Few concepts which Nietzsche developed have been less controversial than ressentiment. I view this as a problem. It’s not unusual to find that ressentiment (and its cousin bad conscience) are at the core of Nietzsche’s thought. It’s also not unusual to observe that Nietzsche was stridently elitist and aristocratic. It’s interesting, then, that people never associate those two observations and ask to what extent ressentiment was constructed to justify that aristocratic worldview. Asked another way, what explanatory force does ressentiment have outside of that view? In my estimation, it is little or none. What I will show is that ressentiment is only a way to ascribe inherent malice to weakness, a line of thought whose only end point is excusing the use of power by the powerful against the weak.
Usually I would simply roll into the meat of the essay, but I think it will be useful to lay out the steps that my argument will take before I break it down. First, I’m going to problematize the root of the notion of ressentiment by discussing his ideas of masters and slaves, as well as the übermensch. Then I want to talk about misconceptions that many people have regarding Nietzsche’s ideas on the slave mode of valuation and creativity, contrasting his views on “slave creativity” with those on “master creativity”, and after this I will discuss his contempt for the weak. I’ll finish with two mirrored points: first, that Nietzsche believes in an essential weakness and that it’s this weakness, not ressentiment or bad conscience, which is the primary problem; and second, that Nietzsche also believes in an essential strength, but that this strength is a fallacy. Now that we have the roadmap, let’s begin.
The main work I’m going to cite in this essay is Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, though I will cite other works, both by Nietzsche and by others. I am reading him through favorable English translations, primarily those from Walter Kaufman. (I will be referring to Nietzsche’s works in this script by abbreviations and section numbers. “GM” is On the Genealogy of Morals, with “GM1” being the first essay, and so on; “BGE” is Beyond Good and Evil; “EH” is Ecce Homo; and “Z” is Thus Spoke Zarathustra.)
Nietzsche’s Bad Etymology
Nietzsche begins his argument in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals by alluding to etymology, so we will start there too. This is almost the only sort of obvious support he gives for his positions. The other, which I won’t deal with as much, are his literary allusions to dramatic works and stories. These types of literary evidence are clearly subjectively interpreted, as this is almost a definitional part of experiencing art. His etymology then is really the only firm support he offers as a base for his explanation of the human condition. Despite his presentation, Nietzsche’s use of etymology has serious flaws that call into question his method of inquiry.
Some of Nietzsche’s flaws cannot be ignored. It’s pretty surprising (we’ll go with that) that a serious philosopher would say “The Latin malus (beside which I set melas)” [1] [GM1 §5], using sound-alikes to try and connect “bad” with “black” in different languages (Latin & Greek). His treatment of bonus in the same section similarly shows signs of fitting the facts to his pre-conception[2] [GM1 §5]. “Duo” in Latin means “two”, which might suggest dissention (as he says) but could just as easily represent marriage. Further, there’s no reason to assume that bonus/duonus is even connected to duo. I know that I am speaking from 2024 and I can easily look at over 100 years of research beyond what he had. If this was in a paper on philology or etymology I would say he had made good conjectures. The issue here is that On the Genealogy of Morals is a work of philosophy and he is using these conjectures to argue that people in the past were a certain way. Given that goal, the fact that his etymology is wrong (and that he presents no other non-subjective evidence) is pretty damaging to the credibility of his central assertions.
Nietzsche’s technical failures stem from larger flaws in his method of reading which come from his ideology. In section 2 of the first essay, he takes the logic of “history is written by the victors” almost childishly, as if it was exactly literal. He invokes a “lordly right of giving names”[3] to say that all words are direct references to the desires of the ruling class[4] [GM1 §2]. This is very obviously not how language evolves. Then his discussion of pure and impure in section 6 [GM1 §6][5] also shows a series of value judgments which may feel intuitive but which, for a serious scholar, should at least be scrutinized. The fact that Nietzsche never does this suggests that he never went from an exploration of evidence to a conclusion, he instead only presented evidence in such a way that it allowed him to say what he had already intended to say.
