My own simple answer to this complex question is - No! While I think the Genealogy is undoubtedly a very great work I see no justification for privileging it so massively among Nietzsche's works. Of course, stylistically, it appears to have a connecting, dialectically sustained narrative and a unity of sorts and this partly explains its appeal for many academics. But even a fairly casual reading informs us that this is actually a highly fragmented, ambivalent and deceptive text, in which argument and rhetoric are not always easily distinguished.
For example, many of the most passionate and rhetorical claims of the Genealogy (regarding the "masters", "higher types", and "decadents") are clearly undermined or explicitly contradicted in BGE, the very work that Nietzsche characterises the Genealogy as "supplementing" and "clarifying"; to say nothing of the depiction of Zarathustra in TSZ or, for instance, the characterisation of the Jews and "decadence" in A.24.
Yet it must be said that the Genealogy is, as Michael Tanner remarked "a work of extreme seriousness". Which only begs the question, why then are so many commentaries on it so ultimately harmless and even reassuring? The short answer to that, I think, is that Nietzsche has been assimilated by sizeable chunks of academia who seek (implicitly or otherwise) to render him either culturally irrelevant or even conducive to the dominant lies of our age (do I need to state them?). If this was really the ultimate import of Nietzsche's work, it's hard to see why he shouldn't be ignored or simply left to the antiquarians.
On the contrary, for me Nietzsche's importance and relevance (alongside, admittedly, his significant limitations) grows ever more visible the deeper we collectively advance towards the world of the "Last Man"; a trajectory which seems as inevitable as it is nauseous.
I find that the Twilight of the Idols is quoted more often than the text is given credit for its importance.
Perhaps the Genealogy is privileged because it is the most focused work. But in that case, a compilation of Nietzsche's aphorisms on one topic could produce a reading course of similar focus.
This is a tough question. A year ago, I would have easily said that Twilight of the Idols is my favorite work. I thought that it included the core of his philosophy and the vast majority of his insights.
Now, I'm not so sure I could pick a particular work. I'd say, however, that my favorite things to read in Nietzsche are his psychological insights in his mid-to-late works (several of which appear in Daybreak e.g. 109, Genealogy e.g. I: 13, Twilight e.g. "The Four Great Errors" and yet also those many scattered heavily throughout all his works).
Reading Daybreak 542, for me, throws some light on some of the "weaker" aspects of the later works. The tendency to proclaim, to announce, certain things of apparently supreme importance, without sufficient justification. But it's a vexed question as to whether this tendency was the "real" Nietzsche, a cry to be heard, or a self-willed rhetorical ploy?
Twilight is a wonderful work, but there's something uniquely both profound and calm about Daybreak that i'm increasingly drawn to. Not that i'm averse to the impassioned, forceful, partial side of Nietzsche. On the contrary, without it i'd have little abiding interest in him. The problem is, sometimes he attacks the wrong targets. I agree that his psychological insight is astonishing and perhaps ultimately his chief intellectual merit.
In my opinion GS is his best work, not the least for its literary qualities. But further, one can find therein most of the major themes that occuiped N in his later philosophical stage. It's a work of a transitory nature: on the one hand he retains the more "scientific" and direct style of HH and DB which I love so much, but on the other starts experimenting with various forms of playfulnes, which could be both aggravating and inspiring.
I think GS part IV is pivotal in Nietzsche's works. There's a later letter to Gast (i'm quoting from memory) which says:"I have presented such terrible images to knowledge that any 'Epicurean' outlook is now impossible, only 'Dionysian' is sufficient". This recognition and decision seems to be most visible in GS.
The subsequent break with Lou no doubt also played its part, but post GS Nietzsche begins to lose some of his "impartiality" and "neutrality" regarding existence. It's this "experimenting with various forms of playfulness" question that seems so impenetrable; to me, at least. e.g. the claims subsequently made for the "will to power", the subsequent emphasis on "decadence", the increased idealisation of the "noble" man etc.
Was Nietzsche, in fact, well aware of what he was doing in the later works, well aware that he was, at times, making the boldest claims on the flimsiest of evidence, or, did he really think he had "legitimate" epistemic grounds for some of these claims?
I believe that he was aware that the time for "neutrality" is up and that one should move towards taking a stance. One major clue for this, I believe, comes at the end of GS when he says, in the penultimate section (GS 383), that "the tragedy begins". But what does that mean? It connects, I think, with the very first section of GS (and thus closes a circle, in a way) where N connects tragedy with seriousness and meaningfulness, goals and directions. And this is exactly where his "hand moves": towards a concrete valuation, namely, the affirmation of life and the denigration of the slavish psychology/values. Sounds reasonable?
I think Nietzsche, the flesh and blood historical individual, did increasingly (but not always) "take a stand" in the later works; the question I ask myself is: did he do this while knowing that it lacked adequate dialectical/epistemic justification (i.e. is part of it simply propaganda on behalf of his contingent visceral disposition?); or, did he really believe that he had discovered intellectually respectable grounds?
As he remarks in WP331: "the standpoint of desirability, of unauthorised playing-the-judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection".
Hi David, You ask whether N knowingly took a stance on issues without epistemic justification and was aware that these were just his visceral responses. This is one of the major question in N studies, I think, namely, to what extent did N adhere to what he took to be objective values, that is, values which he thought had a claim on everyone (or ought to have a claim on everyone).
I am inclined to say, and the very interesting quote you gave from WP is written in this spirit (though I am always a bit sceptical when it comes to WP), namely, that N was aware that to live is to judge and evaluate, even if you don't have and probably could never have the proper and ultimate justification for for your judgment. And he was aware that his judgments are his personal judgments (he says this somewhere: my judgment is *my* judgment).
So the problem is: how can one at one and the same time both condemn X, argue agasint X, try with all your might to dissuade people from X, while knowing that it is just your personal opinion? The answer is a Humean one, I reckon: we must judge as we must breathe and feel, and so in order to do that we have to supress what conscious reflection tells us. That is one of the greatest contradictions of our form of life. N reaches a similar conclusion in HH 32 where he says:
"We are from the the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings *and can recognize this*: this is one of the greatest and irresolvable discords of existence".
This is basically, as I see it, another manifestation of the age old tension between theory and practice.
First of all, I share your reluctance to grant the entries found in the book 'The Will To Power' the same status as the published work.
If I understand you, your suggesting that Nietzsche (the flesh and blood man) bears witness to his own insight that:
"most of a philosopher's conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into certain channels by his instincts" (BGE.3)
And that "Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any doubt. . . To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is te question; that is the experiment" (GS.110).
And two hundred years earlier we find Pascal saying: "All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling. . . Reason is available but can be bent in any direction. And so there is no rule" (Pensees 530).
I would agree with this thesis generally and I would also agree that it's increasingly noticeable in the later works of Nietzsche himself. Yet because he was a deeply divided man, ruthlessly curious and self-probing, his "lies" and errors couldn't reign supreme as they do in most of us most of the time. However much "propaganda" he engages in, his "intellectual conscience" always makes an appearance somewhere, allowing the attentive reader to get a glimpse of Nietzsche's "wounds", his visceral and ideological conditions of existence.
I think Nietzsche does, at times, consciously (as well as unconsciously) tell lies, yet he remains, for me, the most honest of thinkers in spite of this.
The difficulty is in trying to understand how Nietzsche wished to be read? After all , he wasn't writing down his thoughts in a diary, he was offering these texts for public consumption. Ive already alluded to the relevance, in my view, of Daybreak 542, and the year in year out silence that his books enjoyed must have wounded him deeply, as well as increasing his sense of impotency.
It's separating the "bombastic, polemical" aspect from the rest that is problematic at times. A prime example would be his treatment of "decadence" in A.24. This contrasts sharply with how this subject is typically treated in GM.
Thus related to my previous post, was Nietzsche therefore "correcting" the dominant analysis of "decadence" in GM, or, as I tend to believe, did he know perfectly well (as a thinker), while writing GM, that he was not always being intellectually honest with the reader.
I want to change tack now and focus on some of the central terms (and conceptual errors) that often dominate whenever the Genealogy is discussed.
Some of the resulting incoherence and confusion can be justly attributed to Nietzsche himself. It's often impossible to determine with any certainty whether Nietzsche is himself simply confused (or self-deceived), or whether he is being deliberately misleading or dishonest. This is a crucial question for anyone seriously concerned with Nietzsche, but it's a question i'll leave for another occasion. Part of the problem is that Nietzsche is great in isolation, in miniature, but is rarely interested in, or capable of, system-building.
In addition, Nietzsche is a thinker with considerable emotional investment in many of the subjects he is most concerned with. What this means is that he can't always be trusted. He is honest enough to admit this, but it remains true nevertheless. I see no contradiction in admitting this and yet still recognising him as one of the most remarkably honest of all thinkers.
On the other hand, some of the trivial and distracting academic exegesis of this text is, I think, quite deliberate, or at least symptomatic of a certain kind of person. Most contemporary academics are basically in agreement with so-called "progressive" values, and differ only in the methods they endorse in order to bring about, or to speed up, the apparent movement of history towards this glorious telos. It is simply naive to expect Nietzsche to get a sympathetic and honest reading from such advocates.
I will now proceed to clarify, in the broadest terms, some of the central terms at the heart of the Genealogy.
(a) Nietzsche's dishonesty regarding ressentiment and "bad conscience".
In the second essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche informs us that the birth of "bad conscience" was the inevitable result of mankind leaving behind its nomadic past and finding itself locked in a "society". "Bad conscience", at its root, is instinctual and physiological inhibition.
"Half-humans", who were previously "happily adapted to a life of wilderness, war , nomadism and adventure" were henceforth "in a single stroke" caged within the walls of culture. Instincts previously discharging themselves in external acts are now frequently denied that outlet and become increasingly internalised, directed back within the self or forced to seek compensatory satisfactions (GM. II.16).
Unfortunately, Nietzsche also tells us that the conquering hordes who created the "state" were themselves free of "bad conscience" (GM.II.17).
Now this statement is carelessly and dangerously ambiguous. Either Nietzsche means that (a) the barbarian founders of the "state" were not the first to experience "bad conscience", they did not themselves succumb to "bad conscience" while the "state" was being violently established, or, he means that (b) long after the "state" was established and dominance was complete, the conquering horde continued to be free from "bad conscience"? (i.e. physiological inhibition)
In the first case, the conquering barbarians would be free from "bad conscience" simply because they had not yet completed their task of comprehensively subjugating their opponents. The violence would still be on-going and so the wild and aggressive instincts of the dominant horde could continue without restraint. In the second case, the conquering barbarians would remain free from "bad conscience" long after their victory and long after the "state" had been established.
The question is thus: once the "state" has been established and victory is complete, are only the conquered population subject to "bad conscience", or does "bad conscience" now apply, albeit to a lesser degree, to both the conquerors and the conquered alike?
This is an important question because so much of Nietzsche's language and tone implies that the "masters" remain, long after the establishment of the "state", free from "bad conscience" themselves. If this is true, then it marks a very clear typological demarcation, obviously, between any "master" and "slave" moralities.
I don't think this is true, and more importantly, I think Nietzsche knows that it isn't true. I will now introduce two key passages to support this claim. Keep in mind that the concept at issue here, "bad conscience", is, first and foremost, physiological inhibition.
(i) In order for any "state" to survive, certain forms of order, rules, decision-making and unity of purpose within the ruling caste itself need to be agreed and enforced, otherwise the "state" would simply descend into violent and arbitrary chaos and cease to be a "state" at all.
In the first essay Nietzsche says "We would be the last to deny that anyone who met these 'good men' only as enemies would know them only as 'evil' enemies".
He continues that "these same men, who are inter paras so strictly restrained by custom, respect, usage, gratitude, even more by circumspection and jealousy, and who, in their relations with one another prove so inventive in matters of consideration, self-control, tenderness, fidelity, pride, and friendship - these same men behave towards the outside world . . . in a manner not much better than predators on the rampage". (GM.I.11).
Clearly, if these "masters" are "strictly restrained", "circumspect" and practise "self-control", then they are, ipso facto, subject to "bad conscience". The fact that they indulge in predatory violence with those outside their group doesn't alter the fact that they are otherwise subject to physiological inhibition, and thus "bad conscience".
And just in case there be any doubt about the type of creature being described here, and its connection to the creators of the first "state", he adds "There is no mistaking the predator beneath the surface of all these noble races, the magnificent blond beast" (GM.II.11).
The words "beneath the surface" are a further admission that the original blond beast, who was essentially uninhibited and free, has ceased to exist.
The attentive reader will know that in the second essay, in offering his account of the birth of the "state" and the origin of "bad conscience", he described the original conquering barbarians as "some horde or other of blond predatory animals. . ."(GM.II.17).
So there is no doubt that the "masters" are also, inevitably, subject to physiological inhibition, to "bad conscience", to some degree. Once the "state" is established the "blond beast", the predatory, arbitrary, free, spontaneously violent, uninhibited individual is a thing of the past, he is not representative of a ruling caste.
(ii) Nietzsche explicitly tells us that the Genealogy should be seen as a "clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil".
This assessment is itself partly disingenuous because on some key questions things are visibly clearer in Beyond Good and Evil than Nietzsche presents them in the Genealogy, particularly sections BGE.257-260.
In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche is very clear that every noble, aristocratic society began as the work of barbarians, and that the superiority of these beasts "lay not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical"(BGE.257). There is no hint in this section that these original conquering barbarians simply remained barbarians (i.e. free, wild, spontaneous, uninhibited predators) once their domination was established. The barbarian evolves into the noble, he does not simply remain a barbarian, because the noble does not enjoy the same instinctual freedom that the pre-state barbarian allegedly did. This is partly why the "political concept of rank always transforms itself into a spiritual concept of rank"(GM.I.6), this is how the nobles, as well as the subjugated population, begin to acquire "spiritual" qualities.
This is made very clear in BGE.259 where Nietzsche says that "To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation" can be part of "good manners" provided the individuals involved share similar "strength and value standards" and "belong to one body".
The relevant point here, once gain, is that once the "state" is established even the ruling caste of violent nobility refrain from indulging their predatory instincts spontaneously; and this can only mean that they too are subject to "bad conscience" and "ressentiment".
