All beings that have existence in the world have pasts. To have a past means to embody for oneself and for others some quality that was and shapes the way one’s being is in the world. Only God does not have a past and that is because God exists only in the present, which is what the meaning of eternity is.1 For a range of thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, having a past was seen as a form of coercion. Marx, in the first page of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, found that the past “lay like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” For James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, the past “was a nightmare” from which he was trying to awake. For Freud, the cumulated weight of childhood experiences distorted present agency into neurotic behavior. Marx theorized revolution, which he saw as necessarily sundering the integument that held the new world in the ashes of the old. Joyce tried to make that past available in the odyssey of Leopold Bloom and in Molly’s ecstatic affirmation. Freud held that psychoanalysis is to reform the past, so as to keep it from distorting the present. The sense that what drives humans is what they have been, that they have been driven willy-nilly into behavior that they neither intend nor want, is a major concern of philosophical thought after the French Revolution. Indeed, the Revolution had shown a stunned Europe that what had started as a minor jacquerie over the price of bread led to the imposition of the metric sys-tem on continental Europe. The past seemed to have an ineluctable stranglehold over the unfolding of human affairs.
These concerns, common to all those for whom history became the principle muse, were unavoidable to serious thinkers in the nineteenth century. It is thus no surprise that from early in his career, Nietzsche was concerned with the possibility of transforming the present by changing its past. Thus he can write in the Use and Misuse of History for Life:
For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible to free oneself wholly from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations, and regard ourselves free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate:—always a dangerous attempt because it is so hard to know the limit to denial of the past and because second natures are usually weaker than first. What happens all too often is that we know the good but do not do it, because we also know the better but cannot do it. But here and there a victory is nonetheless achieved, and for the combatants, for those who employ critical history for the sake of life, there is even a noteworthy consolation: that of knowing that this first nature was once a second nature and the every victorious second nature will become a first. (HL 3)
This is not simply a “theoretical” problem. Nietzsche was centrally concerned with the issue in his own existence. In Ecce Homo, he claims to be a throwback to ancient Polish nobility; later in the passage he will claim paternity from Caesar or Alexander (EH “Wise” 3). What is important here is that Nietzsche is claiming that his relation with his father is so attenuated that he now exists as himself as if Caesar had been his father. Indeed, he will go so far as to claim that he is “all names in history,” as if all surnames were his.2 He associates his lowest point (1880) with the same age at which his father died. This is also the period of his life when his eyes give him the most trouble and he finds himself but a “shadow” of himself. But it is precisely the experience of this going under that permits his new birth: The Wanderer and his Shadow will be followed by Break of Day. Nietzsche, one might say, is concerned to give himself a new genealogy. As he remarks in Human, All Too Human 1:381, “If one does not have a good father one must give oneself one.”
Yet how might one do this? To ask this question is to investigate the nature of genealogy, for genealogy is the actuality of the past in the present. How does genealogy, however, manifest itself in present action? One might think, as do many of the standard interpretations, as a matter of will. It is thus essential to ask if it is possible by human volition to shape one’s present so that it is not subject to a past. In the chapter “On Redemption” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche raises the question of the relation of temporality and the will. He is concerned with the way that what we have been in the past shapes what we do in the present to make a future. If the will is the human faculty to construct the future and is both structured and held prisoner by its past, then the possibility of human freedom seems greatly diminished or eradicated. Nietzsche examines a number of proposed understandings of will (he includes—without naming them—Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and, I believe, his own work in The Birth of Tragedy) and concludes that they are all deficient in that they either simply ignore the weight of the past or too easily assert the possibility of escaping from it.3
Why so? The problem, he avers, is that they have all misunderstood will: “My idea,” he writes in a later note, “is that the will of earlier psychology is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all, that instead of grasping the formulation of a single given will in many forms, one has eliminated the character of the will, in that one has subtracted the content, the ‘whither’ (Wohin)” (KSA 13:14[121]). Nietzsche’s first point is that an understanding of the will as a single entity or faculty is mistaken.4
I shall come back to what might constitute such redemption toward the end of this chapter but, for now, note that for Nietzsche, none of these previous writers provides access to a realm that would escape or transfigure a human past. The past remains a problem. At the end of the chapter, he drops a hint that the “will that is the will to power” might possibly be able to will “backwards.”
