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Love of Fate Compassion As suggested by the fact that “malady,” the word of French origin for illness, echoes the French word for evil, “mal,” a society and an individual may enjoy either mixed physical and psychological health or mixed moral health. A person’s morals may be in some respects the morals of the herd and in other respects the morals of the hard, the morals of the master. This duality is not a parallelism. It is a duality of duplicity in the sense of a concealed interference between the noble (the agathoi, who in Homer are the courageous), and the ignoble, mean, or base (the kakoi). This is an interference in which a stronger force and a weaker force of will give rise to a change of force understood as semantic value, for example of the terms “pity” and “equality.” It was observed in the last chapter that equality of rights among all human beings is a principle of herd morality. A master morality suspends the universality of this principle. But it adapts it from the morality of the herd to relationships among the noble. Similarly with regard to pity. A prime mover of herd morality is what, following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche names “Mitleid.” If in certain contexts this is translated as “pity” it carries a dyslogistic force in that it implies condescension. Acknowledgment of this takes us some way to understanding why for Nietzsche Mitleid as Mitleid for those that suffer is ignoble. What Nietzsche refers to SEVEN LOVE OF FATE | 121 as “your pity,” meaning pity on the part of the ignoble for each other, remains ignoble according to him even if instead of translating his word by “pity” we translate it more literally by “compassion” or “sympathy.” It is important not to miss a nuance in our employment of these terms. I may have more than one motive for reporting to the highways department a hole in a pavement. I could be thinking that I myself may pass that way again at night and fall into it. No one can be sure, however, that I am not thinking of the danger the hole poses to others, who may be complete strangers to me. Now I do not pity anyone until they have had the accident or have suffered in some other way. But my getting in touch with the authorities may well presuppose that I experience sympathy or compassion with my fellow human being—or their dogs. Whichever of these words we use to translate Nietzsche’s term “Mitleid,” they lose any unfavorable resonance they have for him only when, “pity against pity,” pity as “our pity” is restricted to relationships among members of the moral aristocracy who are not preoccupied with seeking the maximization of happiness and the minimization of suffering.1 That preoccupation is what Nietzsche scorns, and, despite the difference of “climate” that prevails in his world as compared with Kierkegaard’s, both of these offspring of Lutheran fathers agree that “there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and pity.”2 It may reasonably be objected that a narrowing of the range over which a term is applied does not entail a change in its force. When rights formerly limited to men are claimed for women, is it not rights in the same sense of the word that are intended? However, Nietzsche is describing not a synchronic cross-section of usage, but the diachronic genealogy that is the background of a foreground state. Over time the point and the conscious or unconscious purposes with which given terms are required to cope can transform at least their emotive force, as new wine may in due course affect the color and texture of the old bottle into which it is poured. This redistribution of semantic and emotive load is an effect achieved with comparative ease by having recourse to quotation marks. Or the doubling can be marked by taking advantage of the fact that a language is already double thanks to its being a historical outcome of two other tongues, as modern English is a product of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. But other doublings assist this process, for instance the doubling reflected in the distinction between “compassion” and “pity” within that sphere of English that derives from French. And this duplicity multiplies into a triplicity insofar as “pity” is cognate with “piety.” Where a multiplicity of this kind is not provided for by a given language, a term can be...

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