Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditations6But let us leave this weakness behind; and let us turn to a muchcelebrated strength of modern man with the question, a painful oneto be sure, as to whether on account of his well-known historical'objectivity' he has a right to call himself strong, that is to say just, andjust in a higher degree than men of other ages. Is it true that thisobjectivity originates in an enhanced need and demand for justice?Or is it an effect of quite different causes and only appears tooriginate in a desire for justice? Does it perhaps seduce one to aharmful, because all too flattering, prejudice as to the virtues ofmodern man? Socrates considered that to delude oneself that onepossesses a virtue one does not possess is an illness bordering onmadness: and such a delusion is certainly more dangerous than theopposite illusion of being the viaim of a fault or a vice. For in the lattercase it is at any rate possible one will become better; the former delusion,however, makes a man or an age daily worse - which in thepresent instance means more unjust.In truth, no one has a greater claim t our veneration than he whopossesses the drive to and strength for justice. For the highest andrarest virtues are united and concealed in justice as in an unfathomableocean that receives streams and rivers from all sides and takesthem into itself. The hand of the just man who is empowered tojudge no longer trembles when it holds the scales; he sets weightupon weight with inexorable disregard of himself, his eye isunclouded as it sees the scales rise and fall, and his voice is neitherharsh nor tearful when he pronounces the verdict. If he were a colddemon of knowledge, he would spread about him the icyatmosphere of a dreadful suprahuman majesty which we wouldhave to fear, not revere: but that he is a human being and yet nonethelesstries to ascend from indulgent doubt to stern certainty, fromtolerant mildness to the imperative 'you must', from the rare virtueof magnanimity to the rarest of all virtues, justice; that he resemblesthat demon but is from the start only a poor human being; andabove all that he has every moment to atone for his humanity and istragically consumed by an impossible virtue - all this sets him on asolitary height as the most venerable exemplar of the species man; fo rhe desires truth, not as cold, ineffectual knowledge, but as a regulatingand punishing judge; truth, not as the egoistic possession of theindividual, but as the sacred right to overturn all the boundarystonesof egoistic possessions; in a word, truth as the LastJudgment and not, for instance, as the prey joyfully seized by theindividual huntsman. Only insofar as the truthful man possesses the