The will to power cannot be grasped as something that can be satisfied: it requires a “Wohin,” and whatever we call will is to be understood in terms of its Wohin (whither). Will is thus a bringing about rather than something that is bought about. The will, he says, “wants to go forward and always again become master of that which stands in its way.” The will to power is constant motion and finds expression as the overcoming of borders and obstacles. It does not in itself seek a particular state of affairs—in the English version of Freud’s terminology it has “motility of cathexis”5—just that there be a state of affairs. Importantly it does not seek pleasure, nor to avoid pain: it is simply the “attempt to overcome, to bring to oneself, to incorporate” (KSA 13:14[174]). In fact, from the standpoint of the will to power “there are no things at all, but only dynamic quanta.” Nietzsche continues, “[T]he will to power, not being, not becoming, but a pathos is the most elementary fact from which a becoming, a working first arises” (KSA 13:14[79]).
An important clue is offered by this designation of the will to power as a pathos. In the Gay Science, Nietzsche made a distinction between pathos and ethos and suggested that as long as humans continue to think of a particular form of life they tend to think of it as an ethos, that is, as “the only possible and reasonable thing.” A true understanding, however, is that life is “pathos,” as it is “not one’s lot to have certain particular sensations for years.” (GS 317). Pathos means “that which happens to a person or a thing,” “what one has experienced, good or bad”; it refers sometimes to the “incidents of things.”6 In no case does it imply a notion of growth or development, but only the different states a person or a thing may assume.7 Will to power thus “cannot have become” (KSA 13:11[29]). It is movement itself and thus has neither being nor becoming. The most basic quality of all organisms is their attempt to incorporate into and as themselves all that they encounter; thus they will define all that they meet. All the forms that any organism acquires it assumes, and taken as a whole they constitute its will to power. The various Wohins are the instances of the will to power of a particular organism. These Wohins can assume different qualities: among the categories Nietzsche identifies are optimism or pessimism, activity or passivity, superfluidity or lack—much of his later years are spent sorting out these differences. It is thus quite sensible from this understanding to proclaim, as he does in one of his most famous remarks, that life is “will to power.” The full remark is this: “What are our valuations and tables of the good worth? What comes from their control? For whom? In relation to what?—Answer: for life. But what is life? Here is needed a new more definite formulation of the concept ‘life.’ My formula for that goes: Leben [‘Life’ or ‘to live’] is will to power.... What does evaluation mean? ... Answer: moral evaluation is an exegesis, a way of interpreting” (KSA 12:2[190].47; my italics).
The will to power is a “way of interpreting.” Indeed, elsewhere, Nietzsche is explicit: “The will to power interprets: it is a question of interpreting during the building of an organ; it sets limits, defines degrees, differences of power.... In truth, interpretation is a means to become master of something. The organic process presupposes continuing interpretation” (KSA 12:2[148]). To interpret is to place oneself as the lens through which the observed is seen. The important thing then about the will to power is that it refers to the quality that living beings have to make or understand the world in their own image. Etymologically, Macht (as in Wille zur Macht) is archaically related to the same root from which we get our word “might,” which in turn has a meaning of the ability to make or do something.8 The will to power is thus the quality that all life has of giving form, that is, of giving rise to the pathoi that are (a) life.—But what form?—The form that is given must be the form of the giver. Thus “cognition” itself is said to be will to power (KSA 11:34[185]). In the Genealogy. the will to power is a “form giving... force” (GM II:18); elsewhere the will to power is held to interpret the “new in the forms of the old.”9
This, however, means that the particular past of a willing agent so shapes that will that it simply repeats a particular pattern; changing that pattern would require changing the past of a will or determining a way not to be caught by it. This is why the question of temporality is central to Nietzsche’s discussion of the will.10
A point that emerges from the above consideration is that everyone, perhaps even every thing—all life—has or rather is will to power. We see immediately a problem relevant to slave morality: if whatever will one exercises is one’s own or rather is what one means by one’s self, what is the nature of the self that exercises such and such a will? So a question raised by this investigation of “the” will must be: “what kind of beings are we?” And here it is noteworthy that Nietzsche associates a particular weakness of will with our present moral world in general. Thus: “Today the tastes and virtues of the time diminish and debilitate the will. Nothing is so timely as will-weakness (Nichts ist so sehr zeitgemäss als Willensschwäche)” (BGE 212). This is immediately referred to as quality of character: “Turned around: the need for belief, for some unconditional yes and no, is a need for weakness, all weakness is of the will (alle Schwäche ist Willensschwäche): all weakness of will stems from the fact that no passion, no categorical imperative, commands” (KSA 13:11[48]. 318; cf. BGE 207). I shall return to the importance of the reference to Kant at the end of the chapter. For this condition, Nietzsche coins a term: Entselbstung—“de-selfing,” we might translate it. The preliminary sense is that a weak will is associated with not being a self, thus unable to own, to be one’s own self, to have a right to what is one’s own. Such a weak will is not weak at a particular moment: weakness is its nature.
