Nietzsche subtitled The Genealogy of Morals ‘A polemic’, and the next page announces that it is ‘A sequel to my last book, Beyond Good and Evil, which it is meant to supplement and clarify’. It is in a different form, at least superficially, from his other works, in that it consists of three titled essays, divided into sometimes quite lengthy sections. It has some of the appurtenances of an academic essay, but that is Nietzsche teasing. It is much better regarded as a send-up of academic procedures, though it is, in its content, a work of extreme seriousness. It is easily Nietzsche’s most complex text, at least for the first two essays, performing dialectical reversals at a rate that only just prevents the virtuosic from sliding into the chaotic.
It is worth noting that it was after he heard Eduard Hitschmann read excerpts from GM in 1908 that Freud said Nietzsche ‘had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live’ (Jones, 1955: ii. 385). Since GM is Nietzsche’s most sustained and profound attempt to make sense of suffering, and of how other people have tried to make sense of it, it may not be surprising that Freud, who devoted his life in a radically different way to the same enterprise, should have been stirred to this remarkable compliment. The astounding twists and turns of GM, occasionally issuing in downright contradiction, are the result of Nietzsche’s constant broodings on the variety of methods which people have developed for coping with it. So (to anticipate one of his lines of thought) the ascetic imposes one kind of suffering on himself in order to escape from many other kinds. By itself that is not to be judged. But when, in the Third Essay, ‘What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?’, he begins to examine the varieties of asceticism practised by artists, philosophers, priests and their flocks, evaluations proliferate and enter into relationships with one another whose complexity suggests that Nietzsche has reached a point of subtlety, often disguised by the crude vigour of its expression, which admits that the phenomena are no longer susceptible of intelligible ordering.
The movement of the book as a whole is from a simplicity of contrasts which, both in its form and content, induces incredulity, to a collapse of categories which hovers around incomprehensibility. The initial postulate of the First Essay, ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’, is of ‘the noble’, those who are entitled to be legislators of value because of their position, ‘who felt and established their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this feeling of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values: what had they to do with utility!’ (GM I. 2) It is here that Nietzsche makes fully explicit another force of the phrase ‘beyond good and evil’. For they are now said to be the categories of the slaves, who regard their masters as evil, and define ‘good’ by what is unlike them. By contrast, the original nobles first define themselves, and then call ‘bad’ whatever lacks their qualities. Clearly Nietzsche thinks that the latter procedure is superior to the former, which is inherently reactive, a product of negation. The trouble with these proto-nobles is that in the simplicity of their approach to life they are boring. Incorrigibly healthy, indifferent to suffering, uninterested in condemnation of those unlike themselves, they are the creators of value without having any of the materials to work on which make evaluations pointful.
In BGE Nietzsche had repeatedly stressed the necessity of vigilant evaluation – life depends on it. But how is it to operate simultaneously with the unrestricted affirmation which sometimes seems to be the only positive value, and which the noble once came closest to? This takes us back, as it should, to the aporia of BGE. To live without regrets or nostalgia, for instance, sounds in a way wonderful. And yet how can one not regret wasted time, missed opportunities, failure, as well as happiness of a kind that one can never know again? And how can one avoid, in these regrets, going in for a lot of comparison and contrast, the bases of evaluation? In general, some of Zarathustra’s most pregnant words seem to settle the matter:
And you tell me, my friends, that there is no disputing of taste and tasting? But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting. Taste – that is at the same time weight and scales and weigher; and woe unto all the living that would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighers!
(TSZ II, ‘On Those Who are Sublime’)
So it is clear that the noble, the original ‘masters’, are not for Nietzsche an unequivocal subject of praise. Equally, the ‘slaves’, those who resent the masters, are more likely, in their industrious enquiries into the sources of their misery, to emerge with interesting answers. But the answers become too interesting, and any possibility of heroic simplicity is lost. Since there is no question but that it has been lost, irrecoverably, we late men, decadents, must have the courage of our lateness and pursue the argument wherever it leads. To abbreviate Nietzsche’s most searching points in a brutal way (it is hopeless to try to summarize GM): the slaves found that by being subtler than their masters (no difficult feat) they could exercise their Will to Power in ways that, though despicable from the noble perspective, were effective; even, finally, to the extent of converting the masters to their own values. That was the inevitable progression from the Jews in captivity to Christianity, the greatest moral coup ever perpetrated. Among many other things, that is what is traced in the Second Essay, ‘“Guilt”, “Bad Conscience”, and the Like’. By condemning worldly values such as pride, prosperity, satisfaction with oneself, and replacing them by modesty, humility, and the rest, Christians succeeded in making their rulers as small as they were. But to do that they cultivated values which contained the seeds of Christianity’s own destruction. Nietzsche quotes one of the most persuasive passages in Book V of GS near the end of GM:
Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To view nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and providence of a God; to interpret history to the glory of a divine reason, as the perpetual witness to a moral world order and moral intentions . . . – that now seems to belong to the past, that has the conscience against it . . .
(GS 357)
And he continues GM with one of his most stupendous passages:
All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of ‘self-overcoming’ in the nature of, life – the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: Submit to the law you yourself proposed. In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as a morality must now perish too; we stand on the threshold of this event.
