Abstract
Beyond Good and Evil, especially the Fifth Book, is a key text to access the Nietzschean program of a "natural history of morals". In contrast to the modern project of grounding morality, which has characterized the supposed "Science of Morals" and was advocated by the majority of the German moral philosophers until then, Nietzsche proposes here, on one hand, as the first and immediate task that of collecting ethnographic and historic materials through a comparative analysis of many morals; on the other hand, this first task should be done as a preparation for a typology of Morals, one which would give us "a clear idea of the recurring and more common forms of these living crystallizations". This renewing of the Science of Morals is guided by the idea of translating man back again into nature, so that these various moral crystallizations, composed from such a heterogeneous and historically situated material, could be psychologically classified and interpreted as a sign-language of emotions. In this sense, historical and psychological-natural aspects converge around a central theme: the herd moral and them main instincts expressed by it. To this moral, Nietzsche opposes his problematic project of disciplining and cultivating a superior type of man.
Keywords
moral; science; typology; history; homo natura