This point is often obscured by Nietzsche's claim in the Genealogy that ressentiment is the perogative of the "weak" and that the "noble" man rarely, if ever, experiences this sensation: "For the ressentiment of the noble man himself, if it appears at all, completes and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction. For that reason it does not poison"(GM.I.10).
Now ressentiment is said to be the preserve of "creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who find compensation in imaginary revenge"(GM.I.10).
This depiction of the noble man as a creature who immediately reacts to any insult or injury with an immediate and proportionate counter-strike is simply impossible to reconcile with Nietzsche's admission elsewhere that the noble caste refrains from mutual violence and practices self-control.
In BGE.260, for example, when Nietzsche first introduces and contrasts the terms "master morality and slave morality" he says that among the "typical marks of nobility" that the "morality of the rulers" display is "The capacity for and the duty of . . . protracted revenge" and "subtlety in requital . . . a certain need to have enemies (as a conduit system, as it were, for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance" (BGE.260).
Protracted revenge may still be revenge but it is clearly not the kind of revenge that finds expression in an immediate counter-strike.
Once again we find Nietzsche, reluctantly perhaps, acknowledging the fact that the nobles do not routinely revenge any insult or injury in an immediate reaction, in an immediate act of revenge, in immediate requital. And "subtlety in requital" points to the same avoidance of an immediate and direct counter-strike. And this can only mean that the noble also experiences "bad conscience" and the feelings of ressentiment.
Notice, in particular, that as well as experiencing the feelings of "envy" (feelings which in the Genealogy Nietzsche often confines to the psychology of the "slave"), the noble man also finds himself needing "enemies as a conduit system", for various antagonistic emotions. This is a significant admission on Nietzsche's part because it acknowledges that the apparent "enemy" is, in reality, merely an opportunity, a pretext, a convenient scapegoat through which to vent aggressive emotions seeking release, emotions that were there prior to any actual encounter with the nominal "enemy" having taken place.
If a "conduit system" is necessary, and "enemies" (in advance), are required, then this is because forms of "substitute revenge" are being indulged, but "substitute revenge" and "substitute satisfactions" were supposed to be, according to Nietzsche's idealised moral typology in the Genealogy, the perogative of the "slave" who cannot vent his aggression directly and immediately onto those who harm him.
In an important section of the third essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche finally comes clean.
Emphasising that most of our suffering comes from individual physiology and the universal "bad conscience" that inevitably results from our being enclosed within the walls of culture, he says:
" According to my hypothesis, it is here alone, in a desire to anaesthetise pain through feeling, that the real physiological cause of ressentiment, of revenge, and related matters is to be found - although generally this is sought, quite wrongly it seems to me, in the defensive counter-strike, a merely reactive protective measure, a 'reflex movement' in the case of any kind of sudden injury and danger, like the way in which a frog still seeks to escape a corrosive acid once decapitated. But the difference is fundamental here: in one instance, the desire is to prevent further injury, in the other, to anaesthetise by means of any more intense emotion a secret pain and torment which is becoming unbearable, and, so to exclude it from consciousness for a moment at least. And for this purpose a feeling is required, the most intense feeling possible . . ." (GM.III.15.) See also GM.III.20.
These words need to be fully understood and appreciated, because they outline the fundamental theoretical background against which and within which all the argumentation of the Genealogy takes place.
The pain that needs anaesthetising is the universally experienced pain of "bad conscience", and ressentiment (as well as "revenge" itself) is ultimately the emotional and psychological result of this physiological inhibition and discomfort, and is not, contrary to all appearances, a response to any specific, localised, contingent injury, weakness or inferiority.
This point cannot be sufficiently emphasised, yet it is often missing from many commentaries. Intense ressentiment and even "revenge" itself is, like "every great feeling", and excess of emotion, which is harnessed and stimulated in order to anaesthetise the universal pain of "bad conscience", pain that is already there and exists independently of any contingent injury or insult.
Although the Genealogy contains great subtlety and admirable complexity in its argumentation, it also contains an extraordinary amount of carelessness of expression. I think much of this is quite deliberate (and unfortunate).
What does this mean? It means that some remarks and judgements are simply not true and are not to be trusted.
For example, regardless of what any specific sentence or passage may say, it is clear from both the Genealogy as a whole and Nietzsche's other books, that there is no clear separation and boundary line to be discovered between "master and slave morality".
These are crude polemical and propagandist terms, and there has, in reality, never been pure and genuinely distinct incarnations of these phantoms among any sizable group. The difference between all "master and slave" morality is one of degree and not one of kind.
There is a reason why Nietzsche allocates no time at all to exploring the group dynamics of the original blond beasts prior to their subjugation of another population.
Regarding the formation of groups generally, he says: "The strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate; if the former unite together, it is only with the aim of an aggressive collective action and collective satisfaction of their will to power, and with much resistance from the individual conscience"(GM.III.18).
Here the "strong" come together because by doing so they get to enjoy an aggressive collective action that, on their own, they would be too weak to accomplish. But there is a price to be paid for this "collective satisfaction", and the price they choose to pay is that they are no longer free to act as they wish. They must now submit to some form of collective command structure, and unity of purpose, which they, individually, do not control. This is why there is "much resistance from the individual conscience".
This logic of group dynamics simply must have applied to the original blond beasts who created the "state". In order for the blond beasts to be one group, and to resist atomisation and separation into individual parts, individual members within it must have given up some of their freedom and autonomy.
But once this is admitted it destroys any attempt pretend that these individual blond beasts were all "strong" (i.e. unwilling to submit to the demands of others). And because this inhibition and restraint must have taken place it simply isn't possible that the individual members could altogether escape feelings of "bad conscience" and "ressentiment". Few, if any of them, could actually act as they please.
It is undeniable, of course, that some individuals and groups are more powerful, more violent, more self-reliant, more honest, more affirmative than others, and that while no one can escape feelings of ressentiment entirely, some are engulfed and dominated by such reactive sensations to an alarming degree, while others are not. None of this is to be denied.
What is worthy of denial is any attempt by Nietzsche to absolutise these distinctions in any coherent and dichotomous fashion. "Master and slave", "strong and weak", these are relative terms, fluid and mobile, and sensitive to context. Sometimes Nietzsche forgets this or pretends things could be otherwise, and it's this resistance or blindness on his part that accounts for so many of the confusions and ambiguities, moral and characterological, in the Genealogy.
For example, it would be difficult for any commentator to argue that Periclean Athens did not represent Nietzsche's highest conception of culture yet realised on earth (with the Renaissance coming second). In relation to the "Other" these Athenians were capable of reverting back to the behaviour of the blond beast, without shame or apology.
But this contingent reversion to "barbarism" is not a remotely sufficient reason for Nietzsche's high admiration. What Nietzsche admired so much in Periclean Athens were its creative "cultural" achievements, and the characterological traits of many of its leading figures, coupled with the fact that it was not ashamed of the "blond beast" which lay "beneath its surface" and became visible especially in conflicts with the external world (GM.I.11).
It is very noticeable, for example, that Sparta and the Peloponnesian War is never mentioned in the Genealogy. Wouldn't Sparta, with its austerity, eternal militarism and its Helots, necessarily see Athens as a "corrupt" and "decadent" civilisation? And didn't Sparta defeat Nietzsche's beloved Periclean Athens in war?
One would be making a gross error of judgement if one thought that Nietzsche favoured Sparta over Athenian civilisation, and no informed commentator (as far as i'm aware) has ever defended such a preposterous claim. And yet, certain careless and irresponsible remarks in the Genealogy create an ambiguity that Nietzsche could have, and should have, easily avoided.
The biggest problem with the Genealogy, then, is that Nietzsche, for some reason, chose to present a pair of supposedly antithetical and clearly distinct moral perspectives, that don't, and indeed can't, actually exist.
The "strong" and the "weak" are never quite as unrelentingly, comprehensively, strong or weak as Nietzsche sometimes depicts them; and the same goes for his most idealised abstractions regarding the analogous dichotomies of health and sickness, noble and slave, active and reactive, affirmation and negation, instinctual spontaneity and inhibition, ressentiment and amor fati, and active and passive forms of asceticism.
It is not that these categories are to be discarded as useless and inapplicable. On the contrary, I think these categories and distinctions are meaningful and important. What is to be disregarded is the falsehood that they have ever existed, and could ever meaningfully exist, in pure, discrete and absolute forms. It's Nietzsche's unwillingness to make this point absolutely clearly and unequivocally, and to stick to it thereafter, that leads to so much of the confusion and sophistry that surrounds this text and much of the commentary surrounding it.
(b) Next, I will look at the concepts of "Power" and "strength" in the Genealogy.
It is Nietzsche's view, quite correctly I believe, that power-relations are fundamental in human affairs. I am in complete agreement with the following:
"Accordingly, 'right' and 'wrong' exist only from the moment the law is established (and not . . . from the moment of injury). To talk of right and wrong as such is senseless; in themselves, injury, violation, exploitation, destruction can of course be nothing 'wrong', in so far as life operates essentially - that is, in terms of its basic functions - through injury, violation, exploitation and destruction and cannot be concieved in any other way" (GM.II.11).
Whenever law and justice are enforced in a community this is always a reflection of existing power-relations within the group. The moral typologies that Nietzsche highlights and investigates in the Genealogy necessarily come into being as the result of power-relation within and between competing groups. Without social power of some kind one has only impotent and inconsequential localised and subjective abstractions, soap bubbles with no discernible sociological effects.
But Nietzsche, at times in the Genealogy, too often uses terms like "power" and "strength" (and their corresponding antonyms) in an overtly unrealistic and misleading manner, as if it made any sense to simply speak of concepts like "strength" and "power" as such.
Nietzsche is right to insist that there is no absolute, universal and unconditional "right" and "wrong", as such; but his rejection of moral absolutism applies equally to the concepts of "power" and "strength".
Rather than cite some of the numerous examples in the Genealogy where Nietzsche is irresponsibly careless in his use of terms such as "power" and "strength", I will here simply highlight some important, though rather obvious, distinctions that need to be made (distinctions that Nietzsche himself refuses to make perfectly clear).
Some varieties of "power" and "strength" that need noting:
(I) An individual with incredible relative physical strength and power, who can accomplish astonishing feats of power and strength by virtue of their physical characteristics.
(II) An individual with incredible relative physical power who has, nevertheless, an easy-going, largely passive psychology.
(III) An individual with incredible relative physical power who has, by contrast, and incredibly aggressive and confrontational psychology.
(IV) An individual who lacks incredible physical strength, but who is extremely aggressive, and also cunning.
(V) An individual who is distinguished by being an ally, friend, relative, or associate of an individual or group who is extremely powerful.
(VI) An individual who is distinguished principally by their extraordinary proficiency in the use of weapons.
(VII) A group which enjoys tremendous power by virtue of its numerical, strategic, geographical, informational, economic or technical character.
(VIII) An individual at the head of a powerful political community.
(IX) An non-state actor who has tremendous ideological or religious power over others.
(X) A military commander at the head of an incredibly powerful, efficient, and obedient army.
(XI) An individual who is physically and psychologically strong, affirmative and self-reliant, but who shuns all groups which he is not able to dominate completely.
This list could easily have been made longer and tighter, but my point, I hope, will be clear. It is quite impossible to read the Genealogy without noticing that Nietzsche makes no effort to clearly distinguish between very different forms of power and strength.
Think of Nietzsche's frequent praise and admiration of "strength" and "power" in the Genealogy, and then try to specify what kind of strength and power, exactly, is being championed and why? There is no single answer to this question that can be consistently applied to the Genealogy as a whole.
Nietzsche can never quite make his mind up on who the truly powerful and strong really are, and which forms of strength and power he admires and despises. He never reaches any settled position on this question, and because he doesn't it is misleading to place so much emphasis on ill-defined terms such as "power" and "strength".
I will begin here by first presenting a deliberately simplified and extremely condensed outline of the most important features of the entire Genealogy. I will do this, in spite of the obvious risk, because I frequently encounter readings of this text which, in my view, can't even get the basics right; and this is neither the time nor the place for me to engage in precise and lengthy detail with each and every misreading i've encountered.
The following should be read as a heuristic which is primarily concerned with getting the basic outline right, knowing full well that very many subtler, more nuanced and very important details still need to be identified and assessed.
Mankind's nomadic existence came to an end through the establishment of the primitive "state", and the "state" was the work of violent and predatory barbarians. One group dominated while the other was subjugated. Friction and conflict is always present within and between each group, and it to be presumed that no one, not even the leader of the ruling group, could simply act as he pleased, regardless of context.
This state of affairs, naturally enough, expelled a great amount of autonomy and arbitrariness from the earth, but the degree and nature of this restriction was not equally shared among the population. Nietzsche suggests that the resulting systemic restrictions and inhibitions on certain behaviours manifests itself as "bad conscience" (physiological discomfort that results, usually unknowingly, from instinctual inhibition and physiological disorders), and he believes that our most basic physiological impulses, derives and instincts cannot be divorced from our being and that they continue to operate within us, long after our species has been socialised in the state, and long after our nomadic and barbarian ancestors have vanished into the distant past.
These instincts, he believes, never go away; they continue making demands, they continue seeking satisfaction and expression.
Everyone experiences these instinctual frustrations to some extent, even the most powerful, but the degree of instinctual inhibition and frustration varies tremendously from person to person, and from caste to caste.
Sooner or later, a rupture occurs within the ruling caste, and some of its members begin to forsake physical vitality in favour of more "spiritual" and "intellectual" concerns. Neither of these terms, at this stage, are to be understood as necessarily effete, or fragile or whimsical, they are both compatible with tremendous seriousness, power, courage, ambition and cunning.
Since these more "intellectual" types within the ruling caste have increasingly different conditions of preservation and growth, they sometimes find themselves in conflict with their more physically assertive "brothers" and "cousins". Everything depends upon circumstances; sometimes the "intellectual" type capitulate, sometimes they come to an amicable agreement (perhaps they agree on a kind of separation-of-powers understanding), and sometimes they achieve dominance.
