Our Virtues

This paper offers a reading of the seventh chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, and in particular, a solution to its puzzle.Nietzsche titled that chapter “Our Virtues,” and this immediately generates a puzzle because the opening words of the chapter comprise the question, “Our virtues?” The puzzle, then, is that there might not be any subject matter for this chapter—unlike, say, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” but possibly more like “What Is Noble”—leaving us to wonder what to do with all those words if they are not about anything. There is a familiar way of handling Nietzsche’s questions, however: to take the answer as obvious. This approach offers a straightforward assignment of content to the text: we have virtues, Nietzsche can tell us what they are, and the reason for bothering to ask about them was to spice things up by drawing the reader in, or to draw the reader in by spicing things up. And there are other rhetorical strategies to which we could assimilate Nietzsche’s question, while still giving an easy affirmative answer. Posing a question could be a way for an epistemically privileged narrator to call the reader’s unnoticed ignorance to her attention. Or posing a question could be a small temporal inconsistency, in which one goes back to before a nowcompleted inquiry has begun, so that one can retrace one’s steps. On occasion, however, we should take Nietzsche’s questions seriously as such. Nietzsche poses questions not only to indicate that the answer is obvious, or to call