BEYOND GOOD and EVIL

Prelude

to a Philosophy of the Future

by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Translated, with Commentary,

by WALTER. KAUFMANN

VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House

NEW YOB.IC

FIRST VINTAGI! BOOKS EI>mON,

September, 1966

© Copyright, 1966, by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc;., and

simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited.

library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-21504

Manufactured in the United States of America

PART NINE

WHAT IS NOBLE l

l YorMhm. Sec r.ection 212 above, espei:ially the last paragraph.

201

.Part Nint!

257

Every enhancement of the type "man" has so far been the work of an aristocratii: society-and it will be so again and again-a so­ ciety that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and dif. ferences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata·-when the ruling caste constantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects and in• struments and just as constantly practices obedience and com• mand, keeping down and keeping at a distance-that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either-the craving for ·an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the devel• opment of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states-in brief, simply the enhancement of the type "man," the continual "self-overcoming of man," to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.

To be sure, one should not yield to humanitarian illusions about the origins of an aristocratic society (and thus of the pre­ supposition of this enhancement of the type "man"): truth is hard. Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth so far has begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races. perhaps traders or cattle rais-. ers, or upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then

11 Stlintle: Slant/ can mean-apart from position, state, condition-dass. rank, profession, and Stiinde can mean the estates of the realm. Asked to indicate her Stant/ on a questionnaire. a German woman might write, ev~n after World War 11: Sirassenbal1nschaf/neri11·itwe, that is, ''Widow of a streetcar conductor."

202 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption, In the be­ ginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul-they were more whole human beings ( which also means, at every level, "more whole beasts").

258

Corruption as the expression of a threatening anarchy among the instincts and of the fact that the foundation of the affects, which is called "life," has been shaken: corruption is something totally dif­ ferent depending on the organism in which it appears. When, for example, an aristocracy, like that of France at the beginning of the Revolution, throws away its privileges with a sublime disgust and sacrifices itself to an extravagance of its own moral feelings, that is corruption; it was really only the last act of that centuries-old corruption which had led them to surrender, step by step, their governmental prerogatives, demoting themselves to a mere func­ tion of the monarchy (finally even to a mere ornament and show­ piece). The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aris­ tocracy, however, is that it experiences itself not as a function (whether of the monarchy or the commonwealth) but as their meaning and highest justification-that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments. Their fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not exist for society's sake but only as the founda­ tion and scaffolding on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being3-comparable to those sun-seeking vines of Java-they are called Sipo Matador -that so long and so often enclasp an oak tree with their tendrils until eventually, high above it but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and display their happiness.

8 Cf. the outlook of the heroes of the Iliad,

WHAT IS NOBJ.i 203

259

Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one's will on a par with that of someone eise-this may become, in a certain rough sense, good manners among individuals if the appropriate conditions are present (namely, if these men are actually similar in strength and value standards and belong to­ gether in one body). But as soon as this principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is-a will to the denial of · life, a principle of disintegration and decay.

Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life itself is essen­ tially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, in­ corporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation-but why should one always use those words in which a slanderous intent has been Jmprinted for ages?

Even. the body within w~ individuals treat each other as equals, as suggested beforo-and this happens in every bealthy aristocracy-if it is a living and not a dying body, has to do to other bodies what the individuals within it xefrain from doing to each other: it will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, se=, become predominant-not from any morality or immorality but because it is Uving and because life simply fs will to power. But there is no point on which the ordinary consciousness of Europeans iesists instruction as on this: every­ where people are now raving, even under scientific disguises, about coming conditions of society in which "the exploitative aspect'' will be removed-which sounds to me as if they promised to invent a way of life that would dispense with all organic functions. ''Exploi­ tation" does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive so­ ciety: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a conseq_uence of the will to power, which is after all · the will of life.

204 BBYOND OOOD AND :SVJL

If this should be an innovation as a theory-as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: people ought to be honest with themselves at least that far.

