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.[1] 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,[2] of his campaign against morality,[3] of his boring, undermining work in this direction.[4] He declares that it should no more be disgraceful to depart from morality.[5] "Morality is annihilated: exhibit the fact. There remains 'I will.'"[6] 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.[7]
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
- ↑ The motives for the renunciation of absolute morality are indicated plainly in Werke, XIV, 87, § 174; cf. 419-20, § 303.
- ↑ Preface, § 4, to Dawn of Day; Werke, XII, 84, § 165; Genealogy etc., III, § 27.
- ↑ Ecce Homo, III, iv, § 1.
- ↑ Preface, §§ 1, 2, to Dawn of Day.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 164.
- ↑ Werke, XIII, 363, § 896; cf. Joyful Science, § 107; Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 482, § 13; preface, § 6, to Genealogy etc.
- ↑ 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).
