IN LILLIANA CALAVANI’S rather eccentric movie about Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, the very charming mustached character who plays the leading role bursts out laughing in the midst of a dinner conversation, “Morality—ha, ha!” That captures as well as any “sound bite” could Nietzsche’s often dismissive view of morality. But morality for Nietzsche was no laughing matter. He saw it as the ultimate and most successful expression of decadence and nihilism, no matter that the leading moralists would claim that it is only morality (with its accompanying religion) that protects us from the evil forces of decadence and nihilism.
But what exactly do we mean by morality? Before we go any further, it is important to make a careful distinction, between various moralities, that is, different “rank orders of value,” and “Morality,” in one particular sense that is characteristic of (but certainly not unique to) modern bourgeois society. The first sense of the word morality, as a genus in which there may be many species, is a concept in anthropology. Every culture, no matter how cosmopolitan or “primitive,” no matter how single-minded or multicultural, has its values, its ideals, it taboos, its practical guidelines, its rules (which in some societies become laws). In this sense, to be human is to have a morality. Even a hermit, separated from society, necessarily lives according to some values (for example, maintaining solitude), ideals (perhaps personal enlightenment), taboos (don’t eat the squirrels), practical guidelines (put enough wood on the fire before going to sleep), and even rules (sing every day at sunset). A morality is a collection of inherited, invented, or even instinctual practices (what Hegel famously called “Sittlichkeit”). As such, the concept contains no specific values, no concrete rules or prohibitions, no particular guidelines or philosophical orientation.
The second sense of the word (and we will continue to capitalize it, Morality, in this sense) is, by contrast, quite specific and particular, even if it is sometimes described in terms of very general, even “universal” rules or principles. The best-known illustration of such a formal code of Morality is the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, delivered personally by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. They are quite specific. “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Honor thy parents,” and so on. They also have an authoritative source (namely, God himself) and a particular logical form (namely, as unconditional commands). Immanuel Kant captured this form in what he famously called “the Categorical Imperative.” Kant denied that the necessity of Morality so conceived lies in its supposed Divine Origin and claimed it rather as a product of Practical Reason, but there is no doubt that what he is defending in the most sophisticated philosophical terminology is one and the same Morality that he learned as a pious child at his mother’s knee.
It is this conception of Morality as something singular, as something categorical (as opposed to conditional on the particular circumstances and temperament of a people or a person), as something dictated by authority (whether by God or Practical Reason), as something largely prohibitive (“Thou shalt not …!”) that Nietzsche rejects and against which he wages war. He does not—and this bears repeating—he does not in any way suggest or imply that we should feel free to kill or steal or go out of our way to offend or dishonor our parents. The attack on morality does not signify that “everything is permitted,” and when Nietzsche presents himself as an “immoralist,” we should not be misled by his schoolboy bravado. In his less flamboyant moments, he declares himself quite sensibly in favor of not only the customary virtues (courage, generosity, honesty) but even such a genteel virtue as courtesy. What Nietzsche rejects is neither moralities (in the general sense) nor the accepted rules of civilized behavior.
How, then, should we understand his war on morality? The watchword of Nietzsche’s ethics comes, predictably, from the ancients, in this case from the Greek poet Pindar (522–438 B.C.E.). Nietzsche writes, over and over again, “Become who you are!” This sounds like an unhelpful, even vacuous, piece of moral advice, much like a parent’s frustrating assurance to a confused teenager, “Just be yourself.” In the case of the teenager, the problem is that it is just this self that is in question. But Nietzsche says “become,” not “be,” and in this small difference lies a whole philosophy. It is indeed the self that is in question, but not just a particular person’s self-identity.
