Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Good Europeans and the German Question

Optional full-text route · Station 29 of 35

Read: Book V, §§357–359, in full, added in 1887. Begin at §357 and stop before §360.
Allow: About 75–100 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. §357 is the longest section in the book. Read it in one sitting, and §§358–359 in another.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): §357 · §358 · §359.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here. The translator’s footnote to §357, which glosses a German song line, is Common’s, not Nietzsche’s.

Before you read

Book V was added in 1887, after Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, and in the same year as the Genealogy. These three sections ask what belongs to a nation and what belongs to Europe. They ask what defeated belief in the Christian God, and what the Reformation did to the Church. They ask where morality finds its most “rancorous advocates.”

Some of the book’s most important claims about truthfulness stand here beside some of its least supported claims about peoples, classes, and motives. §357 includes an antisemitic generalization. §358 ranks people by birth and “caste.” This lesson states those claims plainly and asks what support they have, as it does for the rest.

The main question: Nietzsche honours one kind of honesty as “the European conscience” and disdains another as “coarse” and plebeian. What separates them—truthfulness, or rank?

Keep the marks from station 2 ready. These sections need many Hs: historical claims that need outside evidence.

What to notice

1. “German” and “good European.” Count how often §357 assigns a thought to a nation, and how often it takes one away.
2. “Honest.” The word appears in §357 and in §358. Note what it praises in one and what it blames in the other.
3. From motive to value. §359 explains moral language by a motive. Ask what that explanation would show about the value of the morality.

Close reading

Were the German philosophers Germans?

§357 opens with a question: should German philosophy’s real achievements be credited to “the ‘German soul’”? Or were they as exceptional as Goethe’s paganism? In short, “were the German philosophers really philosophical Germans?” Nietzsche calls to mind three cases. Leibniz saw that “consciousness is only an accident of mental representation”; Kant wrote an “immense note of interrogation” after the concept of causality; Hegel taught that concepts of kinds develop out of one another. §357, three cases

Use the marks. That consciousness is not the whole of mental life is a philosophical claim, and it returns to §354, which you read at station 28 (and in Reading 9). “For without Hegel there would have been no Darwin” is an H of great size, and the section offers no evidence for it. §357, Hegel and Darwin

Then the voice shifts to a national “we.” “We Germans should still have been Hegelians, even though there had never been a Hegel,” because “we (in contradistinction to all Latin peoples)” value becoming above being. This is a generalization about the character of whole peoples. Nietzsche speaks as a German, so it has the tone of self-examination. The tone is not evidence. Mark it H and V, and notice that the section is about to take one great thought away from the nation. §357, the national “we”

A European event

The fourth case is Schopenhauer’s pessimism, “the problem of the worth of existence.” Nietzsche denies that it had to be German. The event that made the problem inevitable was “the decay of the belief in the Christian God, the victory of scientific atheism.” That event “is a universal European event.” Far from producing it, the Germans “delayed this victory of atheism longest.” Hegel was “its retarder par excellence,” because he tried to show the divinity of existence through “the historical sense.” Schopenhauer was “the first avowed and inflexible atheist we Germans have had.” §357, a European event

What defeated the Christian God

Here is the core of the section. Schopenhauer’s “unconditional, honest atheism” is presented as “a final and hardwon victory of the European conscience, as the most prolific act of two thousand years’ discipline to truth, which in the end no longer tolerates the lie of the belief in a God.” Then comes the answer to the question of what really won: §357, honest atheism

“Christian morality itself, the conception of veracity, taken ever more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated to the scientific conscience, to intellectual purity at any price.”

Read this slowly. The claim is not that science refuted Christianity from outside. It is that Christianity’s own demand for truthfulness, sharpened for centuries, turned against the belief in God. Nietzsche will quote this passage at length in the last section of the Genealogy’s Third Essay (III §27), published the same year. Treat the two as overlapping inquiries: neither is a draft of the other. Compare also Reading 8’s §344, where the will to truth itself is found to rest on a faith, and the theme page’s note on §357 and the death of God.

Now connect it with the start of the route. At station 2, the speaker of §2 demanded “the ultimate and surest reasons for and against” a belief and called the lack of that demand contemptible. §357 gives that intellectual conscience a history: it is the heir of the Christian conscience. The conscience that the book’s first pages demanded is here traced to the faith it has overcome.

The section then lists the interpretations this conscience now rejects:

• nature as proof of a God’s goodness and care;
• history as the work of a divine reason;
• personal experiences as “a dispensation or intimation of Providence.”

