The Ripest Fruit

I read the following, taken from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, early last week and it struck a chord with me.  In fact, I seem to keep being drawn to this passage, and rereading it, once, or twice, a day for the past week.  Though I may tweak a word or two within the passage, I have found it to be a choice morsel.

“If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit, where society and the morality of custom at last reveal what they have simply been the means to: then we discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral (for “automonous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive), in short, the man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises--and in him a proud consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion.  This emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man--how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses-- he “deserves” all three--and of how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures?  The “free” man, the possessor of a protracted and unbreakable will, also possesses his measure of value: looking out upon others from himself, he honors or he despises: and just as he is bound to honor his peers, the strong and reliable (those with the right to make promises)--that is, all those who promise like sovereigns, reluctantly, rarely, slowly, who are chary of trusting, whose trust is a mark of distinction, who give their word as something that can be relied on because they know themselves strong enough to maintain it in the face of accidents, even “in the face of fate"--he is bound to reserve a kick for the feeble windbags who promise without the right to do so, and a rod for the liar who breaks his word even at the moment he utters it.  The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilige of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct.  What will he call this dominating instinct, supposing he feels the need to give it a name?  The answer is beyond doubt: this sovereign man calls it his conscience."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Translated and Edited by Walter Kaufmann, Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like, Section 2, pg. 495

Posted by on 06/13 at 03:52 AM

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