nietzsche’s virtue ethic

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The purpose of this paper is to sift through the corpus of Nietzsche’s works, with

particular attention to his Joyful Wisdom, in order to present as honest a representation as possible

of Nietzsche’s virtue ethic, and how it is founded entirely on his own epistemological approach

and moral psychology – with a particular focus on the notion of shame. This paper will also serve

as a defence of Nietzsche’s virtue ethic. The work undertaken herein is of particular importance

because Nietzsche’s virtue ethic is associated in a tangible way with a functional understanding

of the human condition – it is in fact dependent upon this human condition – which is understood

through the lens of an honest epistemological approach. His virtue ethic is of particular

importance because if it is, as I suggest, accurately based on human condition, then we should

have fewer reasons for not adopting such an ethic, and we would certainly have fewer problems

with the theory itself.

In the first section we shall discuss Nietzsche’s meta-ethic, which is a discussion of ethics

grounded on a particular epistemological approach. In the second section we will discuss

Nietzsche’s understanding of moral psychology, and will then discuss his virtue ethic. Ernest

Becker’s book, The Denial of Death, as well as other sources, will be consulted from time-to-

time in order to assist in fleshing out these concepts that Nietzsche is employing, only when

doing so will facilitate clearer communication regarding these concepts. In the third section the

virtue ethic of Nietzsche will be critiqued, especially remarks made by Philippa Foot, and present

what the author considers to be valid defences.

I. Nietzsche’s Meta-Ethic

Before we can begin to appropriately understand Nietzsche’s virtue ethic, we must first

turn our attention to what Nietzsche has in mind as a precursor: his meta-ethic. With his meta-

ethic, Nietzsche attempts to ground his virtue ethic on an epistemological approach. He argues, in

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a commonsensical way, that if we do not go about the pursuit of knowledge honestly, then our

pursuit from the beginning is self-defeating. We begin to acquire knowledge of the world when

we begin to experience the world, which is to say when we begin perceiving the world and then

contemplating and assigning values to these perceptions. Nietzsche writes:

It is we…who think and feel, that actually and unceasingly make something which did not before exist: the whole eternally increasing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, gradations, affirmations and negations…Whatever has value in the present world, has not it in itself, by its nature – nature is always worthless – but a value once given to it, bestowed upon it and it was we who gave and bestowed! We only have created the world which is of any account to man!1

The first hurdle then, when considering how to go about most effectively and honestly pursuing

truth is, Nietzsche argues, realizing that all values in the world that we possess are contrived by

us: in interpreting experience we assign values and estimations to that experience, and so create

for ourselves the reality we experience. Because we come to know the world via our perceptions

and because we create our own worlds out of our own perceptions – that is, our own contextual

meanings regarding the world – then our beliefs about the world are actually beliefs about values

that we have created for ourselves. In his aphorism The Believed Motive Nietzsche argues:

However important it may be to know the motives according to which mankind has really acted hitherto, perhaps the belief in this or that motive, and therefore that which mankind has assumed and imagined to be the actual mainspring of its activity hitherto is something still more essential for the thinker to know.2

Thus, in analyzing our own beliefs about the world, we have to remain cognizant of what

Nietzsche is discussing; specifically that these beliefs are about the experiential world whose

value exists only in our own minds.

This, however is not to suggest that Nietzsche spoke of the world as an ever changing

series of appearances. Much to the contrary, he argued that when you perceive, you really do

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003) 235-6.

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 81.

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perceive reality as it is to you: you do not achieve a direct or privileged knowledge of the world

when you experience it, but you do experience it nonetheless. One’s degree of knowledge of the

world, therefore, has to do with how well one comes to know their own self – their impulses,

desires, moods, biases, inclinations, thoughts, and weaknesses. In becoming increasingly aware

of one’s own perspectives – or what is the same for Nietzsche, selves – one comes to have much

richer perspectives, and thus develop more robust notions of knowledge. Regarding perspective,

Nietzsche writes:

There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our objectivity be.3

The more honestly we encounter and understand experience, the more fully we try to “take in”

experience, the more perspectives of it we will develop, and thus not only come to understand

experience with more completeness (though it will never be complete), but also come to

understand ourselves, the centers of value creation.

