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Preface 1 We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason.

We have never looked for ourselves, - so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?

How right is the saying: 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also';1 our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are.

As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing - to 'bring something home'.

As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called 'experiences', - who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time?

I fear we have never really been 'with it' in such matters: our heart is simply not in it - and not even our ear!

On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders 'What hour struck?

', sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, 'What did we actually experience then?'

or even, 'Who are we, in fact?'

and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being - oh!

and lose count... We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto2 'everyone is furthest from himself' applies to us for ever, - we are not 'knowers' when it comes to ourselves... 2 - My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices - for that is what this polemic is about - were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human.

A Book for Free Spirits,3 which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled.

This was in the winter of 1876-7; the thoughts themselves go back further.

They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays - let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect!

The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands.

And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher.

We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually.

Instead, our thoughts, values, every 'yes', 'no', 'if' and 'but' grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree - all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun.

- Do you like the taste of our fruit?

- But of what concern is that to the trees?

And of what concern is it to us philosophers?...

3 With a characteristic scepticism to which I confess only reluctantly - it relates to morality and to all that hitherto on earth has been celebrated as morality -, a scepticism which sprang up in my life so early, so unbidden, so unstoppably, and which was in such conflict with my surroundings, age, precedents and lineage that I would almost be justified in calling it my 'a priori', - eventually my curiosity and suspicion were bound to fix on the question of what origin our terms good and evil actually have.

Indeed, as a thirteen-year-old boy, I was preoccupied with the problem of the origin of evil: at an age when one's heart was 'half-filled with childish games, half-filled with God',4 I dedicated my first literary childish game, my first philosophical essay, to this problem - and as regards my 'solution' to the problem at that time, I quite properly gave God credit for it and made him the father of evil.

Did my 'a priori' want this of me?

That new, immoral, or at least immoralistic 'a priori': and the oh-so-anti-Kantian, so enigmatic 'categorical imperative'5 which spoke from it and to which I have, in the meantime, increasingly lent an ear, and not just an ear?...

Fortunately I learnt, in time, to separate theological from moral prejudice and I no longer searched for the origin of evil beyond the world.

Some training in history and philology, together with my innate fastidiousness with regard to all psychological problems, soon transformed my problem into another: under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil?

and what value do they themselves have?

Have they up to now obstructed or promoted human flourishing?

Are they a sign of distress, poverty and the degeneration of life?

Or, on the contrary, do they reveal the fullness, strength and will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future?

To these questions I found and ventured all kinds of answers of my own, I distinguished between epochs, peoples, grades of rank between individuals, I focused my inquiry, and out of the answers there developed new questions, investigations, conjectures, probabilities until I had my own territory, my own soil, a whole silently growing and blossoming world, secret gardens, as it were, the existence of which nobody must be allowed to suspect... Oh!

how happy we are, we knowers, provided we can keep quiet for long enough!...

4 I was given the initial stimulation to publish something about my hypotheses on the origin of morality by a clear, honest and clever, even too-clever little book, in which I first directly encountered the back-to-front and perverse kind of genealogical hypotheses, actually the English kind, which drew me to it - with that power of attraction which everything contradictory and antithetical has.

The title of the little book was The Origin of the Moral Sensations; its author was Dr Paul Rée; the year of its publication 1877.

I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I said 'no', sentence by sentence and deduction by deduction, as I did to this book: but completely without annoyance and impatience.

In the work already mentioned which I was working on at the time, I referred to passages from this book more or less at random, not in order to refute them - what business is it of mine to refute!

- but, as befits a positive mind, to replace the improbable with the more probable and in some circumstances to replace one error with another.

As I said, I was, at the time, bringing to the light of day those hypotheses on descent to which these essays are devoted, clumsily, as I am the first to admit, and still inhibited because I still lacked my own vocabulary for these special topics, and with a good deal of relapse and vacillation.

In particular, compare what I say about the dual prehistory of good and evil in Human, All Too Human, section 45 (namely in the sphere of nobles and slaves); likewise section 136 on the value and descent of ascetic morality; likewise sections 96 and 99 and volume II, section 89 on the 'Morality of Custom', that much older and more primitive kind of morality which is toto coelo6 removed from altruistic evaluation (which Dr Rée, like all English genealogists, sees as the moral method of valuation as such); likewise section 92, The Wanderer, section 26, and Daybreak, section 112, on the descent of justice as a balance between two roughly equal powers (equilibrium as the precondition for all contracts and consequently for all law); likewise The Wanderer, sections 22 and 33 on the descent of punishment, the deterrent [terroristisch] purpose of which is neither essential nor inherent (as Dr Rée thinks: - instead it is introduced in particular circumstances and is always incidental and added on).7 5 Actually, just then I was preoccupied with something much more important than the nature of hypotheses, mine or anybody else's, on the origin of morality (or, to be more exact: the latter concerned me only for one end, to which it is one of many means).

