What Nietzsche REALLY SAID about Master & Slave Morality - Twin Origins of Our Modern Values

[Music] this is the nietzsche podcast [Music] today we're getting into one of the most popular ideas of nietzsche the master in slave morality sounds dangerous doesn't it well a lot of content creators are eager to jump right into this one for that very reason and i mean it's it's no surprise that it's very popular to talk about because it's one of nietzsche's most important contributions to the western philosophical canon the fact that we've waited more than ten episodes to delve into this topic should tell you though how seriously i take it and that i wanted

to lay all of the groundwork that we have so far before covering it it's really easy to misunderstand even what nietzsche means by the word morality first of all since the word can have multiple meanings and in different contexts he can mean different things by the word and it's easy to get suckered in by someone's simplistic view of nietzsche's idea of the master and slave morality so hopefully that won't happen given the preparation we've done so far we've examined the nietzschean method of considering human beliefs beliefs about our most cherished ideas and values we consider

them as indicative not of facts about the objective world but facts about mankind so you know you might say the the stereotypical image of the philosopher is that he's measuring the rel the the objective truth value of two different beliefs and deciding which one of them is true or two different ideas or something like that that's one way to engage philosophically but the reason why niche is called a proto-psychologist is you can also look at those beliefs or claims that someone makes to learn things about them quite independent of the truth or falsity of their

belief furthermore we've discussed the primacy of the body of instinct of passion of our irrational and unconscious parts of ourselves in nietzsche's philosophy this is in contrary distinction to the idea of the ego consciousness as this voluntarily governing free will making rational decisions right and then also how morality itself is this phenomenon that has evolved over time in mankind it's a product of nature just as human beings are and it's therefore again something we can examine to glean psychological and sociological insights about people and so at this point having covered all we have even if

you went into this podcast knowing nothing about nietzsche or knowing nothing about philosophy you now know that when nietzsche is discussing morality he's discussing it from a perspective that is beyond good and evil as the title of one of his favorite or his my favorite of his works reads he's not arguing in a moral realist framework for his morality he's not even arguing for immorality except maybe you know in those little little moments of devilish humor where he calls himself an immoralist or speaks on behalf of we immoralists because he recognizes how truth-seeking and in

the purest sense must always be seen as immoral by society at large our truth seeking involves interrogating even the moral foundations of society and that's one of the central tasks of nietzsche's philosophy and so this is the perspective from which nietzsche examines the morality of past cultures just as our own standing from this amoral vantage point we can nevertheless derive descriptive claims about how and why moral beliefs form what purpose they serve what they meant to the people who held them and how they developed and the understanding of those moral systems and moral values changed

he explains um in the preface of twilight of idols um twilight vitals is subtitled how to philosophize with a hammer um the act of philosophizing with a hammer is the metaphor of using a hammer not as a destructive implement or a weapon but like a tuning fork he means like a little hammer that you hit against something to hear its sound the the the deepest values of all the world's cultures are revealed when you you know strike your hammer against those cultures idols so he uses the metaphor that all the world's cultures they're like these

hollow metal idols and he the philosopher is going along striking each of these idols to listen for what note they sound and so the sound is going to ring out differently that's affected by the negative space around which the idol is cast right the inner shape produces a vibration that's what the philosopher pays attention to not the superficial appearance of the outward exterior but this difference in tone which is invisible until you chime against it with your hammer uh the the tone it chimes is a summation of the whole object from the perspective of sound

that's what the idol sounds like on an auditory level so this metaphor has a lot of layers to it that's why it really saddens me that people often misread the metaphor as being about nietzsche saying you should philosophize by smashing things um it's it's one of the most common misreads of nietzsche actually it's not even actually a misreading because if you read just barely into the beginning of twilight of idols which is the work where he coined that term he explains it perfectly well what he means but sorry this is just a tangent i've just

i've seen articles in supposedly serious news publications where people who claim to be intellectuals talk trash about nietzsche and then they use this metaphor like it's about smashing old ideologies or what have you which just reveals they didn't read the book uh it doesn't reveal anything about nietzsche again examining other people what other people claim and say to learn things about them rather than about the objective world so anyway i wanted to bring up the metaphor because that's what we're doing today we're philosophizing with a hammer along with nietzsche we're now working beyond good and

evil from the perspective of humans as natural creatures with these moral claims as a conscious gloss on reality from which we can learn something about ourselves and our own psychology and so nietzsche was he was influenced by aphorists such as uh la rochefoucault and these you know were people who wrote about human psychology or about morality and the conscience and so on they observed human behavior and kind of drew these philosophical conclusions about human nature so that's these are other proto-psychologists that nietzsche is in the tradition of but um you know nietzsche also wrote like

this you know he wrote in maxims the way that la rochefoucaue did and nietzsche had no disrespect for these little observations right and human all to human he said how these humble little truths are as important if not more so than the big ideas but nietzsche takes it a step further from larushviko and lapardi um and this is why this aspect of his philosophy is so popular he came up with a grand narrative to explain the origins and history of our moral feelings and our beliefs today the passage where nietzsche first started on this project

is all the way back in human all to human this is in section 45 where he says quote the concept of good and evil has a double pre-history namely first of all in the souls of ruling clans and castes the man who has the power to requite goodness with goodness evil with evil and really does practice requital by being grateful and vengeful is called good the man who is unpowerful and cannot requite is taken for bad as a good man one belongs to the good a community that has a communal feeling because all the individuals

are entwined together by their feeling for requital as a bad man one belongs to the bad to a mass of abject powerless men who have no communal feeling the good men are a caste the bad men are a multitude like particles of dust good and bad are for a time equivalent to noble and base master and slave conversely one does not regard the enemy as evil he can requite in homer both the trojan and the greek are good not the man who inflicts harm on us but the man who is contemptible is bad end quote

so here nietzsche is laying out a socio-historical analysis which is based on his work in philology as we'll see in greater detail when we look at the material from genealogy of morality but here in human altihuman he lays out the description of how the noble classes of antiquity viewed morality morality is based in this normal noble model on strength another way to say it is that this is morality based on power one who exists in an equal power relationship is considered good and this group is unified by a sense of all feeling powerful and able

