I
IT is not a criticism of the beliefs we hold regarding the world when one says that all of them are false. It is not the fact that they are false to which Nietzsche objects when he considers these beliefs critically. “It is here that our new language sounds perhaps strangest.”1 What he is concerned with is a belief about these beliefs, a second-order belief, in accordance with which they should be true, that they should correspond with facts as they are. It is not our language, as we might say today, but our metalanguage which goes astray, insofar as it makes demands on our language which it cannot and need not subserve. The fact that our beliefs are false relative to that theory of truth (the Correspondence Theory) in accordance with which we demanded that they be true is perfectly irrelevant as to whether we should hold these beliefs. Propositions which were true, in terms of corresponding with reality, would do us little good indeed, since there is nothing about reality to be said (or, about reality, there is only that to be said); and to say of our beliefs that they are false is not per se to recommend their abandonment. We are being asked only to abandon an expectation concerning these beliefs which we were ill-advised to hold from the beginning. “The real question,” Nietzsche goes on to say, “is how far a belief [ein Urteil] furthers and supports life, maintains and disciplines a species.”2 To renounce our beliefs merely because they were (absolutely) false would in effect be to renounce life, for these beliefs are conditions for life and “the falsest beliefs—to which belong the synthetic a priori judgments—are the least dispensable of all.”3 It is, then, not the ordinary beliefs of ordinary men which are under attack, but the philosophical justification of these beliefs by philosophers who may have begun as critics, but ended as apologists of the systems of thought they pretended so fiercely to expose to their purifying scepsis. Nietzsche’s polemic has been with philosophers.
It has often been the avowed enterprise of philosophers to reconstitute human knowledge upon permanent, hopefully immutable foundations. Criticisms and construction have typically gone hand in hand: one rejects only to replace, discarding (one thinks) only what is nonsense or beyond justification. So far as the plain man goes, “the greater part of his conscious thoughts must be reckoned as instinctive activities.”4 By contrast, the philosopher was to have been cautious and self-conscious, controlling rather than being carried along by his thoughts, eliminating what did not strike him as clear and distinct, or as self-certifiably true, or as satisfying some other, stringent criterion of admissibility. But in fact, Nietzsche seems to have felt, earlier philosophers were slack: they never really succeeded in calling into question, or even recognizing for what they were, the deep falsehoods and unexpendable fictions which were worked out in the predawn of the human mind. Consequently, philosophers were locating their foundations upon foundations already there, so to speak, their edifices conforming to a conceptual geography laid down by the primitive mentality, and so familiar as not to have been detected as even present. “The most self-conscious thoughts of a philosopher are guided by his hidden instincts, and forced into determined paths.”5 Whatever they finally bring forth out of the depths with their purportedly critical soundings, and exhibit as basic truth, “is at bottom a preconceived dogma, a fancy, an inspiration, or, at most, a heart’s desire made abstract and refined, and defended with reasons sought after the fact.”6 Indeed, “every great philosophy has so far been … the self-confession of its originator, and a kind of unintentional, unaware mémoires.”7
Nowhere Nietzsche thought, is this more the case than in moral philosophy, where much the same ambition has prevailed as in epistemology or in metaphysics; only in this instance it is to put our moral beliefs on unshakable moorings, to make a science of morals. But what each such philosophy has been au fond is a piece of special pleading on behalf of a moral perspective misconstrued as inherent in the order of the world. Nor could it have been easy for philosophers to have believed otherwise. For it is not easy to isolate moral from factual claims or to distinguish the moral factors in our perspective from the rest. Our very sense perceptions “are altogether permeated with valuations (useful or harmful, hence acceptable or unacceptable)”:
The individual colors even express a value for us (though we seldom, or only after a long exclusion from these colors confess it, like those imprisoned in error, or in jail). Even insects react differently to different colors, one preferring this, another that….8
The precise terms we use in our analyses of perception, or in the philosophical discussion of cognitive claims, are interpenetrated with normative attitudes and moral preferences. In a striking discussion in the Nachlass, “Moral Values in the Theory of Knowledge Itself,” Nietzsche lists some examples:
The trusting of reason—why not mistrust?
The “real world” must be the good one—why?
Appearance, change, contradiction, and strife are morally disvalued.
[This is] desiring a world which lacks them.
Inventing the “Transcendent world,” therewith a place remains for “moralistic freedom” (with Kant).
Dialectic as the road to virtue (with Plato and Socrates: evidently because sophistry was judged the path to immortality).
Time and space ideal: consequently “unity” in the essence of things, consequently no “sin,” no evil, no imperfection—a justification of God.
Epicurus denied the existence of knowledge: in order to maintain moral (specifically hedonistic) values as the highest. Augustine the same, later Pascal (“the corrupted reason”) on behalf of Christian values.
The contempt of Descartes for everything mutable; similarly that of Spinoza.9
The remarkable first part of Beyond Good and Evil is devoted to this subject. Nietzsche identifies, and impales with perspicuity and wit, the moral casuistry with which the great philosophers have imposed on us their own moral preferences. Not, of course, that this can easily be helped. Philosophy “always creates a world after its own image,”10 because the imposition of moralities is a form of the Will-to-Power and “Philosophy is this tyrannizing drive itself, the most spiritualized Will-to-Power.”11 Again, it is only the beliefs about their beliefs which Nietzsche stigmatizes. Philosophers might acknowledge that they are lobbying and not reporting.
The making of choices and the holding of preferences is hardly a thing man (or any creature) can avoid. For life itself simply means “valuing and preferring”:12
In evaluation are expressed the conditions of [one’s] preservation and growth. All our sense organs and our senses are developed only in relation to these conditions. The trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, and hence the valuing of logic, proves only that through experience these have been shown useful, and not that they are true.13
Schemes and tables of valuation, schedules of preference and rank, are ingredients in our ocnceptual structure, and as such internally related to our language. Just as philosophers have miscredited themselves with discovering facts about the world which were facts only about their language, so their moral discoveries have reference to nothing in the world itself, but only to themselves. The alleged description of moral facts is merely an expression of moral attitudes. But these moral attitudes are involved with the terms of our survival. “There are no moral phenomena,” he says (and says frequently), “but only moralistic interpretations of phenomena.”14 “There are altogether no moral facts.”15 This follows as a specialization of his general thesis that there are no facts, no order, and hence no moral order in the world. But it is as though his entire general philosophy was a preparation for this application.
