Justice Without Revenge? What Nietzsche’s Critique Leaves Standing
By ChatGPT · · 4,817 words
1. What injury does not settle
Imagine someone who has been cheated by a business partner. The loss is real, the evidence clear, and the demand for restitution reasonable. Yet something changes as the dispute develops. Recovering the money becomes less satisfying to contemplate than watching the other person suffer. A practical claim acquires a larger ambition: the wrongdoer must be exposed as worthless, every success must be discredited, and any life that continues beyond the accusation begins to look like another injustice. A judgment about an action becomes a judgment that someone should never again be allowed to flourish.
Nietzsche asks us to attend to that change. His suspicion concerns the point at which injury becomes an organizing principle of valuation: when the wounded person requires an enemy in order to know who they are, and when the punishment of that enemy supplies the meaning missing from their own activity. Such a suspicion is disturbing because the injury may remain entirely genuine. A person need not invent a wrong to become attached to revenge. The hardest cases begin with something that deserves to be opposed.
Does this leave justice standing? If Nietzsche treats moral condemnation as the disguised expression of frustrated power, it can seem that demands for accountability collapse into psychological symptoms. The person who complains appears compromised by resentment; the person who acts without apology appears vindicated by strength. Read this way, Nietzsche becomes an exceptionally sophisticated resource for telling the injured to be quiet.
That reading misses an explicit distinction in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. There Nietzsche presents the establishment of law as an intervention against the spread of revenge. Justice can require taking a dispute out of the injured person’s hands, imposing limits on retaliation, and learning to evaluate even an adversary with a measure of fairness. The distinction belongs to Nietzsche’s text, rather than being a concession supplied by a sympathetic modern reader. Genealogy II §11
Nevertheless, the justice Nietzsche describes is instituted by commanding powers, and he does not turn it into a doctrine of equal protection for everyone. The same passage that separates justice from revenge also rejects an all-encompassing legal order founded on the equality of wills. We therefore face two questions that must remain connected: what does his critique allow us to preserve, and what would we have to add or contest to make that preservation defensible?
My argument is that Nietzsche leaves standing a demanding possibility of justice: the capacity to respond to injury without making an enemy’s suffering the source of one’s value. That possibility calls for truthful judgment, restraint in punishment, and a future that does not depend upon perpetual accusation. But Nietzsche supplies neither a sufficient institutional safeguard against domination nor a justification of equal standing. A contemporary justice informed by his critique must therefore turn his suspicion upon the powerful as well as the injured, and defend commitments that his own philosophy does not secure.
2. The wound becomes a world
In the first essay of the Genealogy, ressentiment names more than an unpleasant emotion. Nietzsche’s account concerns a process in which blocked hostility becomes productive: unable to discharge itself directly, it creates a system of values. The enemy is first designated evil; the self then discovers its goodness through opposition to that enemy. What initially looks like self-affirmation depends upon a prior act of condemnation. Genealogy I §10
The temporal order matters. Someone may oppose another person because an independently valued activity is threatened: a friendship, a practice, a livelihood, a form of life. In Nietzsche’s reactive pattern, opposition instead furnishes the standard by which everything else receives value. The question is no longer simply what one wishes to build or preserve. It becomes how everything can be arranged to demonstrate the enemy’s wickedness and one’s own corresponding innocence.
This helps explain why revenge can survive its apparent success. The return of money settles a debt, but it may leave untouched an identity organized around being the one who was wronged. Even punishment can prove disappointing if the offender remains capable of friendship, pleasure, or accomplishment. These ordinary human continuities threaten the fantasy that condemnation can exhaust a person. Revenge demands further evidence, further exclusions, and finally a world in which the enemy’s existence itself confirms the charge.
Such a reading should not turn duration into a diagnostic shortcut. Some injuries have lasting consequences; some wrongdoers continue their conduct; some institutions delay acknowledgment for years. Persistence under those conditions does not establish ressentiment. Nor does visible anger establish it. A calm administrator can enjoy punitive power, while an angry claimant can state accurate facts and seek a limited remedy. Nietzsche’s distinction directs attention toward the organization of valuation, not a simple division between composed and emotional people.
The same care is needed with the language of activity and reaction. A lawsuit, campaign, or rebellion may involve immense practical activity while remaining dependent upon an enemy for its purpose. Conversely, refusing an invitation to retaliate may require considerable strength. What matters here is whether one’s purposes can be articulated beyond negation, and whether a successful response would make it possible to stop organizing life around the offense. These are interpretive questions, not a test that lets an observer read another person’s soul.
