Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter XXIII

by William Mackintire Salter

 

CHAPTER XXIII

CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Concluded). TRUTH AS AN OBLIGATION. NET RESULTS OF THE CRITICISM

 

I

As we have already seen, morality is conceived of by Nietzsche as a law (condition of life) of social groups, and, in the nature of the case, truth, i.e., truthful relations between members of the group, forms a part of it. There is no need to show in detail how habits of deception would prove destructive to the life of the group. But a further step may be taken, and is sometimes taken. Deception or dissimulation may be considered wrong in itself. Moreover, since speaking the truth involves knowing it, this too may be considered obligatory—and obligatory not merely for reasons of social utility, but as an ideal in and for itself. Truth, in both meanings of the term, may come to seem absolute duty—and as matter of fact a fine and exacting conscience in these directions has arisen among civilized peoples.

But Nietzsche asks, Is truth an unconditional obligation? First, is there an absolute obligation to speak or act the truth—never to dissimulate? It is necessary to distinguish between his personal attitude and conduct, and the answer he gives to the theoretic question. He himself was an example of the finest openness^[1]—it might have been better for him in certain ways, had he concealed more and said less. He was apt, too, to judge others according to his own standard. For example, the change in his attitude to Wagner was due in no slight degree to the feeling that Wagner was something of an actor. He found Bismarck also guilty of lack of sincerity, though from a different motive (viz., negligence). He remarks that we should today condemn Plato for his sanction of pia fraus, and Kant for deriving his categorical imperative as he did, since faith certainly did not come to him in that way.^[2] All the same he asks whether dissembling can be absolutely condemned. He has to admit that it has played a part in the evolution of man, and even in the evolution of morality. In his conduct primitive man more or less concealed his real self; he, so to speak, clothed himself with the mores of his environment, and put his fearful side out of sight—his morality was a kind of protective device. Yet paradoxically enough the pretense might become reality in time; for if dissimulation is practised long enough, it becomes nature. This holds of the strong as well as the weak. "Goodness has been most developed by long-continued dissimulation which sought to appear goodness: everywhere, where great power existed, the necessity of just this kind of dissimulation was perceived—it inspired assurance and confidence and multiplied an hundredfold the actual amount of physical force." "In the same way honor has been developed to great proportions by the demand for an appearance of honor and uprightness—in hereditary aristocracies." Falsehood is then, if not the mother, the nurse of goodness. By a kind of biological dialectic dissimulation at last abolishes itself, and organs and instincts are the little expected fruits in the garden of hypocrisy.^[3] Evidently then truthfulness, as the opposite of playing a part, is not an absolute duty. Nietzsche even thinks that a philosopher, who will be at the same time a great teacher, must assume some of the rights of a teacher and hold back much; yet he must not be suspected of doing so, and a part of his mastery will consist in the success of his dissimulation.^[4]

Second, is there a strict obligation to know the truth—never to be deceived? Probably few men have had a finer intellectual conscience than Nietzsche—it is the key to much that was tragic in his intellectual history: he would not be taken in, whether as to the make-up of existence, as to religion, as to Wagner, as to Schopenhauer, as to morality, or as to truth itself. But this was his idiosyncrasy—did he regard the remorseless pursuit and facing of reality as a duty for all? On the contrary, he came to question such a duty. I say "came," since for a time he seems to have regarded knowledge as an absolute good. "We should rather have humanity go to ruin than that knowledge should go back, "he once wrote.^[5] Indeed, he still honors the conscientiousness of scientific investigators—"Were scrupulousness in knowing gone, what would become of science?"^[6] The same fine sense for objective truth is at the bottom of his criticism of morality; he even says that skepticism of morality is a self-contradiction, since if the skeptic does not feel the authoritative nature of truth, he has no longer any reason for doubting and investigating in this realm.^[7] Nor does he question that reason, the intellectual nature, is the final arbiter of truth^[8]—he knows of no short-cuts to truth like "intuition," "will to believe," the "needs of the soul," etc. That a belief "makes happy" proves nothing—a truth may be dangerous and harmful; the ground-character of existence may be such that knowledge of it would be ruinous to most; it might be the measure of a mind's strength, how far it could stand truth or had to have it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, falsified.^[9] Nietzsche's critical questioning goes deeper than all this—it is as to the value of truth.^[10] We have been bearing much discussion of late as to the meaning of truth, but philosophers have not often asked, What is it worth? Most appear to take for granted that the possession of it is desirable, and Nietzsche is the first—or among the first—to disturb this naïveté. Why, he asks, prefer truth to appearance? Why may not appearance be better? Why may not something we in part create be better than what is? Indeed, what reason is there for preferring, how can we speak of better at all in this connection, save as we have a standard of value—something which we do indisputably create?