What Nietzsche is suggesting is an epistemological approach that employs honesty in line

with one’s reason in the pursuit of knowledge for oneself and indeed of oneself – what Nietzsche

at times calls the great “yea-saying” to life. To deny that this is the case is not only nonsense, but:

To refuse to believe in the self, to deny one’s own “reality” – what a triumph! – already no longer merely over the senses, over appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violence and cruelty to reason: this lust reaches its peak when the ascetic self-contempt, self-derision of reason decrees: “there is a realm of truth and being, but precisely reason is excluded from it!”4

From Nietzsche’s perspective, to intentionally mislead oneself or others, even by allowing

oneself to believe in such-and-such against better judgment, for any reason whatever, is nothing

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998) 84-5.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, 84-5.

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but an insult to one’s own reason and is an act of self-derision, as it impairs how one perceives

experience, and thus how one assigns values to experience, which in turn reflects how one comes

to understand oneself. It is also of Nietzsche’s argument that when people are mislead in this

manner, the mirror by which they come to understand themselves becomes distorted to such an

extent that the reflection they perceive is nothing short of hideous, contributing to agonizing and

reinforcing self-contempt.5

Because these derailing movements do nothing to assist any of us in acquiring honest

knowledge of experience and ourselves, we need to focus on encouraging people to follow their

own natural and creative impulses. In terms of how to go about encouraging honesty in people,

Nietzsche provides us with three principles. First, those who do not suffer from a bad conscience,

that mal-contempt for oneself described above, should help those who do suffer overcome their

bad-conscience. Second, an environment is to be fostered whereby this overcoming can take

shape; to encourage and discourage certain qualities insofar as they contribute or detract from

establishing an honest character. Third, Nietzsche suggests what he calls “self-hypnotism”, or

patience, as qualities require time to take root.6 He is suggesting that everyone be encouraged to

celebrate who and what they are while shedding the cloaks of self-derision. He is not suggesting,

however, that people be told to do such-and-such or to believe in such-and-such. This is not,

however, to suggest that Nietzsche thought we could believe in just anything, as his reasoning

thus far demonstrates. But what he would say here, rather Platonically to boot, is that an honest

man is wont to pursue honest ends, or once sought, honesty propels thought and action.

Regarding such things as metaphysics, Nietzsche is I am sure considering that other people will

5 This topic will be discussed in further detail later in the following section.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 323-4.

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fall in the same sort of conceptual framework as himself. He argues, “Mystical explanations are

regarded as profound; the truth is that they do not even go to the length of being superficial.”7

A flag of caution may be raised at this suggestion, as it seems as though he is more-or-less

telling people what an honest approach to the world would consist in. To demonstrate that this is

not the case, and so to demonstrate that Nietzsche is not guilty of hypocrisy, we will work

through the example just provided. If you will recall, our perceptions of the world are

interpretations of the world, and that without valuers and esteemers, there would be no values or

estimations. If everything we understand about the world and about ourselves is based on these

values and estimations, then we must admit that appeals to otherworldliness and other such

metaphysical claims are problematic; they are problematic because they erect and focus on

concepts that have nothing to do with, and indeed are not even supported by reality. What is

more, in further self-derision, they focus on the otherworldly at the expense of focussing on

reality and, consequently, themselves. Metaphysics then, according to Nietzsche, is an abortion of

reason, in all of its many forms, and thus not something that an honest person would be inclined

to consider seriously at all.

Furthermore, as has been entailed from what was said above, the total possible amount of

knowledge possible is directly dependent upon each individual valuer’s own level of self-

awareness; knowledge becomes the sum of all self-knowledge. The more perspectives that are

available, which is to say, the more selves or perspectives that there are available, determines

how much knowledge in all of reality has been attained. In this sense, any example of self-

awareness can be seen as the process by which reality becomes aware of itself. Nietzsche argues:

We cannot see round our corner: it is hopeless curiosity to want to know what other modes of intellect and perspective there might be: for example, whether any kind of being could perceive time backwards, or


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alternately forwards and backwards (by which another direction of life and another conception of cause and effect would be given). But I think that we are to-day at least far from the ludicrous immodesty of decreeing from our nook that there can only be legitimate perspectives from that nook. The world, on the contrary, has once more become “infinite” to us: in so far we cannot dismiss the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations.8

Thus, for us to be able to acquire any amount of knowledge of anything, including – and

Nietzsche would argue especially – ourselves, we must go about all our pursuits honestly. As was

suggested earlier, to go about anything dishonestly – or, what is the same thing, going about

things and with the intention of being dishonest – is self-defeating, as how you choose to

perceive affects in the way that you do; and dishonest intentions produce dishonest results. Thus,

in the interest of not labouring our entire lives in the trade of self-derision, knowledge must be

situated theoretically in such a manner that the honest pursuit thereof becomes the proverbial

yard stick by which Nietzsche will revalue all values; knowledge must become an end unto itself.

