He argued that Nietzsche’s vision of self-overcoming would lead inexorably into an immoral self-abandonment—an abnegation both of the self and of the traditional anchors that bound the individual to eternal truths. Whereas Royce perceived self-overcoming to be a strengthening of the self and one’s moral resolve in an uncertain universe, Babbitt interpreted it to be a weakening of the self by succumbing to the whirl of modern lawlessness in the realm of ethics and aesthetics.