I may give one or two illustrations, which will perhaps make his meaning clearer. Suppose that reality had ultimately a tragic character, as Nietzsche early, and in a sense always, believed, that most men could not look on it and live, would it still and none the less be their duty to face it? Would facing it and perishing be better than deception about it and life? It is of course an extreme case, but it may none the less serve as a test, and now as at the beginning Nietzsche puts life first. "We must be conscienceless as regards truth and error, so long as life hangs in the balance."^[11] Again, the mass of men believe in things, bodies, atoms, substances. They are illusory beliefs in his estimation, but none the less convenient and useful for the practical purposes of life. "If we take the strictest standpoint of morality, e.g., of honesty (Ehrlichkeit), intercourse with things and all the articles of faith of our ordinary action (as, for instance, that there are bodies) are unmoral."^[12] But Nietzsche does not consider us obliged to throw away these articles of faith on this account.^[13]

What he has in mind appears in still another connection. There is a tendency among scientific men today to eschew theory and hypothesis—to lay the emphasis on getting facts, ever more facts, even the petits faits. We see it not only in the natural sciences, but in history—the important thing is thought to be not to prove anything, not to judge, to approve or disapprove, but to fix the facts, describe them, be a mirror of them.^[14] Nietzsche regards it as a kind of asceticism. In a way indeed he honors it; he calls the painstaking, scrupulous, scientific men who deny the vagrant speculative instincts in which it is so easy to wander or wallow, the real heroes in the intellectual world of our day.^[15] And yet he asks himself, Why, in the last analysis, this worship of the actual, this rigid separation of everything subjective from it, this feeling that truth only is sacred and that thinking which is not devoted to getting it is labor thrown away? In other days, when God was supposed to be behind all and in all, reality as a whole might be something to be revered and the smallest particle of it better than any work of man's; but now, why this extreme respect? Nietzsche sets it down as mere prejudice that truth is of more value than appearance (Schein)—he calls it the worst proven opinion in the world. He even asserts the contrary: "If there is in general anything to worship (anbeten), it is appearance that must be worshiped; it is falsehood and not truth that is divine!"^[16] Hence he sees science—so far as this means simply an accurate, painstaking account of the actual—in a new perspective: no longer is it an intrinsic, self-evident good in his eyes. It needs a justification; it gives rise to a problem. This is, of course, from a standpoint beyond science: "the problem of science cannot be recognized (erkannt) on the ground (Boden) of science."^[17] Nor can it answer the question it raises. To this end other things must be taken into account; there must be a larger, more ultimate view, a final standard of value—in short, some kind of philosophy, or "faith." Only as we have a supreme value, can we measure the worth of science, of actuality, or of anything else. To attempt, then, to put philosophy "on a strictly scientific basis," as is sometimes proposed, is really to invert the true order of things: it is, as Nietzsche half-humorously remarks, to make not only philosophy, but the truth stand on its head—a violation of all decency for beings (Frauenzimmer) so respectable!^[18] Nietzsche thinks that science, however unconsciously to itself, has rested on some kind of faith in the past. Even the ascetic form of science with which we are familiar today has its presupposition ("there is no presuppositionless science"),^[19] namely, the idea that getting pure unadulterated facts is greatly important, that truth is more important than anything else—itself a broad, extra-scientific, and most discussable proposition.^[20] And when this faith is gone or shaken, and the mere blind mechanical impulse of knowing lags (for it may be as blind and unreasoning as any other), what, in the absence of some other faith, will keep it going, what purpose shall inspire it?^[21] Nietzsche thinks that there is more or less restlessness and inner discontent among scientific men today: "science as a means of benumbing oneself (Selbst-Betäubung)—do you know that?"^[22] The, supreme value which he himself postulates is life, ever stronger and more victorious life, life rising to the superhuman and divine. With such an ideal he has something with which to measure the worth of other things: now science may receive a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to be.^[23] Truth is valuable so far as it helps in attaining the great end, is necessary to its attainment; but that which gives it its value, fixes also the limits of its value, and to the extent that truth would militate against life, not to say undo it, its sacredness and authority cease. Life is beyond true and false, as it is beyond good and evil.