In antiquity, Nietzsche argues:

…the striving after virtue stood first and foremost, and that people thought they had given the highest praise to knowledge when they celebrated it as the best means to virtue. It is something new knowledge claims to be more than a means.9

Nietzsche is suggesting that we are going to definitely be discussing virtues, and that knowledge,

and how we arrive at this knowledge, will determine what is to be considered a virtue. Nietzsche

is thus advocating that his own epistemological position be utilised as a means of establishing

what is virtuous, and thus what is ethical.

At this point some persons are going to disagree with me. One author who has something

to say about my conceptual understanding of the relationship between knowledge and

epistemology in Nietzsche’s thought is Tracy Strong, in her essay Texts and Pretexts: Reflections

of Perspectivism in Nietzsche. In this essay, Strong defines epistemology as:

8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 340-1.


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…that branch of philosophy that is concerned either to ground knowledge in a realm that is “objective,” that is, not affected by the act of knowing, or to establish “objectively” that this aim is impossible in at least certain realms of human experience.10

But in Strong’s opinion, Nietzsche does not do this. In her eyes, what Nietzsche does is replace

what he considers to be a flawed epistemological system with his notion of perspectivalism.11

The reason Strong makes this move, it seems, is because what Nietzsche is doing here is not what

she says epistemology is. However, if epistemology can be understood as that branch of

philosophy which concerns itself with how knowledge is or ought to be attained, then the two

procedures which Strong listed by no means exhaust the possibilities for knowledge acquisition.

We saw earlier, however, how Nietzsche suggests that the total possible amount of

knowledge that exists is determined by the level of self-awareness possessed by valuers. Thus, it

seems as though Nietzsche is conceptually using his perspectivalism as a means of amassing

knowledge, or at the very least, of increasing the amount of self-knowledge at any given time.

Therefore, I think we are justified in claiming that Nietzsche does advocate an approach that

grounds ethical estimations epistemically.

Another possible hiccup we might have at this point has to do with the correlation

between knowledge and honesty, such that one can say we “have honest knowledge”. If we

equate knowledge and truth, such that knowledge ↔ truth, then even Nietzsche himself would

scoff at an utterance such as this thus, this is certainly not what Nietzsche has in mind. Nietzsche

certainly does employ the word “truth” on a number of occasions, indeed, even positively so: So

what exactly does Nietzsche have in mind when he discusses the idea of truth?

From what Nietzsche has said above, no single individual valuer has privileged access to

objective certainty in any regard or in any amount; all a valuer has in terms of knowledge of the

10 Tracy Strong, “Text and Pretexts: Reflections of Perspectivism in Nietzsche,” Political Theory 13 (1985) 164-5.

11 Tracy Strong, “Text and Pretexts: Reflections of Perspectivism in Nietzsche,” 165.

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world and their self is what the valuer has of their own accord created. While Nietzsche may

appreciate the pragmatic utility of truth statements such that “1 + 1 = 2 is true at any given

temporal or spatial coordinate”, he regards any other type of truth statements such that “X ↔ Y is

true at any given temporal or spatial coordinate” as being ludicrous. These estimations are

ludicrous because they assume a certain objectivity or certainty the Nietzsche denies as possible.

He could of course be wrong about this point, but then it would have to be shown that we have

unmediated access to, and thus direct knowledge of reality. Therefore, Nietzsche argues that this

type of certainty is impossible, and to insist that Nietzsche employs truth in this regard would be

irresponsible on our behalf. Thus in the lexicon of Nietzsche, we find that he uses the two words

interchangeably, but only because he has adapted the meaning of the word “truth”. In this way he

can use the words “knowledge” and “truth” synonymously, but in the same manner in which we

can use the words “street” and “road” synonymously, because in both instances we mean to

indicate “that which is driven upon”.