Beyond Nietzsche’s ability or ethics in the use of etymology, the larger issue is that etymology is a poor window into history. As Franklin Edgerton, a notable American linguist, says in “Etymology and Interpretation”: “In short, interpretation by etymological analysis can never, in the nature of things, result in anything but a guess as to the meaning. There is no objection to using it in a tentative way, precisely as a preliminary guess. Not infrequently it may help to put us on the right track; although it must be added also that it has very often proved a will-o’-the-wisp and led investigators away from the truth.”[6]
To use etymology as the basis of your analysis is, in a word, foolish. Nietzsche only does so because he has to. The historical record does not line up with his assertions and neither does science. There simply isn’t good evidence for the things that Nietzsche claims, so he presents bad evidence and doesn’t linger on it. He needs to present a factual core to be taken seriously but it doesn’t need to be true, just substantial enough to be convincing. From there, he can proceed however he wants.
What Is Ressentiment?
Now that we’ve dispensed with his evidence, we can ask the central question: what is ressentiment? Unhelpfully, Nietzsche never gives a straightforward definition. I’ve therefore found two quotes from On the Genealogy of Morals which I think best elaborate the meaning. First, from section 10 of the first essay: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.”[7] [GM1 §10]
Next, from the second essay, section 11: “To the psychologists first of all, presuming they would like to study ressentiment close up for once, I would say: this plant blooms best today among anarchists and anti-Semites—where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violet, though with a different odor. And as like must always produce like, it causes us no surprise to see a repetition in such circles of attempts often made before… to sanctify revenge under the name of justice—as if justice were at bottom merely a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved—and to rehabilitate not only revenge but all reactive affects in general.”[8] [GM2 §11]
To sum these up, then, ressentiment is the state of being where a person emphasizes imaginal reaction because they are unable to react in the real world. Moreover, it is a false or inferior reaction from inferior, contemptible people: slaves, anarchists, and antisemites, all groups which Nietzsche spends lots of time excoriating throughout his career. Nietzsche’s relationship with antisemitism deserves separate treatment, but I will make this point: what do slaves, anarchists, and antisemites really have in common? Nothing. Nietzsche has simply decided to list these groups together. We can’t take anything said about these groups as giving us reliable information about them. That said, Nietzsche’s use of these figures as icons of ressentiment suggests what he thinks of the concept: it is only indulged in by the worst sort of people.
To really understand ressentiment, we must separate the ressentiment of the sick (as he says) from the ressentiment of the strong. A major element of Nietzsche’s thought is the duality of true & false, pure & impure, strong & weak, noble & corrupt. Many of his concepts are discussed as if there is a “real” and “fake” version of the concept. One such concept is, of course, ressentiment itself. Unlike in most cases where true or real is good, the real version of ressentiment is that of the weak, as he says “Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick—it is their specific evil—unfortunately also their most natural inclination.”[9] [EH1 §6] In other words, ressentiment is not natural for the strong. He goes on to say: “Born of weakness, ressentiment is most harmful for the weak themselves. Conversely, given a rich nature, it is a superfluous feeling; mastering this feeling is virtually what proves riches.”[10] [EH1 §6] While most commenters focus on the concept of surpassing ressentiment (as he says that the strong do), what I want you to keep in mind is this division that Nietzsche has set up because it is a throughline in his presentation.
Strong, noble spirits will favor the master mode of valuation (or master morality) while the weak and contemptible favor the slave mode of valuation; this is Nietzsche’s assertion. A famous metaphor he employs is that of the bird of prey (I usually call it a hawk) and the lamb. Master morality says that the subject and whatever benefits the subject is “good” and that which doesn’t serve the subject is “bad”; Nietzsche says this has no moral degradation (despite continually saying that masters/nobles “despise” their inferiors and other uses of similar language). Slave morality, on the other hand, is formed by the subject being aware of their inferiority relative to a superior. He says that the subject here first terms as “evil” whatever harms them, and says that “good” things are those which resemble the subject: weak, helpless, furtive, insecure, etc. Nietzsche says that “evil” carries a moral censure that “bad” does not. Further, Nietzsche explicitly connects the two moralities, saying: “…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.”[11] [GM1 §11] This quote makes it doubly clear that he finds slave morality to be actually undesirable: first, he ascribes malice to the slave’s view; second, he sets slave morality directly against the noble good, and noble good is a concept which Nietzsche always extols.
