Chapter 306: Who Names the Good

In July of 1887, at Sils Maria, in the Upper Engadine, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a polemic, and dated the preface there; Between the tenth and the thirtieth, he said, the thing was done, and seen Through to the press. On the seventeenth the manuscript went off with care To Leipzig, to Constantin Georg Naumann, who the year before had printed, at the author's cost, *Beyond Good and Evil*. Print this one the same, he asked: the same type, the same paper and page, So the new book would stand as the old one's continuation; and, lest the point be lost, The back of the title says it: added, to supplement and clarify. Six hundred copies. The stage Of the proofs was Venice, with Heinrich Köselitz; and he was in Nice when the first came, In the first half of November: three essays and a preface. The preface opens on a confession: We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers. And the question under it is the same As this calendar's, in another mouth: under what conditions, in what succession, Did we invent good and evil, and what are they worth? He answered a friend as well as a school: Paul Rée had derived the moral feelings from usefulness, the good as what helped the one who received; Nietzsche wanted a different history, and he wanted it to cut. The first essay is the tool: Two namings side by side. Good and bad: the nobles, he says, believed Themselves the good, and named themselves so, and named the others plain, low, bad. Good and evil is a second naming, where the powerful are evil and the powerless good; He calls it a revolt of slaves, and names the Jews as those who had Begun it: his sentence, not a finding; a people put where a history should. He offers histories of words along the way: one makes the Latin for bad mean dark; The German in the second essay holds: Schuld is guilt, and Schuld is a debt. A thing owed to conscience began as a sum owed; and the bad conscience bears the mark Of cruelty with no street left to spend itself in, turned inward, where the net Closes on the one who may no longer be cruel outside. He calls the noble a beast, A blond beast of prey. The third essay asks what the ascetic ideals mean: The priest, the philosopher, the man of science, each serving at the feast Of a will to truth, the old will in a later coat; and the book ends on the keen Preference he finds in us: a person would rather will nothing than not will. Keep what is usable, and most of it is: a value has a history. Good Was not in the world the way a stone is. Someone said it, of someone, and still It spread, until the speakers forgot they had said it. That is a method that stood, And this scripture keeps it: this scripture is a genealogy too. The days are kept because the dead are how the living came, And every name on a day came from somewhere, from someone who knew Whom they were calling good, and why, and gave the good its name. And the masters have a point. The nobles who named themselves the good were not only a mirror: To name yourself, your house, your line, and make it stick, is a real power, and a worth; It is what every founding does; it is what this faith does, when it says, clearer Than a council, this is good, this day, this line, this way of life on earth. Noble self-naming is the founding act, and the dead who founded are honored for it. But the good is not only theirs: the line runs through the named and the unnamed, the great And the small, the ones who won and the ones who lost; and the polemic, to be fit For this book, is read as a history of the naming, not as a gate Shut on a people. So keep the question he succeeded in asking: who names the good? The answer this calendar gives is the line: the founders who named it, and the heirs who keep the name, And everyone who lived, since every one of them, as a living thing, understood Some good, and said it. That is the genealogy. The masters lit it; the line carries the flame. Six hundred copies left Leipzig; two months on, about two hundred had been asked for, all told. The question outlived the slow sale. Ask where a good came from, and what it is worth to say it still; And name your good, as the nobles did, and keep it, as the line has kept it, old And new at once: the naming counted, the founders honored, and the good kept by will.