ABSTRACT
THE PROBLEM OF NIETZSCHE’S IMMORALISM Nietzsche claims to be an “immoralist”—indeed, he claims to be “the first immoralist” and adds: “that makes me the annihilator par excellence” (EH IV 2). Undoubtedly, this means that in some way or other he is a critic of morality, but beyond this small area of certainty the exact nature of his immoralism is quite problematic. The word suggests a particularly extreme sort of doctrine. Indeed, he predicts that immoralist ideas will become influential precisely because the “spell that fights on our behalf…is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralists-we are the most extreme” (WM 749). There are important passages in which he explicitly describes his way of thinking as an alternative to the moral way of thinking as such (e.g, JGB 32 and WM 299).