Given what I have said, there must be wills to power of different qualities of character (that is, of different Wohins), a will to power, for instance, that is masterly or nobly moral as well as another will to power that is slavely moral. And this is precisely what the Genealogy is (among other things): a story of how it came to be that one form of life replaced another and how it might happen that yet a new second nature might replace that which has become our first nature. What is absolutely essential here is to recognize that both noble and slave morality are wills to power.
The matter is of considerable complexity. One might suppose that slaves are simply less than the noble, ineffective in relation to the masters, and are thus to be held in opprobrium. This, however, is not Nietzsche’s position or is rather a vast oversimplification of it. Let us look at these two wills to power.
The terms master (or noble) and slave are often given negative resonance by those who read Nietzsche—memories of Nazi and racial contexts lead easily to the conclusion that Nietzsche is, as one always half suspected, whether or not a bad thinker, certainly a bad man. Yet the idea of master and slave has an obvious apparent ancestry in Rousseau (“He who believes himself to be the master of others is all the more a slave than they” [Social Contract I, 1]) and in Hegel (Herrschaft and Knechtschaft in the Phenumenology). At the time that Nietzsche was writing, Marx was developing an entire theory of history based on the interaction of the oppressor and the oppressed. Nietzsche had read the left-Hegelians and explicitly found resonances between his work and Bruno Bauer’s;11 he may have read of Marx in other texts.12 Nietzsche’s main exploration of different kinds of will to power appears in the Genealogy.
In a number of passages, Nietzsche delineates and distinguishes the quality of the will in nobles and in slaves. The nobles, he says, “do not know guilt, responsibility, or consideration.” They are “born organizers” (GM II:17–18). In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes that “when the ruling group determines what is ‘good,’ the exalted proud states of the soul are experienced as conferring distinction and order of rank.... The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; ... it knows itself to be value creating” (BGE 260).
The noble moral type says—to paraphrase Al Lingis’s paraphrase of Bataille—“My God, am I good! How beautiful, strong, and powerful I am! You offer no possible contest for me and would be a waste of my time. You are no match for me and are bad.” “Good” here means something like “worthy of being dealt with.” Think of the exchange between Glaukos and Diomedes in book 6 of the Iliad (lines 80ff) where the two warriors, having met on the field of battle must first determine whether or not the other is a worthy opponent (one is much younger), that is, “good” in noble moral terms, for without this there would be no reason to fight someone who is not as you are (i.e., is “bad”). They thus run through their respective genealogies to establish their worth to the other. (As it turns out their grandparents were guest-friends and the bond is such that they do not fight but exchange battle gear.)13 More contemporarily, any of us who were chosen last to a team because of our lack of skill, or put out to play right field, have some idea of what it means to live in a masterly moral world (and remember the sense of self derived from the time where we were chosen first, or, better yet, got to do the choosing). Thus also does the concept, still surviving, of a “worthy opponent” remind us of master morality. I do not here wish to develop further the credibility of master morality as a moral form:14 precisely its strangeness (and the fact that I move most easily to sports examples), is testimony to the fact that we now think of morality in and only in its “good and evil” form.
