The fifth in a sporadic series.  Previously one, two, three and four.

The Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche’s fully developed analysis (and attack) on the basis of modern Western morality. He posits there are two sources of morality: from the aristocratic, warrior source or from the conquered – thus master or slave morality. Historically, this is plausible – the winners impose a morality that justifies their victory, and the losers are either bound to that, or they develop an alternative (which is not a trivial task). However, Nietzsche would dig deeper, looking to a completely natural world of man without civilization – but he does so not realizing the futility of that quest.

The natural world has no morality. Nietzsche speaks to the birds of prey and the lambs, but we must stop right there. For neither the bird, nor the lamb, has any sense of morality – not toward themselves or to the other. As soon as you introduce the word, the concept of, morality – you have already left the natural world and entered the world of man as a social – and thinking (and eventually civil) – creature. This will hinder Nietzsche, for he imputes emotion (joy in inflicting suffering) to the predator, and he attempts to trace that from nature to modern man (who must suppress this to be civilized). But there is no joy or suffering in the animal world – all words of humans to that effect are nothing but human thoughts, imaginings, speculations – anthropomorphism (ironically a human, all too human thing); as the Olympian gods were mortal foible in immortal guise, so too is the assignment of human attributes and emotions to natural phenomenon. Nature doesn’t judge, nature doesn’t emote, nature simply is. And this is particularly laid bare when Nietzsche starts (The Second Essay) with this:

The breeding of an animal that can promise—is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is not this the very problem of man? The fact that this problem has been to a great extent solved, must appear all the more phenomenal to one who can estimate at its full value that force of forgetfulness which works in opposition to it.

The breeding, evolution, that leads to any animal is not an act of a sentient Nature. Certainly we can talk of breeding of domesticated animals, so done by the will of the human mind, but there is no equivalent for wild animals. But, the idea of a Designer of nature, Nietzsche has abandoned that (even if he slyly relies on it). We could of course take this as poetic interpretation, but that isn’t his strand of thought. He is laying here a rhetorical foundation, and since the base of it is sand, the whole edifice is at risk. He is on the brink of indulging in the teleological error.

I will elide his grossly erroneous ethnological views, which may not have been entirely hideous in his time, but have no value to add to our understanding today. Sadly, it gets worse for the case he would make.

The feeling of “ought,” of personal obligation (to take up again the train of our inquiry), has had, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and most original personal relationship that there is, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower: here it was that individual confronted individual, and that individual matched himself against individual. There has not yet been found a grade of civilisation so low, as not to manifest some trace of this relationship. Making prices, assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging—all this preoccupied the primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted thinking itself: it was here that was trained the oldest form of sagacity, it was here in this sphere that we can perhaps trace the first commencement of man’s pride, of his feeling of superiority over other animals.

It is a wonder that Nietzsche hasn’t been raised up as a high priest of anarcho-capitalism – the proto-Mises. What is even more wondrous is how Nietzsche disdains the utilitarian English and yet embraces as the foundation of all human morality, the market. Think too of how this relates to what he said earlier, that man is an animal that can promise; and that what is owed, by whom and to whom, are of course based on the ability to give and receive a promise and to make good on that.

So, what happens when is a promise is not made good. There is guilt, or as Nietzsche goes to some length in elaboration – bad conscience. This bad conscience is not part of the natural man, it has been introduced and enforced, rather than being a consequence of this ability to promise and then fail to act in accordance with that promise. Nietzsche subsequently stakes out a strange middle ground between Hobbes and Rousseau.

I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound to contract under the stress of the most radical change which he has ever experienced—that change, when he found himself finally imprisoned within the pale of society and of peace.

Here, he agrees with Hobbes that the state of nature constitutes the war of all against all, and for Nietzsche – this is the natural world in which mankind arose. Whereas Hobbes says man withdraws from this by submitting to his Sovereign (who establishes the King’s peace), Nietzsche says it is that peace that debilitates the noble will to power being exercised in that state of mutual aggression. And in accordance with Rousseau he blames society as an agent of corruption, not as part of man’s essential nature. He of course disagrees with Rousseau about man’s nature being peaceful (and cow like as Rousseau would have it).

