Europe's moral feeling, Nietzsche says, is subtle and refined, but its science of morals is young and clumsy. Philosophers have tried to give morality a foundation, and in doing so they took the morality of their own place and time for granted. He proposes something humbler first: collect the material, sort the types of morality, and only then ask questions. Seen this way, moral systems are a sign-language of the emotions. One system justifies its author. Another calms him. Another lets him punish himself or take revenge on others.
Then comes a claim that surprises readers who expect him to praise freedom. Every morality, he says, is a long constraint, a tyranny against nature and even against reason. That is no objection. Long obedience in one direction gave Europe its strength of mind, its art, and its discipline. Nature's command, as he puts it, reads: you must obey someone, and for a long time, or you will come to grief and lose all respect for yourself. He reads Socrates as a man who tried to make instinct give reasons for itself, and who still followed instinct in the end.
The middle turns to history. The Jews, he says, performed the inversion of valuations: they fused rich, powerful, and violent into one word with wicked, and made poverty a sign of holiness. With them, in his account, begins the slave revolt in morals. Moralists, he adds, misread the strong and dangerous man, Cesare Borgia for example, as sick, as if they hated the jungle itself. Most moralities turn out to be recipes for taming the passions of people who are a danger to themselves. He then sketches the man of a late, mixed culture, who carries warring instincts inside him and mostly wants the war to stop, so he dreams of happiness as rest. Now and then the same mixture produces the opposite: an Alcibiades, a Caesar, a Leonardo da Vinci, people for whom the inner war becomes a source of strength.
The last sections name the force behind modern moral language. Humans have lived in herds for so long that the instinct to obey is now inherited. When a herd cannot do without a leader, it invents one, and he notes the relief Europe felt when Napoleon appeared. Otherwise the herd praises only what keeps it safe: public spirit, modesty, gentleness, pity. Anything that lifts one person above the rest starts to feel evil, and fear becomes the mother of morals. Morality in Europe today, he concludes, is herd-animal morality, and the democratic movement carries it forward. Where can he place his hope? In new philosophers strong enough to create opposite values and to teach people that their future depends on their own will. He ends on a fear, not a plan: that the human type could keep shrinking because nobody takes up that task.