All this “is now past.” Compare “Personal Providence” (§277) in the 1882 Book IV, where the thought of a providence arranging one’s life is still a live temptation, met with “beloved Chance.” §357, what conscience rejects

Look at the words of condemnation: such interpretations count as “mendaciousness, femininism, weakness, and cowardice.” Mark that list V. It uses a gendered word as a term of contempt beside “weakness” and “cowardice.” Samuel’s translation of the Genealogy, quoting the same passage, has “feminism.” Check how your own edition renders it; the contempt is plain in any rendering. By this severity, Nietzsche says, “we are good Europeans, the heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest self-conquest.”

A question and a premature answer

Rejecting the Christian interpretation raises the Schopenhauerian question: “Has existence then a significance at all?” Nietzsche says it will take “a couple of centuries even to be completely heard.” Schopenhauer raised it, but his own answer was “a premature, juvenile reply.” It stuck in the same “Christian-ascetic, moral perspectives” that had lost their credit with the belief in God. Separate the two achievements: asking the question and answering it. Nietzsche credits Schopenhauer with the first and denies him the second. §357, the question of significance

The pessimists, and an aside

Did the Germans at least prove their kinship with Schopenhauer by taking up his question? Nietzsche mocks three later pessimists. He suspects Eduard von Hartmann of being a rogue who was making fun of German pessimism, and of the Germans. He calls Julius Bahnsen “the old humming-top,” and recommends his writings as “anti-pessimistic fare.” Of Philipp Mainländer, “the mawkish apostle of virginity,” he writes: “After all he was probably a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralise).” §357, the aside on Mainländer

State what this sentence does. It guesses at one man’s descent, offers no evidence for the guess, and supports it with a stereotype about Jews as a group. It is an antisemitic generalization. Nothing in the sentence marks it as ironic or as someone else’s view. It is also an aside: the section’s argument about Schopenhauer and the European conscience does not depend on it. Both points should be kept. The book’s own demand for intellectual conscience applies here with full force.

Keep a further fact in view without letting it cancel this one. Later in Book V, §377 has its homeless free spirits refuse “to advocate nationalism and race-hatred.” It mocks the “falsified racial self-admiration” then on display in Germany. The same book contains both the refusal and the stereotype. Neither erases the other.

§357 ends with the jingoism of the day. Nietzsche cites the line “Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles” and calls this a view sub specie speciei, “namely, the German species.” The Latin parodies sub specie aeterni, the philosopher’s view under the aspect of eternity, which §262 used as a title (station 19). “No! The Germans of to-day are not pessimists! And Schopenhauer was a pessimist, I repeat it once more, as a good European, and not as a German.” §357, the conclusion

If you are reading in two sittings, stop here. Before you return, write one sentence stating what, according to §357, defeated belief in the Christian God.

A world of ruins

§358 surveys “an immense world of ruins”: the Church, whose religious organization is “shaken to its deepest foundations.” Christianity “was the last construction of the Romans!” The strange fact, Nietzsche says, is that the people who tried hardest to preserve it did most to destroy it: “the Germans.” The Church rests on “a southern freedom and liberality of spirit” and a southern suspicion of nature, man, and spirit. The north never understood it. §358, the ruins

Mark these claims before going further. That Christianity was Rome’s last construction is an H and a metaphor at once. The contrast of a subtle south and a simple north is a generalization about regions and peoples, of the same kind as §357’s “Latin peoples.” Nietzsche gives no evidence for it here.

Luther

The Lutheran Reformation, Nietzsche writes, was “the indignation of the simple against something ‘complicated,’” “a coarse, honest misunderstanding.” Its makers saw only corruption where a victorious Church allowed itself “the luxury of scepticism and toleration.” §358, an honest misunderstanding

Luther himself, “as a man sprung from the people,” lacked “all the hereditary qualities of a ruling caste.” Nietzsche means this as an explanation. The claim is that political judgment is inherited by birth and rank, and the passage states it without qualification. Mark it V and H, and do not soften it. It belongs to the section’s argument, not to its ornament.

Then come the consequences, each a causal claim:

• Luther gave the sacred books to everyone, and so to the philologists, “the annihilators of every belief based upon books.”
• He gave the priest a wife, and therefore had to take away auricular confession, and with it the priest as “a sacred ear, a silent well, and a grave for secrets.”
• Behind the formula “Every man his own priest” lay “the profoundest hatred of ‘higher men.’” The Reformation was a “peasant insurrection” of the spirit.