Yet what happens? Here it is important to understand that “good/evil slave morality” is quite different from “good/bad noble morality,” not simply the inverse. The slave says in effect, “My goodness, do I suffer! You make me suffer, you are evil and I am the opposite of you and therefore am good. Why do you make me suffer?” The definition of self of the slavely moral is thus the conclusion of a dialectical argument. Several things are worth noting: First, this situation is not all that different from what Hegel described in the Phenomenology where the self is attained by a progressive differentiation first from nature and then from others. Second, this form of attaining identity—this form of moral agency—requires oppression. That is, unless I suffer, I will have nothing to negate. Hence it is important for the continuity of my self that I maintain a source of suffering, and nothing that 1 do should or may put an end to the possibility of suffering. Over time, Nietzsche argues, humans incorporate the source of suffering into themselves; they become their own oppressor (this is how he interprets the idea of original sin): he will trace this dynamic through various stages in the second and third books of the Genealogy.
Slave morality is thus not just the noble morality stood on its head—a reversal of the structures of domination. It is structured in a different manner and thus is a different way of being in the world. Nietzsche works this out in a parable of the eagle and the lamb.
It is, in fact, not surprising that the lamb dislikes the eagle. After all, for no apparent reason every so often a bird of prey swoops down and carries off one of the flock. Since it is not clear that this is in response to something one has done wrong, it is also quite possible that one day this might happen to anyone. The lamb clearly would like to put an end to this situation. The eagle is evil; the lamb is the opposite of the eagle, thus it must be “good.”15 But the bird keeps swooping down.
What the lamb must want is for the eagle not to behave as an eagle, to be ashamed of its desires, of itself—to acquire another, new character such that it would live under the domination of time past. On the face of it this is silly. As Nietzsche continues, “[T]o demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a will to overpower, to cast down, to become master, a thirst after enemies, oppositions and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require weakness to express itself as strength” (GM I:13). The lamb wants, however, precisely this “absurdity.” He wants the eagle not to act as an eagle; that is, he wants the eagle not to act in accord with what he, the eagle, considering all things, knows to be his eagle’s desire.
But there is a problem: the eagle has no other will than the will of an eagle. So what we learn here from Nietzsche is that the eagle must require the acquisition of specific qualities of character, ones that are not, as it were, natural to a particular being. What does the lamb require of the eagle? He requires, first, that the eagle need a reason for doing what it does; second, he requires that the eagle have a choice in doing what he does (this follows from and requires the first); this requires, third, that there be an independent common framework in terms of which both the eagle and the lamb can make judgments; and this requires, finally, that the eagle be reflective. The lamb wants the eagle to be rational.
These considerations lead us to a third element. They correspond to the acquisition by the eagle of reflective rationality (“why am I doing this?”), that is, to the acquisition of those qualities for which Nietzsche attacked Socrates. In Nietzsche’s reading, Socrates sought to get people to give reasons for their beliefs. The Greek found that das Unbewusste (the “unconscious” but note that this is a dangerous translation) could not account for itself. So Socrates, in the agora as in the theater, Nietzsche avers, wanted reasons for why individuals or characters act or think as they do, and this made it impossible for him to accept tragedy as tragedy. “Whereas,” Nietzsche writes in BT, “in all productive men the instinct is precisely the creative-affirmative power and consciousness (Bewusstsein) operates in a critical and dissuasive way, in Socrates the instinct becomes a critic and consciousness the creator.... Here the logical nature is, by a hypertrophy, developed... excessively.” (BT 13). As Nietzsche remarks in an early public lecture, a remark that shocked his audience: “Wenn Tugend Wissen ist, so muß der tugendhafte Held Dialektiker sein.—If virtue is knowledge, then the virtuous hero must be a dialectician” (“Sokrates und die Tragödie,” KSA 1, 547).
