ABSTRACT
These English psychologists – what do they really want? One always discovers them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task, namely at dragging the partie honteuse of our inner world into the foreground and seeking the truly effective and directing agent, that which has been decisive in its evolution, in just that place where the intellectual pride of man would least desire to find it…what is it that really always drives these psychologists in just this direction? Is it a secret, malicious, vulgar, perhaps selfdeceiving instinct for belittling man? Or possibly a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrustfulness of the disappointed idealists grown spiteful and gloomy? Or a petty subterranean hostility and rancor toward Christianity (and Plato) that has not even crossed the threshold of consciousness?…The way they have bungled their moral genealogy comes to light at the very beginning, where the task is to investigate the origin of the concept and judgment ’good’…One sees straightaway that this primary derivation already contains all the typical traits of the idiosyncrasy of the English psychologists – we have ’utility’ ’forgetting,’ ’habit,’ and finally ’error,’ all as a basis of an evaluation of which the higher man has hitherto been proud as though it were a kind of prerogative of man as such. This pride has to be humbled, this evaluation disvalued: has that end been achieved?
