Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morality

Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Genealogy of Morality, Tr. Maudemarie Clark & Alan J Swensen, Hackett Publishing Co, Indianapolis, 1998

This book was first published in 1887.  My 1st instinct when reading the introduction to this book was resistance.  As I read that Nietzsche was going to be arguing against the validity or commonly held high valuation about "good" moral values such as "honesty, compassion, fairness" etc my defences went up and I wanted to immediately repudiate his 'immoralism'.  Recognizing this automatic reaction, I knew I had to keep an open mind about his premise and I was quite excited to read this text.

In his preamble, Nietzsche argues that if we just accept that these "good values" are universally of higher value, we risk accepting values that may hinder man's progress, that perhaps "the present were living at the expense of the future" and "that precisely morality would be to blame if a highest power and splendour of the human type - in itself possible - were never attained."

I found this concept very intriguing but when I started to read Nietzsche's words I was enormously irritated.  Diving into this book with no background in his previous work (which he says is necessary to understand this text) and with only a superficial knowledge of the evolution of Western thinking to the 19th century, I was really floundering trying to make sense of Nietzsche's arguments.  He keeps talking about the nobles at the beginning of this all, choosing the "good" moral values in order to self-glorify and to differentiate themselves from the "common herd".  But who were these nobles?  I don't see mankind as starting out with "nobles" nor do I see mankind as having held off from having values until some social stratification had occurred.  Nietzsche writes about (43.8-10)

the diseased softening and moralization by virtue of which the creature "man" finally learns to be ashamed of all his instincts 

I also have trouble with all Nietzsche's talk about Aryans, the blond beasts, about noble races, about Germanic peoples vs Teutons, Goths and Vandals.  I don't understand the context in which he would be discussing "blond beasts" and a "race of conquerors (58.13)  Where does this leave all the older civilizations: African, Asian, Middle Eastern - and their development of values?  I don't understand his discussion in his 1st section of "the Noble" and "the Jews" as being in opposition to the 'aristocratic value equation (16.31) and when he writes about Jesus as the "Redeemer bringing blessedness" and being "the seduction and detour to precisely those Jewish values and reshapings of the ideal" (17.31) I don't understand how this is going to the root of morals.  I'm pretty sure that many cultures pre-dating the years when Jesus lived among the Jews, Romans and the various tribes in the current Middle East, valued morals similar to ones ascribed to Christianity.

I can understand his suggestion that Christianity and/or Christian morals could have been a reaction, a push back against a ruling class, so that values such as humbleness, patience, obedience, forgiveness became elevated but I don't know that I would agree that honesty, fairness, generosity, compassion etc are not intrinsically 'high value' morals and ones which would have been universally considered estimable from mankind's earliest evolution.

Nietzsche considers that the basis for current morality, the estimation of "good values" was the slave revolt of the Jewish priestly class against the Roman noble class; and that the Reformation, Restoration, and even the French Revolution, were subsequent slave-revolts against the classical ideal, the noble class.

36.24-29

If[...] we place ourselves at the end of the enormous process, where the tree finally produces its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally brings to light that to which  it was only the means: then we will find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, the individual resembling only himself, free again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supermoral (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive).

37.13-18

The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and fate, has sunk into his lowest depth and has become instinct, the dominant instinct - what will he call it, this dominant instinct, assuming that he feels the need to have a word for it? But there is no doubt: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience...

As I was reading Nietzsche's 2nd treatise: Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters, where he writes about the basic, primitive instinct for revenge, for punishment, for making the person who has caused injury suffer, and how this instinct in a powerful, secure community or society can be sublimated or satisfied by 'the law', and where crime becomes a crime against the state rather than between individuals.   I wondered about aboriginal healing circles and restorative justice processes where the perpetrator and the victim come together with the community to sort out retribution with a focus on how to heal the community, compensate the victim for injury and help the perpetrator heal and reintegrate back into the community.