The last major subject of Nietzsche’s that I want to deal with here is the übermensch, usually translated as overman, superman, or beyond-man (which is my favorite). Like several of his concepts, Nietzsche doesn’t ever give a succinct definition of this idea. For our boilerplate definition, I’ll quote YouTuber Thinking Deeply with Ben who has a video summarizing the idea. In Ben’s words, the übermensch is “a psychologically superior being of the future [which] individuals of today should strive to become.”[12] This is the definition of the idea. The essence of the übermensch lies in the phrase “beyond good and evil”. It is a surpassing of a present condition. As Nietzsche says early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “But it is with man as it is with the tree. The more he aspires to the height and light, the more strongly do his roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep—into evil.”[13] [Z1 §8]
Nietzsche’s Hatred of the Weak
The second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals is about the concept of bad conscience, effectively a repackaging of ressentiment. In it, he gives clear voice to the idea that the ideal person, the one who transcends so-called “modern man”, will freely indulge in what modern man calls evil. In section 18, he says that artists must have a joy in making suffer, that this desire to cause suffering is essential to creating beauty[14] [GM2 §18]. In section 24, he says that we need to turn our “evil eye” away from inclinations he calls natural—such as aggression, cruelty, and arrogance—and towards unnatural inclinations, by which we can assume he means friendliness, benevolence, and humility[15] [GM2 §24].
Nietzsche makes a stronger statement in this vein in Beyond Good and Evil: “We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to [the] beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does. Indeed, we do not even say enough when we say only that much; and at any rate we are at this point, in what we say and keep silent about, at the other end from all modern ideology and herd desiderata—as their antipodes perhaps?”[16] [BGE §44] He is explicit here: doing “devilry” and things that are “evil, terrible, [and] tyrannical” is not only as good for the “enhancement of the species ‘man’” as its opposite (which is to say, doing good); doing evil is in facto better. After all, transgression is the way one shows that they are beyond a particular restraint, so this übermensch must be equally capable of and dispassionate about acts of good and acts of evil. It is tempting to read Nietzsche as speaking only about a personal, inward process, but this comes out of the generosity of the reader. As I’ll show, Nietzsche is clear about considering the greater overcoming, and the activity which is native to strength and nobility, as the overcoming and domination of others[17] [GM2 §17]. That will add to our understanding now of the übermensch not simply as an advanced human but as someone whose quote-unquote “advancement” is specifically about being capable of at least as much evil as they are good.
There are two other central aspects of the übermensch idea. One is that only a few people can ever aspire to become an übermensch. We can see this when Zarathustra descends the mountain and is rejected by the crowd when he tries to teach. He immediately decides not to try and teach crowds any longer, only seeking out disciples. This is in contrast to his obvious analogue Jesus of Nazareth, who instructed his followers to preach even to those who despised them and, apart from the warnings about the coming of the Kingdom of God, not to bear any ill will to others, even for crimes committed (see Luke 6). Jesus himself was, if anything, more outgoing, accepting, and generous than he told his followers to be. Both characters were despised by many people but Jesus’s message was nevertheless for a wider group whereas Zarathustra’s was for a chosen few. This idea, that only a few people are capable of going beyond good & evil, is not only found at this point in Nietzsche’s work, it is also a major part of his thoughts on Napoleon, Goethe, and the German poet Heinrich Heine, as well as his thoughts on himself.