This point leads to the last topic of our discussion of Nietzsche’s meta-ethical position

and how it relates to his ethical stance, before we can begin discussing his virtue ethic. The point

that is of crucial illustrate here is that Nietzsche does not have a doctrine, despite the countless

number of times writers, even those claiming to understand Nietzsche, say that he does. Not only

does he make statements such that, “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a

system is a lack of integrity.”12 In Daybreak he also writes:

Systematizers practice a kind of play-acting in as much as they want to fill out a system and round off its horizon, they have to try to present their weaker qualities as their stronger – they try to impersonate whole and uniformly strong natures.13

12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Strand, London: Penguin, 1990) 35.

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R .J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 315.

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Notice the language he employs, in particular, that systematizers are “play-acting” and “…want

to fill out a system and round off its horizon…” In calling systematizers and indoctrinators play-

actors, he is insisting that all the concepts they develop are just certain perspectives they hold,

and nothing more than fanciful notions. And the second quoted fragment really touches upon

Nietzsche’s conceptual issue with doctrine and truth: in every instance those who erect a doctrine

take but a fragment of reality, rip it out of its context, and call this “the thing in itself”, or “the

eternal word”, or other similar sorts of belief utterances. Nietzsche simply cannot be said to have

a doctrine of anything by virtue of his concept of truth or knowledge, as the sum of all possible

perspectives, which is to say that as more perspectives are developed, the total sum of possible

knowledge increases. He goes so far as to make arguments such as, “How far is truth susceptible

of embodiment?-that is the question, that is the experiment.”14 A man who tells us that truth or

knowledge should always be placed under scrutiny, to conduct ourselves through life as through

a grandiose experiment, to challenge especially those ideas or theories which are largely

responsible for our own worldviews, cannot be said to be a person who advocated doctrine of any

kind. It is fitting, I think, to conclude this section of the essay with a quotation from Daybreak

that succinctly details just what Nietzsche has in mind regarding this experimentalism, and

surmises his position on doctrine:

Never keep back or bury in silence that which can be thought against your thoughts! Give it praise! It is among the foremost requirements of honesty of thought. Every day you must conduct your campaign also against yourself. A victory and conquered fortress are no longer your concern – your concern is truth – but your defeat is no longer your concern, either!15

II. Nietzsche’s Virtue Ethic


15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 169.

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Thus far we have evidenced that Nietzsche is leaning towards an ethic based on virtue,

which will be rooted upon his concept of knowledge and how it is acquired (his epistemological

approach), and will pay special attention to avoid including as virtues those characteristics that

reduce or prohibit our ability to approach reality honestly. Also, we learned that neither in his

meta-ethic nor his virtue ethic is Nietzsche implementing or advocating a doctrine. What he is

doing is arguing for what to him makes the most sense; but even what Nietzsche takes to be the

case, we know, is not being advocated by him as being infallible or beyond scrutiny. The purpose

of this section of the essay is to flesh out Nietzsche’s virtue ethic and to demonstrate, while doing

so, that this ethical theory is a well-reasoned and valid argument.

Because this is a virtue ethic, what is of concern to us are what types of characters people

have. We will be including as virtues, Nietzsche argues, those characteristics which produce

honesty in one, as they will increase their own self-awareness, which will simultaneously allow

them to increase their own awareness of reality as well. As we read above, this entails a person

coming to terms with and accepting who one is, what one’s strengths and weaknesses are, and to

go about this pursuit honestly, which means to Nietzsche, with a good conscience; one cannot go

about self-discovery in good conscience if one also hates oneself. It does not matter whether this

hate, or shame, is personally constructed (that is, without much in the way of direct influence

from the other), or whether the shame is something forced upon the person by way of authority,

doctrine, or other influences. Shame categorically poisons one’s will and leads to what Nietzsche

earlier called self-derision. Shame produces bad conscience in the individual.

In The Joyful Wisdom, Nietzsche clearly elucidates his position regarding shame. “What

dost thou call bad? – Him who always wants to put others to shame.”16 “What dost thou think


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tzsche writes:

most humane? To spare a person shame.”17 “What is the Seal of Attained Liberty? – To no

longer be ashamed of oneself.”18 Shame then is something one should spare others from

experiencing and also something one should avoid experiencing oneself, indeed, to cease being

ashamed of oneself is to attain liberty. In order to demonstrate just how poisonous shame and

other forms of self-derision are, and why they should be avoided, Nie

This young world desires that there should arrive or appear from the outside – not happiness – but misfortune; and their imagination is already busy beforehand to form a monster out of it, so that they may afterwards be able to fight with a monster…they fill the world with their cries of distress, and consequently too often with the feeling of distress in the first place! They do not know what to make of themselves – and so they paint the misfortune of others on the wall; they always need others! And always again other others!19

