Rather from the lap of Being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the ‘thing-in-itself’ — there must be their basis, and nowhere else.

Everything that we(as a species) have gotten to so far has had to be fought for. Energy has to be spent by Nietzsche in order to correct his predecessors’ wrong frame of thinking.

Just like his critique of Christianity: energy had to be spent into refuting centuries-old follies and I wonder what Nietzsche could have done with such energy in this particular case. Similar to the Newton-alchemy problem. But it could not be otherwise alas.

The way the best minds of mankind (the great philosophers pre-Nietzsche) thought about the origin of moral values is presented here. Nietzsche is the first to offer a ‘reasonable’ alternate theory without taking a metaphysical flight in doing so.

For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, …

I mean, even if you grant them the advantage of assuming that there are opposites -which there are not-, still these great philosophers fail miserably in that they only see the surface and -I might add- reason far too much by analogies. You can think of this in terms of Musk’s first principles approach, a physics method: Nietzsche is accusing his other mates (Kant & Schopenhauer primarily) that they merely caught ‘provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook’. They did not go deep enough, they just scratched the surface.

He also puts it like this in the same chapter:

What the philosophers are in the habit of doing: “adopting a popular prejudice and exaggerating it.”

But you would assume that these best minds of mankind hitherto were independent of the convictions lurking in an all-too-average mind of their century (take into account how limited such a mind was back then).

It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things — maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!

(note the bold here: Nietzsche does not claim truth. And also note what he says on this particular point elsewhere in the same book)

This is the main postulate of Nietzsche. He goes much deeper elsewhere in his work and I strongly recommend going deep into this.

I will not go into much detail about the following and so I hope I am not misunderstood.

I have frequently thought of a perverse idea which I’ve now coined as “the usefulness of Hitler” (Hitler as a representative because quite some people fall into this category. And there of course are a lot of varying degrees but I am here talking about the most intense case. I wrote a post on a much lower degree here) and in my mind queried Nietzsche on this point. I lay down in a rough overview the foulness of the first part of the last century and even go into some details on certain points during the second war and then I fast forward to 2020 and lay down for him a rough overview of the inexplicable beauty of 1001 things that we have and will shortly achieve and then ask him:

Notwithstanding your personal loathing of the Nationalsozialismus movement (he does indeed exactly predict that such a movement might very well stem in Germany) what do you have to say of the period from 1939 to 1944 about the human race as a whole?

And he just lightly smiles back.

You know, one of the hypothesized reasons as to why we -so far- have no knowledge of at least another advanced civilization in the observed universe is that of the barriers offered to them and one such filter is that the civilization might destroy itself in one way or another. I think ww2 was such an instance. If the wrong side had won it is likely that we literally would not have made it past this particular filter. Contrary to the belief of Bret Weinstein that Hitler can be thought of as useful to their people in a genes perspective (which I find a very reasonable statement), in the long run Hitler’s movement would be very detrimental to his own people as it would have infantilized them.

So the real perverse question is: Was the aberration of the first half of the last century not necessary for us to come at this wonderful point today (and I don’t just mean in the sense that ‘things can only follow one pattern and cannot be otherwise’)?

This is exactly what Nietzsche is hinting here and of course in much more detail elsewhere in this book and his other work.

And the danger today remains greater than ever and -exactly for that reason?- so is what might and will be possible!

As he ends the section (one has to wait for the advent of a new species of philosophers) he reiterates (Nietzsche loves to iterate stuff: an attempt to be better understood unlike what most people would think) what he already said in the first paragraph: Nietzsche is here sketching (the sketch is in great details but the problem is much more immense and hence it remains a ‘sketch’) the problem that posterity should work upon.