The fifth in a sporadic series. Previously one, two, three and four.
The Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche’s fully developed analysis (and attack) on the basis of modern Western morality. He posits there are two sources of morality: from the aristocratic, warrior source or from the conquered – thus master or slave morality. Historically, this is plausible – the winners impose a morality that justifies their victory, and the losers are either bound to that, or they develop an alternative (which is not a trivial task). However, Nietzsche would dig deeper, looking to a completely natural world of man without civilization – but he does so not realizing the futility of that quest.
The natural world has no morality. Nietzsche speaks to the birds of prey and the lambs, but we must stop right there. For neither the bird, nor the lamb, has any sense of morality – not toward themselves or to the other. As soon as you introduce the word, the concept of, morality – you have already left the natural world and entered the world of man as a social – and thinking (and eventually civil) – creature. This will hinder Nietzsche, for he imputes emotion (joy in inflicting suffering) to the predator, and he attempts to trace that from nature to modern man (who must suppress this to be civilized). But there is no joy or suffering in the animal world – all words of humans to that effect are nothing but human thoughts, imaginings, speculations – anthropomorphism (ironically a human, all too human thing); as the Olympian gods were mortal foible in immortal guise, so too is the assignment of human attributes and emotions to natural phenomenon. Nature doesn’t judge, nature doesn’t emote, nature simply is. And this is particularly laid bare when Nietzsche starts (The Second Essay) with this:
The breeding of an animal that can promise—is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is not this the very problem of man? The fact that this problem has been to a great extent solved, must appear all the more phenomenal to one who can estimate at its full value that force of forgetfulness which works in opposition to it.
The breeding, evolution, that leads to any animal is not an act of a sentient Nature. Certainly we can talk of breeding of domesticated animals, so done by the will of the human mind, but there is no equivalent for wild animals. But, the idea of a Designer of nature, Nietzsche has abandoned that (even if he slyly relies on it). We could of course take this as poetic interpretation, but that isn’t his strand of thought. He is laying here a rhetorical foundation, and since the base of it is sand, the whole edifice is at risk. He is on the brink of indulging in the teleological error.
I will elide his grossly erroneous ethnological views, which may not have been entirely hideous in his time, but have no value to add to our understanding today. Sadly, it gets worse for the case he would make.
The feeling of “ought,” of personal obligation (to take up again the train of our inquiry), has had, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and most original personal relationship that there is, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower: here it was that individual confronted individual, and that individual matched himself against individual. There has not yet been found a grade of civilisation so low, as not to manifest some trace of this relationship. Making prices, assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging—all this preoccupied the primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted thinking itself: it was here that was trained the oldest form of sagacity, it was here in this sphere that we can perhaps trace the first commencement of man’s pride, of his feeling of superiority over other animals.
It is a wonder that Nietzsche hasn’t been raised up as a high priest of anarcho-capitalism – the proto-Mises. What is even more wondrous is how Nietzsche disdains the utilitarian English and yet embraces as the foundation of all human morality, the market. Think too of how this relates to what he said earlier, that man is an animal that can promise; and that what is owed, by whom and to whom, are of course based on the ability to give and receive a promise and to make good on that.
So, what happens when is a promise is not made good. There is guilt, or as Nietzsche goes to some length in elaboration – bad conscience. This bad conscience is not part of the natural man, it has been introduced and enforced, rather than being a consequence of this ability to promise and then fail to act in accordance with that promise. Nietzsche subsequently stakes out a strange middle ground between Hobbes and Rousseau.
I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound to contract under the stress of the most radical change which he has ever experienced—that change, when he found himself finally imprisoned within the pale of society and of peace.
Here, he agrees with Hobbes that the state of nature constitutes the war of all against all, and for Nietzsche – this is the natural world in which mankind arose. Whereas Hobbes says man withdraws from this by submitting to his Sovereign (who establishes the King’s peace), Nietzsche says it is that peace that debilitates the noble will to power being exercised in that state of mutual aggression. And in accordance with Rousseau he blames society as an agent of corruption, not as part of man’s essential nature. He of course disagrees with Rousseau about man’s nature being peaceful (and cow like as Rousseau would have it).
