Christianity as a religion of the past unceasingly practised and preached the torture of souls. Imagine the state of the mediæval Christian, when he supposed he could no longer escape eternal torment. Eros and Aphrodite were in his imagination powers of hell, and death was a terror.
To the morality of cruelty has succeeded that of pity. The morality of pity is lauded as unselfish, by Schopenhauer in particular.
Eduard von Hartmann, in his thoughtful work, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (pp. 217-240), has already shown the impossibility of regarding pity as the most important of moral incentives, to say nothing of its being the only one, as Schopenhauer would have it. Nietzsche attacks the morality of pity from other points of view. He shows it to be by no means unselfish. Another's misfortune affects us painfully and offends us—perhaps brands us as cowards if we do not go to his aid. Or it contains a hint of a possible danger to ourselves; moreover, we feel joy in comparing our own state with that of the unfortunate, joy when we can step in as the stronger, the helper. The help we afford gives us a feeling of happiness, or perhaps it merely rescues us from boredom.
Pity in the form of actual fellow-suffering would be a weakness, nay, a misfortune, since it would add to the world's suffering. A man who seriously abandoned himself to sympathy with all the misery he found about him, would simply be destroyed by it.
Among savages the thought of arousing pity is regarded with horror. Those who do so are despised. According to savage notions, to feel pity for a person is to despise him; but they find no pleasure in seeing a contemptible person suffer. On the other hand, the sight of an enemy's suffering, when his pride does not forsake him in the midst of his torment—that is enjoyment, that excites admiration.
The morality of pity is often preached in the formula, love thy neighbour.
Nietzsche in the interests of his attack seizes upon the word neighbour. Not only does he demand, with Kierkegaard, a setting-aside of morality for the sake of the end in view, but he is exasperated that the true nature of morality should be held to consist in a consideration of the immediate results of our actions, to which we are to conform. To what is narrow and pettifogging in this morality he opposes another, which looks beyond these immediate results and aspires, even by means that cause our neighbour pain, to more distant objects; such as the advancement of knowledge, although this will lead to sorrow and doubt and evil passions in our neighbour. We need not on this account be without pity, but we may hold our pity captive for the sake of the object.
And as it is now unreasonable to term pity unselfish and seek to consecrate it, it is equally so to hand over a series of actions to the evil conscience, merely because they have been maligned as egotistical. What has happened in recent times in this connection is that the instinct of self-denial and self-sacrifice, everything altruistic, has been glorified as if it were the supreme value of morality.
The English moralists, who at present dominate Europe, explain the origin of ethics in the following way: Unselfish actions were originally called good by those who were their objects and who benefited by them; afterwards this original reason for praising them was forgotten, and unselfish actions came to be regarded as good in themselves.
According to a statement of Nietzsche himself it was a work by a German author with English leanings, Dr. Paul Rée's Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (Chemnitz, 1877), which provoked him to such passionate and detailed opposition that he had to thank this book for the impulse to clear up and develop his own ideas on the subject.