186 Nietzschethe goal of ensuring that each individual become "a whole person." On
the contrary: the history of morality is a bloodstained lunacy that has
devoured people. Anyone who has been successful in making "a whole
person" of himself accomplished it despite history.
The first contours of this sort of disillusioning history of morality
are presented in Human, All Too Human and are developed further in
Daybreak. On the Genealogy of Morals brings the analysis of the nonmoral
history of morality to a conclusion.
As far back as Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche was testing a hypoth-
esis that would continue to define his writings, namely that behind the
moral distinction between good and evil lurks the older distinction
between "noble" and "base" (2,67; HH I § 45). Who is noble?
Nietzsche's answer was those who are sufficiendy strong, determined,
and fearless to "engage in retaliation" (2,67; HHI § 45) when attacked.
Those who can stand up for themselves and know how to protect and
avenge themselves are noble. The actions of a noble person are good
because the person is fundamentally good. The "base" individual is bad
because his lack of self-regard prevents him from defending himself
with whatever limited means he has at his disposal. Hence, "noble" and
"base" are designations for differing measures of self-regard. From the
perspective of the noble person, a bad person is an insignificant person
from whom nothing needs to be feared, because he does not even have
regard for himself.
Insignificant people can pose a danger to noble people if they com-
pensate for their frailty by banding together and taking the offensive,
either in the physical sense of an actual slave revolt or mentally by over-
turning the hierarchy of values and replacing imperious virtues with a
morality of tolerance and humility. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche
began to develop his critique of ressentiment in morality and to pick
apart Schopenhauer's morality of pity by shifting the accent from the
sensation of pity to the arousal of pity and interpreting the use of pity
as a weapon of the weak. The weak discover the vulnerable aspect of the
strong, namely their ability to experience pity, and the weak exploit this