We are not being asked to abandon, or at least not to abandon merely as a consequence of this analysis, the moral beliefs we hold. We are being asked only to abandon our meta-ethical beliefs (to use contemporary terms) as to the possibility of justifying whatever moral beliefs we have. Just as we are not required to jettison a single scientific belief (but only a belief about science) when told that scientific theories all are conventions, so here we may advocate and bring up our children to accept the same moral code, even if this code depends on us alone, and is itself neither true nor false. There is no constraint to the abandonment of beliefs. But there is no telling what changes in our moral attitudes might not come about in consequence of our changed meta-ethical beliefs; for once divorced from the idea that moral ideas, if they are to be accepted, must be supported by some external authority or some reigning moral order in the universe at large, there opens up to us the possibility that an entirely different kind of justification might allow us a choice among moralities far wider than we had imagined. We may see which moral outlook suits us best, and conduces most effectively to our prevailing over obstacles. It may well be that the one we now subscribe to will do best. Yet, should it now chafe, or be found inhibiting, or be felt in any way destructive of ourselves, we must opt and, if required, fight for its modification or replacement. Hence the critique of moral systems, which Nietzsche sustained during his productive period, was not incompatible with his fierce and militant advocacy of the overthrow of one morality and the acceptance of another.
Nietzsche played the roles of moral critic and moralist at the same time, often in the very same aphorism, commenting in a general way about the logic of moral concepts and enjoining a specific moral reform at once. When he spoke of himself, as he often did, as an Immoralist, he was sometimes implying simply that he was speaking as a philosophical critic of moral systems generally, concerned with morality as a problem and not with the endorsement or condemnation of any specific moral system. At times, however, he meant that he was taking a particular stand against the moral attitudes of his own place and time and tradition, and speaking out in behalf of another and more liberating way. Again, when he exhorts philosophers to follow his lead, “to take a stand beyond good and evil [and] to put beneath one the illusion of moral judgments,”16 he is asking that they appreciate, with him, the moral neutrality of the world and the subjective coloring of every moral judgment. Sometimes he is certainly also seeking to enlist them in a moral cause, to now take stands against that specific moral system in which the terms “good” and “evil” contrast, a moral code which, he thought, might cause irreparable human damage if it had not already done so.
Nietzsche’s two roles vis-à-vis morality must be kept distinct, because Nietzsche has been understood, discussed, and condemned in just one of these capacities. This condemnation, of course, is not difficult to understand, in view of his strident accusations, his incendiary language, and his seemingly uncontrolled denouncements of Christian morality. This phase of his writing we must assess in time, but he meant to keep the two roles apart and be primarily a moral philosopher rather than a preacher or evangelist:
Moralists must now accept the fact that they are to be regarded as immoral because they dissect morals…. Men confuse the moralist with the moral preacher. The older moralists dissected too little and preached too much, and this is the basis for that confusion, and its unpleasant consequences for the moralists of today.17
There can be little doubt about the aptness of this comment, even if Nietzsche later obscured, even for himself, the extramoral with the contramoral positions he came simultaneously to occupy. The extramoral position has the most interest but the lesser influence, and I shall now seek to identify some of Nietzsche’s characteristic theories in moral philosophy.
II
There is a celebrated and influential argument ascribed to Hume, to the effect that we cannot logically derive an “ought” from an “is,” and hence no amount of knowledge regarding what is in fact the case will entail a single conclusion about what ought to be the case. Unless our premises contain some expression of value able to be stated as an imperative, in addition to factual information expressed in indicative sentences, no expression of value and no imperative may legitimately be deduced. It must in fairness be said of the philosophers who have sought a factual or objective basis for their moral views that they were not always victimized by exactly the logical error which Hume identified. They did not suppose they were basing moral judgments upon nonmoral facts, but rather upon moral facts, for it never occurred to them to doubt that there were any. The Humean attack is telling only in case the one it is aimed against actually does draw a distinction between the two orders of judgment and then seeks the logical connection between them. It is a gratuitous attack, however, if no such distinction was drawn, or if moral facts were regarded as part of what the world contains. Nietzsche’s attack is against this view. He holds that indeed there is no distinction to be drawn, not because there are no moral facts, but because there are no facts at all, only interpretations. If Hume were to say that at least there is a logical gap between factual and moral interpretations, Nietzsche would be ready with a challenge to show how the distinction is to be made, for, as we have seen, he contends that our factual claims are fused and amalgamated with our moral ones, the distinction being (at best, and in present idiom) metalinguistic.
Nevertheless, there remains a question of how we are to explain the phenomenon of moral interpretations. Given Nietzschean methodology, we must suppose that these interpretations have a use and answer to a need if they are practiced at all. If we found this to be so, it would not be deriving an ought from an is but, rather, explaining the nonmoral provenance of moral interpreting18 and its function in life. Just what, he asks, “is the value of value?”19 Merely to be in a position to ask this question is to have located onself “beyond good and evil.”20 He was posing a question in what we today would perhaps call social psychology. To some degree his answers are not really unfamiliar; at times they are almost clichés of the social sciences. I shall mention them only to the extent that they serve to clarify the philosophical points they illustrate.
To begin, we might say that morality consists just in obedience to customs, whatever these might be.21 Customs are traditional practices, and wherever there is no traditional way, there is no morality, for there is nothing with which to conform. It is not in the least required of these customs to have intrinsically served any use whatever. There are innumerable customs whose obvious utility is doubtful. However, just to be a custom, independent of content, is already to have a certain utility. There may be no rhyme or reason to the customs one obeys, but there is some rhyme and reason to the obedience of customs per se. “Any rule is better than none. [This] is the principle which stands at the beginning of civilization.”22 It is in this respect that Nietzsche seeks to explain the seeming irrationality and arbitrariness of the traditions adhered to, at times with the most horrendous sanctions for their abrogation, by societies the world over. Accordingly, the question has to do with conformity in general to custom, and customs are plainly indispensable if there is to be any society at all, whatever specific anthropological content they may have. But deviating from a set of customs is immoral relative to that set, and insofar a challenge to the society these customs make possible.
A morality does not consist merely in a set of customs. It often, and typically, offers some reasons why these are the rules to be obeyed. In actual practice, as Nietzsche saw the matter, the imposition of custom is simply the imposition upon an individual of the Will-to-Power of the group, or “herd.” But a morality is hardly recognized as the naked exercise of power on the part of the group, exclusively for its own perdurance and advantage, irrespective of the price in suffering to be paid by the individual who obeys. Morality demands such sacrifices. This means, among other things, that any number of impulses which the individual might have must be ruthlessly repressed if they or their expression in any way conflict with the authority of the group. The natural and the effectively desired consequence is that each shall be like each, and all think and feel and talk alike. This means, finally, the unremitting pruning of the deviant or exceptional individual (whose individuality is in some measure a function of exactly those prohibited impulses). This idea, which we have touched on already in connection with consciousness and language, will be taken up again. I am concerned here with the reasons and justifications given by the group for the traditions it upholds.
