FROM RATIONALITY TO SUBJECTIVITY
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morality, were merely borrowing from the religious capital that was the
source of their morality. His contempt for these "moral fanatics" as he
called them was unrelenting. He saw this world view as weak and half–
hearted. Having lost the fear of God, it was degenerating into a
quasi-religion of comfortable enjoyment and respectability. The best that
was left of it was a "gentle moralism," the modest disposition to believe
that divine love would make everything for the best. Nor did Nietzsche
think much better of the secular philosophies which offered themselves as
substitutes-democracy, liberalism, humanitarianism, scientific and indus–
trial progress-"Modern ideas," he sarcastically called them. They
repeated the same essential values on a less heroic scale, and none seemed
to offer an adequate goal for living.
Beneath their "insipid and cowardly concept of man," he argued, lin–
gered the old "cult of Christian morality." What they did not realize was
how conditional their morality was on the religion they professed to dis–
card. As Nietzsche saw it, when one gives up the Christian faith one
thereby pulls from under one's feet the right to the Christian ethic. The
same must be said about Jewish faith or any other faith. The reason is that
each particular faith is a system, an intellectually connected and whole
view of things. If one breaks a major notion, such as the belief in God, out
of it, one shatters the whole. In Christianity, for example, ethics are uttered
as commands; their origin is transcendent and they are beyond all criticism,
all right to criticism. Their truth resides only if God is the truth. When
the English say they believe they know "intuitively" what is good and evil,
it is merely the result of the authority of the Christian value judgment and
an expression of the strength and depth of this authority. Here as every–
where "men have ceased to be Christian without having the courage to be
anything else."
Morali ty wi thout religion? Indeed not: "All purely moral demands
without their religious basis," he says, "must needs end in nihilism." What
is left? Intoxication. "Intoxication with music, with cruelty, with hero–
worship, or with hatred ... some sort of mysticism ... Art for Art's sake,
Truth for Truth's sake, as a narcotic against self-disgust; some kind of rou–
tine, any silly little fanaticism ..." But none of these drugs can have any
lasting effect.
Morality was not yet a problem for the English, in Nietzsche's view,
because of the persistence of the Christian religion in that society. All is
different today. Morality has become a problem precisely because the
divorce between religion and morality is now complete. All of the reli–
gious capital that has been the source of our public moralities has all been
used up. Thus, the phenomenon that Nietzsche observed among Victorian
intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century has become (or is quickly
