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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? 1 39

leitus shunned is still just what we too avoid now-
adays: the noise and democratic babble of the
Ephesians, their politics, their news from the
" empire " (I mean, of course, Persia), their market-
trade in " the things of to-day " — for there is one
thing from which we philosophers especially need
a rest — from the things of " to-day. " We honour
the silent, the cold, the noble, the far, the past, every-
thing, in fact, at the sight of which the soul is not
bound to brace itself up and defend itself — some-
thing with which one can speak without speaking
aloud. Just listen now to the tone a spirit has when
it speaks ; every spirit has its own tone and loves
its own tone. That thing yonder, for instance, is
bound to be an agitator, that is, a hollow head, a
hollow mug : whatever may go into him, everything
comes back from him dull and thick, heavy with the
echo of the great void. That spirit yonder nearly
always speaks hoarse : has he, perchance, thought
himself hoarse ? It may be so — ask the physiolo-
gists — but he who thinks in words, thinks as a
speaker and not as a thinker (it shows that he does
not think of objects or think objectively, but only of
his relations with objects — that, in point of fact, he
only thinks of himself and his audience). This third
one speaks aggressively, he comes too near our body,
his breath blows on us — we shut our mouth involun-
tarily, although he speaks to us through a book : the
tone of his style supplies the reason — he has no
time, he has small faith in himself, he finds expres-
sion now or never. But a spirit who is sure of him-
self speaks softly ; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself
be awaited, A philosopher is recognised by the



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I40 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

fact that he shuns three brilliant and noisy things —
fame, princes, and women : which is not to say that
they do not come to him. He shuns every glaring
light : therefore he shuns his time and its "daylight. "
Therein he is as a shadow ; the deeper sinks the sun,
the greater grows the shadow. As for his humility,
he endures, as he endures darkness, a certain de-
pendence and obscurity : further, he is afraid of the
shock of lightning, he shudders at the insecurity
of a tree which is too isolated and too exposed, on
which every storm vents its temper, every temper
its storm. His " maternal " instinct, his secret love
for that which grows in him, guides him into states
where he is relieved from the necessity of taking
care of himself, in the same way in which the
" mother " instinct in woman has thoroughly main-
tained up to the present woman's dependent position.
After all, they demand little enough, do these philo-
sophers, their favourite motto is, " He who possesses
is possessed. " All this is noi, as I must say again
and again, to be attributed to a virtue, to a meri-
torious wish for moderation and simplicity; but
because their supreme lord so demands of them,
demands wisely and inexorably ; their lord who is
eager only for one thing, for which alone he musters,
and for which alone he hoards everything — time,
strength, love, interest. This kind of man likes not
to be disturbed by enmity, he likes not to be dis-
turbed by friendship, it is a type which forgets or
despises easily. It strikes him as bad form to play
the martyr, " to suffer for truth " — he leaves all that
to the ambitious and to the stage-heroes of the
intellect, and to all those, in fact, who have time



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? I4I

enough for such luxuries (they themselves, the
philosophers, have something to do for truth). They
make a sparing use of big words ; they are said to
be adverse to the word "truth" itself: it has a
" high falutin' " ring. Finally, as far as the chastity
of philosophers is concerned, the fruitfulness of this
type of mind is manifestly in another sphere than
that of children ; perchance in some other sphere,
too, they have the survival of their name, their little
immortality (philosophers in ancient India would
express themselves with still greater boldness : " Of
what use is posterity to him whose soul is the
world ? "). In this attitude there is not a trace of
chastity, by reason of any ascetic scruple or hatred
of the flesh, any more than it is chastity for an athlete
or a jockey to abstain from women ; it is rather the
will of the dominant instinct, at any rate, during the
period of their advanced philosophic pregnancy.
Every artist knows the harm done by sexual inter-
course on occasions of great mental strain and
preparation ; as far as the strongest artists and
those with the surest instincts are concerned, this is
not necessarily a case of experience — hard experi-
ence — but it is simply their "maternal" instinct
which, in order to benefit the growing work, disposes
recklessly (beyond all its normal stocks and supplies)
of the vigour of its animal life ; the greater power
then absorbs the lesser. Let us now apply this in-
terpretation to gauge correctly the case of Schopen-
hauer, which we have already mentioned : in his
case, the sight of the beautiful acted manifestly like
a resolving irritant on the chief power of his nature
(the power of contemplation and of intense pene-



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142 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

tration) ; so that this strength exploded and became
suddenly master of his consciousness. But this by
no means excludes the possibility of that particular
sweetness and fulness, which is peculiar to the
cEsthetic state, springing directly from the ingredient
of sensuality (just as that " idealism " which is
peculiar to girls at puberty originates in the same
source) — it may be, consequently, that sensuality is
not removed by the approach of the aesthetic state,
as Schopenhauer believed, but merely becomes
transfigured, and ceases to enter into the conscious-
ness as sexual excitement. (I shall return once
again to this point in connection with the more
delicate problems of the physiology of the cBsthetic, a
subject which up to the present has been singularly
untouched and unelucidated. )

9-

A certain asceticism, a grimly gay whole-hearted
renunciation, is, as we have seen, one of the most
favourable conditions for the highest intellectualism,
and, consequently, for the most natural corollaries
of such intellectualism : we shall therefore be proof
against any surprise at the philosophers in par-
ticular always treating the ascetic ideal with a
certain amount of predilection. A serious historical
investigation shows the bond between tBe ascetic -
ideal and philosophy to be stiirmuch tighter and
still much stronger. It may be said that it was"
only in the leading strings of this ideal that philo-
sophy really learnt to make its first steps and baby
paces — alas how clumsily, alas how crossly, alas



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 143

how ready to tumble down and lie on its stomach
was this shy little darling of a brat with its bandy
legs ! The early^history of^^hilosophy isjikejhat
of all goo3 things ; — for a long time they had not
the c6UfagS"tO "be themselves, they kept always
toalring roufid loTsee if no one would come to their
help7"fiarther, they were afraid of all who looked
at~'tliem. Just enumerate in order the particular
tendencies and virtues of the philosopher — his
tendency to doubt, his tendency to deny, his
tendency to wait (to be " ephectic " ), his tendency
to analyse, search, explore, dare, his tendency to
c'ompare and to equalise, his will to be neutral and
objective, his will for everything which is " sine ira
et'studio " : — has it yet been realised that for quite
a lengthy period these tendencies went counter
to the first claims of morality and conscience ?
(Tor~say nothing at all of Reason, which even
Luther chose to call Frau Kliiglin* the sly
whore^ Has it been yet appreciated that a
philosopher, in the event of his arriving at self-
consciousness, must needs feel himself an incarnate
" nitimur in vetitum" — and consequently guard
himself against " his own sensations," against self-
consciousness ? It is, I repeat, just the same with
all good things, on which we now pride ourselves ;
even judged by the standard of the ancient Greeks,
our whole modern life, in so far as it is not weak-
ness, but power and the consciousness of power,
appears pure " Hybris " and godlessness : for the
things which are the very reverse of those which

* Mistress Sly. — Tr.