260

Wandering through the many subtler and coarser moralities which have so far been prevalent on earth, or still are prevalent, I found that certain features recurred regularly together and were closely associated-until I finally discovered two basic types and one basic difference.

There are master morality and slave morality4-I add im­ mediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts. at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstand­ ing of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other­ even in the same human being, within a single soul.6 The moral dis­ crimination of values has originated either among a ruling group whose consciousness of its difference from the ruled group was accompanied by delight-or among the ruled, the slaves and de­ pendents of every degree.

In the first case, when the ruling group determines what is "good," the exalted, proud states of the soul are experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order of rank. The noble human being separates from himself those in whom the opposite of such exalted, proud states finds expression: he despises them. It should be noted immediately that in this first type of morality the opposition of "good" and "bad" means approximately the same as "noble" and "contemptible." (The opposition of "good" and "evil" has a different origin.) One feels contempt for the cowardly, the

4 Wlu1e the ideas developed here, and explicated at greater length a year later in the first part of the Genealogy of Morals, had been expressed by Nietzsche in 1878 in section 45 of Huma11, All-Too-Human, this is the pas­ sage in which his famous terms "master morality" and "slave morality" are introduced, II These crucial qualifications, though added immediately, have often been overlooked. "Modern" moralities are clearly mixtures; hence their manifold tensions, hypocrisies, and contradictions.

WHAT·IS NOBLI 205

anxious, the petty, those mtent oo narrow utility; also for the sus­ picious with their unfree glances, those who humble themselves, the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated, the begging flatterers, above all the liars: it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. "We truthful ones"- thus the nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself. ·

It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first ap­ plied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions. 'I)erefore it is a gross mistake when historians of morality start

• from such questions as: why was the compassionate act praised? The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, ''what is harmful to me is harm­ ful in itself''; it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things; it is value-creating. Everything it knows as part of itself it honors: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happi­ ness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow: the noble human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from pity, but prompted more by an urge be­ gotten by excess of power. The noble human being honors himself as one who is powerful,· also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness • ."A hard heart Wotan put into my breast/' says an old Scandinavian saga: a fitting poetic expression, seeing that it comes from the soul of a. proud Viking. Such a type of man is actua11y proud of the fact that he is not made for pity, and the hero of the saga therefore adds as a warning: "If the heart is not hard in youth it will never harden." Noble and courageous human beings who think that way are furthest removed from that morality which finds the distinction of morality precisely in pity, or in acting for others, or in desinte­ ressemelil,· faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony against "sel~sness" belong just as definitely to noble morality as does a slight disdain and caution regarding compas­ sionate feelings and a "warm heart."

It is the powerful who understand how to honor; this is their art, their realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and

206 Bl!YOND GOOD AND EVIL

tradition-all law rests on this double reverence-the faith and prejudice in favor of ancestors and disfavor of those yet to come are typical of the morality of the powerful; and when the men of "modern ideas," conversely, believe almost instinctively in "prog­ ress" and "the future" and more and more lack respect for age, this in itself would sufficiently betray the ignoble origin of these 11ideas."

A morality of the ruling group, however, is most alien and em­ barrassing to the present taste in the severity of its principle that one bas duties only to one's peers; that against beings of a lower rank, against everything alien, one may behave as one pleases or "as the heart desires," and in any case "beyond good and evil"­ here pity and like feelings may find their place. 8 The capacity for, and the Juty of, long gratitude and long revenge-both only among one's peers-refinement in repaying, the sophisticated concept of friendship, a certain necessity for having enemies (as it were, as drainage ditches for the affects of envy, quarrelsomeness, exuber-

. ance-at bottom, in order to be capable of being good friends): all these are typical characteristics of noble morality which, as sug­ gested, is not the morality of ''modem ideas" and therefore is hard to empathize with today, also bard to dig up and uncover. 1

8 The final clause that follows the dash, omitted in the Cowan translation, is crucial and qualifies the first part of the sentence: a noble person has no duties to animals but treats them in accordance with his feelings, which means, if he is noble, with pity.