to requite harm with harm or requite favor with favor we might add they might even be forgiving even though nietzsche doesn't really mention this in this passage but he does later you don't have to requite harm with a reprisal of inflicting harm instead somebody might be merciful but it would be up to that noble person to make that decision they would still possess the feeling of power because they have the ability to requite even if in some cases they choose not to you know in contrast what nietzsche calls the mass they cannot requite um even

if they want to at least not reliably so the these are the weak ones and so the nobles label them bad nietzsche then comments um in the same passage on the morality of the lower classes as a secondary development quote then in the souls of the oppressed powerless men every other man is taken for hostile inconsiderate exploitative cruel sly whether he be noble or base evil is their epithet for man indeed for every possible living being signs of goodness helpfulness pity are taken anxiously from malice the prelude to a terrible outcome bewilderment and deception in

short for refined evil with such a state of mind in the individual a community can scarcely come about at all or at most in the crudest form so that wherever this concept of good and evil predominates the downfall of individuals their clans and races is near at hand our present morality has grown up on the ground of the rulings classes and clans end quote so this examination as yet it does not contain some of the classic attributes of you know slave morality that you may be aware of if you studied nietzsche but this is a

provisional sketch of certain aspects of lower class morality which even though nietzsche doesn't directly call either of these masters slave morality the associate dissociation here is clear because he says there's a double prehistory of good and evil one coming from the nobles and one from the oppressed and that one name one could use as master and slave and so the aspect he shines a light on here is that the lower morality is based on fear power is the measure of the noble morality's value someone is good according to the level of power for requital that

they possess but in the ca in the cast or sorry um you know in the morality of the oppressed i almost called them a cast even though nietzsche says they're they're not even really a cast but in the morality of the oppressed the dominating feeling the dominating emotion is fear and so nietzsche doesn't draw at this point great deal in the passage but it is there the lower class begins from the position of the external notice how he he plots out the different histories in the noble case the individual begins from their own self-evaluation i'm

good because i'm powerful we're good because we're powerful those people over there are bad but only as a sort of afterthought that what the bad is is a secondary consideration um and furthermore the noble morality comes first historically in his view he says all of our other moralities have grown up on the ground of this first noble morality and thus the original morality is one self-conception of one's own good or one's own value as the defining pole around which you orient the whole system and the oppressed morality evil comes first the lower class begins by

evaluating all the things that can inflict harm and calls that evil and here he doesn't really get into defining what the lower class calls good but as we'll later see in the case of the lower morality good is the afterthought it's the opposite orientation of the noble morality good things or good people to the lower morality that's just the thing or the person that doesn't harm you it's safe things and also interestingly he seems to suggest that like the capacity for seeing oneself as a collective or part of a collective and thus for collective action

for cooperation actually depends on a shared sense of power a shared sense of destiny shared sense of identity and thus he sources this human quality for cooperation originally to the nobility and says that essentially a society based purely on the lower class morality could it best be a crude small-scale society because it would be rife with paranoia and enmity among neighbors and so on and so notice one of the subversions nietzsche is doing here most of us in modern times would find it distasteful to associate ourselves with the the oppressive master we tend to have

more sympathy for the person who is oppressed uh and that moral value that comes from christianity blessed you know blessed are the you know the meek shall inherit the earth and so on blessed are the poor in spirit what nietzsche is doing is associating some of the traits we might have a positive association with such as you know the ability to follow through on your word to keep your promises to uphold justice or the ability to be merciful or form successful communities he's saying all that derives from the masters and he's associating traits that are

not laudable like distrust paranoia moral panic being judgmental and so on with the oppressed he's not doing this because these conventionally good or conventionally bad traits are an argument for the master morality or an argument against the slave morality it's another way of demonstrating to us that many of the things we call good today emerge from origins that we would now call evil that these simple essentialist moral categories are not a useful way of looking at the world and more importantly he's not arbitrarily saying this um he's not just claiming it as kaufman says in

a footnote to be on good and evil you can see the master morality as nietzsche describes it in the iliad and you can see the slave morality in the new testament and so these are the two idols that nietzsche is chiming his hammer against here just to give you a little key to understanding what master and slave represents in terms of the origin of morality you have the ancient greek idol standing for the nobility and then the christian idol standing for the oppressed he's arguing that the morality typical of ancient greece dominated in man's pre-history

it was a radical shift that occurred in man's moral thinking when christianity began to take hold within the roman empire during the first few centuries of a.d so before this nietzsche would argue and you know there are all sorts of variations in what different people's valued and the details of their morality and there are passages where he talks about that you know he argues in beyond good and evil that this was affected by things like climate diet lifestyle geography conflicts with other human groups and so on but nevertheless he thinks in spite of all those

differences power-based morality of good versus bad as the central orientation was the common shape of moral thinking not just in greece but in general good as the primary orientation bad as an afterthought and so nietzsche would argue this would be just as true with the egyptians as with the persians as with the indians as with the chinese in ancient times then with christianity in the west and to some extent with buddhism in the east you have this pity-based revolution this morality as nietzsche says did not it was not new or completely new innovation of these

religions because it's born on this lower class morality this which is fear-based and externally oriented that already existed these religions uh took things to a new level as we'll see the the individual and the good again is only an afterthought in this and what is primary is the fear of suffering the fear of the other um and so there the religious revolutions and morality that occurred were the apotheosis of that externally directed fear-based um pity-based moral orientation and again it's funny because last episode we looked at two parallel passages one from beyond good and evil

and the other from human all too human and it's gonna happen again here um we're not gonna stay with him for as long but it's interesting there's another passage just like the one we just examined from human ulti human that appears in beyond good and evil where nietzsche developed the idea even further in some ways beyond good and evil is like nietzsche coming back to do a later refinement of human all to human which when human ulti human came out that was supposed to be a presentation of his whole philosophy covering all the major topics

that he's are of concern to him and so he does mostly the same thing and beyond good and evil and so a lot of those ideas that rattled around in his head for eight years end up re-expressed and beyond good and evil in a more developed form and so we see the master and slave morality appear again and aphorism 260 in that book and here this is where they finally get their explicit definition or their label quote there are master morality and slave morality i add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures

