The Genealogy of Morals is a feast for a philosopher. In Nietzsche’s telling, it is the philosopher who guides the production of a meaningful world. Nietzsche’s view of philosophy is grander than Plato’s. The latter had philosophy rule the political order, whereas according to Nietzsche philosophy shapes the material of life into a beautiful and interesting existence. Moreover, the book includes wonderfully comic insights and commentary about why the philosopher should never marry or have kids, for example, or why thinkers have a taste for desert landscapes or the reasons why San Marco’s Square in Venice is the best place to do your thinking, but only before noon. Part of the point of the book is to take philosophy back from the heights of abstraction to the everyday where thinking is alive—where it smells, hurts, provokes, and gives joy.
The problem for Nietzsche is what to do with desire—specifically the watered-down desire we experience in modern times, crippled by generations of social taming and the growing belief that there is not much we can do as individuals to change our world. To a large extent our desires must be modified or denied so that we can live together in today’s world. In Nietzsche’s terms we learn how not to desire. But that too is a form of desire—the desire not to desire. Nietzsche fears the nihilistic attitude that spreads like a digital virus when we are left without our passions. This is the problem of our times—knowledge and love come apart to such an extent that the more we know the less we care about life. Nietzsche’s question is how to renew our passionate engagement with knowing the world. The Genealogy of Morals reveals our agency in creating meanings and values. It tells the history of the formation of our moral concepts. By showing how they came into being, it allows for creative reevaluation.
Introduction to Nietzsche
Nietzsche remains the world’s best-selling and most widely known philosopher. He was born in 1844 in a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father was a Protestant pastor who died when Nietzsche was four and left Nietzsche in the care of his mother and older sister. Nietzsche trained as a classicist and a philologist, which means, “a lover of words,” a profession that has disappeared today. His achievement and brilliance were such that he was appointed professor at the university in Basel before he even received his doctorate at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four.
Nietzsche was never attracted to grand systems of philosophy such as Aristotle’s or Kant’s and was more interested in issues of culture, morality, and art. His unsystematic approach is encapsulated in one of his more famous statements: “God is dead.” The thought is presented in a number of books, always as a hypothesis, a thought-experiment, or an event whose meaning is metaphorical rather than literal. What Nietzsche called “the death of god” was at once a cultural event that involved the demise of the Christian-moral interpretation of life and a philosophical event, which entailed abandoning absolute truth or the absolutist foundations that had dominated Western philosophy since Plato. As a cultural event, it was a source of both excitement and concern. Nietzsche feared the “nihilistic rebound” that would arise if no “life affirming” approach could take its place. As a philosophical event, the casting away of absolutism and the emphasis on individual perspective opened the way for a radical reconsideration of human existence. After his writing shattered beliefs in fixed foundations or absolute truths, the concepts of knowledge, value, morality, had to be rethought. Nietzsche’s method and orientation in refuting accepted “truths” opened the way to a radical new thinking that shaped the history of ideas.
Nietzsche’s literary career was short but very prolific. In the twenty years of his productive life, he wrote more than twenty-two books, all of which exhibit literary flare and signs of a radically provocative mind. In 1889 he was declared insane, and he died eleven years later in 1900.
Introduction to the Book
On the Genealogy of Morals, subtitled “a polemic,” is considered Nietzsche’s most influential and brilliant work. It is composed of three essays, all of which deal with the origins of moral values and ideals. Nietzsche takes an unorthodox perspective in relating a history of morality with the aim of establishing the value of morality to life: “have they [value judgments] hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity?”1 The first essay contrasts the morality of “the slave” and that of “the master,” the second essay considers “guilt” and “bad conscience,” and the third addresses the ascetic ideal or the self-mastery of the self. In all three cases Nietzsche seems to take pleasure in overturning the common moral assumptions. First-time readers are usually impressed with the shocking revelation that our moral standards are borrowed from the “slaves” rather than from the heroic “masters.” As descendent of the slave revolt against the masters, we value moderation and selflessness rather than the triumphant celebration of desire.
