In relation to such a hot pouring out of the highest rank-ordering, rank-setting
judgments of value, the point of view which considers utility is as foreign and
inappropriate as possible. Here the feeling has reached the opposite of that low level
of warmth which is a condition for that calculating shrewdness, that calculation by
utility—and not just for a moment, not for an exceptional hour, but permanently. The
pathos of nobility and distance, as mentioned, the lasting and domineering feeling,
something total and complete, of a higher ruling nature in relation to a lower nature,
to a “beneath”—that is the origin of the opposition between “good” and “bad.” (The
right of the master to give names extends so far that we could permit ourselves to
grasp the origin of language itself as an expression of the power of the rulers: they say
“that is such and such,” seal every object and event with a sound and, in the process,
as it were, take possession of it.)
Given this origin, the word “good” was not in any way necessarily tied up with
“unegoistic” actions, as it is in the superstitions of those genealogists of morality.
Rather, that occurs for the first time with the collapse of aristocratic value judgments,
when this entire contrast between “egoistic” and “unegoistic” pressed itself ever more
strongly into human awareness—