there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both and at times they occur directly alongside each other even in the same human being within a single soul end quote so i want to stop there because people usually just breeze past this part but nietzsche as he says he brings this up immediately because it's essential to understanding what exactly it is that nietzsche is talking about here this is a dual origin of morality what does that mean it means two origins not two moralities that

persist to this day but two origins that weave together as it were to form our modern morality of today and so our present morality is a mix and a synthesis in some sense of both types of morality although it's not a very good one because as he says there's a lot of mutual misunderstanding still in spite of all of the intertwining where we don't really have any sort of awareness or self-reflection on on the actual the the irreconcilable differences in the origin of moral ideas that we hold um and so if you're concerned at this

point with refining the scope of what we're talking about in this inquiry even though we could apply a lot of these principles to cultures all around the world we should note nietzsche really is specifically talking about western civilization what we would broadly call western civilization european societies that were in culturally influenced by the greek and latin canon and then dominated by christianity as the main religious ideology and so that would include america and the british commonwealth even though those are not countries in europe that would include countries that were colonized by europeans and that are

still practicing european culture at least to some extent they have all inherited the modern morality that has its double prehistory and the master in slave morality that's what nietzsche is talking about so we could talk i i'm just sort of bringing this up to say i could imagine somebody objecting well that's not exactly true you know in china or in japan or in india maybe so that's not but nietzsche he's eurocentrist i mean that's the time he wrote in the milieu he wrote in that's what he's concerned with and so the european morality comes out

of that union between the greek power-based self-based morality and the christian fear-based other-based morality so he goes on in this passage and beyond good and evil to give his updated description of these two moral perspectives and so he writes speaking here of the master morality quote in this first type of morality the opposition of good and bad means approximately the same as noble and contemptible the opposition of good and evil has a different origin one feels contempt for the cowardly the anxious the petty those intent on narrow utility also for the suspicious with their unfree

glances those who humble themselves the dog-like people who allow themselves to be maltreated the begging flatterers above all the liars it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie we truthful ones thus the nobility of ancient greece referred to itself end quote and so the moral axis here we may notice is just slightly different um nietzsche chooses here to emphasize rather than the element of simply the master morality you know being oriented around being powerful or you know able to requite as he puts it in human all to human

here he emphasizes uh the moral aspect of the nobility that flows forth from the fact that they are powerful and the main axis here is honesty rather than power as such and so we might say that honesty is a form of power it one conceals or dissembles when their strength is not enough to say what they want to honestly say or if like saying the honest truth would be dangerous or disadvantaged disadvantageous for them and so nietzsche brings up again the suspicion of the masses their inability to believe anyone because they themselves are dishonest and

therefore distrustful so the ancient conception of power indeed you know it often is correlated with the precept that one's actions should follow after one's words when someone says this is what i shall do and then does it in many ancient cultures that is what power really means that's a demonstration of power and that's a demonstration of goodness of on an honest description of what your you know your words matching your deeds um and so we can see the sense in this i think most people can but again we must remember it's not as simple as

nietzsche advocating for this morality or not advocating for it on the one hand anyone who tells you that nietzsche doesn't have a fond view of the nobility is not being completely honest nietzsche clearly praises the aristocracy particularly of ancient greece but again he's laying out this is one of the sources where we derive our current morality um and our morality to this the very day has an aspect of this greek outlook and so he's again i'm just trying to point out how he's he's hinting you admire this morality to some extent too but in all

likelihood you don't appreciate that this you know noble view this oppressive master view is where some of your moral sentiments come from and to complicate matters that's intertwined with this other christian morality it's mixed up together with it within your own heart and the contradictions that this causes within the individual and within society are now ours to bear so it's not as simple as saying master morality good slave morality bad as the ancient greeks did because they we are not the ancient greeks we have to live with both living within us and it wouldn't represent

an acceptance of ourselves a love of ourselves that's demanded by the idea of am or fatih to try and excise part of our own heart have to confront the contradictions that as children of western civilization we all have to inherit nietzsche then goes on to describe something which we examined in great detail in the last episode which is the development of man's moral outlook and how our perspectives changed he writes quote it is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later derivatively to actions therefore it is a gross mistake

when historians of morality start from question such questions as why was the compassionate act praised the noble type of man experiences itself as determining values it does not need approval it judges what is harmful to me is harmful in in and of itself it knows itself to be that which first accords honor to things it is value-creating everything it knows as part of itself it honors such a morality is self-glorification end quote so and in addition to giving us more information about the master morality nietzsche is talking about how the current evaluations of the history

of morality are too wrapped up in their own perspectives about morality given to them by their society and culture so for example if you have a utilitarian perspective where you judge actions as good or evil according to how much suffering is caused or pleasure increased or suffering prevented or what have you this is completely alien from the perspective of noble people past ages who would never have thought to even consider the moral consequences of their actions in this way they had a completely different means of determining what was good and bad based on themselves and

based on their own iron faith and their own significance and so whatever you think of the utilitarian perspective whether it's wrong or right from the standpoint of logic or whatever nietzsche's saying from a psychological perspective you cannot let those presuppositions of your current morality inform you in your study of the history of morality because it will lead you to misunderstand the way people who don't share those presuppositions actually think so don't give in to the congenital defect of all philosophers and draw conclusions on a grand universal scale about all mankind based on the thoughts and

feelings and beliefs and and sentiments of the people in the culture of your own time key to understanding the master morality i think is the absence of moral duties this puts the aristocratic morality at odds with virtually every moral school of thought today um except for the you know school of thought of virtue ethics which is derived from the greeks so big surprise there but this is best elucidated not in some portrayal of the nobility as like beyond good and evil in the sense of being brutal psychopaths who answer to no one that's sometimes you

know how people portray nietzsche's ideas rather when nietzsche talks about it himself it's quite the opposite he says of the ruling morality quote against beings of a lower rank against everything alien one may behave as one pleases or as the heart desires and in any case beyond good and evil here pity and like feelings may find their place end quote so you know and he he says earlier in the passage as well that the noble soul may well help people of a lesser rank but they don't do this out of a sense of moral obligation

