Part 4

But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. We can tell that the judgment of So-and-So's conscience has a past history in his instincts, his original sympathies or antipathies, his experience or want of experience. We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.

And as regards the ethical teachers' preaching of morality for all, this is every bit as empty as the gossip of individual society people about each other's morals. Nietzsche gives the moralists this good advice: that, instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person. But as a rule the moral ranters are themselves quite uneducated persons, and their children seldom rise above moral mediocrity.

He who feels that in his inmost being he cannot be compared with others, will be his own lawgiver. For one thing is needful: to give style to one's character. This art is practised by him who, with an eye for the strong and weak sides of his nature, removes from it one quality and another, and then by daily practice and acquired habit replaces them by others which become second nature to him; in other words, he puts himself under restraint in order by degrees to bend his nature entirely to his own law. Only thus does a man arrive at satisfaction with himself, and only thus does he become endurable to others. For the dissatisfied and the unsuccessful as a rule avenge themselves on others. They absorb poison from everything, from their own incompetence as well as from their poor circumstances, and they live in a constant craving for revenge on those in whose nature they suspect harmony. Such people ever have virtuous precepts on their lips; the whole jingle of morality, seriousness, chastity, the claims of life; and their hearts ever bum with envy of those who have become well balanced and can therefore enjoy life.

For millenniums morality meant obedience to custom, respect for inherited usage. The free, exceptional man was immoral, because he broke with the tradition which the others regarded with superstitious fear. Very commonly he took the same view and was himself seized by the terror he inspired. Thus a popular morality of custom was unconsciously elaborated by all who belonged to the tribe; since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment--if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudoscience on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.

Manners and customs represented the experiences of bygone generations concerning what was supposed to be useful or harmful; the sense of morality, however, does not attach to these experiences as such, but only to their age, their venerability and consequent incontestability. In the state of war in which a tribe existed in old times, threatened on every side, there was no greater gratification, under the sway of the strictest morality of custom, than cruelty. Cruelty is one of the oldest festal and triumphal joys of mankind. It was thought that the gods, too, might be gratified and festively disposed by offering them the sight of cruelties--and thus the idea insinuated itself into the world that voluntary self-torture, mortification and abstinence are also of great value, not as discipline, but as a sweet savour unto the Lord.

Christianity as a religion of the past unceasingly practised and preached the torture of souls. Imagine the state of the mediæval Christian, when he supposed he could no longer escape eternal torment. Eros and Aphrodite were in his imagination powers of hell, and death was a terror.

To the morality of cruelty has succeeded that of pity. The morality of pity is lauded as unselfish, by Schopenhauer in particular.

Eduard von Hartmann, in his thoughtful work, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (pp. 217-240), has already shown the impossibility of regarding pity as the most important of moral incentives, to say nothing of its being the only one, as Schopenhauer would have it. Nietzsche attacks the morality of pity from other points of view. He shows it to be by no means unselfish. Another's misfortune affects us painfully and offends us--perhaps brands us as cowards if we do not go to his aid. Or it contains a hint of a possible danger to ourselves; moreover, we feel joy in comparing our own state with that of the unfortunate, joy when we can step in as the stronger, the helper. The help we afford gives us a feeling of happiness, or perhaps it merely rescues us from boredom.

Pity in the form of actual fellow-suffering would be a weakness, nay, a misfortune, since it would add to the world's suffering. A man who seriously abandoned himself to sympathy with all the misery he found about him, would simply be destroyed by it.

Among savages the thought of arousing pity is regarded with horror. Those who do so are despised. According to savage notions, to feel pity for a person is to despise him; but they find no pleasure in seeing a contemptible person suffer. On the other hand, the sight of an enemy's suffering, when his pride does not forsake him in the midst of his torment--that is enjoyment, that excites admiration.

The morality of pity is often preached in the formula, love thy neighbour.

Nietzsche in the interests of his attack seizes upon the word neighbour. Not only does he demand, with Kierkegaard, a setting-aside of morality for the sake of the end in view, but he is exasperated that the true nature of morality should be held to consist in a consideration of the immediate results of our actions, to which we are to conform. To what is narrow and pettifogging in this morality he opposes another, which looks beyond these immediate results and aspires, even by means that cause our neighbour pain, to more distant objects; such as the advancement of knowledge, although this will lead to sorrow and doubt and evil passions in our neighbour. We need not on this account be without pity, but we may hold our pity captive for the sake of the object.

And as it is now unreasonable to term pity unselfish and seek to consecrate it, it is equally so to hand over a series of actions to the evil conscience, merely because they have been maligned as egotistical. What has happened in recent times in this connection is that the instinct of self-denial and self-sacrifice, everything altruistic, has been glorified as if it were the supreme value of morality.

The English moralists, who at present dominate Europe, explain the origin of ethics in the following way: Unselfish actions were originally called good by those who were their objects and who benefited by them; afterwards this original reason for praising them was forgotten, and unselfish actions came to be regarded as good in themselves.

According to a statement of Nietzsche himself it was a work by a German author with English leanings, Dr. Paul Rée's Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (Chemnitz, 1877), which provoked him to such passionate and detailed opposition that he had to thank this book for the impulse to clear up and develop his own ideas on the subject.