These reasons, which of course reinforce the practices they sanction, basically are “imaginary causalities,” once again, “believed in as the basis of morality.”23 Custom becomes accredited by “some falsely explained accident.”24 It is for this reason that science, and especially the scientific examination of moralities, is regarded as immoral, for science is often required to be incompatible with the irrational phantastischer Kausalitäten upon which our moral code rests, so that any intellectual challenge by science is a threat to the way of life it supposedly supports. It is then in the interest of the group as a whole, or so it seems, to keep its beliefs quarantined in order to protect its practical demands. So morality stupefies: “it works against our acquiring new experiences and of correcting morality accordingly, which means that morality works against a better, newer morality.”25 However useful a morality might be in preserving the life of the group, any morality, reinforcing beliefs as well as attitudes and making it impossible for the members of the group to distinguish one from another, becomes at last a shell which inhibits further moral growth. Instead of becoming a means for the successful conduct of life, it becomes a brake against the furtherance of life and fulfillment for the living. Again, the critic of moralities exposes the irrationalities of the beliefs which are drawn protectively over moralities, and the critic cannot but be counted as their enemy. Nietzsche wants emphatically to claim that
The moral judgment has this in common with religious judgments, that each believes in a reality which does not exist. Morality, which is only an interpretation, or better a misinterpretation of certain phenomena … belongs to a stage of ignorance at which the concept of reality, of any distinction between imaginary and real, is lacking.26
In such comments one feels a tension in Nietzsche’s thought. How, after all, can he distinguish real from imaginary? What sense can he give to the notion of “reality” at all except a negative and unspecifying one? But this general reservation apart, it is not easy to connect his views on morality into a coherent account, in part because he goes back and forth between sociological and psychological considerations which should at times be kept distinct, particularly because the connection is not always plain. Sociologically, societies enforce certain rules and demand the extirpation of impulses and actions which might, through disconformity, be destructive of the order defined by these rules. Any deviating impulse is potentially dangerous. Consequently, the same sets of mind are reinforced everywhere within the group, and these, consisting of feelings, impulses, and the like, become virtually instinctual: “Morality becomes the herd instinct within the individual.”27 Once this interiorization occurs—what today is sometimes called the superego—there not only would be little room for independent thinking and evaluating but also the very idea of being on one’s own would be terrifying rather than liberating. “All sorts of terrors and miseries were associated with being alone.”28 So far there is a reasonable connection between the sociological and the psychological thesis. Now, suppose a man began to sense impulses to do or to think differently from the rest of society. Naturally he would feel threatened by these impulses and he would seek an explanation of their occurrence. Some typical explanations might be that he had sinned, or he was guilty of something, or his ancestors were guilty and he was discharging their debts. These are of course imaginary causes, but it does not take long for imaginary causes to stabilize into mythologies and mythologies into systems of belief, and then for these beliefs to come to reinforce men into the accepted ways of behavior. Our moral codes are curiously strengthened by our own pathology and our propensities for seeking out imaginary causes. A man feels, for whatever reason, life at some ebb in him, and he seeks to explain it in terms perhaps of his guilt when it is the sense of guilt which, the other way round, is to be explained in terms of the ebbing vitality. It is thus that moral beliefs, or those beliefs which imprison us within the cast of custom, “belong in whole and in part to the psychology of error. In every single case we find cause and effect interchanged.”29
Such seems to have been Nietzsche’s account. The gist of it is plain enough. The proclaimed causes for our practices are never the correct but only the imaginary ones. These cannot be taken seriously as explanations, but one can profitably take them as “symptoms and sign language.”30 Then one might have some remarkable insight into the internal working of primitive mentation. In a similar way, perhaps, one can hardly countenance references to astral influences in the explanation of behavior. But one may use such references as some index to the working of those intellects which believe astral influences to count. Nietzsche’s program in moral psychology is:
The moral judgment is never to be taken literally. As such, it contains but nonsense. But moral judgments remain invaluable as semiotic. They exhibit, at least to the knowledgeable, the most valuable realities of the cultures … which did not know enough to know themselves. Morals merely are sign language, purely symptomatologies. One must first know what it is connected with in order to make the least use of it.31
One is to go from the moral philosophy to the biography of the moral philosopher, just as one must go from the moral code to the social psychology of the culture which enforces it. None of this, however, will be altogether clear until we have worked through the doctrine of the Will-to-Power.
III
The differences between Nietzsche’s mature philosophy and the views he expressed in the period of The Birth of Tragedy are nowhere more evident than in his discussions concerning the relationship of group and individual member. In that early volume one has the sense that he was much occupied with the problem of solidarity. He hoped to find in art, and especially in the Wagnerian avatar of tragic art, the instrument through which individuals might, if but for a time, be melded into some sort of communion, their differences effectively obliterated for that time. Certainly, he believed that this was the power of the old Dionysiac rites. In the ideal presentation of tragedy, as in the frenzied crises of the Dionysiac ritual, differences and boundaries were washed away; each shared, as it were, a common dream or vision. He was concerned, in brief, with the sort of problem which Marx (far more realistically, I should think) pursued in connection with class consciousness, or which the syndicalist Georges Sorel, many years later, sought the solution to in social myths. In the later philosophy, there is little of this. Or rather, Nietzsche came to feel that there was a sufficiency of solidarity and not enough individuality in life—an emphasis which has especially attracted to his writings those of an anarchistic bent.
The more interesting point philosophically, however, is his suggestion that the concept of individuality, indeed of individuals as such, is a late concept, a suggestion which finds its polemic context within the speculative anthropologies of Hobbes or Locke. It has always been a temptation (it was so already for Glaucon in the Republic) to think of men as primordially individuals, with societies then formed out of these as perhaps compounds are formed of elements or, better, molecules of atoms. As the latter can be resolved into their atomic parts, so societies can be dissolved into their individual constituents. Social relations are then purely external, or, in Hobbes’s terms, “artificial”: we have always the option of turning back into that natural state whence we derived, retrieving our aboriginal individuality. This would have been the analogue, in social philosophy, of the epistemological theory that ideas are simple or compound, and that the latter are built up out of the former. This implies that an individual, with all his required senses and no external aid, might, after all, compound all the non-simple ideas he should require. On such a view it is a problem, all our simple ideas being essentially our own, how we should ever communicate. Perhaps the analogue to this in (empiricist) social philosophy would be the problem of how individuals could interrelate with one another, each having a sufficient endowment to survive on his own with no true need for others except for protection.
We have already seen that Nietzsche rejected such a theory; his view was that consciousness, as language, has a social origin and function, so that individuals achieve consciousness only of the ideas which everyone has in common with everybody else. As an individual could scarcely survive without a society, so he hardly could achieve a sense of himself as an independent unit. It would therefore only be late in the evolution of things that (however it takes place) individuals may begin to think of themselves as such, and even wonder, as philosophers, whether others have feelings and interiors at all. It indeed becomes logically tenable to defend a solipsism which could hardly have been so much as expressed earlier.