Instances of the utility of truth and science it is needless to give—they are on every hand. But instances of the utility of error and illusion may be in order. I have just referred to the utility of the error which most men make about the physical world. Nietzsche also recognizes—as we have seen—the beneficial rôle which illusions of free-will and responsibility have played in the past."^{[24] a} In social life and intercourse now there may be useful illusions. There is no duty to see things too clearly, too exactly. It was one of Zarathustra's prudences to be to some extent blind in face of men, to allow himself to be deceived by them.^[25] Nietzsche outgrew, but did not regret his illusions about Wagner—in certain years, he remarks, we have the right to see things and men falsely, to have magnifying glasses to give us hope.^[26] There is a value in illusions like those of eternal love, eternal revenge, eternal mourning—the feelings become ennobled in this way, even if the event proves that the vows cannot be kept.^[27] Making absolute knowledge a duty is a madness of the period of virtue; we must hallow falsehood, illusion, faith—life would be in peril if we did not.^[28] Nietzsche had known himself the perilousness of the pursuit of truth. "For so dangerously does it stand with us today: all that we loved when we were young has deceived us. Our last love—that which makes us confess this now, our love of truth—let us see that also this love does not deceive us!"^[29] That is (as I understand him), intellectual honesty itself, the finest spiritualization of morality, is dangerous—only the few are equal to all the risks it involves. ^b

So torn was Nietzsche by contrary instincts, one to life, the other to truth at any cost, that he undertook, as we have seen, the desperate expedient of changing the meaning of truth, so that it should signify hereafter life-preserving and upbuilding ideas—but unavailingly.^[30] Indeed, he was led to language stranger still. There was an order of assassins in the Orient whom the Crusaders came upon, who—or rather whose superiors—had for their secret motto, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." The words struck Nietzsche by their daring and subtle suggestiveness. He quotes the motto more than once and with semi-approval^[31]—and has scandalized many. ^c On the face of it, it means complete license, intellectual and moral. How can he, we ask, take it up and make it in a way his own? Is he turning his back on all his past? He does indeed once say, "We have libertinage of the mind in all innocence," but this is in characterizing Europeans of the nineteenth century, and the "we" is not necessarily personal;^[32] if it is taken personally, it is out of harmony with other references to intellectual libertinism and his ever repeated emphasis on intellectual scrupulousness?^[33] We really get at his meaning in using the motto (and also in the remark about "libertinage of the mind," in case that has to be taken personally), when we notice the connection in which its principal use is made, and follow the highly refined discussion of the value and significance of truth in which it plays a part—a discussion which I have just inadequately summarized (Genealogy etc., III, § 24). In an earlier chapter [XV] we observed the extent of his skepticism as to our possession of truth, and now we see his skepticism as to its value. He could offer an hypothesis only as to the nature of reality, and now he is aware that any kind of a judgment of value presupposes some standard which is created by the mind. Hypotheses, mental constructions or creations are then all he has—and he knows that his right to have them may be questioned by the sort of asceticism that goes by the name of science today. If we bear all this in mind—if we remember that to his mind "truth" is not strictly true, but provisional, shifting, and that instead of an antithetical true and false, there are only grades of likelihood, lighter and darker shadings, different valeurs (to borrow the language of painters),^[34] if we remember also that a standard of value is not something independently existing, but a projection of the mind and that he wanted to be free to project his standard, we may perhaps understand (if we do not justify) how in a kind of bravado, reckless of whether he was understood or not, he took up the revolting assassin-motto and made it in a sense his own. Nietzsche proposed life, ascending and victorious life, as the goal and measure of things; he aspired to be one of those philosophers who are at the same time commanders and lawgivers, saying "so should things be," who determine a whither and a reason for man,^[35] and the goal and law he proposed were more or less different from those that have been credited in the past, particularly in the Christian past; indeed, the Christian world confronted him with the view that the law for man existed already, laid down by God himself, and it was a law enjoining certain things, like benevolence and pity, which, however good and necessary within limits, cut athwart advancing life, when taken absolutely, as they were by Christianity. And so he turned about and said, No, this is not God's law, nor anybody's save those who posit it; there is no objective reality or truth in this realm and I am free to propose my law. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted"—it is his charter of liberty for the new valuations.^[36] Those who take the words out of their connection, and interpret them as a sanction for thinking and acting in general as one likes, do violence to the whole character and history of the man. ^d

With these remarks on his views of truth, I bring the consideration of the criticism of morality to an end.

