Part 7 — Our Virtues

Part 7 opens with a careful distinction: we moderns probably have virtues, but they are not the simple, massive, publicly legible virtues of previous centuries. The European of 1886 is complex, multiple, constituted by conflicting historical inheritances — classical, Christian, democratic, scientific — in ways that make simple virtue almost impossible. Section 214 proposes that the characteristic virtues of the contemporary educated man are actually forms of self-contradiction: we value honesty but practice evasion; we value independence but submit to consensus; we value courage but are terrified of social disapproval.

Section 220 on pity is the part's most argued point. Pity, Nietzsche claims, is not a virtue. It is a weakness — a form of suffering that adds to the sum of suffering in the world rather than reducing it. The man who is mastered by pity suffers along with the sufferer, and then suffers at his own suffering, and accomplishes nothing toward the actual removal of the original cause. Nietzsche is not arguing for indifference; he is arguing that pity as a systematic value — the kind that becomes a moral demand — is the morality of the herd, the insistence that the strong must not be strong because the weak find it painful.

The closing section on woman (§231–239) has generated more controversy than almost any other passage in Nietzsche. Read in context, the argument is not straightforwardly misogynist — Nietzsche is suspicious of the "emancipation" movement not because he thinks women inferior but because he thinks it is asking women to become worse versions of men. The women he admires are those who are most fully themselves, not those who have adopted the vocabulary and ambitions of the scholarly male. Whether this is a sophisticated position or a sophisticated rationalization of a bias remains one of the more genuinely open questions in Nietzsche scholarship.