such a person does not feel obligated to anyone which is what makes it all the more impressive when they do behave with pity and gratitude you know they're not being compelled by some divine story of how they have to behave or else um it's the mark of a noble soul that they just sort of they just overflow with generosity um because that's a that's a way of feeling your own power right the more you can give and give freely asking for nothing for yourself the more powerful you are the more powerful you feel and so

um now that we've outlined the master morality quite thoroughly um we're still in the same passage and beyond good and evil 260 but we're going to move on now to his more full description of the slave morality quote it is different with the second type of morality slave morality suppose the violated oppressed suffering unfree who are uncertain of themselves and weary moralize what will their moral valuations have in common probably a pessimistic suspicion about the whole condition of man will find expression perhaps a condemnation of man along with his condition the slave's eye is not

favorable to the virtues of the powerful he is skeptical and suspicious subtly suspicious of all the good that is honored there he would like to persuade himself that even their happiness is not genuine conversely those qualities are brought and flooded with light which serve to ease existence for those who suffer here pity the complacent and obliging hand the warm heart patience industry humility and friendliness are honored for here these are the most useful qualities and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence slave morality is essentially a morality of utility end quote so

more shots fired we uh can obviously see where he's going at the end of that passage and who he's talking about there he's g nietzsche was generally just dismissive of utilitarianism he sees in it just as he sees in deontological ethics and continuism and aspect of christianity which is to say the slave morality see utilitarianism shares the pity of christianity and sees the relief of suffering as the highest good you know the greatest good for the greatest many based on reducing pain and increasing happiness or pleasure the aspect that kantian style ethics shares with christianity

on the other hand is that it is duty-based one is obligated to behave in a certain way and furthermore such obligations or moral laws are of course universal and one is compelled to think and act in a way that universalizes their way of living and their actions and the consequences thereof they're compelled to consider these moral issues always from that universal perspective and so we can see how all of these aspects here described of the good of the slave morality find their way into these philosophical schools of thought as as regards morality you know you

can't you can't have a morality that is just for one oneself and say this is harmful to me therefore it's harmful in and of itself as the master morality says in kantianism that is not permitted must be universalized nietzsche doesn't think you can universalize morality um and so moving on uh some other elements he discusses towards the end of the passage i'm not going to read it but i'll just briefly describe the nobles do not have a longing for freedom because they have an innate sense of freedom in fact that the nobility have what he

calls an enthusiastic reverence and a sense of devotion they're always looking for difficult things to overcome uh ways to stand out ways to express their passion seeking for hard-won honors and so on so self-imposed duties rather than universal moral duties um and so on the other hand it's the slave morality that that breeds this yearning for freedom as this abstract moral good because of the very reality that they do not feel an innate sense of being free they feel pressured coerced and pushed and finally he says that the slave morality ultimately becomes suspicious even of

good men speaking here of good men as defined by the slave morality itself its own sense of the good the truly good person to the slave has to be completely undangerous and so nietzsche says therefore the the portrait of a good man sometimes becomes someone who is simple good-natured perhaps even easy to deceive perhaps even a little stupid and so he writes a quote wherever slave morality becomes preponderant language tends to bring the words good and stupid closer together let's see here so now we've gone over two of the major passages that outline nietzsche's thinking

on the double history of morality but as you may know a year after he wrote beyond good and evil he comes out with another book called on the genealogy of morality or on the genealogy of morals this book he said was a sort of companion text to be on good and evil which is something that's often ignored and today we're going to look into quite a few passages from the first essay of that book and some of the some of the uh sources that nietzsche cites among his own work in the preface to genealogy and

morality so the first essay of the book covers this double prehistory of morality and as you can guess from the title nietzsche is literally doing a moral genealogy and i want to clarify the significance of the term genealogy here um drawing on some of the past ideas of nietzsche's books the that came before this one um i've already kind of hinted at this already but i want to make it very clear so in the very first book of nietzsche's the birth of tragedy he uses a phrase in reference to two different myths he's talking about

the prometheus story from greek mythology and the adam and eve story from the bible and he calls them a brother sister pair so this is common with nietzsche to regard some ideas or some cultures or some nations or peoples even as being masculine or feminine in character in a sort of like symbolic abstract sense and this might be you know an influence of the german language nietzsche himself wrote in his essay uh on truth and lies in the non-moral sense that the german language is absurdly gendered and so even though nietzsche was a polyglot perhaps

he internalized this practice of separating all things into categories of masculine and feminine but it provides him with an excellent metaphor in doing so because we can use this framework to understand what he's doing when he sets out to do a genealogy of morality and i think it's somewhat literal in the crude sense we have our maternal line which is christianity and then we have our paternal line which is the greek morality these two moralities are not they're not monolithic entities these are whole genealogical lines of descendants spanning centuries and millennia their families of moral

thought which share the same characteristics and they exist in the minds of men and thus they produce offspring through men across the generations of humankind um the product is the current european morality of today as we've said but it comes from this interaction this intercourse i mean that in that that sense that you're the double entendre between these two distinct types of morality that we've described and so i'm taking pain to lay this out because i feel that the interpretation of deluse for example which i will not go into here even though it may be

very interesting i think misses the mark a little bit because he insists that the significance of the term genealogy is to emphasize difference total separateness and that this is a rebuke to like hegelian dialectical thought and i think de luz is totally correct and very insightful to point out that nietzsche did reject the dialectic and that hegel was sort of this um figure that he was largely silently hostile towards um but when we speak genetically when we speak genealogically that is not a model or a metaphor that stresses incompatible differences rather the intermingling of genes

from a maternal and a paternal parent who themselves have intermingled genes from their maternal and paternal lines i think that is more what nietzsche is getting at here which i only say because he points out repeatedly how our modern morality is descended from both so he's he's doing the genealogy of our morality through our male and female parent so to speak um to to put it broadly the greek and the christian and so the reason why genealogy of morality is so celebrated and it gets a lot more attention today in academia than maybe a lot

of nietzsche's other work receives is because it's informed by his philological background philology was a branch of scholarship dealing with the classics the study of language and culture through the greek and latin classics today it's understood a bit more broadly but during nietzsche's time this is how they did it and so it's the study of how the structure of languages informs and shapes culture and vice versa so nietzsche asks in genealogy uh one aphorism four quote what was the real etymological significance of the designations for good coined in the various languages i found they all

