,
distance, breadth, and certainty. In other cases the aphoristic form creates
difficulties. These stem from the fact that nowadays people don’t take this
form seriously enough. An aphorism, properly stamped and poured, has not
yet been “deciphered” simply by being read. It’s much more the case that only now can one begin to explicate it, and
that requires an art of interpretation. In the third essay of this book I have
set out a model of what I call an “interpretation” for such a case.—In this essay an aphorism is presented, and the essay itself
is a commentary on it. Of course, in order to practice this style of reading as
art, one thing is above all essential, something that today has been
thoroughly forgotten—and so it will require still more time before my writings
are “readable”—something for which one almost needs to be a cow, at any rate not
a “modern man”—rumination.
Sils-Maria, Oberengadin
July 1887
Notes
. . . heart be also:
The quotation come from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6. [Back
to Text]
a
priori: This phrase refers to some idea or capacity one possesses
inherently, something not provided by experience. The phrase is associated with
the theories of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) the great German philosopher; categorical
imperative: the key phrase in Kant’s morality, the idea that moral action
consists of acting upon a principle which could become a rational moral
principle without creating a moral contradiction (“Act so that the maxim [which
determines your will] may be capable of becoming a universal law for all
rational beings”). [Back to Text]
Paul Rée
(1849-1901): German philosopher and friend of Nietzsche’s. His The Origin of
the Moral Sensations was published in 1877. [Back
to Text]
Wanderer was published in 1880 and Daybreak
(or Dawn) in 1881. In these references to Nietzsche’s earlier works the
page numbers he gives in his text have been replaced with section numbers. [Back
to Text]
Schophenhauer:
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher, whose work exercised a
significant influence on Nietzsche, especially his emphasis on the importance
of the human will. [Back to Text]
Plato (428-348 BC), the most important of the
classical Greek philosophers; Spinoza: Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677),
Dutch philosopher; La Rochefoucauld: Francois
de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), French author,
famous for his maxims. [Back to Text]
Darwin: Charles Darwin (1809-1882), English scientist
whose Origin of Species was published in 1859. [Back
to Text]
Zarathustra: Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was written between 1883 and 1885. [Back
to Text]
[Table of Contents for Genealogy
of Morals]
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