 

II

Before turning, however, to his constructive work in this realm, it may be well to sum up the main results of the criticism. Some have the idea that he rejected morality in toto, and it must be admitted that language he sometimes uses would, taken literally, justify such a conclusion. He speaks of the self-destruction of morality,^[37] of his campaign against morality,^[38] of his boring, undermining work in this direction.^[39] He declares that it should no more be disgraceful to depart from morality.^[40] "Morality is annihilated: exhibit the fact. There remains 'I will.'"^[41] One writer speaks of him as bent on destroying morality root and branch, challenging not merely this or that idea of the current code, but wishing to annihilate the very conception of the code.^[42]

But few thinkers may less safely be judged by single utterances than Nietzsche. One or two things must be borne in mind if we wish to get at his real meaning. First, by morality he understands the historical phenomenon going by that term, namely a social, socially imposed, rule of life. That an individual may have a rule of life of his own making and that this may be called morality, he does not question, but it is not the kind of morality which he criticises. Second, in his criticism he often has in mind not so much actual moral codes as the theory of morality, more particularly the religious or absolutist theory, as it has developed especially under Christian influence, and still finds an echo in the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. The word he uses in the passages just cited, for instance, is not "Sittlichkeit" or "Moralität," but "die Moral," which is somewhat like "morals" or "moral philosophy" with us—and the moral philosophy he has in mind is generally the Christian, or at least Kantian or Schopenhauerian. This type of moral philosophy is not so common in our secular and positivist days as it was once—and perhaps if Nietzsche had lived in England or America, where ethics is usually quite divorced from theology and metaphysics, he would have written differently. The older view is expressed by one who was perhaps the last great Englishman to maintain the Christian tradition, John Henry Newman, when he refers to conscience as a "messenger from Him, who, in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil," as "the aboriginal vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas";^[43] and also by the late Father Tyrrell, when he says, "It is from the Sinai of conscience (individual and collective) that He thunders forth His commandments and judgments."^[44] In a modified form it is perpetuated by Kant and Schopenhauer, both of whom, though in differing ways, conceived of morality as bringing man into connection with a supersensible, metaphysical world. It is this morality of the grand order which Nietzsche criticises, rather than the modest, utilitarian morality, little more than a working program, which is most in evidence among scholars today. He speaks, for instance, of a possible unmoral humanity in the future, the connection showing that he means one aware that "there is no eternal moral law."^[45] The morality he considers is something that has been the object not only of honor, but of worship;^[46] it is an assurance"on which we philosophers have been wont to build for now two thousand years as upon the surest foundation";^[47] it is something which gives to every man an infinite worth, a metaphysical worth, and ranges him in a different order from this earthly one;^[48] it is "die Moral im alten Sinne," covering all practices and mores on which the power of Gods, priests, and saviours rests, including ideas of free-will, sin, guilt, of an offended deity, of calamity as punishment, of a way of salvation, of conscience as supernatural—the whole of what he calls "the moral interpretation of existence," and none at bottom made it more assuredly than Schopenhauer.^[49] The historical (as opposed to Nietzsche's imaginary) Zarathustra shared in it essentially, turning morality as he did into something metaphysical, making it a force, a cause, an end in itself, and viewing the contest between good and evil as the driving wheel in the general machinery of things.^[50] Such is the morality which Nietzsche thought his criticism undermined—at least it is oftenest what he has in mind.

To put the results somewhat in order (and stating them always as he conceives them), the criticism undermines, first, the faith that morality brings one in any special sense into contact with ultimate reality. Rée had said that the moral man stands no nearer the intelligible (metaphysical) world than the physical man does, and Nietzsche follows him.^[51] To put morality into the nature of things, as philosophers in common with peoples have done, to give the world a moral significance has as much validity and no more than ascribing a male or female gender to the sun.^[52] Kindness, sympathy exist and have a meaning in social formations—they serve and help maintain a whole in conflict with other wholes, but in the total economy of the world, where there can be no passing away or loss, they are a superfluous principle.^[53] The whole circle of ethical conceptions can be explained without going out of the realm of human relations. The idea of a moral order, the construing of the fortunes of men and nations as rewards and punishments, is a palpable anthropomorphism—and not an altogether noble one.