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144 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

we honour to-day, have had for a long time
conscience on their side, and God as their
guardian. " Hybris " is our whole attitude to nature
nowadays, our violation ol nature wit h the help of
machinery, and all the unscrupulo us ing enuity nf

_^mg::gcregistrand '^^^^^^
attitude to Godj_thatJs, t o some alleged teleological
and ethical spider behind th. e„. pigsli es of the great
trap ofthejcausal_webJ Like Charles the Bold

"in his war with Louis the Eleventh, we may say,
"je combats runiverselle araignie " ; " Hybris " is our
attitude tP JoursebjeaTr-for we experimeat'witliai}X:_
selvesin a way that we would not allow with any
animal, and with pleasure and curiosity open o ur
soul in our living body : what matters now to us
the " salvation " of the "soul ? We heal ourselves
afterwards : being ill is instructive, we doubt it
not, even more instructive than being well —
inoculators of disease seem to us to-day even more
necessary than any medicine-men and " saviours. "
There is no doubt we do violence to ourselves

"nowadays, we crackers "xrf ' the SDlifs'^WlTCtrwe
incarnate riddles, who are ever asking riddles, as
though life were naught else than the cracking of a
nut ; and even thereby must we necessarily become
day by day more and more worthy to be asked
questions and worthy to ask them, even thereby
do we perchance also become worthier to — live?

jp^ . . . All good things were once bad, things ;
from every original sin . has. . growii,„aiL,OTigiaal
virtuej Marriage, for example, seemed for a long
time a sin against the rights of the community;
a man formerly paid a fine for the insolence of



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? , 14S '

claiming one woman to himself (to this phase
belongs, for instance, the jus primes noctis, to-day
still in Cambodia the privilege of the priest, that
guardian of the " good old customs ").

rr he softr benevolent, yieldi ng, sympathetic feel-
ings — eventually valued sohigHlyTESTl^^^Kost"
became " mtrinsjc_j[alues,""wCTe~for a very^long
time actually despised by their possessors : gentle-
hess wa's then"a"subject for shame, just as hardness
is~now (compare Beyond Good and Evzl^ Aph.
266). t iT ie submission to law, o h, with what
qualms of conscience was it that the noble races
throughout the world renounced the vendetta and
gave the law power over themselves ! Law was
long a vetitum, a blasphemy, an innovation ; it was
ilitrtfditced~wtth-force,~/»^i? a- force, to which men
only submitted witK'a 'sense "Of personaT shame.
Every tiny step forward in tlie world was formerly
made at the cost of mental and physical torEure.
Nowa3ays the wKole of this point of view—" that
not only stepping forward, nay, stepping at~all7~
movement, change, air~~needed 'their cou'ritTfess
martyrs,"^ rings in our ears quite stirangely.
I have put it forward in the Dawn of Day,
Aph. 1 8. " Nothing is purchased more dearly,"
says the same book a little later, " than the
modicum of human reason and freedom which is
now our pride. JButJthat^ pride is the reason why
it is now almost impossible for us to"TeeI~ln
sympathywitH" those 'immense periods of "the "
' Morality of Custom,' which lie at the beginning"
of' the 'world's history,' constituting as they do
the real decisive historical principle which has



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146 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

fixed the character of humanity ; those periods,
I repeat, when throughout' the world suffering
passed for virtuTeT^crueTty'loF virtue, deceit for"
■virtue, revenge for virtue, repudiatioh'orthe^rM,sprr
for virtue ; and when, conversely, well-being passed
current for danger, the desire for knowledge for
danger, pity for danger, peace for danger, being
pitied for shame, work for shame, madness for
divinity, and change for immorality and incarnate
corruption ! "

10.

There is in the same book, Aph. 1 2, an explana-
tion of the burden of unpopularity under which
the earliest race of contemplative men had to live
— despised almost as widely as they were first
feared 1 Contemplation first appeared on earth
in a disguised shape, in an ambiguous form, with
an evil heart and often with an uneasy head : there
is no doubt about it. The inactive, brooding, un-
warlike element in the instincts of contemplative
men long invested them with a cloud of suspicion :
the only way to combat this was to excite a definite
fear. And the old Brahmans, for example, knew
to a nicety how to do this ! The oldest philo-
sophers were well versed in giving to their very
existence and appearance, meaning, firmness, back-
ground, by reason whereof men learnt to fear
them ; considered more precisely, they did this
from an even more fundamental need, the need of
inspiring in themselves fear and self-reverence.
For they found even in their own souls all the
valuations turned against themselves ; they had to



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 147

fight down every kind of suspicion and antagonism
against " the philosophic element in themselves. "
Being men of a terrible age, they did this with
terrible means: cruelty to themselves, ingenious
self-mortification — this was the chief method of
these ambitious hermits and intellectual revolution-
aries, who were obliged to force down the gods
and the traditions of their own soul, so as to enable
themselves to believe in their own revolution. I
remember the famous story of the King Vicvamitra,
who, as the result of a thousand years of self-
martyrdom, reached such a consciousness of power
and such a confidence in himself that he undertook
to build a new heaven : the sinister symbol of the
oldest and newest history of philosophy in the
whole world. Every one who has ever built any^
where a " new heaven " first found the power thereto
in his own hell. \. . . Let us compress the facts
into a short formula. The philosophic spirit had,
in order to be possible to any extent at all, to
masquerade and disguise itself as one of the
previously fixed types of the contemplative man,
to disguise itself as priest, wizard, soothsayer, as a
religious man generally : the ascetic ideal has for a
~Iorig~ttme served the^ phil,os,ppher_as a superficial
"formTas a condition which enabled him to exist.
T". . To be able to be a philosopher he had to
exemplify the ideaTjJo exemplify it, lie. waa/Bound
io Jielieve~ va. it. The peculiarly etherealised
abstraction of philosophers, with their negation of
the world, their enmity to life, their disbelief in the
senses, which has been maintained up to the most
recent time, and has almost thereby come to be



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148 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

accepted as the ideal philosophic attitude — this
abstraction is the result of those enforced conditions
under which philosophy came into existence, and
continued to exist ; inasmuch as for quite a very
long time philosophy would have been absolutely
impossible in the world without an ascetic cloak
and dress, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding.
Expressed plainly and palpably, the ascetic priest
has taken the repulsive and sinister form of the
caterpillar, beneath which and behind which alone
philosophy could live and slink about. . . .