led back to the same conceptual transformation that everywhere noble aristocratic in the social sense is the basic concept from which good in the sense of with aristocratic soul noble with the soul of high order with the privileged soul necessarily developed a development which always runs parallel with that other in which common plebeian low are finally transformed into the concept bad the most convincing example of the latter is the german word schlecked or bad in english the word select itself which is identical with schlicht which means plain simple can play compare with schleck veg which means

plainly and schlechter dings which means simply and originally designated the plane the common man as yet with no inculpatory implication and simply in contra distinction to the nobility about the time of the thirty years war late enough therefore this meaning changed into the one now customary end quote um and before moving on uh i'm not aware that anyone has ever disproven nietzsche's linguistic scholarship in this front people obviously differ with his conclusions but his observations about languages and how their words which is to say how their concepts for what constitutes good and what constitutes bad

derive from these etymological organ or origins um that he posits no one really disagrees with that i don't think so all the stuff we've been reading up to this point from his previous works this is not just bluster there is evidence that this is actually how the concepts evolved in human history consider in contrast uh you know to the german example he gives the word for plain and simple becoming the word for bad um we have an example of the opposite case of the etymology of words and concepts having to do with the master morality

and so in genealogy 1-5 he says of the noblemen quote they designate themselves simply by their superiority in power as the powerful the masters the commanders or by the most clearly visible signs of the superiority for example as the rich the possessors this is the meaning of arya and of the corresponding words in iranian and slavic but they do it by a typical character trait also they call themselves for instance the truthful end quote so the word arya is greek for good or brave nietzsche again he points out originally this term derived from the meaning

of being a possessor of being rich being wealthy another example he uses for the master morality is the latin word bonus this word simply means good in latin but here nietzsche says quote i believe i may venture to interpret the latin bonus as the warrior provided i am right in tracing bonus to an earlier word dwonas compare bellum to dwellum to dwindlin which seems to me to contain dwellness therefore bonus as the man of strife of dissension which is the word duo in latin as the man of war one sees what constituted the goodness of

man in ancient rome our german goot even does it not signify the godlike the man of the godlike race and is it not identical with the popular originally noble name of the goths end quote and so to explain the last passage gut means good in german got means god and anyone can see the genealogical resemblance there kaufman raises the issue in the footnotes of his translation that may be going through some of my listeners minds at the moment he writes readers who are not classical philologists may wonder as they read this section how well taken

nietzsche's points about the greeks are uh he then goes on to quote at length from professor jared f elsa's study uh aristotle's poetic the argument i'm going to quote from professor else here in an abridged form because i think it backs up the point rather well quote the dichotomy is mostly taken for granted in homer there are not many occasions when the heaven wide gulf between heroes and commoners even has to be mentioned in the 7th and 6th centuries on the other hand the antithesis grows common in theogenous it amounts to an obsession 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 the dichotomy is absolute and exclusive for a simple reason it began as the aristocrats view of society and reflects their idea of the gulf between themselves and others end quote and so else goes on to say that for the aristocrats we are the good people the beautiful the happy the right thinking and so on and they are the liars they're the cowards they're

the good for nothings and so on and so that's at least one other scholar who is in lockstep with nietzsche on his analysis of the etymology of the greek language and i think this fleshes out more or less what these two moralities consist of and how they differ in their approach we can see some of ourselves in each of the two once again and the supporting evidence for this video is found in language and how the greeks has an exemplary people in the sense of representing master morality came to define good and bad versus how

the christians defined it and so now in genealogy immorality essay 1 part 6 nietzsche talks about how this reversal under christianity came to pass he says that one of the key elements in this what he calls the slave revolt in morality is the priestly cast every society has had a priestly cast the cast of people charged with defining the spirituality of the people defining their religious laws interpreting their religious scriptures and so on and as for the function of all of these activities it is essentially the charge of managing the collective psyche of the community

the priests told people how to feel about themselves about their actions about others the religion sets the deepest values of the society it rather it transmutes them into something sacred and so it orients the society and therefore it makes moral judgments in the same way that the independent creative nobility also makes moral judgments the priests do not do this from a position of power though of physical strength or high status within society as the nobility do the priests do this this mor this legislation of morality from a position of purity or holiness and so throughout

this document nietzsche discusses how the ascetic value system of the priestly caste which means the value system of abstaining from vices of not being entangled in familial or romantic relationships of not handling money not living by a trade these ascetic values demonstrated a sort of moral strength or fortitude of the priestly caste and this over odd even the nobility in their presence and so nietzsche says that originally to talk about you know the the very beginnings of this this awe that we felt for the priests the pure man was a very literal designation and so

once again here he's doing etymology and so he writes in 1 6 quote one should be warned against taking these concepts pure and impure too ponderously or broadly not to say symbolically all the concepts of ancient man were rather at first incredibly uncouth coarse external narrow straightforward and altogether unsymbolical in meaning to a degree that we can scarcely conceive the pure one is from the beginning merely a man 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 hardly more end quote so nietzsche in addition to providing a valuable philological insight here also he's pointing to something very important which is how the priestly caste gained their moral power that this power over the hearts of the collective which was parallel to the power of the noble classes the power of the nobility was obviously supported by physical force you know by bloodlines by strength of command the loyalty they inspired um and so on the priest gains authority among the populists by a different means however and those means are by becoming

something mysterious and terrifying in the consciousness of the people even in the consciousness of the nobility and so um he writes about this in human ultihuman 143. um hopefully so in the preface to genealogy of morality nietzsche provides for us a series of references to aphorisms in his previous works that touched on the issues he finally brought together in genealogy and kaufman actually then includes these passages and then some and an appendix to his translation um 75 aphorisms from five volumes so when i was like starting to do research for the episode you know i

was about to start looking up all these aphorisms that nisha mentions and then i remember oh wait kaufman already compiled all this for me so the research for this episode was a little bit easier and so that's where i found this passage that explains this aspect of the priestly class quote not what the holy man is but what he signifies in the eyes of those who are not holy gives him this world historical value it was because one was wrong about him because one misinterpreted the states of his soul and drew as sharp a line