Further, the criticism undermines the faith that morality is the thing of supreme moment in life.^[54] It is but a means, and has been made an end. It is a means, too, to a special type of life, namely the social or gregarious, and there are other and higher types. Great individuals standing more or less apart are superior to the "social man," and the purely moral instinct is to suspect, look askance at them; particularly is this so with Christian morality, which is social morality par excellence. The flock says, Let them serve us, make themselves one of us, if they are to be good: its type of goodness is the type, the only type. Nietzsche cannot restrain his irony. Why, he asks, should people with these little gregarious virtues imagine that they have pre-eminence on earth and in heaven—"eternal life" being especially for them! Even if an individual brings these virtues to perfection, he is none the less a dear, little absurd sheep—provided always that he does not burst with vanity, and scandalize by assuming the airs of a judge.^[55] Again, "What is it that I protest against? That one should take this little peaceful mediocrity, this equilibrium of a soul that knows not the great impulsions arising from great heapings up of force, for something high, possibly even as the measure of man."^[56] In a similar spirit he makes reflections on the morality that becomes popular, on the reverence for morality that hinders progress in morality.^[57] To him exclusive emphasis on (gregarious) morality is a kind of poison—he invents a chemical name for it, moralin.^[58] The social virtues take man a certain way, they are indispensable to the existence of social groups, but, when made absolute, they go against the development of a higher, stronger type—they tend to fix man's form, although it has been a distinction of the human animal hitherto that he was without a fixed and final form.^[59] Moreover, the propitious time for the blossoming of great individuals may be limited, and an absolute dominancy of morality may mean the defeat of the higher possibilities.^[60] Morality a danger!—this is one of Nietzsche's points of view. The language is not so startling as it sounds—sometimes old-time religious teachers have used it, though from another point of view; and even in Nietzsche's mouth it is not without a touch of religious meaning, since his thought is that morality covers only the lower ranges of man's life and that there are higher! With questions of morality and immorality, we do not even touch, he holds, the higher value of man, which is altogether independent of social utility—a man may have it, though there is no one to whom he can be useful; indeed, one may be injurious to others and yet have it. "A man with a taste of his own, shut and hidden by his solitude, incommunicable, uncommunicative—an incalculable man, hence a man of a higher, in any case a different species: how are you going to measure him, since you cannot know, cannot compare him?" Moral preoccupation then puts one low in the order of rank, since it shows that one lacks the instinct for separate right, the a parte, the sense of freedom of creative natures, of "children of God" (or the Devil).^[61]

To mention one or two details, the criticism undermines the ordinary idea of conscience. Conscience is a social product, and may vary as social standards vary. Yes, as a late result of social evolution, there may be an individual conscience against social standards. But conscience of itself is no standard at all. The notion is also undermined that evil is to be stamped out in the world, that only the good has a rightful place there. The total necessities of the world, i.e., of progress in it, require good and evil (understanding by "good" the friendly, preservative impulses, and by "evil" the destructive ones). The criticism still further undermines the idea that moral acts are of a peculiar kind, i.e., free and unegoistic. There is an absolute homogeneity in all happening; there are no moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. As the perspective, the interests differ, so do the moralities.^[62] A curious incident of the criticism is the discovery that the actual empire of virtue is not always secured by virtuous means—that is, that false assumption, defamation, and deception contribute to the result.^[63] A virtue comes to power, Nietzsche observes, much as a political party does, by misrepresenting, casting suspicion upon, undermining the opposition, i.e., contrasted virtues already in power; it gives them other names [one thinks of how missionary religions have sometimes turned the native Gods of a country into devils], systematically persecutes and derides them.^[64] An instance is the way in which Christian ideals managed to triumph over the ancient ideals.^[65]

 

III

What is left of morality, after the criticism? In speaking once of modern tendencies generally, Nietzsche observes that traditional morality suffers, but not necessarily single virtues, like self-control and justice—for freedom may spontaneously lead to them and hold them useful.^[66] He by no means denies that many actions called unmoral are to be avoided and striven against, and that many called moral are to be done and furthered—but for other reasons than heretofore.^[67] Utilitarians, æstheticians, friends of knowledge, and idealists may make the same demands which morality makes, so that its self-destruction need not practically change matters.^[68] He once attempts a kind of balancing of morality: he finds it harmful in certain ways, useful in others. It is harmful, for instance, in hindering the enjoyment of life, and thankfulness to life; in hindering the beautifying and ennobling of life; in hindering the knowledge of life, and also the unfolding of life, i.e., so far as it seeks to set the highest forms of life at variance with themselves. But, on the other hand, it is useful as a preservative principle of social wholes and a means of restraining individual