The subjugated population, on the other hand, have fewer outlets for the direct discharge of their instincts, and are unable to resist humiliation or injury of some sort from their political masters. Opportunities also exist here for introspection and self-overcoming but they are severely limited relative to the aristocratic ascetics.
The historical examples of Buddhism and Brahmanism, to say nothing of ancient European societies, demonstrate that the aristocratic ascetics, even when they gain ultimate power, do not necessarily promote hostility and antagonism or moralic acid towards the rich, the worldly, the powerful, the rulers, the happy. Buddhism, for example, prohibits ressentiment of any kind, and the Law Book of Manu assigns the more "muscular and temperamental" types to the role of defending the rule of the "spiritual" caste.
With the creation of the "state" and the resulting hierarchies favoured by aristocratic rule, mankind as a whole becomes "sick" because it is unable to function as our evolutionary past prepared us. However, it is only via this "sickness", this prohibition on various forms of instinctual release and activeness, that mankind becomes meaningful and significant. As he says: "Bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about it, but an illness in the same way that pregnancy is an illness"(GM.II.18).
So far, we have largely resisted infecting the wound of civilisation itself (bad conscience) with the additional wound of self-denigration and castigating moralism. But now a new kind of ascetic priest comes to power in the midst of a community newly oppressed and subjugated. Religion is now used as an instrument to justify the enslavement and humiliation of a community and it begins to take pride in worldly failure and to condemn the powerful and the unbelievers. Rather than abandon the God who had seemed to abandon them, the Jews after Babylonian and Assyrian enslavement, altered their conception of him. Bad conscience, ressentiment and theology now all come together in such a way that Christianity later embraces and extends.
The inevitable suffering of life, both personal and communal, is now understood as punishment for sin, and sinfulness is neither contingent or conditional but unavoidable and intrinsic. Chance is robbed of its innocence, human nature is corrupt, our instincts are depraved, even our virtues are disguised forms of depravity and selfishness. Suffering is deserved, complaint is blasphemy and the earth itself can offer no satisfaction or redemption. There is no earthly escape from this unrelenting depravity and wickedness, and those who love life, earthly pleasure and the world itself are the vilest and most despised of all.
This whole outlook represents a tremendous inversion of values, naturalness and earthly affirmation, and on the face of it, seems extraordinarily peculiar and absurd. How then, did such a perverse set of values come to prevail? The short answer to this complex question is that mankind has striven to escape from the meaninglessness and Godless innocence of its suffering, but that in its rush to find a utilitarian meaning in its suffering, it has been unable (or unwilling) to understand the real material causes of its suffering. Consequently, it has been unable (or unwilling) to understand the utilitarian and thoroughly narcissistic nature of its allegiance to ascetic values (their raison d'etre).
By means of this ignorance or dishonesty it fails to understand itself and it fails to recognise the distinction between active and passive forms of asceticism.
It fails to understand that every single human being, without exception and regardless of circumstance and individual physiological and psychological constitution, is unavoidably and innocently selfish, seeking to further its own interests to the best of its ability, given its status, constitution and enviornment.
It fails to understand that the barbarian and the ascetic, the hedonist and the martyr, the philanthropist and the misanthrope, the sadist and the masochist, the saint and the sinner, the good and the evil, the master and the slave, the leader and follower, are all, without exception, necessarily and innocently (metaphysically speaking) pursuing the same fundamental goal, and that all our actions, values and commitments are instruments towards that inevitably self-affirming end.
Asceticism is a purely descriptive tag, there needn't be any praise or blame attached to it. A warrior and hermit, to take two examples, can each find uses for it in some form or other.
For Nietzsche, the obvious differences between the warrior and the hermit belong only to the foreground of things, in that each of them has very different conditions of preservation and growth, and therefore employs different instruments, different means, in order to attain their optimum self (whatever that may be).
At the fundamental level, both are pursuing the same basic thing(s), and at this level there is no reason to blame or praise, or to love or hate anyone, because things simply couldn't be otherwise.
Asceticism, then, has been practised all along by a variety of types, simply as a means to attain some goal that the individual judges to be beneficial to himself in some way. That's all, in essence, asceticism really is. It's an instrument, a means that the self employs in order to advance itself, depending on its goals and circumstances. It is no surprise then, and no accident, that various forms of the ascetic ideal have been embraced by a wide variety of people in a wide variety of circumstances.
Unfortunately, the ascetic ideal, as such, has been seized upon by numerous otherworldly types who have moralised it at the expense of natural humanity and the natural world.
The practise and concept has been hijacked by those most intent on depriving humanity of its happiness and dignity. It has been viewed as a praiseworthy denigration of the earth and the natural appetites, as such, in favour of a world unseen and superior, while in reality it has never ceased to be anything other than a thoroughly selfish and worldly expedient.
Accordingly, we need to understand the fundamental difference between active and passive forms of asceticism.
Active asceticism would be asceticism practised freely and knowingly for one's own unique benefit on earth. Passive asceticism would be asceticism practised as justifiable punishment, as sin, as shame, as hatred of self and world, as self-loathing - all justifiable only with reference to a being outside the self (God), and a world beyond the natural world.
This is the fundamental corruption and confusion that the Genealogy wants to unmask and uncover. Nietzsche wants to take back the ascetic ideal in the service of naturalists, atheists and affirmers and to restore its inherently natural and earthly status.
Because so much of the Genealogy aggressively deplores what priests, philosophers and the masses have done with the ascetic ideal, it is easy to misread Nietzsche as being intrinsically and implacably against it. But nothing could be further from the truth. Virtually everything he really loves, values and wants couldn't take place without it and he knows it.
In the hands of the most anti-natural and opportunistic priests, ideologues and politicians, the values of self-denial and transcendence (all impossible, all phantoms) have become, and have largely remained, unchallenged, long after the rule of the blond beasts has ceased.
Instead of "bad conscience", ressentiment, and asceticism being seen for the things they truly are, entirely natural, entirely understandable things, they have been systematically misrepresented in the service of a morality which requires that we continue to deny some very obvious facts about ourselves and our place in the universe.
Nietzsche states that it took a "long time" (GM.I.2) before forms of herd/slave morality came to actually dominate European culture generally, and to replace conceptions of morality that were basically aristocratic in origin.
Repeating his claim that the political concept of rank (i.e. actualised power) always transforms itself into a spiritual concept of rank, he states that: "Roughly around the time of the Thirty Years War [1618-1648]- late enough, then - this sense [the aristocratic sense] was displaced to produce the one which is usual now. This seems to me to be a fundamental insight with respect to the genealogy of morals" (GM.I.4).
These few lines are very important, but their significance is often overlooked. What changed in 17th century Europe, in order to bring about the dominance of herd/slave values, obviously, was not that the Jewish priesthood suddenly inaugurated the "slave revolt in morality", or that Christianity suddenly became the dominant religion of Europe. What changed were concrete power-relations on the ground.
(e) "Guilt", "Bad Conscience", and Related Matters.
Although Nietzsche appears to place great significance on the notion of "bad conscience" in the Genealogy, this alledged significance is difficult to justify once we look at Nietzsche's actual treatment of this phrase in the book itself.
At the begining of GM.II.4. Nietzsche treats "the sense of guilt [and], the whole matter of 'bad conscience'" to be, originally, one and the same thing. He goes on to suggest that this phenomenon originated in the "contractual relationship between creditor and debtor" in the most primitive forms of exchange, prior to the creation of any "state".
This is where promises are made; and promises require an enduring will, a will which persists amid the flux of intervening events between the promise and its actual delivery. The price paid for failing to abide by one's promises is the infliction of suffering by the creditor on the debtor.
If promises are broken the creditor gets to enjoy the pleasure of inflicting cruelty on another, the pleasure of violation (which is usually a privilege of the "masters").
A little later Nietzsche says that "the feeling of guilt, of personal responsibility originated, as we have seen, in the earliest and most primordial relationship between men, in the relationship between buyer and seller, debtor and creditor: it is here that one man first encountered one another . . ."(GM.II.8).
Lest there be any doubt that he is talking here about events that occurred prior to the creation of any "state", he underlines the point: "Buying and selling, together with the psychology which accompanies them, are older than even the beginnings of any social form of organisation and association"(GM.II8).
Now, this analysis is wholly incompatible with, and directly contradicts, the more famous account he gives, just eight sections later, for the origin of "bad conscience".
In GM.II.16 he argues that "bad conscience" arose as a direct consequence of the formation of the "state", which forced previously externalised instincts to turn back against the self, or to discharge themselves through various indirect means.
Did this phenomenon only apply to the conquered nomads? What of the violent creators of the proto-"state", the conquering blond beasts?
Nietzsche says that "The meaning of guilt . . . is unknown to these born organisers . . . They were not the ones among whom 'bad conscience' grew up, as goes without saying from the outset - but it would not have existed without them" because through them a "vast quantity of freedom" was "expelled from the world. This instinct of freedom made latent through force. . . this instinct of freedom . . . ultimately still venting itself and discharging itself only upon itself: such is bad conscience at its origin, that and nothing more"(GM.II.17).
And again: "He who is capable of giving commands, who is a 'master' by nature, who behaves violently in deed and gesture - what are contracts to him!"(GM.II.17).
It is inconceivable that the blond beasts, the future "masters", prior to their establishment of the primitive "state", did not engage in these primordial forms of exchange, both with other groups, and between themselves.
In other words, the primordial forms of exchange, from which guilt is said to have emerged, must have applied to humanity generally, prior to the formation of any "state".
But, once this is granted, it necessarily destroys the idealised distinctions that Nietzsche is keen to employ throughout the entire book; distinctions between active and passive, noble and base, free and enslaved, strong and weak, etc.
None of these supposedly antithetical distinctions deserve to be taken literally, because none of them exist in pure form in actuality; they represent differences of degrees and not of kinds. In reality Nietzsche, the profound psychologist, in his sober moments, knows this.
When he employs these distinctions he is trying to change the world in a manner consistent with his own idiosyncratic interests, he is no longer trying to simply understand and depict it.
On the one hand, he is too involved, too partial in all this, to resist lying and falsifying things, but, on the other hand, to his credit, he is too honest to resist contradicting his own falsifications and visceral/aesthetic preferences.
In addition, a little later in the second essay Nietzsche offers yet another, a third account, of the origin of bad conscience and guilt; this time in the notion of ancestor indebtedness (see GM.II.19).
The inconsistency and ambiguity that i'm drawing attention to here is too obvious, too easily noticed, too explicit in the text, to be anything other than deliberate. But before we get too critical of Nietzsche we should remember that, for all his faults, he didn't write for academics and had a very low opinion of them, with good reason . . .
So much useless academic commentary surrounds this book because it is frequently read as if it represented a kind of conceptual milestone in Nietzsche's thought, as if here, more than anywhere else, he had attained a clarity and coherence that his work had hitherto lacked on matters of vital importance to him.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe this. It simply isn't that kind of book, and he isn't that kind of thinker. Academics, generally speaking, "Nietzschean" academics included, lack a genuine interest in the topics that most interest Nietzsche (just read their books!); their "clarity" and "coherence" is only evident because they lack Nietzsche's passion, honesty, and his willingness to seriously offend public opinion.
(f) The Future Task of the Philosopher, and the Problem of Value.
The first essay of the Genealogy is arguably the most vivid, shocking and memorable part of the entire book. I'm speaking here primarily of its visceral, iconoclastic and polemical quality, the forcefulness and directness of the language and terminology employed. There is a level of rage, contempt and anxiety on display here concerning the overwhelming majority of historical and contemporary humanity; and this contrasts strikingly with a disturbing sympathy and bias towards those who embody our most violent, sadistic, predatory and destructive instincts.
And yet, the accumulating force of Nietzsche's violent dissatisfaction with humanity, especially current humanity, is severely undermined by both the tone and content of the essay's concluding section. The crescendo of intensity unexpectedly dissolves with a respectful appeal to academic philosophers, historians, physiologists, philologists, and general physicians.
He continues: "In fact, all tables of commandments, all 'Though shalts' known to history or ethnological research, certainly require physiological investigation and interpretation prior to psychological examination. Equally, all await a critique from the medical sciences. The question: what is the value of this or that table of commandments and 'morality'? should be examined from the most varied perspectives . . . From now on, all disciples have to prepare the future task of the philosopher: this task being understood as the solution of the problem of value, the determination of the hierarchy of values".(GM.I.17).
This oddness is characteristic of Nietzsche, but no less perplexing for all that. If these words were placed at the begining of the first essay, instead of at its end, then much of the content of the essay would seem ludicrous, because as the concluding section stresses, so much difficult and time-consuming interdisciplinary work still needs to be done, before those who do not already share Nietzsche's emotional predispositions can be reasonably expected to sympathise with his (ideological) plight.
If so much work still needs to be done, by others, before this problem can be adequately and intelligently addressed, then it follows that much of Nietzsche's engagement with these problems is necessarily premature and subjective. (cf.Daybreak.453).
The other major difficulty concerns the "future task of the philosopher" in determining the "hierarchy of values".
Does this hierarchy of values refer to the conflict within the self that the philosopher experiences? In that case the task of the future philosopher is to recognise and then establish an order of rank among impulses within him, in order to bring about an "improved self" in a project of self-overcoming.
Or is the formulation of a hierarchy of values primarily a sociological project? A project whereby the philosopher, having absorbed all the factual and scientific work attained by the relevant specialists, now promotes values applicable to the entire social order, values that are informed by, but not determined by, the relevant knowledge now available.
This possibility seems fanciful. Given Nietzsche's explicit prejudice in favour of the "few" (the very few) as opposed to the "many", why should the overwhelming majority of the population take any notice? Why would the masses sacrifice themselves for the sake of the (very) few? Nietzsche is keenly aware that the masses are increasingly powerful and the time is past when they (when we) can be so easily swept aside.
And this hopeful elitism, of course, presupposes that the facts which Nietzsche's specialists present to the future philosopher are conducive to Nietzsche's current prejudices. Unfortunately for Nietzsche, it is just as likely that these specialists will present to the future philosopher the virtual impossibility of any such project succeeding!
