If, then, we have not made much progress with truth
and error, we can make even less with good and evil. This antithesis manifests
itself exclusively in the domain of morals, that is, a domain belonging to the
history of mankind, and it is precisely in this field that final and ultimate
truths are most sparsely sown. The conceptions of good and evil have varied so
much from nation to nation and from age to age that they have often been in
direct contradiction with each other.
But all the same, someone may
object, good is not evil and evil is not good; if good is confused with evil,
there is an end to all morality and everyone can do or leave undone whatever he
wants. Stripped of all oracular pomposity, this is also Herr Dühring's opinion.
But the matter cannot be so simply disposed of. If it were such an easy business,
there would certainly be no dispute at all over good and evil; everyone would
know what was good and what was bad. But how do things stand today? What
morality is preached to us today? There is first Christian‑feudal
morality, inherited from past centuries of faith; and this again is divided, essentially,
into a Catholic and a Protestant morality, each of which in turn has no lack of
subdivisions, from the Jesuit‑Catholic and the Orthodox‑Protestant
to the lax and "enlightened" morality. Beside the Christian‑feudal
morality we find the modern‑bourgeois morality and again beside the
latter the proletarian morality of the future, so that in the most advanced
European countries alone the past, present and future provide three great
groups of ethical theories which are in force simultaneously and side by side.
Which, then, is the true one? Not one of them, in the sense of absolute
finality; but certainly that morality which contains the most elements
promising permanence, which, in the present, represents the overthrow of the
present, represents the future, and therefore the proletarian morality.
But when we see that the three
classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie [i.e,
the capitalists] and the proletariat [i.e., the working class], each
have a morality of their own, we can only draw the conclusion that men,
consciously or unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas in the last resort
from the practical relations on which their class position is based ‑‑
from the economic relations in which they carry on production and exchange.
But nevertheless there is great deal
which the three moral theories mentioned above have in common -- is this not at
least a portion of a morality which is fixed once and for all? -- These moral
theories represent three different stages of the same historical development,
have therefore a common historical background, and for that reason alone they
necessarily have much in common. Even more. At similar or approximately similar
stages of economic development moral theories must of necessity be more or less
in agreement. From the moment when private ownership of movable property developed,
all societies in which this private ownership existed had to have this moral injunction
in common: Thou shalt not steal. [Exodus 20:15; Deuteronomy 5:19.] Does this
injunction thereby become an eternal moral injunction? By no means. In a
society in which all motives for stealing have been done away with, in which
therefore at the very most only lunatics would ever steal, how the preacher of
morals would be laughed at who tried solemnly to proclaim the eternal truth:
Thou shalt not steal!
We therefore reject every attempt to
impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever
immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above
history and the differences between nations. We maintain on the contrary that
all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the
economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has
hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality;
it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class,
or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented
its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the
oppressed. That in this process there has on the whole been progress in
morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge, no one will doubt. But
we have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which
stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes
possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class
antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life. And now one can
gauge Herr Dühring's presumption in advancing his claim, from the midst of the
old class society and on the eve of a social revolution, to impose on the
future classless society an eternal morality independent of time and changes in
reality. Even assuming -- what we do not know up to now -- that he understands
the structure of the society of the future at least in its main outlines….
From the moment when the
bourgeois demand for the abolition of class privileges was put forward, alongside
it appeared the proletarian demand for the abolition of the classes themselves ‑‑
at first in religious form, leaning towards primitive Christianity, and later
drawing support from the bourgeois equalitarian theories themselves. The proletarians
took the bourgeoisie at its word: equality must not be merely apparent, must
not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must also
be extended to the social, economic sphere.... the real content of the
proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes.
"Good
And Evil," "Good And Bad"
1) … the judgment "good" did not originate
with those to whom "goodness" was shown! Rather it was "the
good" themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and
high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good,
that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded,
common and plebeian. …. It follows from this origin that the word
"good" was definitely not linked from the first and by
necessity to "unegoistic" actions, as the superstition of these genealogists
of morality would have it. Rather it was only when aristocratic value judgments
declined that the whole antithesis "egoistic" "unegoistic"
obtruded itself more and more on the human conscience—it is, to speak in my own
language, the herd instinct that through this antithesis at last gets
its word (and its words) in.