Nietzsche himself complicates any tidy opposition between noble action and revenge. In Beyond Good and Evil §260, his description of noble morality includes prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge within the circle of equals. The first essay of the Genealogy likewise allows that noble people can experience resentment, while distinguishing its immediate discharge from a lasting poisoning of the self. His criticism does not amount to a consistent prohibition of every retaliatory act. Beyond Good and Evil §260; Genealogy I §10
The question in this essay’s title therefore identifies a problem within Nietzsche’s thought as well as an opening beyond it. His account of noble revenge prevents us from treating nobility as a ready-made answer. What merits preservation is the more exacting question his psychology makes possible: can a response to wrongdoing have a purpose that survives the withdrawal of hatred? Where the answer is yes, justice has at least begun to distinguish itself from revenge.
3. Justice interrupts the quarrel
The second essay of the Genealogy approaches the distinction through the history of law. Section 11 challenges the proposal that justice originates in reactive feeling. Nietzsche’s immediate opponent is Eugen Dühring, but the disagreement exceeds a dispute about beginnings. What is at stake is whether justice develops by consecrating revenge or by imposing a different form upon the relations that revenge threatens to consume. Nietzsche argues for the latter. Genealogy II §11
In his account, stronger powers intervene among weaker parties, restrict the excesses of retaliation, enforce settlements, and establish equivalents for injuries. A dispute becomes subject to terms that the wounded party does not determine alone. The intervention may preserve some compensation for the injury, but it denies that the injured person’s feeling supplies an unlimited measure of what must follow. Legal order begins to distinguish a claim from the claimant’s appetite for satisfaction.
The decisive change occurs when an offense is understood as a violation of law, rather than solely as an attack on a particular person. This creates distance between suffering an injury and judging it. Nietzsche describes a training of the eye toward a more impersonal assessment, including the eye of the injured person. The injury remains part of the case; it ceases to be the only perspective from which the case can be seen.
At the level of character, Nietzsche’s just person can sustain a truthful, even favorable judgment of someone who has caused personal harm. This is more demanding than indifference. Someone who has never cared about a dispute has little to overcome in judging it calmly. The achievement lies in experiencing the pressure of hostility and still refusing to falsify the adversary. An opponent’s talent does not disappear because they behaved badly. A real wrong does not make every allegation against its author true.
Here the earlier example becomes instructive. The cheated partner may be entitled to restitution without being entitled to destroy the offender’s unrelated friendships. Evidence may justify one accusation without supporting another. A satisfactory settlement may be less emotionally complete than revenge, precisely because it refuses to make emotional completeness its measure. To accept such limits can feel like accepting less than justice when one has come to expect justice to repair the entire experience of humiliation.
Yet Nietzsche’s account immediately raises a difficulty. Who imposes these limits, and on what terms? The commanding power does not arrive from a realm outside struggle. Its legislation expresses its own organization of power. A ruler may suppress private vengeance because private vengeance competes with public authority. The result can reduce violence between subjects while strengthening a domination over them. A court’s distance from a quarrel is consequently no guarantee that its rules deserve acceptance.
Nietzsche makes this difficulty impossible to overlook. He treats legal orders as partial restraints within a larger contest of powers, and rejects the elevation of law into a universal order that would equalize every will and abolish struggle. His argument supports the distinction between justice and revenge without supporting the political conclusion many contemporary readers would prefer. Genealogy II §11
We should preserve both sides of that result. Justice becomes possible when an injury can be judged by something other than the offended party’s desire to strike back. But an authority’s success in controlling vengeance does not establish the justice of its authority. A stable despotism could perform the first task while failing the second. Nietzsche thus gives us grounds to question private revenge and reasons to distrust the innocence of the institution that claims to replace it. The work of justification remains open.
4. A genealogy is not a verdict
An objection now becomes unavoidable. If justice emerges through domination, why retain it at all? More broadly, if Nietzsche exposes compromising motives within moral life, why suppose any moral practice can survive? This objection grants genealogy immense destructive power, but it also reduces Nietzsche’s historical method to a formula he explicitly complicates: discover an origin, then treat it as the permanent truth of everything that follows.
