Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Master and Slave Morality · Submission

Master Morality, Slave Morality, and Ressentiment

A reading compilation. Passages from across Nietzsche’s corpus, in fresh translation, with brief framing notes.

Translator’s Note

The translations that follow are my own, made from the standard German texts (Colli–Montinari readings where they bear on a passage). They are not authoritative and they should not be cited as scholarly translations. They aim, in the Kaufmann register, at lucid English that preserves Nietzsche’s rhythm, his em-dashes, his italicizing pressure, and the conceptual texture of words he uses with technical care — vornehm, schlecht, böse, Pathos der Distanz. For citation, consult the Kaufmann or Hollingdale editions.

Where Nietzsche italicizes for emphasis, I have preserved the italics. Where he uses the French Ressentiment, I have kept the French — he himself does, deliberately, because no German word carried the same grain of meaning. I have rendered Herren-Moral and Sklaven-Moral as “master morality” and “slave morality” throughout, vornehm as “noble,” gemein as “common,” schlecht (in its old aristocratic sense) as “bad,” and böse as “evil.” The distinction between schlecht and böse is decisive for everything that follows.

The passages have been chosen and sequenced to make a path. Each section opens with a short framing note in italics that says why the passage is here and what to watch for. The framing notes are mine; the passages are Nietzsche’s.

Part I: The Conceptual Map

Beyond Good and Evil §260

Start here. This is the cleanest mature statement of the master–slave distinction. Read it as a typology, not a history; the historical-psychological account comes in the Genealogy. Watch especially for the difference between “good and bad” (master valuation) and “good and evil” (slave valuation). Those are not the same opposition.

In a wandering through the many subtler and coarser moralities that have so far prevailed on earth — or that still prevail — I found certain features regularly recurring together and bound to one another: until at last two basic types revealed themselves to me, and a fundamental distinction sprang into view. There is master morality and slave morality; — I add at once that in all higher and more mixed cultures attempts at mediation between these moralities also appear, and still more often a confusion of the two and a mutual misunderstanding, indeed sometimes a hard juxtaposition — even within the same person, within a single soul. The moral distinctions of value have arisen either among a ruling kind, conscious with pleasure of its difference from the ruled — or among the ruled themselves, the slaves and dependents of every degree.

In the first case, when it is the ruling group that determines the concept “good,” it is the elevated, proud states of the soul that are felt to be that which distinguishes and determines the order of rank. The noble human being separates from himself those natures in which the opposite of such elevated, proud states finds its expression: he despises them. Note immediately that in this first kind of morality the antithesis “good” and “bad” means about the same as “noble” and “contemptible”: — the antithesis “good” and “evil” has another origin. The cowardly are despised, the timid, the petty, those who think narrowly of utility; likewise the suspicious with their unfree glance, the self-abasing, the dog-like sort who let themselves be mistreated, the begging flatterers, above all the liars: — it is a basic conviction of all aristocrats that the common folk is mendacious. “We truthful ones” — that is what the nobility of ancient Greece called itself.

It is obvious that everywhere the moral designations were at first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions: which is why it is a serious mistake when historians of morality begin from such questions as “why was the action that pities praised?” The noble type of man feels himself as the one who determines values; he does not need to be approved; he judges “what is harmful to me is harmful in itself”; he knows himself to be the one that first accords honor to things; he is value-creating. Everything he knows of himself he honors: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of fullness, of overflowing power, of a happiness from high tension, the consciousness of a wealth that would like to give and bestow: — the noble human being too helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, out of pity, rather from an impulsion engendered by superabundance of power. The noble human being honors in himself the powerful one, also the one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who takes pleasure in being severe and hard with himself and reverences whatever is severe and hard.

It is otherwise with the second type of morality, slave morality. Suppose that the violated, the oppressed, the suffering, the unfree, those who are uncertain of themselves and the weary, moralize: what will the moral judgments of these have in common? Probably a pessimistic suspicion regarding the entire condition of humanity will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of humanity together with its condition. The slave looks with disfavor upon the virtues of the powerful; he has skepticism and mistrust, he has refinement of mistrust toward everything that is honored as “good” among them — he would like to convince himself that even their happiness is not genuine. Conversely, those qualities are extracted and flooded with light which serve to ease existence for those who suffer: here pity, the obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, friendliness come to honor — for these are here the most useful qualities and almost the only means of bearing the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility. Here is the seat of the origin of that famous opposition “good” and “evil”: — into evil, power and dangerousness are felt to belong, a certain dreadfulness, finesse and strength which does not allow contempt to arise. According to slave morality, then, the “evil” man arouses fear; according to master morality, it is precisely the “good” man who arouses fear and wants to arouse it, while the “bad” one is felt to be contemptible.

A last fundamental distinction: the longing for freedom, the instinct for the happiness and refinements of the feeling of freedom, belongs as necessarily to slave morality and morals as artful and enthusiastic reverence and devotion are the regular symptom of an aristocratic way of thinking and valuing. — From this it can be understood without further ado why love as passion — which is our European specialty — must absolutely be of noble descent: as is well known, its invention belongs to the Provençal poet-knights, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the gai saber to whom Europe owes so much, and almost itself.

Part II: The Genealogy of Good and Evil

The First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals is the heart of this whole topic. Read it twice if you can: once for the historical-philological argument (§§2–7), once for the psychology (§§10–16). Below are the passages that carry the most weight. §10 is the central one in the entire corpus for understanding ressentiment; if you only have time for one passage in this whole compilation, read that one.

Genealogy I §2 — Against the English Psychologists

Nietzsche begins the First Essay by attacking the dominant English account of moral origins (he has Spencer and the utilitarians in mind). Watch for the move at the end: morality does not begin with concern for others. It begins with the noble’s self-affirmation.

These English psychologists, whom we have to thank for the only attempts that have so far been made to produce a history of the origin of morality — they themselves are no small puzzle to us; indeed, in the form of a riddle in flesh, they offer us, I admit, something that their books do not — they themselves are interesting!

“Originally” — so they decree — “one approved of unegoistic actions and called them good from the standpoint of those for whom they were done, that is to say, of those to whom they were useful; later one forgot the origin of this approval and, because unegoistic actions had always been called good as a matter of habit, one also felt them to be good — as if they were something good in themselves.” One sees at once: this first deduction contains all the typical features of the English psychologists’ idiosyncrasy — we have here “utility,” “forgetting,” “habit,” and at the end “error,” the whole as the foundation of a value-feeling on which the higher man has prided himself as on a kind of privilege of man as such. This pride must be brought low, this value-feeling must be devalued: has that been achieved?