(GM III 27)
And his very last remarks in this book are about the collapse of morality, hijacked by Christianity, as the will to truth gains self-consciousness.
Note: ‘all great things’ and then an account of Christianity’s self-destruction. GM is Nietzsche’s most balanced book not by virtue of the sobriety of its style – Nietzsche is no longer interested in that – but by its taking contraries to extremes and giving them all their due, so that he presides over a battle, or rather several, in which he delights in arming both sides as powerfully as possible and lending all the assistance he can to getting them to fight it out. That enables him to indulge in the studied unfairmindedness of his last books. GM is both a creative retrospective and a point of departure for his next phase, which was to be abruptly cut off.
This retrospective dimension of the book is what gives the Third Essay, ‘What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?’, its strange structure, seemingly wandering far from the points he has been making earlier. For in it he conducts a survey of what ascetic ideals mean to various groups of people who have always been important to him, in the light of their self-inflicted sufferings. Life is dreadful anyway; so why make it worse by practising asceticism, the voluntary increase in what one would expect people to avoid? Suffering that is merely contingent, visited on us without explanation, is unendurable. But if we inflict it on ourselves we can understand it, and extend our understanding to the whole of life.
Artists are the first to be scrutinized; but that soon comes down to a consideration (not one of Nietzsche’s big surprises) of Wagner, and of what Nietzsche took to be his embracing of chastity in his old age. In the course of it Nietzsche says ‘one does best to separate an artist from his work, not taking him as seriously as his work . . . The fact is that if he were it, he would not represent, conceive, and express it: a Homer would not have created an Achilles nor a Goethe a Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or Goethe a Faust’ (GM III. 4). The conclusion is that the artist is conscienceless, adopting any pose that will further his work. He uses experience for the purpose of creation, which may have little to do with ‘the truth’. ‘What, then, is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the case of an artist, as we see, nothing whatever!’ (GM III. 5). Having at the outset of his career said that ‘art is the true metaphysical activity of this life’ and then abandoned metaphysics, Nietzsche is by now not disposed to think that there are any intimate relations between art and reality. In a late note he writes: ‘For a philosopher to say “the good and the beautiful are one” is infamy; if he goes on to add “also the truth”, one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly. We have art lest we perish of the truth’ (WP 822). And yet he always takes art as the paradigm of human activity. So it seems – a further aporia, not addressed – that artists are inherently suspicious characters, while art is a life-preserving evasion of the truth, often presented – certainly by Wagner – as the truth. Any artist who merely tries to produce a report on reality is roundly condemned. Apart from them, the rest ‘have at all times been valets of some morality, philosophy or religion’ (GM III. 5). So as far as understanding ascetic ideals goes, ‘let us eliminate the artists’ (ibid.).
Nietzsche next turns to philosophers. To be a philosopher is to practise asceticism for one’s own benefit. But here asceticism comes to no more than, in the first place, being single-minded and denying oneself various pleasures for the sake of a single-mindedly pursued goal. Whereas the compulsion to asceticism is the result of horror at the possibility of enjoyment of life, because one does not deserve it. There is asceticism chosen and asceticism imposed, and they are utterly separate phenomena. Those who practise it at the behest of priests do not do it to achieve any good for which it is a prerequisite, but because the guilt the priests have made them feel drives them to an increase of suffering which they deserve: the hideous cruelty of explaining to them why life is painful by inflicting more pain on them: they are responsible for their own suffering.
Such a bizarre phenomenon clearly both fascinates and appals Nietzsche, just as he is amazed at people’s capacity for turning their backs on the whole thing and dwelling in a state of frivolous misery. ‘Man is the sick animal’, but it seems that all available remedies have been tried and found wanting. Hence Nietzsche’s growing impatience, expressed in the telegraphic prose of his last year, and his longing for total revolution. As his own sufferings became more acute, which they did at an alarming rate during 1887 and 1888, he became less tolerant of any view of things that tried in any way to claim a meaning for them; and that is how he conceives morality during this period, as no more than a collection of frequently terrifyingly adroit moves to persuade people that behaving well and prospering are connected. At the close of GM he allows himself the hope that ‘there can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish’. But he cannot have believed that. For so much of GM has been devoted to showing the infinitely resourceful ways in which the priestly, who need not, of course, be actually in the service of the Church, contrive to keep morality going. And as we become smaller – without Christianity there is the possibility of becoming bigger, but the overwhelming probability that we shall cling to our Christian-based morality, claiming that it only needs a few adjustments to bring the heaven on earth of utilitarianism – we will lose even the capacity to recognize greatness, supposing it were any longer possible. Slave-morality has triumphed. We are content to be slaves even when there are no masters. The brilliant last section of GM sums it all up without simplifying or making crude:
Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far – and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all . . . man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was no longer like a leaf in the wind . . . he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself – all this means – let us dare to grasp it – a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! . . . And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.
(GM III. 28)
With those words Nietzsche ends the last truly original book he was to write. It is extraordinary how exhilarating it is, since it contains almost no messages of hope. But diagnosis carried out at this level strikes one – however illusorily – as being halfway to cure.