Nietzsche's reversal of values does not dispense with evaluation
Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.
The closest explicit parallel is Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (first published in German in 1887), First Essay §11: what one morality condemns is the admired person of its rival. Sections 7 and 10 describe the displacement of aristocratic valuations by an opposing morality born of resentment. Nietzsche is describing antagonistic systems, not simply announcing that anything becomes right when its century changes. The inspected witness is Horace B. Samuel's English translation, in Oscar Levy's Complete Works, vol. VIII, T. N. Foulis, 1913. This later witness supplies a comparison, not evidence of Chesterton's reading before Orthodoxy appeared in 1908.
More significantly, Nietzsche's Preface §3 asks whether moral judgments promote or obstruct human flourishing; §6 asks whether accepted goodness might diminish humanity's future possibilities. He therefore does evaluate competing moralities. His chosen grounds are themselves contestable, but he has not relinquished the activity of judging. See the Preface, §§3 and 6.
Chesterton's Jones analogy establishes that surpassing requires a direction of comparison. It does not establish that the direction must be the one acknowledged by both competitors. One can distinguish a society's own standard from the standard used to assess it, or ask whether its standard deserves revision. The force of the paragraph consequently depends on a distinction: a report that standards have changed is compatible with judging those changes; abandoning every basis of comparison would make the language of improvement empty. Chesterton incisively challenges the latter position, but Nietzsche's genealogy alone does not commit him to it.
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