So, as stated at the outset, morality for Nietzsche comes from either an aristocratic source, the master morality, or from the common (the subjugated) and that would be slave morality. What a splendid dualism, all the more remarkable for one who would rebuke the dialectics of Hegel. Even the master morality is a system of constraint on the instincts of those constituting the aristocratic class (or race as he puts it). The ethnographics he employs in discussing the aristocrats is bunk, but the concept isn’t completely repudiated by that defect. He also makes reference to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and their cultures being based on aristocratic bias. You can recast it in modern terms – the winners make the rules, and that isn’t bogged down by the ‘racial’ bunk. And the master morality expresses good as the things that define aristocrats [and yes, you certainly can see the circularity there as well as the hint of solipsism]; and bad as the common (free people) or lower (slaves); in essence the master morality glorifies strength and the slave morality weakness – as reflects their relative positions. So, let us now turn to slave morality, since it is the dominant morality in the West, in Nietzsche’s time and now.
Slave morality is rooted in resentment, which exists abundantly in the people ruled over by the aristocrats. It defines good as arising from the attributes of those at the bottom, for Nietzsche this is most prominently weakness. So far, both classes look at themselves as the exemplars of what it is to be good. Slave morality has a twist on the contra to good, for it isn’t bad, it is evil. The oppressors aren’t merely bad (because they lack what it is to be good), they are evil. And this does deserve an extended quote:
Yet the priests are, as is notorious, the worst enemies—why? Because they are the weakest. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into a monstrous and sinister shape, a shape which is most crafty and most poisonous. The really great haters in the history of the world have always been priests, who are also the cleverest haters—in comparison with the cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness is practically negligible. Human history would be too fatuous for anything were it not for the cleverness imported into it by the weak—take at once the most important instance. All the world’s efforts against the “aristocrats,” the “mighty,” the “masters,” the “holders of power,” are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, “the wretched are alone the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation—but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity the evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!” We know who it was who reaped the heritage of this Jewish transvaluation. In the context of the monstrous and inordinately fateful initiative which the Jews have exhibited in connection with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I remember the passage which came to my pen on another occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 195)—that it was, in fact, with the Jews that the revolt of the slaves begins in the sphere of morals; that revolt which has behind it a history of two millennia, and which at the present day has only moved out of our sight, because it—has achieved victory.
This is where it gets tricky really understanding Nietzsche with respect to Jews, for he abhorred the morality they had created and propagated – though the greater extent of that propagation was via Christianity and not Judaism. But it really is hard to call him an antisemite because he admired the accomplishment, and he detested every antisemite he knew. The other important character here is in the slave morality, the world is unjust or corrupt – as it is ruled by the evil, and redress of that comes not in this life, but in the afterlife (God’s judgment). This latter part is more specifically Christian, but it is important for how it negates the natural world and elevates an alternate imagined future. Revolutionaries will throw themselves into that same construct with all the devotion of any priest.
This was a difficult work for me to digest, because it was filled with not just hard to answer questions – which are his trademark; it sadly was packed with second-rate thinking, such as the worship of the blond brute – the Teuton (who in fact didn’t overthrow Rome, but was defeated first at Aquae Sextiae [modern Aix-en-Provence] and finally at Vercellae and those who survived were enslaved), the notion of an aristocratic race (as opposed to a class under a sovereign in a hierarchical society) and the utter failure to grasp that even early man was a social being and neither truly predator nor prey. All this from a man criticizing others for not considering history – fine, then do not make use of really bad history, history that is more mythology than hard, factual account. This may be an example of what would have happened had he actually written his transvaluation of all the values, where for all his genius there was still that beyond his grasp.