According to editor Walter Kaufmann in his introduction to Nietzsche’s Genealogy, “The most common misunderstanding of the book is surely to suppose that Nietzsche considers slave morality, the bad conscience, and ascetic ideals evil; that he suggests that mankind would be better off if only these things had never appeared; and that he glorifies unconscionable brutes.”2 Such widespread misconceptions are a consequence of taking Nietzsche at face value without considering his method of philosophizing. Nietzsche describes his own method in Ecce Homo as “philosophizing with a hammer”: he begins with a radical assault on our common belief system and proceeds by exposing the ultimate artificiality of every belief system, including his own. The first step is explicit in the book, as the story turns our moral values on their head. The second step—appreciating the artifice of the moral framework—is left to the reader. The story Nietzsche tells is not intended to be swallowed as “truth,” but rather as an example that what we take to be true depends on the strength of the stories we tell. Nietzsche prompts a trajectory of thinking that allows us to recreate ourselves. So the question is not to identify the values we hold and assess them as objectively good or bad. Rather, the question is why are we holding these values. How do we use them? And are they good or bad with respect to our lives as a whole?
The Impossibility of Self-Knowledge
The problem of self-knowledge appears at the very beginning of the Genealogy: “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?” (preface, 1) Nietzsche does not mean that “we are unknown to ourselves” because we were not searching in the right place or in the right way; his argument is rather that there is an inherent impossibility in the notion of self-knowledge. “So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, for us the law ‘Each is further from himself’ applies to all eternity—we are not ‘men of knowledge’ with respect to ourselves,” he goes on to argue. This point is both an existential problem—that we can never know ourselves—and a way out of an existential conundrum. The failure of self-knowledge is inherent in our existence, and we are those creatures who are, for “all eternity,” unknown to ourselves.
Why can’t we come to know ourselves? And, if indeed that is the case, then how do we answer the Delphic call to “know thyself?” A clue is already embedded in the opening paragraph. According to Nietzsche, we are always so immersed in ourselves that we repeatedly fail to take hold of ourselves; we wake up, as it were, a split second too late:
Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us “absent minded”: we cannot give our heart to it—not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: “what really was that which just struck?” so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, “what really was that which we have just experienced?” and moreover: “who are we really?” and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-stroke of our experience, our life, our being—and alas! miscount them.
(Preface, 1)
There is an inherent belatedness in our relations to ourselves. We always come to know ourselves as something already past and we cannot catch glimpse of ourselves in the present. Whatever we know of ourselves is already a shadow, a memory, or a reflection. We appear as ghosts, always vanishing or disappearing.
Nietzsche’s own style mimics the very absentmindedness he speaks about. His rhetoric has a certain melody to it: it’s hard to stop reading even when the exact meaning is not entirely digestible on first review. There is a force that moves inside the text, a bit like conceptual rhyming. It promises that the meaning will come into relief only later. Like a piece of music, the book’s opening carries us forward, and only afterward will we discover what it was that in fact played in our ears. In reading Nietzsche we cannot stop and parse every sentence for literal meaning in the same way that we cannot stop a musical performance to probe its elements. The whole makes its sense as a form of weaving, continuously in time, and not through a systematic construction of elements.
As the opening paragraph argues, our relations to ourselves are not only that of knowledge; there are aspects and dimensions of ourselves that are hidden in darkness, not because they comprise our mystical core but because they are in constant flux. They are part of the process of making meaning rather than the produce made. The beginning attunes us to listen to the working in the work. We must have ears for Nietzsche as well as a nose.
Our knowledge of ourselves is always partial because we are ourselves, and we cannot see around ourselves. For this reason the desire to know is particularly troubling when it focuses on the self. After all, we are closest to ourselves, which makes self-knowledge both a constant temptation and a threat.
The process of saying “I” already positions me as something other than myself. But what I want to understand is not myself as a distant object, but myself as an agent of knowledge. If I were to write a book about myself, I could try to make it comprehensive by including a full description of my body, a complete account of my mental states, and minute detail about every life experience, but the “I” who writes this book will curiously be absent. Knowledge has both an active and a passive side. The written self is like a marionette operated by forces outside the stage. Nietzsche takes a somewhat extreme position on this when he flatly denies the existence of anything but active knowledge—that the version of the self recorded in text is nothing but a fiction, created by the writer who remains in the dark. “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (I, 13).
