1

Beyond Good and Evil is one of the greatest books by a very great thinker, and like all such books it is very difficult, all the more so for not seeming to be. It was the first book that Nietzsche wrote after what he considered to be his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. That had been for him a great creative effort, and he never wavered in his view that it contained all the most important things he had to say. Perhaps it was, none the less, a suspicion that he had not been so entirely successful in it as he had hoped that led him to claim that all the books he wrote subsequently, at least up to Twilight of the Idols (1888), were commentaries on or expansions of it. When he sent the great historian Jacob Burckhardt a copy of Beyond Good and Evil (henceforth BGE) he wrote in the accompanying letter: ‘Please read this book (although it says the same things as my Zarathustra, but differently, very differently).’ If he hadn't said so, one would hardly have guessed it; and though he did say so, I'm inclined to disagree. Nietzsche was always obsessed with there being a pattern to his life and works, and it is entirely characteristic of him that his last completed work, the wonderfully bizarre so-called autobiography Ecce Homo, should have been devoted to establishing what that pattern was, mainly through tracing the course of his literary productivity in the most tendentious way. But since he was also obsessed with teasing his readers, I rather feel that, both in the letter to Burckhardt and in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche was poking fun, and am inclined to resist his claim about BGE.

2

The most obvious difference between Thus Spoke Zarathustra and BGE is that in the former we have a narrative, though a tenuous one, that Zarathustra communicates through parables, exemplary encounters with a wide variety of people and even animals, and through sermons addressed to mankind but often insisting on the necessity of man's being replaced by the Superman. In BGE, by contrast, Nietzsche is very much concerned with addressing his contemporaries, in his favourite role of an ‘untimely man’, telling them things about themselves that he is sure they would rather not hear. ‘There is not a single good-natured word in the entire book,’ he says in the chapter devoted to BGE in Ecce Homo, wilfully forgetting considerable tracts of it that express as powerfully as anything he ever wrote his tormented love for mankind. He also stresses in Ecce Homo that, while Zarathustra had been his great work of affirmation, after it he had to do what he had often sworn that he wouldn't: namely, say ‘No’ as emphatically as possible. On 1 January 1882 he had taken a set of New Year's resolutions, and had recorded them at the beginning of Part Four of The Gay Science: ‘I do not want to wage war against what is ugly, I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish only to be a Yes-sayer.’ That day never came – in fact receded further and further as he went on writing for a nonexistent public. ‘From now on,’ he writes of BGE in Ecce Homo, ‘all my writings are fish-hooks: perhaps I understand fishing as well as anyone?… If nothing got caught I am not to blame. There were no fish…’ And the less he was taken notice of, the more critical, the more No-saying he became towards his non-readers. The subtitle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is ‘A Book for Everyone and No One’. It turned out to be, at least in his lifetime, for the latter only. Since it was clear that the world wasn't ready for Zarathustra's messages, ardently devoted to proclaiming how life was to be made worth living, Nietzsche turned more confidently than he had before, even in the great series of books which preceded Zarathustra, to diagnosing the reasons for the worthlessness of contemporary existence – both his and ours. Again in Ecce Homo he writes of BGE that it was ‘in all essentials a critique of modernity, the modern sciences, the modern arts, not even excluding modern politics’. But its objects of attack are still wider than this suggests. For Nietzsche attacks modernity by analysing the perennial tendencies that it manifests. In giving a critique of modernity, he is simultaneously producing an account of decadence – a term to which he was addicted, though oddly enough not in BGE, where he employs the possibly more drastic word ‘degeneration’.

