I am working away at a book on Nietzsche, and was about to write a brief synopsis of his revaluation of all values project. He thinks there are genuine values, I think, but they are rooted in health, or the perspective of life, and not in any transcendent moral truths. Basically, to be healthy, you need to cultivate all the forces at work in your psychology (or as many as you can), turning your garden into a teeming jungle, with a result that is profound, complex, powerful, and noble. It may be that no two individuals will turn out alike — one may become Goethe, another Napoleon, etc.

Then I wanted to go on to say “But this is no Disneyland jungle cruise. You may turn out to be a moral monster.” I also have in the back of my mind McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (since I’m reading it), in which there is a character named the judge who is one cruel and cool-headed son of a bitch. He is very learned, speaks eloquently, and thinks nothing of scalping a child. McCarthy makes him out to be like another species — hairless, extraordinarily strong, taller than everyone else, and set apart from everyone else. (Near the end he’s traveling around with a hairy imbecile, hunting another character down — so it reminds me of the ape and the superman chasing down the human, who is caught in the middle.)

So I looked through Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, looking for a telltale quote that made it clear that Nietzsche means terror. (Isn’t there something about a race of supermen returning from war, raping, and pillaging as if from a lark?) But I couldn’t find one. All I could find were quotes attesting to the fact that he is no liberal, let alone a utilitarian, since he thinks truly terrible and terrifying experiences might forge a great individual. But that’s different from saying thatthe great individual would himself be terrible and terrifying.

I’m probably missing some obvious passages, but thought I’d toss this question out to see what anybody thinks: is it obvious that a Nzean superman might well be a moral monster (like the judge)?