injustice, but if we notice carefully, we find that it is injury he has in mind,[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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.'"[5] 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.[6] Is there not, he asks, a moral way and an immoral way of making a judgment—even in saying "so and so is right"?[7] Learning to distinguish more sharply what is real in others, in ourselves, and in nature, is a part of progress in morals.[8] 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.[9] "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."[10] The general idea of duty
- ↑ Cf. Joyful Science, § 267; Beyond Good and Evil, § 258; Will to Power, §§ 352, 965, 968.
- ↑ Unless Werke, XI, 250, § 218, is so construed.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 135-6, § 262.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 456; Joyful Science, § 366.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 192.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 114; Beyond Good and Evil, § 219.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 335.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 129, § 249.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 227.
- ↑ The Antichristian, § 50.
should spring from love and not be the croaking of the frog in the swamp).
