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FOREWORD
1
We are strangers to ourselves, we perceivers — we ourselves to ourselves; for this there is reason enough. We have never sought for ourselves, —how, then, could it happen, that some day we should find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Our treasure is where the bee-hives of our knowledge are. We are ever on the road thither, as born hymenoptera and honey-gatherers of the spirit; we care at bottom but for this — to "bring something home." As regards life otherwise, so-called "experience," — who among us has even earnestness enough for it? Or time enough? On such matters, I fear, we were never really "by the matter;" for our heart is not there — and not even our ear! Nay, rather like one divinely-distracted and absorbed in himself, into whose ear the bell with powerful clang has sounded its twelve strokes of noonday, and who thereupon suddenly awakes and asks himself: "What is it that the clock has struck?" Once in a while, we rub our ears afterwards asking, quite amazed, quite perplexed: "What is it we have experienced? ay: who are we?" and recount, afterwards, all the palpitating twelve bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being — alas! and count amiss in doing so . . . . We must remain strangers to ourselves; we do not understand ourselves; we must mistake ourselves; for us, the saying holds to all eternity "each one is the greatest stranger to himself," — for ourselves, we are no "perceivers . . .
2
My reflections on the origin of our moral prejudices — for these form the theme of our tract — have found their first chary and provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms which bears the title "Human, All-too-human. A Book for Free Spirits" which I first began to put on paper in Sorrento, during a winter which permitted me to make halt like some wanderer, and to survey the far-spread and dangerous land through which my mind had wandered so far. This took place in the winter of 1876–77; the thoughts themselves are older. In the main, however, they were the same thoughts as those which I take up again in these essays. Let us hope, that the long interval proved beneficial to them; that they grew riper, clearer, stronger, more perfect! And that to-day I still hold firmly on to these thoughts; that in the meantime they have come to hold ever more firmly on to one another; that they have grown together and into one another; — these facts confirm in me the cheerful confidence, that from the very beginning they arose not isolatedly, not at random, not sporadically, but from one common root and source, from a profoundly commanding, ever more definitely speaking, ever more definitely defined fundamental will of perception. For thus and only thus it befits a philosopher. We have not the right to be single in any one respect: we must neither err singly nor singly hit upon truth. But with the same necessity with which a tree will bear its fruits, our thoughts will grow from out ourselves, and our values, our "Yeas" and " Nays" and "ifs" and "whethers" — all related and inter-connected and testifying to one will, one health, one soil, one sun. — Whether they are pleasant to your taste, these fruits of ours? — But what matters that to the trees! What matters that to us, the philosophers! . . . .
3
Having a kind of scrupulousness peculiar to myself, which I do not readily acknowledge — inasmuch as it has reference to morality, to all that so far was known on earth, and celebrated as morality —, a scrupulousness which arose in my life so prematurely, so uncalled-for, so irresistibly, so in contradiction to surroundings, age, precedent and ancestry, that I should almost be justified in calling it my A priori, — my curiosity as well as my suspicion had to be confronted, at an early date, by the question of what origin really are our Good and Evil? In very deed, while but a boy of thirteen the problem of the origin of evil haunted me: to it I dedicated in an age, when we have in heart half play, half God, my first literary child-play, my first philosophical composition; and as regards my solution of the problem then, well, I gave, as is but fair, God the honour, and made him father of evil. Was it that my A priori wanted it just so? that new immoral, or, at any rate, non-moral A priori and what sounded forth from it, — the alas! so anti-Kantian, so mysterious "categorical imperative," to which afterwards I gave ever better hearing and not only hearing? . . . . Fortunately, I learned betimes to separate theological from moral prejudices and to seek no longer behind the world for the origin of evil. A little historical and philological schooling, together with an inborn and delicate sense regarding psychological questions, changed my problem in very short time into that other one: under what circumstances and conditions did man invent those valuations Good and Evil? and what is their own specific value? Did they retard or further human progress so far? Are they a sign of need, of impoverishment, of degeneration of life? Or is the reverse the case, do they point to the fulness, the strength, the will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future? — To this question I found and ventured sundry answers; I distinguished between times, peoples and rank-degrees of individuals; I specialised my problem; the answers became new questions, investigations, suppositions, probabilities: till at last I had to myself a private land, a private soil, an altogether hidden and reserved, thriving and flourishing world, secret gardens as it were, of which no one beside me durst have an inkling . . . . Oh, how happy we are, we perceivers, provided we understand the art of keeping silence long enough! . . . .
