Nietzsche

Nietzsche's 'Master Race' Theory

from The Genealogy of Morals

With respect to our problem — which for good reasons we can call a quiet problem, which addresses in a refined manner only a few ears, — there is no little interest in establishing the point that often in those words and roots which designate “good” there still shines through the main nuance of what made the nobility feel they were men of higher rank. It’s true that in most cases they perhaps named themselves simply after their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “those in command”) or after the most visible sign of their superiority, for example, as “the rich” or “the owners” (that is the meaning of arya [noble], and the corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic).

But they also named themselves after a typical characteristic, and that is the case which is our concern here. For instance, they called themselves “the truthful,” above all the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theogonis. The word developed for this characteristic, esthlos [fine, noble] , indicates, according to its root meaning, a man who is, who possess reality, who really exists, who is true. Then, with a subjective transformation, it indicates the true man as the truthful man. In this phase of conceptual transformation it became the slogan and catch phrase for the nobility, and its sense shifted entirely over to “aristocratic,” to mark a distinction from the lying common man, as Theogonis takes and presents him — until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word remains as a designation of spiritual nobility and becomes, as it were, ripe and sweet.

In the word kakos [weak, worthless], as in the word deilos [cowardly] (the plebeian in contrast to the agathos [good] man), the cowardice is emphasized. This perhaps provides a hint about the direction in which we have to seek the etymological origin for the multiple meanings of agathos. In the Latin word malus [bad] (which I place alongside melas [black, dark]) the common man could be designated as the dark-coloured, above all as the dark-haired (“hic niger est” [“this man is dark”]), as the pre-Aryan inhabitant of Italian soil, who stood out from those who became dominant, the blonds, that is, the conquering race of Aryans, most clearly through this colour. At any rate, Gaelic offers me an exactly corresponding example — the word fin (for example, in the name Fin-Gal), the term designating nobility and finally the good, noble, and pure, originally referred to the blond-headed man in contrast to the dusky, dark-haired original inhabitants.

Incidentally, the Celts were a thoroughly blond race. People are wrong when they link those traces of a basically dark-haired population, which are noticeable on the carefully prepared ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic origin and mixing of blood, as Virchow still does. It is much rather the case that in these places the pre-Aryan population of Germany predominates. (The same is true for almost all of Europe: essentially the conquered races finally attained the upper hand for themselves once again in colour, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts. Who can confirm for us whether modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that preference for the “Commune,” for the most primitive form of society, which all European socialists now share, does not indicate for the most part a monstrous counter-attack — and that the ruling and master race, the Aryans, is not being defeated, even physiologically? . . .)

The Latin word bonus [good] I believe I can explicate as “the warrior,” provided that I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older word duonus (compare bellum [war] = duellum [war] = duen-lum, which seems to me to contain that word duonus). Hence, bonus as a man of war, of division (duo), as a warrior. We see what constituted a man’s “goodness” in ancient Rome. What about our German word “Gut” [good] itself? Doesn’t it indicate “den Göttlichen” [the god-like man], the man of “göttlichen Geschlechts” [“the generation of gods]”? And isn’t that identical to the people’s (originally the nobles’) name for the Goths? The reasons for this hypothesis do not belong here. —

To this rule that the concept of political superiority always resolves itself into the concept of spiritual superiority, it is not really an exception (although there is room for exceptions), when the highest caste is also the priestly caste and consequently for its total range of meanings prefers a rating which recalls its priestly function. So, for example, for the first time the words “pure” and “impure” appear as contrasting marks of one’s social position, and later a “good” and a “bad” also develop with a meaning which no longer refers to social position.

Incidentally, people should be warned not to begin by taking these ideas of “pure” and “impure” too seriously, too broadly, or even symbolically. Instead they should understand from the start that all the ideas of ancient humanity, to a degree we can hardly imagine, are much more coarse, crude, superficial, narrow, blunt and, in particular, unsymbolic. The “pure man” is initially simply a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods which produce diseases of the skin, who doesn’t sleep with the dirty women of the lower people, who has a horror of blood — no more, not much more!

On the other hand, of course, from the very nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy it is clear enough how it’s precisely here that early on the opposition between different evaluations could become dangerously internalized and sharpened. And, in fact, they finally ripped open fissures between man and man, over which even an Achilles of the free spirit could not cross without shivering.* From the beginning there is something unhealthy about such priestly aristocracies and about the customary attitudes which govern in them, which turn away from action, sometimes brooding, sometimes exploding with emotion, as a result of which in the priests of almost all ages there have appeared almost unavoidably those debilitating intestinal illnesses and neurasthenia.

But what they themselves came up with as a remedy for this pathological disease — surely we can assert that it has finally shown itself, through its effects, as even a hundred times more dangerous than the illness for which it was to provide relief. Human beings themselves are still sick from the after-effects of this priestly naivete in healing! Let’s think, for example, of certain forms of diet (avoiding meat), of fasting, of celibacy, of the flight “into the desert” (Weir- Mitchell’s isolation, but naturally without the fattening up cure and overeating which follow it, which constitutes the most effective treatment for all hysteria induced by the ascetic ideal) consider also the whole metaphysic of the priests, so hostile to the senses, making men lazy and sophisticated, the way they hypnotize themselves in the manner of fakirs and Brahmins — Brahmanism employed as a glass knob and a fixed idea — and finally the only too understandable and common dissatisfaction with its radical cure, with nothingness (or God — the desire for a unio mystica [mystical union] with God is the desire of the Buddhist for nothingness, nirvana — and nothing more!).

