their tops in the open light, and exhibit their happiness.
259. To refrain mutually from injury, from violence,
from exploitation, and put one’s will on a par with that of
others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good
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conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions
are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals
in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-
relation within one organization). As soon, however, as
one wished to take this principle more generally, and if
possible even as the FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF
SOCIETY, it would immediately disclose what it really
is—namely, a Will to the DENIAL of life, a principle of
dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to
the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself
is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the
strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of
peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it
mildest, exploitation;—but why should one for ever use
precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging
purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within
which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat
each other as equal—it takes place in every healthy
aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying
organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the
individuals within it refrain from doing to each other it
will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will
endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and
acquire ascendancy— not owing to any morality or
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immorality, but because it LIVES, and because life IS
precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the
ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be
corrected than on this matter, people now rave
everywhere, even under the guise of science, about
coming conditions of society in which ‘the exploiting
character’ is to be absent—that sounds to my ears as if they
promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain
from all organic functions. ‘Exploitation’ does not belong
to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society it
belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary
organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will
to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life—Granting
that as a theory this is a novelty—as a reality it is the
FUNDAMENTAL FACT of all history let us be so far
honest towards ourselves!
260. In a tour through the many finer and coarser
moralities which have hitherto 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
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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 juxtaposition—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. 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 above all the liars:—it is a fundamental belief
of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful.
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‘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; 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 honour on things; he is a
CREATOR OF VALUES. He honours 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 fain 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 honours 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.
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‘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 enmity 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
honour, 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
favour of ancestors and unfavourable 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
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irritating to present-day taste in the sternness of its
principle that one has duties only to one’s equals; that one
may 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 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
realize, and also to unearth and disclose.—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 unfavourable eye for
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the virtues of the powerful; he has a skepticism and
distrust, a REFINEMENT of distrust of everything ‘good’
that is there honoured—he would fain 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 honour; 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
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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.
261. Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most
difficult for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted
to deny it, where another kind of man thinks he sees it
self-evidently. The problem for him is to represent to his
mind beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of
themselves which they themselves do not possess—and
consequently also do not ‘deserve,’—and who yet
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BELIEVE in this good opinion afterwards. This seems to
him on the one hand such bad taste and so self-
disrespectful, and on the other hand so grotesquely
unreasonable, that he would like to consider vanity an
exception, and is doubtful about it in most cases when it is
spoken of. He will say, for instance: ‘I may be mistaken
about my value, and on the other hand may nevertheless
demand that my value should be acknowledged by others
precisely as I rate it:—that, however, is not vanity (but
self-conceit, or, in most cases, that which is called
‘humility,’ and also ‘modesty’).’ Or he will even say: ‘For
many reasons I can delight in the good opinion of others,
perhaps because I love and honour them, and rejoice in all
their joys, perhaps also because their good opinion
endorses and strengthens my belief in my own good
opinion, perhaps because the good opinion of others, even
in cases where I do not share it, is useful to me, or gives
promise of usefulness:—all this, however, is not vanity.’
The man of noble character must first bring it home
forcibly to his mind, especially with the aid of history,
that, from time immemorial, in all social strata in any way
dependent, the ordinary man WAS only that which he
PASSED FOR:—not being at all accustomed to fix values,
he did not assign even to himself any other value than that
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which his master assigned to him (it is the peculiar
RIGHT OF MASTERS to create values). It may be
looked upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that
the ordinary man, even at present, is still always
WAITING for an opinion about himself, and then
instinctively submitting himself to it; yet by no means only
to a ‘good’ opinion, but also to a bad and unjust one
(think, for instance, of the greater part of the self-
appreciations and self-depreciations which believing
women learn from their confessors, and which in general
the believing Christian learns from his Church). In fact,
conformably to the slow rise of the democratic social order
(and its cause, the blending of the blood of masters and
slaves), the originally noble and rare impulse of the masters
to assign a value to themselves and to ‘think well’ of
themselves, will now be more and more encouraged and
extended; but it has at all times an older, ampler, and more
radically ingrained propensity opposed to it—and in the
phenomenon of ‘vanity’ this older propensity overmasters
the younger. The vain person rejoices over EVERY good
