Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities§374 Every society has a tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures at, least in its own imagination, as also to starve them. As an example of this sort of caricature we have our “criminal”. Within the aristocratic Roman order of values, the Jew was reduced to a caricature. Among artists, “the philistine and the bourgeois” become caricatures; while among pious people it is the heretics and among aristocrats, the plebeian. Among immoralists it is the moralist. Plato, for instance, in my books becomes a caricature.