If the hierarchy of values refers primarily to establishing an order of rank among the various types and groups that inhabit society (and Nietzsche strongly suggests here that it does) than this seems to me like a compensatory fantasy indulged by an individual all too keenly aware of his own sociological impotence, and the impotence of philosophers generally.
There is no reason whatever to believe that modern society can be shaped and determined by a Lycurgus-like figure in the interest of Nietzsche's peculiar type of elitism. And Zarathustra's teaching, such as it is, can only apply to the very few and it's futile to pretend otherwise. As Nietzsche makes clear elsewhere, as soon as large numbers of people (nominally) associate themselves with any noble doctrine, they inevitably corrupt it.
If the values promoted and established by an individual or a society always reflect the perceived conditions of preservation and growth within competing centres of power (and Nietzsche repeatedly asserts this), then it is wishful thinking to imagine that Nietzsche's "future philosopher" is likely to succeed in any significant sociological sense.
Nietzsche's hopes for a "future philosopher" is his way of finessing the fact that he himself, and philosophy generally, can find no solution to his sociological problem. (cf. the final sentence of BGE.251.)
In Beyond Good and Evil, the preceding work that the Genealogy is supposed to clarify and supplement, Nietzsche devotes an entire section of the book to the question: What is Noble?
Given that the question of "nobility", in one form or another, constitutes the very heart and pinnacle of Nietzsche's concerns, we should perhaps expect that here, more than anywhere else, he would present us with his most impressive definitions, arguments and justifications in favour of his concepts of "nobility".
Unfortunately, he declares that:"It is not his actions which reveal him [the noble man] - actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable-; neither is it his 'works'. . . . It is not the works, it is the faith which is decisive here, which determines the order of rank here . . . some fundamental certainty which a noble soul possesses in regard to itself . . . The noble soul has reverence for itself.-" (BGE.287).
It should be obvious that this is an alarmingly weak and thin defence and definition of "nobility", given the immense time and energy Nietzsche has devoted to this subject.
In fact, so much of the 'What is Noble?' section is neither cheerful nor affirmative, but despairing, sad, wounded, painfully knowing and unimpressed.
"The more a psychologist . . . turns his attention to the more select cases and human beings, the greater grows the danger of his suffocation from pity: he needs hardness and cheerfulness more than other men. For the corruption, the ruination of the higher human beings, of more strangely constituted souls, is the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one's eyes. The manifold torment of the psychologist who has discovered this ruination, who discovers this whole inner 'wretchedness' of the highest human beings . . . first once and then almost always throughout the whole of history . . . And who knows whether what has happened hitherto in all great cases has not always been the same thing: that the mob worshipped a god - and that the 'god' was was only a poor sacrificial beast! Success has always been the greatest liar" (BGE.269).
Here the entire history of so-called "higher men" is depicted as overwhelmingly a sham, a disguise, a foreground perspective which conceals an "inner wretchedness". Again, it should be obvious that this judgement contradicts so much of the idealisation of "nobility" that Nietzsche frequently condones elsewhere in his work. On the other hand, Nietzsche makes clear in this confessional passage that he, personally, is profoundly wounded and diminished by this psychological insight into the inherent corruption of so-called "higher" human beings.
In a nutshell, Nietzsche is viscerally predisposed to falsify and mythologise the concept of the "great man" because he finds it so lacking in reality; and he finds this historical absence of "genuine" greatness, incredibly painful and anxiety provoking. His intellectual conscience will not allow his mythologising tendencies to go unchallenged, but it is, alas, not strong enough to prevent these falsifying tendencies from surfacing. (cf.BGE.289).
The crucial point is not, of course, an egalitarian one. Nietzsche is, I believe, correct to insist on the fact that people are not equal, and that great individuals do, in fact, exist and matter.
Where he goes wrong is in pretending that they are fundamentally and unavoidably different from the rest of us in essence. He is so appalled and horrified by certain natural qualities in human nature that he, at times, cannot rest content with these qualities existing in a sublimated, marginalised or repressed form; he want them utterly absent and non-existent. The physiological and psychological impossibility of this desire being actualised is what drives him into the realms of fantasy and falsification regarding the "noble" man.
I have so far offered various criticisms of the Genealogy, the most significant of which is that Nietzsche in this work is, at times, driven to incoherence, falsification, and obscurantism because his is either unable or unwilling to reject, unambiguously and consistently, the possibility of genuinely antithetical and distinct types of human beings.
We can witness his attatchment to the possibility of genuinely antithetical and distinct moral (and physiological) types in the following:
"There is master morality and slave morality -I add at once that in all higher and mixed cultures attempts at mediation between the two are apparent and more frequently confusion and mutual misunderstanding between them, indeed sometimes their harsh juxtaposition - even within the same man, within one soul" (BGE.260).
These remarks sound, superficially, as if Nietzsche fully accepts that pure forms of each morality are, inevitably, absent from the real world, and that a degree of overlap and intermingling of the two types always exists. But in fact he's saying no such thing.
He's actually saying that however frequent the intermingling and overlap is between the two moralities, pure forms of each have meaningfully existed.
He's saying that, (1) in primitive cultures the two types are, or can be, distinct and pure, and (2) that even in higher and mixed cultures, pure forms of each can, and do, continue to exist, however infrequently.
Nowhere in Nietzsche's entire work, published or unpublished, is he able to provide any sustained and credible arguments or historical data in favour of this proposition. Every form of "higher humanity" that he presents to the reader inevitably contains some portion of weakness, negation, ressentiment, decadence, hesitancy, prudence, subordination, asceticism or dependency - and at times Nietzsche finds this fact intolerable.
It's this extreme aversion to any and all forms of "decadence" that leads him to construct imaginary (i.e. pure) forms of affirmation, potency, activeness and strength.
When Nietzsche's in this mood he can't be trusted, he has become, like all party men, a liar. Thankfully, he's frequently not in such a defensive mood and is able to reemerge as an insightful and honest thinker once more.
I have tried to show that Nietzsche sometimes falsifies the concept of the "great man" in a dangerous and irresponsible manner and that a large part of his motivation for this fabrication is that he is, at times, extremely disturbed by various forms of anti-naturalness that have dominated western civilisation for a long, long time.
However, although Nietzsche undoubtedly falsifies things, much of what he says remains true and important. Every criticism I have of him should be understood in that context. He at times overstates things, but there remains a great deal of truth in much of what he says, and nowhere is this more applicable than in the case of the "good man".
Part of the reason why Nietzsche is so reluctant to unequivocally castigate the aggressive, encroaching, cruelty-inflicting human specimen is that he finds essentially the same destructive desires at the very heart of the nominally peace-loving, humanitarian, sympathetic ideals of the "good man".
The primary historical vehicle for the concept of the "good man" has been Christianity, but the decline of Christian faith has not, for the most part, resulted in a significant re-evaluation of the "good man". On the contrary, herd morality has been cast in ever glowing terms in the discourse advanced by secular ideologies such as socialism and liberalism (to take the most prominent examples). The dominance and power of herd morality in the contemporary world far surpasses anything Nietzsche actually experienced in his lifetime.
"Good men never tell the truth" Nietzsche declared in Ecce Homo, and virtually all of our contemporary "good men", especially the most articulate and sophisticated among us, take care to keep certain lies going; for example: the lie of "natural justice", the lie of equality, the lie of "altruism", the lie of "exploitation", the lie of identity politics, the lie of "false consciousness", the lie of equating relative poverty with innocence and virtue, the lie of political correctness, the lie of equating human dignity with consumerism, the lie of human "brotherhood/sisterhood", the lie of treating science as merely "another way of knowing" among other equally valid perspectives, the lie of cultural egalitarianism, the lie of denigrating the drive for distinction, the lie of treating the working class as necessarily "oppressed", the lie of denying entrenched reactionary forces within various so-called "oppressed" groups, the unrelentingly faux middle class (especially academic and journalistic) affinity with the working class . . .
As Nietzsche's so-called "free spirit" says in the Genealogy - "Who among us would be a free spirit if it were not for the existence of the Church?".
The Church today is often perceived as more likely to "hinder rather than help" the advancement of herd morality, more likely to alienate than seduce, because it "remains something crude and uncouth, repulsive to a more delicate intellect, to a really modern taste" (GM.I.9.).
In other words, many of the lies and motivations behind religious dogma continue to flourish in secular and atheistic perspectives. This is the problem that isn't dissolving away with historical and technological "progress", and it is largely because this herd-flattering morality grows ever more powerful with each passing day that Nietzsche's analysis continues to be relevant in the modern world; to some of us at least . . .
The modern, dominant conceptions of "good" (in the west); what they are and how they came to dominate, is a question of great importance. But, most of what I have to say on this crucial subject I will say elsewhere, especially in the still to be completed, "Last Man, Modernity and Politics" section.
Perhaps the most baffling aspect of Nietzsche's entire output is his treatment of the "will to power". In various books, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards, he makes the grandest claims possible for this theory, suggesting that it essentially explains all organic and inorganic events in the universe, as well as the so-called "laws of nature".
Why would such a subtle and sceptical thinker repeatedly advance such nonsense? And how could he possibly imagine that such claims should be taken seriously in the absence of serious, rigorous, detailed arguments and empirical evidence?
My best attempts to answer these questions are to be found in the "Will To Power" section, so I will say no more about it here. The only point I wish to highlight at present is that even in the simplest, most elementary definitional sense, he can't even remain consistent.
At one point in the Genealogy the will to power is characterised as "the essence of life" (GM.II.12), while a little later it is characterised as "the strongest, most life-affirming drive" (GM.III.18). First it's the "essence" of things, then it's one "drive" among others.
Nietzsche claims that "activity" in the entire biological realm, precedes "adaptation" (contra Herbert Spencer), which he calls a "second-order activity, a mere reactivity", and yet he calls this apparently unconditional push towards "activity" to be "one of its [life's] basic concepts" (GM.II.12).
The language being used here is incredibly sloppy. If activity directed outwards is "one" of life's "basic concepts" then this must mean that, alongside this primordial push towards external activity, there are other, equally primordial concepts.
I am ignoring here other rather obvious problems with the "will to power" as an omnipresent and supreme, all-pervading principle of a psychological, biological or inorganic kind, and merely highlighting the fact that Nietzsche, even at the most basic, abstract level, can't be clear about how far the "will to power" extends and applies in nature.
Nietzsche seriously misunderstood aspects of Darwinism because he mistakenly thought it posited "self-preservation" and the "will to exist" as the "cardinal drive" in an organic being (see, BGE.13. and GS.349), and he thought such things were too passive to account for biological existence as it is. What he doesn't seem to have understood is that it is reproduction that is nature's "cardinal value" and that "self-preservation" is essentially a means to that end (the end of reproduction), the propagation of our genetic material into the future.
But be that as it may, it is not Nietzsche's ignorance or misinterpretation of biology that primarily concerns me here. What I am drawing attention to is his failure to use language carefully and precisely where it's most needed, his inability or unwillingness to articulate clearly and consistently just what he means by the phrase "the will to power".
This carelessness of expression regarding the will to power in the Genealogy applies also to other key terms in the book, such as: ressentiment, bad conscience, power, master, slave, ascetic ideals, ascetic priest, blond beast, aristocratic and the herd. It is simply not possible to give an uncontroversial definition of these terms consistent with their usage throughout the book.
Nietzsche, it shouldn't be forgotten, is eminently capable of writing lucidly on difficult and complex subjects, so it is difficult to imagine that he was genuinely aiming at clarity in his employment of these terms. Too many interpreters of this book focus on undecidable and inconsequential aspects of this work because they treat it as a "scholarly" work, and in doing so they typically ignore what's most important about it.
At the end of the second essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche invokes Zarathustra as the gateway out of the nihilism and passive asceticism that he has been opposing so vehemently. Zarathustra is said to be "pregnant with the future" - the same words that Nietzsche had used to describe the process of internalised aggression that accompanied the formation of the "state" (GM.II.16).
Zarathustra is neither master, nor slave, nor ascetic priest. He conforms to none of the broad categories that Nietzsche frequently employs in the first two essays.
The closest thing to Zarathustra in the entire Genealogy is to be found in GM.III.10. Here Nietzsche argues that the historical philosopher has been predisposed to obscure himself in the form of the ascetic priest, in the "dark, repulsive form of a caterpillar" and that the "bright and dangerous winged creature, the 'spirit' which the caterpillar concealed within itself" may, in the future, be able to shed its skin and emerge more honestly and fruitfully into the light.
If Nietzsche is to be taken seriously here then it means that much of the terminology and localised value judgements of the Genealogy are not to be take too seriously, because Zarathustra himself and the historical developments which brought him about involve an inextricably compromised and many-sided process. Zarathustra's roots and antecedents, both personal and historical, as well as his desiderata, involve the intermingling and obliteration of the crude, singular types of persons that dominate much of the book. This is itself a refutation of the genetic fallacy, but it's also a refutation of many of the localised value judgements of the book.
But there is a further, more significant problem, with the introduction of the figure of Zarathustra in such glowing and epoch-making terms. The Ubermensch never appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra at all, and neither do Zarathustra's "children"! Brave talk and poetic license aside, he remains, at the end, sociologically impotent, without true heirs of any human kind.
The Genealogy implies that Zarathustra already possesses the key of keys, the route out of nihilism, and has succeeded in creating new, life-affirming values. This simply isn't true. The figure of Zarathustra, however heroically inclined, still remains in the shadow of the very nihilism that he wishes to overcome.
Only if we treat Zarathustra's attempt as a noble failure, as an attempt that others should make in the hope that someday, someone will succeed, can Zarathustra be admired. As an end in himself he is not especially impressive.
My own simple answer to this complex question is - No! While I think the Genealogy is undoubtedly a very great work I see no justification for privileging it so massively among Nietzsche's works. Of course, stylistically, it appears to have a connecting, dialectically sustained narrative and a unity of sorts and this partly explains its appeal for many academics. But even a fairly casual reading informs us that this is actually a highly fragmented, ambivalent and deceptive text, in which argument and rhetoric are not always easily distinguished.