Now, in the first place, it is obvious to me that this theory looks for the source of the concept “good” in the wrong place: the judgment “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who felt and posited themselves and their actions as good, that is, as of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values, to coin names for values: what had they to do with utility! The viewpoint of utility is as remote and inappropriate as it possibly could be in face of such a hot eruption of the highest rank-determining, rank-distinguishing value-judgments: here feeling has reached the antithesis of that low degree of warmth which any calculating prudence, any reckoning of utility, presupposes — and not for one occasion only, not for one exceptional hour, but for the long run.

Genealogy I §4–5 — The Philological Ground; Priestly Impotence

These two sections show what makes Nietzsche’s account a genealogy and not a typology. He grounds the master–slave distinction in the etymology of moral terms across languages, then, in §5, prepares the entrance of the priestly type — the figure who will turn impotence into spiritual depth.

§4

The clue to the right path was given to me by the question, what the terms for “good” coined in the various languages actually mean from an etymological standpoint: there I found that they all lead back to the same conceptual transformation — that everywhere “noble,” “aristocratic” in the social sense is the basic concept from which “good” in the sense of “spiritually noble,” “spiritually high-minded,” “spiritually privileged” necessarily develops; a development which always runs parallel with that other in which “common,” “plebeian,” “low” is finally transformed into the concept “bad.” The most eloquent example of the latter is the German word schlecht itself: which is identical with schlicht — compare schlechtweg, schlechterdings — and originally designated the simple, the common man, still without any suspicious side-glance, simply in opposition to the noble. Around the time of the Thirty Years’ War, late enough then, this meaning shifts into the present usage. — To me this seems an essential insight in matters of moral genealogy; that it has been discovered only so late we owe to the inhibiting influence which democratic prejudice in the modern world exercises on all questions of origin.

§5 (closing portion)

Where the noble manner of valuation goes wrong and sins against reality, this happens in spheres which are not sufficiently familiar to it — indeed, against whose actual knowledge it stiffly defends itself: under certain circumstances it misjudges the sphere it despises, that of the common man, the lower folk; on the other hand one should consider that, even granted that the affect of contempt, of looking-down, of looking-superior, falsifies the image of the despised, this falsification will at any rate fall far behind the falsification with which the suppressed hatred, the revenge of the impotent, will violate — in effigy, of course — its opponent. Indeed there is too much carelessness in contempt, too much off-handedness, too much looking-away and impatience mixed in, even too much of one’s own joy, for it to be capable of transforming its object into a real caricature and monster.

Genealogy I §7 — The Priestly Type

This is the bridge passage. The knightly-aristocratic type values strength, vitality, war, the body. The priestly type, blocked from physical mastery, develops a different kind of power: the power of interpretation. Out of priestly impotence comes the most spiritually creative hatred in human history.

One will have already guessed how easily the priestly manner of valuation can branch off from the knightly-aristocratic and then develop into its opposite; this is given a particular impulse whenever the priestly caste and the warrior caste confront each other in jealousy and cannot agree on a price. The knightly-aristocratic value-judgments presuppose a powerful physicality, a flowering, rich, even overflowing health, together with what is needed to maintain it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, jousting, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful action. The priestly-noble manner of valuation — as we have seen — has other presuppositions: bad enough for it when it comes to war! Priests are, as is well known, the most evil enemies — but why? Because they are the most impotent. Out of this impotence, in them hatred grows into something monstrous and uncanny, into something most spiritual and most poisonous. The really great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: — other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly revenge. Human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have brought into it.

Genealogy I §10 — The Slave Revolt and Creative Ressentiment

The single most important passage. The slave revolt in morality is not a political event; it is a creative act of the spirit. Out of impotence — the inability to discharge hostility outwardly in action — comes a new way of valuing. The man of ressentiment is creative, but his creation is fundamentally reactive: he begins from a No to the other, and only afterward arrives at his own Yes. Compare this carefully with the noble pattern, which begins with the Yes and only secondarily arrives at a pale, indifferent No.

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings to whom the genuine reaction, that of the deed, is denied, and who compensate themselves through an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality grows out of a triumphant Yes-saying to oneself, slave morality from the outset says No to an “outside,” to an “other,” to a “not-itself”: and this No is its creative deed. This reversal of the value-positing glance — this necessary direction outward instead of back to itself — belongs to the very nature of ressentiment: in order to come into being, slave morality always needs first an opposing, outer world; physiologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all — its action is fundamentally reaction.

The reverse is the case with the noble manner of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks out its opposite only in order to say Yes to itself with greater gratitude, with greater joy — its negative concept, “low,” “common,” “bad,” is only an after-born, pale contrasting image in relation to its positive, thoroughly life-affirming basic concept, saturated with life and passion: “we noble, we good, we beautiful, we happy ones!” When the noble manner of valuation lays a hand on reality and sins against it, this happens in respect to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently acquainted — indeed, against the true knowledge of which it stubbornly defends itself: under certain circumstances it misunderstands the sphere it despises, the sphere of the common man, of the lower folk; on the other hand, even given the falsification through which the affect of contempt, of looking-down, of looking-superior, falsifies the image of the one despised, this falsification will fall far behind the falsification with which the suppressed hatred, the revenge of the impotent, attacks its opponent — in effigy, of course.

In contempt there is too much negligence, too much taking-lightly, too much looking-away and impatience, even too much joy in oneself for it to be capable of transforming its object into a real caricature and monster. Pay attention to the almost benevolent nuances which the Greek nobility, for example, places in all the words by which it sets itself off from the lower folk; how a kind of pity, consideration, indulgence is constantly mixed in with them and sweetens them, until almost all words referring to the common man have at last become expressions for “unhappy,” “pitiable.” — And on the other hand, how “bad,” “lowly,” “unhappy” have never ceased to sound to the Greek ear in one note, in one tone-color, with a strong predominance of the “unhappy”: this as inheritance of the old, more noble aristocratic manner of valuation, which does not deny itself even in its contempt.