7) One will have divined already how easily the priestly
mode of valuation can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic and then
develop into its opposite; this is particularly likely when the priestly caste
and the warrior caste are in jealous opposition to one another and are
unwilling to come to terms. The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed
a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together
with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war
games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity. The
priestly-noble mode of valuation presupposes, as we have seen, other things: it
is disadvantageous for when it comes to war! As is well known, the priests are
the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is
because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny
proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly
great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most
ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when
compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. Human history would be altogether
too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced into
it—let us take at once the most notable example. All that has been done on
earth against "the noble," "the powerful," "the masters,"
"the rulers," fades into nothing compared with what the Jews
have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their
enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a
radical revaluation of their enemies' values, that is to say, an act of the most
spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the
people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. It was the
Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic
value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God)
and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most
abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying "the wretched alone are
the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived,
sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them
alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel,
the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in
all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!" . . . One knows who
inherited this Jewish revaluation [i.e., Christians]. . . In connection
with the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative provided by the Jews
through this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the proposition
I arrived at on a previous occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, section
195)—that with the Jews there began the slave revolt in morality: that
revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no
longer see because it—has been victorious.
8) … This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of
love, this "Redeemer" who brought blessedness and victory to the
poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not this seduction in its most uncanny
and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish
values and new ideals? Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime
vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this "Redeemer," this
ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret
black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean,
slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the
real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail
it to the cross, so that "all the world," namely all the opponents of
Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety
imagine any more dangerous bait than this? Anything to equal the enticing,
intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the
"holy cross," that ghastly paradox of a "God on the cross,"
that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for
the salvation of man?
10) ...The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment
[French for 'resentment'] itself becomes creative and gives birth to values:
the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of
deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble
morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from
the outset says No to what is "outside," what is
"different," what is "not itself"; and this No is
its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to
direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment;
in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world;
it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its
action is fundamentally reaction.
11) This, then, is quite the contrary of what the noble
man does, who conceives the basic concept "good" in advance and
spontaneously out of himself and only then creates for himself an idea of
"bad"! This "bad" of noble origin and that "evil"
out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred—the former an after-production, a
side issue, a contrasting shade, the latter on the contrary the original thing,
the beginning, the distinctive deed in the conception of a slave
morality—how different these words "bad" and "evil" are,
although they are both apparently the opposite of the same concept
"good." But it is not the same concept "good": one
should ask rather precisely who is "evil" in the sense of the
morality of ressentiment. The answer, in all strictness, is: precisely
the "good man" of the other morality, precisely the noble, powerful
man, the ruler, but dyed in another color, interpreted in another fashion, seen
in another way by the venomous eye of ressentiment.
Here there is one
thing we shall be the last to deny: he who knows these "good men"
only as enemies knows only evil enemies, and the same men who are held
so sternly in check inter pares by custom, respect, usage, gratitude,
and even more by mutual suspicion and jealousy, and who on the other hand in
their relations with one another show themselves so resourceful in consideration,
self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship—once they go outside,
where the strange, the stranger is found, they are not much better than
uncaged beasts of prey. There they savor a freedom from all social constraints,
they compensate themselves in the wilderness for the tension engendered by protracted
confinement and enclosure within the peace of society, they go back to
the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as triumphant monsters who
perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture,
exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student's
prank, convinced they have provided the poets with a lot more material for song
and praise. One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the
beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of
spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal
has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian,
Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings—they
all shared this need.
13) But let us return: the problem of the other
origin of the "good," of the good as conceived by the man of ressentiment,
demands its solution.
That lambs
dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for
reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs
say among themselves: "these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least
like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be
good?" there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal,
except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and
say: "we don't dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we
even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb."
To demand of
strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not
be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a
thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand
of weakness that it should express itself as strength. ….
A quantum of
force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect--more, it is nothing
other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to
the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that petrified
in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something
that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For
just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the
latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning,
so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if
there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to
express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no
"being" behind doing,
effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the
deed—the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it
sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event
first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better
when they say "force moves," "force causes," and the
like—all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire
science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not
disposed of that little changeling, the "subject" (the atom, for
example, is such a changeling, as is the Kantian "thing-in-itself");
no wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and
hatred exploit this belief for their own ends and in fact maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the
strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb—for thus
they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a
bird of prey.
When
the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful
cunning of impotence: "let us be different from the evil, namely good! And
he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who
does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do,
who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and
just"—this, listened to calmly and without previous bias, really amounts
to no more than: 'we weak ones are, after all, weak; it would be good if we did
nothing for which we are not strong enough"; but this dry matter of
fact, this prudence of the lowest order which even insects possess (posing as
dead, when in great danger, so as not to do "too much"), has, thanks
to the counterfeit and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the
ostentatious garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the
weakness of the weak—that is to say, their essence, their effects, their
sole ineluctable, irremovable reality—were a voluntary achievement, willed,
chosen, a deed, a meritorious act.
16) Let us conclude. The two opposing values
"good and bad," "good and evil" have been engaged in a fearful
struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has
certainly been on top for a long time, there are still places where the
struggle is as yet undecided. One might even say that it has risen ever higher
and thus become more and more profound and spiritual: so that today there is
perhaps no more decisive mark of a "higher nature," a more spiritual
nature, than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of
these opposed values.