If we take these thoughts back to the problem of the will of slave morality, it appears that slave morality is something that one can learn to have. The eagle will continue to want to carry off the lamb, but having been subject to dialectical frustration, he will change his mind and not do what he desires but rather what is “good”—in the “good/evil” sense of good. Most considerations of weak willedness hold that one’s will is weak when one does not do what one thinks is in one’s best interest, all things considered.16 Here, however, the transformed eagle becomes weak precisely in taking account of all things. In this case, though, he has had to learn to take these things into account. The noble qua noble cannot have a weak will because for him character is in fact destiny.
It is thus the case that the lamb requires that the eagle exhibit what one writer has in a different context approvingly identified as “a normal amount of self-control,” 17 self-control defined in terms external to what the eagle is as eagle. In Nietzsche’s reversal, slave morality consists in controlling oneself in terms of an external and given framework; nonslave morality is thus to do what is one’s own, no matter what the expectations.
The matter does not stop here. The weakness of the will of the slave is in fact the source of its victory over the noble or the strong. For what happens is that the Unbewusstheit of the noble is unable to resist the dialectics of the slave: the victor is always the weak.18 Nietzsche is quite clear on this: the ability to induce the knowledge that one could have done otherwise is a decisive weapon. For Nietzsche, the weak person—that is, the person who from his or her own viewpoint “could have” acted otherwise—is actually the victor because of the fact that he or she can blame someone else. Eventually, for Nietzsche, the genius of Christianity will be to find in oneself the source of oppression: hence the problem of maintaining the constant source of oppression necessary to slave morality is permanently and irretrievably solved in this world. The only way out will be a redemption from oneself. The point of Nietzsche’s analysis here is the recognition that the victory is always to the weak— that the quality of character that allows one to be weak of will is the source of strength. And the source of the triumph of slave morality over the noble morality will always derive from the fact that the slave is rational. Nietzsche thus has stood the standard analysis of the “weak” will on its head or back on its feet: rationality, which was to counter weakness of will, is for him the central and defining quality of those who have weak wills, and this, seemingly paradoxically, is the source of their domination over those whose will is strong.
The slavely moral type responds to the presence of a generalizable, hence reasoned, external or internalized threat of oppression. The slavely moral type can thus not stand for him- or herself because that self depends on a dialectical relationship to someone or something other, to a fixed and general framework. This is the reason that Nietzsche refers to this condition as one of Entselbstung, as if slavely persons had nothing that was theirs, as if they did not have selves of their own. Such beings do not in fact have, one might say, the right to their actions, those actions are not really their own.19
It is in this sense that the will of the slavely moral is powerful and triumphs over the master precisely because it is weak. By “powerful” Nietzsche means something like “having on one’s terms, be those terms authentic or not.” By “weak” he means here “not authentically one’s own.” This, however, does not get us very far. What does it mean for an act not to be authentically one’s own? Where contemporary philosophers of weakness of will see the akrates as acting “surd”20—without voice or reason—Nietzsche sees him as acting from a being that is not his own. Nietzsche’s analysis thus calls into question the notion that rationality can provide a counter to the dangers of slave moratity—in fact, for Nietzsche., rationality makes slave morality possible.
The politics of the slave are thus epistemological: they consist in altering the moral grammar of the erstwhile noble. Here one might ask if there is anything to be done. The genealogy of slave morality leads, as we saw above, to a situation where persons would rather “will the void than be void of will,” the condition of nihilism.
Against this Nietzsche sets a number of possibilities. They include the “sovereign individual” (his reworking of Kantian autonomy), the “Overman,” and, of important focus in the Genealogy, the person with the “right to make promises.”21 I shall focus on the first and last here.
Why and how should an individual ever want to acquire the “right to make promises”? After all, why should one want to bind oneself to a future that one might well regret? How can one? As Nietzsche poses it, the question of not living in slave morality can be brought back to the question of why and how it is that one should ever be able to so bind oneself, or to find oneself bound.
The movement of the text in the first three sections of the GM II is a first key.22 In each of them Nietzsche describes the possibility of a particular kind of being-in-the-world (the right to make promises, the sovereign individual, the acquisition of conscience) and then circles back to give an account for the genealogy of that quality. Thus the right to make promises requires first the development of calculability, regularity, and necessity (GM II:1). The sovereign individual requires the development of a memory. This is the acquisition of a temporal dimension to the self. Each of these qualities is what Nietzsche calls a “late” or “ripest” fruit, the coming into being of which therefore has required ripening.
