"Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities"
About this Quote
Nietzsche is doing what he does best: pulling the moral rug out from under the reader, then asking why you were standing on it so confidently in the first place. The provocation here is not just that moral judgments are questionable, but that they are category errors. “True” and “false” belong to claims about the world; “for or against life” is a posture, a temperament, a physiological and cultural orientation masquerading as knowledge.
The key move is the word “symptoms.” Nietzsche treats ethics less like philosophy and more like diagnosis. A moral verdict becomes evidence of the speaker’s condition: their strength or fatigue, their fear of chaos, their need to domesticate desire, their resentment toward whoever seems to be thriving. He’s telling you to stop debating morality as if it were mathematics and start reading it like a medical chart or a political tell. Who benefits from this judgment? What kind of person needs it to be true?
Calling such judgments “stupidities” is classic Nietzschean rhetoric: not polite refutation, but contempt for the wrong kind of seriousness. It’s also strategic. By insulting the form, he forces the reader to confront how often “values” arrive with the pomp of objectivity, as if God, Nature, or Reason signed off on them.
Context matters: Nietzsche is writing against the long European project of Christian-moral metaphysics, where life is weighed, condemned, redeemed. His subtext is an inversion: don’t ask whether a value is true; ask whether it intensifies life or anesthetizes it. Values aren’t verdicts from on high. They’re fingerprints.
The key move is the word “symptoms.” Nietzsche treats ethics less like philosophy and more like diagnosis. A moral verdict becomes evidence of the speaker’s condition: their strength or fatigue, their fear of chaos, their need to domesticate desire, their resentment toward whoever seems to be thriving. He’s telling you to stop debating morality as if it were mathematics and start reading it like a medical chart or a political tell. Who benefits from this judgment? What kind of person needs it to be true?
Calling such judgments “stupidities” is classic Nietzschean rhetoric: not polite refutation, but contempt for the wrong kind of seriousness. It’s also strategic. By insulting the form, he forces the reader to confront how often “values” arrive with the pomp of objectivity, as if God, Nature, or Reason signed off on them.
Context matters: Nietzsche is writing against the long European project of Christian-moral metaphysics, where life is weighed, condemned, redeemed. His subtext is an inversion: don’t ask whether a value is true; ask whether it intensifies life or anesthetizes it. Values aren’t verdicts from on high. They’re fingerprints.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Friedrich
Add to List