To be unable to take one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long — that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of plastic, formative, healing power that also makes one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and meannesses done to him and who could not forgive simply because he — forgot). Such a man shakes off with one shrug many vermin which would have crawled into another; here alone is genuine “love of one’s enemies” possible, presupposing that it is possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies! — and such reverence is already a bridge to love. Indeed he demands his enemy for himself, as his distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor!

In contrast to this, picture “the enemy” as the man of ressentiment conceives him — and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” and this as the basic concept from which he then evolves, as an after-image and counterpart, a “good one” — himself!

Genealogy I §11 — The Blond Beast

This is the passage that has done the most damage in the reception, and that is exactly why it must be read. Nietzsche is describing, without sentimentality, the unrestrained discharge of strong instincts in pre-civilized aristocratic peoples — Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese, Homeric, Viking. He is not idealizing this; he is observing it. The closing question — who is to be feared today? — turns the passage on its head. The man of ressentiment, with his cunning and his capacity-not-to-act, is the one Nietzsche actually fears most.

But let us return: the problem of the other origin of “good,” of the good as conceived by the man of ressentiment, demands its solution. — That lambs feel a grudge against great birds of prey is not strange: only it is no ground for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves: “These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, whoever is rather their opposite, a lamb — should he not be good?” — there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this set-up of an ideal, except that the birds of prey will look down at it a little mockingly and perhaps say to themselves: “we don’t feel any grudge against them at all, these good lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”

He who knows these “good ones” only as enemies, knows them only as evil enemies, and the same men who are so strictly held in check by custom, reverence, usage, gratitude, even more by mutual surveillance, by jealousy inter pares, and who, on the other hand, in their conduct toward one another show themselves so resourceful in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship — they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey toward the outside world, where the strange, the foreign, begins. There they enjoy freedom from all social constraint; in the wilderness they recover from the tension which is given them by long imprisonment in the peace of the community; they go back to the innocence of the conscience of the beast of prey, as exultant monsters — perhaps coming from a horrid succession of murder, arson, rape, torture with such high spirits and equanimity of soul as if it were no more than a student-prank, convinced that the poets will have something to sing of and to celebrate again for a long time. At the bottom of all these noble races, it is impossible not to recognize the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast roaming about avidly for spoil and victory; this hidden core needs an outlet from time to time, the beast must come out again, must return to the wilderness — Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings: in this need they are all alike.

I do not know that anyone could spare them this; but supposing one could, we should at least ask whether one would not have to pay the cost in cash. The “taming” of man by no means represents an enhancement of his power; on the contrary, it is in this sense the great catastrophe of cultural history. The deepest gloom is what is most contagious; nothing is heard more clearly today than the call: “one ought to be ashamed of these brutalities!” But I should hate to think the species “man” could lose its cause at the hands of these clever ones, on this their meanest, weakest, most cowardly point: that perhaps man is no longer to be feared, that man no longer arouses fear — Where is fear today? — That is what we should consider above all.

Genealogy I §13 — Birds of Prey, Lambs, and the Subject

This is one of the great philosophical passages in Nietzsche, and not only on morality. The argument is double. First: it is absurd to demand that strength not express itself as strength. Second — and this is the deeper move — the very idea that strength could choose to refrain rests on a grammatical illusion: the fiction of a “doer” behind the “deed.” There is no neutral subject standing behind the bird of prey, free to be a lamb instead. The deed is everything. This is Nietzsche’s critique of the soul, of free will, and of moral blame, all at once.

To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action — indeed, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, acting itself, and only the seduction of language (and of the foundational errors of reason petrified within it), which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by an actor, by a “subject,” can make it appear otherwise.

Just as the common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter as a doing, as the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from manifestations of strength, as if behind the strong there were an indifferent substratum that was free to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, acting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything. The common people doubles the deed when they make the lightning flash; it is a doing-doing: the same event is posited first as cause, then again as its effect.

Scientists do no better when they say “force moves, force causes,” and so on — our entire science still lies, despite all its coolness, all its freedom from emotion, under the seduction of language and has not got rid of the changelings foisted upon it, the “subjects” (the atom is, for example, just such a changeling, like the Kantian “thing-in-itself”). Small wonder if the suppressed, hidden-glowing affects of revenge and hatred exploit this faith for their own purposes and indeed support no other faith more warmly than precisely the faith that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb — they thereby gain for themselves the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey.

When the oppressed, downtrodden, violated say to one another with the vindictive cunning of impotence, “let us be different from the evil ones, namely good! And he is good who does not violate, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who does not retaliate, who hands revenge over to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids all evil and asks little from life altogether, like us, the patient, the humble, the just” — this means, listened to coolly and without bias, in fact nothing more than: “we weak ones are weak after all; it is good if we do nothing for which we are not strong enough.” But this grim state of affairs, this prudence of the lowest order which even insects possess (which, when in great danger, play dead in order not to do “too much”), has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self-deception of impotence, dressed itself in the splendor of an ascetic, calm, expectant virtue, just as if the very weakness of the weak — that is, his essence, his being-active, his entire unique, inevitable, unsubstitutable reality — were a voluntary achievement, something willed, something chosen, a deed, a merit.

Genealogy I §14 — In the Workshop Where Ideals Are Manufactured

Here Nietzsche stages a dialogue: he descends into a dark workshop and reports back what he hears. The whispers he overhears are the great inversions of slave morality. Read this passage aloud if you can. It is one of the great moments of philosophical theatre in the nineteenth century.

— Will anyone please go down a little into this dark workshop? I shall need some moments of courage. Well, then! Here is the entrance, the realm of the dark masters, and there one peers into the bottom: — — What do you see, my brave one? Speak —

— “I see nothing, but I hear all the more. There is a wary, malicious, low whispering and murmuring from every nook and cranny. It seems to me that they are lying; a sugary sweetness clings to every sound. Weakness is to be lied into something meritorious, no doubt about it —”

— Go on!

— “and impotence which retaliates not into a ‘goodness’; timid baseness into ‘humility’; submission to those one hates into ‘obedience’ (namely, obedience to one of whom they say he commands this submission, — they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak, even the cowardice with which he is so well endowed, his standing-at-the-door, his unavoidable having-to-wait, here acquires good names such as ‘patience,’ even gets called the virtue itself; not-being-able-to-take-revenge gets called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, perhaps even forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do — we alone know what they do!’). They also speak of ‘love of one’s enemies’ — and sweat in the process.”

