Essays from the Genealogy of morals by Friedrich Nietzsche

1. On self discovery

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge-and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves-how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. We are constantly making for them, being by nature winged creatures and honey gatherers of the spirit; there is one thing alone we really care about from the heart-“bringing something home.”

Whatever else there is in life, so-called “experiences” - which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time? Present experience has, l am afraid, always found US “absent-minded”: we cannot give our hearts to it-not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose e~r the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: “what really was that which just struck?” so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, “what really was that which we have just experienced?” and moreover: “who are we really?” and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being-and alas! miscount them. So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law “Each is furthest from himselr· applies to all eternity - we are not “men of knowledge” with respect to ourselves.

2. On prejudice

Fortunately I learned early to separate theological prejudice from moral prejudice and ceased to look for the origin of evil behind the world. A certain amount of historical and philological schooling, together with an inborn fastidiousness of taste in respect to psychological questions in general, soon transformed my problem into another one:

• under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil?
• and what value do they themselves possess? Have they hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity?
• Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life?
• Or is there revealed in them, on the contrary, the plenitude, force. and will of life, its courage. certainty. future?