The most significant aspect for me is the flaw in the dialectic at the heart of the genealogy – that all morality must be either master or slave. For that places morality as nothing but the footstool of coercion – the raw exercise of power (from either the perspective of the one using power or the one abused by it). Nietzsche even hints at this when he speaks of the interaction of equals (within the aristocratic layer) – that there isn’t purely power being employed, but cooperation and reciprocation. Sadly that’s as close as he ever gets to thinking about that here. The other thing I’ll note – in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra is never master – seeking dominion over others, nor slave – accepting authority binding him. So even if Nietzsche omits that kind of independence here, he builds it into what he considered his best work.
Where to “comment” first? Mex has better pictures, JI a better moustache. Decisions, decisions…
Thanks JI!!
Hopefully they unpublish the p.m. links so your thunder isn’t stolen.
Seconded! Now to go read and break my brain on what JI dished up for us.
No idea what you’re talking about.
/looks around shiftily
Someone unrung the bell.
The really great haters in the history of the world have always been priests, who are also the cleverest haters
Truth.
The most significant aspect for me is the flaw in the dialectic at the heart of the genealogy – that all morality must be either master or slave. For that places morality as nothing but the footstool of coercion – the raw exercise of power (from either the perspective of the one using power or the one abused by it). Nietzsche even hints at this when he speaks of the interaction of equals (within the aristocratic layer) – that there isn’t purely power being employed, but cooperation and reciprocation.
The great thing about people is their unpredictability. Sometimes they can shake off the bonds of conformity.
“the wretched are alone the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is salvation—but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are to all eternity the evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the damned!”
This sounds all too familiar.
Shooter at Joel Osteen church bought weapon legally despite history of mental illness
Although Moreno had also been arrested several times since 2005, including on misdemeanor weapons charges in 2022, in December 2023 Moreno was still able to legally purchase the AR-15 rifle that was used in Sunday’s shooting.
They keep saying this, but I don’t understand it.
And the Guardian managed to write an entire article without using Moreno’s pronouns.
And somehow, somebody with that superweapon was taken down quickly by a person with a handgun. Even though it’s a weapon that’s so awesomely powerful that the Uvalde cops were completely terrorized by it, in spite of having similar weapons, shields, bullet proof vests, and other gear at their disposal.
I take it as, from their point of view, even the mentally challenged and retarded can get weapons. So our entire 2A about ownership is fucked.
They dont want anyone to have any way to defend themselves.
They don’t want anyone else to be able to defend themselves.
If the feds aren’t notified, it doesn’t go into the system.
Thanks.
I had two thoughts running through my head. First, in this case, how did Moreno fall through cracks of the system that is supposed to prevent him/her getting a gun. Second, what is the counter argument for the inevitable demands for tighter laws.
The answer to both thoughts is that existing and new laws don’t/won’t help if no one actually follows them properly.
When you look back at the history of mass shootings, the shooter being a dangerous nutjob people knew about continues unabated. The guy that shot up the Texas church should have never been able to buy a gun, but the AF dropped the ball. A federal agency didn’t tell another federal agency.
I would say that the base of my morality is to avoid causing intentional harm to others. Not sure if that would be a master or a slave mentality per Nietzsche.
I would add not hurting oneself (gambling, addictions, etc.)
Help others where you can.
and I would throw in good manners as it smooths over interpersonal transactions while making note that nice is different than good.
As far as not hurting people I would focus more on the concept of justice which is giving a person their due. Granted that’s difficult in the best of circumstances and the default should be not harming others.
I avoided the not hurting oneself because to help others, you generally have to hurt yourself. Whether it’s financially, physically (moving, blood/organ donation), mentally, or emotionally there’s usually a price to be paid. As it’s my body and my self, I can choose to hurt myself to my limits to help others, and others are free to make different determinations for themselves.
I also lean towards the restitution side of punishment, with rehabilitation being the secondary focus.
What just happened? My first was stolen.
never happened
it was an unethical first.
that’s not a thing
don’t talk back to your betters!
Speaking of (((them)))
According to Columbia University’s Rules of Conduct, the Ivy League school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side “cannot and will not rule any subject or form of expression out of order on the ground that it is objectionable, offensive, immoral or untrue.”