For me it was a question of the value of morality, - and here I had to confront my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that book of mine spoke as though he were still present, with its passion and its hidden contradiction (- it, too, being a 'polemic').

I dealt especially with the value of the 'unegoistic', the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer8 had for so long gilded, deified and transcendentalized until he was finally left with them as those 'values as such' on the basis of which he said 'no' to life and to himself as well.

But against these very instincts I gave vent to an increasingly deep mistrust, a scepticism which dug deeper and deeper!

Precisely here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction - temptation to what? to nothingness?

- precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, standstill, mankind looking back wearily, turning its will against life, and the onset of the final sickness becoming gently, sadly manifest: I understood the morality of compassion, casting around ever wider to catch even philosophers and make them ill, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture which has itself become uncanny, as its detour to a new Buddhism?

to a new Euro-Buddhism? to - nihilism?...

This predilection for and overvaluation of compassion that modern philosophers show is, in fact, something new: up till now, philosophers were agreed as to the worthlessness of compassion.

I need only mention Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant, four minds as different from one another as it is possible to be, but united on one point: their low opinion of compassion.

- 6 This problem of the value of compassion and of the morality of compassion (- I am opposed to the disgraceful modern softness of feeling -) seems at first to be only an isolated phenomenon, a lone question mark; but whoever pauses over the question and learns to ask, will find what I found: - that a vast new panorama opens up for him, a possibility makes him giddy, mistrust, suspicion and fear of every kind spring up, belief in morality, all morality, wavers, - finally, a new demand becomes articulate.

So let us give voice to this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined - and so we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed and changed (morality as result, as symptom, as mask, as tartuffery, as sickness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, remedy, stimulant, inhibition, poison), since we have neither had this knowledge up till now nor even desired it.

People have taken the value of these 'values' as given, as factual, as beyond all questioning; up till now, nobody has had the remotest doubt or hesitation in placing higher value on 'the good man' than on 'the evil', higher value in the sense of advancement, benefit and prosperity for man in general (and this includes man's future).

What if the opposite were true?

What if a regressive trait lurked in 'the good man', likewise a danger, an enticement, a poison, a narcotic, so that the present lived at the expense of the future?

Perhaps in more comfort and less danger, but also in a smaller-minded, meaner manner?...

So that morality itself were to blame if man, as species, never reached his highest potential power and splendour?

So that morality itself was the danger of dangers?...

7 Suffice it to say that since this revelation, I had reason to look around for scholarly, bold, hardworking colleagues (I am still looking).

The vast, distant and hidden land of morality - of morality as it really existed and was really lived - has to be journeyed through with quite new questions and as it were with new eyes: and surely that means virtually discovering this land for the first time?...

If, on my travels, I thought about the above-mentioned Dr Rée, amongst others, this was because I was certain that, judging from the questions he raised, he himself would have to adopt a more sensible method if he wanted to find the answers. Was I mistaken?

At any rate, I wanted to focus this sharp, unbiased eye in a better direction, the direction of a real history of morality, and to warn him, while there was still time, against such English hypothesis-mongering into the blue.

It is quite clear which colour is a hundred times more important for a genealogist than blue: namely grey, which is to say, that which can be documented, which can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short, the whole, long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of man's moral past!

This was unknown to Dr Rée; but he had read Darwin: - and so, in his hypotheses, the Darwinian beast and the ultra-modern, humble moral weakling who 'no longer bites' politely shake hands in a way that is at least entertaining, the latter with an expression of a certain good-humoured and cultivated indolence on his face, in which even a grain of pessimism and fatigue mingle: as if it were really not worth taking all these things - the problems of morality - so seriously.

Now I, on the contrary, think there is nothing which more rewards being taken seriously; the reward being, for example, the possibility of one day being allowed to take them cheerfully.

That cheerfulness, in fact, or to put it into my parlance, that gay science - is a reward: a reward for a long, brave, diligent, subterranean seriousness for which, admittedly, not everyone is suited.

The day we can say, with conviction: 'Forwards!

even our old morality would make a comedy!'

we shall have discovered a new twist and possible outcome for the Dionysian drama of the 'fate of the soul' -: and he'll make good use of it, we can bet, he, the grand old eternal writer of the comedy of our existence!...

8 - If anyone finds this script incomprehensible and hard on the ears, I do not think the fault necessarily lies with me.

It is clear enough, assuming, as I do, that people have first read my earlier works without sparing themselves some effort: because they really are not easy to approach.

