Herrenmoral
Herrenmoral
(German) A concept popularly used as a blanket term for any ruthless, non-Chnstian type of morality justly and unjustly linked with the ethical theories of Friedrich Nietzsche (q.v.) as laid down by him especially in the works of his last productive period fraught as it was with iconoclast vehemence against all plebeian ideals and a passionate desire to establish a new and more virile aristocratic morality, and debated by many writers, such as Kaftan, Kronenberg, Staudinger, and Hilbert. Such ideas as will to power, the conception of the superman, the apodictic primacy of those who with strong mind and unhindered by conventional interpretations of good and evil, yet with lordly lassitude, are born to leadership, have contributed to this picture of the morality of the masters (Herren) whom Nietzsche envisaged as bringing about the revaluation of all values and realizing the higher European culture upon the ruins of the fear-motivated, passion-shunning, narrowly moral world of his day. — K.F.L.