Our virtues? Nietzsche asks, and he answers with suspicion. Modern Europeans, he says, are curious, many-sided, good at disguise, and marked by a mellow, sweetened cruelty. They still wear their grandfathers' moral pigtail while believing they have outgrown it. Is there anything finer, he asks, than to search for one's own virtues? The rest of the chapter tests which virtues his readers actually have.
He starts with the virtues the age praises most. Modern people, he says, are lit by more than one morality at once, like a planet circling two suns of different colours. They have learned to love their enemies, and a finer skill as well: to despise quietly where they love best. People who pride themselves on moral tact never forgive the person who saw them slip. Moral judging, he says, is the favourite revenge of shallow minds on deeper ones. Praise for the "disinterested" person hides what ordinary people really care about, and self-denial is no virtue in someone born to command. Wherever pity is preached, he hears a groan of self-contempt underneath. The hybrid European needs history as a storeroom of costumes, and he keeps changing them because none of them fit. Even the historical sense, the age's proudest gift, has a price. It lets us taste everything and lose the taste for anything finished and perfect.
The turn comes when he attacks every philosophy that measures life by pleasure and pain. Hedonism, pessimism, and utilitarianism all treat suffering as the enemy. Nietzsche pities something else: the shrinking of the human being into something comfortable. The discipline of great suffering, he says, has produced every elevation of humanity so far. In each of us there is creature and creator, clay and the sculptor's hammer. He and his readers, the immoralists, are not free of duties. They are caught in a fine net of them and cannot get out. Then he names the uncomfortable fact behind higher culture. Almost all of it, tragedy included, rests on cruelty that has been refined and turned inward. The seeker of knowledge is cruel to his own mind every time he forces it to look deeper than it wants. The spirit, he explains, naturally prefers simple pictures, masks, and a pleasant surface. Honest thinking works against that wish.
That leads to the one virtue he keeps. Honesty, he says, is the virtue free spirits cannot get rid of, so they must keep it sharp and stop it hardening into vanity. Its task is to translate man back into nature: to scrape away the flattering readings and face homo natura without fear. Then he warns about himself. Deep down, every thinker has a granite of spiritual fate that learning cannot move. What follows are what he calls only "my truths" about woman. He attacks women's emancipation and the hope of equal rights, and many readers find these sections the weakest and most prejudiced in the book. He presents them as proof of his own fixed limits, and leaves the reader to judge how far his honesty reached.
Coming Up in Chapter 8
Next Nietzsche hears Wagner's overture to The Mastersingers and finds the German soul in it: heavy, proud, and late, with no today. From there he tours Europe's peoples, from German prose to English philosophy and French taste, and asks what a good European would be.
