A Critical Introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay If
The first tract of On the Genealogy of Morality tells the story of a “slave revolt in morality” (GM I:10),1 In the present essay, I inquire first into the internal coherence of this story, the slave revolt hypothesis, and second into its agreement with hisrori-cal fact. I conclude that Nietzsche’s hypothesis is coherent, plausible, and illuminating.
In the beginning were knightly-aristocratic “masters” who determined for themselves that they were “good,” and everybody else “bad.” Not surprisingly, the numerous and miserable bad resented their lot. Somehow, sometime, their ressentiment became creative, and bore fruit in the form of an unheard of new morality, according to which those who had previously been regarded as wretched and bad in fact are in fact pure and good. The masters, meanwhile, are deemed not good but “evil.” Shockingly, this idea caught on in a very big way; so much so that modern Europeans tend to assume without further thought that certain values specific to slave morality-altruism, for example—are in fact constitutive of any morality wor-thy of the name. Hence, according to Nietzsche, the need for a genealogy of morality—and for the uncommon patience, erudition, acumen, and daring needed to carry it out well.
Noble morality is self-established. Developing “from a triumphant affirmation of itself” (GM I:10), it is the morality of “self-glorification” (BGE 260). Against the “bungled” genealogy of morals of unnamed “English psychologists,” Nietzsche insists that
the judgment “good” did not originate with those to whom “goodness” was shown! Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all that is low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for things. (GM 1:2)
When the English moral historians maintain that “originally, ... one approved of unegoistic actions and called them good from the point of view of those to whom they were done, that is to say, those to whom they were useful” (GM 1:2), they are, Nietzsche thinks, twice mistaken. Not only does morality not originate in a favorable assessment of self-sacrifice and unegoistic behavior, it is also not by nature beholden to the value of utility. Noble morality, in fact, is constituted by an exuberant transcendence of the standpoint of utility, a lofty disregard for the importance of mere comfort and survival:
What had [nobles] to do with utility! The viewpoint of utility is as remote and inappropriate as it possibly could be in relation to such a burning eruption of the highest rank-ordering, rank-defining judgments: for here feeling has attained the antithesis of that low degree of warmth which any calculating prudence, any calculus of utility, presupposes—and not for once only, not for an exceptional hour, but for good. (GM 1:2)
A crucial part of what nobles affirm about themselves is their very ability to raise themselves above the common crowd and its vulgar needs. This ability, however, would be unintelligible if it were not supported by other “first order” excellences. Without such support, we would have no idea why nobles should be spontaneously self-affirming. The founders of noble morality are able to think well of themselves because they have “received bountifully from the enormously diverse and splendid mass of happy and desirable attributes” (Frithjof Bergmann, “Nietzsche and Analytic Ethics,” in Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy, and Morality [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 78). Initially and typically, their superiority is made manifest in activities that involve strenuous physical effort and large and dramatic risks; “knightly-aristocratic value judgments presuppose a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, competitive sports [Kampfspiele], and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity” (GM 1:7). In deigning to engage in them, nobles take themselves to honor these activities (cf. BGE 260), when they excel at them, they can therefore honor themselves all the more. Nietzsche’s nobles set exigent standards of achievement and think well of themselves when they meet these standards with aplomb.
Because the criteria of nobility are self-appointed, noble values are ultimately self generated and self-grounded. But because measuring up to these self-appointed criteria is often a matter of fact, not opinion, because superiority in respect of strength, daring, or prowess, for example, is generally an ascertainable rather than a debatable matter, noble values are also grounded in the world. Nobles are nobles because they set themselves certain targets and successfully hit them; and they set the targets and strive to hit them, ... just because; not, that is, because they are constrained to, but because they freely choose to. A noble zest for life is manifested in activities engaged in for their own sakes, not demanded by material circumstance or external authority. 2 So noble morality is a morality of intrinsic value, a morality of lives lived for the sake of the happiness inseparable from engaging in actions and activities deemed worthwhile in and of themselves, together with the honor consequent upon excelling at them in the eyes of one’s peers.3 In Thorstein Veblen’s terms, the defining feature of a Nietzschean nobility is its legislation of an “invidious” contrast between the routine activity needed to sustain the material conditions of life—valued only instrumentally, as a necessary precondition for something better—and the pursuit of “exploit,” which is valued for itself and constitutes that for the sake of which it is worth seeing to mundane matters.4
The powerful physicality and hearty ferocity of Nietzsche’s early nobles is of a piece with their “crude, coarse, external, narrow, and altogether unsymbolical” (GM 1:6) habits of mind. Although the masters value distinguishable qualities and activities, they experience each element in the “aristocratic value-equation,” “good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = God-beloved” (GM 1:7), as part of an indivisible whole, so many facets of the single “Urwert” of “being and doing as we are and do.” Readers of GM cannot, in consequence, experience life as Nietzsche imagines the originators of noble morality to have experienced it; their form of life is practically inaccessible to modern men and women. It does not follow from this, though, that the perspective of master morality5 is epistemically unavailable to inhabitants of the modern world. Noble values are not so bizarre as to render it doubtful that we can understand what it might have been like to live in accordance with them.
Nietzsche’s nobles live according to a crude “unity of the virtues” thesis. Since their self-exaltation and commitment to their aristocratic value equation is instinctive, the thesis will not appear to them to stand in need of articulation or defense; but since excellence in running, jumping, hunting, dancing, fighting or commanding are objective matters, the virtues of the nobles are rooted in something better than sheer mystification or groundless prejudice. It is not that anyone, then or now, need think that the noble identification of “superior in certain respects”—running, hunting, commanding, and the like—with “just plain superior,” “intrinsically better overall,” is intellectually defensible; it is simply that the relevant achievements of the nobles are genuine achievements. And it is because of this basis in fact that the pejorative view of the slavish “other” entailed by noble morality can be something of a logically necessary afterthought; to the nobles, “the bad” are simply those who lack the ensemble of desirable qualities that they have. The distinction introduced by the slave revolt in morality, between good and evil, is a radically different sort of contrast.
When slave moralists deny that the masters are good, the term “good” means something different from what it means for masters. In order to think of the masters as evil, slave moralists must first “dye [them] in another color, interpret [them] in another fashion, see [them] in another way, through the venomous eye of ressentiment” (GM I:11). When the eye of ressentiment looks at the nobles, it does not see the tightly wound skein of power, wealth, courage, truthfulness and the like that the nobles themselves had perceived; it sees instead only cruelty, tyranny, lustfulness, insatiability, and godlessness (GM 1:7). Once the ressentiment of the weak becomes creative and gives birth to a new kind of morality, slaves are able to look at themselves and see not unrelenting, unredeemed misery, but a new kind of goodness, constituted by the voluntary cultivation of submission, humility, and a sense of equality.