3

From The Birth of Tragedy onwards Nietzsche had produced a series of ever-deepening accounts of the ways in which cultures lose their creative drive and become decadent, and the great positive vision of Zarathustra had put him, he felt, in the strongest position for reinforcing these accounts. The first great culture with which he had been concerned was that of what he called ‘the tragic age of the Greeks’, which for him comprised the pre-Socratic philosophers and the first two of the great tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles. They had had the courage to recognize the fundamentally terrible nature of existence and yet still to affirm it, and furthermore not in moral terms – conveyed by such phrases as ‘We become better through suffering’ and assorted similar claptrap – but purely as an aesthetic phenomenon. Such tragic heroism was short-lived, thanks to the arrival on the scene of Euripides and his philosophical counterpart Socrates. These two villains, according to Nietzsche, contrived the suicide of tragic drama through their purveying of optimistic rationalism: in teaching that virtue is knowledge, and that we therefore err through ignorance alone, they deprived their culture of its greatest insight, that the more we know about reality the more frightful we realize that it is; and thus they inaugurated the period of decadence. The situation went from bad to worse, in Nietzsche's view. For what in Socrates was merely a belief that reasoning could lead us to virtue-inducing wisdom became in the hands of his perversely brilliant pupil Plato a completely worked-out system, which, whatever its author may have thought about it (and Plato was in many ways the most pessimistic of philosophers), was regarded by Nietzsche as the hideous perfection of optimism in its positing of a world more real than this one, a world immune to change, and thus to decay and death. As usual when he is tackling his archenemies, Nietzsche feels highly ambivalent towards Plato: appalled by his system, but reluctantly admiring of the élan and cunning with which he devised it. Furthermore, however decadent Socrates and his philosophical progeny may have been, they represent the decadence of something magnificent, and thus reflect, however distortedly, one of mankind's supreme moments.

4

Meanwhile, a little to the east of Greece, another drama was being played out. The relationship of the Jews to their god was not of a kind to induce in them a tragic vision of existence, but it was of a kind that Nietzsche could admire, and several passages in BGE celebrate it. But while he seems always to have felt that there was nothing inevitable in the movement of decline from the tragic Greeks to their successors (in other words that with better luck the latter could have maintained, perhaps even have extended, the tragic insights of the former), it was inherent in Judaism that it should lead to its own overthrow in the most disastrous way. Constantly on the look-out for a Messiah, the Jews finally got one; and though they denied that he was the genuine article, he acquired enough of a following to conquer the civilized world, at any rate the western part of it. Yet Christianity – in Nietzsche's analysis, a grotesque distortion of Christ's own vision – is inherently decadent (‘Platonism for “the people” ’, as he curtly puts it in the preface to BGE), and what we are now witnessing, as well as being participants in, is the decadence of decadence. Platonism proper had been glamorous; now we are confronted with mere squalor on every front, and it is the unsavoury task of the man who is spelling out the ‘Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future’ (the subtitle of BGE) to unmask Christianity, for which purpose, among others, he finds it essential to don a mask himself. Nietzsche's favourite activity – there can be no doubt about it – was celebration. But when he realized how little there was to celebrate in the world around him, and how much to be nauseated by, he brought a gusto to his demolitions that makes them marvellously exhilarating.

5

This may all seem to be rather distant from the experience of reading BGE, at least with respect to the first two parts, ‘On the Prejudices of Philosophers’ and ‘The Free Spirit’. But in fact the prejudices of philosophers turn out to be ones that we all share. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that Nietzsche regards us all, insofar as we subscribe to a system of values, as being philosophers. Nietzsche immediately raises a series of questions concerning values that we hold so deeply that we are not aware of having them as values at all. ‘What really is it in us that wants “the truth”?’ he asks, thereby immediately establishing a distance between himself and other philosophers. He is, as so often, interested in asking a question prior to any it would normally occur to us to ask. As philosophers, that is as ‘lovers of wisdom’, how could we want anything other than the truth? We could hardly go out consciously looking for untruth. As it stands, this first question seems provokingly silly, and it is only when we realize that with it Nietzsche is launching on a series of questions that we are made to feel genuinely uneasy. To want truth and begin searching for it we need to have confidence in our capacity to find it; to recognize it when we encounter it. What gives us this confidence? It is, Nietzsche claims in Section 2, ‘the faith in antithetical values’ that is the ‘fundamental faith of the metaphysicians’. We operate, in the most natural way, with a series of opposites, of which truth–falsity is the most obvious and fundamental. Indeed, it is hard to see how we could avoid working in this way, and one might feel inclined to ask Nietzsche, before he succeeds in dazzling us with a series of increasingly alarming doubts, whether he doesn't operate within this dichotomy too. And it very soon turns out that he does. The original query is, to a large extent, one of those effects which Nietzsche the melodramatist of the inner life is betrayed into making when he lapses from his role as ‘the first tragic philosopher’. The issues that he is most valuably concerned with in these heady opening sections are all closely related to the first one, but not identical with it. His real anxieties have to do with our readiness to take as truths things that for him manifestly aren't, thereby displaying the lack of refinement in our sense of truth. In addition, he is irritated by the dogmatism that insists that between the poles of truth–falsity, good–bad, and so on, there can be no fruitful connections. And, perhaps crucially, he claims (and here I quote the whole of Section 4):

The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement: it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements (to which synthetic judgements a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live – that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.

