Key Arguments

• He notes their cleverness in fingers but inability to form fists, symbolizing lack of strength and resolve.
• Defines their virtue as what makes one modest and tame—domestication as moral program.
• They boast of a 'chair in the middle,' avoiding extremes of danger and gross contentment.
• Their smirk signals complacent centrism.

Source Quotes

This however is : even though it be called ‘virtue.’– And if they should once speak roughly, these small people, hear in it only their hoarseness– for any draught will make them hoarse. Clever they are: their virtues have clever fingers. But they are lacking fists: their fingers know not how to fold themselves into fists. Virtue for them is whatever makes one modest and tame: with that they have made the wolf into a dog and the human being itself into the human’s best domestic animal.

But they are lacking fists: their fingers know not how to fold themselves into fists. Virtue for them is whatever makes one modest and tame: with that they have made the wolf into a dog and the human being itself into the human’s best domestic animal. ‘We have set down our chair in the ’— that is what their smirking says to me— ‘And equally far from dying swordsmen and contented sows.’

Virtue for them is whatever makes one modest and tame: with that they have made the wolf into a dog and the human being itself into the human’s best domestic animal. ‘We have set down our chair in the ’— that is what their smirking says to me— ‘And equally far from dying swordsmen and contented sows.’ This, however, is–

Key Concepts

• Clever they are: their virtues have clever fingers. But they are lacking fists: their fingers know not how to fold themselves into fists.
• Virtue for them is whatever makes one modest and tame: with that they have made the wolf into a dog and the human being itself into the human’s best domestic animal.
• ‘We have set down our chair in the ’— that is what their smirking says to me— ‘And equally far from dying swordsmen and contented sows.’

Context

Culmination of the critique: virtue-as-domestication and middle-ism as the creed of small people.

Perspectives

Nietzsche

Attack on bourgeois middle morality: cleverness without force; domestication of instincts; golden mean as decadence.

Zarathustra

Their fingers are deft, their hands cannot clench; they choose the lukewarm middle and call it virtue.