The German philologist, philosopher, and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is famous for declaring that “God is dead,” an expression of the secularist consequences unleashed by the Enlightenment. Though he was unsparing in his attacks on theism, Nietzsche shared at least one concern with the religious and metaphysical systems he held in such contempt: the problem of pain and how one deals with it.
In Will to Power, Nietzsche provided the following answer to the question of why man is so transfixed by the theistic claim that an unseen world exists behind the one in which we now live: “It is suffering that inspires these conclusions: fundamentally they are desires that such a world should exist; in the same way, to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer.”
Nietzsche’s attacks on theism were not limited merely to the belief in an afterlife. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche questions one of the key premises on which the problem of evil is based—that there is such a thing as “evil”—by criticizing moral conceptions of “good” and “evil,” which he claims are culturally constructed rather than inherently true. In the First Treatise of the book, Nietzsche asserts that the word “good” was first used in reference to the highest caste of society, but that the meaning of the term was altered to suit the “slave morality” of lower socioeconomic groups. In Nietzsche’s “good/evil” philology, the meaning of “good” was changed into the antithesis of the original aristocratic “good,” which itself was re-labelled “evil.” According to Nietzsche, this outcome is a product of the “ressentiment” felt by the weak towards the powerful (“ressentiment” is a psychological state arising from feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, often resulting in self-abasement).
Nietzsche ultimately calls on man to reject the “slave morality” of Christianity, which he regards as false, and to then overcome the nihilism that may result from nonbelief in God by defining for oneself a new value system beyond the human-made constructs of “good” and “evil.”
Excerpts from On the Genealogy of Morality
Preface
3. Given a skepticism that is characteristic of me, to which I reluctantly admit—for it is directed towards morality, towards everything on earth that has until now been celebrated as morality—a skepticism that first appeared so early in my life, so spontaneously, so irrepressibly, so much in contradiction to my environment, age, models, origins, that I almost have the right to call it my “a priori”—it was inevitable that early on my curiosity and my suspicion as well would stop at the question: what, in fact, is the origin of our good and evil? In fact, the problem of the origin of evil haunted me as a thirteen-year-old lad: at an age when one has “half child’s play, half God in one’s heart,” I devoted my first literary child’s play to it, my first philosophic writing exercise—and as to my “solution” to the problem back then, well, I gave the honor to God, as is fitting, and made him the father of evil. Was this what my “a priori” wished of me? that new, immoral, at least immoralistic “a priori” and the, alas! so anti-Kantian, so mysterious “categorical imperative” speaking through it, to which I have since increasingly lent my ear, and not just my ear?… Fortunately I learned early on to distinguish theological from moral prejudice and no longer sought the origin of evil behind the world. A little historical and philological schooling, combined with an innate sense of discrimination in all psychological questions, soon transformed my problem into a different one: under what conditions did man invent those value judgments good and evil? and what value do they themselves have? Have they inhibited or furthered human flourishing up until now? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or, conversely, do they betray the fullness, the power, the will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future? —In response I found and ventured a number of answers; I distinguished ages, peoples, degrees of rank among individuals; I divided up my problem; out of the answers came new questions, investigations, conjectures, probabilities: until I finally had a land of my own, a ground of my own, an entire unspoken growing blossoming world, secret gardens as it were, of which no one was permitted even an inkling… O how we are happy, we knowers, provided we simply know how to be silent long enough!…
First Treatise: “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad”
4. —The pointer to the right path was given to me by the question: what do the terms coined for “good” in the various languages actually mean from an etymological viewpoint? Here I found that they all lead back to the same conceptual transformation—that everywhere the basic concept is “noble,” “aristocratic” in the sense related to the estates, out of which “good” in the sense of “noble of soul,” “high-natured of soul,” “privileged of soul” necessarily develops: a development that always runs parallel to that other one which makes “common,” “vulgar,” “base” pass over finally into the concept “bad.” The most eloquent example of the latter is the German word “schlecht” [bad] itself: which is identical with “schlicht” [plain, simple]—compare “schlechtweg,” “schlechterdings” [simply or downright]—and originally designated the plain, the common man, as yet without a suspecting sideward glance, simply in opposition to the noble one. Around the time of the Thirty-Years’ War, in other words late enough, this sense shifts into the one now commonly used. —With respect to morality’s genealogy this appears to me to be an essential insight; that it is only now being discovered is due to the inhibiting influence that democratic prejudice exercises in the modern world with regard to all questions of origins. And this influence extends all the way into that seemingly most objective realm of natural science and physiology, as I shall merely hint at here. But the nonsense that this prejudice—once unleashed to the point of hate—is able to inflict, especially on morality and history, is shown by Buckle’s notorious case; the plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English descent, sprang forth there once again on its native ground, vehemently like a muddy volcano and with that oversalted, overloud, common eloquence with which until now all volcanoes have spoken.…
