On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 1.7)

Suffice it to say that once this insight revealed itself to me, I had reasons to look around for learned, bold, and hard-working comrades (today I’m still searching). It’s a matter of travelling through the immense, distant, and so secretive land of morality—morality which has really existed, which has really been lived—with nothing but new questions and, as it were, new eyes. Isn’t that almost like discovering this land for the first time? . . . In this matter, it so happened I thought of, among others, the above-mentioned Dr. Rée, because I had no doubts at all that by the very nature of his questions he would be driven to a more correct methodology in order to arrive at any answers. Did I deceive myself in this? At any rate, my desire was to provide a better direction for such a keen and objective eye as his, a direction leading to a true history of morality and to advise him in time against the English way of making hypotheses by staring off into the blue. For, indeed, it’s obvious which colour must be a hundred times more important for a genealogist of morality than this blue: namely, gray, in other words, what has been documented, what can be established as the truth, what really took place, in short, the long and difficult-to- decipher hieroglyphic writing of the past in human morality.—This was unknown to Dr. Rée. But he had read Darwin:—and so to some extent in his hypotheses the Darwinian beast and the most modern modest and tender moral sensibility, which “no longer bites,” politely extend their hands to each other in a way that is at least entertaining —with the latter bearing a facial expression revealing a certain good- natured and refined indolence, in which is even mixed a grain of pessimism, of exhaustion, as if it is really not worth taking all these things —the problems of morality—so seriously.* But for me things appear reversed: there are no issues which are more worth taking seriously; among the rewards, for example, is the fact that one day perhaps people will be permitted to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness, or, to say it in my own language, the gay science, is a reward, a reward for a lengthy, brave, hard-working, and underground seriousness, which, of course, is not something for everyone. But on that day when, from full hearts, we say “Forward! Our old morality also belongs in a comedy!” we’ll have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of “the fate of the soul”: — and we can bet that he will put it to good use, the grand old immortal comic poet of our existence! . . .