The final aspect of the übermensch I want to discuss here is the implied necessity of the slave mode of valuation for developing the übermensch. Though Nietzsche doesn’t seem to make this explicit, this idea of the noble & slave modes of valuation being needed to create the übermensch can be found by pulling strands together. In the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he says “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman”[18] [Z1 §P4]; a tightrope walker attempts to walk that rope but falls. It thus seems like man must be crossed in order to reach the übermensch. Nietzsche frequently associates nobles, knights, and masters with animals such as the “blond beast” while associating priests and slaves with the quote-unquote “tame & docile modern man”. Bringing these ideas together, Zarathustra’s statement seems to suggest a progression in modes of valuation from master morality to slave morality to übermensch morality. We can also presume this idea in a quote like this: “The bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that, but an illness as pregnancy is an illness. Let us seek out the conditions under which this illness has reached its most terrible and most sublime height; we shall see what it really was that thus entered the world.”[19] [GM2 §19] While I view Nietzsche’s thoughts here as actually not being about necessary stages, this is an important concept in Nietzsche revisionism so I wanted to show the support it does have.
This leads into a broader key plank of what I’m calling Nietzsche revisionism: the idea that Nietzsche actually valued the slave mode of valuation or thought its “good-evil” opposition was useful. When I say Nietzsche revisionism (I’ll try to stop saying it now), what I’m talking about is the dominant view of Nietzsche among contemporary English-speaking thinkers, at the very least, characterizing him as someone primarily interested in the actualization of people. It is in this context that I am now going to pick apart these notions in order to demonstrate the difference between what Nietzsche himself meant (through an analysis of his words) and the revisionist position which is based on a softening of his intent by filtering it through the lens of polite society.
Creativity and Creativity
Creativity is a great good for Nietzsche. This idea should be easy to grasp and pretty uncontroversial, so I won’t linger on it. In many areas, he asserts that ressentiment and bad conscience are creative. As I just quoted, in section 19 of On the Genealogy of Morals, he equates bad conscience with pregnancy, the potential creation of a child. While this shows some goal to ressentiment creativity, this is not necessarily a worthwhile goal for Nietzsche; creativity doesn’t justify ressentiment. Instead, creativity is another idea that Nietzsche treats in duality. He says that ressentiment leads to creativity but this is a false, degenerative creativity, a creativity which only reaffirms the decadence of ressentiment. Nietzsche makes this explicit when he says “While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its creative deed.”[20] [GM1 §10].
“Cleverness” is Nietzsche’s main backhanded compliment. It is the creativity of ressentiment, which he makes clear by saying “A race of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree: namely, as a condition of existence of the first importance”[21] [GM1 §10]. The problem is that ressentiment, for Nietzsche, is a corrupt source which makes the creativity false. We can see that he thinks this by how he characterizes the reasons for scientific fairness, which he attributes to ressentiment, saying: “All I draw attention to is the circumstance that it is the spirit of ressentiment itself out of which this new nuance of scientific fairness (for the benefit of hatred, envy, jealousy, mistrust, rancor, and revenge) proceeds. For this ‘scientific fairness’ immediately ceases and gives way to accents of deadly enmity and prejudice once it is a question of dealing with another group of affects”[22] [GM2 §11]. While scientific fairness may be beneficial, Nietzsche believes it is undertaken for corrupt reasons and is ultimately little more than a facade for envy and similar attitudes.
This false creativity is to be contrasted with the true creativity of those he calls the nobles. Again, it is tempting to read Nietzsche as thinking that only the übermensch is truly good and laudable but this is not what he says. The master mode of valuation is not an embryo, it is a complete form which might have gone on forever. As he says, “The reverse is the case with the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly—its negative concept ‘low,’ ‘common,’ ‘bad’ is only a subsequently-invented pale, contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept—filled with life and passion through and through—’we noble ones, we good, beautiful, happy ones!’”[23] [GM1 §10]