This remarkable passage, besides being perplexing, may very well be true. To make it clearer it is necessary to run the risk that besets all commentators on Nietzsche – that of seeming to be painfully prosaic. However, to offer my interpretation: Nietzsche is not claiming that we do, or should, embrace judgements that we know to be false – it is not even clear that such a suggestion makes sense. His point is rather that many of the judgements to which we subscribe most firmly may in fact be false, but that it is better that we should not discover this, or that it may be better. We should, that is, be very careful about where our philosophers are leading us. Actually he would have made his point more effectively if he had spoken of scientists rather than of philosophers, for the latter have not been notably successful in uncovering any concrete truths, palatable or the reverse, at any stage in the history of the subject. But the search for truth at any cost, though it is inspired by a philosophy, has been carried through with terrifying success by scientists; admittedly more so in the century since Nietzsche wrote that passage than in all preceding times. It may well be the case that it is more important that a judgement be ‘life-advancing, life-preserving’, etc., than that it be true. But one can't decide to believe in something because it ministers to life, though one thinks that it is false, simply because one can't decide to believe. Nietzsche is aware of this, to the extent that he has a ‘Hands off!’ attitude towards knowledge-seekers. As he puts it in the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, written later in the year that BGE was published: ‘ “Is it true that God is present everywhere?” a little girl asked her mother; “I think that's indecent” – a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties.’ But surely Nietzsche would again have done better to speak of scientists – the secrets of nature seem to be safe from philosophers. It must be the case that he was so concerned with the drive to truth, which philosophers ceaselessly boast of possessing to a supreme degree, that he overlooked what ought to have been for him their gratifying failure-rate. Or, more sympathetically to him, one might say it was the whole nexus of science-inspired-by-philosophy-inspired-by-religion that really concerned him. For, as he had argued in The Gay Science and was to argue again at greater length in The Genealogy of Morals, it was the self-destructive urge of Christianity, intent on exploring to its furthest recesses the glory of God's world, that led to the discovery that explanations of natural phenomena could continue indefinitely without ever needing to call on divine assistance.

6

But this makes it sound as if Nietzsche regretted the erosion of Christian belief and value by advancing science, whereas if there is one widely held view about him that is true, it is that he was passionately anti-Christian. So if there is one good thing about Christianity, mustn't this be its inherent tendency to autodestruct? This is where Nietzsche's passion for intellectual cleanliness asserts itself. For although we think of Christianity as primarily a religion, it is, like all systems of religious belief, based on a set of views about the way things are, in other words a metaphysic. And as soon as he hears that word, Nietzsche pounces. He puts his case in Section 6, which begins:

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown. To explain how a philosopher's most remote metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself first: what morality does this (does he –) aim at? I accordingly do not believe a ‘drive to knowledge’ to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool.

So, in the course of four pages, Nietzsche has performed a volte face. Having called into question the value of the urge to knowledge, he now denies that it ever is the basic urge, for we always pursue knowledge, so-called, in the interests of supporting a moral order, which is a dressed-up version of how we want things to be, or how we want them to be forced to be. It would be absurd to say that Nietzsche deplores this basic drive of ours – it is the ‘will to power’ in action, and everything is will to power. What he finds intolerable is the lack of intellectual hygiene that is universal among philosophers; the way they ‘pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic… while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an “inspiration”, generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event’ (Section 5). He immediately goes on to instance Kant and Spinoza, who are certainly two flagrant examples of what he has just claimed.