We should be careful to note that a “fiction” in Nietzsche’s sense is not simply a falsehood. Fictions are effective in triggering experience, and they can elicit a reality that later renders them true. Declarations or promises work in this way. When I promise that “I will be different,” I am committing myself to a future state and enacting a transformation in the present. Nietzsche’s model for knowledge is in many ways the same. We create meanings and values by declarative statements that are verified by other declarative statements made from other points of view. For Nietzsche, the more we say “this is so,” the more it actually becomes what we say. We tend to reproduce the same stories, which give the fiction a sense of objectivity because it becomes constant through repetition. Our predominant interpretations take the shape of reality because we forget the magical act of creation, and this oversight causes the final product to seem like fact.
Nietzsche refers to this view that reality consists only of interpretations as “perspectivism.” According to perspectivism, there are no fixed objects, no absolute facts, no world “as it is in itself,” but only viewpoints. Nietzsche did not clarify whether he embraced the full scope of this claim or whether he intended it on a conceptual level. In other words, is objective reality irrelevant, or are the meanings we ascribe to it always open to revision? And perhaps the claim is not meant to be either true or false. Perhaps it is an ethical-artistic provocation that challenges us not to accept the world as it is, but to operate in it as if the material world needed to be shaped according to our desires and projects.
Regardless of the author’s intention, we must concentrate on the force and relevance of the claim today. Perspectivism has become so ingrained in contemporary mindsets that its logic seems almost mundane and the text nearly juvenile, with intellectual-sounding aphorisms such as “there is no ‘being’ behind doing”—a wordier variant of the commonplace “it’s all relative.” The view that everything is an interpretation has become our new dogma—itself a kind of truth that stands beyond interpretation. It follows from the fall of the belief in absolute truth but, ironically, it preserves the very structure of this belief in an opposite valence. When asserted as truth, perspectivism ends in self-contradiction. The paradox is, of course, that perspectivism itself must be an interpretation that lacks the power to trump other belief systems. So how is it better than any other dogma of the past?
As the contemporary American philosopher Alexander Nehamas explains, perspectivism presents a problem for the reader of Nietzsche. Though Nietzsche discusses it in his work, he seems to hold it as if his belief in it is immune from the very perspectivism it preaches.3 All the philosophers discussed so far have raised paradoxes: Socrates focused on the knowledge that knows its lack, Spinoza coupled freedom and necessity in the form of intellectual love, and Rousseau addressed the communication of solitary experience. In the case of Nietzsche, the paradox is how to establish the validity of perspectivism as a claim. Can one believe that it is all open to interpretation without contradicting oneself or becoming dogmatic? This is not just a philosophical problem regarding the truth of a certain position. It is also a question of how we live our lives. How do we proceed today, after the death of God, without absolute foundations, and with the knowledge that meanings are ours to make? How can we believe in the validity of what we know to be our own creation? Where is the balance that gives us freedom to create meaning without falling into a void of “it’s all just interpretations?” Is there a way of avoiding dogmatism, on the one hand, and nihilism on the other?
This problem is even more pronounced today, as two dogmas dominate: one religious and the other liberal-relative. For the most part, the liberal West subscribes to the belief of “live and let live” and thinks of itself as openminded and tolerant. But the one thing that liberalism tends to exclude is tolerance for those who reject pluralism. Living in a pluralistic society, we tend to think that we can accept every faith, as long as each faith respects its alternatives. But liberalism excludes those belief systems that cannot accept this requirement. In so doing, it forgets that it too is motivated by a certain belief—the belief in the value of pluralism. But that is exactly what the nonliberal world does not wish to accept. Pluralism is a practice and a choice that most of us think is preferable. But it is a choice that excludes the dominance of tradition, family, or the search for a meaning that requires unity rather than individualism. The problem of liberalism follows from a perspectival mindset that makes itself immune to a perspectivist evaluation. On the other hand, true open-mindedness must begin by recognizing our own belief system, the lifestyle it elevates, and the ones that it excludes. Recognizing our belief system does not necessarily involve changing it. On the contrary, it is only then that we can, for the first time, chose it for ourselves.