ReplyDeleteFor example, many of the most passionate and rhetorical claims of the Genealogy (regarding the "masters", "higher types", and "decadents") are clearly undermined or explicitly contradicted in BGE, the very work that Nietzsche characterises the Genealogy as "supplementing" and "clarifying"; to say nothing of the depiction of Zarathustra in TSZ or, for instance, the characterisation of the Jews and "decadence" in A.24.
Yet it must be said that the Genealogy is, as Michael Tanner remarked "a work of extreme seriousness". Which only begs the question, why then are so many commentaries on it so ultimately harmless and even reassuring? The short answer to that, I think, is that Nietzsche has been assimilated by sizeable chunks of academia who seek (implicitly or otherwise) to render him either culturally irrelevant or even conducive to the dominant lies of our age (do I need to state them?). If this was really the ultimate import of Nietzsche's work, it's hard to see why he shouldn't be ignored or simply left to the antiquarians.
On the contrary, for me Nietzsche's importance and relevance (alongside, admittedly, his significant limitations) grows ever more visible the deeper we collectively advance towards the world of the "Last Man"; a trajectory which seems as inevitable as it is nauseous.
I find that the Twilight of the Idols is quoted more often than the text is given credit for its importance.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the Genealogy is privileged because it is the most focused work. But in that case, a compilation of Nietzsche's aphorisms on one topic could produce a reading course of similar focus.
Narziss,
ReplyDeletedo you have a favourite work, and why?
This is a tough question. A year ago, I would have easily said that Twilight of the Idols is my favorite work. I thought that it included the core of his philosophy and the vast majority of his insights.
ReplyDeleteNow, I'm not so sure I could pick a particular work. I'd say, however, that my favorite things to read in Nietzsche are his psychological insights in his mid-to-late works (several of which appear in Daybreak e.g. 109, Genealogy e.g. I: 13, Twilight e.g. "The Four Great Errors" and yet also those many scattered heavily throughout all his works).
Reading Daybreak 542, for me, throws some light on some of the "weaker" aspects of the later works. The tendency to proclaim, to announce, certain things of apparently supreme importance, without sufficient justification. But it's a vexed question as to whether this tendency was the "real" Nietzsche, a cry to be heard, or a self-willed rhetorical ploy?
ReplyDeleteTwilight is a wonderful work, but there's something uniquely both profound and calm about Daybreak that i'm increasingly drawn to. Not that i'm averse to the impassioned, forceful, partial side of Nietzsche. On the contrary, without it i'd have little abiding interest in him. The problem is, sometimes he attacks the wrong targets. I agree that his psychological insight is astonishing and perhaps ultimately his chief intellectual merit.
In my opinion GS is his best work, not the least for its literary qualities. But further, one can find therein most of the major themes that occuiped N in his later philosophical stage. It's a work of a transitory nature: on the one hand he retains the more "scientific" and direct style of HH and DB which I love so much, but on the other starts experimenting with various forms of playfulnes, which could be both aggravating and inspiring.
ReplyDeleteAnd I completely agree that GM is overrated for the same reason that you, David, gave: it is more academically digestible.
ReplyDeleteGuy,
ReplyDeleteI think GS part IV is pivotal in Nietzsche's works. There's a later letter to Gast (i'm quoting from memory) which says:"I have presented such terrible images to knowledge that any 'Epicurean' outlook is now impossible, only 'Dionysian' is sufficient". This recognition and decision seems to be most visible in GS.
The subsequent break with Lou no doubt also played its part, but post GS Nietzsche begins to lose some of his "impartiality" and "neutrality" regarding existence. It's this "experimenting with various forms of playfulness" question that seems so impenetrable; to me, at least. e.g. the claims subsequently made for the "will to power", the subsequent emphasis on "decadence", the increased idealisation of the "noble" man etc.
Was Nietzsche, in fact, well aware of what he was doing in the later works, well aware that he was, at times, making the boldest claims on the flimsiest of evidence, or, did he really think he had "legitimate" epistemic grounds for some of these claims?
I believe that he was aware that the time for "neutrality" is up and that one should move towards taking a stance. One major clue for this, I believe, comes at the end of GS when he says, in the penultimate section (GS 383), that "the tragedy begins". But what does that mean? It connects, I think, with the very first section of GS (and thus closes a circle, in a way) where N connects tragedy with seriousness and meaningfulness, goals and directions. And this is exactly where his "hand moves": towards a concrete valuation, namely, the affirmation of life and the denigration of the slavish psychology/values.
ReplyDeleteSounds reasonable?
Guy,
ReplyDeleteI think Nietzsche, the flesh and blood historical individual, did increasingly (but not always) "take a stand" in the later works; the question I ask myself is: did he do this while knowing that it lacked adequate dialectical/epistemic justification (i.e. is part of it simply propaganda on behalf of his contingent visceral disposition?); or, did he really believe that he had discovered intellectually respectable grounds?
As he remarks in WP331: "the standpoint of desirability, of unauthorised playing-the-judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection".
Hi David,
ReplyDeleteYou ask whether N knowingly took a stance on issues without epistemic justification and was aware that these were just his visceral responses.
This is one of the major question in N studies, I think, namely, to what extent did N adhere to what he took to be objective values, that is, values which he thought had a claim on everyone (or ought to have a claim on everyone).
I am inclined to say, and the very interesting quote you gave from WP is written in this spirit (though I am always a bit sceptical when it comes to WP), namely, that N was aware that to live is to judge and evaluate, even if you don't have and probably could never have the proper and ultimate justification for for your judgment. And he was aware that his judgments are his personal judgments (he says this somewhere: my judgment is *my* judgment).
So the problem is: how can one at one and the same time both condemn X, argue agasint X, try with all your might to dissuade people from X, while knowing that it is just your personal opinion?
The answer is a Humean one, I reckon: we must judge as we must breathe and feel, and so in order to do that we have to supress what conscious reflection tells us. That is one of the greatest contradictions of our form of life. N reaches a similar conclusion in HH 32 where he says:
"We are from the the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings *and can recognize this*: this is one of the greatest and irresolvable discords of existence".
This is basically, as I see it, another manifestation of the age old tension between theory and practice.
Would you agree?
Guy,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I share your reluctance to grant the entries found in the book 'The Will To Power' the same status as the published work.
If I understand you, your suggesting that Nietzsche (the flesh and blood man) bears witness to his own insight that:
"most of a philosopher's conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into certain channels by his instincts" (BGE.3)
And that "Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any doubt. . . To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is te question; that is the experiment" (GS.110).
And two hundred years earlier we find Pascal saying: "All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling. . . Reason is available but can be bent in any direction. And so there is no rule" (Pensees 530).
I would agree with this thesis generally and I would also agree that it's increasingly noticeable in the later works of Nietzsche himself. Yet because he was a deeply divided man, ruthlessly curious and self-probing, his "lies" and errors couldn't reign supreme as they do in most of us most of the time. However much "propaganda" he engages in, his "intellectual conscience" always makes an appearance somewhere, allowing the attentive reader to get a glimpse of Nietzsche's "wounds", his visceral and ideological conditions of existence.
I think Nietzsche does, at times, consciously (as well as unconsciously) tell lies, yet he remains, for me, the most honest of thinkers in spite of this.
The difficulty is in trying to understand how Nietzsche wished to be read? After all , he wasn't writing down his thoughts in a diary, he was offering these texts for public consumption. Ive already alluded to the relevance, in my view, of Daybreak 542, and the year in year out silence that his books enjoyed must have wounded him deeply, as well as increasing his sense of impotency.
It's separating the "bombastic, polemical" aspect from the rest that is problematic at times. A prime example would be his treatment of "decadence" in A.24. This contrasts sharply with how this subject is typically treated in GM.
ReplyDeleteThus related to my previous post, was Nietzsche therefore "correcting" the dominant analysis of "decadence" in GM, or, as I tend to believe, did he know perfectly well (as a thinker), while writing GM, that he was not always being intellectually honest with the reader.
I want to change tack now and focus on some of the central terms (and conceptual errors) that often dominate whenever the Genealogy is discussed.
ReplyDeleteSome of the resulting incoherence and confusion can be justly attributed to Nietzsche himself. It's often impossible to determine with any certainty whether Nietzsche is himself simply confused (or self-deceived), or whether he is being deliberately misleading or dishonest. This is a crucial question for anyone seriously concerned with Nietzsche, but it's a question i'll leave for another occasion. Part of the problem is that Nietzsche is great in isolation, in miniature, but is rarely interested in, or capable of, system-building.
In addition, Nietzsche is a thinker with considerable emotional investment in many of the subjects he is most concerned with. What this means is that he can't always be trusted. He is honest enough to admit this, but it remains true nevertheless. I see no contradiction in admitting this and yet still recognising him as one of the most remarkably honest of all thinkers.
On the other hand, some of the trivial and distracting academic exegesis of this text is, I think, quite deliberate, or at least symptomatic of a certain kind of person. Most contemporary academics are basically in agreement with so-called "progressive" values, and differ only in the methods they endorse in order to bring about, or to speed up, the apparent movement of history towards this glorious telos. It is simply naive to expect Nietzsche to get a sympathetic and honest reading from such advocates.
I will now proceed to clarify, in the broadest terms, some of the central terms at the heart of the Genealogy.
(a) Nietzsche's dishonesty regarding ressentiment and "bad conscience".
ReplyDeleteIn the second essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche informs us that the birth of "bad conscience" was the inevitable result of mankind leaving behind its nomadic past and finding itself locked in a "society". "Bad conscience", at its root, is instinctual and physiological inhibition.
"Half-humans", who were previously "happily adapted to a life of wilderness, war , nomadism and adventure" were henceforth "in a single stroke" caged within the walls of culture. Instincts previously discharging themselves in external acts are now frequently denied that outlet and become increasingly internalised, directed back within the self or forced to seek compensatory satisfactions (GM. II.16).
Unfortunately, Nietzsche also tells us that the conquering hordes who created the "state" were themselves free of "bad conscience" (GM.II.17).
Now this statement is carelessly and dangerously ambiguous. Either Nietzsche means that (a) the barbarian founders of the "state" were not the first to experience "bad conscience", they did not themselves succumb to "bad conscience" while the "state" was being violently established, or, he means that (b) long after the "state" was established and dominance was complete, the conquering horde continued to be free from "bad conscience"? (i.e. physiological inhibition)
In the first case, the conquering barbarians would be free from "bad conscience" simply because they had not yet completed their task of comprehensively subjugating their opponents. The violence would still be on-going and so the wild and aggressive instincts of the dominant horde could continue without restraint. In the second case, the conquering barbarians would remain free from "bad conscience" long after their victory and long after the "state" had been established.
The question is thus: once the "state" has been established and victory is complete, are only the conquered population subject to "bad conscience", or does "bad conscience" now apply, albeit to a lesser degree,
to both the conquerors and the conquered alike?
This is an important question because so much of Nietzsche's language and tone implies that the "masters" remain, long after the establishment of the "state", free from "bad conscience" themselves. If this is true, then it marks a very clear typological demarcation, obviously, between any "master" and "slave" moralities.
I don't think this is true, and more importantly, I think Nietzsche knows that it isn't true. I will now introduce two key passages to support this claim. Keep in mind that the concept at issue here, "bad conscience", is, first and foremost, physiological inhibition.
ReplyDelete(i) In order for any "state" to survive, certain forms of order, rules, decision-making and unity of purpose within the ruling caste itself need to be agreed and enforced, otherwise the "state" would simply descend into violent and arbitrary chaos and cease to be a "state" at all.
In the first essay Nietzsche says "We would be the last to deny that anyone who met these 'good men' only as enemies would know them only as 'evil' enemies".
He continues that "these same men, who are inter paras so strictly restrained by custom, respect, usage, gratitude, even more by circumspection and jealousy, and who, in their relations with one another prove so inventive in matters of consideration, self-control, tenderness, fidelity, pride, and friendship - these same men behave towards the outside world . . . in a manner not much better than predators on the rampage". (GM.I.11).
Clearly, if these "masters" are "strictly restrained", "circumspect" and practise "self-control", then they are, ipso facto, subject to "bad conscience". The fact that they indulge in predatory violence with those outside their group doesn't alter the fact that they are otherwise subject to physiological inhibition, and thus "bad conscience".
And just in case there be any doubt about the type of creature being described here, and its connection to the creators of the first "state", he adds "There is no mistaking the predator beneath the surface of all these noble races, the magnificent blond beast" (GM.II.11).
The words "beneath the surface" are a further admission that the original blond beast, who was essentially uninhibited and free, has ceased to exist.
The attentive reader will know that in the second essay, in offering his account of the birth of the "state" and the origin of "bad conscience", he described the original conquering barbarians as "some horde or other of blond predatory animals. . ."(GM.II.17).
So there is no doubt that the "masters" are also, inevitably, subject to physiological inhibition, to "bad conscience", to some degree. Once the "state" is established the "blond beast", the predatory, arbitrary, free, spontaneously violent, uninhibited individual is a thing of the past, he is not representative of a ruling caste.
(ii) Nietzsche explicitly tells us that the Genealogy should be seen as a "clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil".
ReplyDeleteThis assessment is itself partly disingenuous because on some key questions things are visibly clearer in Beyond Good and Evil than Nietzsche presents them in the Genealogy, particularly sections BGE.257-260.
In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche is very clear that every noble, aristocratic society began as the work of barbarians, and that the superiority of these beasts "lay not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical"(BGE.257). There is no hint in this section that these original conquering barbarians simply remained barbarians (i.e. free, wild, spontaneous, uninhibited predators) once their domination was established. The barbarian evolves into the noble, he does not simply remain a barbarian, because the noble does not enjoy the same instinctual freedom that the pre-state barbarian allegedly did. This is partly why the "political concept of rank always transforms itself into a spiritual concept of rank"(GM.I.6), this is how the nobles, as well as the subjugated population, begin to acquire "spiritual" qualities.
This is made very clear in BGE.259 where Nietzsche says that "To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation" can be part of "good manners" provided the individuals involved share similar "strength and value standards" and "belong to one body".
The relevant point here, once gain, is that once the "state" is established even the ruling caste of violent nobility refrain from indulging their predatory instincts spontaneously; and this can only mean that they too are subject to "bad conscience" and "ressentiment".
