First essay what is useful-practical, harmful-impractical. According to this theory, good is what has always shown itself to be useful: so it can claim validity as ‘valuable in the highest degree’, as ‘valuable as such’. This route towards an explanation is wrong, as I said, but at least the explanation in itself is rational and psychologically tenable.
4 – I was given a pointer in the right direction by the question as to what the terms for ‘good’, as used in different languages, mean from the etymological point of view: then I found that they all led me back to the same conceptual transformation, – that everywhere, ‘noble’, ‘aristocratic’ in social terms9 is the basic concept from which, necessarily, ‘good’ in the sense of ‘spiritually noble’, ‘aristocratic’, of ‘spiritually highminded’, ‘spiritually privileged’ developed: a development that always runs parallel with that other one which ultimately transfers ‘common’, ‘plebeian’, ‘low’ into the concept ‘bad’. The best example for the latter is the German word ‘schlecht’ (bad) itself: which is identical with ‘schlicht’ (plain, simple) – compare ‘schlechtweg’ (plainly), ‘schlechterdings’ (simply) – and originally referred to the simple, the common man with no derogatory implication, but simply in contrast to the nobility. Round about the time of the Thirty Years War, late enough, then, this meaning shifted into its current usage. – To me, this seems an essential insight into moral genealogy; that it has been discovered so late is due to the obstructing influence which the democratic bias within the modern world exercises over all questions of descent. And this is the case in the apparently most objective of fields, natural science and physiology, as I shall just mention here. The havoc this prejudice can wreak, once it is unbridled to the point of hatred, particularly for morality and history, can be seen in the famous case of Buckle; the plebeianism of the modern spirit, which began in England, broke out there once again on its native soil as violently as a volcano of mud, and with that salted, overloud, vulgar loquacity with which all volcanoes have spoken up till now. –
5 With regard to our problem, which can justifiably be called a quiet problem and fastidiously addresses itself to only a few ears, it is of no little 9
Nietzsche here uses a derivative of the word ‘Stand’ (‘estate’).
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