Human, All-Too-Human, section 45
Twofold
Prehistory of good and evil.
– The concept good and evil has a twofold prehistory: firstly in the
soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who has the power to requite, good
with good, evil with evil, and also actually practices requital – is, that is
to say, grateful and revengeful – is called good; he who is powerless and
cannot requite counts as bad. As a good
man one belongs to the ‘good’, a community which has a sense of belonging
together because all the individuals in it are combined with one another
through the capacity for requital. As a bad man one belongs to the ‘bad’, to a
swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together. The
good are a caste, the bad are a mass like grains of sand. Good and bad is for a long time the same
thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not
regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer the Trojan and the Greek are
both good. It is not he who does us harm but he who is contemptible who counts
as bad. In the community of the good goodness is inherited; it is impossible that
a bad man could grow up out of such good soul. If, however, one of the good
should do something unworthy of the good, one looks for excuses; one ascribes
the guilt to a god, for example, by saying he struck the good man with madness
and rendered him blind. – Then in the soul of the subjected, the
powerless. Here every other man,
whether he be noble or base, counts as inimical, ruthless, cruel, cunning,
ready to take advantage. Evil is the characterizing expression for man, indeed
for every living being one supposes to exist, for a god, for example; human,
divine mean the same thing as diabolical, evil. Signs of goodness, benevolence,
sympathy are received fearfully as a trick, a prelude with a dreadful
termination, a means of confusing and outwitting, in short as refined
wickedness. When this disposition
exists in the individual a community can hardly arise, at best the most
rudimentary form of community: so that wherever this conception of good and
evil reigns the downfall of such individuals, of their tribes and races, is
near. – Our present morality has grown
up in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes.
-- Human, All
Too Human: A book for free spirits.
Frederick Nietzsche. RJ
Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge
University Press, 1988.) 36-37
Human, All-Too-Human, section 136
Of
Christian asceticism and holiness. – However much individual thinkers have
exerted themselves to represent those strange phenomena of morality usually
called asceticism and holiness as a marvel and miracle to attempt a rational
explanation of which is almost a sacrilege and profanation: the urge to commit
this sacrilege is, on the other hand, every bit as strong. A mighty drive of nature
has at all times prompted a protest against these phenomena as such; science,
insofar as it is, as aforesaid, an imitation of nature, permits itself at least
to register a protest against the alleged inexplicability, indeed
inapproachability, of the said phenomena. So far, to be sure, it has done so in
vain: they are still unexplained, a fact that gives great satisfaction to the
above-mentioned votaries of the morally miraculous. For, speaking quite
generally, the unexplained is to be altogether inexplicable, the inexplicable
altogether unnatural, supernatural, miraculous – thus sounds the demand in the
souls of all religious people and metaphysicians (in those of the artists, too,
when they are also thinkers); while the scientific man sees in this demand the ‘devil
principle’. – The first general probability one arrives at when reflecting on
holiness and asceticism is that its nature is a complex one: for almost
everywhere, within the physical world as well as in the moral, the supposedly marvelous
has successfully been traced back to the complex, to the multiply caused. Let
us therefore venture first to isolate individual drives in the soul of the
saint and ascetic and then conclude by thinking of them entwined together.
-- Human, All
Too Human: A book for free spirits.
Frederick Nietzsche. RJ
Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge
University Press, 1988.) 73.
Human, All-Too-Human, section 96
Custom
and what is in accordance with it.
– To be moral, to act in accordance with custom, to be ethical means to
practice obedience towards a law or tradition established from old. Whether one
subjects oneself with effort or gladly and willingly makes no difference, it is
enough that one does it. He is called ‘good’ who does what is customary as if
by nature, as a result of a long inheritance, that is to say easily and gladly,
and this is so whatever what is customary may be (exacts revenge, for example,
when exacting revenge is part of good custom, as it was with the ancient
Greeks). He is called good because he
is good ‘for something’; since, however, benevolence, sympathy and the like
have throughout all the changes in customs always been seen as ‘good for
something’, as useful, it is now above all the benevolent, the helpful who are
called ‘good’. To be evil is ‘not to act in accordance with custom’, to
practice things not sanctioned by custom, to resist tradition, however rational
or stupid that tradition may be; in all the laws of custom of all times,
however, doing injury to one’s neighbor has been seen as injurious above all
else, so that now at the word ‘evil’ we think especially of voluntarily doing
injury to one’s neighbor. ‘Egoistic’ and ‘unegoistic’ is not the fundamental
antithesis which has led men to make the distinction between ‘in accordance
with custom’ and ‘in defiance of custom’, between good and evil, but adherence
to a tradition, a law, and a severance from it. How the tradition has arisen
is here a matter of indifference, and has in any event nothing to do with good
and evil or with any kind of immanent categorical imperative;* it is above all
directed at the preservation of a community, a people; every
superstitious usage which has arisen on the basis of some chance event
mistakenly interpreted enforces a tradition which it is in accordance with
custom to follow; for to sever oneself from it is dangerous, and even more
injurious to the community than to the individual (because the gods
punish the community for misdeeds and for every violation of their privileges
and only to that extent punish the individual). Every tradition now continually
grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin
is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation,
the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the
morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands
unegoistic actions.