Each of us, Nietzsche says, has a unique set of virtues, but by thinking that what we really are is defined by a set of general rules or principles (categorical imperatives), we deny that uniqueness and sacrifice those virtues to the bland and anonymous category of “being a good person.” It is not that Nietzsche wants to defend immorality but rather that he wants to defend the idea of human excellence that defines his ethics. We should become who we are—“Be all that you can be” to quote a recent U.S. Army recruiting slogan. And becoming our best generally (but not necessarily) leads us into agreement with the prohibitions of popular morality. (“Why should I steal when I can make it on my own?”)
One way to understand Nietzsche’s rejection of Morality is to put it in terms of a historical juxtaposition between two very different types of ethical theory. On the one hand, we have Kant, the exemplar of the moral philosopher who focuses on general rules and particular obligations. Kant proposed that we determine the morality of given actions on the basis of whether or not we could will that everyone act on them. If we could endorse the behavior in question as a general rule, then the action is morally acceptable. If not, if the generalization yields a logical contradiction, it is morally wrong. Kant argued that reason alone can determine right and wrong, and that the principles of morality are identical for all human beings.
On the other hand, we have Aristotle, an ancient philosopher who (like his teachers, Plato and Socrates) focused rather on individual excellence or virtue (areté). Aristotle never denied or ignored the social and political context in which excellence could be achieved. In fact, he assumed that it was only within certain social and political contexts that excellence could be achieved. (“To live a good life, one must live in a great city” was a platitude among the ancients.) But individual excellence is also defined by particular circumstances, by character, by one’s role in society. And although the virtues can be generally described (courage, truthfulness, and so on), the focus, for Aristotle, remains on the individuals who exemplify and cultivate those virtues. General principles (for example, “Be courageous!”) tend to be empty rhetoric. The proof is in one’s behavior, not in the principles one follows or claims to follow.
Nietzsche, to put the matter simply, is more like Aristotle than like Kant. In contemporary terminology, he defends an ethics of virtue rather than an ethics of rational principles or obligations. (Aristotle defends a role for rational principles, but it is not obedience or respect for principles that motivates or justifies an action. So, too, the Greeks had a clear sense of duty, but duties followed from one’s roles and responsibilities. They were not, as in Kant, derived from universal principles.) We should not take the comparison of Nietzsche and Aristotle too far, however. Nietzsche considered Aristotle, along with Socrates and Plato, to be “decadents,” latecomers to the glory that was Greece. He accused them of nostalgically defending virtues that had already been lost in Athens, and, of course, he went much further than Aristotle in stressing the uniqueness of the individual.
Furthermore, while Nietzsche might have agreed that, ideally, a great society might be lush breeding ground for cultivating the virtues in its individual members, his own rejection of the society he lived in suggests that he separated individuality and community, virtue and good citizenship, in a way that would have horrified Aristotle. A philosophical hermit like Nietzsche (and his fictional mouthpiece, Zarathustra) would have a better chance to develop his or her particular excellence when not enmired in bourgeois society. Indeed, being so enmired, thinking of oneself as a good citizen and following the general rules rather than one’s own particular virtues, is what Nietzsche so often condemns as “herd morality,” a morality for cows and not for creative human beings.
What Nietzsche sometimes condemns as “herd morality” he also describes as “slave morality,” a morality fit for slaves and servants. Although there are strong suggestions of this view in some of Nietzsche’s earlier works (Daybreak and Human, All Too Human), it is first fully stated in Beyond Good and Evil, and later more thoroughly worked out in On the Genealogy of Morals. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche boldly announces that “wandering through the many subtler and coarser moralities which have so far been prevalent on earth … I finally discovered two basic types,… master and slave morality.” He immediately adds that these two usually intermingle and function together in all sorts of complex ways, and that they even coexist “within a single soul.”1 This simple dichotomy belies Nietzsche’s own insistence on subtlety and complexity, to be sure, but in the Genealogy he makes it quite clear that what he is giving us is a “polemic,” an oversimplified but brutally thought-provoking way of looking at morality.
