Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal§334 Today when every attempt at determining how man should be is received with some irony, when we adhere to the notion that in spite of all one only becomes what one is (in spite of all that is to say, education, instruction, environment, accident and disaster), in the matter of morality we have learnt, in a very peculiar way, how to reverse the relation of cause and effect. Nothing perhaps distinguishes us more than this from the ancient believers in morality. We no longer say, for instance, “Vice is the cause of a man’s physical ruin” and we no longer say “A man prospers with virtue because it brings a long life and happiness”. Our minds today are much more inclined to the belief that vice and virtue are not causes but only effects. A man becomes a respectable member of society because he was a respectable man from the start that is to say, because he was born in possession of good instincts and prosperous cicumstances —
Should a man enter the world poor and the son of parents who are neither economical nor thrifty, he is insusceptible of being improved, that is to say, he is only fit for the prison or the madhouse —
Today we are no longer able to separate moral from physical degeneration: the former is merely a complicated symptom of the latter; a man is necessarily bad just as he is necessarily ill —
Bad: this word here stands for a certain lack of capacity which is related physiologically with the degenerating type for instance, a weak will, an uncertain and many-sided personality, the inability to resist reacting to a stimulus and to control one’s self and a certain constraint resulting from every suggestion proceeding from another’s will. Vice is not a cause; it is an effect —
Vice is a somewhat arbitrary epitome of certain effects resulting from physiological degeneracy. A general proposition such as that which Christianity teaches, namely, “Man is evil” would be justified provided one were justified in regarding a given type of degenerate man as normal. But this may be an exaggeration. Of course, wherever Christianity prospers and prevails, the proposition holds good: for that demonstrates the existence of unhealthy soil, of a degenerate territory.