My thoughts about the origin of our moral prejudices—for this polemical tract is concerned about that origin—had their first brief, provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms which carried the title Human, All‑too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, which I started to write in Sorrento, during a winter when I had the chance to pause, just as a traveller stops, and to look over the wide and dangerous land through which my spirit had wandered up to that point. This happened in the winter 1876‑77, but the ideas themselves are older. In the main points, they were the same ideas which I am taking up again in these present essays:—let’s hope that the long interval of time has done them some good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger, and more complete! But the fact that today I still stand by these ideas, that in the intervening time they themselves have constantly become more strongly associated with one another, in fact, have grown into each other and intertwined, that reinforces in me the joyful confidence that they may not have originally developed in me as single, random, or sporadic ideas, but up out of a common root, out of some fundamental will for know-ledge ruling from deep within, always speaking with greater clarity, always demanding greater clarity. For that’s the only thing appro-priate to a philosopher. We have no right to be scattered in any way: we are not permitted to make isolated mistakes or to run into isolated truths. By contrast, our ideas, our values, our affirmations and denials, our if’s and whether’s, grow out of us from the same necessity which makes a tree bear its fruit—totally related and interlinked amongst each other, witnesses of one will, one health, one soil, one sun.—As for the question whether these fruits of ours taste good to you—what does that matter to the trees! What concern is that to us, we philosophers! . . .

3

Because of a doubt peculiar to my own nature, which I am reluctant to confess—for it concerns itself with morality, with everything which up to the present has been celebrated on earth as morality—a doubt which came into my life so early, so uninvited, so irresistibly, in such contradiction to my surroundings, my age, the examples around me, and my origin, that I would almost have the right to call it my “a priori” [before experience]—because of this, my curiosity as well as my suspicions had to pause early on at the question about where our good and evil really originated. In fact, as a thirteen‑year‑ old lad, my mind was already occupying itself with the problem of the origin of evil. At an age when one has “half childish play, half God in one’s heart,” I devoted my first childish literary trifle, my first written philosophical exercise, to this problem—and so far as my “solution” to it at that time is concerned, well, I gave that honour to God, as is reasonable, and made him the father of evil. Is that precisely what my “a priori” demanded of me, that new immoral, at the very least unmoral “a priori” and the cryptic “categorical imperative” which spoke out from it, alas, so anti‑Kantian, which I have increasingly listened to ever since—and not just listened to?^[2] Luckily at an early stage I learned to separate theological prejudices from moral ones, and I no longer sought the origin of evil behind the world. Some education in history and philology, along with an inherently refined sense concerning psychological questions in general, quickly changed my problem into something else: Under what conditions did man invent for himself those value judgments good and evil? And what value do they inherently possess? Have they hindered or fostered human well‑being up to now? Are they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying life? Or is it the other way around? Do they indicate fullness, power, a will for living, courage, confidence, his future?—After that I came across and proposed all sorts of answers for myself. I distinguished between ages, peoples, different ranks of individuals. I kept refining my problem. Out of the answers arose new questions, investigations, assumptions, probabilities, until at last I had my own country, my own soil, a totally secluded, flowering, blooming world, a secret garden, as it were, of which no one had the slightest inkling. O how lucky we are, we knowledgeable people, provided only that we know how to stay silent long enough! . . .