6. To this rule that the concept of superiority in politics always resolves itself into a concept of superiority of soul, it is not immediately an exception (although it provides occasion for exceptions) when the highest caste is at the same time the priestly caste and hence prefers for its collective name a predicate that recalls its priestly function. Here, for example, “pure” and “impure” stand opposite each other for the first time as marks of distinction among the estates; and here, too, one later finds the development of a “good” and a “bad” in a sense no longer related to the estates. Incidentally, let one beware from the outset of taking these concept “pure” and “impure” too seriously, too broadly, or even too symbolically: rather all of earlier humanity’s concepts were initially understood in a coarse, crude, superficial, narrow, straightforward, and above all unsymbolic manner, to an extent that we can hardly imagine. The “pure one” is from the beginning simply a human being who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that bring about skin diseases, who doesn’t sleep with the dirty women of the baser people, who abhors blood—nothing more, at least not much more! On the other hand the entire nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy admittedly makes clear why it was precisely here that the valuation opposites could so soon become internalized and heightened in a dangerous manner; and indeed through them gulfs were finally torn open between man and man across which even an Achilles of free-spiritedness will not be able to leap without shuddering. From the beginning there is something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies and in the habits ruling there, ones turned away from action, partly brooding, partly emotionally explosive, habits that have as a consequence the intestinal disease and neurasthenia that almost unavoidably clings to the priests of all ages; but what they themselves invented as a medicine against this diseasedness of theirs—must we not say that in the end it has proved itself a hundred times more dangerous in its aftereffects than the disease from which it was to redeem them? Humanity itself still suffers from the after-effects of these priestly cure naivétes! Think, for example, of certain dietary forms (avoidance of meat), of fasting, of sexual abstinence, of the flight “into the wilderness”… in addition, the whole anti-sensual metaphysics of priests, which makes lazy and overrefined, their self-hypnosis after the manner of the fakir and Brahmin—brahma used as glass pendant and idée fixe—and the final, only too understandable general satiety along with its radical cure, nothingness (or God—the longing for a unio mystica with God is the longing of the Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvana—and nothing more!). With priests everything simply becomes more dangerous, not only curatives and healing arts, but also arrogance, revenge, acuity, excess, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease; —though with some fairness one could also add that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil —and these are, after all, the two basic forms of the previous superiority of man over other creatures!…
8. —But you don’t understand that? You don’t have eyes for something that has taken two thousand years to achieve victory? …There is nothing to wonder at in this: all lengthy things are difficult to see, to see in their entirety, This however is what happened: out of the trunk of that tree of revenge and hate, Jewish hate—the deepest and most sublime hate, namely an ideal-creating, value-reshaping hate whose like has never before existed on earth—grew forth something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all kinds of love: —and from what other trunk could it have grown? …But by no means should one suppose it grew upwards as, say, the true negation of that thirst for revenge, as the opposite of Jewish hate! No, the reverse is the truth! This love grew forth out of it, as its crown, as the triumphant crown unfolding itself broadly and more broadly in purest light and sunny fullness, reaching out, as it were, in the realm of light and of height, for the goals of that hate—for victory, for booty, for seduction—with the same drive with which the roots of that hate sunk themselves ever more thoroughly and greedily down into everything that had depth and was evil. This Jesus of Nazareth, as the embodied Gospel of Love, this “Redeemer” bringing blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinners—was he not precisely seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, the seduction and detour to precisely those Jewish values and reshapings of the ideal? Has not Israel reached the final goal of its sublime desire for revenge precisely via the detour of this “Redeemer,” this apparent adversary and dissolver of Israel? Does it not belong to the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge, of a far-seeing, subterranean, slow-working and precalculating revenge, that Israel itself, before all the world, should deny as its mortal enemy and nail to the cross the actual tool of its revenge, so that “all the world,” namely all the opponents of Israel, could take precisely this bait without thinking twice? And, out of all sophistication of the spirit, could one think up any more dangerous bait? Something that in its enticing, intoxicating, anesthetizing, destructive power might equal that symbol of the “holy cross,” that gruesome paradox of a “god on the cross,” that mystery of an inconceivable, final, extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man? …What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo Israel, with its revenge and revaluation of all values, has thus far again and again triumphed over all other ideals, over all more noble ideals.