Though “modern man” is for Nietzsche now under slave morality after having been under master moralities, this is never described as a natural or inevitable process. Nietzsche calls it a slave revolt. Historically, slave rebellions are unfortunately put down more often than not. At the very least, Nietzsche is implying a struggle which is possible for the masters to win. We can also consider again the scene with the tightrope walker. It can look as though the message is that a person must go from animal to man to übermensch, but then let’s consider the death of the tightrope walker. That represents that the course of man is dangerous and unsure. Further, it is only an exceptional person who makes the attempt. Rather than viewing this parable as representing the route which all people will take, it should instead be seen as a route only taken by those with the ability and desire to become the übermensch. In this reading, the rope of man is not a path, it’s an obstacle for those who want to become the übermensch, and it’s as obstacles that both “modern man” and slave morality are most frequently depicted. As he says in On the Genealogy of Morals, “These ‘instruments of culture’ are a disgrace to man and rather an accusation and counterargument against ‘culture’ in general!”[24] [GM1 §11]
Nietzsche argues that nobility does not view “those it despises” (which is to say the weak) in a negative light, but this is shown to be a lie by the way he characterizes weakness, saying “Weakness is being lied into something meritorious, no doubt of it—so it is just as you said… —and impotence which does not requite into ‘goodness of heart’; anxious lowliness into ‘humility’; subjection to those one hates into ‘obedience’ (that is, to one of whom they say he commands this subjection—they call him God).”[25] [GM1 §14] True ressentiment, bad conscience, and even malice are only the province of weakness. Look at the frankly ridiculous special pleading he engages in to excuse noble misdeeds while condemning any acts of the common: “When the noble mode of valuation blunders and sins against reality, it does so in respect to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently familiar, against a real knowledge of which it has indeed inflexibly guarded itself: in some circumstances it misunderstands the sphere it despises, that of the common man, of the lower orders; on the other hand, one should remember that, even supposing that the affect of contempt, of looking down from a superior height, falsifies the image of that which it despises, it will at any rate still be a much less serious falsification than that perpetrated on its opponent—in effigie of course—by the submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent.”[26] [GM1 §10]
On the other hand, Nietzsche never describes a straightforward degeneration of noble morality; it is only overtaken by violence. He describes slave morality as winning by revolt or by poisoning[27] [GM1 §9]. In addition, it seems that no matter how long the triumphant slaves have power over the nobles, they never acquire the master mode of valuation. When he references the possibility that the two moralities are able to exist at the same time, he uses that language rather than the language of evolution, transformation, or like ideas. To quote him from Beyond Good and Evil: “There are master morality and slave morality—I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other—even in the same human being, within a single soul.”[28] [BGE §260] The purpose of this passage isn’t to demonstrate a truth about these moralities, it is a philosophical device letting him dispense with particulars in order to deal with ideal types. The idea he evokes is not of values changing over time but of a kind of double-think which represents the level to which the slave revolt has succeeded. Weakness does not become strength, nor strength weakness. He instead treats a person’s morality like a castle which can be captured by two sides; like Jerusalem in the Crusades, maybe there will be truces and temporary coexistence but this is understood to be just that: temporary.
Weakness is, for Nietzsche, an essential quality. It does not alter itself or change. As he says, “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.”[29] [GM1 §13] And though weakness may triumph over strength, it does not triumph in the way strength does. Strength, for Nietzsche, triumphs by overthrowing, by defeating on the field of battle. Weakness triumphs by cleverness, by poison, and by deceit. To quote Nietzsche again: “While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself…, the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how to not forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble.”[30] [GM1 §10]
Nietzsche’s essential weakness implies a belief in essential strength. He’s been clear about this many places, such as his discussion of who uses ressentiment productively and who suffers from it. His employment of the Greek gods has a similar affect; in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, section 23, Nietzsche emphasizes the distance and difference between gods and mortals, absolving the gods—as he says, the images of noble people—of any moral censure. But why should we assume that such characters are straightforward depictions of Greek moral values? Nietzsche gives no reason to. Though he cites ancient Greek philosophers, he doesn’t cite their attitudes about depictions of the Greek gods. The only evidence he provides is pointing at the myths, plays, and poems themselves. His interpretation may be plausible but it doesn’t mean such stories necessarily depicted images of nobility. They may have been cautionary tales or allegories. As such, this evidence isn’t strong enough to support a serious philosophical argument. Further, he presents no other evidence that his essential strength was ever actually in existence. He simply assumes it to be true and argues based off of that assumption.
