Because of a doubt peculiar to my own nature, which I am reluctant to confess—for it concerns itself with morality, with everything which up to the present has been celebrated on earth as morality—a doubt which came into my life so early, so uninvited, so irresistibly, in such contradiction to my surroundings, my age, the examples around me, and my origin, that I would almost have the right to call it my “a priori” [before experience]—because of this, my curiosity as well as my suspicions had to pause early on at the question about where our good and evil really originated. In fact, already as a thirteen-year-old lad, my mind was occupying itself with the problem of the origin of evil. At an age when one has “half childish play, half God in one’s heart,” I devoted my first childish literary trifle, my first written philosophical exercise, to this problem—and so far as my “solution” to it at that time is concerned, well, I gave that honour to God, as is reasonable, and made him the father of evil. Is that precisely what my “a priori” demanded of me, that new immoral, at the very least unmoral “a priori” and the cryptic “categorical imperative” which spoke out from it, alas, so anti-Kantian, which I have increasingly listened to ever since—and not just listened to? . . .* Luckily at an early stage I learned to separate theological prejudices from moral ones, and I no longer sought the origin of evil behind the world. Some education in history and philology, along with an inherently refined sense concerning psychological questions in general, quickly changed my problem into something else: Under what conditions did man invent for himself those value judgments good and evil? And what value do they inherently possess? Have they hindered or fostered human well-being up to now? Are they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying life? Or is it the other way around? Do they indicate fullness, power, a will for living, courage, confidence, his future?— After that I came across and proposed all sorts of answers for myself. I distinguished between ages, peoples, different ranks of individuals. I kept refining my problem. Out of the answers arose new questions, investigations, assumptions, probabilities, until at last I had my own country, my own soil, a totally secluded, flowering, blooming world, a secret garden, as it were, of which no one had the slightest inkling. O how lucky we are, we knowledgeable people, provided only that we know how to stay silent long enough! . .

a priori: This phrase refers to some idea or capacity one possesses inherently, something not provided by experience. The phrase is associated with the theories of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) the great German philosopher; categorical imperative: the key phrase in Kant’s morality, the idea that moral action consists of acting upon a principle which could become a rational moral principle without creating a moral contradiction (“Act so that the maxim [which determines your will] may be capable of becoming a universal law for all rational beings”).