superiority. Underlying it is will, courage—its opposite is laziness, weakness, fear. Many, he says, do not put through their best right, because a right is a sort of power and they are too lazy or too afraid to exercise power—decorating then their fault perhaps by talking of forbearance and patience.[1] Power, as Nietzsche uses the term, includes will to power, and the trouble with many is that they don't will—they long, they desire, they are ambitious, but they do not will.[2] Willing is saying, So let it be: it is a kind of commanding.[3] Hence Zarathustra's warning, "Do what you will, but first be such as can will."[4] It is, in Nietzsche's eyes, a trouble with the Germans, that they know how to obey, but not to command, though in exceptional circumstances they may do it.[5] In general, the greatest danger for man is not in the qualities that belong to the robber-animal, but in sickliness, weakness.[6] This makes virtue proper impossible. Vice, on the other hand, is the self-indulgence of the weak, their inability to inhibit impulse.[7] I do not mean that Nietzsche counts as virtue everything that goes by that name—he will first have it proved that "virtues" are virtue, i.e., come from strength,[8] and in effect suggests a re-estimation of them, according to the nature of their source. So vices are regarded as manifestations of weakness. It is even possible that what is vice for a weak man should be a permissible liberty to another.
The intimate connection of virtue with power Nietzsche implies in another connection. It is, he says, "in order that the
- ↑ The Wanderer etc., § 251. A virtue is properly something strong and individual, characterizing above all the exceptional man, Will to Power, § 317.
- ↑ Nietzsche sharply distinguishes between the two things, Zarathustra, I, xvii.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 19.
- ↑ Zarathustra, III, v, § 3.
- ↑ Dawn of the Day § 207. Cf. the contemptuous references to the German soul with its involuntary bowing to titles of honor, orders, gracious looks from above, etc., Werke, XIII, 344, § 855; also, Zarathustra, III, vii. Ralph Barton Perry's references in this connection to Nietzsche (The Moral Economy) show little acquaintance with him.
- ↑ Genealogy etc.. III, § 14; cf. Will to Power, § 98.
- ↑ Cf. Werke, XIV, 119, § 251 (vice, along with sickliness, mental derangement and hypernervosity, a symptom of physiological decadence); Will to Power, § 42 (crime, celibacy, alcoholism, pessimism, anarchism, libertinism, social and intellectual, classed along with vice); ibid., § 871 (men of power and will the antithesis of the vicious and unbridled).
- ↑ Cf. Werke, XIII, 209, § 481.