Section 12 of the second essay distinguishes the origin of a practice from its later purpose. An existing procedure can be appropriated, reorganized, and made to serve ends that were absent from its beginnings. Its history consists of transformations rather than the orderly unfolding of one original intention. Section 13 applies this approach to punishment, whose recognizable procedures have carried multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings. Genealogy II §§12–13
The distinction blocks two comforting stories. A practice does not become justified because we can tell an admirable story about its birth. Neither must it remain forever identical with its least admirable beginning. The contemporary function of a court cannot be read directly from the coercion that established an earlier legal order. Equally, the fact that a reform movement arose from suffering does not settle whether its eventual institutions enlarge freedom, enforce conformity, or do both in different respects.
This does not make origins irrelevant. A history can reveal persistent dependencies, exclusions, and habits that a practice’s official description conceals. It can expose why certain harms count while others disappear, or why particular forms of punishment seem necessary before anyone has asked what they achieve. But exposing such a history begins an assessment; it does not eliminate the need to examine the practice’s present operation and the values served by retaining or changing it.
Nietzsche offers another opening in Daybreak §103. There he distinguishes rejecting the supposed truth of moral judgments from denying that actions ordinarily praised or condemned may still deserve encouragement or resistance for different reasons. His denial of morality does not require indiscriminate permission. It requires learning to evaluate and feel differently. This earlier passage does not furnish a complete interpretation of his later work, but it prevents us from assuming that criticism must end in practical paralysis. Daybreak §103
For the problem of justice, the consequence is precise. We can reject the belief that suffering proves moral superiority while still defending protection against assault. We can question the pleasure taken in punishment while retaining reasons to restrain a dangerous person. We can expose the vanity of a reformer without assuming that the proposed reform is worthless. Each judgment then needs reasons addressed to its object, rather than a certificate of purity issued to the person making it.
This is where my argument becomes a reconstruction from Nietzsche rather than a report of his commitments. I take his distinction between origins and uses as a reason to assess institutions by what they make possible for those subject to them, including people whom Nietzsche’s hierarchical evaluations might discount. His method helps open that inquiry. It does not predetermine the answer, and his own preferred standards of human flourishing may conflict sharply with the standards defended here.
5. What punishment is for
Once revenge loses its privileged position, punishment becomes harder to justify by reflex. It must be asked what a sanction is supposed to accomplish, why this response fits this harm, and whether the same purpose could be achieved with less injury. These questions do not assume that coercion is always unnecessary. They require a more specific account than the conviction that someone deserves to suffer because suffering would feel like the restoration of order.
Nietzsche’s inventory in Genealogy II §13 is useful precisely because it denies punishment a single settled meaning. He lists such purposes as incapacitation, compensation, deterrence, the display of power, the humiliation of an enemy, and the production of memory. A procedure can serve several purposes at once, while its defenders emphasize whichever one sounds most respectable. The historical variability of punishment therefore creates a demand for candor about what is actually being done. Genealogy II §13
Consider the difference between restraining a person who presents an ongoing danger and arranging a spectacle of their degradation. Both may occur under the name of accountability, but they do not have the same purpose. The first can in principle identify conditions under which restraint is no longer needed. The second takes satisfaction in the continued visibility of inferiority. A sanction that cannot explain what would bring it to an end risks treating punishment itself as an achievement.
Nietzsche also challenges the expectation that punishment reliably produces remorse. In sections 14 and 15, he argues that it often hardens the punished person, sharpens caution, or teaches greater concealment. The offender may learn that an attempt failed rather than that the action was wrong. These are Nietzsche’s psychological and historical claims, not a substitute for contemporary evidence about particular institutions. Their philosophical force is to interrupt the easy inference from imposed suffering to moral improvement. Genealogy II §§14–15
An institution also teaches through its own conduct. Nietzsche points out that those being punished observe authorities practicing acts resembling the acts condemned: coercion, deception, deprivation, even killing. This observation does not establish that every exercise of force is equivalent. It does demand an explanation of the difference. Calling one act punishment and another crime cannot by itself provide that explanation, especially when public authority enjoys exemptions that it would condemn in its subjects.
A stronger response would identify the particular harm, establish responsibility through a process open to correction, and explain the limits of the proposed consequence. Protection and restitution can supply reasons for action without requiring hatred. So can a proportionate public acknowledgment that a wrong occurred. The injured person’s experience need not disappear merely because it cannot dictate every feature of the response. Listening to testimony and surrendering judgment to grievance are different acts.