So, as stated at the outset, morality for Nietzsche comes from either an aristocratic source, the master morality, or from the common (the subjugated) and that would be slave morality. What a splendid dualism, all the more remarkable for one who would rebuke the dialectics of Hegel. Even the master morality is a system of constraint on the instincts of those constituting the aristocratic class (or race as he puts it). The ethnographics he employs in discussing the aristocrats is bunk, but the concept isn’t completely repudiated by that defect. He also makes reference to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and their cultures being based on aristocratic bias. You can recast it in modern terms – the winners make the rules, and that isn’t bogged down by the ‘racial’ bunk. And the master morality expresses good as the things that define aristocrats [and yes, you certainly can see the circularity there as well as the hint of solipsism]; and bad as the common (free people) or lower (slaves); in essence the master morality glorifies strength and the slave morality weakness – as reflects their relative positions. So, let us now turn to slave morality, since it is the dominant morality in the West, in Nietzsche’s time and now.

Slave morality is rooted in resentment, which exists abundantly in the people ruled over by the aristocrats. It defines good as arising from the attributes of those at the bottom, for Nietzsche this is most prominently weakness. So far, both classes look at themselves as the exemplars of what it is to be good. Slave morality has a twist on the contra to good, for it isn’t bad, it is evil. The oppressors aren’t merely bad (because they lack what it is to be good), they are evil. And this does deserve an extended quote:

Yet the priests are, as is notorious, the worst enemies—why? Because they are the weakest. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into a monstrous and sinister shape, a shape which is most crafty and most poisonous. The really great haters in the history of the world have always been priests, who are also the cleverest haters—in comparison with the cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness is practically negligible. Human history would be too fatuous for anything were it not for the cleverness imported into it by the weak—take at once the most important instance. All the world’s efforts against the “aristocrats,” the “mighty,” the “masters,” the “holders of power,” are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, “the wretched are alone the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation—but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity the evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!” We know who it was who reaped the heritage of this Jewish transvaluation. In the context of the monstrous and inordinately fateful initiative which the Jews have exhibited in connection with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I remember the passage which came to my pen on another occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 195)—that it was, in fact, with the Jews that the revolt of the slaves begins in the sphere of morals; that revolt which has behind it a history of two millennia, and which at the present day has only moved out of our sight, because it—has achieved victory.

This is where it gets tricky really understanding Nietzsche with respect to Jews, for he abhorred the morality they had created and propagated – though the greater extent of that propagation was via Christianity and not Judaism. But it really is hard to call him an antisemite because he admired the accomplishment, and he detested every antisemite he knew. The other important character here is in the slave morality, the world is unjust or corrupt – as it is ruled by the evil, and redress of that comes not in this life, but in the afterlife (God’s judgment). This latter part is more specifically Christian, but it is important for how it negates the natural world and elevates an alternate imagined future.  Revolutionaries will throw themselves into that same construct with all the devotion of any priest.

This was a difficult work for me to digest, because it was filled with not just hard to answer questions – which are his trademark; it sadly was packed with second-rate thinking, such as the worship of the blond brute – the Teuton (who in fact didn’t overthrow Rome, but was defeated first at Aquae Sextiae [modern Aix-en-Provence] and finally at Vercellae and those who survived were enslaved), the notion of an aristocratic race (as opposed to a class under a sovereign in a hierarchical society) and the utter failure to grasp that even early man was a social being and neither truly predator nor prey. All this from a man criticizing others for not considering history – fine, then do not make use of really bad history, history that is more mythology than hard, factual account. This may be an example of what would have happened had he actually written his transvaluation of all the values, where for all his genius there was still that beyond his grasp.

The most significant aspect for me is the flaw in the dialectic at the heart of the genealogy – that all morality must be either master or slave. For that places morality as nothing but the footstool of coercion – the raw exercise of power (from either the perspective of the one using power or the one abused by it). Nietzsche even hints at this when he speaks of the interaction of equals (within the aristocratic layer) – that there isn’t purely power being employed, but cooperation and reciprocation. Sadly that’s as close as he ever gets to thinking about that here. The other thing I’ll note – in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra is never master – seeking dominion over others, nor slave – accepting authority binding him. So even if Nietzsche omits that kind of independence here, he builds it into what he considered his best work.