4
The first impulse to make known something of my hypotheses on the origin of morality, I received from a clear, clean, smart, also over-smart, little book, in which I was for the first time brought plainly face to face with a reverse and perverse kind of genealogical hypothesis, the truly English kind, — a book which attracted me with that attractive force, peculiar to all things contrary, all things antipodal. The title of the little book was "The Origin of Moral Sensations"; its author Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its publication 1877. Never perhaps have I read aught, to which, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion, I said in like emphatic manner No, as I did to this book: yet without the slightest vexation or impatience. In the work afore-mentioned, at which then I laboured, I made reference, opportunely and inopportunely, to the statements of Dr. Rée's book, not with the intention of refuting them — for what have I to do with refutations!—but as befits a positive mind, placing instead of the improbable the more probable thing, or, as the case might be, in place of one error another. Then, as stated, I advanced for the first time those derivational hypotheses, to which these essays are devoted, — awkwardly, as I would least of all hide from myself, still unfree, still without an original language for these original things, with much relapsing and wavering. Regarding single points, I refer to my observations in Human, All-too-human, aph. 45 on the two-fold derivation of Good and Evil (to wit, from the sphere of the gentlemen and of the slaves); also aph. 136 ff. on the origin and value of ascetic morals; also aph. 96, 99, II, aph. 89 on "morality of custom," that far older and far more original kind of morality, which is removed toto caelo from the altruistic manner of valuation (which Dr. Rée, like all English genealogists of morals, holds to be the manner of moral valuation as such); also aph. 92. Wanderer, aph. 26. Dawn of the Day, aph. 112 on the origin of justice, as a compensation between the approximately equally-potent (balance of power being the fundamental condition of all treaties, i.e., of all law); also on the origin of punishment, Wanderer, aph. 23, 33, for which purposes of determent are neither essential, nor original (as Dr. Rée thinks); — on the contrary, they are superadded, under certain circumstances, to punishment, and are always something secondary, something adventitious.
5
At bottom, something far more important interested me when I wrote that than any hypothetical concern, of my own or of others, relative to the origin of morality (or, more exactly stated: the latter only interested me because of an end to which it is one among many means). The question with me was the value of morality, — and on this point I had to settle accounts almost exclusively with my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom as to one present that book, — the ardour and secret opposition of that book — is directed (— for that book also was "controversial"). More especially, the point in question was the value of "unselfishness," of the sympathising, self-denying, self-sacrificing instincts, which Schopenhauer had persistently just gilded over, deified and beyondified, to such an extent, that finally they remained to him as the "values as such," on the basis of which he said No to life and also to himself. But against these very instincts an ever more fundamental suspicion, an ever deeper-digging scepticism within me gave utterance! Just here I saw the great danger threatening mankind, the sublimest enticement and seduction — whither? into the Nothing? — Just here I saw the beginning of the end, the stopping, the retrospective weariness, the will turning itself against life, the final disease announcing itself softly and melancholily. To me this ever further spreading morality of sympathy, attacking and prostrating even philosophers, revealed itself as the most dismal symptom of our dismal-grown European civilisation, as its round-about way to a new Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to — Nihilism? For this modern philosopher's predilection for and over-valuing of sympathy is something altogether new: even on the worthlessness of sympathy philosophers hitherto were agreed. I but mention the names of Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant, four minds differing as much as possible from one another, but of common opinion in this one point: in the underestimation of sympathy.
