ABSTRACT
Nietzsche was preoccupied with moral matters throughout the whole of his philosophical life. His stance in relation to them is complex, to say the least. For these matters themselves are very diverse (as he is at pains to make clear); and in addition his treatment of them is multifaceted, and his assessment of them mixed. In Ecce Homo he styles himself an ‘immoralist’; but this label is misleading at best, inviting a drastically oversimplifying and distorting understanding of his position even as it indicates one feature of it – namely, his relentless and uncompromising hostility to a certain type of morality and moral mode of valuation and interpretation, which he considers to have achieved ascendency in the Western world (and elsewhere as well). His favorite name for it is ‘herd animal morality’; and it is his contention that ‘morality in Europe today is herd animal morality.’ To this specification, however, he immediately adds something of no less importance in his thinking on this matter: ‘In other words, as we understand it,’ he writes, it is ‘merely one type of human morality beside which, before which and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible’ (BGE 202).