The most important accomplishment of slave morality, though, is not its turning the tables on the masters and deeming the erstwhile bad to be good and the erstwhile good to be evil; what is most important is that slave morality does this by introducing a new type of value, impartial value. Slave morality is the morality of impartial value in that it is the morality of value chosen by an (allegedly) impartial subject, one who is in himself neither master nor slave but can freely choose to behave and to evaluate either as the one or as the other. Slave moralists, says Nietzsche, “maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb—for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey” (GM I:13).6
In light of the “pathos of distance” separating nobles from their inferiors, it needs to be asked how slave morality could ever have made its astonishing incursion into noble morality, how this sublimely subtle slave revolt succeeded in a way unparalleled by any political or economic revolt of the poor and the weak against the strong and the wealthy. According to Rüdiger Bittner (“Ressentiment,” in Schacht, ed), slave morality cannot have originated in the slave revolt posited by Nietzsche. On the Nietzschean hypothesis, slave morality was invented as a means of compensating slaves for their wretched lives, but nobody can compensate himself by means of a revenge that he himself recognizes to be imaginary (133). Pace Bittner, however, the revenge of the slaves as Nietzsche portrays it resembles not the sour grapes of Aesop’s fox, but a kind of collective Schadenfreude: the slaves make themselves happy by making the masters unhappy. What matters is that the slaves actually be motivated by their desire to exact revenge on the masters, not that they be clearly aware of this.7
Slave morality makes masters unhappy by making them feel guilty. Masters lose their grip on their own morality by being made to feel anxious for being who they are and doing what they do. “Men of ressentiment,” we read in GM II:14, “could achieve ”the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge ... if they succeeded in forcing their own misery, forcing all misery, into the consciences of the fortunate so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said to one another: ‘it is disgraceful to be fortunate; there is too much misery.“’ But how could masters be persuaded of anything by slaves, given that they rarely speak to them at all and tend, when they do, to remain in the imperative mood? No satisfactory answer will be possible if we follow Richard Rorty in thinking of the bellicose nobles as ”narcissistic and inarticulate hunks of Bronze Age beefcake.“8 Nietzsche’s nobles are not inarticulate but rather dialectically incompetent. Only because they are articulate can they be argued into granting that they are free to choose whether and how to allow expression to their deepest urges to act; only because they are dialectically incompetent can they be argued into granting the point, which Nietzsche himself believes to be false and pernicious.
A precondition of masters being coaxed into examining the Trojan Horse of slave morality is their having already developed among themselves the practice of settling certain issues by persuasion rather than by force. Not only are Nietzsche’s nobles articulate, they are also, in their relations with one another, wonderfully “resourceful in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship” (GM I:11). By frightful contrast, in their relations with the bad or the alien they could (and often apparently did) behave “not much better than uncaged beasts of prey” (ibid.). Master morality thus operates (without a second thought) according to a double standard; conduct that would not become a noble in his dealings with peers is not regarded as similarly disgraceful vis-à-vis those beyond the pale.“ Before the advent of slave morality, this double standard is held not to have given the nobles any pause; they practiced it with a good conscience.
Nobles become infected with bad conscience when they begin to worry about whether they are responsible, not simply for conducting themselves as befits a noble, but for being noble. These seeds of doubt in place, they are half way to being half convinced that they are not justified in thinking of themselves in the way that they had done. The inability of masters to justify themselves before the bar of impartial value is the result principally of their inability intellectually to defend two features of their outlook: the double standard that allows the bad or the alien to be treated ignobly, and the powerful physicality that infuses the activities that nobles value intrinsically.
In addition to recognizing among themselves the difference between persuasion and force and to acknowledging a peer-relative sense of responsibility, Nietzsche’s master class typically contained within it a priestly caste, a species of nobility that pays special attention to the value of purity. Initially, this element in the value-equation is, like all the others, construed in gross, tangible terms. “‘The pure one,’” Nietzsche writes, “is from the beginning merely a person who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that produce skin ailments, who does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower strata, who has an aversion to blood—no more, not much more” (GM I:C). Nevertheless, he goes on to say, “there is from the first something unhealthy in ... priestly aristocracies and in the habits ruling in them which turn them away from action and alternate between brooding and emotional explosions” (ibid.). Because they become used to turning away from action, priests begin to spiritualize the notion of purity to the point at which it demands as much abstention as possible from the physical and the sensual altogether; and the more thoroughgoing this spiritualization, the more likely it is that “the priestly mode of valuation [will] branch off from the knightly aristocratic and then develop into its opposite,” slave morality and the ascetic ideal (GM 1:7).
It is thus in the very idea of a priestly form of life that we find the beginnings of a Nietzschean explanation of how slave moralists get the attention of nobles. But how could brawny, marauding warlords have come to harbor brooding, neurasthenic priests in their midst?9
According to GM II:19, prehistoric tribes “recognized a juridical duty towards earlier generations.” The members of such tribes believed that “it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantage and new strength” (GM II:19). As the tribe prospers, so waxes the debt that the living owe to the dead, especially the longest dead, the founders, until “in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god” (GM II:19). Initially, in other words, ancestors and gods may be propitiated by sacrifices and accomplishments of a familiarly predatory and aggressive sort; with time, though, there grows a sense that the metaphysical “otherness” of these specially powerful beings demands that they be treated with commensurately refined and mysterious forms of respect, with, for example, buildings, sights, sounds, and smells dedicated to them alone. The priesthood thus becomes that department of the nobility that takes charge of commerce with gods and spirits, leaving the knightly aristocrats to deal with mortal humans and animals.
Nietzsche says that slave morality entered world history via the cult and culture of ancient Judaism (cf. GM 1:7 and BGE 195) and that its success is epitomized by the triumph of Christianity (cf. GM 1:8). But the origination of slave morality in the world of the Hebrew Bible cannot account for its insinuation into masterly circles, for it was not through widespread conversion to Judaism that slave morality achieved its conquests. And although Christians eventually succeeded in spreading the slavish word on a heretofore unprecedented scale, conversions to Christianity cannot count as examples of slave morality’s reaching knightly-aristocrats in the very first place. The late Hellenistic and early Roman world within which Christianity emerged and grew was already familiar with the crucial notions of impartial value and antisensual purity, it was a culture within which master morality had already been contaminated by slave morality’s characteristic mode of evaluation. In fact, the key to Nietzsche’s solution to his problem is found not in the Genealogy but in his interpretation of Socrates.