Nietzsche is quite clear that these earlier developments are the means to making possible a “sovereign individual” (for instance). Nietzsche refers to this as “a preparatory task” and includes in it what he calls human “prehistory.” What is key here is the understanding of history: the past has made possible the present, but it has not necessarily monotonically determined it. The resources for a variety of different presents are all in the past, if we can deconstruct the past we have received and reassembled it.
What quality does the sovereign individual—whom I take here to be an individual who has earned the right and capacity to say what s/he is, something that slave-moral individuals do not have and noble-moral individuals neither need nor have? Nietzsche details a number of qualities in GM II:2, all of which sound like or are intended to sound like the megalopsuchos of Aristotle.23 Yet there is a difference between Nietzsche’s sovereign individual and the great soul in Aristotle, for the sovereign individual is the result of an achievement, a process by which a consciousness has become instinct (cf. HL, cited above). What is important here is the insistence that Nietzsche places on the “right to make promises.”24
What then would/could keep me from not keeping my promises (being weak of will) if, as we have established, rationality is for Nietzsche of no actual avail? Nietzsche is, I think, correct to say that one does not keep one’s promise because one has a reason to do so—I do not need a reason to keep my promise. Nietzsche says that promising requires that I have “mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures” (GM II:2). Those who have the right to promise are like “sovereigns,” because they can maintain their promise in the face of accidents, even in the “face of fate.” To have the right to a promise is to have taken upon oneself, as oneself, all the circumstances present and future in which the promise may occur. It is to maintain that promise—the requirement that the present extend into the future—no matter what befalls. Thus when Kaufmann translates the key passage—für sich als Zukunft gut sagen zu können as “able to stand security for his own future,” one may pass by Nietzsche’s point, which is that one should be able “to be able to vouch for oneself as a future.” One must earn entitlement to one’s “own.”
What this means is that a person who has the right to make promises does not regard his actions as choices. (What counts as a choice varies from person to person and responds to who they are). A promise is thus a declaration of what I am, of that for which I am responsible: as it is not a choice among other choices, there is no possibility of slave morality. It is a way of being. As Stanley Cavell says: “You choose your life. This is the way an action Categorically Imperative feels. And though there is not The Categorical Imperative, there are actions that are for us categorically imperative so far as we have a will.”25
In this, and despite obvious echoes, Nietzsche’s position is not Kant’s. In the Grundwerk and elsewhere Kant argues that one cannot break a promise because to do so would in effect deny the point of the entire institution of promising. Kant took this position with its very strong denial of the relevance of intention because, as he argued, any breaking of a promise or uttering of a lie for contingent reasons (say, as with Sartre, you were being asked by the Gestapo the location of the partisan they were seeking) would mean that you claimed to know precisely what the consequences of your action would be. Since such a claim was epistemologically impossible, it followed that one must be bound by the only certainty one might have, that of one’s nontemporally limited reason.
Kant’s reason for keeping a promise or not telling a lie was consequent to the interplay of a fixed and actually rational self and an incompletely graspable world. The difference in Nietzsche’s analysis of the right to keep promises comes in his insistence that neither the external world nor the self is knowable. The self is, for him, what it has the power to be responsible for. Hence the binding of the self to a promise can only be rightfully accomplished by a power “over oneself and over fate” and must penetrate below the level of assessment—where it remained with Kant—to become part of the assessing itself, what Nietzsche calls “instinct” or the “unbewusst.” This means that promising must become part of what I am, for me to have the right to it.
Nietzsche is also clear—now contra Kant, and post-Kantians from Rawls to Habermas—that the self that is so committed is committed also to all the pain and all the reversals that will and may occur—pains that can be seen in his exploration of what he calls mnetnotechnics. In this, the sovereign individual in Nietzsche will find an instantiation in Weber’s person who has the vocation for politics and who can remain true to his vocation, “in spite of all.” (One might note here that the insistence on the necessity of the pain and cruelty of existence was already central to the argument in BT). Pain and cruelty are endemic to the possibility of life—they are part of what make the sovereign individual possible.