Unfortunately, the principle does not seem to have been fully operative at Columbia’s highly ranked law school, where an application for formal recognition of Law Students Against Antisemitism was rejected because a majority of the student senate disapproved of its definition of antisemitism.
When Marie-Alice Legrande, who is not Jewish, and several friends decided to form Law Students Against Antisemitism, they expected to fill an obvious need, bringing Jewish and non-Jewish students together to “raise awareness and educate about both historical and contemporary antisemitism.”
They had no idea that their proposal would draw furious opposition from people identifying themselves as “Concerned Jewish Students at CLS” and “Jewish pro-Palestine students,” who objected to its incorporation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism.
Naive do-gooder-ist wanders into sanctimonious moralizers’ buzzsaw. Take that, splitters.
Completely disagree with much in the second paragraph. Emotions aren’t unique to humans, animals have them too, including joy and suffering. They do things for fun. Believing otherwise seems like anthropocentrism.
I had similar thoughts.
You may interpret responses as joy, but we can never know for sure if they are experiencing joy. Hell, you can’t even know humans other than yourself really experience joy, but they have the capacity to argue they do. To say otherwise is to make an assumption. You can err on the side of what makes you feel better about the world around you, but you can’t claim to know the unknowable.
I can. It’s part and parcel of being an augur.
I was going to go down the path that they experience the chemical changes so we could say it is ‘joy’ or ‘anger’ but to them its just nature.
is it that different to us besides giving it a name?
Using that logic, you also can’t claim that they don’t experience it.
And what’s more likely, that humans have a unique capacity for emotion, or that it’s something that predates us? Especially something centered in a part of the brain that is shared by all mammals?
I never said I agreed with his blanket statement they don’t experience emotions. As I said, it’s unknowable. Why just mammals? Why do you assume a dung beetle can’t experience joy?
Because we are also mammals? Seems relevant that we might share something with other mammals.
As far as dung beetles, who knows? Maybe they do.
Maybe, indeed, maybe. That’s my only point, it’s maybes all the way down.
you too saw pandas in the snow? or even dogs.
What is the best definition of emotion?
Emotions are conscious mental reactions (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feelings usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. Adapted from Merriam-Webster.
Emotions – American Psychological Association
Yes, critters have those things.
There is a long and pointless discussion to be had as to whether or not the emotional response of a dog is the same as the emotional response of a human.
But is wrong to say that animals (mammals at least) do not have any kind of emotional reaction just because they don’t think like humans think.
We can judge they have the response, we can not judge if they have the experience.
It does not matter if you think they do or do not have the experience. What matters is how you act.
…but there haven’t been any Jewish priests since the temple was destroyed in AD 70.
did not read the book and this does not really make me want to. seems like simplistic explanation for complex topics shoehorned around some pre-existing ideas/conclusions.
forms of morality with various origins depending on many factors.
some morality can be hard to differentiate from instinct e.g. protecting family, empathy to suffering of others
Meh, seems politician phrase of the week is “shared responsibility”. Denver mayor used it now a Boston city council member is using it. All to imply we must share the responsibility of these ‘refugees’ and open our arms and homes to them. Put that in Nietzsche’s pipe and smoke it.
I have no responsibility for foreign invaders.
But think about the future Democratic votes you’ll be buying with your tax dollars.
The whole acceptance of “We are our brother’s keeper” drives just about all of these demands, whether immigration, ,aid to Ukraine, protecting Israel and Taiwan, forgiving student loans, enabling mentally ill folks to indulge their crazy behavior. Etc. Bleeding heart mentality is re-enforced by colleges and the mainstream religious denominations and pandered to by the power seekers who seek their votes
The whole acceptance of “We are our brother’s keeper” drives just about all of these demands,
I generally disagree. Liberals are driven by “The government is our brother’s keeper”, so cough up your money. Few liberals are actually willing to put any direct effort into keeping their brothers housed, fed, and clothed.
^THIS^
I have no problem with someone who believes that he is responsible for the welfare of others donating any and all of his time and resources to supporting those people. I have a huge issue with him trying to force me to do the same.
