Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter XXI

by William Mackintire Salter

 

CHAPTER XXI

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). BAD CONSCIENCE, A MORAL ORDER, OUGHT, EQUALITY

I

I confess that in taking up Nietzsche's analysis of "bad conscience," I find it difficult to trace a clear and consistent course of thought. The main treatment of the subject is in the second treatise of Genealogy of Morals.

First, it may be noted that elsewhere, and incidentally here, he often uses the phrase in a way that causes no perplexity. It simply designates the feeling which one has in departing from a standard which one acknowledges. The first standards of men were, as already explained, social; to disobey the group's mores in any particular was attended with an uneasy consciousness. Even to have different ideas from those commonly recognized did not seem quite right, and science has often come into the world stealthily, feeling like a transgressor, or at least like a smuggler.^[1] The phenomenon continues in its essential features down to the present day. To a troubled young friend Nietzsche wrote: "It is curious to observe: he who early departs from traditional paths to enter on one that seems right to himself, has always half or altogether the feeling of a man who has been exiled and condemned by others and has fled away: this kind of bad conscience is the suffering of the independently good."^[2] He thinks it impossible to estimate what just the rarer, selecter, more original minds in the past have suffered from the fact that they were looked upon as böse and dangerous—yes, appeared so to themselves.^[3] But there may be individual as well as social standards, and one may have "bad conscience" when one forgets these too. "Why do we have pricks of conscience (Gewissensbisse) after ordinary social companies? Because we have taken serious things lightly, because in discussing persons we have not spoken with complete loyalty, or because we have been silent when we should have spoken, because we have not on occasion sprung up and taken ourselves off—in short, because we conducted ourselves in society as if we belonged to it."^[4] A scientific man may have bad conscience, if he allows himself views unsupported by scientific evidence.^[5] One who has determined to become and achieve something in his own person may have bad conscience, if he allows himself to be allured into ordinary benevolent work—it is something which may accompany altruistic acts as well as egoistic ones.^[6] Emerson seems to have experienced it when he succumbed to certain philanthropic appeals, calling it a "wicked dollar" that he on occasion gave for "your miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools, the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand, alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief Societies."^[7] In one of Stendhal's novels a Jew has a bad conscience when he falls in love and takes money out of his business for a bracelet; and so it was with Napoleon, remarks Nietzsche, after he had performed a generous act, and may be with a diplomat who for once is honorable.^[8] Sometimes the feeling may be indicated in indirect ways, as when a man, conscious of the callings of a higher self, but giving himself up to society or official work or his family, talks much of fulfilling his "duty"—he seeks thereby to excuse himself to himself, to quiet himself.^[9] Nietzsche himself wished to give a bad conscience to other-worldly aspirations, to the antinatural ideals of Christianity and Schopenhauer, i.e., he wished to set up a standard from which these would be felt as a conscious defection.^[10] There is no special difficulty in understanding bad conscience in cases like these.

But in making a problem of "bad conscience" Nietzsche has in mind something different—at least graver. If I should say "guilt" or "sense of guilt," I should more nearly suggest it—though guilt, too, may have different shades of intensity or blackness. The guilt he has in mind is that implied when man is spoken of as a guilty being or as having a guilty nature. It is the religious, or more specifically still, the Christian conception of guilt, the conception essentially shared by Schopenhauer, that concerns him. With it a man feels wrong in his essential make-up, particularly in the animal ground-work of his being. He looks on his natural impulses with an evil eye, finds something praiseworthy in denying them, chastising them, mortifying them.^[11] Sometimes one goes so far in painful self-analysis that one draws up a list of the things that make one ashamed of oneself—as Pope Innocent III did, who enumerated "impure procreation, nauseous nourishment in the womb, baseness of the material out of which man grows, abominable stenches, secretion of spittle, urine, and excrement."^[12] How could an attitude like this—a bad conscience about man as man—have come about? What were its probable beginnings?