7

While we may readily agree that philosophers in their claims to be following the argument wherever it leads are being disingenuous in so obvious a way as to border on the banal, we might also ask of Nietzsche how he would like them to behave now in order to redeem their predecessors' delinquency. The search for truth is a dubious enterprise, it seems, both because it isn't clear that it's a good idea for us to try to live with it, and because the very notion of finding truth is in itself suspect. But he has no sooner made these points than he arraigns philosophers for not really searching for truth, but for presenting as truth what they want to be the case! Is he merely asking that they should be more honest with themselves and their public? Hardly, for he attacks them, so far as their conclusions go, for inventing worlds that put this one to shame. But why is that in itself wrong, if their inventions are magnificent when judged by, perhaps, aesthetic criteria or by the enrichment of life that they – the invented worlds – have made possible? There is no simple answer to that question, for the best of reasons. Many of Nietzsche's commentators have taken him to task for what they see as crucial vacillations. Yet it is impossible for a person who feels these issues as deeply as he does not to be torn – Nietzsche's characteristic condition. He is far too honest to deny the enormous allure of what in the end seems to him harmful; so ruthless with himself, indeed, that he has constantly to fight off a kind of paralysis in the face of the huge diversity of phenomena that he feels forcing themselves on his attention. ‘In the philosopher,’ he writes in Section 6, ‘… there is nothing whatever impersonal.’ Most philosophers would vehemently deny that, and claim that on the contrary they were at least aiming at the wholly impersonal. In this they are deluded, however, and Nietzsche provides them with an object lesson in bringing the whole of one's personality into one's work, which he does so blatantly that no one could be under any false impressions about it.

Thus we often find him praising lightheartedness: urging us not to burrow but to remain at the surfaces of things, practising a kind of ideal frivolity. But no less often he exhorts us to stop at nothing in order to find out what is really the case, especially in that most treacherous area, the human heart. In urging both these ideals on us, he is acknowledging something of the utmost importance about human beings that anyone acquainted with the greatest art recognizes: the juxtaposition of unblinking recognition of the frightfulness of life with a stubborn determination not to be subdued by it, which must often mean that even the greatest artists turn their backs on the things they have seen, and insist on carrying on in spite of them, while those who achieve the supreme heights perform the further feat of converting that ‘in spite of’ into ‘because of’. It is Nietzsche's ultimate task, throughout all his work, to justify that transition, to see that it is not a mere sleight of argument or act of self-betrayal. In the end, what he accuses philosophers of is cheapness and over-simplification. In Section 9 he taunts the Stoics for perpetrating just such a ‘noble’ trick:

You want to live ‘according to nature’? O you noble Stoics, what fraudulent words! Think of a being such as nature is, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain; think of indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to such indifference? To live – is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And even if your imperative ‘live according to nature’ meant at bottom the same thing as ‘live according to life’ – how could you not do that?

Nietzsche takes the Stoics to task because they provide a particularly clear example of the dishonesty and trickery that he finds pervasive in philosophy. Their avowed ideal of finding out what nature is and then submitting to it, with the idea of the nobility of such an enterprise being smuggled in along the way, is mere humbug. In the first place, they tailor nature to suit their purposes, making it into a much less intimidating affair than it really is, ignoring its cruelty and wastefulness. Secondly, since nature is simply everything that there is, the idea of submitting to it rather than fighting it turns out to be boastful nonsense, an empty flourish to keep up their spirits. Nature is already in a state of ceaseless combat, one part against all others – this is an idea which Nietzsche first propounded in The Birth of Tragedy, and which he never abandoned, though he often modified his formulations of it. In contrast to the ‘resignationism’ of the Stoics (to use a term with which he abused Schopenhauer in his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, the introduction to the third edition of The Birth of Tragedy, written in 1886, shortly after BGE), Nietzsche posits living as choosing – that is the force of ‘Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust?’, etc. The answer to that question, an answer so obvious that Nietzsche doesn't deign to give it, is of course ‘Yes’.

8

Anyone who knows the central teachings of Zarathustra, or at least of the eponymous central figure in that work, may begin wondering at this point what is going on. Indeed, anyone who knows any of Nietzsche's writings may find his attack on the Stoics odd. For the Superman, whose coming is proclaimed in Zarathustra, and the tragic Greeks, whose courage is celebrated in The Birth of Tragedy, are characterized by, among other things, their unflinching capacity to say ‘Yes’ to whatever comes their way. And one of the other most celebrated teachings of Zarathustra is the ‘eternal recurrence’ of all things; it is, indeed, the test of Supermanship that one should live without regret, converting every ‘Thus it happened’ into ‘Thus I willed it’. One could be forgiven, surely, for thinking that there wasn't a significant difference between that and the scornful description Nietzsche gives of ‘living according to nature’. And the fact that BGE, allegedly a work that says the same things as Zarathustra, contains not a single mention of the Superman, and only one of the eternal recurrence, might lead one to think that Nietzsche had changed his mind, as usual without announcing the fact. Yet that one reference to the eternal recurrence is a very emphatic one. It occurs in Section 56, where Nietzsche writes of

the ideal of the most exuberant, most living and most world-affirming man, who has not only learned to get on and treat with all that was and is but who wants to have it again as it was and is to all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo not only to himself but to the whole piece and play, and not only to a play but fundamentally to him who needs precisely this play – and who makes it necessary.

