In this fragment from The Will to Power,
Nietzsche reiterates that virtue must
always come from within one, not from an
objective standard. Question: How is this
view different from the recognition that
virtue must always be applied in
individual concrete cases? How radical is
this view of Nietzsche's? "Virtues are as
dangerous as vices insofar as one lets
them rule over one as authorities and
laws from without and does not first
produce them out of oneself, as one
should do, as one's own most personal
self-defense and necessity, as conditions
of precisely our own existence and
growth, which we recognize and
acknowledge independently of whether
other men grow with us under similar or
different conditions. This law of the
dangerousness of impersonally understood,
objective virtue applies also to modesty:
many of the choicest spirits perish
through it. The morality of modesty is
the worst form of softening for those
souls for which it makes sense that they
should become hard in time.