members—here useful for the "instrument"; as a preservative principle against the peril of the passions—here useful for the "average"; as a preservative principle against the life-destroying effects of deep want and misery—here useful for the "suffering"; as a counter-principle against fearful explosion on the part of the powerful—here useful for the "humble."^[69] He notes an experience like this: "I said to myself today, 'O that is a good man'! I had a feeling as if I had in my hand a beautiful, ripe, perfect apple with smooth skin: a feeling of tenderness, as of being drawn to him; a feeling of security, as if I might repose near him as under a tree; a feeling of reverence, as if I were in presence of an object to be touched only with the purest hands; a feeling of being satisfied, as if at one stroke I were released from discontent. That is, to the moral judgment 'good,' there corresponded a state in me arising as I thought of a certain man. It is the same as when I call a stone 'bard.'"^[70] Surely one who could speak in this way cannot be taxed with insensibility to goodness. It is true that after a similar picture in another place, he asks, "Why should this undangerous man who affects us pleasantly, be of more worth to us than a dangerous, impenetrable, unreckonable man who forces us to be on our guard? Our pleasant feeling proves nothing"^[71]—but the sensibility to goodness, the sense of its beauty, is none the less real. There is the same implication of a due valuation of contrasted things in another remark: "I do not wish to undervalue the amiable virtues; but greatness of soul is not compatible with them. Also in the fine arts, the great style excludes the pleasing."^[72] The amiable virtues are not the highest, but they have their place. So with another remark: "Beyond good and evil [this of himself and his kind,]—but [in the group] we demand the unconditional holding sacred of group-morality (the supreme categories of which are "good and evil?"].^[73] That is, "good and evil," though not the highest categories, are valid, unconditionally valid, in large realms of human life. So he calls it well to take "right," "wrong," etc., in a definite, narrow, "bourgeois" sense, as in the saying "do right and fear no one": that is, to do one's duty according to the rough, definite scheme, by following which a community maintains itself—and he charges us not to think lightly of what two thousand years of moral training have bred in our mind!^[74] Although morality is now oppressive, i.e., to those of his type, he expresses the "deepest gratitude for the service it has hitherto rendered"; it has itself bred the force that now drives us to venture on the untried^[75]—indeed, we need very much morality to be immoral in this fine way.^[76] That Nietzsche means to preserve something of the subtle spirit of the old morality, we shall see still more clearly in the ensuing chapters.

Once we have a list of what he deems the four principal virtues—they are courage, insight, sympathy, solitude. Other formulations are: honesty, courage, generosity, courtesy; honesty, courage, justice, love.^[77] I have already cited what he says of a "broken word."^[78] There are actions we cannot permit to ourselves, he declares, even as means to the highest ends, e.g., betraying a friend; better perish and hope that there will be more favorable conditions for accomplishing the ends.^[79] He comments on the shameless readiness of the ancient Greek nobles to break their word.^[80] Though he sees the place of destruction, malice and hatred in the world, as well as of conservation and love, the highest thing to him is love—at least the highest love, the "great love"; it is this indeed that is the final sanction of war and inequality and all the successive stages and bridges of advancing life.^[81] Justice stands out the higher to him as it is differentiated from revenge. At times he may seem to justify injustice, but if we notice carefully, we find that it is injury he has in mind,^[82] injury which is so often called injustice, but is only really unjust when committed against a promise or understanding. I do not remember a single case in which he defends injustice proper.^[83] Over against the fact that so many great men have been unjust, he says, "let us be just" and perhaps admit that the great were as just as their insight, their time, their education, their opponents permitted—either this, or else that they were not great.^{[84] e} It is also a very high, if not an absolute place, which Nietzsche gives to honesty with oneself—something which does not appear, he remarks, among the Socratic or the Christian virtues. He honors it in the scholar; genius itself does not make up for the lack of it.^[85] It even has a field for exercise in sense-perceptions; e.g., "it is easier for our eye on a given stimulus to produce an image that has often been produced before, than to hold fast what is distinctive and new in the impression: the latter requires more force, more 'morality.'"^[86] With this and similar things in mind he goes so far as to say that there are no other than moral experiences, intellectuality itself being an outcome of moral qualities.^[87] Is there not, he asks, a moral way and an immoral way of making a judgment—even in saying "so and so is right"?^[88] Learning to distinguish more sharply what is real in others, in ourselves, and in nature, is a part of progress in morals.^[89] Indeed, as if with a half-rueful memory of all he had had to part with, he speaks of honesty as the sole virtue which survives to him.^[90] "What does it mean, then, to be upright in intellectual things? To be on one's guard against one's heart, to despise 'beautiful feelings,' to make a matter of conscience of every yes and no."^[91] The general idea of duty