Among the priests, everything simply becomes more dangerous — not only the remedies and arts of healing, but also pride, vengeance, mental acuity, excess, love, thirst for power, virtue, illness — although it’s fair enough also to add that on the foundation of this fundamentally dangerous form of human existence, the priestly, for the first time the human being became, in general, an interesting animal, that here the human soul first attained depth in a higher sense and became evil — and, indeed, these are the two basic reasons for humanity’s superiority, up to now, over other animals! . . .

You will have already guessed how easily the priestly way of evaluating can split from the knightly-aristocratic and then continue to develop into its opposite. Such a development receives a special stimulus every time the priestly caste and the warrior caste confront each other jealously and are not willing to agree amongst themselves about the winner. The knightly-aristocratic judgments of value have as their basic assumption a powerful physicality, a blooming, rich, even overflowing health, together with those things required to maintain these qualities — war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and, in general, everything which involves strong, free, happy action. The priestly-noble method of evaluating has, as we saw, other preconditions: these make it difficult enough for them when it comes to war!

As is well known, priests are the most evil of enemies — but why? Because they are the most powerless. From their powerlessness, their hate grows among them into something immense and terrifying, to the most spiritual and most poisonous manifestations. The really great haters in world history and the most spiritual haters have always been priests — in comparison with the spirit of priestly revenge all the remaining spirits are generally hardly worth considering. Human history would be a really stupid affair without that spirit which entered it from the powerless.

Let us quickly consider the greatest example. Everything on earth which has been done against “the nobility,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the possessors of power” is not worth mentioning in comparison with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people, who knew how to get final satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical transformation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge. This was appropriate only to a priestly people with the most deeply repressed priestly desire for revenge.

In opposition to the aristocratic value equations (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = loved by god), the Jews, with a consistency inspiring fear, dared to reverse things and to hang on to that with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of the powerless), that is, to “only those who suffer are good; the poor, the powerless, the low are the only good people; the suffering, those in need, the sick, the ugly are also the only pious people; only they are blessed by God; for them alone there is salvation. — By contrast, you privileged and powerful people, you are for all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lecherous, the insatiable, the godless; you will also be the unblessed, the cursed, and the damned for all eternity!” . . . We know who inherited this Judaic transformation of values . . .

In connection with that huge and immeasurably disastrous initiative which the Jews launched with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the sentence I wrote at another time (in Beyond Good and Evil, section 195) — namely, that with the Jews the slave rebellion in morality begins: that rebellion which has a two-thousand-year-old history behind it and which we nowadays no longer notice because it — has triumphed. . . .

But you fail to understand that? You have no eye for something that needed two millennia to emerge victorious? . . . That’s nothing to wonder at: all lengthy things are hard to see, to assess. However, that’s what took place: out of the trunk of that tree of vengeance and hatred, Jewish hatred — the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values, something whose like has never existed on earth — from that grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all the forms of love: — from what other trunk could it have grown? . . .

However, one should not assume that this love arose essentially as the denial of that thirst for vengeance, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No. The reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred, as its crown, as the victorious crown unfolding itself wider and wider in the purest brightness and sunshine, which, so to speak, was seeking for the kingdom of light and height, the goal of that hate, aiming for victory, trophies, seduction, with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were sinking down ever deeper and more greedily into everything that was evil and possessed depth.

This Jesus of Nazareth, the living evangelist of love, the “Saviour” bringing holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the sinners — was he not that very seduction in its most terrible and most irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Judaic values and innovations in ideals? Didn’t Israel attain, precisely with the detour of this “Saviour,” of this apparent enemy to and dissolver of Israel, the final goal of its sublime thirst for vengeance? Isn’t it part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of vengeance, a far-sighted, underground, slowly expropriating, and premeditated revenge, that Israel itself had to disown and nail to the cross, like some mortal enemy, the tool essential to its revenge before all the world, so that “all the world,” that is, all Israel’s enemies, could then swallow this particular bait without a second thought?

On the other hand, could anyone, using the full subtlety of his mind, even imagine in general a more dangerous bait? Something to match the enticing, intoxicating, narcotizing, corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross,” that ghastly paradox of a “god on the cross,” that mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate final cruelty and self-crucifixion of god for the salvation of mankind? . . . At least it is certain that sub hoc signo [under this sign] Israel, with its vengeance and revaluation of the worth of all other previous values, has triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.

— “But what are you doing still talking about more noble ideals! Let’s look at the facts: the people have triumphed — or ‘the slaves,’ or ‘the rabble,’ or ‘the herd,’ or whatever you want to call them — if this has taken place because of the Jews, then good for them! No people ever had a more world-historical mission. ‘The masters have been disposed of. The morality of the common man has won. We may also take this victory as a blood poisoning (it did mix the races up together) — I don’t deny that. But this intoxication has undoubtedly been successful. The ‘Salvation’ of the human race (namely, from ‘the masters’) is well under way. Everything is visibly turning Jewish or Christian or plebeian (what do the words matter!).