Master and Slave
In section 3 of the introduction, Nietzsche explains how he came to investigate the field of morality. It was his sense of suspicion and disbelief that led him to question “all that has hitherto been celebrated on earth as morality” (preface, §3). Truths that proclaim themselves beyond evaluation or interpretation are the most potent seductions because, at the outset, they defy critical examination. As he explains in the Will to Power: “The view that truth is found and that ignorance and error are at an end is one of the most potent seductions there is. Supposing it is believed, then the will to examination, investigation, caution, experimentation is paralyzed: it can even count as criminal, namely as doubt concerning truth—‘Truth’ is therefore more fateful than error and ignorance, because it cuts off forces that work toward enlightenment and knowledge.”4 The purpose of The Genealogy of Morals, as Nietzsche tells us, is to uncover “under what conditions did man devise these value judgments, good and evil? and what value do they themselves possess?” (preface, §3). The essence of value judgments can be revealed by understanding “the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed” (preface, §6). If examined in its historical context, morality itself will no longer appear as an objective truth, but rather as a result or a response to situation-based forces—“morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding” (preface, §6). Morality is a fiction we come to accept as truth. It therefore shapes our perspective, molds our views, and situates us as individuals in the world. The genealogical wheel turns again, making morality not only an effect of forces but also a force in itself that shapes further development: “morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison” (preface, §6).
Nietzsche is a master in ringing words, making them dance in circles. Morality is both an effect and a cause, both an illness and a remedy. There is nothing fixed about our moral values, nothing that is good or bad in itself. The difficulty is to trace the historical movement that led to the formation of our values. Those who view the “good” as something of objective value ignore the historical origin of the concept: “the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because—it has been victorious” (I, §7).
The story is situated at the prehistory of mankind. It begins with a relatively simple set of assumptions that gradually become more complex and consequential. Nietzsche relates a struggle between the masters and the slaves on the meaning of the good life. The masters are physically strong and able, and they enjoy satisfying their desires without regard to the good of others. The world is theirs for the taking. The slaves, by contrast, learn to deny their immediate instincts. They must devise an alternative view of the world wherein selflessness is a virtue. Satisfaction is still the motivating cause, only for slaves it is achieved indirectly by denying their wants.
Let us look more closely at the details of the story Nietzsche tells. To begin with, we should remember that it is a story, and its characters represent philosophical notions rather than historical truths. While Nietzsche claims that the idea of goodness as nobility is in fact historically prior to the idea of goodness as selflessness, nothing much hinges on the historical truth of his claim. The point is not to replace one truth with another but to recast our very conception of how meanings and particularly values become truths.
Obviously this history tells a story about the origins of morality, but it is also about the relations between desire and knowledge, which makes philo-sophia. The main characters are the noble warrior—usually a bronzed blond man, who devours whatever he comes across and shows no weakness—and the slave, a weak plebeian, usually Jewish, who abstains from action, represses his desire, and retreats into himself. The highest, ruling caste first referred to itself as noble, good, beautiful, and truthful. The others, in contrast, were bad, common, weak, and miserable. Nietzsche argues that at first these words were bound to political realities, and only later did they achieve the more symbolic form, designating superiority or inferiority of soul. How did it happen that the political contrast between good and bad, which distinguished the high from the low, turned into the moral difference between good and evil? It was the Jews who initiated this abstraction, and in so doing they reversed the value judgments (which Nietzsche, like all good Jews, is now reversing back again):
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 poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—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, accursed, and damned!” … that with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because it—has been victorious.
(I, 7)
This might sound like a piece of Nazi propaganda, a variation on the anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and it was indeed used for such purposes. But Nietzsche bluntly and conspicuously voices views that had persisted ever since the Jews were blamed for murdering the son of God. He expresses these ideas so coarsely and vigorously that they end up sounding a bit ridiculous.
