38 Drives transformed by moral judgments. The same drive evolves into the painful feeling of cowardice under the impress of the reproach custom has imposed upon this drive: or into the pleasant feeling of humility if it happens that a custom such as the Christian has taken it to its heart and called it good. That is to say, it is attended by either a good or a bad conscience! In itself it has, like every drive, neither this moral character nor any moral character at all, nor even a definite attendant sensation of pleasure or displeasure: it acquires all this, as its second nature, only when it enters into relations with drives already baptised good or evil or is noted as a quality of beings the people has already evaluated and determined in a moral sense. Thus the older Greeks felt differently about envy from the way we do; Hesiod17 counted it among the effects of the good, beneficent Eris18, and there was nothing offensive in attributing to the gods something of envy: which is comprehensible under a condition of things the soul of which was contest; contest, however, was evaluated and determined as good. The Greeks likewise differed from us in their evaluation of hope: they felt it to be blind and deceitful; Hesiod gave the strongest expression to this attitude in a fable whose sense is so strange no more recent commentator has understood it for it runs counter to the modern spirit, which has learned from Christianity to believe in hope as a virtue. With the Greeks, on the other hand, to whom the gateway to knowledge of the future seemed not to be entirely closed and in countless cases where we content ourselves with hope elevated inquiry into the future into a religious duty, hope would, thanks to all these oracles and soothsayers, no doubt become somewhat degraded and sink to something evil and dangerous. The Jews felt differently about anger from the way we do, and called it holy: thus they saw the gloomy majesty of the man with whom it showed itself associated at an elevation which a European is incapable of imagining; they modelled their angry holy Jehovah on their angry holy prophets. Measured against these, the great men of wrath among Europeans are as it were creations at second hand. 17. Hesiod (fl. c. 800 BC): Greek poet whose poem Works and Days described life on his farm, and contained avuncular advice. His Theogony describes the beginning of the world and the birth of the gods.
18. Eris: Greek goddess of strife and discord: daughter of Zeus and Hera. She called forth war, while her brother, Ares, carried out its destruction. |