ETHICS consciousness of sinfulness If he is to escape from this, he must rise from the ethical sphere to this religious sphere: he must make ‘the leap of faith’.5 Nietzsche and the Transvaluation of Values Nietzsche agreed with Kierkegaard that a call to the Christian life was something that could not be justified by reason But whereas Kierkegaard concluded, ‘So much the worse for mere reason’, Nietzsche concluded, ‘So much the worse for the call of Christianity’ Not that Nietzsche spent much time in demonstrating that Christianity was irrational: his main complaint against it was rather that it was base and degrading In works like The Genealogy of Morals he seeks not so much to refute the claims of Christian morality as to trace its ignoble pedigree History, Nietzsche says, exhibits two different kinds of morality In the earliest times, strong, privileged aristocrats, feeling themselves to belong to a higher order than their fellows, described their own qualities—noble birth, bravery, candour, blondness, and the like—as ‘good’ They regarded the characteristics of the plebeians—vulgarity, cowardice, untruthfulness, and swarthiness—as ‘bad’ That is master-morality The poor and weak, resenting the power and riches of the aristocrats, turned this system on its head They set up their own contrasting system of values, a morality for the herd that puts a premium on traits such as humility, sympathy, and benevolence, which benefit the underdog They saw the aristocratic type of person not just as bad (schlecht) but as positively evil (boăse) The erection of this new system Nietzsche called ‘a transvaluation of values’, and he blamed it on the Jews It was the Jews who, reversing the aristocratic equation (good ¼ noble ¼ beautiful ¼ happy ¼ loved by the gods), dared with a frightening consistency to suggest the contrary equation, and to hold on to it with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of the powerless) It is they who have declared ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly are alone good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the hideous, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation You, on the other hand, you noblemen, you men of power, you are to all eternity the evil, the cruel, the covetous, the Kierkegaard’s teaching on faith and religion is discussed in Ch 12 below 237