In a note from 1885 he writes: “Basic idea: new values must first be created—we must not be spared that! The philosopher must be a lawgiver to us. New types. (As earlier the highest types (e.g., Greeks) were bred: this type of ‘accident’ to be willed consciously.)” (KSA 11:35 [47]). So the question that Nietzsche raises for us in relation to the overcoming of slave morality is that of the qualities that are necessary to have in order to have a different nonslavely will and of the politics by which those qualities are acquired. If rationality produces or is a quality of slave morality it cannot be the solution. A question remains: if rationality cannot be the basis of keeping one’s promise (which is what Nietzsche tells us), what can possibly be the case that ensures that someone will keep his or her promise? What does it mean to be a person with the “right to make a promise”? If rationality is not the question—hence his praise of the body against Plato—what qualities does such an individual have? If the problem with slave morality is Entselbstung, what is the basis of Verselbstung?
Verselbstung is to be actually the person you know you are: it is as such that the claim of time past and thus the possibility of slave morality is abolished. From his youth on, one of Nietzsche’s touchstone passages was from Pindar’s Second Pythian: génoi oios éssi mathón, rendered by Barbara Fowler as “Be what you know you arse,”26 and by Alexander Nehamas as “Having learned, become who you are.”27 As the voice of his “Gewissen,” his knowing conscience, Nietzsche tells us: “du sollst der werden wer (or was) du bist—You should become the one you are” (GS 270).28 We learn from Nietzsche that the slavely moral are those who cannot become what they are, nor can they ever know what that is: there is no self that can become their own (KSA 13:14 [102]). They “bob around like corks” in the image he uses in Zarathustra and takes from Pindar. Slave morality for Nietzsche is not having a self that is one’s own.
So the question of how to escape or change the genealogy of slave morality is for Nietzsche the question of how to be able authentically to use the first person singular, to say “I” and use the word correctly. As it turns out—and this should be no surprise—this is the other problem confronting those who found Clio to have become the principle muse. Kant, at the beginning of What is Enlightenment?” insists that the problem is finding one’s own way and each of the questions that set up the three critiques is framed in terms of the first person singular (What can I know? What ought I to do? For what may I hope?). Likewise, John Stuart Mill sought in On Liberty to establish the conditions by which one might freely be one’s own person rather than someone whose actions and desires were shaped by and respondent to the conformities in society. Nietzsche continues this enterprise—but as we have seen he understood the problem as far more difficult than did even Kant and Mill.
My thanks to Christa Davis Acampora for her insightful work editing this manuscript.
In John 8:58, Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
Here, as in performativity theory, contests over naming are contests over Being. See Austin, Butler, Derrida, Wittig, and others.
See the complete discussion in my Friedrich Nietzsche. and the Politics of Transfiguration, 3rd ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), ch. 8.
This is not yet what Nietzsche means when he says there is “no will,” see below. See also chapter eight in my Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics and Transfiguration, and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). [Ed. Note: Müller-Lauter’s chapter that includes discussion of the “whither” of the will is reprinted in full in this volume.]
What Freud called Besetzung—taking a place, or being cast as a character.
Such as Phaedo 96a: “Now I will tell you my own experience in the matter, if you wish.” It also refers to emotion and, in rhetoric, to the appeal to emotion.
I am helped by Liddell and Scott. It is thus not at all what is meant by physis and, while I cannot deal with the matter here, insofar as Heidegger wants to tie the idea of will to power to physis, it seems to me he is mistaken. Physis has a number of meanings but it is centrally the natural constitution of a thing as the result of growth. Nietzsche tends to use it to refer to an achieved culture. See, namely, KSA 7:30 [15]; HL 10; SE 3. Physis has, in other words, a temporal or teleological dimension that pathos does not have.
A Macher is a maker, an active leader, in both Middle High German and Yiddish.
Nietzsche, Die Unschuld des Werdens: Der Nachlaß, ed. Alfred Bäumler, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1978), vol. 2, 78 (not in the KGW).