4

The first stimulus to publish something of my hypothesis concerning the origin of morality was given to me by a lucid, tidy, clever, even precocious little book, in which for the first time I clearly ran into a topsy‑turvy, perverse type of genealogical hypothesis—a genuinely English style. It drew me with that power of attraction which everything opposite, everything antipodal, contains. The title of this booklet was The Origin of the Moral Feelings. Its author was Dr Paul Rée, and it appeared in the year 1877.^[3] I have perhaps never read anything which I would have denied, statement by statement, conclusion by conclusion, as I did with this book, but without any sense of annoyance or impatience. In the work I mentioned above, on which I was working at the time, I made opportune and inoppor­tune references to statements in Dr. Rée’s book, not in order to prove them wrong—what have I to do with preparing refutations!—but, as is appropriate to a positive spirit, to put in the place of something unlikely something more likely and possibly in the place of some error a different error. In that period, as I said, for the first time I brought into the light of day that hypotheses about genealogy to which these essays have been dedicated—but clumsily, as I will be the last to deny, still fettered, still without my own language for these concerns of mine, and with all sorts of retreating and vacillat­ing. For particular details, you should compare what I said in Human, All‑too Human, 45, about the double nature of the prehis­tory of good and evil (that is, in the spheres of the nobility and the slaves); similarly, section 136, concerning the worth and origin of ascetic morality, as well as sections 96, 99, and 2.89 concerning the “Morality of Custom,” that much older and more primitive style of morality, which lies toto coelo [an enormous distance] from the altruistic way of valuing (which Dr. Rée, like all English genealogists of morality, sees as the very essence of moral evaluation); similarly, 1.92, Wanderer section 26, and The Dawn 112, concerning the origin of justice as a compromise between approximately equal powers (equality as a precondition of all contracts and therefore of all justice); likewise concerning the origin of punishment in Wanderer 22, 33, for which an intent to terrify is neither the essential thing nor the origin (as Dr. Rée claims:—it is far more likely first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something inciden­tal, something additional).^[4]

5

Basically even then the real concern for me at heart was something much more important than coming up with hypotheses about the origin of morality, either my own or from other people (or, more precisely stated—this latter issue was important to me only for the sake of a goal to which it was one path out of many). For me the issue was the value of morality—and in that matter I had to take issue almost alone with my great teacher Schopenhauer, the one to whom, as if to a contemporary, that book, with its passion and hidden contradiction, addresses itself (—for that book was also a “polemical tract”).^[5] The most specific issue was the worth of the “unegoistic,” the instinct for pity, self‑denial, self‑sacrifice, some-thing which Schopenhauer himself had painted with gold, deified, and projected into the next world for so long that it finally remained for him “value in itself” and the reason why he said No to life and even to himself. But a constantly more fundamental suspicion of these very instincts voiced itself in me, a scepticism which always dug deeper! It was precisely here that I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime temptation and seduction.—But in what direction? To nothingness?—It was precisely here I saw the begin­ning of the end, the standing still, the backward‑glancing exhaus­tion, the will turning itself against life, the final illness tenderly and sadly announcing itself. I understood the morality of pity, which was always seizing more and more around it and which gripped even the philosophers and made them sick, as the most sinister symptom of our European culture, which itself had become sinister, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to—nihilism? . . . This modern philosophical preference for and overvaluing of pity is really something new. Concerning the worthlessness of pity philosophers up to now have been in agreement. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant—four spirits as different from one another as possible, but united in one thing, in the low value they set on pity.^[6]—

6

This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity (—I’m an opponent of the disgraceful modern immaturity of feelings—) appears at first to be only something isolated, a detached question mark. But anyone who remains there for a while and learns to ask questions will experience what happened to me:—a huge new vista opens up before him, a possibility grips him like an attack of dizziness, all sorts of mistrust, suspicion, and fear spring up, his belief in morality, in all morality, starts to totter—and finally he hears a new demand. Let’s proclaim this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, we must first question the very value of these values—and for that we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which these values grew, under which they have developed and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartufferie [hypocrisy], as illness, as misunderstanding, but also morality as cause, as means of healing, as stimulant, as scruple, as poison), a knowledge of the sort which has not been there up this point, something which has not even been wished for. We have taken the worth of these “values” as something given, as self‑evident, as beyond all dispute. Up until now people have also not had the slightest doubts about or wavered in setting up “the good man” as more valuable than “the evil man,” of higher worth in the sense of the improvement, usefulness, and prosperity with respect to mankind in general (along with the future of humanity). What about this? What if the truth were the other way around? Well? What if in the “good” there even lay a symptom of regression, something like a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, something which makes the present live at the cost of the future? Perhaps something more comfortable, less dangerous, but also on a smaller scale, something more demeaning? . . . So that this very morality would be guilty if the inherently possible highest power and magnificence of the human type were never attained? So that this very morality might be the danger of all dangers? . . .