Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at CambridgeSorley, W. R. (William Ritchie)
Philosophy
Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge
Sorley, W. R. (William Ritchie)
Ethics
The ideas which Nietzsche expresses go to the root of the matter. In
the first place, he drew a distinction between what he regarded as two
different types of morality. One of these he called the morality of
masters or nobles, and he called the other the morality of slaves.
Self-reliance and courage may be cited as the qualities typical of the
noble morality, for they are the qualities which tend to make the man
who possesses them a master over others, to give him a prominent and
powerful place in the world, and to help him to subjugate to his will
both nature and his fellow-men. On the other hand, there are the
qualities which form the characteristic features of Christian
morality--such as benevolence or love of one's neighbour, the
fundamental precept of the Gospels, and the humility and obedience
which have been perhaps unduly emphasised in ecclesiastical ethics.
These are the qualities which he means when he speaks of the morality
of the slave.
In the second place, therefore, what is distinctive of Nietzsche is
this: that he explicitly rejects the Christian morality, in particular
the virtues of benevolence, of obedience, of humility: these are
regarded by him as belonging to a type of morality which is to be
overcome and which he calls the servile morality. He deliberately sets
in antithesis to one another what he calls Christian and what he calls
noble virtues: meaning by the latter the qualities allied to courage,
force of will, and strength of arm, such as were manifested in certain
Pagan races, but above all in the heroes of the Roman Republic. He
would, therefore, deliberately prefer the older Pagan valuation of
conduct to the Christian valuation.
In the third place, he attempts what he calls a transvaluation of
all values. Every moral idea needs revision, every moral idea, every
suggestion of value or worth in conduct, must be tried and tested
afresh, and a new morality substituted for the old. And with this
claim for revision is connected his idea that the egoistic principle
which underlies the Pagan virtues preferred to the Christian, and the
higher development of the self-capacities to which it will lead, will
evolve a superior kind of men--"Over-men" or "Uebermenschen"--to whom,
therefore, we may look as setting the tone and giving the rule for
subsequent conduct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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