as possible between oneself and him as if he were something utterly incomparable and strangely superhuman that he gained the extraordinary power with which he could dominate the imagination of whole people peoples and ages end quote and so nietzsche goes on to say that in actuality the priests were very unhealthy people in his view he attributes this to bad diet over excited nerves um what he means by overexcited nerves is you know these people are withholding um all of these natural like human desires from themselves which puts them in a constant state of craving and they're

spending all day long doing contemplative or meditative exercises which can bring on exciting mental states or perhaps they're fasting or self-flagellating which can also bring on like a sensory overload and so beneath the surface nietzsche does not think the holy man was ever really a good person or a wise person but he gains his image by showing this moral power the power to abstain the power to live without the things that the ordinary person thinks he must live with and thus the ability to stand in moral judgment of others and draw a dividing line between

oneself and their moral purity you know which is to say the literal hygienic practices that separate you from the masses to draw this line based on that and say i'm pure you're not and we remember we might remember this is exactly the thing that gives the aristocracy its power the ability to be separate or what gives the aristocracy its power to legislate morality right what nietzsche calls the pathos of distance and so in genealogy 1-7 he points out the competition between the priestly class and the aristocratic class which was a recurring fact of history he

writes quote one will have divined already how easily the priestly mode evaluation can branch off from the nightly aristocratic and then develop into its opposite this is particularly likely when the priestly caste and the warrior cast are in jealous opposition to one another and are unwilling to come to terms the nightly aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality a flourishing abundant even overflowing health together with that which serves to preserve it war adventure hunting dancing war games and in general all that involves vigorous free joyful activity the priestly noble mode evaluation presupposes as we have

seen other things it is disadvantageous when it comes to war as is well known priests are the most evil enemies but why because they are the most impotent it is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred the truly great haters in the world have always been priests likewise the most ingenious haters other kinds of spirit of other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness end quote and so again there is support for

this idea nietzsche goes on to talk about tertullian and thomas aquinas people who were influential in the formation of christian thought and who celebrated the idea of hell and so aquinas writes quote the blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them end quote and so that's just one example albeit a very strong example of the inventiveness of the priestly class's hatred they invented hell and so indeed if you've been following along you'll recognize immediately here hatred is always an aspect of

the slave morality the aristocracy doesn't hate at least in nietzsche's view not in the way that the common person hates because truly malicious feelings like a feeling of true hatred part and parcel with a desire to see someone else suffer this is an externally directed feeling so remember in the old evaluation of good and bad the master morality one's enemy is not bad or evil one who inflicts harm is not bad or evil the good person can be recognized because they are you know perhaps they're merciful and generous not because they're merciful and generous you

know as good because those are good qualities in and of themselves but because of the inner directed nature of master morality this self-centered type of morality does not allow for the possibility of hatred vindictiveness and so on they may requite harm with harm but um you know or you might have rivalries or someone you see as a worthy adversary um and then you might make moral judgments you might regard someone weak as contemptible or someone dishonest as contemptible but none of this is hatred the the type of hatred that he's describing uh the type of

hatred that was given that's fullest most powerful and most clever voice is the hatred of the priests and so there's these this association of the priests with the slave morality as a competing center of moral authority in society a competing nobility based on purity and and the terrifying but false image that they project rather than based on power and therefore on honesty and so the priest by representing the slave morality comes to be the moral voice of the collective of the masses because he's a um he's an externally directed soul the means of understanding um

i i guess are of like fully fleshing out what happened then with christian morality is in the description given in the antichrist of the psychology of jesus in which nietzsche says that jesus is the slave morality taken to the extreme and and the result is that you get an instinctual hatred of reality and that's how he describes jesus he says this is caused by a soul who's so sensitive that it cannot bear to be touched by anything and is especially sensitive to suffering and that the message of jesus is the most extreme example of a

revulsion at the suffering of the world and thus it disgusted the whole human condition the whole natural condition of man and thus discussed at the whole natural world itself it's the promise of the kingdom of heaven which is a redemption from this world of suffering and thus the christian can reject reality itself um and so the out of the morality of the masses comes the figure of the priest he takes it to to an extreme that the priest becomes this purveyor of world denial as well they thus they deny themselves the worldly pleasures right and

because they deny themselves these worldly pleasures such as intoxicants marriage sex and pure foods what have you they appear to have the power that other men don't and then they were imagined to be superhuman and nietzsche writes that the people who perfected the idea of the priestly caste and perfected the art of being priestly were the jews and jesus the king of the jews as their messiah is the supreme type among the most priestly of priestly people peoples and so this may you know seem like nietzsche's about to speak negatively about the jews but he

he references one of his own aphorisms um so while he's writing in genealogy of moral morality he says he cites beyond good and evil 195 when he starts to talk about the jews and he says you should look at this earlier afros on my road just to be clear because remember genealogy of morality is a sort of addendum to beyond good and evil and so one of the things in that passage that he writes and beyond good and evil 195 is that quote the jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations by means of

which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums their prophets fused in into one the expressions rich godless wicked violent sensual and for the first time coined the word world as a term of reproach end quote so that should all be fairly clear from what we've been talking about but um it isn't clear that nietzsche is judging the jews in a prescriptive sense to me at least if anything he is ambivalent because he says life obtained a new and dangerous charm so it's not exactly praise but it doesn't read

like a harsh nietzschean style criticism um which is why in uh he says in another passage and beyond good and evil 250 that europe owes many things both good and bad to the jews and that is a free spirit he regards them with gratitude um and just as a quick aside nietzsche despised anti-semites that's not what he he's driving at here actually in fact this is probably an important point so by so heavily associating jesus with the jewish people nietzsche is actually being a bit subversive towards the typical german anti-semitic point of view of his

time so his sister's husband um i forget his first name i think bernard fuster yeah so he was an anti-semite and he was writing about christianity and he he i think he wrote a book or an essay where he referred to jesus as an aryan or he he he puts forward the theory that he was an aryan if i recall correctly it was bernard foster but there was this odd tension therefore in german christianity particularly among the lutheran nationalist anti-semitic style of thinking where they heavily identified with christianity themselves and thus with jesus but they're