With regard to my Zarathustra, for example, I do not acknowledge anyone as an expert on it if he has not, at some time, been both profoundly wounded and profoundly delighted by it, for only then may he enjoy the privilege of sharing, with due reverence, the halcyon element from which the book was born and its sunny brightness, spaciousness, breadth and certainty.

In other cases, the aphoristic form causes difficulty: this is because this form is not taken seriously enough these days.

An aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been 'deciphered' just because it has been read out; on the contrary, this is just the beginning of its proper interpretation, and for this, an art of interpretation is needed.

In the third essay of this book I have given an example of what I mean by 'interpretation' in such a case: - this treatise is a commentary on the aphorism that precedes it.

I admit that you need one thing above all in order to practise the requisite art of reading, a thing which today people have been so good at forgetting - and so it will be some time before my writings are 'readable' -, you almost need to be a cow for this one thing and certainly not a 'modern man': it is rumination... Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine July 1887.

First essay: 'Good and Evil', 'Good and Bad' 1 - These English psychologists, who have to be thanked for having made the only attempts so far to write a history of the emergence of morality, - provide us with a small riddle in the form of themselves; in fact, I admit that as living riddles they have a significant advantage over their books - they are actually interesting!

These English psychologists - just what do they want?

You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world to the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development where man's intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and random coupling and mechanism of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid) - what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time?

Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle humans, which it might well not admit to itself?

Or perhaps a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green?

Or a certain subterranean animosity and rancune towards Christianity (and Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of consciousness?

Or even a lewd taste for the strange, for the painful paradox, for the dubious and nonsensical in life?

Or finally - a bit of everything, a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and need for pepper?...

But people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp.

I am resistant to hearing this and, indeed, I do not believe it; and if it is permissible to wish where it is impossible to know, I sincerely hope that the reverse is true, - that these analysts holding a microscope to the soul are actually brave, generous and proud animals, who know how to control their own pleasure and pain and have been taught to sacrifice desirability to truth, every truth, even a plain, bitter, ugly, foul, unchristian, immoral truth... Because there are such truths.

- 2 So you have to respect the good spirits which preside in these historians of morality!

But it is unfortunately a fact that historical spirit itself is lacking in them, they have been left in the lurch by all the good spirits of history itself!

As is now established philosophical practice, they all think in a way that is essentially unhistorical; this can't be doubted.

The idiocy of their moral genealogy is revealed at the outset when it is a question of conveying the descent of the concept and judgment of 'good'.

'Originally' - they decree - 'unegoistic acts were praised and called good by their recipients, in other words, by the people to whom they were useful; later, everyone forgot the origin of the praise and because such acts had always been habitually praised as good, people also began to experience them as good - as if they were something good as such'.

We can see at once: this first deduction contains all the typical traits of idiosyncratic English psychologists, - we have 'usefulness', 'forgetting', 'habit' and finally 'error', all as the basis of a respect for values of which the higher man has hitherto been proud, as though it were a sort of general privilege of mankind.

This pride must be humbled, this valuation devalued: has that been achieved?...

Now for me, it is obvious that the real breeding-ground for the concept 'good' has been sought and located in the wrong place by this theory: the judgment 'good' does not emanate from those to whom goodness is shown!

Instead it has been 'the good' themselves, meaning the noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean first-rate, in contrast to everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian.

It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names: usefulness was none of their concern!

The standpoint of usefulness is as alien and inappropriate as it can be to such a heated eruption of the highest rank-ordering and rank-defining value judgments: this is the point where feeling reaches the opposite of the low temperatures needed for any calculation of prudence or reckoning of usefulness, - and not just for once, for one exceptional moment, but permanently.

The pathos of nobility and distance, as I said, the continuing and predominant feeling of complete and fundamental superiority of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to those 'below' - that is the origin of the antithesis 'good' and 'bad'.

(The seigneurial privilege of giving names even allows us to conceive of the origin of language itself as a manifestation of the power of the rulers: they say 'this is so and so', they set their seal on everything and every occurrence with a sound and thereby take possession of it, as it were).

It is because of this origin that from the outset, the word 'good' is absolutely not necessarily attached to 'unegoistic' actions: as the superstition of these moral genealogists would have it.

On the contrary, it is only with a decline of aristocratic value judgments that this whole antithesis between 'egoistic' and 'unegoistic' forces itself more and more on man's conscience, - it is, to use my language, the herd instinct which, with that, finally gets its word in (and makes words).

And even then it takes long enough for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant for the valuation of moral values to become enmeshed and embedded in the antithesis (as is the case in contemporary Europe, for example: the prejudice which takes 'moral', 'unegoistic' and 'désintéressé as equivalent terms already rules with the power of a 'fixed idea' and mental illness).