CHAPTER XVII
CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). THE SOCIAL FUNCTION AND MEANING OF MORALITY
I
Criticism has for its presupposition a certain detachment from the object criticised; it is a curious look at it from the outside, unbiased by personal feeling—at least it is in this sense that Nietzsche criticises morality. "In order for once to get a view of our European morality from a distance, to measure it by other moralities, past or to come, we must do as a traveler does who wishes to know how high the towers of a city are: to that end he leaves the city. 'Thoughts about moral prejudices,' if they are not to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside morality, some kind of a beyond good and evil, to which we must climb, clamber, or take a flight—and, at all events in the instance supposed a beyond our good and evil, a liberation from all 'Europe,' this being understood as a sum of valuations of mandatory character, which have passed over into our flesh and blood." Nietzsche is aware that there may be a little madness in proposing to do this, and that the question is whether we really can. a He answers half-playfully that it is in the main a question of how light or how heavy we are, the problem of our "specific gravity"; we must be very light to rise to a height from which we can survey millenniums and besides have pure heaven in our eyes, must have freed ourselves from much that weighs just us Europeans down, must first of all have overcome our own time—yes, and our hostility to the time, our disharmony with it, our romanticism.[1]
In describing the critical attitude Nietzsche uses the term "immoralist." The word does not occur, so far as I know, in the dictionaries (e.g., in Muret-Sanders' Wörterbuch or the Century Dictionary), and by Nietzsche it is first used in The Wanderer and his Shadow (1879). He there says, "Moralists must
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 380.