Nietzsche starts out by saying that guilt originally was a form of debt—or rather a development of it under certain conditions. The German word Schuld, I may note, means both debt and guilt. A debt arises when one does not pay for something one has received at once, but if one does not pay eventually, one owes something more, namely, the substitute, equivalent, or pledge for the debt, which at the outset was agreed upon. The latter is guilt in the full, or at least distinctive, sense of the term; the act is a wrong or trespass proper and one can only expect the infliction of the penalty. It is interesting to note that in our English version of the Lord's Prayer, "debts" and "sins" (or "trespasses") are used interchangeably,^[13]—a sin or trespass is simply an increased or heightened debt. Following this cue and remembering that, as already explained, creditor and debtor relations come to apply to the community and its individual members, it is easy to see how immorality in general, i.e., non-conformity to the community's mores, may be felt as guilt—i.e., how "bad conscience," in the customary moral sense of the phrase, may arise. In immorality of any kind there would come to be a certain "fearful looking for of judgment," and, the tendency to immorality being observed to be deep, it might easily be concluded that it had its roots in a guilty nature. This is a line of thought, however, which Nietzsche, oddly enough, does not follow up. He starts on it,^[14] and then stops or switches off—and even proceeds to argue at length that punishment does not give the feeling of guilt, and rather works to harden, at best stimulating prudence and taming the transgressor (not making him better).^[15] But has any one ever argued that punishment produced the sense of guilt?—the latter being obviously the direct result of violating an admitted standard. Surely, to call in something extraordinary and catastrophic to explain "bad conscience," because punishment does not account for it, seems strange and unnecessary. Yet this is what Nietzsche does. For directly after arguing the inefficacy of punishment, he broaches his own special view. This is that bad conscience had its origin in that most thoroughgoing of all the changes which man has experienced in the course of his history, the change consequent on coming definitively under the jurisdiction (Bann) of society and of peace. Up to this time—I need not say that Nietzsche is referring to a prehistoric period—he had been little more than a wild, roving animal, free to follow all his natural instincts, including those to pursue, surprise, injure, and kill. Suddenly, however, he found himself subjected to a social strait-jacket, and his old instincts were deprived of an outlet. With then no outer vent, but still fresh and strong, these instincts turned on their possessor—man became hostile, cruel to himself. "Enmity, cruelty, pleasure in pursuit, in surprise, in change, in destruction—all this turning itself against the possessor of such instincts, this is the origin of 'bad conscience.' The man who, in lack of outer enemies and oppositions, confined under a close, oppressive, and unvarying régime of mores, went at himself impatiently, rending, pursuing, biting, startling, mistreating himself, this animal, put into a cage to be tamed and bruising himself against its bars, this creature, who, deprived of his wilderness and consumed with homesickness for it, has to make out of himself a field of adventure, a place of torture, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness—this fool, this longing and despairing captive became the inventor of 'bad conscience.'" The change in situation was so great that Nietzsche compares it to what water-animals must have experienced when they were first obliged to live on land, and, instead of being upborne, had to go on foot and "carry themselves"—a horrible heaviness seized upon them. In default of guidance from their old impulses, men had to fall back on thinking, reasoning, calculating, combining causes and effects, in general on their "consciousness"—the organ in them that had been poorest developed and was most liable to err. Never on earth was there such feeling of misery, such leaden discomfort as then; and yet the old instincts were still there and unsatisfied, and blindly produced the result just mentioned.^[16]

If it be asked how man could be subjugated, what or who there was to subject him, the answer is "other men." Some superior group or race, falling on wandering, formless populations, subjugated them and clapped their iron rule upon them. The feeling of misery, the unsatisfied instincts preying on their possessor, which make the essence of "bad conscience," do not appear in the conquering, ruling class, but in the conquered. "Bad conscience" is not a universal phenomenon, and the conquerors, as Nietzsche conceives them in the present instance, are quite without it in what they do.^[17]

Nietzsche notes that all depends, in his theory, on the suddenness of the supposed change to which the wild populations were subjected; if there had been a gradual, voluntary passing from a wild to a civilized (or semi-civilized) state, an organic growing into new conditions, the old instincts would have fallen little by little into disuse and lost the vigor and edge needed to produce the characteristic features of the new phenomenon. The roving populations were violently subjected—there was no give and take, no contract: the earliest "state," Nietzsche remarks (and here he expresses a not uncommon opinion), was a fearful tyranny—it was only in this way that the raw formless material could be kneaded, made pliant, and given a shape.^[18] He does not mean (I take it) that this was done for all the world at once, but only that the process of subjugation and social formation was of this character as it occurred: always was there for those subjected a violent break with their animal past, the old instincts then surviving in latent form and forced to act in the subterranean way described. Neither does he mean that the full result—bad conscience as we find it, for instance, in Buddhism, Christianity, and Schopenhauer—was reached at once; it suffices to his theory if the general characteristic features of the new phenomenon appeared—if men savagely turned on themselves, and preyed on themselves, however confused their feelings might be.^[19]

The theory probably strikes the reader (as it has me) as far-fetched and artificial, and I should add that Nietzsche simply speaks of it as "my hypothesis" and calls the exposition of it which we have—as it turns out, the only one—a "first preliminary expression." And yet it covers three points in the phenomenon in a rather striking manner; first, the sharpness of "bad conscience," its stinginess and fierceness, these being traced to primitive instincts of cruelty—simple departure from an admitted standard might not yield anything so extreme; second, the sense of a guilty nature (not merely of wrong acts), man's animal make-up being particularly in mind—this coming from a forced and violent break with an animal past; third, the lack of reason and intelligence in the phenomenon (as Nietzsche views the matter, for he regards it as an Erkrankung), this because a hitherto unused instrument, the conscious reasoning mind, was now for the first time acting.

