Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism
There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good
and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of
truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not
man for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and
are continually being re-made _by_ man. “There is no such thing as
moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” which
interpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with
his own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche
believed to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler
morality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the
Christian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who
possessed it. “The judgment ‘good’ did _not_ originate among those to
whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves;
that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the
high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that
their actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in
contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the
plebeian.” The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman
forbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as a
survival of this original morality. He weighs “moral interpretations”
of phenomena in the same scale as he weighs “truths,” asking, “Have
they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?” His
hostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question.
The replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the
plebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave’s
point of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption
by those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks
to the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human
activity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the
highest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes
by hampering the will to power of “the highest men,” and proceeded
to call those who had ears to listen “beyond good and evil,” begging
them to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept
that of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their
natural ambition. The morality of “the small” is, he says, a handicap
to greater men, because “virtue for them is what maketh modest and
tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s
best domestic animal.” He delights accordingly in using as terms for
praise the words that “the small” use in condemnation. He speaks, for
example, of the “widespread heaven of clear _wicked_ spirituality,” a
spirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not
abolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. “For must there not be
that which is danced _over_, danced beyond? Must there not, for the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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