The Genealogy of Morals: The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Genealogy of Morals: The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Ethics
But let us come back to it; the problem of another origin of the
_good_--of the good, as the resentful man has thought it out--demands
its solution. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge
against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the
great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs
say among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and he who is as
far removed from being a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite,
a lamb,--is he not good?" then there is nothing to cavil at in the
setting up of this ideal, though it may also be that the birds of prey
will regard it a little sneeringly, and perchance say to themselves,
"_We_ bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even like them:
nothing is tastier than a tender lamb." To require of strength that it
should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a wish to
overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for
enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require
of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of
force is just such a quantum of movement, will, action--rather it
is nothing else than just those very phenomena of moving, willing,
acting, and can only appear otherwise in the misleading errors of
language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become
petrified therein), which understands, and understands wrongly, all
working as conditioned by a worker, by a "subject." And just exactly
as the people separate the lightning from its flash, and interpret the
latter as a thing done, as the working of a subject which is called
lightning, so also does the popular morality separate strength from the
expression of strength, as though behind the strong man there existed
some indifferent neutral _substratum_, which enjoyed a _caprice and
option_ as to whether or not it should express strength. But there
is no such _substratum_, there is no "being" behind doing, working,
becoming; "the doer" is a mere appanage to the action. The action is
everything. In point of fact, the people duplicate the doing, when they
make the lightning lighten, that is a "doing-doing": they make the same
phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause.
The scientists fail to improve matters when they say, "Force moves,
force causes," and so on. Our whole science is still, in spite of all
its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of
language, and has never succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious
changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such
a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself"). What wonder,
if the suppressed and stealthily simmering passions of revenge and
hatred exploit for their own advantage this belief, and indeed hold no
belief with a more steadfast enthusiasm than this--"that the strong
has the _option_ of being weak, and the bird of prey of being a lamb."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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