ABSTRACT
Whatever his purely personal reasons, it was above all Nietzsche’s own moral sense that turned against a morality which he considered obsolete. So he was the more anxious to set up such a moral system as would serve life in its biological and earthly sense. Assuming that no actions are moral in themselves but can only become so in our interpretations, he felt entitled to interpret the whole of life in the light of values based on nature, and therefore fully acceptable-as he thought-to the new irreligious consciousness. The alternative to it he saw no longer in Christian ethics, but in moral chaos and nihilism. Hence the ruthlessness of his transvaluations, the principal victim of which was to be the entire system of our old Christian morality. In this respect he certainly was ‘beyond good and evil’, but only in order to create new values of good and of evil in the name of his own biological ideal and the ascending type of life here on earth. This is why his moral code resembles most of all a severe yoga-system (devised for the training of supermen) and can in fact be defined as puritanism from the other end.