Nietzsche’s Socrates confronted the nobility of Athens with a fateful puzzle. An ugly, irritating plebeian, whose characteristic mode of inquiry by cross-examination was impertinent by noble standards, he nevertheless commanded attention; he was “the buffoon that got himself taken seriously” (TI “Socrates” 5). Socrates got himself taken seriously by “discovering a new kind of agon” (TI “Socrates” 8), a dialectical agon; he “fascinated in that he touched the agonistic drive of the ancient Hel-iene, —he introduced a variant form of wrestling between young men and youths. Socrates was also a great erotic (Erotiker)” (ibid.). In virtue of their inability to understand him or to defeat him in the game of question and answer, Socrates’ noble contemporaries were forced to admit that where he was concerned, they were no longer in charge of the situation. Since being a noble, being “one of us excellent specimens of humanity,” was supposed to guarantee the wherewithal always to be in charge insofar as that was humanly possible, this admission brings with it an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
So when, to give a signal example, Alcibiades declares in the Symposium that Socrates is the only man capable of making him feel ashamed of himself, the slave revolt hypothesis would have us understand this on two levels. First, Alcibiades is ashamed of himself by the standards of master morality. When Alcibiades realizes that, since he cannot “prove Socrates wrong,” he must agree that he is living his life according to priorities that he cannot defend,10 he faces the following trilemma by his own lights: either (1) he is not as noble as he had thought; or (2) the practice of justifying his choices with reason and argument is not something worth his noble attention; or (3) he need not care whether or not he is able intellectually to defend himself against the plebeian Socrates. The second option is foreclosed because Alcibiades must recognize that it is frequently incumbent upon nobles to justify actions and decisions to other nobles, for example in councils of war or on other matters of public policy. And the third is foreclosed because Alcibiades has already been seduced into caring very much how he fares in the eyes of Socrates; he has been smitten by Socrates’ strange new brand of eroticism. Hence a first spate of shame, brought on by his failure to live up to his own standards of achievement.
Nietzsche holds that the inability of an Alcibiades to close his mind to the demands of Socratic dialectic is already symptomatic of decay on the part of the noble morality of fifth-century Athens. Socrates, he writes, “understood ... [that] the old Athens was coming to an end, ... [that] the instincts were everywhere in anarchy,” and that as a result “all the world had need of him” (TI “Socrates” 9). The robust appearance of noble morality turns out to have been deceptive, its naive exuberance and unexamined self-confidence inherently fragile and subject to endogenous disintegration. Because of this undiagnosed and only inchoately felt degeneration of fifth-century Athenian noble instincts and values, Socrates was able to radicalize the practice of defending oneself with reasons in two ways: he demanded that his interlocutors justify themselves to Socrates, a plebeian, and he demanded that they justify the fundamental principles according to which they lived, rather than simply justifying particular, local matters against the background of an unquestioned code of noble conduct.
Once ashamed as a noble in virtue of not being able to defeat Socrates in his novel agon of the elenchus, a figure like Alcibiades is ripe for experiencing further shame—bordering on guilt—for not adopting the standards of evaluation Socrates is proposing. When Alcibiades bemoans his “personal shortcomings,” he is speaking as one already infected by Socratic values, one who has been forced intellectually to agree that “reason = virtue = happiness” (TI “Socrates” 9), that one should never voluntarily harm another, even if one has been wronged, and that the established exemplars of wisdom, courage, piety, and justice are sadly ignorant of what wisdom, courage, piety, and justice truly are. Practically speaking, though, Alcibiades has not been really convinced:
[T]he moment I leave [Socrates’] side, I go back to my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd. My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply ashamed, because I’m doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should. (Symposium 216c)
Alcibiades thus bears witness, not only to the loosening grip of noble values on their adherents, but also to the emerging confusion of master and slave morality, for he himself does not separate the two distinct sources of shame that a Nietzschean analysis reveals, but speaks rather of a single disconcerting experience of inadequacy in the face of Socrates.
In the second half of the chapter, I bring empirical evidence to bear on the slave revolt hypothesis. This is necessary on the assumption that GM I is meant to include a historically serious reconstruction of the roots of modern Western ethical consciousness. And this assumption had better be true. For the philosophical heart of GM I’s moral critique is the claim that the idea of impartial value originated in self-estranged ressentiment, while the phenomenon of intrinsic value originated in a self-affirming “active force” (GM II: 18), and this means that the soundness of the critique depends in large part upon the truth of the claim. I argue first that the slave revolt hypothesis receives initial support from certain enduring facts of language use in English and other European languages;11 and second that it is not impugned by the existence of foraging societies with a strikingly egalitarian mode of life but no history of nobles and slaves. If Nietzsche thought that egalitarianism required a slave revolt, such societies would falsify it outright. But an examination of the erstwhile “Bushmen,” or San, of southern Africa12 in the context of a charitable reading of his work will show that Nietzsche thought no such thing. If anything certain Bushmen/ San practices provide positive evidence for his account of the role of ressentiment in human psychology.
According to Peirce, a hypothesis is an attempt to account for something that would otherwise be surprising. In an 1878 paper, he offers the following as an example of the sort of thing he has in mind: “fossils are found; say, remains like those of fishes, but far in the interior of the country. To explain the phenomenon, we suppose the sea once washed over this land. This is [a] hypothesis.”13 Consider now the continued presence in English of a number of ambiguous words and phrases that fit the following two descriptions:
The words “noble” and “common” can serve as examples. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has as the second entry under “noble”: “illustrious by rank, title, or birth; belonging to that class of the community which has a titular pre-eminence over the others,” and as the fourth: “having high moral qualities or ideals; of great or lofty character.” The potential for discrepancy between the two senses is nicely exploited in an 1829 citation, from Kenelm Digby. “The soldiers of Pavia were far more noble than their Emperor, Friedrich II, when they remonstrated against his barbarous execution of the Parmesan prisoners.” Under “common,” the OED has twenty-three entries, divided into three main groups. The first group of (nine) entries rings changes on the general sense “belonging equally to more than one,”14 the second group (of six) is introduced with the phrase “of ordinary occurrence and quality, hence mean, cheap,” while the final grouping contains various technical senses, from mathematics and the law among other areas. The homonymy covering the first two groups evidently conforms to the following logic: nothing that is too common, in the sense of shared equally by many, can be very distinguished(!) or desirable. The most revealing entry in the second group is sense fourteen, according to which, “common” when predicated of “ordinary persons, life, language, etc.” means “lower class, vulgar, unrefined.”15
These ambiguities of“noble” and “common” cannot be explained away as a theoretically unpromising peculiarity of the English language, as the ambiguity of “poor” between “indigent” and “substandard” can perhaps be; for the same ambiguity occurs in other European languages; in, for example, the German “vornehm” and “gemein”16 and the French “noble” and “commun.” Why should single words yoke together, on the one hand a politico-genealogical conception of superiority with a meritocratic, characterological one, and on the other hand, an innocuous concept of being shared with a pejorative term of opprobrium? According to the slave revolt hypothesis, these ambiguities are what the English anthropologist E. B. Tylor called “survivals”: remnants of a time before good and evil, linguistic analogues of Peirce’s inland fish fossils. What today might seem a tendentious yoking of disparate senses was once, according to Nietzsche, a perfectly natural conceptual mixture.