Positive proofs of the hypothesis are, of course, impossible—Nietzsche does not offer any. I suspect that the idea of it came to him from something he observed—or thought he observed—in quarters nearer home. We find him describing, for instance, the probable spiritual fortunes of a German noble, when brought under the influence of the Church in the early Middle Ages and shut up in a monastery. It is in the course of a discussion of two historic methods of "bettering" man, one of taming the animal man, the other of rearing a certain type. These are zoölogical terms, and the former process is like what goes on in menageries with wild beasts—they are weakened, their power to harm is diminished, they are made sickly through fear, pain, wounds, and hunger. It seemed to him that something of this sort was what a German "blond beast" underwent, when he was tamed by the Church, above all when lured into a monastery. The Church was a kind of menagerie, and the most beautiful examples of the "blond beast" were everywhere hunted down in its interest. And how did one of these "bettered" nobles look within the monastery walls? Nietzsche answers, "like a caricature of man, like an abortion; he had become a 'sinner,' he was fast in a cage, he had been shut in between horrible conceptions.… There he lay, sick, wretched, malevolent against himself: full of hatred against the impulses of life, full of suspicion against everything that was still strong and happy."^[20] Plainly it is a phenomenon much like that to which we have just been attending—only that now it is a superior type of man instead of a wandering savage who is subjugated, and that the subjugating force is spiritual rather than physical. What seems to me likely is that Nietzsche generalized from instances of this kind. The passage is in a later book than Genealogy of Morals, but the reflection may have been earlier. A similar psychology of bad conscience is presupposed in another passage. Answering the question, "What is it in Christianity we fight against?" he says, "That it seeks to crush the strong, to take away their spirit, to exploit their bad hours and wearinesses, to convert their proud assurance into unrest and distress of conscience; that it knows how to turn superior instincts into poison and to make them sick, till their force, their will to power turns backwards, turns against themselves—till the strong go to pieces from the extravagances of their self-contempt and self-mistreatment: that appalling way of going to pieces, the most illustrious example of which is furnished by Pascal."^[21] The same essential idea is repeated when he says that now that the slave-morality of humility, selflessness, absolute obedience has conquered in the world, ruling natures are condemned either to hypocrisy or to torments of conscience.^[22] It is an identical inner experience in all these cases, and the process of generating it is the same. Whether the conquerors are an early superior race or a refined spiritual power like Christianity, whether those conquered are primitive roving populations or splendid examples of the "blond beast," like German nobles of the early Middle Ages, conquest lies at the basis of the phenomenon, instincts that had been free and strong before turning while still strong against their possessor and making him ill. The amount of truth in the view may be left to future criticism to disentangle.

Despite Nietzsche's unsympathetic tone, he is far from regarding the rise of bad conscience as an unmixed evil—and he warns us against thinking lightly of it. Let one read § 18, and note also the close of § 16, of Genealogy of Morals, II. When—he says in substance—man turns against himself in the way described, when his old Bosheit is directed inward, a new line of possibilities is opened for him; he awakens an interest, a surprise, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something were heralding itself in him, as if he were no goal, but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise. Sickness is utilizable—it is one of Nietzsche's constant points of view—and this sickness may be one only as pregnancy is.^[23] A new kind of self may be fashioned by the cruel instincts working remorselessly on the material against which they turn—if they criticise, contradict, despise, say "no" to this and that and burn it in, it may all be to this end. He speaks of this active bad conscience as a veritable womb of ideal and imaginative results, a bringer forth of a fullness of new strange affirmations and beauties. It may be, he adds, that it first created beauty in general—"for what would 'beautiful' mean, if contradiction had not first been sensibly felt, if the ugly had not first said to itself, 'I am ugly'?" At least, after this hint, he thinks that the enigma becomes less enigmatical how far an ideal, a beauty may be intimated in contradictory conceptions such as self-lessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice—one thing being henceforth plain, namely, of what sort the pleasure is from the start which the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person experiences: it is a pleasure belonging to cruelty.^[24] This line of reflection is developed but a very little way, and Nietzsche is far from reaching a balanced view on the general subject. But we may say with assurance that he was not without appreciation for ascetic ideals, and recognized a place for them in the world, even if he did not personally share them.^[25] Moreover, he had no repugnance to bad conscience in itself; he wished rather, as we have already seen, to create it in a new form, to give it to persons quite innocent of it at the present time, namely, to those who, disloyal to this world, cultivate other-world aspirations, anti-natural ideas—to Christians (of the historic type), to followers of Schopenhauer.^[26] He once said that for some a spasm of repentance may be the highest exercise of their humanity,^[27] and he wanted the Christian world to have a taste—and more than a taste—of it. Whether he was strong enough to conquer in this fashion and breed bad conscience anew—for it is a question of strength and conquest—is one of the future's problems.