I leave unexamined here the complex relation of Nietzsche to the Kantian architectonic. On Nietzsche as a radical Kantian see, inter alia, the fruitful discussion in B. Babich, Nietzsehe’s Philosophy of Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
KSAB 6, 242; 7, 270, 275; 8, 106, 205, 247, 370.
See Thomas H. Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Knowledge of Marx and Marxism,” Nietzsche-Studien 31 (2002): 298–313, and especially Howard Caygill, “The Return of Nietzsche and Marx,” in Habermas, Nietzsche, and Critical Theory, ed. Babette E. Babich, (New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 195–209. I leave aside here the differences and similarities between the Rousseau/Hegel/Marx dialectical view of the relation of master and slave and Nietzsche’s genealogical one to look at what Nietzsche has to say about the master-slave relation.
I should note that Glaukos apparently gets cheated (“Zeus had stolen [his] wits away”)—Homer presents the whole scene in such a manner that one must read it as a doubly ironic commentary on the war itself.
It has been done by Alasdair Maclntyre in his consideration of Homer in After Virtue (Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), chs. 10 and 11.
Note that in the passages explicating these terms Nietzsche puts “good,” “evil,” and “bad” in scare quotes.
One might argue that it is not a matter of best interest but rather of what is right. Thus strength of will would have to do with the strength to do what is right. The Nazi guard claims that he was simply carrying out his duty, claiming strength of will. Hannah Arendt’s rebuke, which for many readers is insufficient, consists in pointing out how little strength of any kind is involved in the ordinariness of doing what is expected of one and which everyone else does as well. Thanks to Professor Babette E. Babich for a discussion on these matters.
Gary Watson, “Skepticism about Weakness of Will,” Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 316–39. The question here is as to the status of “normal.”
Thus Marx foresaw the victory of the proletariat. Neither Nietzsche nor Marx was a Social Darwinian.
We have an entry here into what Kant was after when he began his essay “What is Enlightenment?” by asserting the importance of attaining one’s own way.
See, namely, Donald Davidson, “How is Weakness of Will Possible?” in D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 40.
For an interesting if, to my mind, somewhat overly Kantian, discussion of possibilities, see Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the Genealogy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
It is worth noting that most readings of the second essay of GM II pass over the first two sections and go immediately to section 3 on conscience. See, namely, Werner Stegmaier, Nietzsches Genealogie der Moral (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliches Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 131 ff. He gets to the question of the sovereign individual on p. 136 without, however, the sense of the genealogical development that Nietzsche sees. See also Mathias Risse, “The Second Treatise in On the Genealogy of Morality: Nietzsche on the Origin of the Bad Conscience,” in European Journal of Philosophy 9:1 (2001): 55–81, who does not begin until after the first two sections.
See Magna Mordlia I 25–26.
One of the very few commentators to focus on this is Randall Havas, Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 193ff, who does so with an eye to the move from “animality” to “humanity,” which I think misleading. He is on sounder ground on p. 196 where he relates the idea of “right” to that of the responsibility for intelligibility. See also, importantly, David Owen, “The Contest of Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy” in Journal of Nietzsche Studies 25 (Spring 2003): 35–57 and David Owen, “Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on Nietzsche’s Agonal Perfectionism” in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (Fall 2002): 113–31. Further discussion appears in Randall Haras, “Nietzsche’s Idealism” and Aaron Ridley, “Ancillary Thoughts on an Ancillary Text,” both in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 20 (2000): 90–99 and 100–108, respectively. See in this volume Christa Davis Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2.”
See the discussion in Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 309.
Archaic Greek Poetry: An Anthology, selected and trans. Barbara Fowler (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 279.
Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 128. I am indebted for these two citations to Babette E. Babich, “Nietzsche’s Imperative as a Friend’s Encomium: On Becoming the One You Are, Ethics, and Blessing,” Nietzsche-Studien 33 (2003): 29–58.
There is a considerable literature about what in Nietzsche’s renderings happens to the matbón. Babich’s paper (2003) deals with this very effectively. One can point out also that by placing the imperative as that which the conscience says, Nietzsche has incorporated it also.