Granted that exuberance isn't in the Stoic repertoire, and that the Stoics stressed coping with rather than affirming the world, the critique of them in Section 9 does seem, if valid, to apply equally to this ideal that Nietzsche celebrates a mere forty pages further into the book.

The resolution of this problem lies in the fact that, though Nietzsche is most famous for his sharp, emphatic dichotomies, such as the one between Apollo and Dionysus, or between master and slave moralities, he is actually (as he isn't hesitant to claim) at least as much a connoisseur of nuances. In particular, his broad distinctions tend to draw attention away from his fine ones. For instance, and with especial relevance to this context, he is often concerned with attitudes that appear to resemble one another, even to be identical, but between which he sees all the difference. And he is cunning enough to leave the hard work of sorting them out to his readers, while he elaborately explains distinctions where confusion is unlikely. This is one of the crucial respects in which he ‘wears a mask’ – something he advocates with great warmth in BGE, more than in any of his other books.

So, to take the case under discussion: both the Stoic and Superman assume an attitude of acceptance (to use the most neutral word available) towards life. But the grounds on which they found their attitudes are fundamentally different, and so their attitudes are essentially different too. The Stoic, in Nietzsche's account of him, examines the world and realizes that it is futile to attempt to interfere with its predetermined course. The Stoic maintains that his values are imposed on him by the world, that having scrutinized the world there is only one possible attitude to take and in this respect he is no different from other philosophers: as Nietzsche writes later in Section 9, ‘this is an old and never-ending story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself’. And he expresses this attitude in terms so vague that in a way he can't be faulted; hence Nietzsche's jeering ‘how could you not do that?’.

Nietzsche's basic methodological point against such philosophical carryings-on is that they put the cart before the horse. There is not, because there can't be, any value-free scrutinizing of the world followed by either the acceptance of a value scheme that the world forces on one, or the adoption of a set of values based on a decision taken after surveying the way things are. That is the central point of Nietzsche's much celebrated and equally much misunderstood doctrine of perspectivism.

Nietzsche's claim that we create values has, then, in the first place, a logical force. It is a mistake to think that values are forced upon us by the nature of things, and in that sense, at least, he would be dubbed by contemporary philosophers a subjectivist. It is also, therefore, an ontological claim: values do not exist in the fabric of the world, are not out there to be discovered by us. Sometimes he is so keen to make this point, and to stress that all our apprehensions of the world are value-laden, that he says that there can be no facts, only interpretations. In other words, we should realize the extent to which our drives and desires colour all our dealings with what we like to think of as a reality existing entirely independently of us, which we can neutrally investigate. The truth of this very wide claim – or challenge, even – doesn't concern me here. What is significant is Nietzsche's stance: though it is perfectly correct to call Nietzsche a subjectivist, this term does not convey the same meaning as it does when applied to those philosophers who maintain that there is a fact–value distinction and that it is entirely up to us to determine what our values should be, whatever the facts are. That kind of subjectivism, often called in anglophone philosophical circles ‘antinaturalism’, is impossible for Nietzsche, simply because he refuses to grant that it makes sense to talk of facts as opposed to values. So, in Nietzsche's view, we inevitably do create values, whether we want to or not. If we fail to see that, we are not only confused about the nature of our relationship to the world, but we also are likely to take a specific attitude to the world that is damaging and that makes us smaller.

It is in this perception that Nietzsche becomes truly original, indeed epoch-making. There had been plenty of subjectivists before him, just as there have been plenty since. But they have nearly all been at pains to insist that locating the source of value in the valuer rather than in the valued makes absolutely no difference to the actual values that they hold; or they have been plunged into gloom by the thought that nothing is ‘really’ good or bad, so that in some way moral differences are not nearly as important as they seem to be (Bertrand Russell was an acute sufferer from this complaint). Nietzsche is the first philosopher to exult in the fact (yes, there are facts, and this is one of the most important, since it is a fact about values) that value is not something that we discover, but something that we invent. At the same time, he is acutely aware of the extent to which values are heavily dependent on one kind of fact – the nature of those doing the valuing. And he is just as aware of the extent to which the individual valuers are liable to derive their values from the culture of which each of them is a member, and to think that because they feel values to be imposed on them, it is the world in general that is doing the imposing, and not the group of which they are members.