 

II

The idea of a moral order in the world rests ultimately, according to Nietzsche, on an attempt to infect the very nature of things with conceptions of guilt and punishment such as those we have been considering.^[28] He states the personal form of the assumption thus: "That there is a will of God as to what man is to do, to refrain from doing; that the worth of a people, or an individual, is determined by the extent to which the will of God is obeyed; that in the fortunes of a people or individual, the will of God demonstrates itself as governing, i.e., as punishing and rewarding according to the degree of obedience."^[29] We may substitute for the "will of God" here an "Eternal Tendency making for righteousness" in the world, or the "Moral Law" (as often conceived), and say virtually the same thing,

"Nur mit em bischen andern Worten."

Nietzsche thinks that the idea arose somewhat as follows^[30]:—The starting-point is individuals conceived of as in debt or guilty toward the community. The community is seen, however, to be not of the moment only, but an extension of the past, so that there is debt to ancestors as well as to the existing generation. The debt thus grows larger, and sacrifices are an endeavor to repay. In time the remotest ancestors become heroes, Gods—particularly does this happen with the ancestors of a powerful and conquering race. Finally, perhaps as the result of a conflict of races and the ascendancy of some one, the idea arises of a supreme, perhaps an only, God. The exact nature of the God-making process is a secondary matter; the important point is that at last debt or guilt to a God arises. Disobedience to the community's mores becomes trespass against the God, sin; if the mores are reduced to what I have ventured to call essential morality, this is none the less, rather the more the case. And now what is the requital for guilt in the new situation, what the satisfaction to the Invisible Creditor? Essentially the the same as to the human creditor. As in lieu of the unpaid debt, the latter could exact a certain amount of pain and humiliation, so with the God. To him also suffering is an equivalent (Ausgleichung) for loss—he too is satisfied when he can inflict or witness it; he has pleasure in suffering, i.e., cruel instincts, just as man has—only as his debtor presents him the spectacle of suffering, is he reconciled. The religions of antiquity, the so-called "ethical religions" included (except atheistic Buddhism), do not get beyond this circle of conceptions. For all wrongdoing pain must follow—it is the satisfaction or compensation par excellence. Even Christianity is no exception—I mean of course the historical movement going by that name, not modern rationalizations or emasculations. It perpetuates the Israelitish view that sin is debt and must be paid, atoned for,^[31] and sometimes the guilt is so great that it cannot be atoned for, i.e., suffering must continue without end. It is true that Christianity is a redemptive religion, but this does not mean that satisfaction is not exacted, but only that it is rendered by other than the guilty parties—one next to God paid with his sufferings the debt due from men (or, shall we say? from some men, since the rest have still to suffer and to suffer forever) ^b