Has all that really changed ? Has that
flamboyant and dangerous winged creature, that
" spirit " which that caterpillar concealed within
itself, has it, I say, thanks to a sunnier, warmer,
lighter world, really and finally flung off its hood
and escaped into the light ? Can we to-day point
to enough pride, enough daring, enough courage,
enough self-confidence, enough mental will, enough
will for responsibility, enough freedom of the will,
to enable the philosopher to be now in the world
really — possible ?

II.

And now, after we have caught sight of the
ascetic priest, let us tackle our problem. What is
the meaning of the ascetic ideal ? It now first
becomes serious — vitally serious. We are now
confronted with the real representatives of the
serious. " What is the meaning of all seriousness ? ,"
This even more radical question is perchance
already on the tip of our tongue: a question,
fairly, for physiologists, but which we for the time



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? I49

being skip. In that ideal the ascetic priest finds
not only his faith. '^ut "alSo his will, his "p bwSr^ Ms
interestr His HgM to existence stands and falls

with that ideaT '"'What wonder that we here run
lip against a terrible opponent (on the supposition,
of course, that we are the opponents of that ideal),
an opponent fighting for his life against those who
repudiate that ideal ! . . . On the other hand, it
is from the outset improbable that such a biased
attitude towards our problem will do him any
particular good ; the ascetic priest himself will
scarcely prove the happiest champion of his own
ideal (on the same principle on which a woman
usually fails when she wishes to champion
" woman ") — let alone proving the most object-
ive critic and judge of the controversy now raised.
We shall therefore — so much is already obvious —
rather have actually to help him to defend himself
properly against ourselves, than we shall have to
fear being too well beaten by him. The idea,
which is the subject of this dispute, is the value
of our life from the standpoint of the ascetic
priests : this life, then (together with the whole of
which it is a part, " Nature," " the world," the
whole sphere of becoming and passing away), is
placed by them in relation to an existence of
quite another character, which it excludes and to
which it is opposed, unless it deny its own self:
ip this case, the case of an ascetic life, life is taken
as a bridge to another existence. The ascetic
treats life as a maze, in which one must walk
backwards till one comes to the place where it
starts ; or he treats it as arj. error which. 'oQ. e may,



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ISO THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

nay must, refute by action : for he demands that
he should be followed ; he enforces, where hecan,
his valuation of existence. What does this mean ?
Such a monstrous valuation is not an exceptional
case, or a curiosity recorded in human history:' It
is one of the most general and persistent facts thaf
there are'. " The rea3ing from the vantage ^f^a—-
distant sFar of the capital letters of our earthly
life, would perchance lead to the conclusion that
/the earth was the especially ascetic planet, a den
of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures,
who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves,
of the world, of all life, and did themselves as
much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurt-
ing — presumably their one and only pleasure!
Let us consider how regularly, how universally;
how practically at every single period the ascetic
priest puts in his appearance : he belongs to" no
particular race ; he thrives everywhere ; he grows
out of all classes. Not that he perhaps bred this
valuation by heredity and propagated it — the
contrary is the case. It must be a necessity of
the first order which makes this species, hostile, as
it is, to life, always grow again and always thrive
again. — LtfejS^cSi must certainly have an interest in
the continuance ofsuch alype of s^lfr^ntradifiltorn—
~F6r_3a_asj:etic life^ is a self-contradiction: here
rules resentment without parallel, the resentmenT"
of an insatiate instinct and ambition, thai would
be master, not over some element in life, but over
life itself, over life's deepest, strongest, inioermost
conditions ; here is an attempt made to utilise
power to dam the sources of power; here does



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? I SI

the green eye of jealousy turn even against physio-
logical well-being, especially against the expres-
sion of such well-being, beauty, joy ; while a sense
of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion,
in decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in
voluntary punishment, in the exercising, flagella-
tion, and sacrifice of the self. All this is in the
highest degree paradoxical : we are here con-
fronted with a rift that wills itself to be a rift,
which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even
Ibecomes more and more certain of itself, more and
more triumphant, in proportion as its, . . Qjfo , pre-
supposition, physiological vitality, decreases. " The
triumph just in the supreme agony " : under this
extravagant emblem did the ascetic ideal fight
from of old ; in this mystery of seduction, in this
picture of rapture and torture, it recognised its
brightest light, its salvation, its final victory.
Crux, nux, lux — it has all these three in one.

12.

Granted that such an incarnate will for contra-
diction and unnaturalness is induced to philosophise ;
on what will it vent its pet caprice? On that
which has been felt with the greatest certainty to
be true, to be real ; it will look for error in those
very places where the life instinct fixes truth with
the greatest positiveness. It will, for instance,
after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta
Philosophy, re duce matter to an illusion, and
similarly; treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical
"contrast of^5«? ^? r'arid''' Olject" — errors, msthing-



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152 ■ THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

but errors ! To renounce the belief in one's own
ego, to deny to one's self one's^own ''^reality "^^^
what a triumph ! and Here "already we haveXmilCh
higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a
triumph over the senses, over the palpable, mJE~afr~
infliction of violence and cruelty on reason ;'~an&
this ecstasy culminates in the ascetic self-contempt,
the ascetic scorn of one's own "reason making this
decree : there is a domain of truth and of ^ife,, but"
reason is specially excluded therefrom. . . . By
the bye, even in the Kantian idea of " the intel-
legible character of things " there remains a trace
of that schism, so dear to the heart of the ascetic,
that schism which likes to turn reason against
reason ; in fact, " intelligible character " means in
Kant a kind of quality in things of which the
intellect comprehends this much, that for it, the
intellect, it is absolutely incomprehensible. After
all, let us, in our character of knowers, not be
ungrateful towards such determined reversals of
the ordinary perspectives and values, with which
the mind had for too long raged against itself
with an apparently futile sacrilege ! In the same
way the very seeing of another vista, the"vBry-^
wishing to see another vista, is no little training
and preparation of the intellect for its eternal
" Objectivity " — objectivity being understood not
as " contemplation without interest " (for that is
inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability
to have the pros and cons in one's fpwer a. ndJio
switch them on and oif, so- as to get, to knovv_how
to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the "
difference in the perspective and in the emolional



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? 153

inte rpretati ons. ,^ But let us, forsooth, my philo-
sophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves
more carefully against this mythology of danger-
ous ancient ideas, which has set up a " pure, will-
less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge " ; let
us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such
contradictory ideas as "' pure reason," "absolute
spirituality,""" knowledge - in - itself" : — in these
theorres^" an "eye that cannot be thought of is
required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has
no direction at all, an eye in which the active and
interpreting functions are cramped, are absent ;
those functions, I say, by means of which " abstract"
seeing first became seeing something ; in these
theories consequently the absurd and the nonsen-
sical is always demanded of the eye. There is
only a seeing from a perspective, only a " know-
ing '' from a perspective, and the more emotions
we express over a thing, the more eyes, different
eyes, we train on the same thing, the more com-
plete will be our " idea " of that thing, our " objec-
tivity. " But the elimination of the will altogether,
the switching off of the emotions all and sundry,
granted that we could do so, what ! would not
that be called intellectual castration ?