This point is often obscured by Nietzsche's claim in the Genealogy that ressentiment is the perogative of the "weak" and that the "noble" man rarely, if ever, experiences this sensation: "For the ressentiment of the noble man himself, if it appears at all, completes and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction. For that reason it does not poison"(GM.I.10).
Now ressentiment is said to be the preserve of "creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who find compensation in imaginary revenge"(GM.I.10).
This depiction of the noble man as a creature who immediately reacts to any insult or injury with an immediate and proportionate counter-strike is simply impossible to reconcile with Nietzsche's admission elsewhere that the noble caste refrains from mutual violence and practices self-control.
ReplyDeleteIn BGE.260, for example, when Nietzsche first introduces and contrasts the terms "master morality and slave morality" he says that among the "typical marks of nobility" that the "morality of the rulers" display is "The capacity for and the duty of . . . protracted revenge" and "subtlety in requital . . . a certain need to have enemies (as a conduit system, as it were, for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance" (BGE.260).
Protracted revenge may still be revenge but it is clearly not the kind of revenge that finds expression in an immediate counter-strike.
Once again we find Nietzsche, reluctantly perhaps, acknowledging the fact that the nobles do not routinely revenge any insult or injury in an immediate reaction, in an immediate act of revenge, in immediate requital. And "subtlety in requital" points to the same avoidance of an immediate and direct counter-strike. And this can only mean that the noble also experiences "bad conscience" and the feelings of ressentiment.
Notice, in particular, that as well as experiencing the feelings of "envy" (feelings which in the Genealogy Nietzsche often confines to the psychology of the "slave"), the noble man also finds himself needing "enemies as a conduit system", for various antagonistic emotions. This is a significant admission on Nietzsche's part because it acknowledges that the apparent "enemy" is, in reality, merely an opportunity, a pretext, a convenient scapegoat through which to vent aggressive emotions seeking release, emotions that were there prior to any actual encounter with the nominal "enemy" having taken place.
If a "conduit system" is necessary, and "enemies" (in advance), are required, then this is because forms of "substitute revenge" are being indulged, but "substitute revenge" and "substitute satisfactions" were supposed to be, according to Nietzsche's idealised moral typology in the Genealogy, the perogative of the "slave" who cannot vent his aggression directly and immediately onto those who harm him.
In an important section of the third essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche finally comes clean.
ReplyDeleteEmphasising that most of our suffering comes from individual physiology and the universal "bad conscience" that inevitably results from our being enclosed within the walls of culture, he says:
" According to my hypothesis, it is here alone, in a desire to anaesthetise pain through feeling, that the real physiological cause of ressentiment, of revenge, and related matters is to be found - although generally this is sought, quite wrongly it seems to me, in the defensive counter-strike, a merely reactive protective measure, a 'reflex movement' in the case of any kind of sudden injury and danger, like the way in which a frog still seeks to escape a corrosive acid once decapitated. But the difference is fundamental here: in one instance, the desire is to prevent further injury, in the other, to anaesthetise by means of any more intense emotion a secret pain and torment which is becoming unbearable, and, so to exclude it from consciousness for a moment at least. And for this purpose a feeling is required, the most intense feeling possible . . ." (GM.III.15.) See also GM.III.20.
These words need to be fully understood and appreciated, because they outline the fundamental theoretical background against which and within which all the argumentation of the Genealogy takes place.
The pain that needs anaesthetising is the universally experienced pain of "bad conscience", and ressentiment (as well as "revenge" itself) is ultimately the emotional and psychological result of this physiological inhibition and discomfort, and is not, contrary to all appearances, a response to any specific, localised, contingent injury, weakness or inferiority.
This point cannot be sufficiently emphasised, yet it is often missing from many commentaries. Intense ressentiment and even "revenge" itself is, like "every great feeling", and excess of emotion, which is harnessed and stimulated in order to anaesthetise the universal pain of "bad conscience", pain that is already there and exists independently of any contingent injury or insult.
Although the Genealogy contains great subtlety and admirable complexity in its argumentation, it also contains an extraordinary amount of carelessness of expression. I think much of this is quite deliberate (and unfortunate).
ReplyDeleteWhat does this mean? It means that some remarks and judgements are simply not true and are not to be trusted.
For example, regardless of what any specific sentence or passage may say, it is clear from both the Genealogy as a whole and Nietzsche's other books, that there is no clear separation and boundary line to be discovered between "master and slave morality".
These are crude polemical and propagandist terms, and there has, in reality, never been pure and genuinely distinct incarnations of these phantoms among any sizable group. The difference between all "master and slave" morality is one of degree and not one of kind.
There is a reason why Nietzsche allocates no time at all to exploring the group dynamics of the original blond beasts prior to their subjugation of another population.
Regarding the formation of groups generally, he says: "The strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate; if the former unite together, it is only with the aim of an aggressive collective action and collective satisfaction of their will to power, and with much resistance from the individual conscience"(GM.III.18).
Here the "strong" come together because by doing so they get to enjoy an aggressive collective action that, on their own, they would be too weak to accomplish. But there is a price to be paid for this "collective satisfaction", and the price they choose to pay is that they are no longer free to act as they wish. They must now submit to some form of collective command structure, and unity of purpose, which they, individually, do not control. This is why there is "much resistance from the individual conscience".
This logic of group dynamics simply must have applied to the original blond beasts who created the "state". In order for the blond beasts to be one group, and to resist atomisation and separation into individual parts, individual members within it must have given up some of their freedom and autonomy.
But once this is admitted it destroys any attempt pretend that these individual blond beasts were all "strong" (i.e. unwilling to submit to the demands of others). And because this inhibition and restraint must have taken place it simply isn't possible that the individual members could altogether escape feelings of "bad conscience" and "ressentiment". Few, if any of them, could actually act as they please.
It is undeniable, of course, that some individuals and groups are more powerful, more violent, more self-reliant, more honest, more affirmative than others, and that while no one can escape feelings of ressentiment entirely, some are engulfed and dominated by such reactive sensations to an alarming degree, while others are not. None of this is to be denied.
ReplyDeleteWhat is worthy of denial is any attempt by Nietzsche to absolutise these distinctions in any coherent and dichotomous fashion. "Master and slave", "strong and weak", these are relative terms, fluid and mobile, and sensitive to context. Sometimes Nietzsche forgets this or pretends things could be otherwise, and it's this resistance or blindness on his part that accounts for so many of the confusions and ambiguities, moral and characterological, in the Genealogy.
For example, it would be difficult for any commentator to argue that Periclean Athens did not represent Nietzsche's highest conception of culture yet realised on earth (with the Renaissance coming second). In relation to the "Other" these Athenians were capable of reverting back to the behaviour of the blond beast, without shame or apology.
But this contingent reversion to "barbarism" is not a remotely sufficient reason for Nietzsche's high admiration. What Nietzsche admired so much in Periclean Athens were its creative "cultural" achievements, and the characterological traits of many of its leading figures, coupled with the fact that it was not ashamed of the "blond beast" which lay "beneath its surface" and became visible especially in conflicts with the external world (GM.I.11).
It is very noticeable, for example, that Sparta and the Peloponnesian War is never mentioned in the Genealogy. Wouldn't Sparta, with its austerity, eternal militarism and its Helots, necessarily see Athens as a "corrupt" and "decadent" civilisation? And didn't Sparta defeat Nietzsche's beloved Periclean Athens in war?
One would be making a gross error of judgement if one thought that Nietzsche favoured Sparta over Athenian civilisation, and no informed commentator (as far as i'm aware) has ever defended such a preposterous claim. And yet, certain careless and irresponsible remarks in the Genealogy create an ambiguity that Nietzsche could have, and should have, easily avoided.
The biggest problem with the Genealogy, then, is that Nietzsche, for some reason, chose to present a pair of supposedly antithetical and clearly distinct moral perspectives, that don't, and indeed can't, actually exist.
ReplyDeleteThe "strong" and the "weak" are never quite as unrelentingly, comprehensively, strong or weak as Nietzsche sometimes depicts them; and the same goes for his most idealised abstractions regarding the analogous dichotomies of health and sickness, noble and slave, active and reactive, affirmation and negation, instinctual spontaneity and inhibition, ressentiment and amor fati, and active and passive forms of asceticism.
It is not that these categories are to be discarded as useless and inapplicable. On the contrary, I think these categories and distinctions are meaningful and important. What is to be disregarded is the falsehood that they have ever existed, and could ever meaningfully exist, in pure, discrete and absolute forms. It's Nietzsche's unwillingness to make this point absolutely clearly and unequivocally, and to stick to it thereafter, that leads to so much of the confusion and sophistry that surrounds this text and much of the commentary surrounding it.
(b) Next, I will look at the concepts of "Power" and "strength" in the Genealogy.
ReplyDeleteIt is Nietzsche's view, quite correctly I believe, that power-relations are fundamental in human affairs. I am in complete agreement with the following:
"Accordingly, 'right' and 'wrong' exist only from the moment the law is established (and not . . . from the moment of injury). To talk of right and wrong as such is senseless; in themselves, injury, violation, exploitation, destruction can of course be nothing 'wrong', in so far as life operates essentially - that is, in terms of its basic functions - through injury, violation, exploitation and destruction and cannot be concieved in any other way" (GM.II.11).
Whenever law and justice are enforced in a community this is always a reflection of existing power-relations within the group. The moral typologies that Nietzsche highlights and investigates in the Genealogy necessarily come into being as the result of power-relation within and between competing groups. Without social power of some kind one has only impotent and inconsequential localised and subjective abstractions, soap bubbles with no discernible sociological effects.
But Nietzsche, at times in the Genealogy, too often uses terms like "power" and "strength" (and their corresponding antonyms) in an overtly unrealistic and misleading manner, as if it made any sense to simply speak of concepts like "strength" and "power" as such.
Nietzsche is right to insist that there is no absolute, universal and unconditional "right" and "wrong", as such; but his rejection of moral absolutism applies equally to the concepts of "power" and "strength".
Rather than cite some of the numerous examples in the Genealogy where Nietzsche is irresponsibly careless in his use of terms such as "power" and "strength", I will here simply highlight some important, though rather obvious, distinctions that need to be made (distinctions that Nietzsche himself refuses to make perfectly clear).
ReplyDeleteSome varieties of "power" and "strength" that need noting:
(I) An individual with incredible relative physical strength and power, who can accomplish astonishing feats of power and strength by virtue of their physical characteristics.
(II) An individual with incredible relative physical power who has, nevertheless, an easy-going, largely passive psychology.
(III) An individual with incredible relative physical power who has, by contrast, and incredibly aggressive and confrontational psychology.
(IV) An individual who lacks incredible physical strength, but who is extremely aggressive, and also cunning.
(V) An individual who is distinguished by being an ally, friend, relative, or associate of an individual or group who is extremely powerful.
(VI) An individual who is distinguished principally by their extraordinary proficiency in the use of weapons.
(VII) A group which enjoys tremendous power by virtue of its numerical, strategic, geographical, informational, economic or technical character.
(VIII) An individual at the head of a powerful political community.
(IX) An non-state actor who has tremendous ideological or religious power over others.
(X) A military commander at the head of an incredibly powerful, efficient, and obedient army.
(XI) An individual who is physically and psychologically strong, affirmative and self-reliant, but who shuns all groups which he is not able to dominate completely.
This list could easily have been made longer and tighter, but my point, I hope, will be clear. It is quite impossible to read the Genealogy without noticing that Nietzsche makes no effort to clearly distinguish between very different forms of power and strength.
Think of Nietzsche's frequent praise and admiration of "strength" and "power" in the Genealogy, and then try to specify what kind of strength and power, exactly, is being championed and why? There is no single answer to this question that can be consistently applied to the Genealogy as a whole.
Nietzsche can never quite make his mind up on who the truly powerful and strong really are, and which forms of strength and power he admires and despises. He never reaches any settled position on this question, and because he doesn't it is misleading to place so much emphasis on ill-defined terms such as "power" and "strength".
(c) The ascetic will and the ascetic priest.
ReplyDeleteI will begin here by first presenting a deliberately simplified and extremely condensed outline of the most important features of the entire Genealogy. I will do this, in spite of the obvious risk, because I frequently encounter readings of this text which, in my view, can't even get the basics right; and this is neither the time nor the place for me to engage in precise and lengthy detail with each and every misreading i've encountered.
The following should be read as a heuristic which is primarily concerned with getting the basic outline right, knowing full well that very many subtler, more nuanced and very important details still need to be identified and assessed.
Mankind's nomadic existence came to an end through the establishment of the primitive "state", and the "state" was the work of violent and predatory barbarians. One group dominated while the other was subjugated. Friction and conflict is always present within and between each group, and it to be presumed that no one, not even the leader of the ruling group, could simply act as he pleased, regardless of context.
This state of affairs, naturally enough, expelled a great amount of autonomy and arbitrariness from the earth, but the degree and nature of this restriction was not equally shared among the population. Nietzsche suggests that the resulting systemic restrictions and inhibitions on certain behaviours manifests itself as "bad conscience" (physiological discomfort that results, usually unknowingly, from instinctual inhibition and physiological disorders), and he believes that our most basic physiological impulses, derives and instincts cannot be divorced from our being and that they continue to operate within us, long after our species has been socialised in the state, and long after our nomadic and barbarian ancestors have vanished into the distant past.
These instincts, he believes, never go away; they continue making demands, they continue seeking satisfaction and expression.
Everyone experiences these instinctual frustrations to some extent, even the most powerful, but the degree of instinctual inhibition and frustration varies tremendously from person to person, and from caste to caste.
Sooner or later, a rupture occurs within the ruling caste, and some of its members begin to forsake physical vitality in favour of more "spiritual" and "intellectual" concerns. Neither of these terms, at this stage, are to be understood as necessarily effete, or fragile or whimsical, they are both compatible with tremendous seriousness, power, courage, ambition and cunning.
Since these more "intellectual" types within the ruling caste have increasingly different conditions of preservation and growth, they sometimes find themselves in conflict with their more physically assertive "brothers" and "cousins". Everything depends upon circumstances; sometimes the "intellectual" type capitulate, sometimes they come to an amicable agreement (perhaps they agree on a kind of separation-of-powers understanding), and sometimes they achieve dominance.