"Sorrow follows wrong"—this Sophoelean refrain contains the gist of the idea of a moral order. It is accordingly an easy inference that wherever we find sorrow (suffering or ill-fortune), wrong must have preceded it.^{[32] c} So the prophets of ancient Israel interpreted the calamities which befell that people; and it was with such a view that later priestly hands rewrote and more or less falsified the early history of the nation, attributing successes to obedience and reverses to disobedience to the nation's God.^[33] Sometimes the view is carried to such lengths—for example by Schopenhauer—that life itself, in which so much suffering is involved, is regarded in the light of a punishment, the result of a fall (Abfall) in metaphysical regions; and if all earthly things pass away, it is thought to show that they ought to pass away, eternal justice demanding the penalty.^[34] We in America and England are familiar with a more comprehensible and less ambitious form of the same belief in Matthew Arnold's attempt to find chiefly moral causes for the downfall of men and nations—to make life and history so far a parable of a moral order. It is a form of faith to which some of us have clung the more, if we have had to renounce much that we once held sacred; for with it we could still feel morality to be central in the scheme of things, and so far have an object of quasi-religious reverence. Whether, we have said to ourselves, a God inflicts harm and suffering on man for wrongdoing or not, they are inflicted—there is a natural and necessary connection between righteousness and life, and between unrighteousness and death; even if men succeed outwardly in wrongdoing, their conscience does not leave them at ease, and sooner or later their success is undone. But Nietzsche's criticism follows us even into this stronghold. It is true that wrong, in the strict sense, i.e., breaking an agreement, brings naturally inner unrest to one doing it, and ordinarily has to be compensated for as well.^[35] But wrong in the broad sense in which it is often used, wrong as injury and intent to injure simply, does not necessarily have these consequences. If there is no agreement, explicit or implicit, to the contrary—and there is implicit agreement between all members of the same group or community—injury need cause no bad conscience. There was no bad conscience (according to Nietzsche's view^[36], when early superior races fell on wandering populations and deprived them of their liberty, as described in the earlier part of the chapter—not even if they did all manner of violence to them. Even within the same society, if it is a caste society and the division of classes is recognized as beneficent or at least necessary, the ruling class may accept sacrifices from the classes below them without twinges of conscience, and the lower classes may not feel wronged in having to make them.^[37] It is an error in psychology to think that böse men are necessarily wretched inwardly or that the passionate are unhappy.^[38] There are böse men who are happy—a species about whom moralists are silent.^[39] Böse impulses become unpleasant when carried to excess or when inhibited by other impulses—they are so far like impulses in general, like pity, for example, which may be felt as miserable weakness, or like thinking, which when unrestrained may become painful.^[40] More suffering comes from opinions about the passions than from the passions themselves.^[41] Indeed, why it is suffering that must needs follow an evil deed is not clear—why not as well another evil deed?^[42] That the evildoer's work is undone sooner or later is equally a doubtful proposition—indeed it is less likely to happen later than earlier, since an order of things may be established on that basis and this be consented to all around. Nietzsche sums the matter up by saying, "That in the consequences of actions reward and punishment are already contained—this thought of an immanent justice is fundamentally false";^[43] and, commenting on the Laws of Manu, he offers interesting suggestions as to the way in which the natural consequences of actions have been turned into rewards and punishments.^[44] As for a moral order in the more general sense that the good, kindly, benevolent impulses have a natural sanction, in that they alone contribute to man's advancement and progress, we have already seen Nietzsche contesting such a premise. Evil (böse), unfriendly, destructive impulses are as vital in the total economy of the world as those called good. It is as necessary to be evil to things that cumber the ground as to be good to those that have the promise and power of life.

 

III

I pass over briefly Nietzsche's scattering remarks on obligation or "ought"—there is no special treatment of the subject and his view may be anticipated from what has gone before. "Ought" is primarily a phenomenon in contractual relations— for in every exchange not completed at once, the debtor binds himself and is in turn bound; and yet wherever there is a relation of enforced subordination, whether of individuals to other individuals, of individuals to a group, or of impulses to other impulses in the same individual, something similar arises. From the controlling side, it means, "so must you do," from the controlled, "so must I do." At bottom it is a relation of wills, one commanding, the other obeying—for there is no sense in a command, where there is not something to obey.^[45] This holds of an individual's inner life as truly as of society: one impulse gets on top, commands, the others have to obey.^[46] That regulation of impulses which is implied in morality rests in the last resort on one impulse that has the upper hand.^[47] In relation to this dominant impulse, we have to let the question Why? go.^[48] Of an ought over and above human relations and human wills, Nietzsche knows nothing.^{[49] d} "Ought" is our creation, though it is a necessary one, growing out of the fact that we are at bottom wills—and will must either command or obey. The great man must command, cannot be saved from doing so; and his imperative "thou oughtst" is not derived from the nature of things, but seeing the higher he must put it through, compel obedience to it.^[50] There is nothing wrong or unnatural in this—rather may it be as natural for the weaker, the unsteadier, to obey as for the stronger and higher to command; it may be positively easier for the weaker to do this after the first recalcitrancy,^[51] may be even a relief [compare, I may say on my own account, the sentiment of Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty"]. ^e That is, two types of individuals may fit organically together in a society—and two kinds of impulses may fit organically together in a single soul.^[52] There is thus a strictly natural order of rank in the world (Rangordnung). The order of precedence, the classification of higher and lower, which appears in a social group, is typical of a phenomenon that is universal in nature—at least in organic nature. "We may consider all that has to be done to preserve the organism as a 'moral demand': there is a 'thou oughtst' for the single organs which comes to them from the commanding organ."^[53]