§358, the consequences

These are claims about Reformation history and practice, and about Luther’s motives. A historian of the Reformation would test each against the record. For example, what did Lutheran churches actually do about private confession? That question needs evidence this guide does not supply. The hidden hatred of “higher men” is a claim about motive, a P, and the section asserts it without showing it.

The verdict is mixed. “He is innocent of all; he knew not what he did”—an echo of the words from the cross in Luke’s Gospel. The Reformation made the European spirit shallower, or “more good-natured.” Yet it also produced “the mobility and disquietude of the spirit, its thirst for independence, its belief in the right to freedom.” If it is credited with preparing “modern science,” Nietzsche adds, it must also answer for “the plebeianism of the spirit” of the last two centuries. “Modern ideas” belong to the same northern revolt. The section ends by ranking the Church above the State: the Church “secures to the most spiritual men the highest rank.” §358, the Church and the State

Revenge on intellect

§359 asks where morality has its “most dangerous and rancorous advocates.” Nietzsche sketches a type:

• ill-constituted, with just enough culture to know he lacks the intellect to enjoy it;
• bored and self-despising;
• deprived even of the consolation of work.

Such a man needs something to feel superior to more intellectual people. What he needs is morality: “always the big moral words.” It gives him “the delight of perfect revenge,” at least in imagination. §359, the big moral words

The portrait widens. From such “born enemies of the spirit” arise the saints and sages that people honour, and “St Augustine was one of these men.” That is a claim about a named person’s motives; the section gives no evidence for it. “Fear of the intellect, vengeance on the intellect—Oh! how often have these powerfully impelling vices become the root of virtues!” Finally, Nietzsche turns the suspicion on philosophers. Their “pretension to wisdom,” “in India as well as in Greece,” has mostly been “a means of concealment.” The section ends on a question: “Wisdom a means of concealment of the philosopher from—intellect?” §359, wisdom as concealment

Keep this portrait distinct from other accounts it resembles. It describes an individual type and his revenge in imagination. It is not the collective slave revolt in morality of the Genealogy’s First Essay. Nor is it every objection to harm; the site’s master and slave morality theme protects that distinction. Book V and the Genealogy appeared in the same year. Compare them without making either one explain the other.

A difficulty

Which honesty?

§357 honours “unconditional, honest atheism” as the victory of the European conscience. §358 calls the Reformation “a coarse, honest misunderstanding” and describes Luther tearing things apart “with honest rage.” Yet by §358’s own account, the Reformation helped produce the philologists who dissolved faith in books, and the “thirst for independence.” It also allows, at least conditionally, that the Reformation prepared “modern science.” Those are close relatives of the scientific conscience that, in §357, made belief in God impossible.

So what separates the honesty Nietzsche honours from the honesty he disdains? The text suggests an answer. The Church’s “noble scepticism” is a luxury of a “victorious, self-confident power.” Luther’s candour is the indignation of “the simple,” of a man “sprung from the people.” If that is the distinction, it is a distinction of rank and refinement, not of truthfulness. Decide whether the text supports that reading. If it does, ask whether the conscience of §357, which will not tolerate a comforting lie, could accept a ranking of honesties by birth.

A second difficulty concerns method. §359 explains moral language by a motive of revenge. But earlier in Book V, §345 (station 26) insists that “a morality could even have grown out of an error: but with this knowledge the problem of its worth would not even be touched.” If that is right, then §359’s account of origin, even if true, does not settle the worth of the virtues it explains. §359 itself says vices “become the root of virtues.” It does not say the virtues are worthless. Keep origin and value apart. See the site’s note on §345 and genealogical method.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Nietzsche honours one kind of honesty and disdains another. Using §357 and §358, explain the difference he draws, and decide whether it is a difference in truthfulness or in rank.

• Quote no more than one phrase from each section.
• Include one claim from these sections that would need outside historical evidence, and say what kind of evidence.
• End with one question you would put to Nietzsche about his own standard of intellectual conscience.

A successful response distinguishes Nietzsche’s account of Christian truthfulness from his judgments of nations and classes. It states the troubling claims accurately, without softening or inflating them. It does not treat a claim about someone’s motive as evidence about the value of what he did.

Continue

Continue to station 30: Actors, Lovers, and Anchorites →

Read next: Book V, §§360–365. Its question: how does performance change a claim about love or character? §363’s generalizations about the sexes need the same testing you used here.

The route keeps this grouping for now. If the station proves too long in practice, the sitting break after §357 is the place to pause.

Previous station: station 28, §§354–356. Return to the route list in the book guide

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.

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