_Morality as a Problem._—A defect in personality revenges itself
everywhere: an enfeebled, lank, obliterated, self-disavowing and
disowning personality is no longer fit for anything good—it is least of
all fit for philosophy. "Selflessness" has no value either in heaven or
on earth; the great problems all demand _great love_, and it is only the
strong, well-rounded, secure spirits, those who have a solid basis, that
are qualified for them. It makes the most material difference whether a
thinker stands personally related to his problems, having his fate, his
need, and even his highest happiness therein; or merely impersonally,
that is to say, if he can only feel and grasp them with the tentacles of
cold, prying thought. In the latter case I warrant that nothing comes of
it: for the great problems, granting that they let themselves be grasped
at all, do not let themselves be _held_ by toads and weaklings: that has
ever been their taste—a taste also which they share with all
high-spirited women.—How is it that I have not yet met with any one, not
even in books, who seems to have stood to morality in this position, as
one who knew morality as a problem, and this problem as _his own_
personal need, affliction, pleasure and passion? It is obvious that up
to the present morality has not been a problem at all; it has rather
been the very ground on which people have met, after all distrust,
dissension, and contradiction, the hallowed place of peace, where
thinkers could obtain rest even from themselves, could recover breath
and revive. I see no one who has ventured to _criticise_ the estimates
of moral worth. I miss in this connection even the attempts of
scientific curiosity, and the fastidious, groping imagination of
psychologists and historians, which easily anticipates a problem and
catches it on the wing, without rightly knowing what it catches. With
difficulty I have discovered some scanty data for the purpose of
furnishing a _history of the origin_ of these feelings and estimates of
value (which is something different from a criticism of them, and also
something different from a history of ethical systems). In an individual
case, I have done everything to encourage the inclination and talent for
this kind of history—in vain, as it would seem to me at present. There
is little to be learned from those historians of morality (especially
Englishmen): they themselves are usually, quite unsuspiciously, under
the influence of a definite morality, and act unwittingly as its
armour-bearers and followers—perhaps still repeating sincerely the
popular superstition of Christian Europe, that the characteristic of
moral action consists in abnegation, self-denial, self-sacrifice, or in
fellow-feeling and fellow-suffering. The usual error in their premises
is their insistence on a certain _consensus_ among human beings, at
least among civilised human beings, with regard to certain propositions