— Go on!

— “They are wretched, no doubt about it, all these whisperers and counterfeiters in the corners, although they huddle together for warmth — but they tell me their wretchedness is divine election from God; one beats the dogs one loves best; perhaps this wretchedness is also a preparation, a test, a schooling, perhaps it is even more — something that one day will be made good and paid out with tremendous interest in gold, no, in happiness. This they call ‘blessedness.’”

— Go on!

— “Now they let me know that they are not only better than the powerful, the lords of the earth whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God commands them to honor those in authority) — they are not only better, but they also ‘have it better,’ or in any case, will some day. But enough! enough! I can’t take any more. Foul air! Foul air! This workshop where ideals are manufactured — it seems to me to stink of sheer lies.”

— No! Just one more moment! You haven’t said anything yet about the masterpiece of these black magicians, who out of every black makes white, milk, and innocence, — have you noticed their full perfection of refinement, their boldest, subtlest, most spiritual, most lying coup of art? Pay attention! These cellar-dwellers full of revenge and hatred — what are they actually making out of their revenge and hatred? Have you ever heard such words? Would you suspect, if you trusted only their words, that you had only men of ressentiment around you?

Genealogy I §15 — The Imaginary Triumph

Here ressentiment becomes metaphysical. Unable to defeat its enemies in this life, it invents another. The Last Judgment is, in Nietzsche’s reading, the deepest revenge fantasy in human history. Note Tertullian. Nietzsche quotes him at length — in the original Latin — because he wants the reader to feel the joy with which an early Christian theologian anticipates the eternal torment of the powerful.

The faith they yearn for, the faith they unconsciously aim at — what could it be, if not, finally, the faith in their final triumph? Their kingdom too is to be called the “kingdom of God.” One is, of course, so humble in all things, these little people; they are but devout enough to need eternal life. Eternal life, indeed: that they might enjoy themselves to all eternity, as compensation for a life on earth in which they were so little permitted to enjoy themselves — to the point of weariness, of nausea, of a bitter Russian fatigue.

What do they really want? At the very least, the simulation of justice, of love, of wisdom, of superiority — that is the ambition of these “lowest,” these sick. How clever such an ambition makes them! Especially because they envy the cleverness of those with coined wealth, and they have to fashion their own coinage out of so little. Their dough has the smell of a very long history of suffering and dissatisfaction in it; — but its bakers, when the loaf finally rises, look as content with themselves as if they had made the universe.

The Church Father Tertullian wrote, in De Spectaculis, of the spectacle that awaits the redeemed in the world to come — and what he describes is not the joy of the saints in beholding God, but the joy of the saints in beholding the damned. He pictures, with rapturous prose, kings and governors and philosophers writhing in flames hotter than any persecution they ever inflicted on Christians. “What sight,” he asks, “shall I most admire? at what shall I most laugh? at what most rejoice? at what most exult, when I see so many great kings, supposed received into heaven, groaning in the deepest darkness with Jove their patron and his own witnesses?” — So he writes, in earnest, this Father of the Church. Read it for yourself if you can stand to. There is the heaven of the men of ressentiment.

Genealogy I §16 — Rome Against Judea

Nietzsche concludes the First Essay with a great historical image: the slave revolt as a millennia-long spiritual war between Rome and Judea, won — for now — by Judea, with the Renaissance and Napoleon as moments of pagan return. Read this carefully and remember it is psychological-historical typology, not a racial or political program.

The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have fought a fearful, thousand-year fight on earth; and although the second value has long had the upper hand, there is no lack of places where the struggle continues, undecided. One could even say that it has in the meantime risen ever higher and thus become ever more profound and spiritual: so that today perhaps no more decisive sign of the “higher nature,” the more spiritual nature, exists than to be conflicted in this sense and still a battlefield for these opposites.

The symbol of this struggle, written in a script that has remained legible across all human history, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome”: — there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction. Rome saw in the Jew something contrary to nature, as it were its monstrous antipode; in Rome the Jew was held to be “convicted of hatred for the whole human race” — and rightly, insofar as one has the right to bind together the welfare and the future of the human race with the unconditional supremacy of aristocratic values, of Roman values.

Which of them has won for the time being, Rome or Judea? But there is no doubt: consider before whom one bows down today in Rome itself as before the embodiments of all the highest values — and not only in Rome, but over almost half the earth, everywhere where man has been tamed or wants to become tamed, before three Jews, as is known, and one Jewess (before Jesus of Nazareth, the fisher Peter, the rug-weaver Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, called Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome was, without any doubt, defeated.

There was, of course, in the Renaissance a brilliant and uncanny re-awakening of the classical ideal, the noble manner of valuing all things: Rome itself stirred like one risen from the dead, under pressure from the new Judaized Rome which had been built over it and which presented the appearance of an ecumenical synagogue — and was called “the Church.” But immediately Judea triumphed again, thanks to that thoroughly plebeian (German and English) ressentiment-movement called the Reformation, plus that which had to follow from it, the restoration of the Church — the restoration also of the old burial-stillness of classical Rome. With the French Revolution, Judea triumphed once again over the classical ideal, in an even more decisive and profound sense: the last political nobleness in Europe, that of the seventeenth and eighteenth French centuries, collapsed beneath the popular instincts of ressentiment — there has never been on earth, ever, a greater jubilation, a noisier enthusiasm! Indeed, in the midst of all this there happened the most monstrous, the most unexpected: the ancient ideal itself stepped bodily and with unheard-of splendor before the eyes and conscience of mankind — and once more, more strongly, more simply, more penetratingly than ever, there resounded, in face of the old, mendacious watchword of ressentiment, the right of the few, the contrary watchword of the right of the many; — louder, more brazen, more uncanny than any of these came that supremely individual, that final monumental form of ressentiment-resistance: Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman.

Part III: Earlier Anticipations

Before the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil gave Nietzsche his mature vocabulary, he was already practicing genealogy in the middle works — Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science. The technical terms are not yet there, but the moves are. The point of this section is to see Nietzsche’s account of master and slave morality emerging out of his earlier moral psychology.

Human, All Too Human §45 — Double Prehistory of Good and Evil

The proto-version of the master–slave distinction. Notice how the basic claim is already in place: morality has a double origin in the souls of the powerful and the powerless. The dramatic vocabulary of ressentiment has not yet arrived.