 

IV

We are accordingly led straightway to what Nietzsche considers the very problematical notion of equality. He takes it broadly—perhaps too broadly—and appears to have no objection to it in and for itself. We may seek equality, he says, either by bringing others down to our level, or by raising ourselves and all up to a higher level.^[54] He has, too, as we have already seen, a sense of the intimate unity of human nature and is instinctively offended at the thought of using others merely as means to our own ends.^[55] He admits that it was the noblest spirits who were led astray by the ideas of the French Revolution, in which "equality" played so large a part (though he makes an exception in the case of Goethe).^[56] And yet in the actual constitution of things there is more inequality than equality—and not merely artificial inequality owing to outer conditions, but natural inequality. The mark of a good man for Schopenhauer was "that he less than the rest makes a difference between himself and others";^[57] but if differences exist, what boots it? Must the good man be a little blind—an idealist, or an artist? A tendency of goodness to stupidity (Dummheit) has been already noticed. It is sometimes said that to God all men are equal, and Carlyle spoke of Islam as a "perfect equalizer of men";^[58] but so from a high mountain the tallest men are pygmies like the rest—there is no distinguishing vision from so far off. ^f Nietzsche does not question that it may be expedient to treat men as equal under certain circumstances or that there are conditions in which differences between them may be actually negligible. He notes, for instance, that after some hours of mountain climbing a scamp and a saint are two tolerably similar creatures—exhaustion being the shortest way to equality and brotherhood.^[59] He gives also a serious instance. When communities are first organized and all alike are in need of protection from the enemy, men may be considered equal. Even long-established communities manifest equalitarian tendencies, whenever danger arises, such as war or earthquake or flood—differences of rank and privilege being quite lost sight of in face of a common misfortune. But save in these exceptional circumstances, native differences between men, gradations of rank of some sort, tend ever to appear in old and well-established communities; and this also happens whenever social order is broken down and anarchy sets in (cf, what happened at Corcyra, according to the account of Thucydides).^[60] The differences really exist all the time, however they may fail to show themselves, and Nietzsche thinks it not truthful or just not to recognize them, and estimate men accordingly. As animal life ranks higher than plant life, and human life ranks above that of the animal, so there is an ascending scale of potencies in human life itself—all men are not on the same level: some are higher, others lower.^[61] We in our day are apt to collocate equal with just—"just and equal," we are accustomed to say. But if justice means giving to each his own (suum cuique), and if one person is on one level of life and another on another, then to treat them as if they were on the same level is not justice, but injustice. "Equality to those who are equal, inequality to those who are unequal"—this were the true teaching of justice.^[62] "Wrong lies never in unequal rights, it lies in the claim to 'equal rights.'"^[63] "The doctrine of equality! … But there is no more poisonous poison; for it appears to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice."^[64]

The present-day sentiment in favor of equality become then a curiosity to Nietzsche, and he seeks to account for it. He does so in this way—really two ways, which on the surface do not harmonize. First, he views it as an accompaniment of the dominating place which the mass have won in modern societies.^[65] The instinct of the mass is to say (and there is something of the spirit of revenge in it),^[66] "there are none better than we, all are equal, no one is to have rights and privileges above the rest." In other words, it is a doctrine for a purpose, a kind of tool in a class-war—the end being to bring all men into one class. Second, the doctrine is the reflection of a certain matter-of-fact resemblance or process causing resemblance—which is accomplishing itself in the modern world. We latter-day beings are a mixture, purity of blood and race is disappearing—we are actually becoming alike: the old differences of high and low cut small figure. Gaps between man and man, between class and class, variety of types, a will to be oneself, to mark oneself off, the pathos of distance,—these are marks of every strong time;^[67] but we are fallen on other days—we want no gaps, we are very sociable, it is sheep like sheep, and we hardly want a shepherd, ni dieu ni maître, as our advance-guard, the socialists, sometimes say.^{[68] g}