In GM I:5, Nietzsche supports the slave revolt hypothesis by appealing to the not easily translatable meanings of the ancient Greek “agathos,” “esthlos,” “deilos,” and “kakos.” The Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon (L&S) gives four primary meanings for agathos: (1) well-born, gentle, (2) brave, valiant, (3) good, serviceable, and (4) good in a moral sense; two for esthlos: (1) brave, stout, noble, and (2) morally good, faithful; three for deilos: (1) cowardly, hence vile, worthless, (2) low-born, mean, (3) miserable, wretched, with a compassionate sense;17 and five for kakos: (1) ugly, (2) ill-born, (3) craven, base, (4) worthless, sorry, unskilled, (5) morally evil, pernicious. On Nietzsche’s view, the distinctions made by L&S are useful and intelligible only to us, inheritors of the slave revolt trying to understand the language and culture of ancient Greece. What is notable about the way the words were used in their natural habitat is that they unproblematically blended together aesthetic, ethical, and socioeconomic qualities.18 If Nietzsche is right, the very possibility of sharply distinguishing the descriptive from the evaluative senses of terms of this sort does not become a live option until slave morality has developed to a suitably sophisticated level.19
Etymology and usage cannot on their own establish the crucial Nietzschean connection between the emergence of impartial value and the expression of ressentiment. The systematic ambiguities I have looked at show that our (still) current moral language is not monolithic, but stratified, and that the older semantic stratum embodies an aristocratic scheme of value, while the younger one shows an accelerating tendency to identify the truly moral with a distinctively impartial, egalitarian mode of evaluation. On their own, the ambiguities cannot show that it was ressentiment that sparked the formation and spread of the egalitarian scheme of value.20 Nietzschean attention to the enduring stratification of our moral vocabulary does, however, bring into relief a need for explanation on two fronts: that of the unexpected emergence of the egalitarian stratum and that of the surprising vestigial persistence of the aristocratic stratum.
And once aware of the subterranean presence of the older scheme of value within a culture ever more committed both to purifying the moral realm of contamination from considerations of brute force, or wealth, or beauty, or mental or physical dexterity, ... or anything else that does not belong properly to morality, and to championing the moral equality of persons, reflective souls in the modern world face a consequential choice between the project of expunging the anomalous evaluative usages in an effort to carry on ethical life in the exclusive terms of an austerely impair-tial, rigorously purified conception of moral value and that of rethinking the nature and foundations of moral value. According to Nietzsche, the former choice is nihilistic, the latter bold and hopeful.21
To identify the historical subject of GM I, to say what the historical story it tells is supposed to be a story of, we can do no better than reach back for the term “Christendom”: GM I attempts to lay bare the ethical significance of Christendom by laying bare its true origins. As Homer provides Nietzsche with his terminus a quo, the knightly-aristocratic mode of living and valuing, so is his terminus ad quem the “modern moral milk-sop,” provided by that familiar nineteenth-century figure, the tender-hearted intellectual who responds to a waning conviction in the truth of Christian metaphysics with an ever more rationalized and spiritualized “cling[ing] ... to Christian morality” (TI “Skirmishes” 5).
Certain of GM I’s central claims, however, seem to transcend this culturally specific ambit. When we read that it is certain that “sub hoc signo [the slave revolt) Israel, with its revenge and revaluation of all values, has thus far again and again triumphed over all other ideals, over all more noble ideals” (I: 9, emphases added, emphasis deleted), we might take Nietzsche to hold that slavish, egalitarian values are inherently reactionary, and can originate only in ressentiment and revenge. But if this is his view, the existence of egalitarian peoples such as the San of southern Africa poses a problem. For it is widely agreed that such peoples have never developed the sort of hierarchically organized form of life that is supposed to be necessary for the existence of noble values, and that they demonstrate in their most firmly entrenched customs a strikingly high regard for peaceable and equitable group relations; they appear not simply to have happened not to develop distinctions of rank among themselves, they actively see to it that “there are no distinct haves and have-nots,”22 that physical hostilities are rare, and that actions or attitudes likely to increase the risk of hostility in any form are assiduously discouraged by “unspoken social laws.”23 Richard Lee goes so far as to say that the egalitarianism of the San “is not simply the absence of a headman and other authority figures, but a positive insistence on the essential equality of all people and a refusal to bow to the authority of others.”24 So the San seem to abide by something very like an impartial respect for each other, even though this outlook cannot have originated in a slave revolt in morality.25
To make matters worse, there are elements of San culture more reminiscent of Nietzschean nobles than his slaves. The San take an intense and vital delight in music and dance,26 are skilled, enthusiastic hunters, are known for their elaborate and beautiful paintings on the walls of caves and on rockfaces, and are inveterate storytellers. Their world, in other words, despite the absence of political hierarchy and economic complexity, suffers from no lack of “vigorous, free, joyful activity” of just the variety Nietzsche prizes when it is engaged in by Homeric Greeks and their like.27 And it is hard to imagine that they do not value these self-expressive sorts of activity intrinsically by contrast with the (presumably instrumental) value accorded to the “menial tasks” devoted to “elaborating the material means of life.” But if the Sittlichkeit of the San is to qualify as a form of master morality, it is a master morality without masters, since there is no evidence that San contrast themselves and their excellences with anything perceived as “low, low-minded, or plebeian.”