Hence Nietzsche's overriding concern, in BGE as in everything else he wrote, with the typology of cultures. His sense of the extreme difficulty of going against the grain of one's culture is the source of his deepest anguish, for he knew both the necessity of distancing himself from his own wretchedly decadent culture, and the risks that were inherent in effecting the separation. He knew, for instance, that if he didn't practise hyperbole his voice would be unlikely to be heard at all, and that if he did he would be likely to be shrugged off as a mere ranter. He also suspected, and more than suspected, that in providing a recipe for the overcoming of decadence he would have to envisage a kind of man, or Superman, who carried self-sufficiency to a degree which virtually meant total exile from society. To create and maintain values of a kind that Nietzsche could approve in the face of the contemporary world would require an act of will so prodigious that the person who could perform it would have to be allocated to a new species. Though the Superman remains a fascinating concept, which deserves a much fuller investigation than I can give it here or than is the fashion among commentators to give it, Nietzsche's subsequent published works do seem to indicate that Nietzsche himself remained deeply unsure of his success in characterizing this ideal figure, and that he returned, in BGE in the first instance, to seeing whether there was any chance for great men to emerge from within society, though to qualify they would have to transcend and violate the values of their society, even more than great men by definition always do. I think that it is for this reason that the concepts of ‘master morality’ and ‘slave morality’ are introduced in Section 260 of BGE, thereby developing an opposition that Nietzsche had first adumbrated seven years before in Section 45 of Human, All Too Human, but had not worked out further in the intervening books.

9

One of the characteristics of a master morality is that those who participate in it are aware of their role as creators of value. Though they differ in many other vital respects from slave moralists, their consciousness that they are responsible for the values by which they live already gives them cause for rejoicing – they are, one might say, self-important in the best sense of that term (a sense it normally lacks, indicating to what degree we ourselves are slave or herd moralists). Nietzsche writes in Section 260:

The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges ‘what harms me is harmful in itself’, he knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates values. Everything he knows to be part of himself, he honours: such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of plenitude, of power which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would like to give away and bestow…

Such a passage arouses at least mixed feelings, if not wholly hostile ones. We are so permeated by the idea that morality is not a matter of self-glorification, of overflowing power, nor of the subsequent characterizations of hardness and ‘a mild contempt for and caution against sympathy and the “warm heart”’; we are so wedded to seeing ‘the mark of the moral precisely in pity or in acting for others or in désinteréssement’ that we find it hard to take such concepts seriously at all. Moreover, the way in which they have been misused by ideological thugs makes it still more difficult. But if one considers them in their context – that is, if one reads BGE carefully and repeatedly, and doesn't regard it as a work that combines brilliant aphorisms with a repulsive general view of things – it becomes clear that Nietzsche is attempting to formulate the conditions under which we may hope to recover a conception of greatness, above all of that kind of greatness which we associate with creativity, at least before that term was so debased by pop psychologists and educational theorists. According to Nietzsche, our attitude towards greatness is, in general, in a state of hopeless confusion. We tend to be grateful for its manifestations while often being appalled at the behaviour of the people who were responsible for them. We indulge in orgies of moral recrimination against those who have done most to enhance our culture, who have given us a very large part of our sense of what makes life worth living. We wish that those who have contributed most to our artistic heritage, our increased knowledge, our political and social arrangements, where those can be prized, had been ‘better’ men than their biographies, more often than not, show them to have been. The thought that if a great man had been different from what he was, he wouldn't have done what he did is rapidly dismissed as special pleading. At the same time, we tend to take pleasure in the notion that great men are, in various ways, human, all too human. It is part of our fear and anxiety in the face of greatness; one might say we take revenge on the greatness of men's works by studying their lives, prying into them with an intensity of scrutiny from which no one would emerge unscathed.

10

Those last sentences are a crude summary of some of what Nietzsche has to say about how slave moralists regard master moralists. He is preoccupied with the way in which those who are used to obeying regard those who are used to commanding, which he believes can be equated with the relationship between those who regard values as imposed, external and universal in their application and those who regard values as coming from within, created by those who are powerful enough for the task, and who delight in their sense of being different from others. In an especially acute passage in Section 199 he writes:

The strange narrowness of human evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we think of this instinct taken to its ultimate extravagance there would be no commanders or independent men at all; or, if they existed, they would suffer from a bad conscience and in order to be able to command would have to practise a deceit upon themselves: the deceit, that is, that they too were only obeying. This state of things actually exists in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands (commands of ancestors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law or even of God), or even to borrow herd maxims from the herd's way of thinking and appear as ‘the first servant of the people’ for example, or as ‘instruments of the common good’.

