Moral Grammar in Nietzsche
In On the Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche writes critically of just how bound his own native German was to more widespread religious-moral beliefs, such as those which take a fixed moral subject as the beginning and end of all we can know, thereby leaving out one’s own doing as secondary to who one is. Nietzsche writes: “But there is no ‘being’ behind doing[…] – doing is everything” (GM I, 13) and thus suggests that the underlying grammar of the languages he himself knew well – all of which acknowledge if only implicitly an objective difference between subject and verb, doer and deed – were in fact wrong and had to be thought through from the ground up. One might yet take Nietzsche to task on this provocation.