Morality, in the singular sense presented in the Bible and defended by Kant, is slave morality. In its most crude forms it consists of general principles imposed from above (by the rulers or by God) that yoke and constrain the individual. In its subtler and more sophisticated forms, that external authority is relocated internally—in the faculty of reason, for example. But what is most characteristic of Morality in either its crude or its sophisticated forms is that it is mainly prohibitive and constraining rather than inspiring. Kant may have been “awed” by “the Moral Law within,” but the Categorical Imperative itself, as he spells it out in several general formulas, consists mainly of implicit “Thou shalt nots” (“Only act such that you would have others in the same circumstances act in the same way,” “always treat people as ends and never as means only”) The ultimate test of a maxim, according to Kant, is whether when universalized it is something that logically cannot be done. Nietzsche, of course, thinks that universalization is utterly irrelevant to virtue. Indeed, insofar as it can be universalized (or even generally described!) a virtue is diminished or destroyed.
Master morality, by contrast, is an ethics of virtue, an ethics in which personal excellence is primary. But personal excellence is not to be contrasted with (or set in opposition to) personal happiness, as obligation so often is. Achieving excellence is precisely what makes one happy, according to both Nietzsche and Aristotle. To grudgingly fulfill one’s obligations, at some cost to one’s own goals and satisfaction, makes one unhappy. (Righteousness is a poor substitute for happiness.) The “master” takes as his or her morality (in the anthropological sense) just those values, ideals, and practices that are personally preferable and suitable. The “master” is epitomized neither by the overly genteel Aristotelian gentleman nor by the overly brutal Homeric heroes but by the very civilized yet still sufficiently Dionysian Greeks of the Golden Age. Master morality takes as its watchword “Become who you are,” and whether or not one turns out to be like anyone else, or even whether or not one is acceptable to others, are matters of no concern.
It is the masters, Nietzsche tells us, who establish the meaning of “good.” The masters use this term to refer to what they see as admirable, desirable, satisfying, and, in fact, to refer to themselves. (The bombastic Roman general in the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum sings out proudly. “I am my own ideal!”) They thus recognize the distinction between what is good and what is bad, but the latter refers only to deficiencies of the good, what is frustrating or debilitating, to failure, or inadequacy, to what is other than themselves, their tastes, their virtues, and to others who fail or fall behind. No principles, rulers, or gods are necessary to make the distinction, which arises from the ideals and desires of the masters themselves. Putting it simply, one might summarize master morality as “being myself, and getting what I want,” with the understanding that what one is and what one wants may be quite refined and noble. (To interpret “getting what I want” as an expression of selfishness reflects an impoverishment of desire, a sure sign of slave morality.) Not getting what one wants is bad, not necessarily in any larger sense (such as causing disastrous consequences for the community, or violating God’s laws and inviting divine retribution) but simply because it falls short of one’s own aspirations and ideals.
For the slaves, by contrast, getting what one wants is just too difficult, too unlikely, too implausible. Slaves do not like themselves, so the idea of becoming who you are is not particularly appealing. Slaves ultimately do not value getting what one wants but, in a perverse yet readily comprehensible sense, not getting what one wants. Their virtue lies not in being themselves but in not being the other, the master, the privileged, the oppressor. The masters see the slaves as pathetic, as miserable, as unhappy, both because they don’t get what they want and because what they want is often so petty. But the slaves do not see themselves that way. They see themselves as deprived. They see themselves as oppressed. They see themselves, in modern terms, as victims. Nor do they see the masters as merely happy and fulfilled. The slaves see them as oppressors, as people with the wrong values, the wrong ideals, the wrong ideas about living.