In order to motivate change one needs to begin where one is—with one’s prejudices. This is true both in cases of individual therapy and on a grander, collective scale. Nietzsche saw himself as a “cultural physician,” and his first order of business was to diagnose the malady, which enables him to proceed by experimenting with treatments. We should remember that the text, as its subtitle suggests, is an exercise in “polemics.” He does not intend us to accept it at face value. Instead, the argument should provoke us and ignite a reaction. Nietzsche uses the force of argument to awaken us from our dogmatic slumber.
How then did the Jews, which Nietzsche presents as weak, resentful people of common, slavish descent, manage to pull this off? And are they not the stronger if they are able to transform the values of the old aristocracy? As a first clue, Nietzsche, the “lover of words,” indicates that he who commands language commands the world. Nietzsche himself is nothing but a spinner of words, and this is a text, after all.
Nietzsche offers several linguistic clues for answering this question. He refers to ressentiment, a word that resembles the English resentment (I, §10). But in French the root lacks a connotation of hatred. Sentiment takes on the prefix re, which designates repetition or return. Ressentiment is essentially reactive. It defines the movement of the desire of the slave, his particular sort of denial of instincts. The slave’s emotional energy is unable to discharge itself outside. Because of weakness or fear, he cannot simply act on what he desires. When this satisfaction is denied, the direction of emotions is reversed. Desire bitterly returns to itself and creates an imaginary realm in which it can be compensated. Ressentiment is desire forced back onto itself, and this return of the repressed creates the inner space of consciousness. This inner realm is essentially fictional since it serves as an alternative to activity in the real world. But it is a fiction that will transform the reality of the human world.
The power of ressentiment is the power of the slave, because only the slave encounters resistances that force him to direct his desire back onto himself. We can also phrase this reactivity in its temporal context: the slave cannot enter into a direct conflict with the master, so his desire is always suspended and confined within him as a potential. Because this emotional energy cannot remain inactive, it therefore carves out an imaginary, virtual world where it can remain alive. The slave avenges himself by creating a fictitious “other world” in which his desires are fulfilled, and he is rewarded for his restraint. So he stores the evil deeds of the master in memory to envision punishments in the other world. The language of virtual reality is entirely appropriate, since the world of the slave is, at first, no more than an alternative to the real world. The master, on the other hand, discharges himself immediately of his impulses. He has no need of consciousness or memory and requires no elaborate formulae to compensate himself in imagined worlds (I, §10).
The story about the master and the slave is therefore also a story about knowing and about desire, or, more accurately, it is about desire turning into knowledge or desire reflected back onto itself creating an inner space where it is preserved in the form of knowledge, ideas, or values. Consciousness and cunning, the ability to store in memory and to keep scores is the slave’s contributions to humanity, in Nietzsche’s conception. To him these traits are both a sign of illness and an achievement. The slave morality is a symptom of the inability to act concretely or immediately. But it is a remedy since it creates an alternative domain to exercise the will. While the master is bound to his physical existence, the slave creates a new realm of activity that is imaginary but no less significant. The creation of subjectivity—that inner fictional space—is the creation of the slave (I, 13). Finally, with the revolt of the slaves, which is imaginary before it is real, the human animal became interesting and deep (I, 6). Now a human being exists both in the real and in the imaginary; it can be strong in one register and weak in the other. Now there is consciousness and there is thinking. Now we can play with the signifiers and decide where our values lie. Now we shape our world. It is a story, after all, and the Jews are indeed the people of the book.
Vertigo—Losing Ground
The Genealogy shatters rigid institutions that, like morality, present themselves as having an objective existence that is inflexible and impervious to change. It enables us to return to the state in which we were the determining and creating force. Historical forces, Nietzsche claims, are important not in understanding the true nature of things, but in appreciating the impossibility of such a thing as a true nature. Nietzsche presents genealogical investigation as a contrast to the stagnation inherent to fixed ideas, dogmatic convictions, and all other “brain sicknesses.” For the genealogist, “a tremendous new prospect opens up … a new possibility comes over him like a vertigo, every kind of mistrust, suspicion, fear leaps up, his belief in morality, in all morality, falters” (preface, §6). Genealogical inquiry liberates “fixed ideas” by offering quasi-historical stories about the development of convictions and beliefs. The result is that, inevitably, these values become questionable, contingent, partial, or fragile, that is, they are made tangible and flexible.
