Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate§317 Virtue must be defended against the preachers of virtue: they are its worst enemies. For they teach virtue as an ideal for everyone, they divest virtue of the charm which consists in its rareness, its inimitableness, its exceptional and non-average character that is to say, of its aristocratic charm. A stand must also be made against those embittered idealists who eagerly tap all pots and are satisfied to hear them ring hollow: what naivety to demand great and rare things and then to declare, with anger and contempt of one’s fellows, that they do not exist! It is obvious, for instance, that a marriage is worth only as much as those whom it joins together, that is to say, that in general it will be something wretched and inept: no priest or authority can make anything else of it.
Virtue has all the instincts of the average man against it: it is not profitable, it is not prudent and it isolates. It is related to passion and not very accessible to reason; it spoils the character, the head and the senses — always, of course, subject to the average standard of men; it provokes hostility towards order and towards the lies which are concealed beneath all order, all institutions, all reality — when seen in the light of its harmful influence upon others, it is the worst of vices.
I recognise virtue in that
it does not insist upon being recognised;
it does not presuppose the existence of virtue everywhere, but precisely something else;
it does not suffer from the absence of virtue, but regards it rather as a relation of perspective which throws virtue into relief: it does not proclaim itself;
it makes no propaganda;
it allows no one to pose as judge because it is always a personal virtue;
it does precisely what is generally forbidden: virtue as I understand it is the real vetitum within all herd legislation;
in short, virtue in the style of the Renaissance, virtu, free from all moralic acid -—.