ABSTRACT
What Nietzsche objects to in Comte is the idea that society is made up of the enlightened and those within their care. This, Nietzsche holds, is to make the fatal error of treating the masters as shepherds. The flock exists for the sake of the masters. Hence the kind of man that Zarathustra loves is the one who sees himself not as an end, but as a means to the overman and is ready to sacrifice himself for his sake. The men Zarathustra meets in the market place have not yet learned to see themselves in this perspective. They have no greater ambition than to conform to Zarathustra’s description of what Nietzsche calls the last man. The last man is the man who has provided himself with a system of education designed to minimise suffering. The morality of the flock or the herd, the slave morality, gives priority to the abolition of pain among all human beings without distinction of rank. Everyone should be motivated by pity for those who suffer. What is bad for one is bad for another and what is good for one is good for another. By the standard of the master morality, however, it is not the case that what is good for one is good for another. Universality, a criterion of morality according to both utilitarians and their Kantian critics, becomes irrelevant once the master morality is distinguished from the morality of the slave. It is only those who pity that are pitied by the masters. For their part, the masters consider great suffering to be a welcome discipline. It is suffering that fosters strength of the right sort, the sort that rates higher on their table of values than what are pre-eminent virtues for the slaves: benevolence, unselfishness, modesty, moderation, friendliness, industriousness, compassion and humility.4 The latter virtues are the virtues of the creature. The morality of the master is the morality of the creator. The Creator is dead. Long live the creator of values, of values beyond good and evil.
