The Genealogy of Morals

will serve with posterity: that of an emetic⁠—and this by reason of its moral sugariness and falsity, its ingrained feminism, which it is pleased to call “Idealism,” and at any rate believes to be idealism. Our cultured men of today, our “good” men, do not lie⁠—that is true; but it does not redound to their honour! The real lie, the genuine, determined, “honest” lie (on whose value you can listen to Plato) would prove too tough and strong an article for them by a long way; it would be asking them to do what people have been forbidden to ask them to do, to open their eyes to their own selves, and to learn to distinguish between “true” and “false” in their own selves. The dishonest lie alone suits them: everything which feels a good man is perfectly incapable of any other attitude to anything than that of a dishonourable liar, an absolute liar, but none the less an innocent liar, a blue-eyed liar, a virtuous liar. These “good men,” they are all now tainted with morality through and through, and as far as honour is concerned they are disgraced and corrupted for all eternity. Which of them could stand a further truth “about man”? or, put more tangibly, which of them could put up with a true biography? One or two instances: Lord Byron composed a most personal autobiography, but Thomas Moore was “too good” for it; he burnt his friend’s papers. Dr. Gwinner, Schopenhauer’s executor, is said to have done the same; for Schopenhauer as well wrote much about himself, and perhaps also against himself: (εἰς ἑαντόν). The virtuous American Thayer, Beethoven’s biographer, suddenly stopped his work: he had come to a certain point in that honourable and simple life, and could stand it no longer. Moral: What sensible man nowadays writes one honest word about himself? He must already belong to the Order of Holy Foolhardiness. We are promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner; who doubts but that it would be a clever autobiography? Think, forsooth, of the grotesque horror which the Catholic priest Janssen aroused in Germany with his inconceivably square and harmless pictures of the German Reformation; what wouldn’t people do if some real psychologist were to tell us about a genuine Luther, tell us, not with the moralist simplicity of a country priest or the sweet and cautious modesty of a Protestant historian, but say with the fearlessness of a Taine, that springs from force of character and not from a prudent toleration of force. (The Germans, by the by, have already produced the classic specimen of this toleration⁠—they may well be allowed to reckon him as one of their own, in Leopold Ranke, that born classical advocate of every causa fortior, that cleverest of all the clever opportunists.)

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But you will soon understand me.⁠—Putting it shortly, there is reason enough, is there not, for us psychologists nowadays never getting from a certain mistrust of out own selves? Probably even we ourselves are still “too good” for our work, probably, whatever contempt we feel for this popular craze for morality, we ourselves are perhaps none the less its victims, prey, and slaves; probably it infects even us. Of what was that diplomat warning us, when he said to his colleagues: “Let us especially mistrust our first impulses, gentlemen! they are almost always good”? So should nowadays every psychologist talk to his colleagues. And thus we get back to our problem, which in point of fact does require from us a certain severity, a certain mistrust especially against “first impulses.” The ascetic ideal in the service of projected emotional excess:⁠—he who remembers the previous essay will already partially anticipate the essential meaning compressed into these above ten words. The thorough unswitching of the human soul, the plunging of it into terror, frost, ardour, rapture, so as to free it, as through some lightning shock, from all the smallness and pettiness of unhappiness, depression, and discomfort: what ways lead to this goal? And which of these ways does so most safely?⁠ ⁠… At bottom all great emotions have this power, provided that they find a sudden outlet⁠—emotions such as rage, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and, in sooth, the ascetic priest has had no scruples in taking into his service the whole pack of hounds that rage in the human kennel, unleashing now these and now those, with the same constant object of waking man out of his protracted melancholy, of chasing away, at any rate for a time, his dull pain, his shrinking misery, but always under the sanction of a religious interpretation and justification. This emotional excess has subsequently to be paid for, this is self-evident⁠—it makes the ill more ill⁠—and therefore this kind of remedy for pain is according to modern standards a “guilty” kind.

The dictates of fairness, however, require that we should all the more emphasise the fact that this remedy is applied with a good conscience, that the ascetic priest has prescribed it in the most implicit belief in its utility and indispensability;⁠—often enough almost collapsing in the presence of the pain which he created;⁠—that we should similarly emphasise the fact that the violent physiological revenges of such excesses, even perhaps the mental disturbances, are not absolutely inconsistent with the general tenor of this kind of remedy; this remedy, which, as we have shown previously, is not for the purpose of healing diseases, but of fighting the unhappiness of that depression, the alleviation and deadening of which was its object. The object was consequently achieved. The keynote by which the ascetic priest was enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the fibres of the human soul⁠—was, as everyone knows, the exploitation of the feeling of “guilt.” I have already indicated in the previous essay the origin of this feeling⁠—as a piece of animal psychology and nothing else: we were thus confronted with the feeling of “guilt,” in its crude