labor, and mutual help means much to them. All live more or less in fear in primitive times, but the humbler and weaker especially, and to be delivered from it, to have others good to them instead of evil, is a supreme desire; the principal function of rulers in their eyes is to protect them from evil from outside.
It is contrasted perspectives like these which give birth, in Nietzsche's judgment, to the contrasted valuations, "gut" and "schlecht" on the one side, "gut" and "böse" on the other. The ruling class feel themselves good, and, sensible of the contrast between themselves and those beneath them, they call the latter not good, schlecht. Nietzsche remarks on the fact that the German word schlecht originally meant little more than plain, ordinary;[1] it had a shade of contempt—Wundt gives "simple," "plain," "poor," "mean" as its equivalents.[2] It came to have its present moral signification roughly speaking with the Thirty Years' War (so Nietzsche says), and still has a flavor of contempt. I know of no precise English equivalent for it, but perhaps the nearest is "bad." So the English translation of Nietzsche's Werke renders it, and when we speak of work as "badly done," of a book as "badly written," and mean "in poor, inferior fashion," we approach the particular shade of significance it has. But the valuations "gut" and "böse" are different. These reflect the sentiments and situation of the subject or slave class. Here "good" is equivalent to fear-allaying, kindly, benevolent, sympathetic—"böse" signifying the opposite. Indeed Nietzsche appears to think that böse is the more original conception of the two, the positive conception—"good" being an after-formation and counterpart to it.[3]
The master and subject valuations are thus quite different. Each class has its good and evil (in the broad sense) corresponding to the conditions of its life, but the good of the one is not the good of the other, and the evil of the one is not the evil of the other.f The rulers can only maintain their particular type of existence by estimating things as they do—to use Nietzsche's metaphor, they protect themselves with their "good" and