The concept good and evil has a double prehistory: namely, in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes, on the one hand, and in the soul of the subject ones, on the other. He who has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and who actually practices requital — being grateful and revengeful, that is — is called good; he who is unpowerful and cannot requite is reckoned bad. As good one belongs to the “good ones,” to a community that has a feeling of belonging-together, because all the individuals are bound to one another by the sense of requital. As bad one belongs to the “bad ones,” to a swarm of submissive, unpowerful men who have no feeling of belonging-together. The good are a caste, the bad are a multitude, like dust. Good and bad are for a time the same as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. The Trojan and the Greek are in Homer both good. Not he who does us harm, but he who is contemptible, counts as bad. In the community of the good ones, the good is inherited; it is impossible that a bad one should grow out of so good a soil.

Daybreak §103 — Two Kinds of Deniers of Morality

A useful piece of self-positioning. Nietzsche distinguishes his own moral skepticism from the more familiar La Rochefoucauld type. He is not just saying “moral motives are really hidden self-interest.” He is saying that moral judgments themselves rest on errors. Both moves matter for the genealogical project.

There are two ways of denying morality. “Denying morality” — this can mean, first, denying that the moral motives that men claim have actually impelled them to their actions — that morality, then, is mere talk and falls into that class of more or less subtle deceptions (especially self-deceptions) of which men, and most particularly the most renowned, are guilty; or it can mean: denying that moral judgments are based on truths. Here it is admitted that they really are motives of action, but that in this way it is errors which, as the basis of all moral judgment, drive men to their moral actions. This is my point of view: but I would be far from denying that in very many cases a subtle distrust in the manner of the first point of view — that is, in the spirit of La Rochefoucauld — is also justified, and at any rate of great general utility. — Thus I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their presuppositions: but not that there have been alchemists who believed in these presuppositions and acted on them. — I also deny immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but that there is any true reason so to feel. I do not, of course, deny — unless I am a fool — that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged — but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto.

The Gay Science §13 — The Theory of the Feeling of Power

Crucial for understanding why “kindness” and “cruelty” are not opposite for Nietzsche. Both are exercises of power. The contrast that matters is not between selfish and unselfish acts but between strong and weak ways of exercising power. This sets up the Genealogy’s analysis of pity and Christian love.

Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon them — that is all one wants in such cases! We hurt those to whom we need to make our power perceptible; for pain is a much more sensitive means for that purpose than pleasure: pain always asks for the cause, while pleasure tends to be content with itself and not look back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are accustomed to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power, because in that way we increase ours; or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power — that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power.

Whether we sacrifice ourselves in benefiting or in hurting others does not change the ultimate value of our actions; even if we offer our lives, as martyrs do for the sake of their church, this is a sacrifice that is offered for our desire for power, or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of power. Those who feel “I possess the truth” — how many possessions do they not let go in order to save this feeling! What do they not throw overboard in order to keep their “position” — that is, their feeling of being superior to those who lack “the truth”! Certainly the condition we live in when we hurt others is rarely as agreeable, in an unmingled way, as that in which we benefit others — it is a sign that we lack power, or it betrays a frustration over this poverty; it brings new dangers and uncertainties for what power we do possess, and clouds our horizon with the prospect of revenge, scorn, punishment, and failure. Only for the most irritable and covetous worshippers of the feeling of power may it be more pleasurable to imprint the seal of power on a recalcitrant brow — those for whom the sight of those who are already subdued is a burden and a tedium. What matters is how one is accustomed to spice one’s life; it is a matter of taste whether one prefers the slow or the sudden, the assured or the dangerous and audacious increase of power — one always seeks this spice according to one’s temperament.

The Gay Science §116 — Herd Instinct

The shortest possible statement of Nietzsche’s view that morality is herd instinct. Read with §117 if you have time.

Wherever we encounter a morality, we find a valuation and an order of rank of the human drives and actions. These valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: that which is most useful to it — and second, third, and fourth most useful — is held to be the highest standard for the value of all individuals. With morality the individual is taught to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. Since the conditions for the preservation of one community have been very different from those of another community, there have been very different moralities; and looking ahead to the great changes of the future in herds and communities, states and societies, one may prophesy that there will be even more very different moralities. Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

The Gay Science §290 — One Thing Is Needful

Read this as the affirmative answer to ressentiment. The man who has not given style to his character is continually ready for revenge. Self-creation — not in the diluted sense, but in the demanding sense Nietzsche means — is what makes a human being capable of bearing the world without hatred. This is one of the most beautiful passages in the corpus.

One thing is needful. — To “give style” to one’s character — a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature has been removed: — both times through long practice and daily work. Here the ugly which could not be removed is hidden; there it has been reinterpreted as sublime. Much of what is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views: — it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how it was the constraint of a single taste that governed and formed everything large and small: whether the taste was good or bad means less than one might think — it is enough that it is one taste!

It will be the strong and domineering natures who enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint, in such perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will is relieved at the sight of all stylized nature, all conquered and serving nature; even when they have to build palaces and lay out gardens, they demur at giving nature a free hand. — Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves who hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitter and evil compulsion were imposed upon them they would be demeaned by it; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits — and they may be of the first rank — are always out to shape or interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, surprising. And they are well advised: for it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself — whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

Part IV: Zarathustra — The Poetic Treatment

Zarathustra rarely uses the words “master morality” or “slave morality.” The drama of revenge and self-overcoming is everywhere instead. Two speeches especially: “On the Tarantulas” (revenge masked as justice) and “On Redemption” (revenge against time). Read these slowly. Zarathustra’s prose has a deliberate music.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra II — “On the Tarantulas”

Nietzsche’s most uncomfortable political passage. The target is a psychological type — those who experience their own impotence as injustice and dress their wish for revenge in the language of equality. The passage is not a refutation of egalitarianism as such; it is a diagnosis of one psychological route to it. Hold this carefully and critically.

Behold, this is the hole of the tarantula! Do you wish to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web; touch it, that it may tremble. There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Black on your back is your triangle and emblem; and I also know what dwells in your soul. Revenge dwells in your soul: wherever you bite, black scab grows; with revenge, your poison makes the soul giddy.

Thus do I speak to you in a parable, you who make souls giddy, you preachers of equality! Tarantulas you are to me, and secretly vengeful! But I shall bring your hiding-places to light: therefore I laugh in your faces my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your web, that your fury may lure you out of your lie-hole, and your revenge leap out from behind your word “justice.” For that man may be redeemed from revenge — that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.