13-

But let us turn back. Such a self-contradic-
tion, as apparently manifests itself among the
ascetics, " Life turned against Life," is — this much
is absolutely obvious — from the physiological and
not now from the psychological standpoint, simply



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154 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

nonsense. It can only be an apparent cont f ^-
diction ; it must be a kind of provisional ex-
pression, an explanation, a formula, an adjustment,
a psychological misunderstanding of something,
whose real nature could not be understQQd_i2Li_
long time, and whose real essence covXd. not be
described; a mere word jamnied into— aaI3l5]"
gap of human knowledge. To put briefly the
facts against its being real : the ascetic ideal springs
from the prophylactic and self -preservative instincts
which mark^^decadent life, which seeks by, every^
means in its power to maintain its position and
>fight for its existence; it points to "a partiat'
physiological depression and exhaustion, against
which the most profound and intact life-instincts
fight ceaselessly with new weapons and dis-
coveries. The ascetic ideal is such a weapon :
its position is consequentlv_^xact! y the re verse
of that which the worshippers of the ideal
imagine — life struggles in it and through ~tt~WTth-
death and against death ; the ascetic"" ideal
is a dodge for the preservation of life. An
important fact is brought out in the extent to
which, as history teaches, this ideal, coijld^rule
and exercise power over man, especially in al!
those places where the civilisation and taming
of man was completed : that fact is, the diseased
state of man up to the present, at any rate, of
the man who has been tamed, the physiological
struggle of man with death (more precisely, with
the disgust with life, with exhaustion, with the
wish for the " end "). The ascetic priest is the
incarnate wish for an existence of another kind.



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? I 55

an existence on another plane, — he is, in fact, the
highest point of this wish, its official ecstasy and
passion : but it is the vety power of this wish
which is the fetter that binds him here ; it is
just that which makes him into a tool that must
labour to create more favourable conditions for
earthly existence, for existence on the human
plane — it is with this very power that he keeps
the whole" herd of failures, distortions, abortions,
unfortunates, sufferers from tlietnselves of every
kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsnian
goes instinctively on in front. You understand
me already : this ascetic priest, this apparent
enemy of life, ^ thi5 jjenier-r^he . actually belongs,
to the really great conservative and affirmative
forces of life. . . | What does it come from, this
diseased state? For man is more diseased, more
uncertain, more changeable, more unstable than
any other animal, there is no doubt of it — he is
the diseased animal : what does it spring from ?
Certainly he has also dared, innovated, braved
more, challenged fate more than all the other
animals put together ; he, the great experimenter
with himself, the unsatisfied, the insatiate, who
struggles for the supreme mastery with beast,
Nature, and gods, he, the as yet ever uncompelled,
the ever future, who finds no more any rest from
his own aggressive strength, goaded inexorably
on by the spur of the future dug into the flesh
of the present : — how should not so brave and
rich an animal also be the most endangered,
the animal with the longest and deepest sickness
among all sick animals ? . . . Man is sick of it, oft



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156 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

enough there are whole epidemics of this satiety
(as about i 348, the time of the Dance of Death) :
but even this very nausea, this tiredness, this
disgust with himself, all this is discharged from
him with such force that it is immediately made
into a new fetter. His " nay," which he utters
to life, brings to light as though by magic an
abundance of graceful " yeas " ; even when he
wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-
destruction, it is subsequently the wound itself
that forces him to live.

14.

The more normal is this sickliness in man —
and we cannot dispute this normality— the higher
honour should be paid to the rare cases of
psychical and physical powerfulness, the wind-
falls of humanity, and the more strictly should
the sound be guarded from that worst of air, the
air of the sick-room. Is that done? \The sick
are the greatest danger for the healthy ; it is not
from the strongest that harm comes to the strong,
but from the weakest. I Is that known ? Broadly
considered, it is not for a minute the fear of man,
whose diminution should be wished for ; for this
fear forces the strong to be strong, to be at times
terrible — it preserves in its integrity the sound
type of man. ( What is to be feared, what does
work with a fatality found in no other fate, is not
the great fear of, but the great nausea with, man ;
and equally so the great pity for man^ Sup-
posing that both these things were one day to



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ?
157

espouse each other, then inevitably the maximum
of monstrousness would immediately come into
the world — the " last will " of man, his will for
nothingness, Nihilism, ^d. in sooth, the way
is well paved thereto. iHe who not only has
his nose to smell with, but also has eyes and
ears, he sniffs almost wherever he goes to-day
an air something like that of a mad-house,
the air of a hospital — 1 am speaking, as stands
to reason, of the cultured areas of mankind, of
every kind of " Europe" that there is in fact in
the world. | [The sick are the great danger of
man, not the evil, not the " beasts of prey. "^ They
who are from the outset botched, oppressed,
broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who
most undermine the life beneath the feet of
man, who instil the most dangerous venom and
scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in our-
selvejjj Where shall we escape from it, from that
covert look (from which we carry away a deep
sadness), from that averted look of him who is
misborn from the beginning, that look which
betrays what such a man says to himself — that
look which is a groan ? " Would that I were
something else," so groans this look, "but there
is no hope. \1 am what I am : how could I ge^
away from myself? And, verily — / am sick of,
myself! " On such a soil of self-contempt, aj
veritable swamp soil, grows that weed, that
poisonous growth, and all so tiny, so hidden, so,
ignoble, so sugary; ]] Here teem the worms of
revenge and vindictiveness ; here the air reeks
of things secret and unmentionable ; here is ever



