18
demand means for the internal life of man) is: “He who humbleth himself wants to be
exalted.”
45
For Nietzsche, as for Montaigne, the motivation for humility cannot be
supplied by the idea of humility itself, nor can it be separated from the domain of
appearances, and thus it cannot be preserved from serious doubts about the genuine
existence of anything called humility. In a more extended way, Nietzsche refers to “the
whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount” as an immense expression of vanity, for:
“man takes a truly voluptuous pleasure in violating himself by exaggerated demands and
then deifying this something in his soul that is so tyrannically taxing.”
46
Nietzsche’s concerns with humility and other “Christian virtues” do not terminate
in a mere game of moral reversal. Nietzsche’s unique contribution to these questions is
not simply the identification of humility with pride and vanity, for many Christian
authors had seen this well enough for themselves. The distinctively Nietzschean claim is
that the humble are not only base and vain, but more profoundly sick and decadent
nihilists who, in embracing nothingness (both their own and in the figuration of God)
have extirpated the psychological or spiritual conditions necessary for life. For
Nietzsche, humility is constitutive of a counter-instinctual drive that denies the basic
generative powers of a human life, (will to power, but also freedom), in the name of a
morality that corrupts as it weakens.
47
The contradictions implicit in humility are not to
be found in relations exterior to the self (between self and God, or between higher and
lower classes) but rather between the self and the internal qualities necessary for a free
and self-sponsoring, self-flourishing life.
Convention