What is noble? Nietzsche begins with a hard historical claim. Every rise of the human type so far, he says, has been the work of an aristocratic society, one that believed in rank and kept people at a distance. Out of that outer distance grew an inner one: a longing to keep widening the distance within the soul itself. He does not soften what this cost. Life, he writes, is appropriation and overpowering at its root, and a society that wants to abolish all exploitation is asking for a life without its basic functions. When the old French nobility threw away its privileges, he calls it corruption, not generosity.
Then he names the two moral grammars that run through the whole book. Master morality starts with self-affirmation. The noble person calls himself good and calls the weak and cowardly bad, meaning only low. Slave morality starts with suffering and distrust. It sees danger in strength and names it evil, and it praises the qualities that make life bearable for the oppressed: pity, patience, humility, the warm heart. So the good man of slave morality is harmless, a little stupid perhaps, while the good man of the masters inspires fear. Most higher cultures, he adds, mix both grammars, sometimes inside one person.
From there he studies the noble soul from several sides. Vanity puzzles it, because it cannot imagine wanting a good opinion it has not earned. A species, he argues, grows strong under long hardship, and when the pressure lifts, individuals appear in wild variety and only the mediocre are sure to last. That is why the moral preachers of his time preach a morality of mediocrity. Words make the same pull. People understand each other most easily when they share the most common experiences, so ordinary, average feeling wins in every language. Rank shows in an instinct for reverence, in what a person refuses to touch. What a man's ancestors did, at a desk or in command, cannot be wiped out by education. The noble soul even accepts its own egoism without shame, as part of the order of things.
The middle sections grow more personal. A psychologist who studies higher people risks being smothered by pity, because their ruin is the rule, not the exception. Deep suffering ennobles and separates. It gives a person a cold certainty of knowing more, and it often hides behind cheerfulness or a show of shallowness. He lists signs of nobility: never lowering your duties into duties for everybody, never sharing your responsibilities, counting your privileges among your duties. He describes those who wait their whole lives for the right moment, and the eternal "too late" of a man who finishes building his house before he learns what he needed to know. The higher soul is also easier to break. When a lizard loses a finger it grows back, he notes, but not in a man.
The noble person learns a certain art of living. He praises only where he does not agree, since praising agreement would be praising himself. He lives in a proud calm, keeps his emotions at his own command, and guards three hundred foregrounds and his dark glasses so that nobody looks too far into him. The greatest thoughts, he adds, are the slowest to be understood. Like the light of distant stars, they take centuries to arrive, and until then people deny the stars are there. Then he asks the chapter's question again, directly. What does the word noble still mean today? Not actions, he says, since actions are ambiguous, and not works either. It is a faith, a basic certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, found, or lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself. Every deep thinker, he adds, fears being understood more than being misunderstood. Man is a complex and artful animal, and he invented the good conscience so that he could enjoy his soul as something simple. He describes the philosopher as a storm full of new lightning, struck by his own thoughts as if they came from outside, often running from himself and then returning, out of curiosity, to himself.
The end turns playful and strange. Nietzsche would rank philosophers by the quality of their laughter, up to golden laughter, and he imagines that gods laugh too. He speaks of the genius of the heart, the tempter god Dionysus, who has taught him a philosophy he can only hint at. He looks back at his own written thoughts and sees them already fading into truths, tame and a little tedious. The book closes with a poem, From the Heights. On a mountain at midday the speaker waits for his friends. When they arrive they barely know him, turn pale, and go home. He lets the old friends go and keeps watch for new ones, until the guest of guests arrives: his friend Zarathustra. On that wedding morning, light and dark become one.
