Part 9 — What Is Noble?

Part 9 opens with a claim that was scandalous in 1886 and remains so: every elevation of the type "man" has been the work of an aristocratic society. The aristocratic society is not defined by hereditary title but by the sustained belief in a "long ladder of rank and worth among human beings" — by the pathos of distance, the awareness of difference, the refusal to flatten the exceptional into the average. Without this, the exceptional does not emerge; it is absorbed into the herd. Section 258 on "corruption" is precise: what looks like decadence in an old aristocracy is the sign that it has lost its belief in its own values without finding new ones.

Section 260 is the book's most famous passage and one of the most analysed in modern philosophy. On a journey through moralities, Nietzsche says, two fundamental types emerge. Master morality: the noble man is good, and what flows from him is good because he is; the contrast is between high and low. Slave morality: the man of resentment defines himself against an enemy; the contrast is between good and evil; "evil" is the reactive term. Nietzsche's claim is not that master morality is morally superior to slave morality in slave morality's own terms — that would be circular. His claim is that slave morality has won, that it now presents itself as universal morality, and that this has cost European civilization something important.

The part closes (§295) with a portrait of the Dionysian philosopher — "the genius of the heart" — who appears briefly and departs before his impact is understood. He is the tempter, the "pied piper of consciences," who draws the best out of every person he encounters by making them feel, for a moment, larger than they knew themselves to be. Nietzsche does not name this figure. He describes him. Whether Nietzsche is describing himself, or a possibility, or an aspiration, the passage refuses to say. It is the book's most intimate section and its most reserved. The philosopher of the future, when he arrives, will be recognized not by what he says about himself but by what the best people become in his presence.