now allow themselves to be reproachfully called immoralists, because they dissect morality. Whosever wishes to dissect must kill; however, only in order that better knowledge, better judgment, better life arise, not that all the world is to dissect." Dissection, he explains in the succeeding aphorism, does not mean denial or depreciation, and he distinguishes the great moralists from the smaller sort by his token. The great ones, when they analyze the grand manner of thought, say of a hero of Plutarch's or the illumined state of the really good men and women, and find complications of motive in what is apparently simple, delicate illusions playing a part have simply the sense of a difficult problem of knowledge before them; but the small moralists say, "here are deceivers and deceptions"—that is, they deny the existence of just what the other are seeking to explain.[1] It is the intellectual motive that makes the moralist, and in another place he compares the lesser sort, who are without the love of knowledge and know only the pleasure of hurting, to small boys who are not happy save as they are pursuing and mistreating the living and the dead.[2] At the same time the genuine moralist is too preoccupied with his special work to be a preacher of morality. The older moralists, he says, apparently to mark off the new kind, who merely dissect and hence incur the suspicion of being anti-moral, that he consents to the application of the label "immoralists" to them.[3] He speaks of it to himself somewhat as one would pick up a gauntlet. One may, or even must, question the wisdom of his doing this, since the ordinary person, unaware of nice distinctions and thinking that "immoralist" must imply some sort of advocacy of immorality, as "moralist" does of morality, infers that Nietzche was on the side of license and vice. b I need not say after the foregoing that this is a mistaken view. Neither
- ↑ The Wanderer etc., §§ 19, 20.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 357.
- ↑ The Wanderer etc., § 20. Also in Beyond Good and Evil, § 228 (cf. Werke, XIII, 114, § 255) he contrasts the moral preacher or Puritan with the moralist. There is the same intellectualist meaning in the reference to the "old varied moralistic culture" of the French,—a respect in which they far surpassed, he thinks, the Germans (Beyond Good and Evil, § 254).