ReplyDeleteThe subjugated population, on the other hand, have fewer outlets for the direct discharge of their instincts, and are unable to resist humiliation or injury of some sort from their political masters. Opportunities also exist here for introspection and self-overcoming but they are severely limited relative to the aristocratic ascetics.
The historical examples of Buddhism and Brahmanism, to say nothing of ancient European societies, demonstrate that the aristocratic ascetics, even when they gain ultimate power, do not necessarily promote hostility and antagonism or moralic acid towards the rich, the worldly, the powerful, the rulers, the happy. Buddhism, for example, prohibits ressentiment of any kind, and the Law Book of Manu assigns the more "muscular and temperamental" types to the role of defending the rule of the "spiritual" caste.
With the creation of the "state" and the resulting hierarchies favoured by aristocratic rule, mankind as a whole becomes "sick" because it is unable to function as our evolutionary past prepared us. However, it is only via this "sickness", this prohibition on various forms of instinctual release and activeness, that mankind becomes meaningful and significant. As he says: "Bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about it, but an illness in the same way that pregnancy is an illness"(GM.II.18).
So far, we have largely resisted infecting the wound of civilisation itself (bad conscience) with the additional wound of self-denigration and castigating moralism. But now a new kind of ascetic priest comes to power in the midst of a community newly oppressed and subjugated. Religion is now used as an instrument to justify the enslavement and humiliation of a community and it begins to take pride in worldly failure and to condemn the powerful and the unbelievers. Rather than abandon the God who had seemed to abandon them, the Jews after Babylonian and Assyrian enslavement, altered their conception of him. Bad conscience, ressentiment and theology now all come together in such a way that Christianity later embraces and extends.
The inevitable suffering of life, both personal and communal, is now understood as punishment for sin, and sinfulness is neither contingent or conditional but unavoidable and intrinsic. Chance is robbed of its innocence, human nature is corrupt, our instincts are depraved, even our virtues are disguised forms of depravity and selfishness. Suffering is deserved, complaint is blasphemy and the earth itself can offer no satisfaction or redemption. There is no earthly escape from this unrelenting depravity and wickedness, and those who love life, earthly pleasure and the world itself are the vilest and most despised of all.
ReplyDeleteThis whole outlook represents a tremendous inversion of values, naturalness and earthly affirmation, and on the face of it, seems extraordinarily peculiar and absurd. How then, did such a perverse set of values come to prevail? The short answer to this complex question is that mankind has striven to escape from the meaninglessness and Godless innocence of its suffering, but that in its rush to find a utilitarian meaning in its suffering, it has been unable (or unwilling) to understand the real material causes of its suffering. Consequently, it has been unable (or unwilling) to understand the utilitarian and thoroughly narcissistic nature of its allegiance to ascetic values (their raison d'etre).
By means of this ignorance or dishonesty it fails to understand itself and it fails to recognise the distinction between active and passive forms of asceticism.
It fails to understand that every single human being, without exception and regardless of circumstance and individual physiological and psychological constitution, is unavoidably and innocently selfish, seeking to further its own interests to the best of its ability, given its status, constitution and enviornment.
It fails to understand that the barbarian and the ascetic, the hedonist and the martyr, the philanthropist and the misanthrope, the sadist and the masochist, the saint and the sinner, the good and the evil, the master and the slave, the leader and follower, are all, without exception, necessarily and innocently (metaphysically speaking) pursuing the same fundamental goal, and that all our actions, values and commitments are instruments towards that inevitably self-affirming end.
Asceticism is a purely descriptive tag, there needn't be any praise or blame attached to it. A warrior and hermit, to take two examples, can each find uses for it in some form or other.
For Nietzsche, the obvious differences between the warrior and the hermit belong only to the foreground of things, in that each of them has very different conditions of preservation and growth, and therefore employs different instruments, different means, in order to attain their optimum self (whatever that may be).
ReplyDeleteAt the fundamental level, both are pursuing the same basic thing(s), and at this level there is no reason to blame or praise, or to love or hate anyone, because things simply couldn't be otherwise.
Asceticism, then, has been practised all along by a variety of types, simply as a means to attain some goal that the individual judges to be beneficial to himself in some way. That's all, in essence, asceticism really is. It's an instrument, a means that the self employs in order to advance itself, depending on its goals and circumstances. It is no surprise then, and no accident, that various forms of the ascetic ideal have been embraced by a wide variety of people in a wide variety of circumstances.
Unfortunately, the ascetic ideal, as such, has been seized upon by numerous otherworldly types who have moralised it at the expense of natural humanity and the natural world.
The practise and concept has been hijacked by those most intent on depriving humanity of its happiness and dignity. It has been viewed as a praiseworthy denigration of the earth and the natural appetites, as such, in favour of a world unseen and superior, while in reality it has never ceased to be anything other than a thoroughly selfish and worldly expedient.
Accordingly, we need to understand the fundamental difference between active and passive forms of asceticism.
Active asceticism would be asceticism practised freely and knowingly for one's own unique benefit on earth. Passive asceticism would be asceticism practised as justifiable punishment, as sin, as shame, as hatred of self and world, as self-loathing - all justifiable only with reference to a being outside the self (God), and a world beyond the natural world.
This is the fundamental corruption and confusion that the Genealogy wants to unmask and uncover. Nietzsche wants to take back the ascetic ideal in the service of naturalists, atheists and affirmers and to restore its inherently natural and earthly status.
Because so much of the Genealogy aggressively deplores what priests, philosophers and the masses have done with the ascetic ideal, it is easy to misread Nietzsche as being intrinsically and implacably against it. But nothing could be further from the truth. Virtually everything he really loves, values and wants couldn't take place without it and he knows it.
In the hands of the most anti-natural and opportunistic priests, ideologues and politicians, the values of self-denial and transcendence (all impossible, all phantoms) have become, and have largely remained, unchallenged, long after the rule of the blond beasts has ceased.
Instead of "bad conscience", ressentiment, and asceticism being seen for the things they truly are, entirely natural, entirely understandable things, they have been systematically misrepresented in the service of a morality which requires that we continue to deny some very obvious facts about ourselves and our place in the universe.
(d) The Politics of Inversion.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche states that it took a "long time" (GM.I.2) before forms of herd/slave morality came to actually dominate European culture generally, and to replace conceptions of morality that were basically aristocratic in origin.
Repeating his claim that the political concept of rank (i.e. actualised power) always transforms itself into a spiritual concept of rank, he states that: "Roughly around the time of the Thirty Years War [1618-1648]- late enough, then - this sense [the aristocratic sense] was displaced to produce the one which is usual now. This seems to me to be a fundamental insight with respect to the genealogy of morals" (GM.I.4).
These few lines are very important, but their significance is often overlooked. What changed in 17th century Europe, in order to bring about the dominance of herd/slave values, obviously, was not that the Jewish priesthood suddenly inaugurated the "slave revolt in morality", or that Christianity suddenly became the dominant religion of Europe. What changed were concrete power-relations on the ground.
(e) "Guilt", "Bad Conscience", and Related Matters.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Nietzsche appears to place great significance on the notion of "bad conscience" in the Genealogy, this alledged significance is difficult to justify once we look at Nietzsche's actual treatment of this phrase in the book itself.
At the begining of GM.II.4. Nietzsche treats "the sense of guilt [and], the whole matter of 'bad conscience'" to be, originally, one and the same thing. He goes on to suggest that this phenomenon originated in the "contractual relationship between creditor and debtor" in the most primitive forms of exchange, prior to the creation of any "state".
This is where promises are made; and promises require an enduring will, a will which persists amid the flux of intervening events between the promise and its actual delivery. The price paid for failing to abide by one's promises is the infliction of suffering by the creditor on the debtor.
If promises are broken the creditor gets to enjoy the pleasure of inflicting cruelty on another, the pleasure of violation (which is usually a privilege of the "masters").
A little later Nietzsche says that "the feeling of guilt, of personal responsibility originated, as we have seen, in the earliest and most primordial relationship between men, in the relationship between buyer and seller, debtor and creditor: it is here that one man first encountered one another . . ."(GM.II.8).
Lest there be any doubt that he is talking here about events that occurred prior to the creation of any "state", he underlines the point: "Buying and selling, together with the psychology which accompanies them, are older than even the beginnings of any social form of organisation and association"(GM.II8).
Now, this analysis is wholly incompatible with, and directly contradicts, the more famous account he gives, just eight sections later, for the origin of "bad conscience".
In GM.II.16 he argues that "bad conscience" arose as a direct consequence of the formation of the "state", which forced previously externalised instincts to turn back against the self, or to discharge themselves through various indirect means.
Did this phenomenon only apply to the conquered nomads? What of the violent creators of the proto-"state", the conquering blond beasts?
Nietzsche says that "The meaning of guilt . . . is unknown to these born organisers . . . They were not the ones among whom 'bad conscience' grew up, as goes without saying from the outset - but it would not have existed without them" because through them a "vast quantity of freedom" was "expelled from the world. This instinct of freedom made latent through force. . . this instinct of freedom . . . ultimately still venting itself and discharging itself only upon itself: such is bad conscience at its origin, that and nothing more"(GM.II.17).
And again: "He who is capable of giving commands, who is a 'master' by nature, who behaves violently in deed and gesture - what are contracts to him!"(GM.II.17).
It is inconceivable that the blond beasts, the future "masters", prior to their establishment of the primitive "state", did not engage in these primordial forms of exchange, both with other groups, and between themselves.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, the primordial forms of exchange, from which guilt is said to have emerged, must have applied to humanity generally, prior to the formation of any "state".
But, once this is granted, it necessarily destroys the idealised distinctions that Nietzsche is keen to employ throughout the entire book; distinctions between active and passive, noble and base, free and enslaved, strong and weak, etc.
None of these supposedly antithetical distinctions deserve to be taken literally, because none of them exist in pure form in actuality; they represent differences of degrees and not of kinds. In reality Nietzsche, the profound psychologist, in his sober moments, knows this.
When he employs these distinctions he is trying to change the world in a manner consistent with his own idiosyncratic interests, he is no longer trying to simply understand and depict it.
On the one hand, he is too involved, too partial in all this, to resist lying and falsifying things, but, on the other hand, to his credit, he is too honest to resist contradicting his own falsifications and visceral/aesthetic preferences.
In addition, a little later in the second essay Nietzsche offers yet another, a third account, of the origin of bad conscience and guilt; this time in the notion of ancestor indebtedness (see GM.II.19).
The inconsistency and ambiguity that i'm drawing attention to here is too obvious, too easily noticed, too explicit in the text, to be anything other than deliberate. But before we get too critical of Nietzsche we should remember that, for all his faults, he didn't write for academics and had a very low opinion of them, with good reason . . .
So much useless academic commentary surrounds this book because it is frequently read as if it represented a kind of conceptual milestone in Nietzsche's thought, as if here, more than anywhere else, he had attained a clarity and coherence that his work had hitherto lacked on matters of vital importance to him.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe this. It simply isn't that kind of book, and he isn't that kind of thinker. Academics, generally speaking, "Nietzschean" academics included, lack a genuine interest in the topics that most interest Nietzsche (just read their books!); their "clarity" and "coherence" is only evident because they lack Nietzsche's passion, honesty, and his willingness to seriously offend public opinion.
(f) The Future Task of the Philosopher, and the Problem of Value.
ReplyDeleteThe first essay of the Genealogy is arguably the most vivid, shocking and memorable part of the entire book. I'm speaking here primarily of its visceral, iconoclastic and polemical quality, the forcefulness and directness of the language and terminology employed. There is a level of rage, contempt and anxiety on display here concerning the overwhelming majority of historical and contemporary humanity; and this contrasts strikingly with a disturbing sympathy and bias towards those who embody our most violent, sadistic, predatory and destructive instincts.
And yet, the accumulating force of Nietzsche's violent dissatisfaction with humanity, especially current humanity, is severely undermined by both the tone and content of the essay's concluding section. The crescendo of intensity unexpectedly dissolves with a respectful appeal to academic philosophers, historians, physiologists, philologists, and general physicians.
He continues: "In fact, all tables of commandments, all 'Though shalts' known to history or ethnological research, certainly require physiological investigation and interpretation prior to psychological examination. Equally, all await a critique from the medical sciences. The question: what is the value of this or that table of commandments and 'morality'? should be examined from the most varied perspectives . . . From now on, all disciples have to prepare the future task of the philosopher: this task being understood as the solution of the problem of value, the determination of the hierarchy of values".(GM.I.17).
This oddness is characteristic of Nietzsche, but no less perplexing for all that. If these words were placed at the begining of the first essay, instead of at its end, then much of the content of the essay would seem ludicrous, because as the concluding section stresses, so much difficult and time-consuming interdisciplinary work still needs to be done, before those who do not already share Nietzsche's emotional predispositions can be reasonably expected to sympathise with his (ideological) plight.
If so much work still needs to be done, by others, before this problem can be adequately and intelligently addressed, then it follows that much of Nietzsche's engagement with these problems is necessarily premature and subjective. (cf.Daybreak.453).
The other major difficulty concerns the "future task of the philosopher" in determining the "hierarchy of values".
ReplyDeleteDoes this hierarchy of values refer to the conflict within the self that the philosopher experiences? In that case the task of the future philosopher is to recognise and then establish an order of rank among impulses within him, in order to bring about an "improved self" in a project of self-overcoming.
Or is the formulation of a hierarchy of values primarily a sociological project? A project whereby the philosopher, having absorbed all the factual and scientific work attained by the relevant specialists, now promotes values applicable to the entire social order, values that are informed by, but not determined by, the relevant knowledge now available.
This possibility seems fanciful. Given Nietzsche's explicit prejudice in favour of the "few" (the very few) as opposed to the "many", why should the overwhelming majority of the population take any notice? Why would the masses sacrifice themselves for the sake of the (very) few? Nietzsche is keenly aware that the masses are increasingly powerful and the time is past when they (when we) can be so easily swept aside.