Nietzsche seems somehow to see an individual emerging from the herd in something like the manner in which the individuated, Apollinian hero emerged from the homogeneous chorus of the ancient tragedies. On his theory of that evolution, there was for a prolonged period only the chorus, just as, according to his anthropology, there was for a long period only the herd. The herd would have been made up of individuals, but they could not have been aware of themselves as such, and deviations from the norm would simply have perished, cast out like alien bodies, through inability to express their wants. Within each herd there would be a profound and virtually irresistible force making for homogeneity. Perhaps, indeed, explanations and justifications would come only when this prolonged communion had begun to give way, and men had to be kept in line. Regardless, there could have been differences between herds, because each would have worked out its language against the conditions that made for its survival; and as these vary, so do herds. We get, then, moral homogeneity within the herd and moral heterogeneity between herds. Nietzsche emphasized moral relativity, not least of all because it provided plain evidence of the possibility of other moralities, which implied that, practically speaking, there was nothing universally compelling about the moral perspective of one’s own herd. This is especially taken up in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
A people which did not evaluate could not live; but if it is to preserve itself, then it dare not evaluate the way its neighbor evaluates.
Much that one people calls “good,” another calls “shame” and “disgrace.” So I found. I found much that was here named evil and there decked in purple honors….
A table of values hangs over each people.32
These oracular verses distill what Nietzsche said on this (not unobvious) topic in his sprawling corpus. Zarathustra speaks of the varieties of good and evil to be found throughout the world, and of the power—“no greater power is to be found on earth”—of evaluation. Men, or more correctly, social groups, “gave themselves good and evil.” They did not discover it in nature, for it is not there to be found. Nor did they receive it from on high (whatever they may offer in explanation of their codes and decalogues). Men “laid values into things, in order to preserve themselves” and so created themselves at the same time as they created the world. Hence “evaluation is creation” [Schätzen ist Schaffen].33 These are familiar teachings. More pertinent to our topic is Zarathustra’s claim that “People were creative first, and only later individuals. Indeed, the individual himself is only the most recent creation.” And “Pleasure in the herd is older than pleasure in the self; and so long as good conscience is called ‘herd,’ bad conscience is called ‘I.’” He who so much as thinks of himself, in the primal unity of herdhood, as someone apart feels guilt for his apartness. Such a person would wish for nothing so much as reunion with the group. As Nietzsche suggested, there is terror in aloneness, and as long as the singleness of individuals is explained with reference to concepts like sin, deviations are apt to be internally as well as externally sensed as punishments rather than opportunities. And that, Nietzsche wants to say as a reformer, is a sin.
A problem which must vex us is: How could the individual have attained to a consciousness of himself as distinct? For, on Nietzsche’s analysis, whatever he did become conscious of would be translated directly into the common idiom. Nietzsche nowhere answers this with any definiteness, any more than Plato tells us how it happens that someone gets loose from those chains that bind the rest of his fellows in the cave. Plato’s liberated philosopher, however, is able to return to the cave and liberate those still enchained amid shadows. But Nietzsche has given an account which makes it, one would think, quite impossible that anyone so detached should be understood: his fellow herdsmen must look upon him amazed and uncomprehending. Nietzsche did think (not excitingly, it must be admitted), that we may dangerously weaken the bonds which hold the group together by analyzing dispassionately, through the techniques of the “science of the origin of ideas,” the stupidity of the beliefs which support the group’s morality. This is slow work at best, and the weight of language and tradition must press heavily upon the free spirit struggling to get loose. It requires, indeed, almost superhuman abilities and “immense counterpowers” to “thwart this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile, this continuing forming of men into the similar, the average, the ordinary, the herdlike—into the common!”34
It is edifying, of course, and scarcely deniable, that one way of easing the pressure of custom is to replace the old monsters of tradition with scientifically sound knowledge. The neurotic must be told repeatedly that his fancied explanations are false, and that the true reason for his obsession or compulsion is found elsewhere and must be carefully identified and illuminated if he is to get beyond that domination of the derangement of imagination. Nietzsche has another, and perhaps less obvious, prescription to offer than merely additional scientific research. Let us assume, for the sake of exposition, his not unreasonable idea that we are born into a scheme of concepts, at once evaluative and descriptive, and that we spontaneously ingest a morality and a metaphysics through simply learning our language. Let us (more dubiously) suppose along with him that what we know of ourselves is that, and that only, which our language permits us to know; also we are conscious only of what words permit us to say. Language and morality function repressively in two ways, excluding from survival anyone who is different to any dangerous degree from the rest of the herd, and throttling within a given individual any feelings or thoughts or ideas which might fail to pass dully into the group idiom. Now let us suppose that into our model community are born some individuals more sensitive than others, or open to a greater range of experiences, or subject to some different order of passion. It is not likely these persons will perdure or be understood, at least not with regard to their deviation. Yet, one might urge, it would only be through the existence of such individuals that new ideas could come to refresh and modify the group’s repository of concepts, inasmuch as there could be no natural alternative source. All of this, whether correct or not, should be at least readily identified as something that Nietzsche believed. But let us draw from all of this some (loose) inferences. The first is that it is at least possible that a great deal is always going on within each of us which we never become conscious of and never, accordingly, talk about. Because groups differ, it is possible again that interior processes which are unconscious and inexpressible within one group may be articulable and conscious in another. This might very much depend on differences in the conditions under which these groups find it possible to survive. Of the total set of interior conditions, then, some are conscious in one group and unconscious in another; this, in turn, might serve to explain the differences in perspective and morality from group to group. But this finally means that we all have within us what it would take to modify the conceptual structure. We all have what Nietzsche calls affects or passions: “the life-conditioning affects” [Lebensbedingende Affekte]. Some but not necessarily all of these are represented in consciousness; some but not all are repressed by social pressure; some but not all are permitted expression. There is the possibility that with a difference in the form and degree of pressure, different affects come into consciousness; perhaps through the release of some of these the moral system itself could be changed. This is a strange and devious theory, but it seems in one or another form to have been held by Nietzsche, who tells us, of these passions or affects, that they “must be further developed if life is to be further developed.”35
It is not necessary here to query the truth or falsity of this theory, but only to assess its importance in the structure of Nietzsche’s system. It is important because it is his view that what the herd and the morality of the herd are repressive of is the passions which must be antisocial in nature. “All the old moralistic monsters are unanimous in this,” he wrote in an essay called “Morality As Anti-nature” (which is in the Twilight of the Idols), “that one must kill the passions [il faut tuer les passions.]”36 It is just at this point, however, that Nietzsche falters badly. Given his theory, he is entitled, I suppose, to say that whatever passions are contrary to the interests of the group must be antisocial. This is virtually a definition. Then, as a moral revisionist, Nietzsche becomes an advocate of antisocial passions and that again is permitted him. However, he found himself specifically endorsing a set of passions and passionate actions which are specifically recognized as antisocial within our morality. But it hardly follows that every antisocial (meaning merely “out of the ordinary and not to be tolerated”) impulse is going to give rise to fresh moral horizons. Nevertheless, Nietzsche found himself writing what seem to be bald apologies for and exhortations to lust, cruelty, violence, hatred, and brutality of every sort. Thus he had no one but himself to blame for his wicked reputation. Still, before completely harmonizing with this condemnation, we must say a few words regarding what were his beliefs in contrast with what I shall call the rhetoric he lapsed into when expressing them. His rhetoric must be conceded as inflammatory; so must his beliefs. But there was a considerable difference between them.