In this section, Nietzsche writes about the true will of life:

50.11-22

One must even admit to oneself something still more problematic: that, from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of justice can never be anything but exceptional conditions, as partial restrictions of the true will of life - which is out after power - and subordinating themselves as individual means to its overall end: that is, as means for creating greater units of power.  A legal system conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the battle of power complexes, but rather as means against all battle generally, say in accordance with Durhings's communist cliche that every will must accept every other will as equal, would be a principle hostile to life , a destroyer and dissolver of man, an attempt to kill the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret pathway to nothingness - 

Niezsche speaks about how with punishment, the criminal is held back from feeling the wrongness of his deed by the fact that 'justice' employed similar actions (lying, bribery, spying, entrapment - and, in the case of countries like China, Iran, the USA...even capital punishment, state-sanctioned killing). 55.4-5

all of these thus actions his judges in no way reject and condemn in themselves

57.10-14

Generally what can be achieved among humans and animals through punishment is an increase of fear, a sharpening of prudence, mastery of the appetites: punishment thus tames man, but it does not make him "better" - one might with greater justification maintain the opposite. 

His section on pg 51 stating that the usefulness of something (whether physiological or institutional) has nothing to do with what caused its genesis or 'coming into being' was interesting to read, especially as we'll be reading Darwin's Origin of Species in a few weeks and also considering the debate over "form follows function" vs "function follows form."

Nietzsche writes about "the suffering of man from man, from himself - as the consequence of a forceful separation from his animal past." 57.23-24
I'm not sure I'm convinced by Nietzsche of mankind's innate desire to cause pain, to receive pleasure from suffering, from causing or observing suffering, whether to others or to him/herself.  His description 63.36-37 of mankind's "will to erect an ideal - that of the "holy God" - in order, in the face of the same, to be tangibly certain of his absolute unworthiness" was an interesting observation.  He counts that as an example of mankind's will to self-punish, to self-torture, towards guilt and "bad conscience."

It is frustrating in all these male writers to have to read their gender-biased ideas and opinions.  Nietzsche, in his 3rd treatise "The Aesthetic Ideal" writes about what these mean to different groups.  What are his examples of different groups which might each have a common viewpoint, distinct from other groups?

• artists
• philosophers
• scholars
• priests
• saints
• women

So women are all lumped together by their sex, not by their interests, education, employment.  And what might 'women' mean by aesthetic ideals? 67.4-5 "at best, one more charming trait of seduction, a little morbidezza on beautiful flesh, the angelicalness of a pretty, fat animal"

We've read so few women writers and their voices over the centuries have been so constricted, so unrecorded - it's very disheartening.

Nietzsche, in his treatise on the ascetic ideal, writes that (80.11-15):

Hubris is our entire stance toward nature today, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the so thoughtless inventiveness of technicians and engineers; hubris is our stance toward God, that is to say toward some alleged spider of purpose and morality behind the great snare-web of causality...

He calls modern-day mankind "nutcrackers of souls" for our propensity to dissect ourselves. Nietzsche states that in mankind's early days what are currently considered vices were virtues (cruelty, dissimulation, revenge, denial of reason, madness was considered divinity) and what are now considered virtues were considered vices back then (well-being, desire for knowledge, peace, compassion, being pitied and work were considered disgraceful, change was immoral). pg 81
He writes about contemplation - initially viewed with fear and distrust as unwarriorlike.  He discusses the example of the Brahmins saying the ascetics had to use self-castigation to win power.  The early philosophers came from these contemplative people, beginning as priest, soothsayer, magician and often assumed an aloof stance from life, even hostile to life, de-sensualized.  Nietzsche says the early philosophers had to hide within these roles, hide within self-segregation from everyday life to survive and function, to think.  83.19-28

The idea we are fighting about here is the valuation of our life on the part of the ascetic priest. [...] The ascetic treats life as a wrong path that one must finally retrace back to the point where it begins; or as an error one refutes through deeds - should refute: for he demands that one go along with him...