Otherwise, however, would the tarantulas have it. “What we call justice precisely is, that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge” — thus they speak among themselves. “Revenge will we use, and insult, against all who are not like us” — thus do the tarantula-hearts pledge themselves. “And ‘will to equality’ — that itself shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against everything that has power will we raise our outcry!”

You preachers of equality, the tyrant-madness of impotence cries thus out of you for “equality”: your most secret tyrant-cravings disguise themselves thus in words of virtue. Disgruntled conceit, repressed envy — perhaps your fathers’ conceit and envy: in you they break out as flame and madness of revenge. What the father has hidden comes out in the son; and often have I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

Inspired they appear to be: but it is not the heart that inspires them — but vengeance. And when they become subtle and cold, it is not spirit, but envy, that makes them subtle and cold. Their jealousy leadeth them also into the path of thinkers; and this is the sign of their jealousy — they always go too far: that their fatigue must at last lie down to sleep in the snow. In every plaint of theirs the note of revenge sounds, in their every praise there is a hurt; and to be a judge seemeth to them blessedness.

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! They are people of bad race and lineage; out of their countenances peer the hangman and the bloodhound. Distrust all those who talk much of their justice! Truly, in their souls not only honey is lacking. And when they call themselves “the good and just,” forget not, that for them to be Pharisees, nothing is lacking but — power!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra II — “On Redemption”

The deepest passage on revenge in Nietzsche’s poetic mode. Revenge, in the end, is not revenge against this enemy or that: it is revenge against time itself, against the unalterable “It was.” Read this alongside the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, which is the answer to it: not just to bear the past, but to will it eternally.

To redeem the past, and to transform every “It was” into a “Thus would I have it” — that alone do I call redemption!

Will — so is called the liberator and joy-bringer: thus have I taught you, my friends! But now learn this also: the will itself is still a prisoner. Willing makes free: but what is it called that puts the liberator himself in fetters?

“It was” — that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, it is to all that is past an angry spectator. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s craving — that is the will’s loneliest melancholy. Willing makes free: what does the will itself contrive to free itself from its melancholy and to mock its prison? Ah, every prisoner becomes a fool; foolishly the imprisoned will redeems itself.

That time does not run backwards — that is its anger; “that which was” is the name of the stone it cannot roll. And so it rolls stones from anger and ill-temper, and takes revenge on whatever does not, like itself, feel anger and ill-temper. Thus did the will, the liberator, become a malefactor; and on all that is capable of suffering it takes revenge for not being able to go backwards. This — yea, this alone is revenge itself: the will’s antipathy to time and its “It was.”

Truly, a great folly dwells in our will; and it became a curse for all humanity that this folly acquired spirit! The spirit of revenge, my friends, has so far been the subject of man’s best reflection; and where there was suffering, there was always supposed to be punishment. “Punishment” is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it creates a good conscience for itself. And because there is suffering in the willing one himself, since he cannot will backwards — thus willing itself, and all life, was supposed to be — punishment! And then cloud upon cloud rolled over the spirit, until at last madness preached: “Everything passes away; therefore everything deserves to pass away! And this too is justice, this law of time that it must devour its children” — thus madness preached. “Things are ordered morally according to justice and punishment. Oh, where is redemption from the flux of things and from the punishment called ‘existence’?” Thus madness preached.

Has the will become its own redeemer and joy-bringer? Has it unlearned the spirit of revenge and all gnashing of teeth? And who taught it reconciliation with time, and what is higher than all reconciliation? — Higher than all reconciliation must that will will, which is the will to power: — But how shall it do this? Who has taught it also to will backwards?

Part V: Beyond Good and Evil — Beyond §260

Four further passages from Beyond Good and Evil that flesh out the typology. §195 names the slave revolt historically; §§201–202 give the diagnosis of contemporary herd morality; §257 introduces the pathos of distance; §287 redirects nobility from social rank to spiritual bearing.

Beyond Good and Evil §195

The historical-psychological pinpoint. The slave revolt has a date and a place. Read it carefully: Nietzsche admires the Jewish prophets here, in the same backhanded way he admires the priest — as the most spiritually inventive human beings.

The Jews — a people “born for slavery,” as Tacitus and the entire ancient world say; “the chosen people among the peoples,” as they themselves say and believe — the Jews accomplished that miracle of inversion of values, thanks to which life on earth has acquired a new and dangerous attraction for a couple of millennia: their prophets fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” “sensual” into one and were the first to coin the word “world” as a term of reproach. In this inversion of values (in which “poor” became synonymous with “holy” and “friend”) lies the significance of the Jewish people: with them begins the slave revolt in morality.

Beyond Good and Evil §201–202 — The European Herd

The contemporary face of slave morality. Nietzsche’s claim is that modern European morality — across all its political flavors, including the ones that would call themselves liberal or socialist or Christian — is a unified morality of the herd-animal. This is the modern situation.

§201

As long as the utility reigning in moral value-judgments is solely the utility of the herd, as long as the eye is solely directed toward the preservation of the community, and immorality is sought in precisely what seems dangerous to the existence of the community: there can be no morality of “love of neighbor.” Suppose that even there a constant little exercise of consideration, pity, fairness, mildness, and mutual aid is granted; suppose that even at this stage of society all those instincts are already active that are later honored by the name of “virtues” and that are eventually almost coterminous with the concept of “morality” — at that time they do not yet belong to the realm of moral valuation: they are still extra-moral. A high and harsh nobility and self-responsibility is felt almost as an insult and arouses suspicion; “the lamb,” even more “the sheep,” wins respect. There is a point of diseased mellowness and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and earnestly.

§202

Let us immediately say once more what we have already said a hundred times: for ears today have no good will for such truths — our truths. We know already enough how offensive it sounds when somebody plainly counts man, without metaphor or simile, among the animals; but it will be charged against us as practically a guilt that for human beings of “modern ideas” we constantly use such expressions as “herd,” “herd instincts,” and the like. What can be done about it? We cannot do otherwise: for here precisely lies our novel insight. We have found that in all the main moral judgments Europe has become unanimous, including the lands where European influence dominates: one obviously knows in Europe what Socrates thought he did not know, and what that famous old serpent once promised to teach — one “knows” today what is good and evil. Now this must sound harsh and offensive to ears: but what we say must finally and inexorably be heard — the morality of all moral judgments in Europe today is the morality of the herd-animal: behind it, before it, after it, around it, there are indeed other still finer and rarer moralities — but they make their appearance only as exceptions, only on the margins, only in the shadows.