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IS8 , THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

spun the net of the most malignant conspiracy
— the conspiracy of the sufferers against the sound
and the victorious; here is the sight of the
victorious hated. J And what lying so as not to
acknowledge this hate as hate ! What a show
of big words and attitudes, what an art of
" righteous " calumniation ! These abortions !
what a noble eloquence gushes from their lips!
Pwhat an amount of sugary, slimy, humble sub-
mission oozes in their eyes ! What do they
really want ? At any rate to represent righteous-
ness, love, wisdom, superiority, that is the
ambition of these " lowest ones," these sick gnesjj
And how clever does such an arnbition make
them! You cannot, in fact, but admire the
counterfeiter dexterity with which the stamp of
virtue, even the ring, the golden ring of virtue,
is here imitated. They have taken a lease of
virtue absolutely for themselves, have these
weaklings and wretched invalids, there is no
doubt of it ; " We alone are the good, the righteous^^
so do they speak^' we alone are the homines
bona voluntatis'. ' pThey stalk about in our midst
as living reproaches, as warnings to us — as
though health, fitness, strength, pride, the sensa-
tion of power, were really vicious things in them-
selves, for which one would have some day to do
penance, bitter penance. Oh, how they themselves
are ready in their hearts to exact penance, how
they thirst after being hangmen I j

I Among them is an abundance of revengeful
ones disguised as judges, who ever mouth the
word righteousness like a venomous spittle — with



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? 1 59

mouth, I say, always pursed, always ready to spit
at everything, which does not wear a discontented
look, but is of good cheer as it goes on its wa y. \
Among them, again, is that most loathsome species
of the vain, the lying abortions, who make a point
of representing " beautiful souls," and perchance
of bringing to the market as " purity of heart "
their distorted sensualism swathed in verses and -
other bandages ; the species of " self-comforters "
and masturbators of their own souls. iThe sick -
man's will to represent some form or other of
s uperiority, h i s i tia tit ieiribr crooked-paths-whiich
lead to a' tj^anny over the healthy— wEere^ari it
not be found, thfs' will to_j)qwer of Xlie_very
weakest ? I The sick woman especially : no one
"SBrpassSSTier in refinements for ruling, oppressing,
tyrannising. The sick woman, moreover, spares
nothing living, nothing dead ; she grubs up again
the most buried things (the Bogos say, " Woman
is a hyena "). Look into the background of every
family, of every body, of every community : every-
where the fight of the sick against the healthy —
a silent fight for the most part with minute poisoned
powfiers, with pin-pricks, with spiteful grimaces of
patience, but also at times with that diseased
Pharisaism of pure pantomime, which plays for
choice the r61e of " righteous indignation. " Right
into the hallowed chambers of knowledge can it
make itself heard, can this hoarse yelping of sick
hounds, this rabid lying and frenzy of such " noble "
Pharisees (I remind readers, who have ears, once
more of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen
Duhring, who makes the most disreputable and



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l6o THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

revolting use in all present-day Germany of moral
refuse ; DUhring, the paramount moral blusterer
that there is to-day, even among his own kidney,
the Anti-Semites). TThey are all men of , resent-
ment, are these physiological distortions and
worm-riddled objects, a whole quiverinig kingd^^
of burrowing revenge, indefatigable and insatiable"
in its outbursts against the happy, and equallj^sq
in disguises for revenge, in pretexts for revenge^
when will they really reach their final, fondest,
most sublime triumph of revenge ? \ At that time,
doubtless, when they succeed in pushing their own
misery, in fact, all misery, inio the consciousmss pi
the happy ; so that the latter begin one day to be
ashamed of their happiness, and perchance say to
themselves when they meet, " It is a shame to be
happy ! there is too much misery . '". . . But there
could not possibly be a greater and more fatal
misunderstanding than that of the happy, the fit,
the strong in body and soul, beginning in this way
to doubt their right to happiness. Away with
this " perverse world " ! Away with this shameful
soddenness of sentiment ! Preventing the sick
making the healthy sick — for that is what such a
soddenness comes to — this ought to be our supreme
object in the world — but for this it is above all
essential that the healthy should remain separated
from the sick, that they should even guard them-
selves from the look of the sick, that they should
not even associate with the sick. Or may it,
perchance, be their mission to be nurses or doctors ?
But they could not mistake and disown their
mission more grossly-|-the higher must not



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? l6l

degrade itself to be the tool of the lower, the
pathos of distance must to all eternity keep
their missions also separateJ The right of the
happy to existence, the right of bells with a full
tone over the discordant cracked bells, is verily
a thousand times greater : they alone are the
sureties of the future, they alone are bound to
man's future. What they can, what they must do,
that can the sick never do, should never do ! but
if they are to be enabled to do what only they must
do, how can they possibly be free to play the doctor,
the comforter, the " Saviour " of the sick ? . . . And
therefore good air ! good air ! and away, at any
rate, from the neighbourhood of all the madhouses
and hospitals of civilisation ! And therefore good
company, our own company, or solitude, if it must
be so ! but away, at any rate, from the evil fumes
of internal corruption and the secret worm-eat|n
state of the sick ! that, forsooth, my friends,(we
may defend ourselves, at any rate for still a time,
against the two worst plagues that could have
been reserved for us — against the great nausea
with man ! against the great pity for man ! \

IS-

If you have understood in all their depths — and
I demand that you should grasp them profoundly
and understand them profoundly — the reasons for
the impossibility of its being the business of the
healthy to nurse the sick, to make the sick healthy,
it follows that you have grasped this further
necessity — the necessity of doctors and nurses
L



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1 62 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

who themselves are sick. And now we have and
hold with both our hands the essence of the
ascetic priest. The ascetic priest must be accepted
by us as the predestined saviour, herdsman, and
champion of the sick herd: thereby do we first
understand his awful historic mission. The lord-
ship over sufferers is his kingdom, to that points
his instinct, in that he finds his own special art,
his master-skill, his kind of happiness. He must
himself be sick, he must be kith and kin to the
sick and the abortions so as to understand them,
so as to arrive at an understanding with them ;
but he must also be strong, even more master of
himself than of others, impregnable, forsooth, in his
will for power, so as to acquire the trust and the
awe of the weak, so that he can be their hold,
bulwark, prop, compulsion, overseer, tyrant, god.
He has to protect them, protect his hsxAs— against
whom ? Against the healthy, doubtless also
against the envy towards the healthy. He must
be the natural adversary and scorner of every rough,
stormy, reinless, hard, violently-predatory health
and power. The priest is the first form of the
more delicate animal that scorns more easily than
it hates. He will not be spared the waging of war
with the beasts of prey, a war of guile (of " spirit ")
rather than of force, as is self-evident — he will in
certain cases find it necessary to conjure up out of
himself, or at any rate to represent practically a
new type of the beast of prey — a new animal
monstrosity in which the polar bear, the supple,
cold, crouching panther, and, not least important,
the fox, are joined together in a trinity as fascinating



