[FRA:] "A word for morality" no. 60 Minima Moralia

[David Westling]

Amoralism, with which Nietzsche chastised the old untruth, is itself now subject to the verdict of history.  With the decay of religion and its palpable philosophical secularizations, restrictive prohibitions lost their inherent authority, their substantiality.  At first, however, material production was still so undeveloped that it could be proclaimed with some reason that there was not enough to go round.  Anyone who did not criticize political economy as such, had to cling to the iimiting principle which was then articulated as unrationalized appropriation at the expense of the weak.  The objective preconditions of this have changed.  It is not only the social non-conformist or even the narrow-minded bourgeois who must see restriction as superfluous in face of the immediate possibility of superfluity.  The implied meaning of the master-morality, that he who wants to live must fend for himself, has in the meantime become a still more miserable lie than it was when a nineteenth-century piece of pulpit-wisdom.  If in Germany the common citizen has proved himself a blond beast, this has nothing to do with national peculiarities, but with the fact that blond bestiality itself, social rapine, has become in the face of manifest abundance the attitude of the backwoodsman, the deluded philistine, that same ‘hard-done-by’ mentality which the master-morality was invented to combat.  If Cesare Borgia were resurrected today, he would look like David Friedrich Strauss and his name would be Adolf Hitler.  The cause of amorality has been espoused by the same Darwinists whom Nietzsche despised, and who proclaim as their maxim the barbaric struggle for existence with such  vehemence, just because it is no longer needed.  True distinction has long ceased to consist in taking the best for oneself, and has become instead a satiety with taking, that practices in reality the virtue of giving, which in Nietzsche occurs only in the mind.  Ascetic ideals constitute today a more solid bulwark against the madness of the profit-economy then did the hedonistic life sixty years ago against liberal repression.  The amoralist may now at last permit himself to be a kind, gentle, unegoistic and open-hearted as Nietzsche already was then.  As a guarantee of his undiminished resistance, he is still as alone in this as in the days when he turned the mask of evil upon the normal world, to teach the norm to fear its own perversity.