Thus, in the long history of Morality there came about a most remarkable “revaluation of values,” according to Nietzsche. First the ancient Hebrews, then the early Christians, turned master morality on its head, declaring that the very values and ideals that the masters took to be the heart of their ethics were in fact offensive, first to God, then secondarily to God’s righteous believers. Getting what you want, rather than being the standard of ethics, is the root of all evil. In slave morality, the simple distinction between good and bad gets replaced by the metaphysical distinction between good and evil. The masters’ distinction between good and bad simply refers to getting versus not getting what one wants, fulfilling versus not fulfilling one’s aspirations. The slaves’ distinction between good and evil refers, instead, to external and “objective” standards, God’s will and principles of reason. Nietzsche sees in this reformulation of values an “act of … spiritual revenge”:
It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying, “The wretched alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God … and you, the powerful and noble, are, on the contrary, the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity, and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, the accursed, and damned!”2
It is in contrast to the sometimes bloated pretensions of philosophy, theology, and metaphysical dogma that simple appeals to motives and emotion gain their force. In attacking Christianity and Judeo-Christian morality, Nietzsche does not remain on the same level of esoteric abstraction as his religious and moral antagonists. What he does instead is to dig under them. What could be more effective against the self-righteousness pronouncements of some philosophers and theologians than an ad hominem argument that undermines their credibility, that reduces their rationality and piety to petty personal envy or indignation? What could be more humiliating for a morality that incessantly preaches against selfishness and self-interest than the accusation that it is in fact not only the product of impotent self-interest but hypocritical as well? And what could be a more effective argument against theism than ridiculing the psycho-sociological ground out of which such a belief has arisen?
Such humiliation is Nietzsche’s objective in his psychological guerrilla war against Christianity and Judeo-Christian bourgeois Morality. Nietzsche wants to shock us. He wants to offend us. He wants us to see through the rationalized surface of traditional Morality to its historical genealogy, the actual human beings who lie behind it. Like Hegel, his great misunderstood predecessor, he holds that one can truly understand a phenomenon only when one understands its origins, its development, and its overall place in human consciousness. But understanding a phenomenon, in this sense, does not always lead to further appreciation.
Nietzsche contends that what we call “Morality” originated among actual slaves, the miserable Lumpenproletariat of the ancient world (a term introduced by Marx to denote the lowest classes of society). Morality continues to be motivated by the servile and resentful emotions of those who are “poor in spirit” and feel themselves to be inferior. “Morality,” however brilliantly rationalized by Immanuel Kant as the dictates of Practical Reason or by the utilitarian philosophers as “the greatest good for the greatest number,” is, according to Nietzsche, essentially the devious strategy of the weak to gain some advantage (or at least minimize their disadvantage) vis-à-vis the strong. What we call Morality, even if it includes (indeed emphasizes) the sanctity of life, displays a palpable disgust for life, a “weariness” with life, an “otherworldly” longing that prefers some other, idealized existence to this one.
To describe this, of course, is not to “refute” the claims of Morality. Morality might still be, as Kant argued, the product of Practical Reason and as such a matter of universalized principles. Nietzsche concedes that it may in fact be conducive to the greatest good for the greatest number, the public good. But to recognize that such obsessions with rational principles and general welfare are products and symptoms of an underlying sense of inferiority is certainly to take the glamour and the seeming “necessity” out of Morality.
The great moral philosophers have given us visions of the perfect society (Plato), portraits of the happy, virtuous life (Aristotle), formal analyses of Morality (Kant), and impassioned defenses of the principles of utility and equality (Mill). Nietzsche, by contrast, offers us a diagnosis, in which morals emerge as something mean-spirited and pathetic. The basis of slave morality, he tells us, is resentment, a bitter emotion based on a sense of inferiority and frustrated vindictiveness. It is a thoroughly reactive emotion, provoked by the successes of others.
The contrast between slave morality and master morality ultimately comes down to this emotional difference: that the slave nurtures resentment until it “poisons” him, while the master, noble and self-secure, expresses his feelings and frustrations. Although Nietzsche sometimes writes like an anthropologist, describing two alternative “perspectives” on life, his continuous condemnation of resentment leaves little doubt as to which of the two “moral types” he finds preferable. Nietzsche’s “genealogy” of morals is designed to make the novice reader uncomfortable with his or her own slavish attitudes, but it is also written to inspire a seductive sense of superiority, the urge to become a “master.” These are dangerous attitudes, however, quite opposed to the edifying moral “uplift” we usually expect from ethical treatises.