 This speaks to me - I've always had a problem with the idea that our life on earth (and I don't know whether this is all there is - my inclination is to this view) is just a stepping point to a better life, that our entire focus and goal should be towards attaining some other existence, to the point of completely devaluing our lives on earth.  Nietzsche says this devaluation is one of the longest & broadest 'facts' there is in mankind's history.

While I can't agree that mankind takes pleasure, perhaps our only pleasure, in causing pain, I do agree that I don't understand why we don't pursue pleasure exclusively nor why we have impulses of self-denial, of self-punishment or self-sabotage - or altruism for that matter.  I'd always assumed, in myself, that these were culturally-learned behaviours (possibly even somewhat but not exclusively gender based) or psychological pathologies.  The presence of the 'ascetic priest' in every age, every race, every culture, suggests that this is a necessary quality, a necessary human tendency, according to Nietzsche.  H extends this ascetic tendency to self-injury to a denial or a derision of reason, excluding reason from the "realm of truth and being" (85.1)

The ascetic ideal [...] is exactly the opposite of what its venerators suppose - in it and through it life is wrestling with death and against death [...] That this ideal has been able to rule and achieve power over humans to the extent that history teaches us it has, in particular wherever the civilization and taming of man has been successfully carried out, expresses a great fact: the diseasedness of the previous type of human, at least of the human made tame, the physiological struggle of man with death (more precisely: with satiety with life, with tiredness, with the wish for the "end")  (86.9-18)

Nietzsche considers that this negating one  represents a deeply sick, diseased mankind, that "the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life that seeks with every means to hold its ground and is fighting for its existence."  86.4-6 .

"The diseased are man's greatest danger: not the evil, not the 'beasts of prey [...]  The weakest are the ones who most undermine life among humans, who most dangerously poison and call into question our confidence in life, in man, in ourselves." 87.26-29

The Dostoyevsky text that we read this week, Notes from the Underground, gave us a frightening, depressing example of just such a human, a self-loathing man who lived almost entirely in his own head.

All this makes sense when you think about the negative qualities of religion, of convention: the hypocrites, the intolerant pious people, the people resentful of the happy, the light-hearted, the joyful - we've seen these rigid, sour, destructive characters over and over in literature.  Nietzsche is very scathing about the "moral onanist and 'self-gratifier'" 88.29  He then goes on to once again rail against womenkind:

The sick woman in particular: no one excels her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannizing. Furthermore the sick woman does not spare anything living, anything dead; she digs the most buried of things up again (the Bogos say: 'woman is a hyena')"  88.32-35

These miserable diseased people are also a danger because they wish to shove "their own misery, all misery generally into the conscience of the happy: so that the happy would one day be ashamed of their happiness"  (89.15-17)

Not sure about the mention of "moral boom-boom"  pg 89.8  (Eugen Duhring) - something I'll have to read about.

The sick aesthetic priest wages war, a war of the spirit, of cunning, against the beasts of prey.  Their biggest internal danger (of the sick herd) is resentment/revenge, what Nietzsche calls "ressentiment".  The priest does this by changing the direction of the ressentiment.  According to Nietzsche the resentment is turned towards the self and leads to concepts such as "sin", "corruption", "damnation", "guilt".  III 15-16

 Nietzsche focuses somewhat on Christianity (as the prevalent European religion) but feels other religions are just as false.  Many of them include a desire for a state beyond the senses, for anaesthetizing, hypnotizing oneself.  The Vedanta says "good and evil he shakes from himself, as a wise man; his realm no longer suffers through any deed; over good and evil, over both he passed beyond."  This state is sought after in both the brahministic and buddhistic religions.  This state of redemption is not attainable through virtue.  Nietzsche considers this desire to isolate oneself form feelings and desires is a form of hibernation, of deep sleep and a denial of life.  He feels the Eastern valuation for nirvana is the same as the esteem of the Epicurean, "the hypnotic feeling of nothingess"pg 97.