These people, he argues, are no longer capable of happiness, which is because they no longer

possess self-knowledge and no longer feel capable of creating anything from within. All they

know how to pursue is distress, and always distress from the external, distress from other people,

the same type of distress that Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in Notes from the Underground felt for

himself. Not even that which vexes these people is created from within for them – even their

emotions are counterfeit! They have lost all authenticity in their lives, and are painted in the same

light as Nietzsche’s last men as characterized in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra20; these men and

women who lost their ambition and desire, who huddle outside in the cold, struggling for warmth

and struggling to stay alive. They could overcome this state, and Nietzsche advocates this – man

is something that must be overcome21 - but this is something that most people cannot do. To

think and create for oneself is the hardest task of all, “The inclination to such a thing [has] been




20 Nietzsche speaks at length regarding the “last men” in the prologue of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978) 198.

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regarded as madness; for all miseries and terrors were associated with being alone.”22 To stand

out amongst one’s fellow person as being different can indeed be met with isolation, harassment,

physical and other mental abuse, and even in some unexceptional cases, murder. To stand out

means facing external opposition in the manners just described. But to repress one’s beliefs or

virtues leads to internal opposition, that same type of self-derision mentioned earlier.

Some might be tempted to dismiss these arguments of Nietzsche as being irrelevant. But

to Nietzsche just this is of the greatest consequence; Nietzsche understood the importance of

moral psychology – he understood that psychological factors do influence one’s ability to act,

and thus also influence one’s ability to be moral in any sense at all. And amongst those who

noticed these same psychological influences on our ability to act for oneself, Becker stands out in

my mind most predominately. In The Denial of Death Becker discusses this situation:

…man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the “character defences”: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him.23

From this perspective, even the smallest trace of difference can lead to penalizations. But when

one looks at larger issues one can see that one faces threats internally and externally. For a person

to come to a point where they begin trying to tear out larger pieces, their entire world-view can

collapse.

In Nietzsche’s estimation, this means coming to terms with uncertainty in every aspect of

one’s life, which is especially hard when one has been raised with variegated notions of certainty,

i.e. their concept of self, their notion of their place and role in the universe, etc. This is when


23 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997) 23.

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Nietzsche’s free spirits will shrug off the need for certainty, and instead of coping with this

anxiety in the face of nothingness with what Becker refers to as neuroses; the free spirit will

dance even beside the abyss. Those of the herd, or those that Becker refers to as having neuroses,

Nietzsche accuses of lacking the will to command their own selves. He argues:

Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed, where there is a lack of will: for the will, as emotion of command, is the distinguishing characteristic of sovereignty and power. That is to say the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for that which commands, and commands sternly, - a God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience…24

They cannot, he thinks, live without these certainties, however contrived they might be. The free-

spirit on the other hand is someone who:

…could imagine a delight and a power of self-determining, and a freedom of will, whereby a spirit could bid farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, accustomed as it would be to support itself on slender cords and possibilities, and to dance even on the verge of abysses. Such a spirit would be the free-spirit par excellence.25

To undergo this self-overcoming, or what Becker refers to as death and rebirth, before one can

get to the point of being able to take joy amidst the sea of uncertainty, one must still comes to

terms concretely with their condition:

What does it mean “to be born again” for man? It means for the first time to be subjected to the terrifying paradox of the human condition, since one must be born not as a god, but as a man, or as a god-worm, or a god who shits. Only this time without the neurotic shield that hides the full ambiguity of one’s life. And so we know that every authentic rebirth is a real ejection from paradise…It takes men of granite, men who were automatically powerful, “secure in their drivenness “ we might say, and it makes them tremble, makes them cry…it is impossible to stand up to the terror of one’s condition without anxiety.26

This is why those of the herd remain in the herd. To stand out and be one of Nietzsche’s

“valuers” simply fills one with too much dread to ever consider doing.

And in this movement we see why Nietzsche’s moral psychological approach is so

insightful; it illustrates why most people are incapable of coming to terms with what Becker calls



26 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 58.

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the “human condition”. People are incapable of accepting uncertainty because everything in their

life either pronounces certainty, i.e. religion, or demands certainty, i.e. reports at one’s job, etc.