Nietzsche’s “genealogy” is, in fact, only partially a genealogy; it is much more a psychological diagnosis. It does include a very condensed and rather mythic account of the history and evolution of morals, but the heart of his account is a psychological hypothesis concerning the motives and mechanisms underlying that history and evolution. “The slave revolt in morality begins,” Nietzsche tells us in Genealogy, “when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.”3
Modern critics might well dismiss such speculation as yet another version of the “genetic fallacy.” (That is, the question is not the genesis or the motivation of morals but rather the validity of our moral principles.) But even Kant himself insisted that one cannot evaluate the “moral worth” of an action without considering its intentions. An action performed out of noble sentiments is noble, even if the act itself is rather small and inconsequential. An action expressing vicious sentiments is vicious, even if the act itself turns out to have benign consequences. At least in part, ethics is made up of what one might generically call “feelings”—or, better, what Kant called the “inclinations”—which would include not only respect, a sense of duty, and the sweet (but suspicious) sentiments of sympathy and compassion, but also the nasty negative emotions of envy, anger, hatred, vengeance, and, especially, resentment.
Nietzsche’s emphasis on nobility and resentment in his account of master and slave morality is an attempt to stress character, motivation, and virtue (and with them, tradition and culture) above all else in ethics. A master morality of nobility is an expression of good, strong character. An ethics of resentment is an expression of bad character—whatever its principles and their rationalizations. Nietzsche argues that Kantian universalizability and universal rules in general (for example, the Ten Commandments) distract us from concrete questions of character.
Furthermore, such abstraction in morals provides not only a respectable façade for faulty character but an offensive weapon for resentment. Reason and resentment have proven themselves to be a well-coordinated team in the guerrilla war of everyday morality and moralizing. “A race of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree.”4 Similarly, Nietzsche submits,
Suppose that … the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey “man” to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment through whose aid the noble races and their ideals were finally confounded and overthrown as the actual instruments of culture.5
Nietzsche insists that we overcome our childish, simplistic tendency to think of all valuation in terms of Manichean “opposite values,” good and evil, but this rejection of “good and evil” does not entail the rejection of good and bad. There is the good life, well-lived, and there is the pathetic life, filled with resentment and impoverished in everything but its sense of its own righteousness.
The diagnosis of resentment and the pathology-laden language that surrounds slave morality tells us, in no uncertain terms, that slave morality is bad. So, too, master morality—albeit in refined and more artistic form, far from its primordial brutishness—is not only good but, in an important sense, natural. It does not depend for its value on God or gods or any transcendent realm. Yet however much he may have admired his uninhibited masters, Nietzsche realizes that “we cannot go back,” that twenty centuries of Judeo-Christian morality have had their combined beneficial and deleterious effects. We have become more spiritual, more civilized, under the auspices of slave morality and Christianity. What we should aspire to, therefore, is no longer what Nietzsche described as “master morality,” although it is notoriously unclear what his proposed “legislation” of morals for the future ought to look like. The Übermensch is clearly beyond us, and even the best of the “higher men” are still “human, all too human”—that is, caught up in the petty cycle of defensiveness and revenge. We seem to be both stuck in our slave morality and ready to transcend it.
Nevertheless, we can still distinguish between what is natural and noble and what is reactionary and born of ressentiment. Nietzsche makes it hard for us to avoid the uncomfortable acknowledgment that, yes, morality does protect the weak against the strong and, yes, it does sometimes seem to be the expression of resentment and, yes, it is often used to “put down” or “level” what is best in us in favor of the safe, the conformist, the comfortable. Given a masterly warrior perspective—the view that Nietzsche absorbed from the Iliad, and which so many American college students take away from Hollywood “action movies”—our everyday conception of morality does indeed seem limp and timid, conducive to civility perhaps but not to spontaneous self-expression, nobility, or heroism.