IV
When Nietzsche speaks of morality as antinature, he has in mind the way in which morality is repressive relative to what we might regard as the unrestrained expression of wants and needs and appetites. This expression is “natural” in perhaps the way it is natural for bushes to grow in whatever random shapes they take without the external modeling given them by gardeners with shears. We might then think of a “natural” person as one who simply satisfies his needs and freely pursues the stilling of his desires, without care or concern or guilt, without submission to any external and certainly no internal regimen. He would act as does an infant, or perhaps an animal, or perhaps, more exactly, a late Roman emperor. Obviously, part of the socialization of an individual consists in his being disciplined to a point where he internalizes his group’s taboos and applies them to himself. When this happens, as we all know from the most personal experience, there often are conflicts. Philosophers since Plato have been impressed with the conflict between appetite and “reason,” and the reader browsing through Nietzsche is almost certain to find him singular in this tradition, as one who openly advocated, or so it seemed, the primacy of the appetites and impulses which operate at the sub-rational level of the human psyche. Nietzsche has been both admired and admonished for this, but the truth is that we shall find him to be far more conventional than either his language or his notoriety suggests.
In the very passage in which he inveighs against the sworn enemies of the passions, he writes that “all passions have a stage in which they are merely fatal, dragging their victim down with the weight of their stupidity.”37 Let us again recall the crucial distinction, so often overlooked, between barbaric and hellenized Dionysianism, and remember that Nietzsche primarily advocated the latter. He was never an enthusiast for mere moral or emotional laisser aller. Admitting that “Every morality is, in opposition to laisser aller, a bit of tyranny against ‘nature,’ even against ‘reason,’” he goes on to remark, “but that is no objection against it.”38 Finally, in fact, the value of systems of value is precisely the “enduring restraint” which they impose. Moral systems are relative and arbitrary, but it must be emphasized repeatedly that conformity to rule—to any rule rather than none, as he put it39—is the beginning of civilization, and that which makes life meaningful and worth living:
The remarkable fact is that whatever is of freedom, subtlety, daring, dance, and masterly firmness, that is or ever was in the world, be it in thinking, or ruling, or in speaking or persuading, in art as in moral conduct, is made possible primarily by this “tyranny of arbitrary laws.” Indeed, in all seriousness, the probability is not slight that this is “Nature” and “natural”—and not any laisser aller.40
This teaching runs through his writings from first to last. In The Wanderer and His Shadow he writes, “The man who has conquered his passions enters into the possession of the most fecund region, like the colonist who has become master of woodland and marsh.”41 And again, in Beyond Good and Evil:
The essential thing “in heaven and on earth” is that there be long, continued obedience in a specific direction. Something always comes of this in the end, on account of which it repays one to live in this world—virtue, or art, or music, dance, reason, or spirituality—something glorifying, purifying, of divinity or madness.42
It cannot be said that Nietzsche stood for the “natural” discharge of emotional energy and a ruthless pushing back of emotional restraint. What he did stand for is plain enough, if less exciting. He is, as usual, employing language whose power is so in excess of the point he wishes to make that it drives him past his message into bordering conceptual territory. Yet he seems to have felt that unless he used excessive language, he could not reach his point at all. He is urging a qualification on our attitudes toward the emotional and passionate side of men. He is attacking what he takes to be a tendency to extirpate rather than to spiritualize or discipline the passions. Philosophers, he felt, were frightened of the passions, which indeed have their dangerous aspects. But like any force in nature, their danger is compensated for by their utter necessity, and the problem is essentially how to give them form and purpose. Nietzsche saw it as his specific task “to divest the passions of their fearful reputation and [at the same time] to prevent them from becoming dominating torrents, to convert passions [Leidenschafften] into joys” [Freudenschafften].43*
There are at least two kinds of stupidity in regard to the passions. There is the stupidity of a man who supposes he can become master in anything if he has not first become master of his own lusts, hates, and resentments.44 There is also the stupidity of the belief that the passions are as such horrendous, and must, in the name and hope of virtue, be annihilated. But: “To annihilate passions and desires, merely in order to forestall their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of their stupidity … is merely an acute form of stupidity.”45 This Nietzsche identifies as the attitude of the Christian religion, and it goes some distance (but I dare say only some) toward explaining his vitriolic, sustained, and famous invective against the Christian Church. “The Church attacked passion with excision in every sense,”46 he wrote in the Twilight of the Idols. In the same passage, however, he also points out that the Church was far more an enemy of intelligence than it was of passion, that it was hostile always, and suspicious, wherever intellect was concerned, favoring the “poor in spirit” and expecting revelation from the mouths of babes. Because it addressed itself essentially to a community not especially open to suasion or analysis, it employed ruthless rather than intelligent methods, castrating, so to speak, rather than coping in some less radical manner. Rather than asking the reasonable question, “How are the passions to be made spiritual, beautified, and divine?” the moralists of the early church laid stress on plucking out the offending organ: “But to attack the passions at their root is to attack life at its root. The practice of the church is inimical to life.”47
It is, accordingly, a much qualified paganism that we must attribute to Nietzsche. Celebrating, as he did, the Mediterranean values, if we may speak of them as such (for he had the northerner’s romanticized view of the sunny Mediterranean life), he held the basically sane if perhaps dull view that the passions and drives of men be disciplined and guided by reason, that our lives be Apollinian and Dionysiac at once, in that balance of force and form which, after all, had been recommended from the beginning of moral philosophy. Language aside, then, Nietzsche hardly deviated from the tradition which goes back at least to Socrates.
He perhaps would have justified his language by saying that the ancients did not have the puritans to attack. His psychology, too, was distinctive. And it must be remembered that, in distinction to the ancient moralists, he was not seeking a “formula” for leading a happy life, with reason in the ascendant over the passions (as Plato did), and will supporting reason in an auxiliary role. Rather, Nietzsche was interested in breaking through to a new metaphysics and a new morality, and he believed that this could be effected only through modifications in our emotional life and release within us of the “life-conditioning affects.” Self-mastery remained a preliminary requirement, and even here he felt that not everyone is capable of achieving it. For most people, the external restrictions of society are essential. For this reason, too, he was somewhat afraid that Pandora’s box might be opened by his philosophy if it was heeded without sufficient subtlety. He cannot, of course, be completely exonerated from the misinterpretations that have been given of him. He might have said what he meant more plainly and with less conflagrating a language. He was too self-indulgent and too self-dramatizing in representing to himself the difficulty of his thought. It is, at this point at least, less difficult than it is dubious.
