To the teachers of selflessness. – A person’s virtues are called good with respect to their presumed effects not on him but on us and society – the praise of virtues has always been far from ‘selfless’, far from ‘unegoistic’! For otherwise one would have had to recognize that the virtues (such as diligence, obedience, chastity, piety, justice) are mostly harmful to their possessors, being drives which dominate them all too violently and covetously and in no way let reason keep them in balance with the other drives. When you have a virtue – a real, complete virtue (and not just a small drive towards some virtue) – you are its victim! But the neighbour praises your virtue precisely on that account! One praises the diligent even if he should harm his vision or the originality and freshness of his spirit; one honours and feels sorry for the youth who has ‘worked himself to death’ because one thinks: ‘For society as a whole the loss of even the best individual is merely a small sacrifice! Too bad that the sacrifice is necessary! It would surely be much worse though if the individual had thought otherwise and considered his own preservation and development more important than his work in the service of society!’ And so one feels sorry for this youth, not for his own sake but because a devoted tool, ruthless towards itself – a so-called ‘good man’ – has been lost to society through his death. Perhaps one also asks whether it would not have been more useful to society if he had worked in a way that was less negligent towards himself and had preserved himself longer – yes, one admits that there would have been some advantage in that, but considers this other advantage to be greater and more last; that a sacrifice was made and the ethos of the sacrificial animal once again vindicated for all to see. What is, therefore, first really praised when virtues are praised is their instrumental nature and then the blind drive in every virtue that refuses to be held in check by the overall advantage of the individual – in short, the unreason in virtue that leads the individual to allow himself to be transformed into a mere function of the whole. The praise of virtues is the praise of something privately harmful – the praise of drives which deprive a human being of his noblest selfishness and of the strength for the highest form of self-protection. For the sake of inculcating and incorporating virtuous habits into people, to be sure, one emphasizes various effects of virtue that make virtue and private advantage appear as sisters – and there is in fact such a relationship! Blindly raging industriousness, for example – this typical virtue of an instrument – is represented as the road to riches and honour and as the best poison for curing boredom and the passions; but one keeps silent about its danger, its extreme dangerousness. That is how education always proceeds: it tries to condition the individual through various attractions and advantages to adopt a way of thinking and behaving that, when it has become habit, drive and passion, will rule in him and over him against his ultimate advantage but ‘for the common good’. How often I see it: that blindly raging industriousness brings riches and honour but at the same time deprives the organs of refinement that make it possible to enjoy the riches and honour; also, that this chief antidote to boredom and to the passions at the same time dulls the senses and makes the spirit resistant to new attractions. (The most industrious age – our own – doesn’t know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money except still more money and still more industriousness; for more genius is required to spend than to acquire! – Well, we’ll still have our ‘grandchildren’!) If education is successful, each virtue of the individual is a public utility and a private disadvantage with respect to the highest private end – probably involving some deterioration of the spirit and the senses or even a premature demise: consider from this standpoint the virtues of obedience, chastity, piety, and justice. The praise of the selfless, the self-sacrificing, the virtuous – that is, of the person who does not apply his entire strength and reason to his own preservation, development, elevation, promotion, and expansion of power, but rather lives, as regards himself, modestly and throughtlessly, maybe even with indifference and irony – this praise is certainly not born out of the spirit of selflessness! The ‘neighbour’ praises selflessness because it brings him advantages! If the neighbour himself thought ‘selflessly’, he would reject this decrease in strength, this harm for his benefit; he would work against the development of such inclinations, and above all he would affirm his selflessness by not calling it good! Hereby we hint at the fundamental contradiction in the morality that is very much honoured just now: the motives to this morality stand in opposition to its principle! What this morality wants to use as its proof, it refutes with its criterion of what is moral! In order not to contradict itself, the command ‘You shall renounce yourself and sacrifice yourself’ could be proclaimed only by a being which thereby renounced its own advantage and perhaps, through the demanded sacrifice of the individual, brought about its own destruction. But as soon as the neighbour (or society) recommends altruism for the sake of its utility, it is using the directly opposed principle, ‘You shall seek your advantage even at the expense of everything else’ – and thus one preaches, in the same breath, a ‘Thou shalt’ and a ‘Thou shalt not’!