Or, their characters are predisposed to innumerable demands for certainty, and incapable of

accepting uncertainty. This is why Nietzsche suggests a virtue ethic based on his epistemological

approach: if every day each person must come to terms with the frightening realization that

nothing is certain and that values exist only in our heads, then we should have each person’s

characters be such a way that they are capable of handling all the ambiguities of life and can take

joy in acting and valuing for oneself. Thus we can appreciate at this point both Nietzsche’s meta-

ethical argument and his moral psychological justifications for his virtue ethic. We can also

understand how his ethics, being rooted and justified as they are, will be applicable to any valuer

in any place.

In their book What Nietzsche Really Said, Solomon and Higgins present the reader with a

tentative list of virtues that are listed as such by Nietzsche in his work. These virtues are:

aestheticism, courage, courtesy, depth, egoism, exuberance, fatalism (amor fati), ‘the feminine,’

friendship, generosity, ‘hardness,’ health, honesty, integrity, justice, playfulness, ‘presence,’

pride, responsibility, solitude, strength, style, and temperance.27 I do, however, believe this list to

be in error, as it lists some things as virtues which are really only aspects of other virtues, or that

they do not list certain characteristics as being virtues at all. As virtues of Nietzsche, I argue the

following are included: Amor fati, honesty, courage, and regard for the other. I would also note

that Nietzsche considers these virtues to be practiced in an overflowing manner, or rather, out of

compulsion, not out of a sense of duty, or of praise or reward

27 Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, What Nietzsche Really Said (New York: Shocken Books, 2000) 181-2.

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Amor fati: This means to find as beautiful, or to love, that which is necessary. Nietzsche writes,

“I want more and more to perceive the necessary characteristics in things as the beautiful: - I shall

thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love!”28 This

means to find as beautiful that which is natural, both about oneself and about reality in general.

And by being so constituted, one will be less likely to shy away from honesty.

Honesty: The importance of honesty to Nietzsche has been stressed to near the point of

exhaustion above; without an honest outlook, every pursuit by every individual would be self-

defeating. An honest pursuit of knowledge will treat knowledge experimentally. An honest

character will necessarily be one that has integrity. Honesty forces one to develop a healthy ego

as well, as self-knowledge will be pursued and in such a person, values will be created; such a

person must have an ego healthy enough to make the positing, else they become incapable of

overcoming. This person, regarding as beautiful what is necessary and being honestly constituted,

will refrain from mistreating any person unnecessarily. Also, because of Nietzsche’s concept of

perspectivalism, and the selves that this perspectivalism entails, this person will necessarily have

depth of character.

Courage: This means to have such control over oneself that one is able to overcome fear. As an

example, they write, “…the inspired artist or philosopher pursues his or her ideas despite the

dangers of failure and ridicule or, perhaps worse, being utterly ignored – not without fear, but

overriding fear.”29 This virtue entails a certain degree of fortitude and tenaciousness.


29 Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, What Nietzsche Really Said, 183.

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Regard for the other: We must keep in mind that when explaining Nietzsche’s meta-ethic we

came across the notion of helping others develop these virtuous characters, and to do so by

creating an environment that fosters these characteristics.

Having thus elucidated Nietzsche’s meta-ethic and his virtue ethic, we have been able to

demonstrate that because they are based on the human condition, and because they focus on

positively living rather than merely coping with living, we have very good reason indeed to adopt

such an approach, and can indeed see that argument itself is sound. Now let us focus our attention

on what criticisms are offered by others, especially Foot, regarding Nietzsche insofar as his ethics

is concerned.

III. Critical Remarks

In her book Natural Goodness, in particular the chapter titled Immoralism, and in her

paper Nietzsche: Revaluation of Values, Philippa Foot raises a number of objections to

Nietzsche’s thought, which I think Nietzsche would be very capable of answering. The first

criticism has to do with Nietzsche’s rejection of “intrinsic badness”. Foot writes, “[Nietzsche]

went so far as to deny ‘intrinsic badness’ in the doing of any kind of act.”30 Nietzsche’s response

would be that all values are creations, even the values good and bad, and thus to insist that things

can be intrinsically bad is irresponsible.