Beyond Good and Evil §257 — The Pathos of Distance

The shortest statement of the aristocratic precondition for spiritual height. The pathos of distance is a feeling of difference between higher and lower types. Without it, Nietzsche thinks, the higher does not develop at all. The passage is provocative; the deeper claim is that real elevation requires real difference, and that egalitarian leveling threatens the very thing it claims to extend to everyone.

Every enhancement of the type “man” has so far been the work of an aristocratic society — and so it will always be: a society which believes in a long ladder of order of rank and difference of value among human beings, and which needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the deeply-rooted difference of stations, out of the constant looking-out and looking-down of the ruling caste on subjects and instruments, and out of their equally constant exercise of obedience and command, of holding-down and holding-at-a-distance, that other still more mysterious pathos could not have grown up at all, that craving for ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, more far-stretched, more comprehensive states — in short, just the elevation of the type “man,” the continued “self-overcoming of man,” to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.

Beyond Good and Evil §287 — What Is Noble?

Crucial. Here the late Nietzsche redirects “noble” from social rank to a quality of soul. Nobility is not what someone does, not even what someone believes; it is a long resolved soul-condition, a fundamental tone, an inner reverence-for-self. This is the answer to anyone who reads Nietzsche as wanting a return to feudal hierarchy.

What is noble? What does the word “noble” still mean to us today? What betrays, what allows one to recognize the noble human being, under this heavy overcast sky of the rule of plebeians, by which everything becomes opaque and leaden? — It is not the works that betray him: works are always ambiguous, always unfathomable; — neither is it “faith.” How often, especially among believers, is faith only an arrangement, only a sort of foreground for shame, a screen, in short, something behind which the strength of the soul hides itself: every faith proves something. — How often, conversely, among believers no creed is so vehement as theirs! — But here, as everywhere, the simple fact remains untouched: it is not the deed that demonstrates the type, but the bearing, the long resolved soul-condition, the basic instinct, the long fundamental tone, the highest taste of the soul.

It is not the works, it is the faith that here is decisive, that here determines the order of rank — to take up an old religious formula again in a new and deeper sense: some basic certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, cannot be found, and perhaps cannot be lost either. — The noble soul has reverence for itself.

Part VI: The Late Polemic

In Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, the master–slave typology folds into a larger diagnosis: morality as decadence, Christianity as institutionalized ressentiment, pity as a danger to life. The tone is sharper. The conceptual framework is the same.

Twilight of the Idols — “Morality as Anti-Nature” §4

The methodological move that is implicit throughout the Genealogy: morality cannot be evaluated from inside morality. To judge whether a moral system is good or bad, one needs a standpoint outside it — namely, the standpoint of the type of life that produced it. Morality, viewed as a problem, is a symptom.

If we have understood the criminality of such a revolt against life as has, in Christian morality, become almost sacrosanct, we have, fortunately, also understood something else: the futility, deceptiveness, absurdity, and falsity of such a revolt. A condemnation of life by the living being is, after all, only the symptom of a definite kind of life: the question whether the condemnation is justified or unjustified is not even raised. To formulate it, one would have to occupy a position outside life, and on the other hand to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it. This is reason enough for us to grasp that morality itself is a problem; and that morality, viewed as a problem, must perforce be reduced to a problem of the type of life which makes the moral judgment.

Twilight of the Idols — “Morality as Anti-Nature” §6

The polemical capstone. Notice how Nietzsche distinguishes between two kinds of moral statement: “one ought to be such-and-such” (which he despises) and the diagnostic claim that this person, in their concrete reality, is what they are, and could not be otherwise. Morality, when it condemns from outside life, is itself a symptom — the idiosyncrasy of the degenerate.

Let us finally consider what naiveté it is to say: “Man ought to be such and such!” Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms — and some pitiful idler of a moralist comments: “No! Man ought to be different.” He even knows what man ought to be, this canting tartuffe; he even paints himself on the wall and says, “Ecce homo!” But even when the moralist merely turns to the individual and says to him, “You ought to be such and such!” he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The individual is, in his future and his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be. To say to him “change yourself” is to demand that everything change, even backward.

And in fact there have been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous; they wanted him in their own image, namely, that of a canting tartuffe: to that end they negated the world! No little madness! No modest kind of immodesty! Morality, insofar as it condemns — in itself, not from the standpoint of life’s points of view, intentions, considerations — is a specific error with which one ought not to sympathize, an idiosyncrasy of the degenerate, which has caused infinite harm. We others, we immoralists, on the contrary, have opened our heart wide to every kind of understanding, comprehension, approval. We do not easily deny; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers. More and more, we have come to recognize the most necessary economy by which everything that we as Christian Europeans abjure has its place. We have learned how mendacious the holy lie is.

The Antichrist §5

The most concentrated statement of Christianity as the institutional enemy of the higher type. Read with care — the rhetoric is white-hot, but the underlying analytical claim is the same one made calmly in the Genealogy.

One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put a ban on all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts: the strong human being as the typically reprehensible human, the “reprobate.” Christianity has taken the side of all that is weak, low, ill-constituted; it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has corrupted the very reason of the spiritually strongest natures by teaching them to feel the highest values of spirituality as something sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity!

The Antichrist §7 — The Critique of Pity

Pity, in Nietzsche’s analysis, is not the antidote to ressentiment but one of its most refined products. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it crosses the law of selection; it depresses the tonic emotions. Read this with care: Nietzsche is not telling individuals to be cruel. He is diagnosing pity as a cultural force that has become a kind of slow death.

Christianity is called the religion of pity. — Pity stands in opposition to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious. Under certain circumstances, it may engender a total loss of life and life-energy out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (— the case of the death of the Nazarene). That is the first viewpoint; but there is a still more important one. Suppose we measure pity by the value of the reactions it usually produces; then its dangerous character to life appears in a much clearer light. On the whole, pity crosses the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life’s disinherited and condemned; through the abundance of the ill-constituted of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect. People have dared to call pity a virtue (— in every noble morality it counts as weakness —); people have gone still further, they have made of it the virtue, the basis and source of all virtues, — only of course, what one must always keep in mind, from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, that inscribed the negation of life on its shield.

