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To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, and even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of a strong individual in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget. Such people will easily brush off what would eat deep into others; it is here were a genuine “love of one’s enemies” is possible—supposing it to be possible at all. Nobel people may have much love for their enemies, and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture “the enemy” as the man of ressentiment conceives him—and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived “the evil enemy,” “the Evil One,” and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a “good one”—himself!
This, then, is quite the contrary of what the noble man does, who conceives the basic concept “good” in advance and spontaneously out of himself and only then creates for himself an idea of “bad.” This “bad” of noble origin and that “evil” out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred—the former an after-production, a side issue, a contrasting shade, the latter on the contrary the original thing, the beginning, the distinctive deed in the conception of a slave morality—how different these words “bad” and “evil” are, although they are both apparently the opposite of the same concept “good.” But it is not the same concept “good”: one should ask rather precisely who is “evil” in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The answer, in all strictness, is: precisely the “good man” of the other morality, precisely the noble, powerful man, the ruler, but dyed in another color, interpreted in another fashion, seen in another way by the venomous eye of ressentiment.
References
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1887). On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo First Essay Good and Evil Good and Bad (Epub p. 50). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
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