Some argue that while there may not be, and perhaps should not be, outer equality, there is an inner equality, that souls are equal; but Nietzsche questions it. Souls are as different as bodies; what strong ones endure and profit by may undo average natures—what nourishes and refreshes the higher kind of man may be to others poison. Dangerous books, for instance, that break in pieces and desolate lower souls may act like herald-calls to others and elicit their bravest.^[69] His own books are not for all—he himself is not good for all: his problems address themselves in the nature of the case selectively to a few ears.^{[70] h} He questions indeed whether really great and beautiful things can be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.^[71] In the same way he sees basis for the distinctions of esoteric and exoteric in a doctrine or a religion, corresponding to different dates grades of intelligence in its followers.^[72] Even the same words people understand differently—they have different feelings, scent, wishes, in connection with them: "what group of sensations and ideas are in the foreground of a soul and are quickest aroused, is the ultimately decisive things about its rank."^[73] Not all have the right to the same judgments; Nietzsche will not admit the right of others to criticise Wagner as he does.^[74] He hates his pure "I will" from course mouths.^[75] Independence is for the fewest—a privilege of the strong.^[76] One must have the right even to do one's own thinking, and not all have it, for right is conditioned on power.^[77] Men are indeed so different that there cannot be an universal law for them; it is selfishness to say that what I should do under given circumstances is imperative on all others—a blind kind of selfishness too, since it shows that I have not yet discovered myself and created my own ideal, something that can never be that of another, not to say of all.^[78] "And how indeed could there be a 'common good'! The expression contradicts itself: that which could be common has ever only small value. In the end it must be as it is and ever has been: great things remain for those who are great, abysses for the deep, delicate things and tremulous things for the fine, and, to sum up briefly, everything rare for the rare."^[79] The way, the ideal, there is not; that such a thing may be, all must be alike, on the same level.^[80]

Nietzsche goes so far as to admit that, because of radical inequality, of ascending grades of life, sacrifice is necessary. Our natural instincts not only of sympathy, but of fair play, lead as to regard all forms of life, even the lowest, as ends in themselves and to wish for each a full and perfect development. But these instincts have only a limited scope in a world constituted like ours, and if we insist on following them absolutely we in effect posit another order of things than this we know—something which Schopenhauer did, at the same time turning his back on this world and feeling that the height of ethics was in renouncing it. For here, save within narrow limits, life lives off life—as the plant off the inorganic world, so the animal off the plant, and higher animal off the lower animal (or the plant). There is no way of avoiding this—the law of sacrifice is ingrained into the constitution of things. The necessity extends even to the relations of men with one another. That some may develope to their full stature, others must be content with less than theirs. At the basis of ancient culture, as already noted, were slaves, and slaves equally exist today, the only question being whether there is a culture compensating for the enormous sacrifices which they—our working, business, professional classes—make. The law of sacrifice may be freely accepted, but it cannot be changed; Nietzsche thinks that it has been accepted in the past and might conceivably be again. And perhaps (I may add on my own account), if our working and business and professional classes could see above and beyond them, and as a result of the freedom they make possible, an Æschylus, a Sophocles, a Phidias, an Aristotle, in short a drama, a sculpture, an architecture, a noble civic and intellectual life, like that of the ancient Greeks, they might be less unwilling to bring their sacrifice than they are—I say "perhaps" and "might," because the indications are at present that they think more of themselves than of anything else, and only care to "get out of life" (as the saying is) all that they possibly can.