The ruling masters, of course, are not always noble in this sense, and this Is recognized by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, in the chapter "The 'Jm. provers' of Mankind," in which he gives strong expression to his distaste for Manu's laws concerning outcastes (Portable Nietzsche, pp. 503-05); also in The Will to Power (ed. W. Kaufmann, New York, Random House, 1967), section 142. Indeed, in The Antichrist, section 57, Niemche contradicts out­ i:ight his formulation above: "When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere courtesy ~f the heart-it is simply his duty."

More important: Niewche's obvious diataste for slave 111orality and the fact that he makes a point of liking master morality better does not imply that he endorses master morality. Cf. the text for note S above. ' Clearly, master morality cannot be discovered by introspection :aor by tho 40bservation of individuals who are "masters" rather than "slaves." Both t1Jf these misunderstandings are widespread. What is called for is rather a rereading of, say, the lliad and, to illustrate "alave morality," the New Testament.

'WHAT II MOBLll 207

1t js difrerltlt with the-seeomltype of morality, slave mor4llty. Suppose i. violated, oppressed, suffering, unf~ who are uncer­ tain of themselves and weary, moralize: what will their moral valu­ ations have in common? Probably, a pessimistic suspicion about the whole condition of man will find expression, perhaps a condemna­ tion of. man along with his condition. The slave's eye is not favora­ ble to the virtues of the powerful: he is skeptical and suspicious, 8Ubtly suai,icious, of all the ~'good" that is honored there-he would like to persuade himself that even their happiness is not genuine. Conversely, those qualities are brought out and flooded with light which serve to ease existence for those who suffer: hero pity, tho complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humiµty, and friendliness are .honored-for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only means for.endur­ ing the pressure of existence. Slave morality i, essentially a morality of utility.

Here Is the place for the origin of that famous opposition of "good" and "evil": into evil one's feelings project power and dan­ gerousnest. a certain terribleness, subtlety, and strength that does not permit contempt td develop. According to slave morality, thoso who are "evil" thus inspire fear; according to master morality it is precisely those who are "good" that inspire, . and wish to inspire, fear, while the "bad" are felt t~ ~ contemptible.

The opposition reaches its climax when, as a logical conse­ quence of slave morality, a touch of disdain is associated also with the "gopd" of this mor.wty-this may be slight and benevolent-­ because the good human being has to be undangerolis in the slaves• way of thinking: he is good-natured, easy to deceive, a little stupid perhaps, un bonhomme,14 Wherever slave morality becomes pre­ ponderant, language tends to bring the words "good" and "stupid" closer together.

One last fundamental difference: the longing for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the subtleties of the feeling of free,.

a Litr.rany "a good human being." lhe term la used for precisely tbe type described hcrt.

208 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

dom belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as art• ful and enthusiastic reverence and devotion are the regular symp­ tom of an aristocratic way of thinking and evaluating.

This makes plain why love as passion-which is our Euro­ pean specialty-simply must be of noble origin: as is well known, its invention must be credited to the Proven~al knight-poets, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the "gai saber• ll to whom Europe owes so many things and almost owes itself.-

261

Among the things that may be hardest to understand for a noble human being is vanity: he will be tempted to deny it, where another type of human being could not find it more palpable. The problem for him is to imagine people who seek to create a good opinion of themselves which they do not have of themselves-and thus also do not "deserve"-and who nevertheless end up believ­ ing this good opinion themselves. This strikes him half as such bad taste and lack of self-respect, and half as so baroquely irrational, that he would like to consider vanity as exceptional, and in most cases when it is spoken of he doubts it.

