Mary Windham

Throughout his writings Nietzsche called himself an immoralist and professed to launch an exhaustive campaign against morality. Despite his emphatic and consistent insistence that his immoralism should be interpreted as a rejection of all morality, most scholars deny that Nietzsche unqualifiably rejected morality. Most insist that Nietzsche only attacked one "type" of morality, and many strategies are adopted by those wishing to minimize the force of Nietzsche's immoralism. ;I offer a careful genetic study of Nietzsche's critique of morality, attending carefully to the middle aphoristic works of Human, All-Too-Human and Daybreak, and to Nietzsche's late work, On the Genealogy of Morals, in order to determine the scope and the bases of Nietzsche's immoralism. This examination shows that Nietzsche consistently rejected morality in a broader way than most commentators realize, though the bases for his attack evolved and the intensity of that attack increased. ;I argue for a comprehensive reading of Nietzsche's immoralism, showing that Nietzsche rejected far more than Christianity or Kantianism. Adhering to Nietzsche's advice not to "confuse the immoralist with the preacher of morals" makes it possible to understand Nietzsche's claim that he was the first immoralist. Interpretations which depict Nietzsche as a virtue-ethicist or as an ethicist of character in the usual senses cannot explain why Hume or Aristotle would not have held the title Nietzsche claimed for himself. ;My motivations for conducting this interpretive project are several. The subject of Nietzsche's immoralism remains a problematic one in the literature, and sustained examinations of it are not to be found. More importantly, a complete investigation of Nietzsche's immoralism serves as a valuable preliminary to exploring alternatives to traditional moral theory. Though Nietzsche was no feminist, he first presented compelling feminist challenges to philosophical assumptions that undergird standard theory; it is the task of feminist philosophers today to complete the project that Nietzsche could only initiate. The final chapter of this thesis defends my claim that Nietzsche's rejection of morality does not entail a rejection of all ethics, and suggests how we might begin to construct Nietzsche's positive ethical views