10. The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings denied the true reaction, that of the deed, who recover their losses only through an imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant yes-saying to oneself, from the outset slave morality says “no” to an “outside,” to a “different,” to a “not-self”: and this “no” is its creative deed. This reversal of the value-establishing glance—this necessary direction toward the outside instead of back onto oneself—belongs to the very nature of ressentiment: in order to come into being, slave-morality always needs an opposite and external world; it needs, psychologically speaking external stimuli in order to be able to act at all, —its action is, from the ground up, reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble manner of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks out its opposite only in order to say “yes” to itself still more gratefully and more jubilantly—its negative concept “low” “common” “bad” is only an after-birth, a pale contrast-image in relation to its positive basic concept, saturated through and through with life and passion; “we noble ones, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy ones!” When the noble manner of valuation lays a hand on reality and sins against it, this occurs relative to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently acquainted, indeed against a real knowledge of which it rigidly defends itself: in some cases it forms a wrong idea of the sphere it holds in contempt, that of the common man, of the lower people; on the other hand, consider that the effect of contempt, of looking down on, of the superior glance—assuming that it does falsify the image of the one held in contempt—will in any case fall far short of the falsification with which the suppressed hate, the revenge of the powerless, lays hand on its opponent—in effigy, of course. Indeed there is too much carelessness in contempt, too much taking-lightly, too much looking away and impatience mixed in, even too much of a feeling of cheer in oneself, for it to be capable of transforming its object into a real caricature and monster. Do not fail to hear the almost benevolent nuances that, for example, the Greek nobility places in all words by which it distinguishes the lower people from itself; how they are mixed with and sugared by a kind of pity, considerateness, leniency to the point that almost all words that apply to the common man ultimately survive as expressions for “unhappy” “pitiful” (compare deilos, deilaios, poneros, mochtheros, the latter two actually designating the common man as work-slave and beast of burden)—and how, on the other hand, to the Greek ear “bad” “low” “unhappy” have never ceased to end on the same note, with a tone color in which “unhappy” predominates: this as inheritance of the old, nobler aristocratic manner of valuation that does not deny itself even in its contempt (let philologists be reminded of the sense in which oizyros, anolbos, flemon, dystychein, xymphora are used). The “well-born” simply felt themselves to be the “happy”; they did not first have to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies, to talk themselves into it, to lie themselves into it (as all human beings of ressentiment tend to do); and as full human beings, overloaded with power and therefore necessarily active, they likewise did not know how to separate activity out from happiness, —for them being active is of necessity included in happiness (whence eu prattein takes its origins)—all of this very much in opposition to “happiness” on the level of the powerless, oppressed, those festering with poisonous and hostile feelings, in whom it essentially appears as narcotic, anesthetic, calm, peace, “Sabbath,” relaxation of mind and stretching of limbs, in short, passively. While the noble human being lives with himself in confidence and openness (gennaios “noble-born” underscores the nuance “sincere” and probably also “naive”) the human being of ressentiment is neither sincere, nor naive, nor honest and frank with himself. His soul looks obliquely at things; his spirit loves hiding places, secret passages and backdoors, everything hidden strikes him as his world, his security, his balm; he knows all about being silent, not forgetting, waiting, belittling oneself for the moment, humbling oneself. A race of such human beings of ressentiment in the end necessarily becomes more prudent than any noble race, it will also honor prudence in an entirely different measure: namely as a primary condition of existence. With noble human beings, in contrast, prudence is likely to have a refined aftertaste of luxury and sophistication about it: —here it is not nearly as essential as the complete functional reliability of the regulating unconscious instincts of even a certain imprudence, for example the gallant making-straight-for it, be it toward danger, be it toward the enemy, or that impassioned suddenness of anger, love, reverence, gratitude, and revenge by which noble souls in all ages have recognized each other. For the ressentiment of the noble human being, when it appears in him, runs its course and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, therefore it does not poison—on the other hand it does not appear at all in countless cases where it is unavoidable in all the weak and powerless. To be unable for any length of time to take his enemies, his accidents, his misdeeds themselves seriously—that is the sign of strong, full natures in which there is an excess of formative reconstructive, healing power that also makes one forget (a good example of this from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and base deeds committed against him and who was only unable to forgive because he—forgot). Such a human is simply able to shake off with a single shrug a collection of worms that in others would dig itself in; here alone is also possible—assuming that it is at all possible on earth—the true “love of one’s enemies.” What great reverence for his enemies a noble human being has! —and such reverence is already a bridge to love… After all, he demands his enemy for himself, as his distinction; he can stand no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to hold in contempt and a very great deal to honor! On the other hand, imagine “the enemy” as the human being of ressentiment conceives of him—and precisely here is his deed, his creation: he has conceived of “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” and this indeed as the basic concept starting from which he now also thinks up, as reaction and counterpart, a “good one” —himself!…
Third Treatise: What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?
28. If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, has until now had no meaning. His existence on earth contained no goal; “to what end man at all?” —was a question without answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny a still greater “for nothing!” resounded as refrain. Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a diseased animal: but the suffering itself was not his problem, rather that the answer was missing to the scream of his question: “to what end suffering?” Man, the bravest animal and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering in itself: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering itself, was the curse that thus far lay stretched out over humanity—and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning! Thus far it has been the only meaning; any meaning is better than no meaning at all; in every respect the ascetic ideal has been the “faute de mieux” par excellence there has been thus far. In it suffering was interpreted; the enormous emptiness seemed filled; the door fell shut to all suicidal nihilism. The interpretation—there is no doubt—brought new suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, gnawing more at life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of guilt… But in spite of all this—man was rescued by it, he had a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense, “without-sense,” now he could will something—no matter for the moment in what direction, to what end, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the willing that has received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material, this abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and of beauty, this longing away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself—all of this means—let us dare to grasp this—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! …And, to say again at the end what I said at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness than not will…
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 2-3, 12, 14-21, 117.