V
If we are to find our way safely through the heartland of popular Nietzschean philosophy—his doctrine of master and slave morality, his references to cruelty, suffering, blond beasts, supermen, and the like—we must go equipped with some clear understanding of his theory of passions, however unclear in itself that theory may be.
We must first state the way in which Nietzsche sees us, even though this is familiar enough by now. Each of us is a cluster of drives and appetites and passions, and whatever we do or think is to be explained with reference to these drives. They give us our momentum and direction. Of these, however, few are identified in language or come to consciousness at all. We are likely to give false accounts of those that do, connecting them up with one another (as the prisoners did with the shadows in Plato’s famous cave) rather than relating them to the seething undersurface of the mind. Conscious of little, and often wrong about that of which we are conscious, we have scant understanding of what we are or why we act. Insofar as we may speak of our reality, or what we really are, this will be the bundle of passions of which we consist. To some extent this becomes systematically clear only in connection with the Will-to-Power theory; but Nietzsche is making the assumption that “Nothing is ‘given’ as real other than the world of our passions and drives; and that we can ascend or descend to no different ‘reality’ than the reality of these drives.”48 The extent to which Nietzsche quite literally means this—that nothing else is real—will, I hope, become plain by the end of this study.
Two further assumptions must now be made. The first is that each individual is endowed with more or less the same set of drives, but the drives will vary in intensity from individual to individual. In some they may be weak to the point of inappetency; and in others they may be strong to the point of obsessiveness. The second is that nothing, short of killing or maiming an individual, may be done to increase or decrease the strength of these passions. We must understand this assumption, however poorly characterized, as some sort of conservational principle. A given drive D of a given strength S will manifest itself in different ways depending upon the different social circumstances in which the individual, whose drive it is, happens to have been raised, and relative to the morality which prevails in that society. Consider a man who has a strong sexual drive. In certain circumstances he will be able to exercise this drive almost as freely as he might wish; for example, if he owns a harem, or is a member of a conquering army with free access to the women of the vanquished force, or lives in a Bohemian society with relaxed standards of sexual conduct. Now imagine this person in an extremely puritanical situation, where extreme sanctions are attached to sexual action. He might defy this, resorting to violence where blandishment fails. But short of emasculation, the drive will (by the conservational principle) remain strong and indeed tormenting without any of the natural outlets. Between emasculation and pure laisser aller, there is a range of possible “spiritualizations” or, to employ a well-known concept from psychoanalytic theory, “sublimations,” which offer more socially acceptable substitute outlets for a drive that could damage society if it were allowed its “natural” course, and damage the individual if it were eliminated from his make-up. Now, we may regard a morality—a set of customs which individuals are required to obey—as offering a way of disciplining the passions and drives while permitting their discharge “as a condition of life and growth.”49 Roughly, then, we may think of moralities as forms imposed on passions, harnessing, as it were, certain native powers (and hence meeting power with power) for the benefit of the society. Individuals, then, may feel happy or not depending on whether they are provided avenues of outlet for drives sufficiently strong to require discharge. In some societies, moralities are creative, permitting a genuinely productive use of natural energy; in others, they are repressive, forcing these drives underground, as it were, where they issue forth as crimes, or mental disorders, or are in some manner destructive to the individual or to society. Without ever having been made explicit, this seems to have been Nietzsche’s theory of the passions, or the main assumptions concerning such a theory.
Let us suppose there is in each of us a drive, stronger by far in some than in others, which we shall call “aggression.” This is sufficiently close to the Will-to-Power to do temporary service and sufficiently close to a word in our vocabulary to take on a partial meaning. Even though aggression essentially has to do with dominating, or exercising one’s power over, or giving one’s form to some external thing, it also must be understood in a wider sense. Each thing, or for our purposes, each person, is directed by this drive, and we might even regard most of his actions as explicable with reference to it—whether he is an artist, a businessman, a preacher, or a soldier. Let us now indulge in a piece of speculative anthropology. Imagine a model (not in the sense of ideal but only of idealized) society where each member is brought up in conformity with a moral code, which both disciplines the group’s members and functions as an integrative instrument, holding all the individuals to roughly the same patterns of behavior, thought, and expression. Each feels himself in solidarity with the rest. Suppose that among the individuals the drive to aggress is markedly higher in strength than elsewhere in the group. It is extremely useful, under certain conditions, for there to be individuals with this degree of the drive, for instance, if the group is threatened from without. Then this aggression is discharged outward, in opposing the enemies of the group. “Strong and dangerous drives such as love of adventure, foolhardiness, vengefulness, guile, rapacity, and power seeking”50 turn out to be, here at least, as socially useful a set of drives (we may count them as modes of aggression) as any. Because of their utility, they will be counted as virtues and their possessors will be honored within the group—“decked in purple honors,” as Zarathustra said. Only naturally, then, the warriors within a group, and the better warriors (those more highly aggressive) within this class, are the honored ones in the group when, as has perhaps nearly always been the case, the group is surrounded by a pool of hostile tribes (and indeed we may think of aggression as a group drive as well).
Let peace now prevail. By our psychological assumptions, the same amount of aggression will be present as before, only now there is no external avenue for its discharge. The warriors, unused to keeping themselves in check, find their aggression turned, despite themselves, against the precise individuals in whose defense it formerly was exercised. Their fields are trodden upon, their women are stolen, and so on. By the precise criterion—utility to the group—according to which their drives were termed virtues and esteemed, they now are disesteemed, regarded as immoral and as a danger to the group. They will, in effect, have become criminals.
Now, as the roads for their discharge are closed, [these drives] gradually become branded as immoral and abandoned to slander. Now the opposite drives and inclinations come to moral honor. The instinct of the herd draws its conclusions bit by bit. How much or how little danger to the common good … lies in a situation, an affect, a talent, or a will: this is now the moral perspective. Fear, once more, is the mother of morality.51
Now the tribe begins to make demands upon its erstwhile heroes. They must either become like everyone else, law-abiding citizens, or be hounded as criminals. But to be like everyone else is impossible for these individuals, given their drive and its unremitting intensity, invariantly as to external condition. From this circumstance Nietzsche will draw some fascinating psychological consequences, but here it is simply required that these individuals, who happen to be outstanding in relation to their group, are always, actually or potentially, a danger to the group.