If a commitment to peaceable egalitarianism entails a commitment to the impartial value characteristic of slave morality, then San culture falsifies the slave revolt hypothesis. But the conditional that grounds this inference is foreign to Nietzsche’s moral anthropology, which explicitly recognizes an epoch of peaceable egalitarianism that precedes the emergence of master morality. In GM 1:5 Nietzsche refers to “the commune” as “the most primitive form of society”; in Beyond Good and Evil, he distinguishes the “pre-moral” phase of human history, during which “the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences,” from the genuinely moral phase, governed by the aristocratic habit of determining the value of an action by reference to its “ancestry” or “origin” (Herkunft) (BGE 231); and in Human, All Too Human he characterizes the first stage of human morality, “the first sign that an animal has become human,” as that in which “behavior is no longer directed to ... momentary comfort, but rather to ... enduring comfort,” and contrasts it with a “higher stage” in which “man acts according to the principle of honor” (HH 94). For Nietzsche, in other words, we find in the very beginning of moral history groups of early humans struggling to survive and reproduce, and doing so in conformity with “The First Principle of Civilization,” that “any custom is better than no custom” (D 16). Though different particular groups developed different particular customs, all of them agreed on two fundamental ideas: “that the community is more important than the individual and that a lasting advantage is preferable to a transient one” (AOM 89). Only after the human species had maintained itself in groups of this kind for some time did the knightly-aristocratic inventors of master morality emerge onto the scene. Nietzsche’s description of this earliest form of ethical life as that of “the commune” strongly suggests that he takes it to be egalitarian in nature.
Nietzsche’s willingness to allow that a morality of, as they might be called, ur-communities constitutes a form of ethical life distinct from both the master morality that breaks from it, and the slave morality that in turn breaks from master morality, means that he need not be troubled by the discovery of groups such as the San whose attitudes and behavior cannot be smoothly assimilated either to the ethos of the masters, nor to that of the slave revolt. In fact, adding the hypothesis of a morality of ur-communities to Nietzsche’s theoretical framework enables two interesting features of San culture to turn up on the credit rather than the debit side of Nietzsche’s theoretical ledger.
The role of ressentiment according to the slave revolt hypothesis together with the brief account of the origins of the state found in GM 11:17 should lead us to expect ur-communities to be marked by the relative absence both of the pent-up ressentiment alleged to have engineered the slave revolt in morality, and of government by a state. According to GM II:17, the function of the oldest “state” (the scare quotation marks are Nietzsche’s) was to “weld ... a hitherto unimpeded and unshaped populace into a fixed form.” The scare quotation marks are there, Nietzsche explains, because he takes himself to be talking about nothing more than “some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers but still formless and nomad” (ibid.). What we know as the state, in other words, is descended from something invented by barbarian nobles, and so cannot be supposed to figure in the lives of communities that have experienced no admixture of master morality.28
If conformity to custom is not enforced by a superordinate authority such as the state, it must presumably be enforced by all against each and each against all. It follows from this, I think, that the bonds that bind egalitarian ur-communities together could not long survive any significant growth in ressentiment on the part of its members. Not that Nietzsche would portray ur-communities as free of ressentiment as such; that would run counter to his view that the experience of ressentiment is strictly coeval with the emergence of a distinctively human animal.29 What is variable across time and type according to Nietzsche is the manner in which ressentiment is experienced and handled. In a noble, Nietzsche tells us, “ressentiment consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison” (GM I:10). And in an ur-community, no significant admixture of this latter, venomous form of ressentiment would be tolerable. For supposing it to crop up in an individual or subgroup, it would be directed either against other individuals or subgroups, or in some generalized way, against the community as a whole. In either case, the persistence of “undischarged” ressentiment would severely handicap the mechanisms of consensual decision making and behavior enforcement demanded by a morality of ur-commuiiities. We should, consequently, expect the members of ur-communities to share with nobles the habit of dealing with immediately experienced ressentiment-that is, the immediate response to perceived encroachments, humiliations, inequities, and the like—by means of similarly immediate, outwardly directed action.
When we test these consequences of the slave revolt-ressentiment hypothesis against ethnographic evidence, it is confirmed on both counts. That the San have no indigenous counterparts to state power and authority as these are understood in the West is evident. As George Silberbauer observes, the regular dispersal of a Bushman /San band into smaller household-like groups during seasons of scarcity would render “a centralized, hierarchical structure, with specialized personnel and roles ... unable to function [during these periods].”30 And that they refuse to tolerate just the sorts of festering grievance that feed the poisonous ressentiment ascribed by Nietzsche to the originators of slave morality is attested to by the variety of “venting” practices they have developed, which serve to sustain cooperative harmony and inhibit divisive hostility.
Silberbauer, for example, divides the relationships that an individual G/wi has with his or her kin (which will typically include the entire band to which the individual belongs) into “joking relationships” and “avoidance/respect relationships.” Avoidance/respect holds between an individual and his or her parents, opposite sex siblings, and children past the age of seven or eight; while joking relatives include the individual’s grandparents, same sex siblings, opposite sex siblings-in-law, and cousins.
An avoidance/respect relationship [writes Silberbauerl ... requires that those so related should #ao (v.t., to be reserved or respectful toward, to be scared of) one another. Their proper behavior is characterized by:
These restrictions on acceptable interaction virtually preclude direct conflict between avoidance relatives.32
Many G/wi conflicts will thus be articulated and resolved within joking relationships, and it is of the essence of the joking relationship, Silberbauer argues, to allow disputes to be conducted in such a way as to minimize the dangers of escalation and lasting resentment. “The behavior appropriate to the joking relationship,” he explains, “permits free and trenchant public criticism of the actions of a joking partner and imposes an obligation to accept the criticism without the kind of resentment that might exacerbate the conflict.”33 Writing twenty years earlier than Silberbauer about the Nyae Nyae !Kung, Lorna Marshall had come to the same conclusion, observing that the !Kung’s vigilant attention to “getting things into words” is something that “keeps everyone in touch with what others are thinking and feeling, releases tensions, and prevents pressures from building up until they burst out in aggressive acts.”34 Richard Lee, meanwhile, remarks of the Dobe !Kung, that
they have evolved elaborate devices for puncturing the bubble of conceit and enforcing humility. These leveling devices are in constant daily use—minimizing the size of others’ kills, downplaying the value of others’ gifts, and treating one’s own efforts in a self-deprecating way. Please and thank you are hardly ever found in their vocabulary; in their stead is a vocabulary of rough humor, backhanded compliments, put-downs, and damning with faint praise.35
Egalitarian cultures such as that of the San are not, therefore, counterexamples to the slave revolt hypothesis.