6
The problem of the value of sympathy and morality of sympathy (I am an opponent of shameful modern effeminacy of sentiment) seems, at first sight, to be something isolated, — a single interrogation-mark; but he who will pause here and will learn to question here, will fare even as I have fared: a vast, new prospect reveals itself to him, a possibility seizes upon him like some giddiness; every kind of distrust, suspicion, fear springs up; the faith in morality, in all morality, is shaken, — and finally, a new demand makes itself felt. Let us pronounce this new demand: we stand in need of a criticism of moral values; the value of these values is first of all itself to be put in question — and to this end a knowledge is necessary of the conditions and circumstances from which they grew and under which they developed and shifted in meaning (morality as effect, as symptom, as mask, as tartuffism, as disease, as misunderstanding; but also, morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as impediment, as poison), — a knowledge which hitherto was not existent, nay, not even desired. The value of these "values" was taken for granted, as a matter of fact, as being beyond all putting-in-question. Never until now was there the least doubt or hesitation, to set down "the good man" as of higher value than "the evil man," — of higher value in the sense of furtherance, utility, prosperity as regards man in general (the future of man included). What if the reverse were true? What if in the "good one" also a symptom of decline were contained, and a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic by which the present might live at the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also in humbler style, — more meanly? . . . . So that just morality were to blame, if a highest mightiness and splendour of the type of man — possible in itself — were never attained? And that, therefore, morality itself would be the danger of dangers? . . . .
7
Suffice it to say, that I myself had reasons, since this prospect presented itself to me, to look about for scholarly, bold and industrious fellow-workers (I am still looking at this moment). Our task is to travel through the wide-spread, distant and so very hidden land of morality — of morality once actually existing and experienced — with altogether new questions and, as it were, new eyes: and is not this almost equivalent to discovering this land itself? . . . . If, in so doing, I thought among others also of the aforesaid Dr. Rée, I did so, not doubting in the least, that the nature of the problems confronting him would force him to adopt a more suitable methodic for enabling him to arrive at answers. Have I been deceived? My desire it was, at all events, to point out to so keen and impartial an eye a safer direction, the direction to the real history of morality and to warn him betimes against such an English fashion of hypothesising into the blue. For it is plain on the face of it, what colour must be a hundred times more important to the genealogist of morals than the blue: namely the gray, i.e., what is documental, actually-determinable, and was once actually-existing, in short, the whole long and not easily decipherable hieroglyphics of the past of human morality! — Of this history Dr. Rée knew nothing; but he had read Darwin; and so, in a manner quite entertaining at least, the Darwinian beast and the most modern and modest morality-tenderling, who "no longer bites," in his hypotheses gracefully join hands,—the latter with a kind of goodnatured, complacent and indolent expression of countenance, to which even a grain of pessimism and fatigue is added, as if it were hardly worth while to take all these things — the problems of morality — as serious. To me, on the other hand, there seems to be nothing which it pays so well to take seriously; in which pay is included, for instance, the permission of taking these things some day cheerfully. Cheerfulness, to wit, or, expressing myself my own way, joyful science — is a reward, a reward for a long, brave, laborious, subterranean earnestness, which of course not each and every one will share. But on the day in which with full heart we say: "Forward, march! our old morality too is a piece of comedy!" on that day we shall have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of the "fate of the soul" — and he will know how to make use of it, we may be sure — he, the grand, old and eternal comedian of our existence! . . . .
8
If this tract reads unintelligibly to some one and will not easily pass into the ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine. It is clear enough, presupposing, what I did presuppose, that my earlier writings have first been read and that, in so doing, a little trouble was not shunned: they are, indeed, not easily accessible. As regards, for instance, my Zarathustra, no one will pass for a connoisseur of it with me, whom each word in it did not at some time deeply wound and at some time deeply delight. Then only will he be allowed to enjoy the privilege of piously taking his share of the halcyonic element from which the work has sprung, of its sunny brightness, distance, breadth and certainty. In other cases the aphoristical form occasions difficulty: the reason is, that this form is not taken weightily enough at present. An aphorism honestly coined and shaped, in being read is as yet far from being "deciphered";" on the contrary, the interpretation now really has to commence, for which purpose a special art of interpretation is needed. In the third essay of this book I have presented a specimen of what in such cases I call interpretation: the essay itself is headed by an aphorism, of which it is the commentary. To practice reading in this manner, as an art, one thing of course is necessary, which today has been best forgotten — and hence the "readableness" of my writings is in no hurry —, for which thing it is almost necessary to be a cow and certainly not a modern man: chewing the cud is necessary . . . .
Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine,
July 1887.