The surprising part of it, however, is this: Dissatisfaction with his first book caused Rée to write a second and far more important work on the same subject--Die Entstehung des Gewissens (Berlin, 1885)--in which the point of view offensive to Nietzsche is abandoned and several of the leading ideas advanced by the latter against Rée are set forth, supported by a mass of evidence taken from various authors and races of men.

The two philosophers were personally acquainted. I knew them both, but had no opportunity of questioning either on this matter. It is therefore impossible for me to say which of the two influenced the other, or why Nietzsche in 1887 alludes to his detestation of the opinions put forward by Rée in 1877, without mentioning how near the latter had come to his own view in the work published two years previously.

Rée had already adduced a number of examples to show that the most diverse peoples of antiquity knew no other moral classification of men than that of nobles and common people, powerful and weak; so that the oldest meaning of good both in Greece and Iceland was noble, mighty, rich. Nietzsche builds his whole theory on this foundation. His train of thought is this--

The critical word good is not due to those to whom goodness has been shown. The oldest definition was this: the noble, the mightier, higher-placed and high-minded held themselves and their actions to be good--of the first rank--in contradistinction to everything low and low-minded. Noble, in the sense of the class-consciousness of a higher caste, is the primary concept from which develops good in the sense of spiritually aristocratic. The lowly are designated as bad (not evil). Bad does not acquire its unqualified depreciatory meaning till much later. In the mouth of the people it is a laudatory word; the German word schlecht is identical with schlicht (cf. schlechtweg and schlechterdings).

The ruling caste call themselves sometimes simply the Mighty, sometimes the Truthful; like the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece Theognis was. With him beautiful, good and noble always have the sense of aristocratic. The aristocratic moral valuation proceeds from a triumphant affirmation, a yea-saying, which we find in the Homeric heroes: We, the noble, beautiful and brave--we are the good, the beloved of the gods. These are strong men, charged with force, who delight in warlike deeds, to whom, in other words, happiness is activity.

It is of course unavoidable that these nobles should misjudge and despise the plebeian herd they dominate. Yet as a rule there may be traced in them a pity for the downtrodden caste, for the drudge and beast of burden, an indulgence towards those to whom happiness is rest, the Sabbath of inactivity.

Among the lower orders, on the other hand, an image of the ruling caste distorted by hatred and spite is necessarily current. In this distortion there lies a revenge.

In opposition to the aristocratic valuation (good = noble, beautiful, happy, favoured by the gods) the slave morality then is this: The wretched alone are the good; those who suffer and are heavy laden, the sick and the ugly, they are the only pious ones. On the other hand, you, ye noble and rich, are to all eternity the evil, the cruel, the insatiate, the ungodly, and after death the damned. Whereas noble morality was the manifestation of great self-esteem, a continual yea-saying, slave morality is a continual Nay, a Thou shalt not, a negation.

To the noble valuation good--bad (bad = worthless) corresponds the antithesis of slave morality, good--evil. And who are the evil in this morality of the oppressed? Precisely the same who in the other morality were the good.

Let any one read the Icelandic sagas and examine the morality of the ancient Northmen, and then compare with it the complaints of other nations about the vikings' misdeeds. It will be seen that these aristocrats, whose conduct in many ways stood high, were no better than beasts of prey in dealing with their enemies. They fell upon the inhabitants of Christian shores like eagles upon lambs. One may say they followed an eagle ideal. But then we cannot wonder that those who were exposed to such fearful attacks gathered round an entirely opposite moral ideal, that of the lamb.

In the third chapter of his Utilitarianism, Stuart Mill attempts to prove that the sense of justice has developed from the animal instinct of making reprisal for an injury or a loss. In an essay on "the transcendental satisfaction of the feeling of revenge" (supplement to the first edition of the Werth des Lebens) Eugen Dühring has followed him in trying to establish the whole doctrine of punishment upon the instinct of retaliation. In his Phänomenologie Eduard von Hartmann shows how this instinct strictly speaking never does more than involve a new suffering, a new offence, to gain external satisfaction for the old one, so that the principle of requital can never be any distinct principle.

Nietzsche makes a violent, passionate attempt to refer the sum total of false modern morality, not to the instinct of requital or to the feeling of revenge in general, but to the narrower form of it which we call spite, envy and rancune. What he calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction; God chastens whom he loves. Or it became a preparation, a trial and a training; even more--something that will one day be made good with interest, paid back in bliss. And the vilest underground creatures, swollen with hate and spite, were heard to say: We, the good, we are the righteous. They did not hate their enemies--they hated injustice, ungodliness. What they hoped for was not the sweets of revenge, but the victory of righteousness. Those they had left to love on earth were their brothers and sisters in hatred, whom they called their brothers and sisters in love. The future state they looked for was called the coming of their kingdom, of God's kingdom. Until it arrives they live on in faith, hope and love.

If Nietzsche's design in this picture was to strike at historical Christianity, he has given us--as any one may see--a caricature in the spirit and style of the eighteenth century. But that his description hits off a certain type of the apostles of spite-morality cannot be denied, and rarely has all the self-deception that may lurk beneath moral preaching been more vigorously unmasked. (Compare Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.)