Conclusion
The problem with Nietzsche revisionism can be summarized in the misreading of the übermensch. The revisionist idea is that the übermensch is a goal for all to seek; modern man who has slave morality is a stage that all people can surpass; the animal man had to become modern man and therefore modern man must evolve. This is not what Nietzsche says. His actual argument is that the noble animal man was overtaken by the slaves that the nobles had oppressed. The slaves then instituted slave morality for all. This stifles those who are noble. The truly great person for Nietzsche is the noble who can surpass the treacherous obstacle that is modern man and become the übermensch. Remember that there are two moralities—the master morality of “good and bad” and the slave morality of “good and evil”—and that the name of one of his books is Beyond Good and Evil specifically; as he himself says, “Whoever begins at this point, like my readers, to reflect and pursue his train of thought will not soon come to the end of it—reason enough for me to come to an end, assuming it has long since been abundantly clear what my aim is, what the aim of that dangerous slogan that is inscribed at the head of my last book Beyond Good and Evil.—At least this does not mean ‘Beyond Good and Bad.’———”[31] [GM1 §17] For Nietzsche, the master morality does not become obsolete, the slave morality must simply be shaken off.
Probably the foundational idea of Nietzsche’s thought is ressentiment. But what is ressentiment? What does it mean? Walter Kaufman explains its importance like this: “The difference between Nietzsche’s ethics and what he himself took to be Christian ethics is not ultimately reducible to different forms of behavior or divergent tables of virtues: it revolves primarily around the agent’s state of mind or, more basically, his state of being. Nietzsche’s critique of the morality of ressentiment is thus not an arbitrary addition to his philosophy, but an integral part of it.”[32] While Kaufman is definitely supporting Nietzsche here, he does give the game away. No one can claim to know exactly what is in another person’s mind, and the fact that he provides no good evidence nor any psychological or even philosophical basis for his assumptions means that this can only be Nietzsche’s unrefined opinion of what is happening. Ressentiment is not an objective observation: it’s an accusation, a subjective interpretation by the person witnessing whatever they are calling ressentiment. It cannot and does not have any explanatory ability.
Ressentiment is a variable which equals zero. Any explanation which employs it would be just as valid without it. The purpose that Nietzsche uses it for is not to develop an argument but to provide cover for it. If true ressentiment comes from weakness, as I’ve argued, then the problem is weakness itself; it’s not being oppressed, it’s being capable of being oppressed. However, that is not a palatable argument even for Nietzsche. For that reason, he constructed an idea which allowed him to say that things like social reforms and political protests were not justified since they came from a corrupt source: not a valid desire to redress injuries but contemptible ressentiment.
This essay is called “Against Ressentiment” because ressentiment is the invading virus of Nietzsche’s ideology. The revisionists have done their best to recast it as something constructive but it still carries a connotation of blaming the victim. Does it make less sense to say that a group of people were upset at a lack of services and developed a platform without reference to ressentiment? Do we really need ressentiment to explain why a group might riot or revolt? We do not. All ressentiment does is allow people in power to talk about why the poor and weak should not be regarded while not directly blaming their disdain on that poverty and weakness. It lets them act as if their perceptions of malice by the lower class[es] outweigh the material fact of their oppression. Ressentiment is nothing more than a cover and that is how Nietzsche employed it consistently. It should be left behind.
[1] Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. (Includes the works: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo, along with other material.) Page 466
[2] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 467
[3] This is something Nietzsche invented.
[4] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 462
[5] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 467
[6] Edgerton, Franklin. “Etymology and Interpretation.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 79, no. 4 (Nov 1938): 705-714. JSTOR. Page 711
[7] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 472
[8] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 509
[9] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 686
[10] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 687
[11] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 476
[12] Thinking Deeply With Ben. “Übermensch Explained & How to Use It – Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (The Overman).” Accessed March 3, 2024. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWtsp6cgH2I
[13] Kaufmann, Walter, ed. The Portable Nietzsche. London: Penguin, 1976. (Includes the works: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Nietzsche contra Wagner, along with other material.) Page 154
[14] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 523
[15] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 531
[16] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 244
[17] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 523
[18] The Portable Nietzsche, 126
[19] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 524
[20] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 472
[21] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 474
[22] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 510
[23] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 473
[24] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 479
[25] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 483
[26] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 473
[27] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 472
[28] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 394
[29] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 481
[30] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 474
[31] Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 491
[32] Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Page 374