The genealogist, as Michel Foucault writes in his essay about Nietzsche, “finds that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.”5 This vision is as liberating as it is terrifying. Through the twists and turns of the plot, we suddenly recognize ourselves as the communal authors of this narrative, and regaining our agency is a way of making us responsible. Acceptance of this ownership and responsibility is necessary for acting as moral agents. So the play that reveals morality as “just a play” is morally enabling, whereas the play that hides its constructed character is immoral. Thus Nietzsche claims that rigid, ahistorical morality is actually immoral because it makes us passive and dead to our own lives and the lives of others. Morality, as tradition has it, denies our rules as creative agents. It teaches us to reject our desires or rather to turn our desire against itself. Finally, it teaches us to desire not to desire; it teaches us nihilism.
It is worth noting that the charge of nihilism was directed against all the philosophers we have discussed so far. Socrates was accused of subverting the state’s established order, introducing new deities, and corrupting the souls of the young. Spinoza was banned from the Jewish community of Amersterdam and his name was equated to heresy. Rousseau was banished from Geneva and France for espousing radical new values of individual freedom that challenged the authority of church and state. Nietzsche himself flirts with nihilism. He too sees life as at bottom meaningless. But for him this means that we are free to create our meanings rather than fall into despair. Life does not come ready-made with value. That’s what all nihilists discover. But the philosopher embraces this condition as a source of freedom while the ascetic priest rejects this life and this world for the sake of salvation after death.
Ascetic ideals include obstinacy, self-control, self-mastery, and, importantly, self-creation. The word comes from the Greek askein, which means “to work” in the sense of being a practitioner (asketikos, askts), later a practitioner of religious devotion—a hermit or a monk. As Pierre Hadot, the eminent French classical philosopher, explains, asceticism was first developed as an exercise of body and mind required by sportsmen and philosophers alike. Socrates embraces this practice in controlling his lustful desire and reshaping it into the desire for knowledge. So the problem is to distinguish methods that seem similar but end in radically different results: on the one hand, the philosophical ability to shape her world, and, on the other, the religious denial of this world for the sake of another.
The philosopher and the ascetic priest show a number of similarities in Nietzsche’s Genealogy; in fact, it seems that the latter evolved from the former, just as Christianity evolved from Jewish morality, which itself originated from the slave revolt. At a certain stage of human development, the ascetic priest was a true therapist. He helped his suffering congregation deal with “deep depression, the leaden exhaustion, the black melancholy of the physiologically inhibited” (III, 17). The priest alleviated suffering not by curing the disease but by inventing a cause for the pain. It was an ingenious technique since there is no greater suffering than suffering in vain. And the priest was able to save his parishioners by asserting that they had caused their own suffering: “‘I suffer: someone must be to blame for it’—thus thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, tells him: ‘Quite so, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it—you alone are to blame for yourself!’—This is brazen and false enough: but one thing at least is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered” (III, 15).
Why is the philosophical method better than that of the priest? The answer cannot be that the philosopher is telling the truth whereas the priest’s interpretation is false. Perspectivism means that interpretations have no deeper reality or truth. So we have to rephrase our question: why is the philosopher’s story better than the priest’s? The answer must be that it is more viable and open to differences: it allows for a greater variety of interpretations and it is open to shifting circumstances and to historical transformations. It is, in a word, perspectival. The philosopher does not claim that one universal method can care for the self. His therapy is essentially open, whereas the priest offers his cure as the one and only truth. The priest ignores historic development, perspectives, and differences in context. He treats all pain as essentially the same and prescribes one universal vision of the good life: “The ascetic ideal has a goal—this goal is so universal that all the other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms, and sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation” (III, 23). The belief in truth as something divine—independent, transcendent, or utterly nonperspectival—is the highest value of all religious faiths. Curiously, Nietzsche adds that rigid belief in truth will ultimately spell religion’s own death: the uncompromising faith that “God is truth, that truth is divine” brought about the demise of religion and the rise of dogmatic faith in science (III, 24). After all, faith in an omnipotent entity does not withstand the measures of truthfulness that religion itself elevates. Science, insofar as it insists on the eternal value of its truths, is nothing but a more refined and abstract variant of the belief in the “other world.” It is an even more powerful rejection of the living, historical, and perspectival character of inhabiting the world.