He will say, for example: "I may be mistaken about my value and nevertheless demand that my value, exactly as I define it, should be acknowledged by others as well-but this is no vanity (but conceit oi:, more frequently, what is called 'humility' or 'modesty')." Or: "For many reasons I may take pleasure in the good opinion of others: perhaps because I honor and love them and all their pleasures give me pleasure; perhaps also because their good opinion confirms and strengthens my faith in my own good opinion; perhaps because the good opinion of others, even in cases

o "Gay science": in the early fourteenth century the term was used to desig­ nate the art of the troubadours, codified in Leys d'umors. Nietzsche subtitled his own Friih/iche Wissenschu/t ( 1882). "la g11ya scienzu." placed a quatrain on the title page, began the book with a fifteen-page "Prelude In German Rhymes," and in the second edition ( 1887) added, besides a Preface and Book V, an "Appendix" of further verses. ·

WHAT JS NOBLB 209

where I do not share it, ~ itill useful to me or promises to become so-but all that is not vanity."

The noble human bei-ng must force himself, with the aid of history, to recognize that, since time immemorial, in all somehow dependent social strata the common man was only what he was con­

. sidered: not at all used to positing values himself, he also attached . no other value to himself than his masters attached to him (it is the characteristic right of masters to create values).

It may be underst.ood as the consequence of an immense atavism that even now the ordinary man still always waits for an opinion about himself and then instinctively submits- to that-but by no means only a "good" opinion; also a bad and unfair one (consider, for example, the great majority of the self-estimates and self-underestimates that believing women accept from their father• confessors, and believing Christians quite generally from their church). ·

In accordance with the slowly arising democratic order of things (and its cause, the intermarriage of masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare urge to ascribe value to oneself on one's own and to "think well" of oneself will actually be encour­ aged and spread more and more now; but it is always opposed by an older, ampler, and more deeply ingrained propen&ity-and in the phenomenon of "vanity" this older propensity masters tho younger one. The vain pers.on is delighted ey every good opin• ion he hears of himself ( quite apart from all considerations of its' utility, and also apart from truth or falsehood), just as every bad opinion of him pains him: for be submits to both, he feels subjected to them in accordance with that oldest instinct of submission. that breaks out in him.

It is "the sla.ve" in the blood of the vain person, a residue of the slave's craftine~~and bow much "slave" is still residual in woman, for cxample!-that seeks to seduce him to good opinions about himself; it is also the slave who afterwards immediately pros­ trates himself before these opinions as if he had not called them forth.

And to say it once more: vanity is an atavism.

210 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

262

A species10 comes to be, a type becomes fixed and strong, through the long fight with essentially constant unf al'Vrable condi­ tions. Conversely, we know from the experience of brceders11 that species accorded superabundant nourishment and quite generally extra protection and care soon tend most strongly toward variations of the type and become rich in marvels and monstrosities (includ­ ing monstrous vices).

Now look for once at an aristocratic commonwealth-say, an anc;ient Greek polis,12 or Venice-as an arrangement, whether vol­ untary or involuntary, for breeding: 13 human beings are together there who are dependent on themselves and want their species to prevail, most often because they have to prevail or run the terrible risk of being exterminated. Here that boon, that excess, and that protection which favor variations are lacking; the species needs it­ self as a species, as something that can prevail and make itself dur­ able by virtue of its very hardness, uniformity, and simplicity of form, in a constant fight with its neighbors or with the oppressed who are rebellious or threaten rebellion. Manifold experience teaches them to which qualities above all they owe the fact that, despite all gods and men, they are still there, that they have always triumphed: these qualities they call virtues, these virtues alone they cultivate.14 They do this with hardness, indeed they want hardness; every aristocratic morality is intolerant-in the education of youth,

. in their arrangements for women, in their marriage customs, in the relations of old and young, in their penal laws ( which take into ac­ count deviants only )-they consider intolerance itself a virtue, call­ ing it "justice."

In this way a type with few but very strong traits, a species of

10Throughout this section Art is rendered as species, and Typus as type. Elsewhere, Art is often translated as type. llZuchter. 12 City-state, 1s Zuchtung. H Ziiclttet sie gross,

WHA't D NOBLB 211

severe, warlr'tce, prudently taciturn men, close-mouthed and closely linked (and as such possessed of the subtlest feeling for the charms and nuances of association), is fixed beyond the changing genera­ tions; the continual fight against ever constant unfavorable condi­ tions is, as mentioned previously, the cause that fixes and hardens a type.

