Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals! (7)
On the Genealogy of Morals P7: (網友提供; 如有錯誤, 請原諒!)
The signpost to the right road
was for me the question:
what was the real etymological significance
of the designations for “good" coined
in the various languages?
I found they all led back
to the same conceptual transformation
that everywhere “noble," “aristocratic"
in the social sense,
is the basic concept from which “good"
in the sense of “with aristocratic soul,"
“noble," “with a soul of a high order,"
“with a privileged soul" necessarily developed:
a development which always runs parallel
with that other in which “common,"
plebeian, loware finally transformed
into the concept “bad"!
The most convincing example
of the latter is the German word schlecht (bad) itself:
which is identical with schlicht (plain, simple)
compare schlechtweg (plainly),
schlechterdings (simply);
and originally designated the plain,
the common man, as yet with
no inculpatory implication and simply
in contradistinction to the nobility.
About the time of the Thirty Years’ War,
late enough therefore,
this meaning changed into the one now customary.
With regard to a moral genealogy
this seems to me a fundamental insight;
that it has been arrived at so late
is the fault of the retarding influence exercised
by the democratic prejudice
in the modern world toward all questions of origin.
And this is so even in the apparently
quite objective domain of natural science
and physiology,
as I shall merely hint here.
But what mischief this prejudice
is capable of doing,
especially to morality and history,
once it has been unbridled to the point
of hatred is shown by the notorious case of Buckle
(Henry Thomas Buckle 1821-1862, English historian);
here the plebeianism of the modern spirit,
which is of English origin,
erupted once again on its native soil,
as violently as a mud volcano and with that salty,
noisy, vulgar eloquence with which
all volcanos have spoken hitherto…
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