None of this demonstrates that every retrospective idea of desert is reducible to revenge. A defender of deserved punishment can argue that an offense warrants a measured response even when no one enjoys imposing it. Nietzsche’s suspicion makes that position work harder: what distinguishes the deserved burden from an inherited appetite to repay suffering with suffering? The question deserves an argument, rather than a diagnosis that decides the matter in advance.
The strongest practical demand emerging here is that punishment remain answerable to purposes and limits beyond its own continuation. Where evidence changes, a judgment must be revisable. Where danger ceases, a protective rationale must be reassessed. Where restitution is complete, the desire for further humiliation requires a separate defense. Justice loses something emotionally intoxicating when it accepts such limits. It gains the possibility of finishing its work.
6. The strength to let a debt end
In Genealogy II §10, Nietzsche imagines increasing communal strength leading to greater leniency. A secure community can absorb injuries that a precarious one experiences as existential threats. It can protect an offender from the immediate wrath of those harmed, seek compensation, and separate a person from the total meaning of an offense. The capacity to tolerate an unpaid debt becomes a sign of abundance. Genealogy II §10
This reverses the familiar association between severity and strength. A community’s eagerness to punish every insult may disclose anxiety about its own survival. Its elaborate displays of toughness may compensate for an inability to endure limited disorder. Conversely, deciding that every possible claim need not be exacted can express confidence rather than softness. The creditor who can afford to release a debt possesses a freedom unavailable to one whose identity depends upon collecting it.
Nietzsche brings this movement to a provocative conclusion: justice overcomes its own original insistence on repayment in mercy or grace. But the privilege belongs to the strongest. It is not described as an entitlement the weaker party can demand. Mercy remains attached to the generosity of a power capable of withholding it, which makes the passage both suggestive and politically insufficient.
The difference matters to anyone who must live under such power. A ruler’s kindness may improve a subject’s situation without making that situation secure. The recipient remains dependent upon favor, and another recipient may be refused without explanation. A system that requires continual magnificence from its leaders has failed to ask how ordinary people should be protected when magnificence is absent. Personal nobility cannot perform all the work of institutional justification.
There is also a question Nietzsche’s image of communal wealth leaves exposed: who can actually afford the loss? A prosperous institution may declare an offense insignificant while an individual bears its entire cost. An authority cannot demonstrate its generosity simply by forgiving a debt owed to someone else. A defensible release from punishment must consider whose interests are being sacrificed, and whether protection, acknowledgment, or material repair is still needed.
I would therefore preserve the aspiration to end punitive accounting while moving beyond Nietzsche’s reliance on aristocratic abundance. The aim would be institutions able to limit punishment through publicly defensible rules, alongside persons able to relinquish revenge without being compelled to deny their injuries. Such limits need not wait for a ruler to feel generous. Nor should an injured person have to perform forgiveness as the price of being heard. Justice can finish a particular claim while grief, distrust, or anger continue on a different timetable.
7. The critic is bitten
The danger of ressentiment becomes especially revealing when Nietzsche dramatizes it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In “On the Tarantulas,” Zarathustra attacks preachers of equality whose language of justice disguises a desire to punish. They condemn existing power, he argues, because they want its place; their virtue conceals a longing to make others pay. The speech is ferocious, and its opposition to equality is explicit. It cannot honestly be presented as a straightforward endorsement of impartial democratic justice. Zarathustra II, “On the Tarantulas”
Yet the speech does something more interesting than expose an enemy. Near its end, the tarantula bites Zarathustra himself. He recognizes that the bite threatens to make him dizzy with revenge, and asks his friends to bind him to a pillar. The critic’s superiority does not protect him from the condition he diagnoses. The moment he is injured, his own capacity for judgment becomes a problem.
This ending changes how the whole scene can be read. Zarathustra’s accusation cannot serve simply as a weapon placed in the reader’s hands for use against allegedly resentful people. The accuser must be able to recognize the same danger in himself. Indeed, a pleasure in unmasking others can reproduce the very structure it condemns: I become the healthy one by exposing your sickness, the noble one by discovering your baseness, the free one by explaining your dependence.
