to be somehow unfair—it is certain that the idea of
‘punishment’ and ‘the obligation to punish’ are then
painful and alarming to people. ‘Is it not sufficient if the
criminal be rendered HARMLESS? Why should we still
punish? Punishment itself is terrible!’—with these
questions gregarious morality, the morality of fear, draws
its ultimate conclusion. If one could at all do away with
danger, the cause of fear, one would have done away with
this morality at the same time, it would no longer be
necessary, it WOULD NOT CONSIDER ITSELF any
longer necessary!—Whoever examines the conscience of
the present-day European, will always elicit the same
imperative from its thousand moral folds and hidden
recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd ‘we
wish that some time or other there may be NOTHING
MORE TO FEAR!’ Some time or other—the will and
the way THERETO is nowadays called ‘progress’ all over
Europe.
202. Let us at once say again what we have already said
a hundred times, for people’s ears nowadays are unwilling
to hear such truths—OUR truths. We know well enough
how offensive it sounds when any one plainly, and
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without metaphor, counts man among the animals, but it
will be accounted to us almost a CRIME, that it is
precisely in respect to men of ‘modern ideas’ that we have
constantly applied the terms ‘herd,’ ‘herd-instincts,’ and
such like expressions. What avail is it? We cannot do
otherwise, for it is precisely here that our new insight is.
We have found that in all the principal moral judgments,
Europe has become unanimous, including likewise the
countries where European influence prevails in Europe
people evidently KNOW what Socrates thought he did
not know, and what the famous serpent of old once
promised to teach—they ‘know’ today what is good and
evil. It must then sound hard and be distasteful to the ear,
when we always insist that that which here thinks it
knows, that which here glorifies itself with praise and
blame, and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herding
human animal, the instinct which has come and is ever
coming more and more to the front, to preponderance
and supremacy over other instincts, according to the
increasing physiological approximation and resemblance of
which it is the symptom. 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
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which many other moralities, and above all 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 humoured 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. Apparently in opposition to the peacefully
industrious democrats and Revolution-ideologues, and still
more so to the awkward philosophasters and fraternity-
visionaries who call themselves Socialists and want a ‘free
society,’ those are really at one with them all in their
thorough and instinctive hostility to every form of society
other than that of the AUTONOMOUS herd (to the
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extent even of repudiating the notions ‘master’ and
‘servant’—ni dieu ni maitre, 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); but equally at one in their religion of sympathy,
in their compassion for all that feels, lives, and suffers
(down to the very animals, up even to ‘God’—the
extravagance of ‘sympathy for God’ belongs to a
democratic age); altogether at one in the cry and
impatience of their sympathy, in their deadly hatred of
suffering generally, in their almost feminine incapacity for
witnessing it or ALLOWING it; at one in their
involuntary beglooming and heart-softening, under the
spell of which Europe seems to be threatened with a new
Buddhism; at one in their belief in the morality of
MUTUAL sympathy, as though it were morality in itself,
the climax, the ATTAINED climax of mankind, the sole
hope of the future, the consolation of the present, the
great discharge from all the obligations of the past;
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altogether at one in their belief in the community as the
DELIVERER, in the herd, and therefore in ‘themselves.’
203. We, who hold a different belief—we, who regard
the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating
form of political organization, but as equivalent to a
degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his
mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our
hopes? In NEW PHILOSOPHERS—there is no other
alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate
opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert
‘eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future,
who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the
knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths.