also remains. Many "duties" are questioned, and the old absolutist conception of duty disappears—it must be with this absolutist understanding of the word that he says he had never met a man of parts who was not ready to admit that he had lost the sense of duty or had never possessed it.^[92] All the same, the superior man, he tells us, ranks his privileges and the exercise of them among his "duties," and if one of this type handles average men with tenderer fingers than he does himself and those like him, it is not mere politeness of the heart—"it is simply his duty."^[93] As already noted, even his "immoralists" are "men of duty."^[94] Nietzsche's thought is evidently that men may place duties on themselves, that will in man as well as in God, in the individual as well as in society, may generate duty—but of this more hereafter. Even piety does not altogether disappear. A man of the old religious type says to Zarathustra, "Thou art more pious than thou thinkest with such unbelief! Some God converted thee to thy godlessness. Is it not your piety itself that no longer allows you to believe in a God!"^[95] And it is always, I may add, with reverence that Nietzsche uses the word "divine."^[96] We are then not unprepared for something more than negation in Nietzsche's total attitude to morality.

1. Cf. Werke, XII, 217, § 457, which may sound boastful to those who do not know Nietzsche well.
2. Werke, XIII, 340-1, § 847. Cf. Zarathustra's language to the wizard, "Thou actor! thou false coiner! Thou liar through and through!" (Zarathustra, IV, v, § 2).
3. Dawn of Day, § 248; Werke, XI, 264-5, § 256; cf. XIII, 100-2; XIV, 67, § 133.
4. Will to Power, § 980.
5. Dawn of Day, § 429. The later attitude was, in part at least, a return to his earliest attitude (see ante, pp. 53-4, and the reference to fiat veritas pereat vita in "Use and Harm of History," sect. 4); the almost limitless magnifying of knowledge belongs to his middle period.
6. Werke, XIII, 115, § 256.
7. Ibid., XIII, 115, § 256; cf. Werke, XII, 84; XIII, 121, §§ 268-9.
8. Dawn of Day, § 167.
9. Genealogy etc.. III, § 24; Beyond Good and Evil, § 39. Cf. the tone of the reference to intuition in Dawn of Day, § 550.
10. Genealogy etc.. III, § 24.
11. Werke, XII, 63, § 108.
12. Ibid., XIV, 307, § 140.
13. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 34; Will to Power, § 616, and my general treatment of the subject in chap. xv.
14. Cf. Genealogy etc., III, § 26.
15. Ibid., III, § 24.
16. Beyond Good and Evil, § 34; Will to Power, § 1011. The qualifying "if" must be noticed.
17. "Attempt at Self-criticism" (1886), § 2, prefixed to later editions of The Birth of Tragedy. This early work also raised the problem of science, but chiefly from another angle, that of art.
18. Genealogy etc., III, § 24. I need not say that the words "philosophy and "truth" are feminine in German.
19. Ibid., III, § 24; Joyful Science, § 344.
20. Nietzsche regards it as really a metaphysical proposition, since in the order of things we know an absolute will to truth may be indirectly a will to death (see Joyful Science, § 344).
21. Genealogy etc., III, § 25.
22. Ibid., III, § 23. Pascal had thrown out a similar suggestion (see the reference in "David Strauss etc.," sect. 8).
23. Ibid., § 24.
24. Human, etc., § 40 (cf. § 33); Werke, XIII, 204, § 458; The Wanderer etc., § 350.
25. Zarathustra, II, xxi.
26. Werke, XIV, 375, § 254; cf. 380, § 264.
27. Dawn of Day, § 27.
28. Werke, XIII, 124, § 280; cf. preface, § 4, to Joyful Science.
29. Werke (pocket ed.), VIII, 500, § 27.
30. See ante, p. 187.
31. Zarathustra, IV, ix (it is the "shadow" here who speaks); Genealogy etc., III, § 24; Werke, XIII, 361, § 888.
32. Will to Power, § 120.
33. Cf. Ibid., §§ 42, 43, and the way in which "strict conscience for what is true and actual" is spoken of in Dawn of Day, § 270.
34. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 34.
