XXIV

Few, however, of those I have encountered recently leave me in doubt about their most primitive capabilities: they seem unable to read anymore! At the moment I am writing this, an issue of a newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt of August 16, 1892, flies to me. What is a certain Conrad Dohany saying there? Nietzsche allegedly wants to abolish morality! "Beyond Good and Evil" means the denial of moral concepts! "Human beings may enjoy whatever gives them pleasure! There is no longer any commandment or prohibition for them." . . . Well, as long as blindness and ignorance are permitted to indulge in such punishable slanders of an author, one cannot think of his thoughts having any efficacy. Dohany knows nothing of the fact that Nietzsche, in his investigation of human feelings of rank, encountered two opposing modes of evaluation: one of which, as we have seen, he calls Master-Morality the dominant, high-born person perceives himself and his peers as "good," but perceives those standing below him as "bad," lowly, and the other he calls Slave-Morality the subordinate, suffering, undeveloped person perceives himself and his peers as "good," but perceives those placed above him as "evil," hateful.

That Nietzsche, by placing himself "beyond good and evil," beyond our prevailing morality that judges everything only from the perspective of the small human being—that Nietzsche, with this position of "beyond," finds himself in the realm of the much stricter Master-Morality ("Good" — "Bad") and that it is only with this mode of evaluation that greatness, which lived under the pressure of a guilty conscience in the opposing morality, can again come to honor and development—these dim-witted heads do not understand. Nietzsche does not want to be understood by such people, either. He has specifically ensured that they speak distorted things about him. If he, who lived in heights that no one before him had scaled, he, upon whose essence the consecration of Sophoclean purity lay—calls himself an "immoralist" someone who rejects prevailing moral standards, he wants to deter everyone who still finds satisfaction in the sweet, tiring, hazy atmosphere of the prevailing morality. These comfortable people should stay away from him, hate him, and flee: they are Nietzsche's natural enemies, and so they must remain; the only thing they are capable of is distortion—therefore, they should not carry heroic thoughts and words in their mouths; they only make themselves and (for their own kind) the heroes ridiculous. For good measure, it should be said here that Nietzsche, with the bogeyman word "immoralist," does not mean to designate himself as an opponent of every morality (a life without biological values, without any morality is not possible at all: every feeling already contains a value judgment, and thus as a premise also a morality, a scale of values) — rather: with the word "immoralist," Nietzsche designates himself as an opponent of the mode of evaluation that is today the only one still known and preached under the name of "morality" — that "morality" which, to the same extent, prevents the emergence, validity, and growth of the Great as it grants the Small, the Weak, and the Pull-Downwards the right to see themselves as the norm, as the only ones entitled to exist, and as the only ones decisive in all large and small questions of humanity.

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