Another critique offered by Foot is, “Nietzsche, however, fell into the philosophers’ trap

of inventing a generalizing theory largely unsupported by observation.”31 But as has been

demonstrated above, Nietzsche based his ethic upon robust notions of knowledge and moral

psychology, such that his observations influenced the work of Freud, Rank, Becker, and others.

30 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, < http://dx.doi.org.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/10.1093/0198235089.001.0001> 110.

31 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 113.

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Thus, to argue that his theory is unsupported by evidence really appears to be a misunderstanding

more than anything else.

In another critique, this time about Nietzsche and propensity for violence she claims that

his ‘doctrine’ is misleading, “…tempting those who see themselves as exceptional to think that

when they murder and torture they are doing nothing wrong.”32 What Foot seems to be concerned

with here is that by a free spirit creating values, the same free spirit can give any value to any

action, thus is potentially able to positively value activities like murder and torture. No doubt her

ideas in this arena are shaped by misconceptions, such as his sister Elizabeth modifying his later

writings, especially works like his Will to Power, and presenting them in a manner that the

German Third Reich found appealing.33 Statements such as the following could also be seen, if

read out of context, as advocating violence towards others:

The first effect of happiness is the feeling of power: this wants to express itself; either to us ourselves, or to other men, or to ideas or imaginary beings. The most common modes of expression are: to bestow, to mock, to destroy all three out of a common basic drive.34

Again, he uses language in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, amongst still other places that would seem to

advocate violence, “You should have eyes that always seek an enemy – your enemy. And some

of you hate at first sight. Your enemy you shall seek, your war you shall wage – for your

thoughts.”35 We can see then that Nietzsche is advocating a certain type of violence, but not the

violence that Foot spoke of earlier. Nietzsche is advocating a warring of ideas, in which we are

no longer concerned with victory or loss, but knowledge. One must also remember that in

Nietzsche’s mind, the concept of will to power, often misunderstood as advocating violence,

32 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 115.

33 Linda Williams, “Will to Power in Nietzsche’s Published Works and Nachlass,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996) 447.

34 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 166.

35 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 47.

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means nothing but the will to life.36 To live is to come to know one’s own self and reality by

adopting an approach to knowledge based on honesty. It is a will to have power over oneself, to

possess the courage, the honesty, the amor fati and the regard for the other in an overflowing

manner; to continuously question and go to war with the entirety of one’s beliefs without regard

for the outcome that is required to embrace life.

In Nietzsche: Revaluation of Values, one of Foot’s final cautions, if not criticisms,

regarding Nietzsche’s concept of morality, is, as she thinks, “How could one see the present

dangers that the world is in as showing that there is too much pity and too little egoism

around?”37 Nothing has been said with regards to pity at this point, but given the role the pity

plays in some moral structures, including Foot’s, it is something worth discussing at this time.

We need to ask ourselves why Nietzsche regards pity in such low esteem and egoism in such

high regard.

To understand this one need only look at the meaning of the words employed. The

English word ‘pity’ is translated into German as ‘Mitleid’. If one were to open an English-

German dictionary they would find ‘Mitleid’ translated into English as ‘pity’, and so seem to

mean the same thing. This is however only a seeming and nothing more. ‘Mitleid’ is a

compounded word, comprised of the two words ‘mit’ and ‘leid’. The word ‘mit’ means ‘with’

and ‘leid’ means a number of things, including sorrow, grief and misfortune.38 Thus, ‘Mitleid’


37 Philippa Foot, “Nietzsche: Revaluation of Values,” in Virtues and Vices and other essays in moral philosophy, ed. Philippa Foot (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978) 94.

38 Harper-Collins German-English Dictionary. Fifth Edition. (Glasgow: Harper-Collins, 2005).

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literally means ‘to suffer with’ or to ‘share another’s suffering’.39 But, because all values and

perceptions are the creations of each individual valuer, to insist that two people could share

identical emotional states is impossible, and an insult to honesty. It demands of an individual

something that they cannot possibly do. As such, demands of this kind lead again to what

Nietzsche refers to as self-derision and the accumulation of bad-conscience. This contributes to

mental psychoses, which contributes to the problems of the world. A healthy egoism,

encompassed in the virtue of honesty, sees this demand as the poison that it is. Instead of

attempting to ‘suffer with’, one would respect and assist another person who was in need of such

things – but not because of duty, or utility, or any external demands of any kind: his kindness is

authentic, brought about by his overflowing nature; a nature that acts for itself, and looks for

nothing in return.40 In this same sense, Nietzsche rejects pity still more because in making

another person pity, you degrade their character. As Cartwright writes, “Pity [is] seen as an

imposed transmission of suffering.”41

A final critique I would like to discuss is not so much directed at Nietzsche as it is this

essay. I am highly indebted to my mentor and colleague Bernard Zelechow. Bernard suggested

that I may here be concerned with the “chicken and the egg” scenario, as he suggests that it may

not be so clear, insofar as Nietzsche is concerned, that knowledge sculpts virtue. It could in fact

be the case that virtue shapes knowledge, or that we do not even know enough to say either way.

