On the Genealogy of Morality

thumb|right|A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (German: Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift; sometimes translated as On the Genealogy of Morals) is an 1887 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It consists of a preface and three interrelated treatises ('Abhandlungen' in German) that expand and follow through on concepts that Nietzsche outlined in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Quotes We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? Preface, Section 1 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as "the powerful," "the masters," "the commanders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as "the rich," "the possessors" (this is the meaning of 'Arya,' and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic). Essay 1, Section 5 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness. Essay 1, Section 7 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) The "masters" have been done away with; the morality of the vulgar man has triumphed. Essay 1, Aphorism 9 (tr. Horace B. Samuel) While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. Essay 1, Section 10 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget [...] Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine 'love of one's enemies' is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! Essay 1, Section 11 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) To require of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a wish to overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of movement, will, action—rather it is nothing else than just those very phenomena of moving, willing, acting, and can only appear otherwise in the misleading errors of language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become petrified therein), which understands, and understands wrongly, all working as conditioned by a worker, by a "subject." And just exactly as the people separate the lightning from its flash, and interpret the latter as a thing done, as the working of a subject which is called lightning, so also does the popular morality separate strength from the expression of strength, as though behind the strong man there existed some indifferent neutral substratum, which enjoyed a caprice and option as to whether or not it should express strength. But there is no such substratum, there is no "being" behind doing, working, becoming; "the doer" is a mere appanage to the action. The action is everything. In point of fact, the people duplicate the doing, when they make the lightning lighten, that is a "doing-doing": they make the same phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause. The scientists fail to improve matters when they say, "Force moves, force causes," and so on. Our whole science is still, in spite of all its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself"). What wonder, if the suppressed and stealthily simmering passions of revenge and hatred exploit for their own advantage this belief, and indeed hold no belief with a more steadfast enthusiasm than this—"that the strong has the option of being weak, and the bird of prey of being a lamb." Thereby do they win for themselves the right of attributing to the birds of prey the responsibility for being birds of prey. Essay 1, Section 13 (tr. J. M. Kennedy) To demand of strength, that it should not manifest itself as strength, that it should not be a will to overpower, to subdue, to become master of, that it should not be a thirst for enemies, resistance, and triumphs, is as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should manifest itself as strength. (tr. William A. Haussmann and John Gray) To ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a will to dominate, a will to subjugate, a will to become master, a thirst for enemies and obstacles and triumphant celebrations, is just as absurd as to ask weakness to express itself as strength. (tr. Adrian Del Caro) Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive! Essay 2, Section 6 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle which even the apes might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were his "prelude." Essay 2, Section 6 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) We expressly attest the fact that formerly, when mankind did not as yet feel ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more pleasant than now that there exist pessimists. Essay 2, Section 7 (tr. William A. Haussmann and John Gray) Unsourced translation: Let me declare expressly that in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now that pessimists exist. Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps pain — I say this to comfort the squeamish — did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction; — they do not do that to Negroes. (The curve of human capacity for pain actually does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural elite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suffering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in scientific research is as nothing.) Essay 2, Section 7 (tr. Carol Diethe) What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering. Essay 2, Section 7 (tr. Horace B. Samuel) It is possible to imagine a society flushed with such a sense of power that it could afford to let its offenders go unpunished. Essay 2, Section 10 (tr. Francis Golffing) That every will must consider every other will its equal — would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness. Essay 2, Section 11 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance. Essay 2, Aphorism 14 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better." Essay 2, Section 15 (tr. Horace B. Samuels) All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul." Essay 2, Section 16 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. Essay 2, Section 20 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed. Essay 2, Section 24 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) Is this even possible today?–But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness–he must come one day. Essay 2, Aphorism 24 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) Whoever is completely and wholly an artist is to all eternity separated from the "real," the actual; on the other hand, one can understand how he may sometimes weary to the point of desperation of the eternal "unreality" and falsity of his innermost existence- and that then he may well attempt what ia most forbidden him, to lay hold of actuality, for once actually to be. Essay 3, Section 4 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) Es sind im asketischen Ideale so viele Brücken zur Unabhängigkeit angezeigt, dass ein Philosoph nicht ohne ein innerliches Frohlocken und Händeklatschen die Geschichte aller jener Entschlossnen zu hören vermag, welche eines Tages Nein sagten zu aller Unfreiheit und in irgend eine Wüste giengen. Ascetic ideals reveal so many bridges to independence that a philosopher is bound to rejoice and clap his hands when he hears the story of all those resolute men who one day said No to all servitude and went into some desert. Essay 3, Aphorism 7 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the “Empire,” ... their market business of “today”—for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with “today.” We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up. Essay 3, Aphorism 8 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) Every one who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell. Essay 3, Aphorism 10 (tr. Horace B. Samuel) A married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my proposition—and as for that exception, Socrates—the malicious Socrates, it would seem, married ironically, just to demonstrate this proposition. Essay 3, Aphorism 7 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my rule; as for that exception of a Socrates—the malicious Socrates married himself, it seems, ironice, just to prove this very rule. (tr. Horace B. Samuel) Every tiny step forward in the world was formerly made at the cost of mental and physical torture. Essay 3, Aphorism 9 (tr. Horace B. Samuel) The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest. Essay 3, Aphorism 14 (tr. Horace B. Samuel) A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. Essay 3, Aphorism 16 (tr. Horace B. Samuel) O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal! Essay 3, Aphorism 23 (tr. Walter Kaufmann) External links Category:Works by Friedrich Nietzsche