like unable to acknowledge his jewish origins and so many of the anti-semites over the years and a lot of the wagnerians and other such people during nietzsche's time really wanted to rewrite the stories so that jesus was not a jew but an aryan who was murdered by the jews and so nietzsche gives them he gives a completely the opposite picture jesus is not only jewish he's the epitome of judaism and the jewish culture and so his understanding of who jesus is upon which the whole argument hinges nietzsche's understanding goes against the popular anti-semitic views of

his time by saying you know your entire religious identity is descended from jewish culture this is your moral and religious genealogy so it's nonsensical for you to hate the jews because they gave you the religion that you now identify with and the religion that's part of you and the way you think and so um we now get to one of the most famous ideas in the work of nietzsche which is a second order effect of this whole master and slave morality relationship and that is the feeling of resentment nietzsche uses the term resentment in french

the meaning is the same as the term resentment in english this is the feeling that we mentioned that one experiences when one is powerless to stop harm from being inflicted upon oneself by others the desire for revenge is nurtured by this feeling because there's this lingering gnawing sense that one wishes to requite harm with harm that remains long after one has experienced you know having harm done to them and so when people are are stopped from pursuing power when they don't possess the power to overcome the obstacles they face they become resentful and this is

an externally directed feeling it's produced by this lingering need to inflict harm so that one can experience power and as it goes unfulfilled it poisons the soul to speak metaphorically it's a spiraling negative state of mind so i'm going to read a paragraph that i already read in the episode uh weakness corrupts but as i looked over the passage that introduces resentment i don't think i could find a better uh chunk to quote from than this one that i already quoted from but um you know so if you if you already heard that episode you'll

hear this passage again but it's important to laying out everything about master and slave morality quote the beginning of the slaves revolt and morality occurs when resentment itself turns creative and gives birth to values the resentment of those beings who denied the proper response of action compensate for it only with imaginary revenge whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying yes to itself slave morality says no on principle to everything that is outside other non-self and this no is its creative deed this reversal of the evaluating glance this essential orientation to the outside

instead of back onto itself is a feature of risotto in order to come about slave morality first has to have an opposing external world it needs physiologically speaking external stimuli in order to act at all its action is basically a reaction end quote so the genealogy of morality the blending of these two competing sources for moral valuations this this interpenetration starts to happen when the creative power of the master morality the power to create values out of a sense of self-certainty willingness to be a judge this becomes joined with the outward facing aspect of slave

morality and so the slave morality then begins to create values and what what this means is the spiritualization of revenge making revenge holy and so this is the beginning of justice and the way that most people conceive of the word justice today and through religion making you know divine justice woven into the fabric of the universe so this is this is divine judgment on all mankind according to the standard set by the anti-worldly priestly cast this is the priestly morality's creative act to remake the world into this moral battleground in which the world is an

evil place and redemption from the suffering of the world is the ultimate good and the revenge element you know that's seen plainly in the christian doctrine of hell as we described earlier or in the book of revelation you know the the good news is eventually jesus is going to come and melt the faces off all the unbelievers um it's the revenge fantasy so in genealogy 113 nietzsche returns to emphasize that this inquiry of his is itself non-moral in nature that he's not passing judgment on these moralities in the sense that a moral realist would he

does have his preferences which are stated rather clearly at the end which we'll get to by the end of the episode but um he's not moralizing himself because he sees the nature of both these moralities as necessary and therefore natural and therefore morally neutral phenomena and so he compares these two moralities to the moral perspectives we might expect from a predator and a prey animal if if such animals were to to have a morality so uh this is 113 quote that lamb's dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange only it gives no ground

for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs and if the lambs say among themselves these birds of prey are evil and whoever is least like a bird of prey but rather its opposite a lamb would he not be good there's no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say we don't dislike them at all these good little lambs we even love them nothing is more tasty than a little lamb end quote so there's a little nietzschean

humor for you um [Music] um so again i i want to stress we're not saying the nobles and commoners are literally like different species what the what they are is they they have a completely different view of life that sets them at odds with one another different conditions give advantage to the different groups and so they develop these moral and religious ideas as a rationalization that what gives them advantage is good um and so the the way the the analogy he uses is what the predator what the predator's good would be versus the prey animal's

good you know when we watch a nature show and we watch the lion chase the gazelles and of course they always go for the weakest and the littlest ones which are the ones that we think should be protected the most you know protect the most adorable and the weakest things that's part of our modern morality and some people find themselves a lot of the time rooting for the gazelles but the lioness you know she's usually trying to feed herself and her cubs she's got her own cute little weak helpless cubs that'll starve if she doesn't

feed them so it's easy sometimes to forget that but in any case the gazelle has its good and the lion has its good and the good of the lion is incompatible with the good of the gazelle that doesn't mean one of them is right and the other is wrong so we have this prejudice that if there are conflicting values there can always be some mediated response or some judgment made to determine how to end the conflict but in the case of the lion and the gazelle this would be absurd nietzsche is willing to accept that

in many cases two groups can have valuations that are not able to be reconciled the only deciding factor is conflict it's not a moral judgment that convinces the bad side to behave themselves it's not a rational compromise between two extremes in the case of the good of the lion and the good of the gazelle or for that matter the good of the prey and the good of the little lamb those possibilities are not open to you um and so there's a great part in um in the same passage a little further down where nietzsche explains

why his view which is a more naturalistic view a morally neutral view avoids the mistakes of other philosophers and proto-psychologists who have attempted to provide their own origins for morality he says in so many words it's because they essentialize the subject um they they essentialize the person as the moral agent as the doer of the deed so it's a it's a linguistic prejudice is what he says this very construction and language separates the doer from the deed sinicia would argue this is a trick language in its grammatical structure shapes our thinking and so by habit

we separate conceptually the doer from the deed the quote unquote thing from the effect of the thing but for nietzsche the deed is merely an expression of the nature of the doer one's action is an outflow of one's character of one's nature and so nietzsche thinks separating them is a mistake um you know to go into the reason why it's because of the aspects of the human self that we've gone into great detail in the past two episodes or so that the self is not this um single unitary entity but a multiplicity the self is

a body and um throughout the body are drives all these impulses and instincts and desires and so on that pull the consciousness in one direction or another and then the consciousness comes up for you know comes up with reasons for why it's going in one direction or another direction fulfilling this drive or that there's no stable consistent thing called the self which has an essence in the past we used to locate the self in the ego consciousness but since nietzsche denies the supremacy of the ego and says the real self is in the body and