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 163

as it is fearsome. If necessity exacts it, then will
he come on the scene with bearish seriousness,
venerable, wise, cold, full of treacherous superiority,
as the herald and mouthpiece of mysterious powers,
sometimes going among even the other kind of
beasts of prey, determined as he is to sow on their
soil, wherever he can, suffering, discord, self-contra-
diction, and only too sure of his art, always to be
lord of sufferers at all times. He brings with him,
doubtless, salve and balsam ; but before he can
play the physician he must first wound ; so, while
he soothes the pain which the wound makes, he at
the same time poisons the wound. (Well versed is
he in this above all things, is this wizard and wild
beast tamer, in whose vicinity everything healthy
must needs become ill, and everything ill must
needs become tam^ He protects, in sooth, his
sick herd well enough, does this strange herdsman ;
he protects them also against themselves, against
the sparks (even in the centre of the herd) of
wickedness, knavery, malice, and all the other ills
that the plaguey and the sick are heir to ; he fights
with cunning, hardness, and stealth against anarchy
and against the ever imminent break-up inside
the herd, where resentment, that most dangerous
brastihg-stuff and explosive, ever accumulates and
accumulates. Getting rid of this blasting-stuff in
such a way that it does not blow up the herd and
the herdsman, that is his real feat, his supreme
utility ; if, you ^wish to comprise in the sh ortest
formula the value of the priestl;>Mife, it would be
correct to say the priest Tslhie diverter of the course
of resentment. Every sufferer," in fa'cf,' searches



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l64 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

instinctively for a cause of his suffering ; to put it
more exactly, a doer, — to put it still more precisely,
a sentient responsible dber, — in brief, something
living, on which, either actually or in effigie, he can
on any pretext vent his emotions. For the venting
of emotions is the sufferer's greatest attempt at
alleviation, that is to say, stupefaction, his mechanic-
ally desired narcotic against pain of any kind.
It is in this phenomenon alone that is found,
according to my judgment, the real physiological
cause of resentment, revenge, and their family is to
be found— ;-that is, in a . demand for i! &s. -deadmiag__
of pain through emotion : this cause is generally, but
in my view very erroneously, looked for in the
defensive parry of a bare protective principle of
reaction, of a " reflex movement " in the case of
any sudden hurt and danger, after the manner
that a decapitated frog still moves in order to get
away from a corrosive acid. But the difference
is fundamental. In one case the object is to
prevent being hurt any more ; in the other case
the object is to deaden a racking, insidious, nearly
unbearable pain by a more violent emotion of
any kind whatsoever, and at any rate for the time
being to drive it out of the consciousness — for
this purpose an emotion is needed, as wild
an emotion as possible, and to excite that
emotion some excuse or other is needed. " It
must be somebody's fault that I feel bad" — this
kind of reasoning is peculiar to all invalids, and
is but the more pronounced, the more ignorant
they remain of the real cause of their feeling bad,
the physiological cause (the cause may lie in a



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? l6S

disease of the nervus sympathicus, or in an ex-
cessive secretion of bile, or in a want of sulphate
and phosphate of potash in the blood, or in pressure
in the bowels which stops the circulation of the
blood, or in degeneration of the ovaries, and so
forth). Ail sufferers have an awful resourcefulness
and ingenuity in finding excuses for painful
emotions ; they even enjoy their jealousy, their
broodings over base actions and apparent injuries,
they burrow through the intestines of their past
and present in their search for obscure mysteries,
wherein they will be at liberty to wallow in a
torturing suspicion and get drunk on the venom
of their own malice — they tear open the oldest
wounds, they make themselves bleed from the
scars which have long been healed, they make
evil-doers out of friends, wife, child, and every-
thing which is nearest to them. " I suffer : it
must be somebody's fault" — so thinks every sick
'sheep. But his herdsman, the ascetic priest, says
to him, " Quite so, my sheep, it must be the
fault of some one ; but thou thyself art that some
one, it is all the fault of thyself alone — it is the
foMtt of thyself alone against thyself" : that is. bold
enough, false enough, but one thing is at least
attained ; thereby, as I have said, the course of
resentment is — diverted.

1 6.

You can see now what the remedial instinct of
life has at least tried to effect, according to my
conception, through the ascetic priest, and the



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1 66 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

purpose for which he had to employ a temporary
, tyranny of such paradoxical and anomalous ideas
as " guilt," " sin," " sinfulness," " corruption,"
I " damnation. " What was done was to make the
; sick harmless up to a certain point, to destroy the
'. incurable by means of themselves, to turn the
'•milder cases severely on to themselves, to give
t their resentment a backward direction ("man
needs but one thing"), and to exploit similarly
the bad instincts of all sufferers with a view to
self-discipline, self-surveillance, self-mastery. It is
obvious that there can be no question at all in
the case of a " medication " of this kind, a mere
emotional medication, of any real healing of the
sick in the physiological sense ; it cannot even
for a moment be asserted that in this connection
the instinct of life has taken healing as its goal
and purpose. tOn the one hand, a kind of con-
gestion and organisation of the sick (the word
" Church" is the most popular name for it)jj on the
other, a kind of provisional safeguarding of the
comparatively healthy, the more perfect specimens,
the cleavage of a rift between healthy and sick —
for a long time that was all ! and it was much ! it
was very much !

I am proceeding, as you see, in this essay,
from an hypothesis which, as far as such readers
as I want are concerned, does not require to be
proved ; the hypothesis that " sinfulness " in man
is not an actual fact, but rather merely the inter-
pretation of a fact, of a physiological discomfort,
— a discomfort seen through a moral religious
perspective which is no longer binding upon us.



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 167

The fact, therefore, that any one feels " guilty,"
" sinful," is certainly not yet any proof that he
is right in feeling so, any more than any one is
healthy simply because he feels healthy Re-
member the celebrated witch-ordeals : in those
days the most acute and humane judges had no
doubt but that in these cases they were confronted
with guilt, — the " witches " themselves had no doubt
on the point, — and yet the guilt was lacking. Let
me elaborate this hypothesis : I do not for a
minute accept the very " pain in the soul " as a
real fact, but only as an explanation (a casual
explanation) of facts that could not hitherto be
precisely formulated; I regard it therefore as
something as yet absolutely in the air and devoid
of scientific cogency — ^just a nice fat word in the
place of a lean note of interrogation. When any
one fails to get rid of his " pain in the soul," the
cause is, speaking crudely, to be found not in his
" soul " but more probably in his stomach (speaking
crudely, I repeat, but by no means wishing there-
by that you should listen to me or understand me
in a crude spirit). A strong and well-constituted
man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds
all included) just as he digests his meats, even
when he has some tough morsels to swallow. If
he fails to " relieve himself" of an experience,
this kind of indigestion is quite as much physio-
logical as the other indigestion — and indeed, in
more ways than one, simply one of the results of
the other. You can adopt such a theory, and yet
entre nous be nevertheless the strongest opponent
of all materialism.



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1 68 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

17.

