ETHICS It is difficult to make a critical judgement about Nietzsche’s ethics, since his writing is often wilfully chaotic, and it is unsurprising that scholars vary widely in their interpretation and evaluation It is not easy, for instance, to find out where Nietzsche stands on an issue such as the morality of cruelty When denouncing the role played by guilt in slave morality, he describes with eloquent outrage the tortures inflicted by persecuting bigots But he is tender to the excesses of his aristocratic ‘blond beasts’ who ‘perhaps come from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral equanimity, as though some wild student’s prank had been played’ Certainly Nietzsche is an enthusiast where war is concerned ‘Renouncing war’, he wrote, ‘means renouncing the great life’ (TI 23) War is an education in freedom, and freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in victory triumph over any other instinct, including the desire for happiness ‘The liberated man, and even more the liberated spirit, tramples underfoot the despicable kind of well-being that shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats, dream of ’ (TI 65) Suicide, too, in certain circumstances engages Nietzsche’s admiration Physicians should remind their patients that sick persons are parasites on society, and that a time comes when it is indecent to live longer Die proudly if it is no longer possible to live proudly Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brought about cheerfully and joyfully among children and witnesses—so that a real leave-taking is still possible, when the one who is taking his leave is still there; a true assessment of one’s achievements and ambitions, a summing up of one’s life—all this in contrast to the ghastly and pitiful comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death (TI 61) If you away with yourself, Nietzsche concludes, you are doing what is most admirable: it almost earns you the right to live But is Nietzsche an ethicist at all? Is he a genuine moralist with highly unconventional views of virtue and vice, or is he a completely amoral person with no concern for right and wrong? On the one hand, he is clearly operating in the same field as some great past moralists: his ideal human being bears a resemblance to the great-souled man of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics On the other hand, he himself professes not just to be presenting novel views of good and evil, but to be transcending those categories altogether He calls himself an immoralist, and tells us that there 241