Nietzsche: The Will to Power. Friedrich Nietzsche

nature, and then begins to feel at ease. This judgment on the part of the "comfortable" ones rigs itself out in the most beautiful words—and thus "morality" is born. Let any one observe, however, the hatred of the herd for all truthful men.

      286.

      Let us not deceive ourselves! When a man hears the whisper of the moral imperative in his breast, as altruism would have him hear it, he shows thereby that he belongs to the herd. When a man is conscious of the opposite feelings,—that is to say, when he sees his danger and his undoing in disinterested and unselfish actions,—then he does not belong to the herd.

      287.

      My philosophy aims at a new order of rank: not at an individualistic morality.5 The spirit of the herd should rule within the herd—but not beyond it: the leaders of the herd require a fundamentally different valuation for their actions, as do also the independent ones or the beasts of prey, etc.

      3. General Observations Concerning Morality

       Table of Contents

      288.

      Morality regarded as an attempt at establishing human pride.—The "Free-Will" theory is anti-religious. Its ultimate object is to bestow the right upon man to regard himself as the cause of his highest states and actions: it is a form of the growing feeling of pride.

      Man feels his power his "happiness"; as they say: there must be a will behind these states—otherwise they do not belong to him. Virtue is an attempt at postulating a modicum of will, past or present, as the necessary antecedent to every exalted and strong feeling of happiness: if the will to certain actions is regularly present in consciousness, a sensation of power may be interpreted as its result. This is a merely psychological point of view, based upon the false assumption that nothing belongs to us which we have not consciously willed. The whole of the teaching of responsibility relies upon the ingenuous psychological rule that the will is the only cause, and that one must have been aware of having willed in order to be able to regard one's self as a cause.

      Then comes the counter-movement—that of the moral-philosophers. These men still labour under the delusion that a man is responsible only for what he has willed. The value of man is then made a moral value: thus morality becomes a causa prima; for this there must be some kind of principle in man, and "free will" is posited as prima causa. The arrière pensée is always this: If man is not a causa prima through his will, he must be irresponsible,—therefore he does not come within the jurisdiction of morals,—virtue or vice is automatic and mechanical....

      In short: in order that man may respect himself he must be capable of becoming evil.

      289.

      Theatricalness regarded as the result of "Free Will" morality. It is a step in the development of the feeling of power itself to believe one's self to be the author of one's exalted moments (of one's perfection) and to have willed them....

      (Criticism: all perfect action is precisely unconscious and not deliberate; consciousness is often the expression of an imperfect and often morbid constitution. Personal perfection regarded as determined by will, as an act of consciousness, as reason with dialectics, is a caricature, a sort of self-contradiction.... Any degree of consciousness renders perfection impossible. ... A form of theatricalness.)

      290.

      The moral hypothesis, designed with a view to justifying God, said: evil must be voluntary (simply in order that the voluntariness of goodness might be believed in); and again, all evil and suffering have an object which is salvation.

      The notion "guilt" was considered as something which had no connection at all with the ultimate cause of existence, and the notion "punishment" was held to be an educating and beneficent act, consequently an act proceeding from a good God.

      The absolute dominion of moral valuations over all others: nobody doubted that God could not be evil and could do no harm—that is to say, perfection was understood merely as moral perfection.

      291.

      How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality....

      The value of an action must be judged by its results, say the utilitarians: to measure it according to its origin involves the impossibility of knowing that origin.

      But do we know its results? Five stages ahead, perhaps. Who can tell what an action provokes and sets in motion? As a stimulus? As the spark which fires a powder-magazine? Utilitarians are simpletons.... And finally, they would first of all have to know what is useful; here also their sight can travel only over five stages or so.... They have no notion of the great economy which cannot dispense with evil.

      We do not know the origin or the results: has an action, then, any value?

      We have yet the action itself to consider: the states of consciousness that accompany it, the yea or nay which follows upon its performance: does the value of an action lie in the subjective states which accompany it? (In that case, the value of music would be measured according to the pleasure or displeasure which it occasions in us ... which it gives to the composer. ...) Obviously feelings of value must accompany it, a sensation of power, restraint, or impotence—for instance, freedom or lightsomeness. Or, putting the question differently: could the value of an action be reduced to physiological terms? could it be the expression of completely free or constrained life?—Maybe its biological value is expressed in this way....

      If, then, an action can be judged neither in the light of its origin, nor its results, nor its accompaniments in consciousness, then its value must be x unknown....

      292.

      It amounts to a denaturalisation of morality, to separate an action from a man; to direct hatred or contempt against "sin"; to believe that there are actions which are good or bad in themselves.

      The re-establishment of "Nature": an action in itself is quite devoid of value; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same "crime" may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).

      293.

      The concept "reprehensible action" presents us with some difficulties. Nothing in all that happens can be reprehensible in itself: one would not dare to eliminate it completely; for everything is so bound up with everything else, that to exclude one part would mean to exclude the whole.

      A reprehensible action, therefore, would mean a reprehensible world as a whole....

      And even then, in a reprehensible world even reprehending would be reprehensible.... And the consequence of an attitude of mind that condemns everything, would be the affirmation of everything in practice.... If Becoming is a huge ring, everything that forms a part of it is of equal value, is eternal and necessary.—In all correlations of yea and nay, of preference and rejection, love and hate, all that is expressed is a certain point of view, peculiar to the interests of a certain type of living organism: everything that lives says yea by the very fact of its existence.

      294.

      Criticism of the subjective feelings of value.—Conscience. Formerly people argued: conscience condemns this action, therefore this action is reprehensible. But, as a matter of fact, conscience condemns an action because that action has been condemned for a long period of time: all conscience does is to imitate. It does not create values. That which first led to the condemnation of certain actions, was not conscience: but the knowledge of (or the prejudice against) its consequences.... The approbation of conscience,