Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate§328 In the end, what have I achieved? Let us not close our eyes to this wonderful result: I have imparted to virtue new charms — the charm of something forbidden. It has our most subtle honesty against it, it is salted in the “cum grano satis” of the scientific pang of conscience. It has an old-fashioned, antique odour, so that it is at last beginning to draw refined people and to make them inquisitive — in short, it seems like a vice. Only after we have once recognised that everything consists of lies and appearance, shall we have regained the right to uphold this most beautiful of all fictions, virtue. There will then remain no further reason to deprive ourselves of it: only when we have shown virtue to be a form of immorality do we again justify it, it then becomes classified and likened, in its fundamental features, to the profound and general immorality of all existence, of which it is then shown to be a part. It appears as a form of luxury of the first order, the most arrogant, the dearest and rarest form of vice. We have robbed it of its grimaces and divested it of its cowl; we have delivered it from the importunate familiarity of the crowd; we have deprived it of its ridiculous rigidity, its vacant expression, its stiff false hair and its hieratic muscular system.