This problem of the value of pity and of the morality of pity (—I’m an opponent of the disgraceful modern immaturity of feelings—) appears at first to be only something isolated, a detached question mark. But anyone who remains there for a while and learns to ask questions will experience what happened to me:—a huge new vista opens up before him, a possibility grips him like an attack of dizziness, all sorts of mistrust, suspicion, and fear spring up, his belief in morality, in all morality, starts to totter—and finally he hears a new demand. Let’s proclaim this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, we must first question the very value of these values —and for that we need a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which these values grew, under which they have developed and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as Tartufferie [hypocrisy], as illness, as misunderstanding, but also morality as cause, as means of healing, as stimulant, as scruple, as poison), a knowledge of the sort which has not been there up to this point, something which has not even been wished for. We have taken the worth of these “values” as something given, as self-evident, as beyond all dispute. Up until now people have also not had the slightest doubts about or wavered in setting up “the good man” as more valuable than “the evil man,” of higher worth in the sense of the improvement, usefulness, and prosperity with respect to mankind in general (along with the future of humanity). What about this? What if the truth were the other way around? Well? What if in the “good” there even lay a symptom of regression, something like a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, something which makes the present live at the cost of the future? Perhaps something more comfortable, less dangerous, but also on a smaller scale, something more demeaning? . . . So that this very morality would be guilty if the inherently possible highest power and magnificence of the human type were never attained? So that this very morality might be the danger of all dangers? . . .