But, I ask in conclusion, if a sustained commitment to treating everyone alike together with a pronounced aversion to arrogance and a tendency to shun competition do not add up to a commitment to impartial value, what does? Impartial value in my quasi-technical sense, I answer, can be found only in moral outlooks similar enough to that which has emerged in the course of Western civilization; its vague identity condition is simply a sufficient conceptual resemblance to our, Western sense of the concept. The slave revolt hypothesis presupposes that the diverse, interrelated paradigms of slave morality-the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the canonical moral philosophers from Socrates to Schopenhauer-exhibit enough unity among them to make the proposed identity condition for commitment to impartial value theoretically useful. So if it were to turn out that what divided, say, Aquinas from Kant from Mill was more philosophically significant than anything that united them, the hypothesis would be commensurately weakened. By the same token, though, to identify a network of concepts or commitments that, there is reason to think, are common to the canonical slave moralists and that are of genuine philosophical interest, is to have the materials for a satisfying answer to the question: What does it take to be committed to impartial value? The answer would be that it takes familiarity with these concepts and commitment to these views, the ones integral to the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament, and Socrates, and the others on the list.
When introduced in the first section of this chapter, the concept of impartial value was characterized as “value chosen by an [...] impartial subject,” one “who is in himself neither master nor slave, but can freely choose to behave and to evaluate either as the one or as the other” (cf. above, p. 112). This account implies that a commitment to impartial value is bound up with a commitment to a certain conception of agency. Of a piece with impartial value is the conception of a distinctively moral sense or locus of agency. What are the conditions of moral agency? What are the legitimate grounds of appraisal of a distinctively moral—as opposed to aesthetic, athletic, epistemic, prudential, ...—sort? These are questions that will occupy thinkers within the culture labeled by Nietzsche, with malice aforethought, the culture of slave morality; impartial value is an umbrella concept comprising the nest of ideas and assumptions about value that generate the kind of question just listed.
Examining and rejecting the idea that the egalitarian culture of the San might pose a counterexample to the slave revolt hypothesis has led us in conclusion to recognize a deeper and more precise sense in which the history of GM I is a history of Western morality. For Nietzsche’s most interesting and defensible historical claim is that it is distinctive of our culture, the culture that has roots in both the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric epics, that self-affirmation and intrinsic value entered it by way of a knightly-aristocratic leisure class, whose moral scheme was overthrown by a slave revolt that introduced a novel morality of impartial value. Whether having this history is our fortune or our misfortune is as maybe; more to the Nietzschean point, it is our fate.
I would like to thank audiences at Bishop’s University, The University of Miami, The Canadian and American Philosophical Associations, and Hamilton College for questions that helped me improve earlier drafts of this chapter. I would like most especially to thank Rüdiger Bittner, Ken Gemes, Jean Grondin, Susan Haack, Aimee MacDonald, Eric Saidel, James Stayer, Allen Wood, and an anonymous referee for detailed criticisms and helpful suggesrions; and Christa Davis Acampora for help in trimming the originally published paper to its present size.
For translations of Nietzsche’s works, I have relied upon Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s GM and WP; Hollingdale’s HH, D, Z, and TI; and Kaufmann’s GS and BGE, I have often altered the translation of particular words and phrases.
The inclusion of war on Nierzsche’s lisr of characteristic noble activities might seem to count against the suggestion that these activities are all engaged in for their own sakes. With Aristotle, it might be thought that “nobody chooses to make war or provoke it for the sake of making war; a man would be regarded as a bloodthirsty monster if he made his friends into enemies in order to bring about battles and slaughter” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. J. A. K. Thompson, trans., Hugh Tredennick, revised trans. [New York: Penguin Books, 1979], X 1177b10). To think this, though, is to fail to understand the scheme of value that governed the lives of barbarian nobles. If Aristotle’s remark is an ethical truism, then Nietzsche’s heroic warriors are indeed “bloodthirsty monsters.” As Nietzsche says, the nobles’ “indifference to and contempt for security, body, life, comfort, their appalling cheerfulness (entsetzliche Heiterkeit) and profound joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty—all this came together in the minds of those who suffered from it, in the image of the ‘barbarian,’ the ‘evil enemy,’ perhaps as the ‘Goths,’ the ‘Vandals”’ (GM I:11, 275/42). Now there is nothing in the thesis that, as Arthur Danto puts it, Nietzschean nobles take warmaking to be “not so much what [they] do but what [they] are, so that it is not a matter of warring for, but as, an end” (“Some Remarks on On the Genealogy of Morals,” in Richard Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy> Morality: Essays on On the Genealogy of Morals, 35), that precludes acknowledgment that nobles might also have valued war for the sake of extrinsic goods such as territory, plunder, and honor that can be obtained by waging it successfully. The case is entirely akin to, for example, valuing athletic ability both for its intrinsic rewards and for its conduciveness to good health. Cf. on the intrinsic value of war, Zarathustra, “Of War and Warriors”: “You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause” (Z:1).
My characterization of master morality as a morality of intrinsic value has evident affinities with Danto’s description of it as a morality of “absolute and unconditioned value” and the “categorical good” (Nietzsche as Philosopher [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 159). But I think that Danto is mistaken to add that the contrast between master and slave morality “reduce[s] to a fairly simple and, since Kant, routine distinction between an absolute and unconditional value, and a hypothetical or contingent value” (ibid.). For Kant, the unconditioned good must be independent of circumstance or restriction of any kind, including restrictions having to do with contingent features of us. So for Kant a truly unconditioned good could not possibly be good for some but not for others, while the goods valued intrinsically by Nietzsche’s nobles fit just this description; they are thought to be good for nobles, but not for commoners. Just as the former view menial employments as unworthy of them, so they view slaves as unworthy of honorable activity. For a Nietzschean noble, the fact that he takes, for example, leading the troops into battle to be an intrinsically valuable thing to do does not entail that it would be good for one of the troops to attempt the same feat. At root, the difference between Kantian unconditioned value and the intrinsic value I am attributing to Nietzsche’s nobles is the difference between: a “value in itself” identified by contrast to mere “value for us,” and a “value in itself” identified by reference to “us nobles”; as Nietzsche puts it in BGE: “the noble type of man ... judges, ‘what is harmful to me is harmful in itself.’” [Ed. note: Extensive discussion of intrinsic value in Nietzsche is found in Ridley, included in this volume.]
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Random House, 1934).