When these highest and strongest drives break out passionately, taking the individual far beyond the lowlands of the consciousness of the herd, the latter’s self-confidence, its belief in itself, its backbone, so to speak, breaks. So it is best to brand and vilify these drives.52
We must remind ourselves, as Nietzsche did not always do, that we are dealing with speculative anthropology, with an idealized model that illustrates the working of certain forces and shows how the same thing will be evaluated differently in terms of variations in circumstance—itself hardly a novelty in moral theory. We must remind ourselves, again as Nietzsche did not always do, that the drive we have termed aggression is not and need not always be manifested or expressed in antisocial ways and exhibited in the personae of soldier and outlaw. Indeed, aggression—or Will-to-Power, which is its near analogue—must be understood as a general phenomenon, widely and variously exemplified. In Nietzsche’s own philosophy, art, religion, science, philosophy, and morality itself are among its instances. Nevertheless, Nietzsche favored, as an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of his writing, a dramatis personae in which the hero, more frequently than not, was a military type (he liked to refer to himself, with the slimmest justification, as “the old artilleryman”)—though, in the very passage from which I have been quoting, he goes on to say: “A high, independent intellect, a will to stand alone, even a great understanding, are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates the individual above the herd and frightens one’s neighbors is called by them “evil” [Böse], Nietzsche sometimes identifies intelligence and rationality as Böse, forgetting that he has said that “good” and “evil” are traits which men impose and do not find in an absolute sense in the world, just as he forgets, or permits his readers to forget at times, that “herd” is a descriptive word and not a mere pejorative. There could be a herd of Einsteins, after all.
It is not difficult to see how readers who feel themselves to be superior persons should have found Nietzsche to be their philosopher, especially if they also felt that their superiority was unrecognized or without appreciation. Finally, this was Nietzsche’s own situation, accounting perhaps as much as anything else for the ascending violence of his prose, for the increasing nastiness of his imagery and illustrations. He could have retained the same analysis with a far less Guignolesque rhetoric (after all, we find it already in his early books) and with a far wider and more humane application, for, as I have suggested and hope to show, it belongs to a broad and general theory indeed. But his isolation and vanity conspired, I believe, to confirm him in a style of writing and a pitch of shrill invective which seems, often, to be a despairing threat. In a way he declared war on society, as though he were misled by his own imagery into believing that only in time of war is the superior person—whom in violation of his own theory he narrowly identified as the soldier—honored and recognized as such. But this is a digression.
VI
The relativity of morality, of which Nietzsche and his Zarathustrian porte-parole make so much, is only perfunctorily illustrated in his writings. One finds, here and there, a comment on the differing tables of value adhered to by the Greeks, the Persians, and the Jews. He was not concerned, however, to compile an anthology but rather to construct a typology of moral practices; strictly speaking, it impressed him that there were only two main types of morality.
In wandering through the many gross and subtle moralities which have reigned heretofore, or which still reign in this world, I found certain manifestations regularly connected with one another, and regularly recurring, until I hit upon two fundamental types, and a basic distinction appeared. There is master morality and there is slave morality…53
Nietzsche clearly stressed that these were types, that they seldom were found in any pure state, either in a given group or in the value attitudes of a single individual. But he sometimes speaks as though there are, or should be, perfectly pure exemplifications. The distinction is a basic and an important one for him, although the designations are perhaps unfortunate. As usual, we must look to context rather than connotation to see what Nietzsche means by these two moralities.
They are connected, in some respects, with the differences in evaluation assigned by members of a tribe or herd to their superiors. This depends on the utility of the superiors to the tribe, itself a matter of external circumstance to some degree. Nothing need be different about these superiors for them now to be honored and now to be slandered: it depends on the outlets available to them for the release of the passions that define their character and determine their superiority. These individuals, in whom aggression is strong, and who would throughout millennia have been warriors, are specifically designated “masters” or “aristocrats” by Nietzsche. The average members of the tribe, for whom the others fight, and whom in peace they threaten, are called “slaves.” This term is not used in either a social or an economic sense; perhaps Nietzsche had in mind an ancient Aristotelian thesis that some men are natural slaves, whatever their economic or social condition may be, and that not every slave in the legal sense is a slave in the metaphysical sense. I am certain that Nietzsche revived this ancient horror of an idea and he regarded the bulk of mankind as made up of slaves in this regard—though there is also a conflicting statistical sense in which the bulk of mankind is made up of just those who are statistically average, no matter what absolute characteristics they may have. This confusion is responsible for considerable mischief in Nietzsche’s writing. Notice that we remain here within our little anthropological model; for if we never take it as more than a model, it is a convenient tool for working out these distinctions. The two moralities we are concerned with originate from the two main groups; it does not follow from the fact that the “aristocrats” are honored that they should be regarded as “good.” This brings us to the crux.
Both moralities employ the word “good,” but, apart from the supervenient force of commendation which this word has, they use it in distinct ways and by means of it point quite distinct contrasts. The two moralities, in other words, are representable in language; and Nietzsche charts their main articulations by examining the moral idioms which express them. He had a remarkable ear for moral nuance; in a note he appended to Part One of the Genealogy of Morals, he urged that some university establish a prize for the best essay on the light which linguistics, and especially etymology, throws upon the history and evolvement of moral ideas. His writings are filled with suggestions as to how the same moral term can be variously used by persons with different situations, so that they have distinct moral perspectives without being aware that they have: to one man “virtue” might connote absence of pleasure, for example, whereas to another it might mean simple freedom from a goading appetite, so that neither understands the other.54 The different meanings of “good,” through its contrasts with “bad” [schlecht] and “evil” [böse], indicate the different moral perspectives of those who use them so. Naturally, if you can influence someone to use a moral predicate in your way, you can also get him to modify, if not himself, then at least his conception of himself. Nietzsche has been insistent on saying how moralities influence our conception of the world and of ourselves. His thinking this through in some detail entitles him, whatever one might think of his specific analyses, to the status of a moral philosopher and not the mere crank he is sometimes taken to be.
I begin by considering master morality. The individual, whose morality this is, feels there is a genuine distinction of value between himself and his peers and whoever in point of fact is different from them; and that he and his like are, in an absolute sense, superior to whoever does not resemble them in that in which their excellence consists. Indeed, he feels the distance between his group and les autres to be immense; whereas his group is, in the nature of the case, far more sparsely populated than the other. He sees the world divided into two distinct classes of being: the word “good” is applied to one class because the members possess absolutely certain qualities; whereas the members of the other class, by virtue of either lacking these qualities or possessing them only to an inferior degree, are “bad.” “Good” is not used prescriptively. For prescriptions are directives as to how someone, even someone who is not of a certain kind, ought to be. It is Nietzsche’s view that he who is not good cannot be good, goodness being simply a matter of what one is, not what one might, through dint of effort, become. The good are natural aristocrats, and it is the prerogative of aristocracy to impose its own values on the world. He who is good in this sense
feels himself to be value determining. He does not need to be justified, he judges that “whatever is offensive [schädlich] to me is intrinsically offensive. He knows himself to be that which generally gives honor to things, he creates values: his morality is self-glorification.55
Such a person may be useful to the group of which he is a member, and so may be valued for this. But he does not see himself in such terms.