Nihilism comes in many different shape and forms, like a monster that shifts and mutates, and Nietzsche is very adept in following these mutations. Nihilism creeps in whenever the process of creation is forgotten or denied, as when faith denies the perspective it serves. But it is not enough to recognize this pattern in a theoretical way because this knowledge can quickly turn into a new dogma—the dogma that there are no dogmas. We are forever blind to the orienting framework that shapes the truths we live by. Genealogical investigation is therefore not a theory but a practice. It does not offer up additional truths but becomes an exercise of thought and imagination that returns us again and again to our own perspectives.
The Genealogy of Morals is then a performance rather than an assertion of perspectivism. The text guides us in how to weave stories, how to make our own narratives and create interpretations that will be viable and compelling enough for us to live by.
Nietzsche presents the third essay of the Genealogy as an exercise (askesis) in this process—the art of interpretation. It opens with an aphorism taken from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves a warrior” (III, 1). Philosophy is usually translated as the love of knowledge or the love of wisdom, but Nietzsche’s aphorism inverts the relationship. It pushes us to ask: if philosophy is the love of wisdom, what does wisdom love? And it answers: wisdom loves the warrior—the one who takes it by the hands and put it to work. The essay that follows, so Nietzsche tells us, is an interpretation of this aphorism. But, instead of recounting the love of action in a linear manner, the story starts with the negative claim and details the varieties of nihilism.
It seems to leave this aphorism behind, unattended. And that is precisely the point. The essay will perform rather than interpret how unconcerned and mocking it is of its initial motivation. Or, rather, the interpretation will be this very performance.
Nietzsche’s polemical stance in the Genealogy reminds us that philosophy is not just a theory but a creative activity. We need to remain free with respect to the material at hand; we need to fight with it or against it while keeping the process under our control. The results will be something to which we ascribe wholeheartedly but don’t need to enslave ourselves. It is this ironic stance of commitment to what one knows to be a fiction that saves perspectivism from becoming another form of dogmatism. Perspectivism is not an assertion, not a claim, but a practice—an exercise, a form of joyful asceticism.
Free Spirits and Perspectivism
The free spirits that Nietzsche envisages toward the end of the book are individuals who can live without fixed ideals and without rigid, predefined “meanings” and still maintain an engaged and creative view of the world. Those individuals embrace the partiality of their perspectives and the incompleteness of their knowledge. They aspire to reach a more impartial view not by rejecting their desires but by learning to switch between perspectives. They make room for others because they are constantly in the process of becoming other to themselves. Free spirits learn how to operate without conviction and yet not be paralyzed by hesitation. Their response to the genealogical process is not that “nothing matters.” On the contrary, to them everything matters to the highest degree possible because nothing is outside the field of human action. To realize the “truth” of this perspective is to become more sensitive to oneself and more deeply aware and responsible to others.
To ask about the truth of perspectivism is to miss the point. The question itself is misguided; it presupposes the conception of truth that Nietzsche is rejecting. Perspectivism does not mean that all interpretations are equal in value or that we cannot assess the value of different interpretations. On the contrary, the way to judge between interpretations is not by relating them to some independent criterion but by relating them to ourselves—examining the kind of life they shape.
Can we acquire the perspectivist approach and release ourselves from the imperative to know how things are independently of our ways of knowing them? Can we return to the state in which knowledge and love go hand in hand? The book was intended as an exercise; it is not a treatise but a practice. It offers no definitive conclusions but instead demonstrates how to become once again like a child at play, irreverent and unconcerned yet always passionate: the game is quite serious, but it is ours to play.