BY
1913
In 1887, with the view of amplifying and completing certain new
doctrines which he had merely sketched in _Beyond Good and Evil_
(see especially aphorism 260), Nietzsche published _The Genealogy of
Morals_. This work is perhaps the least aphoristic, in form, of all
Nietzsche's productions. For analytical power, more especially in those
parts where Nietzsche examines the ascetic ideal, _The Genealogy of
Morals_ is unequalled by any other of his works; and, in the light
which it throws upon the attitude of the ecclesiast to the man of
resentment and misfortune, it is one of the most valuable contributions
to sacerdotal psychology.
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. Translated by J. M. Kennedy
1.
We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own
good reason. We have never searched for ourselves--how should it then
come to pass, that we should ever _find_ ourselves? Rightly has it been
said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." _Our_
treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to
those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight,
and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts
only for one thing--to bring something "home to the hive!"
As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is
concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or
sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I
fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not
there, and certainly not our ear. Rather like one who, delighting
in a divine distraction, or sunken in the seas of his own soul, in
whose ear the clock has just thundered with all its force its twelve
strokes of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, "What has in
point of fact just struck?" so do we at times rub afterwards, as it
were, our puzzled ears, and ask in complete astonishment and complete
embarrassment, "Through what have we in point of fact just lived?"
further, "Who are we in point of fact?" and count, _after they have
struck_, as I have explained, all the twelve throbbing beats of the
clock of our experience, of our life, of our being--ah!--and count
wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves,
we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken,
for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, "Each one is the
farthest away from himself"--as far as ourselves are concerned we are
not "knowers."
2.
My thoughts concerning the _genealogy_ of our moral prejudices--for
they constitute the issue in this polemic--have their first, bald,
and provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms entitled
_Human, all-too-Human, a Book for Free Minds_, the writing of which
was begun in Sorrento, during a winter which allowed me to gaze over
the broad and dangerous territory through which my mind had up to that
time wandered. This took place in the winter of 1876-77; the thoughts
themselves are older. They were in their substance already the same
thoughts which I take up again in the following treatises:--we hope
that they have derived benefit from the long interval, that they have
grown riper, clearer, stronger, more complete. The fact, however,
that I still cling to them even now, that in the meanwhile they have
always held faster by each other, have, in fact, grown out of their
original shape and into each other, all this strengthens in my mind the
joyous confidence that they must have been originally neither separate
disconnected capricious nor sporadic phenomena, but have sprung from
a common root, from a fundamental "_fiat_" of knowledge, whose empire
reached to the soul's depth, and that ever grew more definite in its
voice, and more definite in its demands. That is the only state of
affairs that is proper in the case of a philosopher.