--
*Kant
considered the categorical imperative – defined in the Groundwork for a
Metaphysic of Morals as ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become
through your will a universal natural law’ – to derive from the nature of
rationality.
Human, All-Too-Human, section 99
The
innocent element in so-called evil acts. – All ‘evil’ acts are motivated by the drive to preservation
or, more exactly, by the individual’s intention of procuring pleasure and
avoiding displeasure; so motivated, however, they are not evil. ‘Procuring pain
as such’ does not exist, except in the brains of philosophers, neither
does ‘procuring pleasure as such’ (pity in the Schopenhaurerian sense). In
conditions obtaining before the existence of the state we kill the
creature, be it ape or man, that seeks to deprive us of a fruit of the tree if
we happen to be hungry and are making for the tree ourself: as we would still
do to the animals even now if we were traveling in inhospitable regions. – The evil
acts at which we are now most indignant rest on the error that he who
perpetrates them against us possess free will, that is to say, that he could
have chosen not to cause us this harm. It is this belief in choice that
engenders hatred, revengefulness, deceitfulness, all the degrading our
imagination undergoes, while we are far less censorious towards an animal
because we regard it as unaccountable. To do injury not from the drive to
preservation but as requital – is the consequence of a mistaken judgment and
therefore likewise innocent. In conditions obtaining before the existence of
the state the individual can act harshly and cruelly for the purpose of frightening
other creatures: to secure his existence through such fear-inspiring tests of
his power. Thus does the man of violence, of power, the original founder of
states, act when he subjugates the weaker. His right to do so is the same as
the state now relegates to itself; or rather, there exists no right that can
prevent this from happening. The ground for any kind of morality can then be
prepared only when a greater individual or collective-individuality, for
example society, the state, subjugates all other individuals, that is to saw
draws them out of their isolation and orders them within a collective. Morality
is preceded by compulsion, indeed it is for a time itself still
compulsion, to which one accommodates oneself for the avoidance of what one
regards as unpleasurable. Later it becomes custom, later still voluntary
obedience, finally almost instinct: then, like all that has for a long time
been habitual and natural, it is associated with pleasure – and now is called virtue.
-- Human, All
Too Human: A book for free spirits.
Frederick Nietzsche. RJ
Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge
University Press, 1988.) 53.
Human, All-Too-Human, Volume II, section 89
Custom
and its sacrifices. – The origin
of custom lies in two ideas: ‘the community is worth more than the individual’
and ‘an enduring advantage is to be preferred to a transient one’; from which
it follows that the enduring advantage of the community is to take
unconditional precedence over the advantage of the individual, especially over
his momentary wellbeing but also over his enduring advantage and even over his survival.
Even if the individual suffers from an arrangement which benefits the whole,
even if he languishes under it, perishes by it – the custom must be maintained
the sacrifice offered up. Such an attitude originates, however, only in
those who are not the sacrifice – for the latter urges that, in his own
case, the individual could be worth more than the many, likewise that present
enjoyment, the moment in paradise, is perhaps to be rated higher than an
insipid living-on in a painless condition of comfort. The philosophy of the
sacrificial beast, however, is always noised abroad too late: and so we
continue on with custom and morality [Sittlichkeit]: which latter
is nothing other than simply a feeling for the whole content of those customs
under which we live and have been raised – and raised, indeed, not as an
individual, but as a member of the whole, as a cipher in a majority. – So it
comes about that through his morality the individual outvotes himself.
-- Human, All
Too Human: A book for free spirits.
Frederick Nietzsche. RJ
Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge
University Press, 1988.) 231-32.
The Wanderer and His Shadow, section 26
Rule
of laws as a means. – Law, reposing on compacts between equals,
continues to exist for so long as the power of those who have concluded these
compacts remains equal or similar; prudence created law to put an end to
feuding and to useless squandering between forces of similar strength.
But just as definitive an end is put to them if one party has become
decisively weaker than the other: then subjection enters in and law ceases,
but the consequence is the same as that previously attained through the rule of
law. For now it is the prudence of the dominant party which advises that
the strength of the subjected should be economized and not uselessly
squandered: and often the subjected find themselves in more favorable
circumstances than they did when they were equals. – The rule of law is thus a
temporary means advised by prudence, not an end.
-- Human, All
Too Human: A book for free spirits.
Frederick Nietzsche. RJ
Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge
University Press, 1988.) 314.