But is he really 2. physician, this ascetic priest?
We already understand why we are scarcely
allowed to call him a physician, however much
he likes to feel a " saviour " and let himself be
worshipped as a saviour. * It is only the actual
suffering, the discomfort of the sufferer, which he
combats, not its cause, not the actual state of sick-
ness — this needs must constitute our most radical
objection to priestly medication. But just once
put yourself into that point of view, of which the
priests have a monopoly, you will find it hard to
exhaust your amazement, at what from that stand-
point he has completely seen, sought, and found.
The mitigation of suffering, every kind of " con-
soling '' — all this manifests itself as his very genius :
with what ingenuity has he interpreted his mission
of consoler, with what aplomb and audacity has
he chosen weapons necessary for the part. Christi-
anity in particular should be dubbed a great
treasure-chamber of ingenious consolations, — such
a store of refreshing, soothing, deadening drugs
has it accumulated within itself; so many of the
most dangerous and daring expedients has it
hazarded ; with such subtlety, refinement, Oriental
refinement, has it divined what emotional stimu-
lants can conquer, at any rate for a time, the deep
depression, the leaden fatigue, the black melan-
choly of physiological cripples — for, speaking

* In the German text " Heiland. " This has the double
meaning of " healer " and " saviour. " — H. B. S.



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 1 69

generally, all religions are mainly concerned with
fighting a certain fatigue and heaviness that has
infected everything. You can regard it as prima
facie probable that in certain places in the world
there was almost bound to prevail from time to
time among large masses of the population a
sense of physiological depression, which, however,
owing to their lack of physiological knowledge,
did not appear to their consciousness as such,
so that consequently its " cause " and its cure
can only be sought and essayed in the science
of moral psychology (this, in fact, is my most
general formula for what is generally called a
"religion"^ Such a feeling of depression can
have the most diverse origins ; it may be the
result of the crossing of too heterogeneous races
(or of classes — genealogical and racial differences
are also brought out in the classes : the European
" Weltschmerz," the " Pessimism " of the nineteenth
century, is really the result of an absurd and
sudden class-mixture) ; it may be brought about
by a mistaken emigration — a race falling into
a climate for which its power of adaptation is
insufficient (the case of the Indians in India) ; it
may be the effect of old age and fatigue (the
Parisian pessimism from 1850 onwards); it may
be a wrong diet (the alcoholism of the Middle
Ages, the nonsense of vegetarianism — which,
however, have in their favour the authority of Sir
Christopher in Shakespeare) ; it may be blood-
deterioration, malaria, syphilis, and the like
(German depression after the Thirty Years' War,
which infected half Germany with evil diseases,



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I70 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

and thereby paved the way for German servility,
for German pusillanimity). In such a case there
is invariably recourse to a war on a grand scale
with the feeling of depression ; let us inform our-
selves briefly on its most important practices and
phases (I leave on one side, as stands to reason,
the actual philosophic war against the feeling of
depression which is usually simultaneous — it is
interesting enough, but too absurd, too practically
negligible, too full of cobwebs, too much of a
hole-and-corner affair, especially when pain is
proved to be a mistake, on the naif hypothesis
that pain must needs vanish when the mistake
underlying it is recognised — but behold ! it does
anything but vanish . . . ). That dominant de-
pression is primarily fought by weapons which
reduce the consciousness of life itself to the
lowest degree. Wherever possible, no more wishes,
no more wants ; shun everything which produces
emotion, which produces " blood " (eating no salt,
the fakir hygiene) ; no love ; no hate ; equanimity ;
no revenge ; no getting rich ; no work ; begging ;
as far as possible, no woman, or as little woman
as possible ; as far as the intellect is concerned,
Pascal's principle, " il faut s'abetir. " To put the
result in ethical and psychological language, " self-
annihilation," " sanctification " ; to put it in physio-
logical language, " hypnotism " — the attempt to
find some approximate human equivalent for what
hibernation is for certain animals, for what cestiva-
tion is for many tropical plants, a minimum of
assimilation and metabolism in which life just
manages to subsist without really coming into the



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEAL,S ? 171

consciousness. An amazing amount of human
energy has been devoted to this object — perhaps
uselessly? There cannot be the slightest doubt
but that such sportsmen of " saintliness," in whom
at times nearly every nation has abounded, have
really found a genuine relief from that which
they have combated with such a rigorous training
— in countless cases they really escaped by the
help of their system of hypnotism away from deep
physiological depression ; their method is conse-
quently counted among the most universal ethno-
logical facts. Similarly it is improper to consider
such a plan for starving the physical element and
the desires, as in itself a symptom of insanity (as a
clumsy species of roast-beef-eating " freethinkers "
and Sir Christophers are fain to do) ; all the more
certain is it that their method can and does pave
the way to all kinds of mental disturbances, for
instance, " inner lights " (as far as the case of
the Hesychasts of Mount Athos), auditory and
visual hallucinations, voluptuous ecstasies and
effervescences of sensualism (the history of St.
Theresa). The explanation of such events given
by the victims is always the acme of fanatical
falsehood ; this is self-evident. Note well, however,
the tone of implicit gratitude that rings in the
very will for an explanation of such a character.
The supreme state, salvation itself, that. £nal. goal
of uriiversal hypnosis and peace, is always regarded
by them as the mystery of mysteries, which even
the most supreme symbols are inadequate to ex-
press; it is regarded as an entry arid homecsining
to the essence of things, as a liberation from all



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172 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

illusions, as " knowledge," as " truth," as " heing" as
t an escape from every end, every wish, every action,
i as something even beyond Good and Evil.
I " Good and Evil," quoth the Buddhists, " both are
fetters. The perfect man is master of them both. "
" The done and the undone," quoth the disciple
of the Vedanta, " do him no hurt ; the good and
the evil he shakes from off him, sage that he is;
his kingdom suffers no more from any act ; good
and evil, he goes beyond them both. " — An ab-
solutely Indian conception, as much Brahmanist
as Buddhist. Neither in the Indian nor in the
Christian doctrine is this " Redemption " regarded
as attainable by means of virtue and moral improve-
ment, however high they may place the value of
the hypnotic efficiency of virtue : keep clear on
this point — indeed it simply corresponds with the
facts. The fact that they remained irue on this
point is perhaps to be regarded as the best speci-
men of realism in the three great religions, abso-
lutely soaked as they are with morality, with this
one exception. " For those who know, there is
no duty. " " Redemption is not attained by the
acquisition of virtues ; for redemption consists
in being one with Brahman, who is incapable of
acquiring any perfection ; and equally little does
it consist in the giving up of faults, for the
Brahman, unity with whom is what constitutes
redemption, is eternally pure" (these passages
are from the Commentaries of the Cankara, quoted
from the first real European expert of the Indian
philosophy, my friend Paul Deussen). We wish,
therefore, to pay honour to the idea of " redemp-