it strives he denies that type of essentialism as well and so this ties into both the reframing of human beings as natural beings not morally different from the animals um because we again we don't imagine that when a tiger gobbles you up that it did so out of free will or a rational consideration or out of malice but rather that the tiger was simply being driven by instinct um this is also why so he he he calls genealogy of morality a polemic and and it should be clear by now it's polemical because he's attacking all

of these simplistic explanations for morality that others have put forward and they're all based on this old essentializing view and so in 113 he writes quote to demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength that it should not be a desire to overcome a desire to throw down a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength a quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive will effect more it is nothing other than precisely this very driving

willing affecting and only owing to the seduction of language and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects by a subject that it can appear otherwise for just as the popular mind separates lightning from its flash and takes the ladder for an action for the operation of a subject called lightning so popular morality separates strength from the expressions of strength as if it were a neutral substratum behind the strong man which was free to express strength or not to do

so but there is no being behind doing affecting becoming the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed the deed is everything end quote and then i'll skip further down where he says quote no wonder the submerged darkly glowing emotions of vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief for their own ends and in fact 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 end quote so again in this passage we're this is why i've chosen to cover the material in the order we have because nietzsche is here reminding us why the will is not free and furthermore that subtle the subtle psychological relationship between freedom of the will and moral responsibility and here he's demonstrating how absurd it is to blame people or birds of prey for that matter for their own nature and that this is of course something that will be exploited by vengeful hateful souls which is the provenance of slave morality and this returns us

to the passage we quoted from zarathustra last time that nietzsche's bridge to his highest hope the rainbow after long storms is the dream that mankind may one day be liberated from revenge and how revenge is what stands behind the word justice what quote-unquote justice is really about is blaming people for being who they are and the basis of blaming them is the the claim that there's this neutral substratum between the doer and the deed this invisible governing force within the individual between themselves and their actions and that we might think of this as synonymous with

the idea of a of a free will and so i must again emphasize we're not here to blame the aristocrats nor the oppressed for their natures their natures were shaped by conditions natural geographical cultural and so on and these psychological transmutations took place and were prompted by these conditions but at the end of the day it's the same morally as if we were to examine the predation of one species and another species and so to return to another quote i've already brought up truth is cersei error has made animals into men might truth be capable

of making men into animals again these moral prejudices color our interpretation of the history of morality we can't study morality from inside these prejudicial views that's not a real study that's not an attempt at understanding the history of moral feelings that's just a more sophisticated type of moralism to really study and thus to really understand the history of morality we have to regard it like any other natural phenomenon and not include these prejudices even the ones that might be invisible to us like the prejudice that there is a doer that is accountable for doing the

deed that in nietzsche's view is it's not simply a common sense intuition that's a moral prejudice that we have baked into our language and now it directs the shape of our thought and it prevents us from seriously grappling with these ideas so we're coming to the conclusion here uh as i said we're not going to go through all of genealogy and morality um there's two more essays in the book there's one on guilt and the next is on the meaning of aesthetic values but we're just going to cover through to the end of the first

essay um because it's sort of it's really nietzsche's final thoughts on this double prehistory of morality and so nietzsche concludes this essay by discussing how in 116 these two opposing value structures one based on the values good and bad and the other based on the values good and evil can be represented in the idea of rome versus judea and he says that definitively the value structure of judea triumphed over rome the religion of resentment par excellence eventually converted the entirety of the roman empire and out of this out of the corpse of rome the disease

of this vindictive world denying religion spread throughout europe but again there's a complication and it's the same complication that he raised immediately in the passage we brought up in um beyond good and evil and so this is genealogy 1-6 quote 116 quote one might even say that the struggle has risen ever higher and thus become more and more profound and spiritual so that today there is perhaps no decisive mark of a higher nature a more spiritual nature than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposed ideas end quote again

both moralities exist within the same soul and as i hinted at before there's not really a reconciliation between them i i shouldn't even used the word synthesis earlier now that i think about it because it's really not it's it's a what he's saying is our genealogy our moral genealogy has produced an intractable conflict in it in some sense and and and so the highest type of nature today he says the most spiritual type is just such a person with this inner conflict the battleground of opposed ideas and um the reason why nietzsche probably would say

that is because of the value that he sees in conflict and in strife and so there's no easy answers here as to the course forward both in the descriptive and the prescriptive nietzsche has laid out the facts so far as he sees them but he prefers rather than predicting the future um at the end of this essay to ask questions um although he does give us as i mentioned before some of his own preference for the master morality um or if not for the master morality as such a liberation from these essentialist prejudices you know

separating the doer from the deed liberation from outer directed moral orientation or the myth of moral accountability that we get from slave morality all the all these lies which make people morally responsible for their own nature because again nietzsche wishes for man to be delivered from revenge so he obviously is going to tilt towards the master morality and so he wants to he wants to rediscover um a lot of the good of the of the of the master morality once again um you know he he's now using the term morality i think in a slightly

different sense in the in the sense of one's personal judgments and what they find beautiful what they find ugly what they find good and so on we've been talking this whole time about morality on a cultural level on a society-wide level um but what he i talks about at the very end here this is genealogy of morality 117 what he talks about is i don't know a rediscovery of our capacity for self-creativity the creation of our own values this is this can be our morality our personal morality as free spirits right um in spite of

how the world historical genealogy of our morality has been handed down to us and so uh i'm not going to give any more commentary i'll just let nietzsche finish off the episode so we'll conclude with a reading of the last section of genealogy of morality quote was that the end of it had the greatest of all conflicts of ideals been placed ad acta for all time or only adjourned indefinitely adjourned must the ancient fire not someday flare up much more terribly after much longer preparation more must one not desire it with all one's might even

will it even promote it whoever begins at this point like my readers to reflect and pursue his train of thought will not soon come to the end of it reason enough for me to come to an end assuming it has long since been abundantly clear what my aim is what the aim of that dangerous slogan is that is inscribed at the head of my last book beyond good and evil at least this does not mean beyond good and bad so [Music] you