Accepted ethics are deficient in veracity, according to Nietzsche, because the conceptions of good and evil which they make current do not spring out of man’s reflexion on the meaning of his life, but have been invented in order to keep individuals useful to the majority. The weak proclaim that sympathy and love are good, because that is to their advantage. Thus led astray, all men try to force themselves to the opinion that they fulfil the highest destiny of their existence by surrender of themselves and devotion to others. But this opinion never becomes with them a real inward conviction. They live out their lives without any thought of their own as to what makes their life valuable. They join the crowd in praising the morality of humility and self-sacrifice as the true morality, but they [pg 176] do not really believe in it. They feel self-assertion to be what is natural, and act accordingly without admitting the fact to themselves. The public ethical respect paid to humility and self-sacrifice they do not question; they help to maintain it, from fear that individuals stronger than themselves might become dangerous to them, if this method of taming men were abandoned. Current ethics, then, are something with which mankind as a whole is deceived by means of traditional views, and with which individuals deceive themselves. With indignant statements like these Nietzsche is so far in the right, that the ethic of humility and self-sacrifice does as a matter of principle avoid coming to a clear and practical understanding with reality. It lives by leaving quite undetermined the degree of life-denial which is involved in it. In theory it proclaims life-denial; in practice, however, it allows a life-affirmation which has thereby become unnatural and sickly to prevail. Stripped of all its passion, then, Nietzsche’s criticism means that only that ethic deserves to be accepted as current which springs from independent reflexion on the meaning of life, and comes to a straightforward understanding with reality. Individual ethics come before social ethics. Not what ethics mean for society, but what they mean for the perfecting of the individual, is the first question which has to be put to them. Do they allow a man to become a personality or not? It is here, says Nietzsche, that current ethics fail. They do not allow men to grow straight up, but trains them like stunted trees on espaliers. They put humility and self-surrender before men as the content of perfection, but to the ethical, which consists in man being one with himself, and veracious through and through, they contribute nothing. What does “noble” mean? shouts Nietzsche to his age with harsh words as being the ethical question which has been forgotten. Those who, when the question re-echoed everywhere, were touched by the truth which was stirring, and by the anxiety which was trembling within it, [pg 177] have received from that solitary thinker all that he had to give to the world.