As Alexander Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985], 254) points out, Nietzsche only uses the phrase “master morality” once in his published works (in BGE 260). Nevertheless, he speaks often enough of “noble morality” (GM I:10 and A 24), “aristocratic values and value judgments” (GM 1:2, 7, 16) and “nobler ideals” (GM II:9), and he identifies nobles with masters unambiguously enough to warrant the use of the term as a natural and convenient contrast to “slave morality.” I shall, in any case, use “master morality” interchangeably with “noble morality.”
Nierzsche’s model for the ethos of primeval man is the ethos of Homeric man. The casual noble (mis)treatment of inferiors is vividly illustrated by Odysseus’s rebuking of Thersites in Book Two of the Iliad. See The Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), Book II, lines 246–64.
Bittner thinks that if we are to speak of creative ressentiment and a slave revolt, we must imagine the earliest slave moralists to be in a situation analogous to La Fontaine’s fox; they must look at the lives of nobles, “know” that such lives are healthier and happier than their own, and yet convince themselves (and others) that the masters are in fact worse off than themselves. I think it more charitable to interpret Nietzsche as holding, with Bittner himself, that the evolution of slave morality was a long, slow process. Why could Nietzsche not agree that slave morality “may have dawned on the slaves and grown on them, without ever having been set up expressly” (Bittner, 133)? Because, Bittner says, his “pathos of creativity” demands that a slave revolt spring from a creative act and something’s being the result of a creative act is incompatible with its “just growing on us.” In effect, Bittner assumes that a creative slave revolt requires fully-fledged Sartrean self-deception, and I disagree.
Richard Rorty, “Against Belatedness,” London Review of Books, 16 June-6 July 1983: 3.
In GM I’s most incendiary passage concerning the propensity of nobles periodically to exempt themselves from their own standards of civilized behavior and return to the innocence of a “predator conscience” (GM I:11), Nietzsche speaks of the nobles’ releasing their pent-up aggression on “das Fremde” (the foreign or alien), rather than on their inferiors. Furthermore, the fact that the marauding warriors are depicted as “returning from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, molestation, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student prank, convinced that the poets will have much to sing about for a long time to come” (ibid.), suggests that Nietzsche has in mind an expedition such as that of the Greeks to Troy rather than a day-to-day diet of less dramatic brutalities inflected upon the weak by the strong. I do not, therefore, think it obvious that master moraliry’s double standard entailed that dealings between nobles and their subordinates were governed by no remotely humane standards at all.
Plato, Symposium, Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), 216b-c.
In so doing, I will be expanding upon suggestions found in GM 1:4 and 5, as well as in a modest way responding to Nietzsche’s proposed prize question: “What light does linguistics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts?” (GM I:17).
The term “Bushman” derives from the Dutch “Bojesman,” and was used by the Dutch settlers of southern Africa to refer to one of the two quite different native groups that they had found upon arrival. I have retained the word in my titles because, as Richard Lee observes, it is the name by which these people “became known to the world” (The !Kung San [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 29). But I have chosen to refer to them as the San in the text, since there seems to be a consensus amongst those who work on and with the people in question, that the term “Bushman” has acquired an unpleasantly derogatory connotation (see Lee op cit., 29–31 and Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989] 26–32; but note that George Silberbauer in Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981] chooses Bushman over San to refer to the larger group to which the G/wi, who are the focus of his study, belong). As it happens, even San is not, as Lee remarks, “an entirely satisfactory term,” since it has a connotation signifying “rascal” in Khoi-Khoi, the language spoken by the other native people found by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and it is not used by any of the people referred to by it to refer to themselves. But in the absence of any single term that does cover just the people under discussion and is used by those people themselves, it seems to me that “San” is, at the risk of sounding mealy-mouthed, the “safest” term there is for my purposes.
Charles Sanders Peirce, “Deduction, Induction, Hypothesis,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 2. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), paragraph 625.
The definition is Dr. Johnson’s.
“Vulgar” is itself a word that exhibits the ambiguity under discussion, and it is not therefore surprising to find that “common” appears regularly in the OED’s entries for it. Many of these senses are evaluatively neutral, for example, “common or usual language, vernacular,” “in common or general use,” “of common or general kind,” while others are strongly disparaging, for example entry thirteen: “having a common and offensively mean character; coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement or good taste; uncultured, ill-bred.” While we’re at it, “mean” (as an adjective) offers yet another instance of the phenomenon. It has a large number of senses clustering around “intermediate,” “moderate,” “of average value, as in ‘mean pressure, temperature’ etc.,” and it can also be predicated of things to mean “poor in quality, of little value, interior, petty, unimportant, inconsiderable” and of persons, their characters and actions to mean “destitute of moral dignity or elevation, ignoble, small-minded.”
According to the etymological conjectures favored by the OED and others, “gemein” is cognate both with “common” (“ge-mein,” like “co-mon”) and with “mean.”
Note in passing the support that this third sense gives to Nietzsche’s contention, canvassed above, that “almost all the [ancient Greek] words referring to the common man have remained as expressions signifying ‘unhappy’, ‘pitiable’ (GM I:10).
The modern lexicographer’s need to provide, for agathos, esthlos, and kakos, a separate entry stressing that the words can mean “morally” good or bad as the case may be, is a good example of the lack of philosophico-historical depth that GM attempts to combat. When Liddell and Scott illustrate the fourth listed sense of agathos with passages from Theognis and Plato, as if in the same breath, they are, according to Nietzsche, eliding exactly the gulf to which attention needs to be drawn. According to Nietzsche, Theognis is a spokesman for noble values, while Plato is involved in a campaign to undermine them.
As to the question whether Nietzsche is right on this point, he appears to be so. Walter Kaufmann’s translation of GM includes, at I §5, an editorial footnote that cites Gerald Else in support of Nietzsche’s view. Else writes, inter alia, that “Greek thinking begins with and for a long time holds to the proposition that mankind is divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and these terms are quite as much social, political, and economic as they are moral” (Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957], 75). To Else could be added Moses Finley, The World of Odysseus, revised ed., (New York: Viking Press, 1978), and William Prior, Virtue and Knowledge: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Ethies (New York: Roudedge, 1991). The former notes that in the world of the Homeric poems, ”‘warrior’ and ‘hero’ are synonyms, and the main theme of a warrior culture is constructed on two notes—prowess and honour. The one is the hero’s essential attribute, the other his essential aim. Every value, every judgment, every action, all skills and talents have the function of either defining honour or realizing it” (113), and maintains as well that “it is self-evident that the gods of the Iliad were the gods of heroes, or, plainly spoken, of the princes and the heads of the great households” (ibid., 139). The latter characterizes the Homeric hero as ”a person of noble rank who functions in a highly stratified society according to a strict code of conduct. He lives for glory, which he achieves by the display of virtue or excellence, particularly excellence in combat, and which is accorded to him by his fellow heroes in the form of gifts and renown” (9).
