Part Five

A Natural History of Morals

186

Moral feeling in Europe is now just as refined, old, multifaceted, sensitive, and sophisticated as the "Science of Morality" associated with it is still young, amateurish, awkward, and fumbling:- an attractive contrast which now and then even becomes visibly incorporated in the person of a moralist. Even the phrase "Science of Morals" is, so far as what it designates is concerned, much too arrogant and contrary to good taste, which tends always to prefer more modest terms. We should in all seriousness admit to ourselves what we have needed to do for a long time here and still need to do, the only thing that is justified at this point, that is, to assemble materials, organize conceptually, and set in order an immense realm of delicate feelings of value and differences in values, which live, grow, reproduce, and die off - and, perhaps, to attempt to clarify the recurring and more frequent forms of these living crystallizations - as a preparation for a theory of types of morality. Naturally, so far we have not been so modest. As soon as philosophers busied themselves with morality as a science, they collectively have demanded from themselves, with a formal seriousness which makes one laugh, something very much higher, more ambitious, more solemn. They have been looking for the rational basis of morality - and every philosopher so far has believed that he has provided such a rational grounding for morality. But morality itself has been considered something "given." How distant from their stodgy pride lay that apparently unspectacular task, left in the dust and mould, of a description, although for that task the subtlest hands and senses could hardly be subtle enough! The very fact that the moral philosophers had only a crude knowledge of the moral facts, in an arbitrary selection or an accidental abbreviation, something like the morality of their surroundings, their class, their church, the spirit of their age, their climate and region of the world - the very fact that they were poorly educated and not even very curious with respect to peoples, ages, and past events - meant that they never confronted at all the essential problems of morality - all of which come to the surface only with a comparison of several moralities. In all the "science of morality" up to this point what is still lacking, odd as it may sound, is the problem of morality itself. What's missing is the suspicion that here there may be something problematic. What the philosophers have called a "rational grounding of morality" and demanded from themselves was, seen in the right light, only a scholarly version of good faith in the ruling morality, some new way of expressing it, and thus itself an element in the middle of a determined morality, even indeed, in the final analysis, a form of denial that this morality could be grasped as a problem - and, at any rate, the opposite of a test, analysis, questioning, or vivisection of this particular belief. Listen, for example, to how even Schopenhauer presents his own task with such an almost admirable innocence, and make your own conclusions about the scientific nature of a "science" whose ultimate masters still talk like children and little old women: "The principle," he says (on p. 136 of The Fundamental Problem of Morality), "the basic assumption whose meaning all ethicists are essentially in agreement about - neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juve [hurt no one, instead help everyone, as much as you can] - that is essentially the principle which all teachers of morality struggle to ground in reason . . . the essential foundation of ethics, which people have been seeking for thousands of years as the philosopher's stone." The difficulty of rationally grounding the principle quoted above may, of course, be considerable - as we know, it's not something even Schopenhauer was successful in doing - and whoever has once thoroughly understood just how tastelessly false and sentimental this principle is in a world whose essence is the will to power may permit himself to recall that Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, actually - played the flute. . . . Every day, after his meal: just read his biographer on this point. And here's an incidental question: a pessimist, a man who denies God and the world, who stops in front of morality - who says yes to morality and blows his flute, to the laede-neminem [hurt no one] morality - How's that? Is that essentially - a pessimist?