Nietzsche doesn't need to present any argument in favour of those observations; they are manifestly true, and constitute a devastating reductio ad absurdum of contemporary morality. Moreover, they help us to understand why Nietzsche regards even the great men of the nineteenth century with suspicion, with the signal exceptions of Napoleon and Goethe, the two men who emphatically didn't think of themselves as acting in obedience to laws from beyond or outside. That is why Nietzsche jubilantly ends Section 209 with:

One should at last have a sufficiently profound comprehension of Napoleon's astonishment when he caught sight of Goethe: it betrays what had for centuries been thought was meant by the ‘German spirit’. ‘Voilà un homme!’ – which is to say: ‘but that is a man! And I had expected only a German!’

Typically, in making his point, Nietzsche distractingly localizes it by jibing at the Germans, a recurrent tendency in his later writings. One needn't be concerned about this; he took his fellow-countrymen as highly advanced examples of slave morality, partly because of their delight in obeying the commands of the Reich – their delight that there was a Reich to obey – and partly because he saw Kantian morality as a quintessentially German phenomenon: that morality which insisted that one acts morally only if one acts according to the dictates of the ‘categorical imperative’, a law founded in reason alone and equally applicable to all rational beings. It must be granted that between them, Bismarck's Reich and Kant's ethics were seen by Nietzsche as providing a very handy mnemonic. Adherence to both of them results in the total legalization of life, so to speak, the situation in which most people feel happiest, so long as obedience to the laws carries with it the promise of happiness. In such a context art is seen as a relief from the serious things in life, and artistic greatness is consequently diminished and ‘safe’: the great artist is reduced to the level of a great sportsman.

For Nietzsche, however, art was the epitome of seriousness, and artistic greatness of a kind where the greatest risks are run. Though in his later writings he often seems to slight the supreme importance that he had allotted to art in The Birth of Tragedy, the insistence with which he returns to it, and especially his inability to forgive Richard Wagner either for betraying his genius or for being a fake genius in the first place (Nietzsche can never quite make up his mind which), show that it remained for him what it had always been: the peak of human activity, above all the realm in which man can celebrate existence most completely. And celebration, comprehensive in its spirit but not indiscriminate in what it celebrates, is a leading indication of master morality – another reason why Goethe takes an increasingly central place in Nietzsche's later writings: Goethe the joyous pagan, the contemptuous anti-Christian, the equally tireless investigator of nature and composer of magnificent lyric poetry.

11

There seems to be a vast gap in Nietzsche's argument, as I have been selectively expounding it. For if the chief task of art is to celebrate, and there is at least some intimate connection between the impressiveness of the celebration and the value of that which is celebrated, what of the glories of Christian art? Christianity is the slave morality par excellence, and yet it is the inspiration – to take one of its most spectacular manifestations – behind the Sanctus of the Mass in B minor, where Bach celebrates as no one ever has before or since. But though Nietzsche is horrified by Christian morality, his attitude towards the Deity Himself is much more complex, which is made clear in what is probably the most famous passage in all his writings – the madman's proclamation that God is dead in Section 125 of The Gay Science. The man is regarded as mad precisely because he makes such a fuss about God's death, which seems to be a matter of indifference to the people in the marketplace. Nietzsche is of course the madman, and everything he produced after this proclamation is written in its shadow. It is taken for granted, therefore, in BGE that God's death is a fait accompli, and that, without God, the only possibility of greatness is in its creation. ‘He who does not find greatness in God finds it nowhere,’ Nietzsche says in a notebook; ‘he must either deny it or create it.’ Zarathustra is Nietzsche's major attempt to indicate how it might be created; BGE is in large part an exploration of how greatness is rendered impossible if we continue in the habits of thought instilled by two millennia of Christianity while abandoning the presupposition of the whole enterprise: God. Bach found greatness in God, and had no doubts about the truths of his religion. To return to the beginning of BGE: ‘The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection… the question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving…’ But now we know that Bach's judgement was false, and that all our perspectives need to be altered. Indeed, no one, I think, can read BGE seriously without at least having an impressive number of his perspectives altered.

Michael Tanner