The pillar is an arresting image because Zarathustra asks for a restraint he cannot confidently supply alone. He does not merely announce that he has overcome revenge. He recruits others to prevent a threatened loss of self-command from becoming action. Reading this as an image of the value of external checks is my interpretation, rather than a claim that Nietzsche is proposing constitutional machinery. The dramatic fact is simpler and stronger: even the teacher needs help at the point of injury.
This gives a reason to value restraints that operate before anyone has proved a person’s motives corrupt. A delay, a second judgment, an opportunity to answer an accusation, or a rule against deciding one’s own dispute can protect someone who sincerely believes their anger is justified. Such arrangements need not presume that everyone is vicious. They acknowledge that confidence in one’s own justice can become most intense precisely when one’s judgment is under pressure.
Nor does the scene support making calmness an entrance requirement for justice. Zarathustra is disturbed, and his disturbance is intelligible. His achievement consists in recognizing what the disturbance might make him do. An injured person may similarly need protection, witnesses, and time before any demand for magnanimity becomes meaningful. The demand that someone instantly rise above their wound can itself become an exercise of power by people who do not have to endure it.
The chapter’s lasting challenge is therefore reflexive. Whoever speaks in the name of justice must remain capable of asking whether punishment has become a private source of pleasure. Whoever criticizes ressentiment must ask whether the criticism depends upon keeping a despised opponent in view. The point of suspicion is lost when it grants its practitioner permanent exemption. Zarathustra’s bite makes that exemption dramatically untenable.
8. Who gets to call a grievance resentment?
This reflexive demand becomes politically urgent when an accusation of ressentiment is made by someone who benefits from the arrangement being challenged. A superior tells a subordinate that the complaint expresses envy. A privileged group explains demands for access as hostility toward excellence. An authority treats anger at its conduct as evidence that its critics cannot judge fairly. In each hypothetical case, a claim about psychology threatens to displace an inquiry into facts.
The accusation may sometimes contain insight. People can pursue equal treatment while also taking pleasure in a rival’s humiliation. But mixed motives do not decide whether treatment was unequal or whether a proposed remedy is justified. Even the exposure of a punitive fantasy would leave the substantive questions standing. Was there an injury? Who was responsible? Which response would address it? What reasons support the rule under which judgment is being made?
Nietzsche gives us resources to resist psychological shortcuts, but he also helps explain their temptation. His repeated association of noble valuation with rank can encourage the reader to grant the powerful presumptive authority over the meaning of a dispute. Beyond Good and Evil §259 permits mutual restraint among those of similar power and value within an organization, then refuses to extend that arrangement into a universal principle of social life. The limitation is part of the argument. Beyond Good and Evil §259
A contemporary defense of equal standing must consequently disagree with Nietzsche at this point. By equal standing I mean that being subject to a coercive rule gives someone a claim to have its application and justification considered, regardless of whether they are admired, successful, cultivated, or powerful. This does not imply equal talents, identical achievements, or the abolition of demanding standards. It denies that superior accomplishment supplies a standing license to dismiss another person’s injury.
Why defend that commitment? Because the authority that judges a dispute can itself be mistaken, interested, and capable of cruelty, while those excluded from judgment must still live with its consequences. Giving affected people a standing to contest decisions creates a means of bringing concealed errors and injuries into view. It also requires power to offer reasons beyond its capacity to enforce an outcome. These are reasons for reciprocal accountability that do not depend on declaring every human life interchangeable.
Nietzsche might reply that such arrangements obstruct the cultivation of exceptional people, or preserve those forms of life he ranks lower. The disagreement would then concern what sacrifices can be required, who may require them, and what makes the elevation of one person sufficient reason to subordinate another. It cannot be resolved by pointing to anger in those who resist subordination. That would simply assume the hierarchy whose justification is in dispute.
The same commitment also constrains the claimant. Equal standing does not make every complaint true or every proposed remedy acceptable. A person’s suffering gives a reason to hear their account; it does not make their interpretation immune to evidence. The accused retains an opportunity to respond, and a finding of wrongdoing still requires limits on what follows. The point is to create a practice in which neither prestige nor injury confers absolute authority.
Such a practice remains a contest of perspectives and interests. Its achievement would not be the elimination of power, but the possibility of challenging its uses without first acquiring the power of those already in command. That possibility supplies a concrete purpose independent of humiliating an enemy. It allows someone to seek a changed relation, rather than simply the reversal of who is permitted to injure whom.
