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212 moralists nor immoralists are advocates, as he uses the terms, but critics, analysts. The scientific motive characterizes both alike, and apparently, as just stated, it was to emphasize this fact that he took up with the more unusual term. That he does not become, any more than he had been, an advocate of license and vice, will probably be sufficiently clear in future pages. Indeed, we shall find him saying strongly, "we immoralists" are "men of duty," "also to us speaks a 'thou oughtst,'" "we also obey a strict law above us." All the same it must be frankly admitted that at times Nietzsche veers from this purely critical conception of the immoralist and uses the term in a more or less doctrinal, partisan sense. He confuses, one might say, an attitude, a method with a result—at least with what was the result in his own case. From being "outside" European morality, a simple observer and critic of it, he came to be against it—and perhaps the truth is that he was against it from the start, however unclearly or undecidedly. Even so, he was not against morality, but against a certain type of morality—and within limits he recognized the usefulness and validity of this type, as we shall later see.

Undoubtedly Nietzsche has injured himself in the eyes of the general public by using the obnoxious term, and yet it is probable that he would have excited prejudice anyway by the detached critical attitude toward morality which he assumed. Society can hardly look on with indifference when any of its number stand outside the common agreements and look questioningly at them, least of all at an agreement so central and deep as morality. A morality is not unlike a God who wishes no other Gods beside him: it resents, Nietzsche says, the idea of many moralities, wants no comparison, no criticism, but unconditional faith in itself. It is hence in its nature anti-scientific, and the perfect moralist must be outside it (unmoralisch), beyond its good and evil. "Plato has splendidly described how the philosophical thinker in the midst of every de facto society has to pass as the quintessence of all that is impious; for as critic of all mores he is the antithesis of the moral man,