It is perhaps worth anticipating an objection to the effect that the Nietzschean view for which I am claiming scholarly confirmation is in fact so well known and accepted as to be insignificant rather than striking. It seems to me sufficient in reply to point out that Nietzsche expounded these ideas at a time in which no less an aficionado than Gladstone was able to find in Homer, not only “the ‘essential germ’ of the form of constitution enjoyed in Britain and America” (Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 202), but also a remarkable degree of convergence with Christian theology. Richard Jenkyns reports that Gladstone thought it “evident that Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto (he used the Roman names) were a memory [sic!] of the Trinity, Apollo was a relic of belief in a Messiah, as can be seen from his double character as Saviour and Destroyer (a page is allotted to demonstrating that Apollo’s rape of Marpessa was ‘not of a sensual character’). Was Minerva the Logos or the Holy Spirit? Did Latona represent Eve or the Virgin Mary? How curious that the poems contained no mention of the Sabbath!” (ibid., 203).
I am grateful to Allen Wood for showing me the force of this point.
A defense of these claims is, of course, beyond the scope of this chapter.
Lorna Marshall, “Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions among the !Kung,” in Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Kalahari Hunter Gatherers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 357.
Ibid., 351, 370–71.
Lee, op cit., 457.
The view of San life that I am taking as canonical is not universally shared. Edwin Wilmsen, for example, thinks that the image of the San that I accept here for the sake of argument is scarcely more solidly grounded in the actual lives and history of the people in question than was the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century image of the noble savage. If this is so, the San do not pose nearly as direct a threat to the slave revolt hypothesis as I am assuming they do. So I do not think that I need take a stand as between Wilmsen on the one hand and Lee and Marshall on the other.
Van der Post writes that “music was as vital as water, food, and fire to [the Bushmen]. ... We never found a group so poor or desperate that they did not have some musical instrument with them. And all their music, song, sense of rhythm, and movement achieved its greatest expression in their dancing (Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari [Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 19581, 225–26).
In addition to all this, Laurens van der Post provides evidence that, while they may not have developed a barbarian fondness for conquest on their own, the San can respond to attacks from others in the manner of masters rather than slaves.
What, indeed, [writes van der Post] could be prouder than the Bushman’s reply to the young Martin du Plessis, a boy of fourteen who was sent into a great cave ... where the Bushman was surrounded in his last stronghold by a powerful commando? The boy ... besought him to surrender, promising to walk out in front of him as a live shield against any treacherous bullets. At last, impatient that his refusal was not accepted, the Bushman scornfully said: “Go! Be gone! Tell your chief I have a strong heart! Go! Be gone! Tell him my last words are that not only is my quiver full of arrows but that I shall resist and defend myself as long as I have life left. Go! Go! Be gone!” (van der Post, op. cit. 46)
The preference for death before cowardice and dishonor exhibited here, it seems, is entirely of a piece with that of an Achilles, a Hector, or the heroes of the Norse or Irish sagas. Note, though, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s contrary conclusion that “it is not in [the] nature of [Bushmen] to fight” and that “they would much rather run, hide, and wait until a menace has passed than to defend themselves forcefully” (Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970] 21). Marshall Thomas goes so far as to say that “Bushmen deplore and misunderstand bravery. The heroes of their legends are always little jackals who trick, lie, and narrowly escape, rather than larger animals such as lions (who in the Kalahari are something of a master race)” (ibid., 22). Wilmsen would take Marshall Thomas’s evidence to be indicative, not of anything intrinsic to San culture as such, but rather of the subjugated position into which the San have been forced over the past several hundred years by other native Africans and by Europeans.
It might be thought that Nietzsche’s references to prenoble ur-communities are inconsistent with his account of the origin of the state in GM I:17. For that account is developed in the course of articulating “a first, provisional statement of [an] hypothesis concerning the origin of ‘bad conscience,’” and according to that hypothesis bad conscience was “a serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally (endgultig) enclosed within the walls (in den Bann) of society and peace” (ibid.). Does this mention of “society and peace” not imply that Nietzsche here identifies the origin of the state with the origin of socialization überhaupt, that he sees no substantial difference between hierarchically structured human society and human society as such? In a word, no.
Translated more literally than he is by Kaufmann, Nietzsche (1) speaks of man finding himself “conclusively under the spell of society and peace,” (2) refers twice in the opening sentences of GM II:17 to identifiable “populations” (Bevölkerungen) that are conquered, subjugated, and reformed by more powerful and hierarchically minded invaders, and (3) maintains that punishments figure prominently among the “fearful bulwarks with which the political (staatliche) organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom” (ibid.). In light of all this, Nietzsche’s argument in GM II:16–17 positively requires the assumption that life in hierarchically structured state-governed communities is preceded by something simpler, more amorphous, and more egalitarian. It is the cataclysmic advent of the state that demands the instinctual repression responsible for the growth of bad conscience. Life in a prehierarchi-cal state is comparatively unformed, not yet fully “under the spell of society and peace,” which is to say that such communities lack the sort of sharply defined political identity made possible by the institutionalized authority of law and the state. Chief among the “bulwarks” of social order we can expect to be missing from ur-communities will be publicly enforced and codified practices of punishment. Kaufmann’s free translation of “in den Bann der Gesellscbaft und Frieden” as “within the walls of society and peace” makes the interprerarion I wish to defend rather hard to bring into view, for it would seem that groups must be located either inside or outside such walls, with no third location possible. On my view Nietzsche’s language draws attention, not only to the fact of being in a condition of society and peace, but also to the means by which this condition is achieved; namely by a kind of mental captivation reminiscent of a magical spell. This subtlety, allows one to hold that egalitarian ur-communities are peaceful societies (rather more peaceful in fact than the militaristic societies that succeed them) without yet being “conclusively under the spell of society and peace” (or “under the sway of” them, as Clark and Swensen put it), that is, without regarding society and peace as conditions that have to be enforced-le mot juste for once-hegemonically. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research for bringing this point to my attention.
I am assuming here that ressentiment in its most generic form can be identified with the turning inward of an instinct denied outward discharge spoken of in GM II:16.
Silberbauer, op cit., 168.
Ibid., 143.
Ibid., 175.
Ibid., 172.
Marshall, op cit., 355.
Lee, op cit., 458.