CHAPTER XIX
CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). VARYING TYPES OF MORALITY
I
In introducing some paragraphs on "the natural history of morals" in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche urges the necessity of making a collection of different types of morality. While admitting that moral feeling in Europe is subtle, many-sided, sensitive, refined, "the science of morals" seems to him still young, tyro-like, clumsy (plump)—even the word "science" in this connection being presumptuous and against good taste, which is always a taste in the first place for modest expressions. A preliminary need, he urges, is to gather material, to grasp conceptually and classify an immense domain of delicate valuations and distinctions of value, which live, grow, propagate, and die—and to try, perhaps, to make detailed pictures of the recurring and more frequent forms of this living crystallization. But instead of such work, for which no hand could be too fine, philosophers, whenever they have addressed themselves to morals as a science, have demanded of themselves, with pedantic and amusing gravity, something far higher, more pretentious, more solemn, a basis of morality—and all think that they have provided one; but morality itself passed as something "given." The fact is, however, that they have only known the moral facta roughly (gröblich), in some arbitrary abstract or some accidental abridgment, perhaps as the morality of their environment, their class, their church, their time, their climate and zone—and just because they have been so poorly instructed and were so little curious in respect to peoples, eras, and past ages, they have not come face to face with the real problems of morality, which first arise in connection with a comparison of many moralities.[1]
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 186.
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