On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.9)

A certain asceticism, as we have seen, a hard and cheerful renunciation with the best intentions, belongs to those conditions favourable to the highest spirituality and is also among its most natural consequences. So it’s no wonder from the outset that philosophers in particular never treat the ascetic ideal without some bias. A serious historical review demonstrates that the tie between the ascetic ideal and philosophy is even much closer and stronger. We could say it was in the leading reins of this ideal that philosophy in general learned to take its first steps and partial steps on earth—alas, still so awkwardly, alas, still with such a morose expression, alas, so ready to fall over and lie on its belly, this small, tentative, clumsy, loving infant with crooked legs! With philosophy things initially played themselves out as with all good things: for a long time it had no courage for itself—it always looked around to see if anyone would come to its assistance, and even more it was afraid of all those who gazed at it. Just make a list of the individual drives and virtues of the philosopher—his impulse to doubt, his impulse to deny, his impulse to wait (the “ephectic” impulse), his impulse to analyze, his impulse to research, to seek out, to take chances, his impulse to compare, to weigh evenly, his desire for neutrality and objectivity, his will to every “sine ira et studio” [without anger and partiality]—have we not already understood that for the longest time all of them went against the first demands of morality and conscience (to say nothing at all about reason in general, which even Luther liked to call Madam Clever, the Clever Whore) and that if a philosopher were to have come to an awareness of himself, he would really have had to feel that he was almost the living manifestation of “nitimur in vetitum” [we search for what’s forbidden]—and thus taken care not to “feel himself,” not to become conscious of himself? As I’ve said, the case is no different with all the good things of which we are nowadays so proud. Even measured by the standards of the ancient Greeks, our entire modern being, insofar as it is not weakness but power and consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and godlessness; for the very opposite of those things we honour today have for the longest period had conscience on their side and God to guard over them. Our entire attitude to nature today, our violation of nature, with the help of machines and the unimaginable inventiveness of our technicians and engineers, is hubris; our attitude to God is hubris—I mean our attitude to some alleged spider spinning out purposes and morality behind the fabric of the huge fishing net of causality—we could say with Charles the Bold in his struggle with Ludwig XI, “Je combats l’universealle araignée” [I am fighting the universal spider]; our attitude to ourselves is hubris—for we experiment with ourselves in a manner we would not permit with any animal and happily and inquisitively slit the souls of living bodies open. What do we still care about the “salvation” of the soul? We cure ourselves later. Being sick teaches us things—we don’t doubt that—it’s even more instructive than being healthy. The person who makes us ill appears to us nowadays to be more important even than any medical people and “saviours.” We violate ourselves now, no doubt about it, we nutcrackers of the soul, we questioning and questionable people, as if life were nothing else but cracking nuts. And in so doing, we must necessarily become every day constantly more questionable, more worthy of being questioned, and in the process perhaps also worthier —to live? All good things were once bad things; every original sin has become an original virtue. For example, marriage for a long time seemed to be a sin against the rights of the community. Once people paid a fine for being so presumptuous as to arrogate a woman to themselves (that involves, for instance, the jus primae noctis [the right of the first night], even today in Cambodia the privilege of the priest, this guardian of “good ancient customs”). The gentle, favourable, yielding, sympathetic feelings—which over time grew so valuable that they are almost “value in itself”—for the longest period were countered by self- contempt against them. People were ashamed of being mild, just as today they are ashamed of being hard (compare Beyond Good and Evil, Section 260). Subjugation under the law—O with what resistance of conscience the noble races throughout the earth had to renounce the vendetta and to concede the power of the law over themselves! For a long time the “law” was a vetitum [something prohibited], a sacrilege, an innovation; it appeared with force, as force, something to which people submitted only with a feeling of shame for their conduct. Every one of the smallest steps on earth in earlier days was fought for with spiritual and physical torture. This whole historical point, “that not only moving forward—no!—but walking, moving, and changing necessarily required their countless martyrs,” nowadays sounds so strange to us. In The Dawn, Section 18, I brought out this point. “Nothing has come at a higher price,” it says there, “than the small amount of human reason and feeling of freedom, which we are now so proud of. But because of this pride it is now almost impossible for us to sense how that huge stretch of time of the ‘morality of custom,’ which comes before ‘world history,’ is the really decisive and important history which established the character of humanity, when everywhere people recognized suffering as virtue, cruelty as virtue, pretence as virtue, revenge as virtue, the denial of reason as virtue and, by contrast, well-being as danger, the desire for knowledge as danger, peace as danger, pity as danger, being pitied as disgrace, work as disgrace, insanity as divinity, change as inherently immoral and pregnant with ruin!”