Abstract
What is Nietzsche's message in the seventh chapter of Beyond Good and Evil: 'our virtues'? First an analysis of the structure of the chapter (which itself seems to be the central chapter of the second half of the whole book) is presented. From that analysis sections 214 and 227 appear to be of special importance. An analysis of mainly these two sections suggests that in this chapter the reader is being introduced into a typical Nietzschean condition: the critical questioning of morality is being made self-referential: the questioner makes his own questioning questionable. What Nietzsche did in section 1 of the first chapter with regard to philosophy and the will to truth (the traditional will to truth one as well as 'our' own), is now, in the second half of the book repeated with regard to 'honesty' or 'probity' [Redlichkeit] and so applied to morality (again: traditional, as well 'our' moral virtue). What in the beginning looks like being a presentation of the free spirit's moral virtue, turns out to be a 'self-liquidation' of morality. The interpretation is elaborated and confirmed by the clarifying light it sheds on the allegedly anti-feminist texts in the last part of the chapter.
Keywords
virtue; morality; honesty; probity