35. Cf. ibid., § 211; Will to Power, § 422.
36. The motives for the renunciation of absolute morality are indicated plainly in Werke, XIV, 87, § 174; cf. 419-20, § 303.
37. Preface, § 4, to Dawn of Day; Werke, XII, 84, § 165; Genealogy etc., III, § 27.
38. Ecce Homo, III, iv, § 1.
39. Preface, §§ 1, 2, to Dawn of Day.
40. Dawn of Day, § 164.
41. Werke, XIII, 363, § 896; cf. Joyful Science, § 107; Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 482, § 13; preface, § 6, to Genealogy etc.
42. A. R. Orage, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian Spirit of the Age, p. 46. Even W. Weigand states it broadly as Nietzsche's view that morality has corrupted hiunanity (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein psychologischer Versuch, p. 101).
43. A Letter to his Grace the Duke of Norfolk, on occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation (1875), § 5; see also interesting later paragraphs developing this view, and proving that it is the historic view of the church.
44. I borrow this passage from Stanton Coit's Social Worship, p. 50.
45. Werke, XII, 167, § 342.
46. Ecce Homo, III, iv, § 1.
47. Preface, § 2, to Dawn of Day.
48. Will to Power, § 55.
49. See practically the whole first book of Dawn of Day.
50. Ecce Homo, IV, § 3.
51. Human, etc., § 37.
52. Werke, XII, 130-1, § 251; Dawn of Day, § 3.
53. Werke, XIV, 323.
54. Cf. Will to Power, §§ 1006, 1020.
55. Ibid., § 203; cf. § 252.
56. Ibid., § 249.
57. Joyful Science, § 292; Dawn of Day, § 19.
58. The word appears in compounds, "moralinsauer" ("The Case of Wagner," § 3) "moralinfrei" (Will to Power, § 740; The Antichristian, § 2) , and, I think by itself, though I cannot now give an instance.
59. Werke, XIV, 66-7, § 132.
60. So I interpret the close of § 198, Werke, XI, 240.
61. Will to Power, §§ 877-0; Werke, XI, 248-50.
62. From this point of view Nietzsche speaks of morality as sign-language, symptomatology, and so far invaluable for the understanding of man (Twilight etc., vii, § 1).
63. Will to Power, §§ 266, 305; cf. Dawn of Day, § 97.
64. Will to Power, § 311; cf. 310.
65. Cf. a passage like Werke, XII, 171, § 354.
66. Ibid., XIII, 181-2, § 413.
67. Dawn of Day, § 103.
68. Werke, XII, 83-5. Cf. Kurt Breysig's remarks, Jahrhuch für Gesetzgebung, xx (1896), pp. 10, 11.
69. Will to Power, § 266.
70. Werke, XIII, 181-2, § 413.
71. Ibid., XIV, 79, § 155.
72. Will to Power, § 1040.
73. Ibid., § 132. Cf. § 287 ["the point of view—Sinn—of the group shall rule in the group, but not beyond").
74. Ibid., § 267. Cf. the relative justification of the morality of the old Greek cities, as against the abstractions, universalizations, of Socrates and Plato, ibid., §§ 428-9.
75. Ibid., §§ 404-5. Cf. as to the indispensableness of morality in man's early contest with nature and wild animals, § 403.
76. Ibid., § 273.
77. Beyond Good and Evil, § 284; Dawn of Day, § 556; Werke, XIV, 312.
78. Werke, XIII, 196-7, § 433.
79. See ante, p. 285, footnote 35.
80. Dawn of Day, § 199; cf. § 165.
81. Zarathustra, II, vii; cf. III, vii (Zarathustra takes to task one who despises great cities and everything in them, saying that one's contempt should spring from love and not be the croaking of the frog in the swamp).
82. Cf. Joyful Science, § 267; Beyond Good and Evil, § 258; Will to Power, §§ 352, 965, 968.
83. Unless Werke, XI, 250, § 218, is so construed.
84. Werke, XII, 135-6, § 262.
85. Dawn of Day, § 456; Joyful Science, § 366.
86. Beyond Good and Evil, § 192.
87. Joyful Science, § 114; Beyond Good and Evil, § 219.
88. Joyful Science, § 335.
89. Werke, XII, 129, § 249.
90. Beyond Good and Evil, § 227.
91. The Antichristian, § 50.
92. Werke, XIV, 209, § 419.
93. Beyond Good and Evil, § 272; The Antichriatian, § 57.
94. Beyond Good and Evil, § 226.
95. Zarathustra, IV, vi.
96. Cf. Ibid., II, vii; III, iv; Will to Power, §§ 304, 685.