While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself … the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints.…6
Although resentment is born of impotence, Nietzsche sees it as being concerned, even obsessed with power. It is not the same as self-pity, with which it often shares the subjective stage; it is not merely awareness of one’s misfortune but involves a kind of blame and personal outrage, an outward projection, an overwhelming sense of injustice. But neither is it just a version of hatred or anger—with which it is sometimes conflated, for both of these presume an emotional and expressive power base, which resentment essentially lacks. Resentment is obsessive. “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly,” Nietzsche tells us, yet his descriptions often employ terms denoting slow, lingering consumption, such as “smoldering,” “simmering,” “seething,” and “fuming.” Although quick to cause damage, resentment does not burn out.
Resentment is also notable among the emotions for its lack of any specific, positive desire. In this, it is not the same as envy—a kindred emotion—which has the advantage of being quite specific and based on desire. Envy wants, even if it cannot have and has no right to have. If resentment has a desire, it is the desire for revenge, but even this is rarely very specific. It often takes the form of an infantile nihilism, entertaining the abstract desire for the total annihilation of its target. So, too, resentment is quite different from spite, into which it occasionally degenerates, for resentment is nothing if not prudential, strategic, even ruthlessly clever. It has no taste at all for self-destruction; to the contrary, it is the ultimate emotion of self-preservation.
Resentment may be an emotion that begins with an awareness of its powerlessness, but by way of compensation, resentment has forged the perfect weapon—an acid tongue and a strategic awareness of the world, which provides parity if not victory in most social conflicts. Thus the irony, the dramatic reversal of fortunes, as defensive resentment overpowers defenseless self-confidence and the sense of inferiority overwhelms its superiors. The neo-Nietzschean stereotypes are too often portrayed in terms of the cultivated, noble master versus the miserable, illiterate slave, and the descriptions in Nietzsche’s Genealogy certainly encourage such a reading. But the typology that counts in the genealogy of resentment and morals is the articulate slave and the tongue-tied, even witless, master. It is the slave who is sufficiently ingenious to do what Nietzsche wants to do; he or she invents new values. And it is the master, not the slave, who becomes decadent and dependent and allows him- or herself to be taken in by the strategies of resentment. Hegel had it right in the Phenomenology of Spirit: language may be the political invention of the “herd” (as Nietzsche suggests in The Gay Science) but it is also the medium in which real power is expressed and exchanged. Irony is the ultimate weapon of resentment, and as Socrates so ably demonstrated, it turns ignorance into power, personal weakness into philosophical strength. It is no wonder that Nietzsche had such mixed feelings about his predecessor in the weaponry of resentment who created the “tyranny of reason” as the successful expression of his own will to power. Nietzsche used irony and “genealogy” as Socrates used dialectic, to undermine and ultimately dominate others and their opinions.
What Nietzsche despises about resentment is its pathetic impotence, its weakness. But the criteria for strength and weakness are by no means obvious or consistent in Nietzsche, and it is not even obvious, for example, that weakness is a lack of strength. Sometimes, the descriptions in Genealogy suggest that social status and class alone determine strength and weakness; aristocrats, by virtue of their birth and education, are strong. Because of their servile role, slaves are weak, whatever physical or spiritual strength they might possess. Sometimes, Nietzsche seems to be using a quasi-medical (“physiological”) criterion—strong means healthy, weak means sickly. But even this is by no means consistent, and some of what Nietzsche says would even imply that it is the slaves who are strong, not the masters.
More than anything else, Nietzsche seems to see strength and weakness in aesthetic terms, harking back, no doubt, to his famous injunction in The Birth of Tragedy that one should consider one’s life as a work of art. Masters are a delight to behold; it would be even more of a delight to be one, to experience that sense of spontaneity and self-confidence. Slaves, to put it politely, are banal and boring. Their demeanor is servile and timid. They protect themselves with humorless, submissive smiles, without character. When their backs are turned, they snarl. It is Othello who provides the nobility in the play that bears his name. Iago provides the plot, by way of his scheming resentment. But then again, we should remember Simone Weil’s well-placed warning, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”7 The banality of goodness on the stage is no argument against it.