What is essential to the good and healthy aristocrat is that he does not see himself as a function (be it of king or commonwealth) but rather as its meaning and highest justification…. His fundamental belief is that society does not exist for society’s sake, but only as a support and scaffolding by means of which a select sort of being might rise to a higher sort of task and a higher sort of existence.56
Toward those unlike (and by definition inferior to) him, his attitude is merely contempt. Unlike him, they are (and Nietzsche does not say “for example,” though he should) “cowardly, anxious, petty, and think in terms of narrow utility.”57 He is content to see any number of such individuals sacrificed so that he, and others like him, might be. He might aid and nurture the weak and defenseless, not out of pity but because noblesse oblige, or, if through compassion, it is not the compassion of the weak; it “counts for something”58 and is an extension of his power. It would of course be readily understood were he to exploit the masses under him for his own purposes. He does not do so because he is necessarily cruel, but because his perspective prevents him from thinking his behavior in the least reprehensible. Nietzsche is utterly dispassionate (and, unfortunately, frighteningly accurate) in his discussion. Suppose a rich man, a prince, takes from a poor man something he treasures. Or some Don Juan steals the sweetheart from a man to whom women do not come easily. The victim is certain to regard his tormentor as a wicked person because he took from the victim the little that he has, which means to him so much. But he is in error:
The other does not at all esteem so deeply the value of a single possession. He is accustomed to many. So he cannot imagine himself in the poor person’s place, and does not act nearly so unjustly as the other believes. Each has a false idea of the other.59
We never, Nietzsche elaborates, feel great qualms about creatures we might hurt when the distances between them and us is vast; no one feels guilty over crushing a bug, especially when the bug has been a nuisance. Xerxes, for example, felt another individual to be annoying in much the same way, and it was not cruelty on his part which motivated him similarly to crush that individual.60 The same action, viewed from different perspectives, is differently appreciated and assessed.
From the masters’ perspective, those unlike themselves are merely bad humans; that is to say, humans who do not come up to the mark. This is similar to the way bad eggs are low in the scales of egghood. There is nothing morally bad in being a bad egg or, in this usage, a bad human. It is just the way one is. Too bad, then, for the bad. They hardly can be blamed for what they are; but they are bad.
The slave morality derives from what is in effect the Lilliputian view of Gulliver. Precisely the qualities which the masters prize are called evil by their inferiors. In compensation, it is the bad—the lame, the halt, the blind, the meek, the poor in spirit—who really are good:
The slave’s eye looks unfavorably upon the virtues of the mighty. He is skeptical toward, and mistrusts, whatever is honored as “good.” He might persuade himself that not even happiness is there. Conversely, those qualities are underlined and spotlighted which serve to ease the existence of the sufferer: pity, the kindly helping hand, a warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, friendship—these now are honored—for they are the useful traits and almost the only means for enduring the crush of existence. Slave morality is the morality of utility.61
In effect, the slaves are “good” (in their sense) because they cannot, as inferiors, be “evil”—not because they would not be if they could. They want the evil masters to come around, mend their ways, and be like the others. In fact, however, those who are evil cannot become bad. Life courses through them too strongly for that. Nevertheless, the slave cannot see this, and his use of “good” is prescriptive: it says how everyone ought to be.
Details of Nietzsche’s exposition aside, the two moralities reduce to a fairly simple and, since Kant, a fairly routine distinction between an absolute and unconditional value, and a hypothetical or contingent value. Some things are categorically good, others are so only conditionally. The master could be anyone who gives unconditional values. The slave, concerned with utility and consequences, has no absolute values at all. But we could hardly see the justification for using master and slave as sobriquets for these two types of evaluation, and Nietzsche does not discuss the matter in sufficient abstractness for us to take them up on that level.
VII
Morality, Nietzsche says repeatedly, is all a lie, if a necessary one—a Notlüge. It is necessary because “without the errors which lie in the presuppositions of morality, man would have remained an animal.”62 As it is, man is an Übertier, an ambiguous expression (as Übermensch will prove to be) meaning a higher animal, something which is higher than an animal, or an animal which has got beyond its animality. However it is to be interpreted, it is to be explained in terms of morality; and morality is, beyond doubt, often repressive of the animalities it lifts us beyond. Because it does this, Nietzsche, as an “immoralist” in the specific sense of opposing Christian morality, finds himself speaking at times in favor of this animality, forgetting that by his own analysis every morality is opposed to animality, not this one alone. We must be more careful in interpreting him than he was cautious in expressing himself.
His primal horde, or herd, which serves admirably as a model, has scant application to contemporary society, and it is hardly a satisfactory guide, much less ideal, for the resolution of society’s moral problems. It must be remembered that when we abandon the strict compass of the primal herd the master morality is not to be identified as those practices carried out by lords and heroes, for these are only illustrations of it, and at any rate the master was to have been a giver of values. In the wider context of Nietzsche’s discussion, masters simply are distinguished individuals of whatever sort who impose values on the world. They can be artists, they can be philosophers, they can be whom you will. Nietzsche filled the pages of his notebooks with criteria for answering the question “What is it to be distinguished?” [Was ist vornehm?]—and his lists come out to be strikingly autobiographical.
Finally, as though forgetting completely his main perspectivistic message, he goes on to speak of aristocrats and slaves as natural kinds. The aristocrat rises up over the masses, to use his revealing metaphor, as the Javanese ivy creeps up and finally overtops the trees that support it.63 In what sense is the Javanese ivy superior to the oaks it climbs? Nietzsche often falls into the stupidest errors of the social Darwinian, identifying survival with excellence, although for some perplexing reason not seeing through to Huxley’s devastating point that a slight shift in the chemistry of the atmosphere and perhaps only some lichens might survive, lords of the universe.
Now that we have said all this, there is something important and interesting in the theory that there are these moralities, and we should have a distorted view of Nietzsche’s moral theories if we dropped the matter here. Indeed, we should have failed to see what happens when the masters apply to themselves the slaves’ evaluation. This cannot be explained save with reference to religion and religious psychology, a topic on which Nietzsche was original and deep.
* The German here will not pass into English, but in part this is so because Freudenschafften is a word made up for the symmetry it gives with Leidenschafften. The latter has Leid = suffering as a component as the former has Freud = joy. If we remember the etymology of the word “passion,” the contrast is roughly between passions and actions, as it is here between sorrow and joy. Unfortunately, “passion” is no longer used in the sense of “passivity.”