Page 40 of 74
Important material touching on many of the fundamental points of Nietzsche's philosophy is embodied in the chapter entitled "Our Virtues." The more general inquiries into conduct and the research along the broader lines of ethics are supplanted by inquiries into specific moral attributes. The current virtues are questioned, and their historical significance is determined. The value of such virtues is tested in their relation to different types of men. Sacrifice, sympathy, brotherly love, service, loyalty, altruism and similar ideals of conduct are examined, and the results of such virtues are shown to be[Pg 184] incompatible with the demands of modern social intercourse. Nietzsche poses against these virtues the sterner and more rigid forms of conduct, pointing out wherein they meet with the present requirements of human progress. The chapter is a preparation for his establishment of a new morality and also an explanation of the dual ethical code which is one of the main pillars in his philosophical structure. Before presenting his precept of a dual morality, Nietzsche endeavours to determine woman's place in the political and social scheme, and points out the necessity, not only of individual feminine functioning, but of the preservation of a distinct polarity in sexual relationship.
In the final chapter many of Nietzsche's philosophical ideas take definite shape. The doctrine of slave-morality and master-morality, prepared for and partially defined in preceding chapters, is here directly set forth, and those virtues and attitudes which constitute the "nobility" of the master class are specifically defined. Nietzsche designates the duty of his aristocracy, and segregates the human attributes according to the rank of individuals. The Dionysian ideal, which underlies all the books that follow "Beyond Good and Evil," receives its first direct exposition and application. The hardier human traits such as egotism, cruelty, arrogance, retaliation and appropriation are given ascendency over the softer virtues such as sympathy, charity, forgiveness, loyalty and humility, and are pronounced necessary constituents in the moral code of a natural aristocracy. At this point is begun the transvaluation of values which was to have been completed in "The Will to Power." The student should read carefully this chapter, for it is an introduction as well as an explanation[Pg 185] for what follows, and was written with that purpose in view.
EXCERPTS FROM "BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL"
To recognise untruth as a condition of life: that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. 9
Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof. 20
It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is the privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. 43
The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. 44
Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air. 44
"Will" can naturally only operate on "will"—and[Pg 186] not on "matter" (not on "nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever "effects" are recognised—and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect of will. Granted, finally, that we succeed in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of will—namely, the Will to Power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be traced back to this Will to Power, and that the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition—it is one problem—could also be found therein: one would thus have acquired the right to define all active force unequivocally as Will to Power. The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its "intelligible character"—it would simply be "Will to Power," and nothing else. 52
Happiness and virtue are no arguments. It is willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter-arguments. A thing could be true, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it—so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of "truth" it could endure—or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. 53-54
Everything that is profound loves the mask; the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the contrary only be the right disguise for the shame of a God to go about in? 54-55
One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree[Pg 187] with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a "common good." The expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of small value. In the end things must be as they are and have always been—the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare. 57-58
In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at present ... a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits.... Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the levellers, these wrongly named "free spirits"—as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its "modern ideas"; all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied; only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost all human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed—a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely. 53-59
We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and revelry of every kind,—that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite.... 59