And this hopeful elitism, of course, presupposes that the facts which Nietzsche's specialists present to the future philosopher are conducive to Nietzsche's current prejudices. Unfortunately for Nietzsche, it is just as likely that these specialists will present to the future philosopher the virtual impossibility of any such project succeeding!
If the hierarchy of values refers primarily to establishing an order of rank among the various types and groups that inhabit society (and Nietzsche strongly suggests here that it does) than this seems to me like a compensatory fantasy indulged by an individual all too keenly aware of his own sociological impotence, and the impotence of philosophers generally.
There is no reason whatever to believe that modern society can be shaped and determined by a Lycurgus-like figure in the interest of Nietzsche's peculiar type of elitism. And Zarathustra's teaching, such as it is, can only apply to the very few and it's futile to pretend otherwise. As Nietzsche makes clear elsewhere, as soon as large numbers of people (nominally) associate themselves with any noble doctrine, they inevitably corrupt it.
If the values promoted and established by an individual or a society always reflect the perceived conditions of preservation and growth within competing centres of power (and Nietzsche repeatedly asserts this), then it is wishful thinking to imagine that Nietzsche's "future philosopher" is likely to succeed in any significant sociological sense.
Nietzsche's hopes for a "future philosopher" is his way of finessing the fact that he himself, and philosophy generally, can find no solution to his sociological problem. (cf. the final sentence of BGE.251.)
(g) The mythology of "nobility".
ReplyDeleteIn Beyond Good and Evil, the preceding work that the Genealogy is supposed to clarify and supplement, Nietzsche devotes an entire section of the book to the question: What is Noble?
Given that the question of "nobility", in one form or another, constitutes the very heart and pinnacle of Nietzsche's concerns, we should perhaps expect that here, more than anywhere else, he would present us with his most impressive definitions, arguments and justifications in favour of his concepts of "nobility".
Unfortunately, he declares that:"It is not his actions which reveal him [the noble man] - actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable-; neither is it his 'works'. . . . It is not the works, it is the faith which is decisive here, which determines the order of rank here . . . some fundamental certainty which a noble soul possesses in regard to itself . . . The noble soul has reverence for itself.-" (BGE.287).
It should be obvious that this is an alarmingly weak and thin defence and definition of "nobility", given the immense time and energy Nietzsche has devoted to this subject.
In fact, so much of the 'What is Noble?' section is neither cheerful nor affirmative, but despairing, sad, wounded, painfully knowing and unimpressed.
"The more a psychologist . . . turns his attention to the more select cases and human beings, the greater grows the danger of his suffocation from pity: he needs hardness and cheerfulness more than other men. For the corruption, the ruination of the higher human beings, of more strangely constituted souls, is the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one's eyes. The manifold torment of the psychologist who has discovered this ruination, who discovers this whole inner 'wretchedness' of the highest human beings . . . first once and then almost always throughout the whole of history . . . And who knows whether what has happened hitherto in all great cases has not always been the same thing: that the mob worshipped a god - and that the 'god' was was only a poor sacrificial beast! Success has always been the greatest liar" (BGE.269).
Here the entire history of so-called "higher men" is depicted as overwhelmingly a sham, a disguise, a foreground perspective which conceals an "inner wretchedness". Again, it should be obvious that this judgement contradicts so much of the idealisation of "nobility" that Nietzsche frequently condones elsewhere in his work. On the other hand, Nietzsche makes clear in this confessional passage that he, personally, is profoundly wounded and diminished by this psychological insight into the inherent corruption of so-called "higher" human beings.
In a nutshell, Nietzsche is viscerally predisposed to falsify and mythologise the concept of the "great man" because he finds it so lacking in reality; and he finds this historical absence of "genuine" greatness, incredibly painful and anxiety provoking. His intellectual conscience will not allow his mythologising tendencies to go unchallenged, but it is, alas, not strong enough to prevent these falsifying tendencies from surfacing. (cf.BGE.289).
ReplyDeleteThe crucial point is not, of course, an egalitarian one. Nietzsche is, I believe, correct to insist on the fact that people are not equal, and that great individuals do, in fact, exist and matter.
Where he goes wrong is in pretending that they are fundamentally and unavoidably different from the rest of us in essence. He is so appalled and horrified by certain natural qualities in human nature that he, at times, cannot rest content with these qualities existing in a sublimated, marginalised or repressed form; he want them utterly absent and non-existent. The physiological and psychological impossibility of this desire being actualised is what drives him into the realms of fantasy and falsification regarding the "noble" man.
I have so far offered various criticisms of the Genealogy, the most significant of which is that Nietzsche in this work is, at times, driven to incoherence, falsification, and obscurantism because his is either unable or unwilling to reject, unambiguously and consistently, the possibility of genuinely antithetical and distinct types of human beings.
ReplyDeleteWe can witness his attatchment to the possibility of genuinely antithetical and distinct moral (and physiological) types in the following:
"There is master morality and slave morality -I add at once that in all higher and mixed cultures attempts at mediation between the two are apparent and more frequently confusion and mutual misunderstanding between them, indeed sometimes their harsh juxtaposition - even within the same man, within one soul" (BGE.260).
These remarks sound, superficially, as if Nietzsche fully accepts that pure forms of each morality are, inevitably, absent from the real world, and that a degree of overlap and intermingling of the two types always exists. But in fact he's saying no such thing.
He's actually saying that however frequent the intermingling and overlap is between the two moralities, pure forms of each have meaningfully existed.
He's saying that, (1) in primitive cultures the two types are, or can be, distinct and pure, and (2) that even in higher and mixed cultures, pure forms of each can, and do, continue to exist, however infrequently.
Nowhere in Nietzsche's entire work, published or unpublished, is he able to provide any sustained and credible arguments or historical data in favour of this proposition. Every form of "higher humanity" that he presents to the reader inevitably contains some portion of weakness, negation, ressentiment, decadence, hesitancy, prudence, subordination, asceticism or dependency - and at times Nietzsche finds this fact intolerable.
It's this extreme aversion to any and all forms of "decadence" that leads him to construct imaginary (i.e. pure) forms of affirmation, potency, activeness and strength.
When Nietzsche's in this mood he can't be trusted, he has become, like all party men, a liar. Thankfully, he's frequently not in such a defensive mood and is able to reemerge as an insightful and honest thinker once more.
(h) The "Good" Man.
ReplyDeleteI have tried to show that Nietzsche sometimes falsifies the concept of the "great man" in a dangerous and irresponsible manner and that a large part of his motivation for this fabrication is that he is, at times, extremely disturbed by various forms of anti-naturalness that have dominated western civilisation for a long, long time.
However, although Nietzsche undoubtedly falsifies things, much of what he says remains true and important. Every criticism I have of him should be understood in that context. He at times overstates things, but there remains a great deal of truth in much of what he says, and nowhere is this more applicable than in the case of the "good man".
Part of the reason why Nietzsche is so reluctant to unequivocally castigate the aggressive, encroaching, cruelty-inflicting human specimen is that he finds essentially the same destructive desires at the very heart of the nominally peace-loving, humanitarian, sympathetic ideals of the "good man".
The primary historical vehicle for the concept of the "good man" has been Christianity, but the decline of Christian faith has not, for the most part, resulted in a significant re-evaluation of the "good man". On the contrary, herd morality has been cast in ever glowing terms in the discourse advanced by secular ideologies such as socialism and liberalism (to take the most prominent examples). The dominance and power of herd morality in the contemporary world far surpasses anything Nietzsche actually experienced in his lifetime.
"Good men never tell the truth" Nietzsche declared in Ecce Homo, and virtually all of our contemporary "good men", especially the most articulate and sophisticated among us, take care to keep certain lies going; for example: the lie of "natural justice", the lie of equality, the lie of "altruism", the lie of "exploitation", the lie of identity politics, the lie of "false consciousness", the lie of equating relative poverty with innocence and virtue, the lie of political correctness, the lie of equating human dignity with consumerism, the lie of human "brotherhood/sisterhood", the lie of treating science as merely "another way of knowing" among other equally valid perspectives, the lie of cultural egalitarianism, the lie of denigrating the drive for distinction, the lie of treating the working class as necessarily "oppressed", the lie of denying entrenched reactionary forces within various so-called "oppressed" groups, the unrelentingly faux middle class (especially academic and journalistic) affinity with the working class . . .
As Nietzsche's so-called "free spirit" says in the Genealogy - "Who among us would be a free spirit if it were not for the existence of the Church?".
The Church today is often perceived as more likely to "hinder rather than help" the advancement of herd morality, more likely to alienate than seduce, because it "remains something crude and uncouth, repulsive to a more delicate intellect, to a really modern taste" (GM.I.9.).
In other words, many of the lies and motivations behind religious dogma continue to flourish in secular and atheistic perspectives. This is the problem that isn't dissolving away with historical and technological "progress", and it is largely because this herd-flattering morality grows ever more powerful with each passing day that Nietzsche's analysis continues to be relevant in the modern world; to some of us at least . . .
The modern, dominant conceptions of "good" (in the west); what they are and how they came to dominate, is a question of great importance. But, most of what I have to say on this crucial subject I will say elsewhere, especially in the still to be completed, "Last Man, Modernity and Politics" section.
ReplyDelete(i) The Ungraspable Will To Power.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the most baffling aspect of Nietzsche's entire output is his treatment of the "will to power". In various books, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards, he makes the grandest claims possible for this theory, suggesting that it essentially explains all organic and inorganic events in the universe, as well as the so-called "laws of nature".
Why would such a subtle and sceptical thinker repeatedly advance such nonsense? And how could he possibly imagine that such claims should be taken seriously in the absence of serious, rigorous, detailed arguments and empirical evidence?
My best attempts to answer these questions are to be found in the "Will To Power" section, so I will say no more about it here. The only point I wish to highlight at present is that even in the simplest, most elementary definitional sense, he can't even remain consistent.
At one point in the Genealogy the will to power is characterised as "the essence of life" (GM.II.12), while a little later it is characterised as "the strongest, most life-affirming drive" (GM.III.18). First it's the "essence" of things, then it's one "drive" among others.
Nietzsche claims that "activity" in the entire biological realm, precedes "adaptation" (contra Herbert Spencer), which he calls a "second-order activity, a mere reactivity", and yet he calls this apparently unconditional push towards "activity" to be "one of its [life's] basic concepts" (GM.II.12).
The language being used here is incredibly sloppy. If activity directed outwards is "one" of life's "basic concepts" then this must mean that, alongside this primordial push towards external activity, there are other, equally primordial concepts.
I am ignoring here other rather obvious problems with the "will to power" as an omnipresent and supreme, all-pervading principle of a psychological, biological or inorganic kind, and merely highlighting the fact that Nietzsche, even at the most basic, abstract level, can't be clear about how far the "will to power" extends and applies in nature.
Nietzsche seriously misunderstood aspects of Darwinism because he mistakenly thought it posited "self-preservation" and the "will to exist" as the "cardinal drive" in an organic being (see, BGE.13. and GS.349), and he thought such things were too passive to account for biological existence as it is. What he doesn't seem to have understood is that it is reproduction that is nature's "cardinal value" and that "self-preservation" is essentially a means to that end (the end of reproduction), the propagation of our genetic material into the future.
But be that as it may, it is not Nietzsche's ignorance or misinterpretation of biology that primarily concerns me here. What I am drawing attention to is his failure to use language carefully and precisely where it's most needed, his inability or unwillingness to articulate clearly and consistently just what he means by the phrase "the will to power".
ReplyDeleteThis carelessness of expression regarding the will to power in the Genealogy applies also to other key terms in the book, such as: ressentiment, bad conscience, power, master, slave, ascetic ideals, ascetic priest, blond beast, aristocratic and the herd. It is simply not possible to give an uncontroversial definition of these terms consistent with their usage throughout the book.
Nietzsche, it shouldn't be forgotten, is eminently capable of writing lucidly on difficult and complex subjects, so it is difficult to imagine that he was genuinely aiming at clarity in his employment of these terms. Too many interpreters of this book focus on undecidable and inconsequential aspects of this work because they treat it as a "scholarly" work, and in doing so they typically ignore what's most important about it.
(j) All Roads (mis)Lead to Zarathustra.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the second essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche invokes Zarathustra as the gateway out of the nihilism and passive asceticism that he has been opposing so vehemently. Zarathustra is said to be "pregnant with the future" - the same words that Nietzsche had used to describe the process of internalised aggression that accompanied the formation of the "state" (GM.II.16).
Zarathustra is neither master, nor slave, nor ascetic priest. He conforms to none of the broad categories that Nietzsche frequently employs in the first two essays.
The closest thing to Zarathustra in the entire Genealogy is to be found in GM.III.10. Here Nietzsche argues that the historical philosopher has been predisposed to obscure himself in the form of the ascetic priest, in the "dark, repulsive form of a caterpillar" and that the "bright and dangerous winged creature, the 'spirit' which the caterpillar concealed within itself" may, in the future, be able to shed its skin and emerge more honestly and fruitfully into the light.
If Nietzsche is to be taken seriously here then it means that much of the terminology and localised value judgements of the Genealogy are not to be take too seriously, because Zarathustra himself and the historical developments which brought him about involve an inextricably compromised and many-sided process. Zarathustra's roots and antecedents, both personal and historical, as well as his desiderata, involve the intermingling and obliteration of the crude, singular types of persons that dominate much of the book. This is itself a refutation of the genetic fallacy, but it's also a refutation of many of the localised value judgements of the book.
But there is a further, more significant problem, with the introduction of the figure of Zarathustra in such glowing and epoch-making terms. The Ubermensch never appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra at all, and neither do Zarathustra's "children"! Brave talk and poetic license aside, he remains, at the end, sociologically impotent, without true heirs of any human kind.
The Genealogy implies that Zarathustra already possesses the key of keys, the route out of nihilism, and has succeeded in creating new, life-affirming values. This simply isn't true. The figure of Zarathustra, however heroically inclined, still remains in the shadow of the very nihilism that he wishes to overcome.
Only if we treat Zarathustra's attempt as a noble failure, as an attempt that others should make in the hope that someday, someone will succeed, can Zarathustra be admired. As an end in himself he is not especially impressive.