property, just as in general they are charitable and helpful
out of a desire for property. One finds them jealous when
they are crossed or forestalled in their charity. Parents
involuntarily make something like themselves out of their
children—they call that ‘education"; no mother doubts at
the bottom of her heart that the child she has borne is
thereby her property, no father hesitates about his right to
HIS OWN ideas and notions of worth. Indeed, in former
times fathers deemed it right to use their discretion
concerning the life or death of the newly born (as among
the ancient Germans). And like the father, so also do the
teacher, the class, the priest, and the prince still see in
every new individual an unobjectionable opportunity for a
new possession. The consequence is …
195. The Jews—a people ‘born for slavery,’ as Tacitus
and the whole ancient world say of them; ‘the chosen
people among the nations,’ as they themselves say and
believe—the Jews performed the miracle of the inversion
of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a
new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums.
Their prophets fused into one the expressions ‘rich,’
‘godless,’ ‘wicked,’ ‘violent,’ ‘sensual,’ and for the first
time coined the word ‘world’ as a term of reproach. In
this inversion of valuations (in which is also included the
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use of the word ‘poor’ as synonymous with ‘saint’ and
‘friend’) the significance of the Jewish people is to be
found; it is with THEM that the SLAVE-
INSURRECTION IN MORALS commences.
196. It is to be INFERRED that there are countless
dark bodies near the sun—such as we shall never see.
Among ourselves, this is an allegory; and the psychologist
of morals reads the whole star-writing merely as an
allegorical and symbolic language in which much may be
unexpressed.
197. The beast of prey and the man of prey (for
instance, Caesar Borgia) are fundamentally misunderstood,
‘nature’ is misunderstood, so long as one seeks a
‘morbidness’ in the constitution of these healthiest of all
tropical monsters and growths, or even an innate ‘hell’ in
them—as almost all moralists have done hitherto. Does it
not seem that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of
the tropics among moralists? And that the ‘tropical man’
must be discredited at all costs, whether as disease and
deterioration of mankind, or as his own hell and self-
torture? And why? In favour of the ‘temperate zones’? In
favour of the temperate men? The ‘moral’? The
mediocre?—This for the chapter: ‘Morals as Timidity.’
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198. All the systems of morals which address themselves
with a view to their ‘happiness,’ as it is called—what else
are they but suggestions for behaviour adapted to the
degree of DANGER from themselves in which the
individuals live; recipes for their passions, their good and
bad propensities, insofar as such have the Will to Power
and would like to play the master; small and great
expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty
odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of
them grotesque and absurd in their form—because they
address themselves to ‘all,’ because they generalize where
generalization is not authorized; all of them speaking
unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all
of them flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but
rather endurable only, and sometimes even seductive,
when they are over-spiced and begin to smell dangerously,
especially of ‘the other world.’ That is all of little value
when estimated intellectually, and is far from being
‘science,’ much less ‘wisdom"; but, repeated once more,
and three times repeated, it is expediency, expediency,
expediency, mixed with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity—
whether it be the indifference and statuesque coldness
towards the heated folly of the emotions, which the Stoics
advised and fostered; or the no- more-laughing and no-
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more-weeping of Spinoza, the destruction of the emotions
by their analysis and vivisection, which he recommended
so naively; or the lowering of the emotions to an innocent
mean at which they may be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of
morals; or even morality as the enjoyment of the emotions
in a voluntary attenuation and spiritualization by the
symbolism of art, perhaps as music, or as love of God, and
of mankind for God’s sake—for in religion the passions are
once more enfranchised, provided that … ; or, finally,
even the complaisant and wanton surrender to the
emotions, as has been taught by Hafis and Goethe, the
bold letting-go of the reins, the spiritual and corporeal
licentia morum in the exceptional cases of wise old
codgers and drunkards, with whom it ‘no longer has much
danger.’ —This also for the chapter: ‘Morals as Timidity.’
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—in view, therefore, of the
fact that obedience has been most practiced and fostered
among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose
that, generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in
every one, as a kind of FORMAL CONSCIENCE which
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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, protractedness, 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. If one imagine this
instinct increasing to its greatest extent, commanders and
independent individuals will finally be lacking 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
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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 gregarious 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 bell-wether cannot be dispensed with,
attempt after attempt is made nowadays to replace
commanders by the summing together of clever gregarious
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 gregarious
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.