1. Mixed Opinions etc., § 90.
2. Werke (pocket ed.), V, vii; cf. Joyful Science, § 296.
3. Dawn of Day, § 9.
4. Human, etc., § 351.
5. Cf. the suggestions of Will to Power, § 328.
6. Werke, XII, 123-4, § 243.
7. Essay on "Self-Reliance."
8. Werke, XI, 266, § 260.
9. Ibid., XI, 216, § 145. "All that he now does, is brave and proper (ordentlich)—and yet he has with it a bad conscience. For the extraordinary (Ausserordentliche) is his task" (Joyful Science, § 186).
10. Genealogy etc., II, § 24.
11. Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §§ 16, 18, 24. Schopenhauer's view is given in his Werke (Grisebach ed.), II, 596, 669 f., 681 ff., 710 f.; IV, 78; V, 298 f., 317, 329 ff. See Volkelt's chap., "Das Dasein als Schuld," in his Schopenhauer (particularly pp. 280–2).
12. Genealogy etc., II, § 7.
13. Matthew vi, 12; Luke xi, 4. The Greek words are respectively ὀϕειλήματα and ἁμαρτίασ; the word for debtors is virtually the same in both places.
14. See Genealogy etc., II, § 4 (p. 350—the paging is the same in both pocket and octavo editions of the German original of this book); also, § 8 (p. 360), and § 14 (p. 37,5); the analogy of the community and its members to the creditor and debtor is worked out in § 9.
15. Ibid., II, §§ 15, 16.
16. Ibid., II, § 16.
17. Ibid., II, § 17; ef. I, § 11, and a remark as to the aggressive man in general, II, § 11 (p. 366).
18. Ibid., II, § 17.
19. Nietzsche once speaks of what has been described as the crude beginnings (Rohzustand) of the feeling of guilt (ibid., III, § 20).
20. Twilight of the Idols, vii, § 2.
21. Will to Power, § 252 (the italics are mine). As to Pascal, cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 229; The Antichristian, § 5.
22. Will to Power, § 870 (italics are mine).
23. Genealogy etc., II, § 19.
24. Nietzsche makes a supplementary remark here: "So much toward tracing the origin of the 'unegoistic' as a moral value, and toward marking out the soil out of which this value has grown: first bad conscience, first the will for self-mistreatment furnishes the presupposition for the value of the unegoistic" (ibid., II, § 18). Nietzsche must use "unegoistic" here in a more special sense than that in which he recognized the significance and value of the unegoistic for social formations in general, as noted previously (pp. 216-7); and even the present remark does not deny the value of the unegoistic.
25. See the discussion of ascetic ideals in Genealogy etc., III—the whole of the treatise is devoted to that subject. In a certain broad (not the Christian) sense, it may be a question whether Nietzsche did not share ascetic ideals.
26. Cf. Genealogy etc., II, § 24.
27. Beyond Good and Evil, § 252.
28. Cf. Genealogy etc., II, § 22; Werke, XI, 373, § 569; Zarathustra, II, V, XX; Will to Power, § 1021; The Antichristian, § 26.
29. The Antichristian, § 26.
30. Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §§ 19-22. There is an imperfect anticipatory statement of the general view in Zarathustra, II, xx.
31. Cf. Ezekiel xviii, 4; Romans vi, 23; James i, 15.
32. On the moral interpretation of misfortune, see Dawn of Day, §§ 78, 86 (cf. §§ 10, 21).
33. The Antichristian, §§ 25-6.
34. Cf. Zarathustra, II, xx.
35. Cf. Nietzsche's personal confession, "Let one talk as one will about all kinds of immorality: but to be able to endure it! For example, I could not endure a broken word, or even a murder: wasting away (Siechthum) and ruin would sooner or later be my lot!—quite apart from a knowledge of the misdeed or punishment for it" (Werke, XII, 224, § 486).
36. Cf. Genealogy etc., I, § 11.
37. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 258.
38. Joyful Science, § 326.
39. Beyond Good and Evil, § 39.
40. Werke, XI, 201, § 115.
41. Ibid., XT. 202, § 116.
42. Ibid., XIII, 31.5, § 770.
43. Ibid., XIII, 315, § 770; cf. Dawn of Day, § 563.
44. Werke, XIV, 120-1, §§ 2.54-5.
45. Werke, XIII, 216, § 511. Even Kant said, "Denn dieses Sollen ist eigentlich ein Wollen" (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. von Kirchman, p. 78).
46. Ibid., XI, 221, § 155; cf. 199, § 109.
47. Ibid., XI, 200, § 111.
48. Ibid., XI, 201, § 114.
49. Ibid., XIV, 320, § 155.
50. Ibid., XIV, 103, § 227.
51. For all impulses want to rule for the moment at least.
52. Cf. Werke, XIII, 105, § 246; 170, § 393.
53. Ibid., XITI, 170, § 392; cf. the tone of XII, 358, § 675.
54. Human, etc., § 300.
55. Ibid., § 524, and see ante, pp. 65, 126.
56. Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 48.
57. Werke, XIV, 85, § 168, quoting from Schopenhauer's Grundlage der Moral, § 22.
58. Heroes and Hero-Worship, Lect. II.
59. The Wanderer etc., § 263.
60. Ibid., § 31.
61. Cf. Zarathustra, II, vii.
62. Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 48.
63. The Antichristian, § 57; cf. Zarathustra, II, xvi.
64. Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 48.
65. Werke, XIV, 68, § 134.
66. Cf. Zarathustra, II, vii.
67. Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 37.
68. Werke, XIV, 68, § 134; Beyond Good and Evil, § 202.
69. Will to Power, §§ 901, 904; Beyond Good and Evil, § 30.
70. Cf. Zarathustra, IX, xvii, § 1; Genealogy etc., I, § 5.
71. Twilight of the Idols, viii, § 5.
72. Beyond Good and Evil, § 30.
73. Werke, XIV, 411, § 289.
74. Ibid., XIV, 378-9, § 260.
75. Ibid., XIV, 270, § 42.
76. Beyond Good and Evil, § 29.
77. Zarathustra, I, xvii.
78. Joyful Science, § 335.
79. Beyond Good and Evil, § 43.
80. Cf. Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2; Will to Power, § 349.