The Antichrist §24 — The Slave Revolt, Revisited

Late Nietzsche returns one more time to the historical question of where the slave revolt began. The treatment is psychological, not racial — he is admiring the Jewish people’s capacity for survival under impossible conditions, even as he locates the inversion of values with them. Read both halves of his judgment together.

With the Jews the slave revolt in morality begins: the slave revolt with two thousand years of history behind it, which we today no longer perceive because it has been victorious. — You will already have grasped what I owe to the Jews: that they have done the most fateful work in the falsification of mankind. Yet one must know what one is dealing with: with the most catastrophic people in world history; through them they have left such a falsification of values in their wake that the Christian can think antinaturally and feel even now still that he is acting morally. — Psychologically, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy who, transplanted into impossible conditions, voluntarily, with the deepest intelligence of self-preservation, take the side of all the instincts of decadence — not as if these were dominated by them, but because they divined a power in them with which to prevail against “the world.” The Jews are the antithesis of all decadents: they have had to represent decadents to the point of illusion; with a non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have known how to place themselves at the head of all movements of decadence (— as the Christianity of Paul —), in order to make of them something stronger than any party affirming life.

Part VII: Personal Coda

End here. In the autobiographical Ecce Homo, Nietzsche reads his own life through the lens of ressentiment. The crucial admission is that he understands ressentiment because he has had to fight it in himself. His critique was never an attack on “the weak” as another kind of person; it was a confrontation with the temptation that besets anyone who has been wounded — to organize a soul around the injury.

Ecce Homo — “Why I Am So Wise” §6

Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment about ressentiment — who knows the extent to which I ultimately owe my thanks for these to my long sickness? The problem here is not exactly simple: one must have experienced it from strength as well as from weakness. If anything at all must be alleged against being sick, being weak, it is that in such conditions the actual healing instinct, that is, the defensive and offensive instinct in man, becomes weakened. One does not get rid of anything, one does not get over anything, one does not repulse anything — everything wounds. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory is a festering wound. Sickness itself is a kind of ressentiment.

Against this the sick person has only one great remedy: I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become unbearable finally lies down in the snow. To no longer accept anything, to receive nothing, to take nothing into oneself — to cease entirely to react. The great rationality of this fatalism, which is not always the courage to die, may be lifesaving in the most life-threatening conditions, in that it reduces the metabolism, makes it slow, a kind of will to hibernation. A few steps further in this logic, and we have the fakir who sleeps for weeks in a grave.

Because one would expend oneself if one reacted at all, one no longer reacts: this is the logic. And by means of ressentiment nothing burns up faster than ressentiment. Annoyance, morbid susceptibility, inability to take revenge, the desire and thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense — for one who is exhausted, this is certainly the most disadvantageous kind of reaction: it causes a rapid expenditure of nervous energy, a morbid increase of harmful excretions — for example, of bile into the stomach. Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick — it is their evil; unfortunately also their most natural inclination.

This was understood by that profound physiologist the Buddha. His “religion,” which one would do better to call a system of hygiene, lest it be confused with a Christianity so pitiful, has been freed from ressentiment as a precondition of its effect: thus, freeing the soul from it — the first step toward recovery. “Not through hostility does hostility come to an end, through friendship does hostility come to an end” — this stands at the beginning of the teaching of the Buddha. Thus speaks not morality, thus speaks physiology.

Ressentiment, born of weakness, to no one more harmful than to the weak himself — in the opposite case, where a rich nature is the presupposition, ressentiment is a superfluous feeling; to remain master of it is almost the proof of richness. Whoever knows how seriously my philosophy has taken up the fight against the feelings of revenge and rancor, even into the doctrine of “free will” — my fight against Christianity is only a special case of it — will understand why I throw the spotlight here on my personal behavior, on my instinctive sureness in practice. In periods of decadence I forbade them to myself as harmful; as soon as life was again rich and proud enough for them, I forbade them to myself as beneath me.

Afterword: What Has Been Left Out

Several passages relevant to this theme have been deliberately set aside, either to keep this compilation focused or because they are best read in their entirety in their own books rather than excerpted. They are worth knowing about.

Genealogy II in its entirety — “Guilt, Bad Conscience, and the Like” — is the second great theatre of ressentiment in the corpus. It develops the same psychology, but turned inward: how the human animal, prevented from discharging hostility outward, turns it against itself and invents the bad conscience. Read it as the natural sequel to the First Essay rather than as a side-topic.

Genealogy III on the ascetic ideal develops the figure of the ascetic priest — the historical type that managed and channeled ressentiment for two thousand years. It is one of Nietzsche’s most psychologically dense pieces of writing, but it pulls in directions (the will to truth, the meaning of suffering, science, atheism) that go well beyond the master–slave question. Read it after this compilation, not within it.

Daybreak as a whole — not just §103 — is full of small, sharp aphorisms on the psychology of moralizing. Treat it as a quarry rather than as a single argument. §113 (“The striving for distinction”), §142 (“Sympathy”), §172 (“Tragedy and music”), and §548 (“Victory over strength”) all bear directly on the theme.

Some of Zarathustra’s most important speeches on related themes — “On the Despisers of the Body,” “On Self-Overcoming,” “The Convalescent” — are not included here because they belong to wider topics (the body, the will to power, the eternal recurrence) for which the master–slave frame is only one entry point.

Finally, and importantly: Nietzsche’s most explicit late summary of the Genealogy itself, in Ecce Homo’s short chapter on On the Genealogy of Morals, is worth reading once you have worked through the Essay. He there describes the book’s three essays as three campaigns, and offers a self-portrait of his own method that no commentator can replace.

Index of Passages

All passages used in this compilation, organized chronologically by work. Citations are by book and section number; consult the Kaufmann or Hollingdale editions for the canonical English text.

Human, All Too Human (1878)

Daybreak (1881)

The Gay Science (1882; expanded 1887)

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85)

Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

Twilight of the Idols (1888)

The Antichrist (1888)

Ecce Homo (1888)

Total: thirty passages from nine works, spanning the decade from Human, All Too Human (1878) through the final productive year of 1888. The center of gravity is the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, which contributes ten of the thirty entries; everything else is best read as either preparation for the First Essay or extension of its argument.

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