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First EssayGood and Evil, Good and BadNote
I`m taking the opportunity provided to me by this essay publicly and formally to state a desire which I have expressed up to now only in occasional conversations with scholars, namely, that some philosophical faculty might set up a series of award-winning academic essays in order to serve the advancement of studies into the history of morality. Perhaps this book will serve to provide a forceful push in precisely such a direction. Bearing in mind a possibility of this sort, let me suggest the following question—it merits the attention of philologists and historians as much as of professional philosophical scholars:
What indications does the scientific study of language, especially etymological research, provide for the history of the development of moral concepts?
On the other hand, it is, of course, just as necessary to attract the participation of physiologists and doctors in this problem (of the value of all methods of evaluating up to now). That task might be left to the faculties of philosophers, after they have completely succeeded in converting the relationship between philosophy, physiology, and medicine, originally so aloof, so mistrusting, into the most friendly and fruitful exchange. In fact, all the tables of value, all the "you should`s," which history or ethnology knows about, need, first and foremost, illumination and interpretation from physiology, rather than from psychology.
And all of them similarly await a critique from the point of view of medical science. The question "What is this or that table of values and `morality` worth?" will be set under the different perspectives. For we cannot analyze the question "Value for what?" too finely. Something, for example, that has an apparent value with respect to the longest possible capacity for survival of a race (or for an increase in its power to adapt to a certain climate or for the preservation of the greatest number) has nothing like the same value, if the issue is one of developing a stronger type. The well being of the majority and the well being of the fewest are opposing viewpoints for values. We will leave it to the naïveté of English biologists to take the first as the one of inherently higher value. All the sciences from now on have to advance the future work of the philosopher, understanding this task as solving the problem of value, determining the rank order of values.
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