I know lots of these folks and they generally are involved in all sorts of charity. But their efforts aren’t enough and they see tons of people who don’t contribute. So they turn to “the government” (the collective we) to fill the gap. Sure, it is virtue signaling and phony compassion with other people’s money but they truly believe they are following higher moral principles.
I’ve known many good people who were actively involved in charitable efforts. Some of them quietly worked away; some of they actively encouraged the friends to get involved; and some of them lobbied for government action.
The number good people who do these charitable works is none the less dwarfed by the enormous population of do-gooders who want to impose governmental solutions on all people to solve all problems and feel their tax payments count as totally fulfilling their moral obligations to help others.
The board of Raytheon kindly thanks them for their generous donations. They’ll make sure the fruits are delivered directly to the poor throughout the world, using the most efficient delivery systems mankind has ever devised.
Sorry Juris, I thought I had it set for a few minutes past 1500 server time. No excuses, that’s on me.
Please be aware, to make up for lost time, PM Links will be scheduled on or around 1530, because quite frankly we’re going to need an additional 30 minutes to chew on this one.
this is why the US needs to use metric hours not that imperial crap
Excuse me? The US redefined many units of measurement and are different from Imperial units despite using the same name. These are American hours, my friend.
You tell that commie Romanian.
A metric hour would be shorter than a standard, Imperial hour, due to needing 100 in a day, as opposed to the King’s 24.
I bet you base your day on Paris mean time, in defiance of Greenwich. Heathen.
https://twitter.com/AccountantBrad/status/1757435822314242174
That guy doesn’t mind stealing bread from the mouth of decadence?
Im not clicking.
I hate that stupid song. Mostly because it was way over-played on the radio.
Not for it’s ringing endorsement of bringing Bolshevik ideas over here? I’m sure it will work this time Eddie.
seems politician phrase of the week is “shared responsibility”. Denver mayor used it now a Boston city council member is using it. All to imply we must share the responsibility of these ‘refugees’ and open our arms and homes to them.
You first, Mayor. Go be a moralizing scold somewhere else.
Goddammit.
I am up to my eyeballs here and cannot give this the attention it deserves. I will have to read later and comment on it off topic in later links over the next week or so.
Sorry JI, I am stuck.
Same. In fact all I can write is “same.” Back to work.
Back to Work again
Slap in the face
Back to work again
I feel so out of place
Got to make my money
It’s a blue collar school
Try to rise above
But I’m beat down just like a fool
No man is an island.
Three men are though.
turns out, you only need two.
I can explain why: the average person reads at the 4th grade level. Nietzsche is out of reach for a lot of people.
“shared responsibility“
Fuck off.
you just want to selfishly keep all there good bourbon for yourself.
My oscilliscope arrived, and after the self-test, I hooked it to the debug board for programming the microcontrollers I’ve been playing with.
The data on the serial output pin was the cleanest square I’ve ever seen, with so little noise it almost looks fake. I’ve seen a number from computer repair videos, and they always have an acceptable level of noise within the TT Logic bands. This board was so free of noise I had trouble believing it.
as someone who works in electronics and fucking hates it I am fascinated about people who find this interesting as a hobby. My father had all sorts of oscilliscope and such and I never touched them
Howard Johnson summarizes Nietzsche.
All the world’s efforts against the “aristocrats,” the “mighty,” the “masters,” the “holders of power,” are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realised that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge.”
Oof. I’ve been listening to The Rest is History Podcast and it was hard to listen to how the German Reich systematically destroyed the Jews and disenfranchise them right before sending them off to the camps. It was even more depressing at how most of the German people at worst actively helping the Nazis and at best (which is terrible in itself) just went along with it to not stir the pot.
Not just about (((us))), but all of humanity to any group of Others. See Japan re Korea, Mongols re eastern Europe, Zulu’s re Bushmen, and so on.
Even here during COVID, I saw people who were actively cheerleading those who got crushed by the boot for not wearing masks or taking people’s jobs.
The snowstorm hit Mexico?