Eventually, however, a day arrives when conditions become more fortunate and the tremendous tension decreases; perhaps there are no longer any enemies among one's neighbors, and the means of life, even for the enjoyment of life, are superabundant. At one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline11 are tom: it no longer seems necessary, a condition of existence-if it persisted it would only be a form of luxury, an archaizing taste. Variation, whether as deviation (to something higher, subtler, rarer) or as degeneration and monstrosity, suddenly appears on the scene in the greatest abundance and magnificence; the individ­ ual dares to be individual and different.

At these turning points of history we behold beside one an­ other, 8'ld often mutually involved and entangled, a splendid, manifold, junglelike growth and upward striving. a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow, and a tremendous ruin and setf­ ruination, as the savage egoisms that have turned,, almost ex­ ploded, against one another wrestle "for sun and light" and can no longer derive any limit, restraint, or consideration from their previ­ ous16 morality. It-was this morality itself that dammed up such enor­ mous strength and bent the bow in such a threatening manner; now it is "outlived." The dangerous and uncanny point has been reached where the greater, more manifold, more comprehensive life transceDds and lives beyond the old morality; the "individual" appears, obliged to give himself laws and to develop his own arts and wiles for self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption.

All sorts of new what-fors and wherewithals; no. shared formu­ las any longer; misunderstanding allied with disrespect; decay, cor-

tszucht. 21Blshnl~n: dsewhere.bishtr has alwa,s 1,cen rendered as "so far"; see Preface. note t.

212 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

ruption, and the highest desires gruesomely entangled; the genius of the race overflowing from all cornucopias of good and bad; a calamitous simultaneity of spring and fall, full of new charms and veils that characterize young, still unexhausted, still unwearied corruption. Again danger is there, the mother of morals, great dan­ ger, this time transposed into the individual, into the neighbor and friend, into the alley, into one's own child, into one's own heart, into the most personal and secret recesses of wish and will: what may the moral philosophers emerging in this age have to preach now?

These acute observers and 'oiterers discover that the end is approaching fast, that everything around them is corrupted and corrupts, that nothing will stand the day after tomorrow, except one type of man, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have a chance of continuing their type and propagating-they are the men of the future, the only survivors: "Be like them! Become mediocre!" is now the only morality that still makes sense, that still gets a hear­ ing.

But this morality of mediocrity is hard to preach: after all, it may never admit what it is and what it wants. It must speak of measure and dignity and duty and neighbor love-it will find it .difficult to conceal its irony.-

263

There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything else, is a sign of a high rank; there is a delight in the nuances of reverence that allows us to infer noble origin and habits. The refinement, graciousness, and height of a soul is tested dangerously when something of the first rank passes by without being as yet pro­ tected by the shudders of authority against obtrusive efforts and in­ eptitudes-something that goes its way unmarked, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps capriciously concealed and disguised, like a liv­ ing touchstone. Anyone to whose task and practice it belongs to search out souls will employ this very art in many forms in order to determine the ultimate value of a soul and the unalterable, innate

·WIIQ': JS ?fOILB ffl

~ oC rank to which it belongs:• he will test it for its Instinct o/ reverence.

Difference engendre haine:1T the baseness of some people suddenly spurts up like dirty water when some holy vessel, some precious thing from a locked shrine, some book with the marks of a great destiny, is carried past; and on the other hand there is a reflex

. of silence, a hesitation of the eye, a cessation of all gestures that ex• press how a soul feels the proximity of the most venerable. Tho way .in which reverence for the Bible has on the whole been main­ tained ao far in Europe is perhaps the best bit of discipline and re­ finement of DW1Ders that Europe owes to Christianity: such· books of profundity and ultimate significance require some eitemal ~ of authority for their protection in order to gain those mil­ lennia of persistence which are 11CCCssary to exhaust them and fig- ure tbem out.

1

Much is gained once the· feeling bas finally been cultivated in the masses (among the sh~ and in. the high-speed intestin

Related Tags