On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 3.18)

We need to be careful not to entertain a low opinion of this entire phenomenon simply because it is from the start nasty and painful. In fact, it is basically the same active force which is at work on a grander scale in those artists of power and organizers and which builds states. Here it is inner, smaller, more mean spirited, directing itself backwards, into “the labyrinth of the breast,” to use Goethe’s words, and it creates bad conscience for itself and builds negative ideals, just that instinct for freedom (to use my own language, the will to power). Only the material on which the shaping and violating nature of this force directs itself here is simply man himself, his entire old animal self— and not, as in that greater and more striking phenomenon, on another man or on other men. This furtive violation of the self, this artistic cruelty, this pleasure in giving a shape to oneself as a tough, resisting, suffering material, to burn into it a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a denial, this weird and horribly pleasurable work of a soul willingly divided against itself, which makes itself suffer for the pleasure of creating suffering, all this active “bad conscience,” as the essential womb of ideal and imaginative events, finally brought to light —we have already guessed—also an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation and perhaps for the first time the idea of the beautiful in general. . . . For what would be “beautiful,” if its opposite had not yet come to an awareness of itself, if ugliness had not already said to itself, “I am ugly”? At least, after this hint the paradox will be less puzzling, the extent to which in contradictory ideas, like selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice, an ideal can be indicated, something beautiful. And beyond that, one thing we do know—I have no doubt about it—namely, the nature of the pleasure which the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person experiences from the beginning: this pleasure belongs to cruelty. So much for the moment on the origin of the “un-egoistic” as something of moral worth and on the demarcation of the soil out of which this value has grown: only bad conscience, only the will to abuse the self, provides the condition for the value of the un-egoistic.