To teach man the future of humanity as his WILL, as
depending on human will, and to make preparation for
vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in
rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an end to
the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto
gone by the name of ‘history’ (the folly of the ‘greatest
number’ is only its last form)—for that purpose a new type
of philosopher and commander will some time or other be
needed, at the very idea of which everything that has
existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent
beings might look pale and dwarfed. The image of such
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leaders hovers before OUR eyes:—is it lawful for me to
say it aloud, ye free spirits? The conditions which one
would partly have to create and partly utilize for their
genesis; the presumptive methods and tests by virtue of
which a soul should grow up to such an elevation and
power as to feel a CONSTRAINT to these tasks; a
transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and
hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a
heart transformed into brass, so as to bear the weight of
such responsibility; and on the other hand the necessity for
such leaders, the dreadful danger that they might be
lacking, or miscarry and degenerate:—these are OUR real
anxieties and glooms, ye know it well, ye free spirits! these
are the heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep
across the heaven of OUR life. There are few pains so
grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an
exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated; but
he who has the rare eye for the universal danger of ‘man’
himself DETERIORATING, he who like us has
recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness which has
hitherto played its game in respect to the future of
mankind—a game in which neither the hand, nor even a
‘finger of God’ has participated!—he who divines the fate
that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind
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confidence of ‘modern ideas,’ and still more under the
whole of Christo-European morality-suffers from an
anguish with which no other is to be compared. He sees at
a glance all that could still BE MADE OUT OF MAN
through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of
human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the
knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is
for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the
type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions
and new paths:—he knows still better from his painfulest
recollections on what wretched obstacles promising
developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually
gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become
contemptible. The UNIVERSAL DEGENERACY OF
MANKIND to the level of the ‘man of the future’—as
idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates—this
degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely
gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of ‘free
society’), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy 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!
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CHAPTER VI: WE SCHOLARS
204. At the risk that moralizing may also reveal itself
here as that which it has always been—namely, resolutely
MONTRER SES PLAIES, according to Balzac—I would
venture to protest against an improper and injurious
alteration of rank, which quite unnoticed, and as if with
the best conscience, threatens nowadays to establish itself
in the relations of science and philosophy. I mean to say
that one must have the right out of one’s own
EXPERIENCE—experience, as it seems to me, always
implies unfortunate experience?—to treat of such an
important question of rank, so as not to speak of colour
like the blind, or AGAINST science like women and
artists ("Ah! this dreadful science!’ sigh their instinct and
their shame, ‘it always FINDS THINGS OUT!’). The
declaration of independence of the scientific man, his
emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-
effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the
self- glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned
man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best
springtime—which does not mean to imply that in this
case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct of the
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populace cries, ‘Freedom from all masters!’ and after
science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology,
whose ‘hand-maid’ it had been too long, it now proposes
in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for
philosophy, and in its turn to play the ‘master’—what am I
saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account.
My memory— the memory of a scientific man, if you
please!—teems with the naivetes of insolence which I have
heard about philosophy and philosophers from young
naturalists and old physicians (not to mention the most
cultured and most conceited of all learned men, the
philologists and schoolmasters, who are both the one and
the other by profession). On one occasion it was the
specialist and the Jack Horner who instinctively stood on
the defensive against all synthetic tasks and capabilities; at
another time it was the industrious worker who had got a
scent of OTIUM and refined luxuriousness in the internal
economy of the philosopher, and felt himself aggrieved
and belittled thereby. On another occasion it was the
colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing in
philosophy but a series of REFUTED systems, and an
extravagant expenditure which ‘does nobody any good".
At another time the fear of disguised mysticism and of the
boundary-adjustment of knowledge became conspicuous,
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at another time the disregard of individual philosophers,
which had involuntarily extended to disregard of
philosophy generally. In fine, I found most frequently,
behind the proud disdain of philosophy in young scholars,
the evil after-effect of some particular philosopher, to
whom on the whole obedience had been foresworn,
without, however, the spell of his scornful estimates of
other philosophers having been got rid of—the result
being a general ill-will to all philosophy. (Such seems to
me, for instance, the after-effect of Schopenhauer on the
most modern Germany: by his unintelligent rage against
Hegel, he has succeeded in severing the whole of the last
generation of Germans from its connection with German
culture, which culture, all things considered, has been an
elevation and a divining refinement of the HISTORICAL
SENSE, but precisely at this point Schopenhauer himself
was poor, irreceptive, and un-German to the extent of
ingeniousness.) On the whole, speaking generally, it may
just have been the humanness, all-too-humanness of the
modern philosophers themselves, in short, their
contemptibleness, which has injured most radically the
reverence for philosophy and opened the doors to the
instinct of the populace. Let it but be acknowledged to
what an extent our modern world diverges from the
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whole style of the world of Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles,
and whatever else all the royal and magnificent anchorites
of the spirit were called, and with what justice an honest
man of science MAY feel himself of a better family and
origin, in view of such representatives of philosophy, who,
owing to the fashion of the present day, are just as much
aloft as they are down below—in Germany, for instance,
the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Duhring and
the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann. It is especially the
sight of those hotch-potch philosophers, who call