What is “power”? What is “strength”? What is “weakness”? It is all too easy to think in Homeric warrior metaphors, the strength of an Odysseus or a Hercules, the broken servility of a captured slave. Of course, there were all of those Christian gladiators, and the Jews at Masada, and there were those several generations of effete and all-but-defenseless mutually resentful Roman emperors and aristocrats. (Poison isn’t the weapon of choice for a warrior.) But physical and military prowess is not the “power” that Nietzsche is endorsing, and one of the most effective responses to Roman military might, it turned out, was the rather masterly practice of “turning the other cheek.” In our own times, of course, we have seen the strategy of nonviolent “passive resistance” practiced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The metaphors Nietzsche most often uses in talking about strength are medical metaphors, health and sickliness, “physiological” images. Master morality is healthy; slave morality is sickly. Strength as health is clearly a personal and not a competitive virtue. It has much to do with one’s metabolic fund of energy, expressed in a spontaneity that is not so much thoughtless or carefree as robust. Weakness as sickliness is above all a lack of energy, a lethargy caused by exhaustion. But Nietzsche’s vision here is often of a very different kind, and it is not health as such but the response to ill-health that is the measure of strength. His famous comment that “what does not overcome me makes me stronger” is emblematic of a certain way of thinking about strength and heroism. One need not speculate or search very far for the personal origins of Nietzsche’s concern about health and his rather complex conceptions of the proper response to illness. Nietzsche’s own response to his debilitating infirmities was a muscular and aggressive prose, full of vitality, displaying a strength that only the strongest souls can fully comprehend.
One of the most bothersome features of Genealogy, even to those who are wholly persuaded by its characterization of “slave morality,” is Nietzsche’s apparent determinism, as if people are the way they are, and there is little that they can do to change. In this, Nietzsche is starkly at odds with existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Sartre. Personal choice is severely limited by “who we are.” Thus he is bitterly sarcastic toward “the ‘improvers’ of mankind.”8 His analogy of eagles and lambs says explicitly that the difference between the strong and the weak is one of basic biology, not a matter of choice:
That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?” there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: “we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”9
Indeed, at the end of that section, in which Nietzsche is centrally concerned with resentment and the “revaluation of values,” he argues that one is not responsible for one’s predatory ways, any more than one is responsible for one’s weaknesses. That one is responsible and capable of change is an illusion fostered by centuries of Christianity, and more recently by Kant. That view of responsibility in turn justifies the vindictiveness of resentment and the harshness of moral judgments of blame.
[N]o wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief [in the Kantian subject] for their own ends and in fact maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb—for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey.10
Nietzsche’s peculiar brand of fatalism, amor fati, is not the same as determinism. It represents a carefree, nonjudgmental attitude, even “a bold recklessness”—something Nietzsche clearly envied. It emerges philosophically in his denial and mockery of “free will” and in his rather restricted insistence on the cultivation of the virtues. His famous instruction “Become who you are” has been read (and read well) as an “existential imperative,” and it has been read (equally well) as a mode of discovery and reinterpretation. The dominant impression Nietzsche gives—at least in Genealogy—is that one can do very little to change one’s basic being, much less to “improve mankind.” In particular, whether one is strong and noble or weak and pathetic is not a choice of existential options but a kind of “given,” in terms of one’s social origins and upbringing, and resides at the core of one’s character, perhaps even in one’s genes. As he puts it in Genealogy, an eagle can no more become a lamb than a lamb can become an eagle. But it is clear to whom Nietzsche is addressing his supposedly neutral descriptions: not to the lambs but to the readers who identify with the “master”-type and suffer from “bad conscience.” For them, reading Nietzsche can be a liberating experience.