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 173

tion " in the great religions, but it is somewhat
hard to remain serious in view of the appreciation
meted out to the deep sleep by these exhausted
pessimists who are too tired even to dream — to
the deep sleep considered, that is, as already a
fusing into Brahman, as the attainment of tn^
unio mystica with God. " When he has com-
pletely gone to sleep," says on this point the
oldest and most venerable " script," " and come to
perfect rest, so that he sees no more any vision,
then, oh dear one, is he united with Being, he has
entered into his own self — encircled by the Self
with its absolute knowledge, he has no more any
consciousness of that which is without or of that
which is within. Day and night cross not these
bridges, nor age, nor death, nor suffering, nor
good deeds, nor evil deeds. " " In deep sleep,"
say similarly the believers in this deepest of the
three great religions, " does the soul lift itself from
out this body of ours, enters the supreme light and
stands out therein in its true shape : therein is it
the supreme spirit itself, which travels about, while
it jests and plays and enjoys itself, whether with
women, or chariots, or friends ; there do its thoughts
turn no more back to this appanage of a body, to
which the ' prana ' (the vital breath) is harnessed
like a beast of burden to the cart. " None the
less we will take care to realise (as we did when
discussing " redemption ") that in spite of all its
pomps of Oriental extravagance this simply ex-
presses the same criticism on life as did the clear,
cold, Greekly cold, but yet suffering Epicurus.
jThe hypnotic sensation of nothingness, the peace



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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

of deepest sleep, anaesthesia in short — that is what
passes with the sufferers and the absolutely de-
pressed for, forsooth, their suprenne good, their
value of values ; that is what must be treasured
by them as something positive, be felt by them as
the essence of the Positive (according to the same
logic of the feelings, nothingness is in all pessi-
mistic religions called God). j>

Such a hypnotic deadening of sensibility and
susceptibility to pain, which presupposes some-
what rare powers, especially courage, contempt of
opinion, intellectual stoicism, is less frequent than
another and certainly easier training which is
tried against states of depression. I mean
mechanical activity. It is indisputable that a
suffering existence can be thereby considerably
alleviated. This fact is called to-day by the
somewhat ignoble title of the " Blessing of work. "
The alleviation consists in the attention of the

jTh

sufferer being absol utely diverted from suffe ring, in
' the incessant monopoly of the consciousness by

action, so t hat~"conseq uently there is little Toom ^
iieftrfbr suffering — for narro w is it, this chamb er of^
"h uman conscTousness ! | Mechanical__actiYily_aod

its corollaries, such as~absolute regularityjpunctili-

ous iinreasoning obedience^jthe _chroiiic^routijie^
life, ^Ee^Tomplete occupation of time,_acertain
iTBerty to be ijmpersonal, nay, a jrainingjn " fm-"
pefsorialitYj^ jelfjiorgetfulness. " inc uria sui " — with
~whaLt thoroughness and expert subtlety have all



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS? 17S

these methods been exploited by the ascetic priest
in his war with pain !

When he has to tackle sufferers of the lower
orders, slaves, or prisoners (or women, who for the
most part are a compound of labour-slave and
prisoner), all he has to do is to juggle a little
with the names, and to rechristen, so as to make
them see henceforth a benefit, a comparative
happiness, in objects which they hated — the slave's
discontent with his lot was at any rate not invented
by the priests. An even more popular means of
fighting depression is the ordaining of a little joy,
which is easily accessible and can be made into a
rule; this medication is frequently used in con-
junction with the former ones. The most frequent]
form in vjiich joy is prescribed as a cure is the
joy in producing joy (such as doing good, giving
presents, alleviating, helping, exhorting, comforting,
praising, treating with distinction) ; together with
the prescription of " love your neighbo ur. " | The
ascetic priest prescribes, though in the most
cautious doses, what is practically a stimulation
of the strongest and most life-assertive impulse —
the Will for Power. The happiness involved in
the " smallest superiority " which is the con-
comitant of all benefiting, helping, extolling,
making one's self useful, is the most ample consola-
tion, of which, if they are well-advised, physio-
logical distortions avail themselves : in other
cases they hurt each other, and naturally in obedi-
ence to the same radical instinct. An investiga-
tion of the origin of Christianity in the Roman
world shows that co-operative unions for poverty,



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176 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

sickness, and burial sprang up in the lowest stratum
of contemporary society, amid which the chief
antidote against depression, the little joy experi-
enced in mutual benefits, was deliberately fostered.
Perchance this was then a novelty, a real dis-
covery ? This conjuring up of the will for co-opera-
tion, for family organisation, for communal life,
for " Ccenacula" necessarily brought the Will
for Power, which had been already infinitesimally
stimulated, to a new and much fuller manifesta-
tion. The herd organisation is a genuine advance
and triumph in the fight with depression. With
the growth of the community there matures even
to individuals a new interest, which often enough
takes him out of the more personal element in his
discontent, his aversion to himself, the ," despectus
sui" of Geulincx. f^U sick and diseased people
strive instinctively after a herd-organisation, out
of a desire to shake off their sense of oppressive
discomfort and weakness ; the ascetic priest
divines this instinct and promotes it ; wherever a
herd exists it is the instinct of weakness which
has wished for the herd, and the cleverness of the
priests /which has organised it, for, mark this: by
an equally natural necessity the strong strive as
much for isolation as the weak for union : when
the former bind themselves it is only with a view
to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction
of their Will for Power, much against the wishes
of their individual consciences ; the latter, on the
contrary, range themselves together with positive
delight in such a muster — their instincts are as
much gratified thereby as the instincts of the



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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS ? 1 77

"born master" (that is, the solitary beast-of-prey
species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the
quick by organisatio n. | There is always lurking
beneath every oligarchy — such is the universal
lesson of history — the desire for tyranny. Every
oligarchy is continually quivering with the tension
of the effort required by each individual to keep
mastering this desire. (Such, e. g. , was the Greek ;
Plato shows it in a hundred places, Plato, who
knew his contemporaries — and himself^

19.

I The methods employed by the ascetic priest,
which we have already learnt to know — stifling
of all vitality, mechanical energy, the little joy,
and especially the method of " love your neigh-
bour" herd-organisation, the awaking of the
communal consciousness of power, to such a pitch
that the individual's disgust with himself becomes
eclipsed by his delight in the thriving of the
community — these are, according to modern
standards, the " innocent " methods employed in
the fight with depressi on ;^ let us turn now to
the more interesting topic of the '' guilty "
methods.