39 To deny the applicability of such a philological approach to understand the meaning of pity, or to say that such an approach is irrelevant, would be to ignore that Nietzsche, being trained a philologist, spent his entire life deconstructing concepts in this way. A brief reading of his Genealogy of Morality would quickly affirm this claim.

40 This is what Nietzsche really has in mind with a healthy egoism; it is not a neglect of the other, and is certainly not a cruelty to the other. It involves a self that is overflowing to the extent that for a person, being itself is its thanks to itself; it does not look for thanks because the person did not lose any of their self by so acting.

41 David E. Cartwright, “Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984) 85.

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I do however think that Nietzsche does consider knowledge to play a dominate role in virtue

formation. It could be seen as difficult to argue that the epistemological position could come to

be unless certain characteristics existed is us humans, what Nietzsche calls virtues, that inclined

some more than others towards honesty. I concur that honesty would not exist without honest

inclinations, but knowledge acquisition, I think, whether it was honest or otherwise, predates

notions of honesty. I believe this is how Nietzsche would argue, by virtue of the his belief that to

recognize a thing as being honest, or a venture as being honestly pursued, one must first create

for themselves the value of honesty, or if you will, the notion of honesty. Thus, one would come

to recognize certain things as having the quality of something they call honesty, or the desire to

not deceive, and may then come to consider this as being beneficial to one’s pursuit of

knowledge. It is in this manner, I think, that Nietzsche avoids the “chicken and the egg”

scenario, and also avoids possible accusations of begging the question. It must be noted,

however, that we cannot conclusively state what Nietzsche ultimately thought about many things,

and he himself would admit the same.

IV. Concluding Remarks

Throughout this essay it has been demonstrated that Nietzsche does have in mind to base

a virtue ethic on a moral psychological approach which is based on eliminating the notion of

shame, and an epistemological approach which understands that we acquire knowledge about the

world perspectivally. We also saw that Nietzsche is not proposing a doctrine of any sort, and that

the reasons for this are abundantly clear. Intrinsic badness is to be denied, argues Nietzsche,

because no valuation at all is possible without that value being created first. The only type of

violence that Nietzsche was advocating involved the warring of ideas and the destruction of

certainty. We also saw that he has very good reason indeed for his rejection of pity, because it is

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something that can never be achieved, and because the very attempt to accomplish this perversion

would hurt the character of the person in question. And ultimately we were able to demonstrate

that he avoids possible criticism insofar as the relation between his epistemological approach and

his virtue ethic is concerned. In short, I believe this argument is sound and valid, and is thus

something worthy of serious consideration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997. Cartwright, David E. “Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 83-98. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes From The Underground. Ed. Philip Smith. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover: 1992. Foot, Philippa. “Nietzsche: Revaluation of Values,” in Virtues and Vices and other essays in moral philosophy. Ed. Philippa Foot. Berkley: University of California Press, 1978. ----- Natural Goodness. < http://dx.doi.org.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/10.1093/0198235089.001.0001> 110. Harper-Collins German-English Dictionary. Fifth Edition. Glasgow: Harper-Collins, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Strand, London: Penguin, 1990. ----- Daybreak. Trans. R .J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ----- On The Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998. ----- The Joyful Wisdom. Trans. Thomas Common. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003. Solomon, Robert C. and Higgins, Kathleen. What Nietzsche Really Said. New York: Shocken Books, 2000. Strong, Tracy. “Text and Pretexts: Reflections of Perspectivism in Nietzsche,” Political Theory 13 (1985): 164-82. Williams, Linda. “Will to Power in Nietzsche’s Published Works and Nachlass,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 447-63. Zuckert, Catherine. “Nietzsche on the Origin & Development of the Distinctively Human,” Polity 16 (1983): 48-71.

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