200. The man of an age of dissolution which mixes the
races with one another, who has the inheritance of a
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diversified descent in his body—that is to say, contrary,
and often not only contrary, instincts and standards of
value, which struggle with one another and are seldom at
peace—such a man of late culture and broken lights, will,
on an average, be a weak man. His fundamental desire is
that the war which is IN HIM should come to an end;
happiness appears to him in the character of a soothing
medicine and mode of thought (for instance, Epicurean or
Christian); it is above all things the happiness of repose, of
undisturbedness, of repletion, of final unity—it is the
‘Sabbath of Sabbaths,’ to use the expression of the holy
rhetorician, St. Augustine, who was himself such a man.—
Should, however, the contrariety and conflict in such
natures operate as an ADDITIONAL incentive and
stimulus to life—and if, on the other hand, in addition to
their powerful and irreconcilable instincts, they have also
inherited and indoctrinated into them a proper mastery
and subtlety for carrying on the conflict with themselves
(that is to say, the faculty of self-control and self-
deception), there then arise those marvelously
incomprehensible and inexplicable beings, those
enigmatical men, predestined for conquering and
circumventing others, the finest examples of which are
Alcibiades and Caesar (with whom I should like to
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associate the FIRST of Europeans according to my taste,
the Hohenstaufen, Frederick the Second), and among
artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear precisely
in the same periods when that weaker type, with its
longing for repose, comes to the front; the two types are
complementary to each other, and spring from the same
causes.
201. As long as the utility which determines moral
estimates is only gregarious utility, as long as the
preservation of the community is only kept in view, and
the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively in what
seems dangerous to the maintenance of the community,
there can be no ‘morality of love to one’s neighbour.’
Granted even that there is already a little constant exercise
of consideration, sympathy, fairness, gentleness, and
mutual assistance, granted that even in this condition of
society all those instincts are already active which are
latterly distinguished by honourable names as ‘virtues,’ and
eventually almost coincide with the conception ‘morality":
in that period they do not as yet belong to the domain of
moral valuations—they are still ULTRA-MORAL. A
sympathetic action, for instance, is neither called good nor
bad, moral nor immoral, in the best period of the
Romans; and should it be praised, a sort of resentful
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disdain is compatible with this praise, even at the best,
directly the sympathetic action is compared with one
which contributes to the welfare of the whole, to the RES
PUBLICA. After all, ‘love to our neighbour’ is always a
secondary matter, partly conventional and arbitrarily
manifested in relation to our FEAR OF OUR
NEIGHBOUR. After the fabric of society seems on the
whole established and secured against external dangers, it is
this fear of our neighbour which again creates new
perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and
dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise,
foolhardiness, revengefulness, astuteness, rapacity, and love
of power, which up till then had not only to be honoured
from the point of view of general utility—under other
names, of course, than those here given—but had to be
fostered and cultivated (because they were perpetually
required in the common danger against the common
enemies), are now felt in their dangerousness to be doubly
strong—when the outlets for them are lacking—and are
gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny.
The contrary instincts and inclinations now attain to moral
honour, the gregarious instinct gradually draws its
conclusions. How much or how little dangerousness to the
community or to equality is contained in an opinion, a
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condition, an emotion, a disposition, or an endowment—
that is now the moral perspective, here again fear is the
mother of morals. It is by the loftiest and strongest
instincts, when they break out passionately and carry the
individual far above and beyond the average, and the low
level of the gregarious conscience, that the self-reliance of
the community is destroyed, its belief in itself, its
backbone, as it were, breaks, consequently these very
instincts will be most branded and defamed. The lofty
independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, and even
the cogent reason, are felt to be dangers, everything that
elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of
fear to the neighbour, is henceforth called EVIL, the
tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing
disposition, the MEDIOCRITY of desires, attains to
moral distinction and honour. Finally, under very peaceful
circumstances, there is always less opportunity and
necessity for training the feelings to severity and rigour,
and now every form of severity, even in justice, begins to
disturb the conscience, a lofty and rigorous nobleness and
self-responsibility almost offends, and awakens distrust,
‘the lamb,’ and still more ‘the sheep,’ wins respect. There
is a point of diseased mellowness and effeminacy in the
history of society, at which society itself takes the part of
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him who injures it, the part of the CRIMINAL, and does
so, in fact, seriously and honestly. To punish, appears to it