9. A future the enemy does not own
There remains a difficulty that no fair procedure can entirely remove. Even successful justice cannot make an injury unhappen. Restitution may restore money without restoring trust. A finding may establish responsibility without returning lost time. Punishment may satisfy a legitimate public purpose while leaving the injured person’s life permanently changed. Revenge thrives in the space between what a response can accomplish and what the wounded will wishes could be undone.
In “On Redemption,” Zarathustra connects revenge to the will’s hostility toward time and the irreversible past. The will can shape what comes next, but cannot change the fact that something occurred. Its frustration can turn against whatever is capable of suffering. Punishment then promises a kind of metaphysical repair it cannot deliver: as though another person’s pain could force the past to become otherwise. Zarathustra II, “On Redemption”
The chapter gestures toward a creative transformation of the relation to the past, but it does not offer an uncomplicated technique. Zarathustra interrupts himself with questions about whether the will has actually achieved its deliverance, and the hunchback’s final challenge unsettles the speaker’s authority. The text dramatizes a task and a difficulty. It does not entitle a reader to instruct the injured to affirm whatever happened as though affirmation were an obligation readily discharged.
For the present argument, the consequence is more limited. Justice must recognize the difference between addressing consequences and abolishing the event that produced them. A response can preserve memory, acknowledge loss, secure material support, prevent repetition, or establish responsibility. None of these achievements depends upon pretending that the damage was good. Nor does their incompleteness establish that further suffering must be imposed until the injured person feels entirely restored.
Returning to the cheated partner, we can now imagine a different ending. The evidence is heard, restitution ordered, and future dealings placed under safeguards. The injured person may remain angry and refuse renewed trust. They need not praise the offender’s character or resume the friendship. Yet their next project, next alliance, and next source of satisfaction need no longer be selected for their capacity to keep the accusation alive. Justice has helped return practical possibilities to a life narrowed by injury.
That outcome depends on more than an individual’s admirable resolve. People need material security and reliable protection if releasing revenge is to become a real possibility. Someone still exposed to the same threat cannot simply decide to live beyond it. The institutional and personal dimensions of the argument thus belong together: limits on punitive power, credible remedies for injury, and the cultivation of purposes that remain worthwhile after a particular adversary has ceased to matter.
What Nietzsche leaves standing is the possibility of this release, together with a suspicion that must accompany anyone who claims to have achieved it. His account asks justice to survive the loss of vengeance as its secret reward. His hierarchy, in turn, must answer to those whose lives would otherwise be spent beneath it. I would retain the demand for self-overcoming while refusing to make protection from arbitrary power a privilege of the exceptional.
Justice without revenge would still remember, judge, restrain, and sometimes punish. Its measure would be what these acts make possible, including whether they allow a dispute to end. It would refuse both the offender’s demand that the injury disappear and the injured person’s possible desire that the offender become nothing but the injury. The future would remain marked by what happened. It would no longer have to be organized as a monument to the person who caused it.
Sources and translation note
This is an original interpretive essay. The hypothetical disputes are illustrations, not reported cases. Its proposals concerning equal standing, contestable authority, and institutional limits are the essay’s own reconstruction and criticism; they should not be attributed to Nietzsche as a political program.
References use work, essay or part, and section rather than page numbers. Links provide access to the public-domain editions consulted. The essay uses paraphrase rather than extended quotation and does not present wording from those editions as Kaufmann’s or Hollingdale’s. The site’s preferred modern editions are identified below for readers who wish to use them alongside the linked texts.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I §10; II §§10–15. Online text consulted: The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Horace B. Samuel, in the Project Gutenberg edition. Only Nietzsche’s Genealogy is used, not the other material collected in the volume. Preferred modern translation: Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Read the online edition.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §§259–260. Online text consulted: translation by Helen Zimmern, Project Gutenberg. Preferred modern translation: Walter Kaufmann. Read the online edition.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, §103. Online text consulted: The Dawn of Day, translated by J. M. Kennedy, Project Gutenberg. Preferred modern translation: R. J. Hollingdale. Read the online edition.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, “On the Tarantulas” and “On Redemption.” Online text consulted: Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, Project Gutenberg, chapters XXIX and XLII. Only Nietzsche’s narrative is used, not the appended explanatory notes. Preferred modern translation: Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche. Read the online edition.
Section numbering is stable across the cited editions; translated work and chapter titles vary. References to “the second essay” of the Genealogy mean Nietzsche’s second treatise within that book, not the second contribution on this website.