Nietzsche’s Will to Power Explained - The Basis of All Moral Systems

what is morality? the question here is not which morality should man follow but rather what does it mean to follow a morality? what is the moral need in mankind, such that we should have all of these competing ideas about morality in the first place? without conceiving of any particular moral code can we come up with a principle a general principle to explain man's creation of moral codes in and of itself? assuming of course that they are created and not handed down from on high this is a central question in nietzsche's philosophy and it has an

answer to that question that we're going to first seriously examine a very famous idea of nietzsche's which is the will to power um because having dug deeper and deeper in our inquiry into morality eventually you have to hit bedrock right? and for nietzsche the bedrock of reality is will to power and by the end of this episode hopefully i'll have conveyed to you what that statement means we've talked quite a bit about morality leading up to this episode to the point where you might be wondering how it could be that there's more to say about

any of this but to that i would just simply say we will not exhaust the topic even here. but just to briefly recap we've discussed nietzsche's rejection of morality as premised on supernatural premises and how he believed that our modern morality was still based on these supernatural premises. we've considered how nietzsche approached morality from more of a descriptive lens than a prescriptive one at least when it comes to many of his big ideas concerning morality such as the master and slave morality: those two forms of morality um they're classifications of different super types of morality

and so that's a... to call something master slave morality is a descriptive statement. we've also discussed how nietzsche tended to view the human being as primarily driven by instinct and passion um and how our intelligence our restraint our moral codes everything about man which we consider good and noble derives from baser origins in human biology and since reason is not a supernatural force and the ego is not a magical thing such as a soul created by god - we can even identify the voluntarily governing free will as yet another prejudice we've inherited from supernatural origins

so from this viewpoint of a purely descriptive perspective on human beings and human behavior and human actions and their consequences and so on it's from this perspective that nietzsche makes his judgments throughout his work about the moral codes of various societies and about the moral ideas of various uh philosophers and individuals. you may recall the passage i've cited i believe a few times from the gay science aphorism number 354 in which nietzsche says that consciousness developed because of the need for a collective net of communication between human beings and that if we lived as solitary

beasts of prey we would not have needed consciousness and furthermore he says that language determines our conceptual horizons that our thought is bounded within the cultural-linguistic network that we are born into and raised in, and a core set of concepts within that network is morality and this is why nietzsche says that morality is the herd instinct in the individual and um that what most people experience as a moral intuition or as the voice of their conscience is actually enculturated rather than innate and you know nietzsche's evidence for this is that an immoral act in our

culture could have been performed by somebody from another culture with a completely clean conscience: such as the spartans leaving malformed babies to die of exposure what this all points to is morality as a voice of the collective which is to say morality is the power of the collective which takes root in each individual in each of its constituent parts and the form that this power takes is our moral sentiments and so we might remember just another final piece to this the fragment we discussed from nietzsche's notebooks in the 1870s that for the community's morals to

be imposed what's necessary is that a feeling must be suppressed by a thought: that means if we have a feeling a passion a drive of some kind towards something something upon which the community has set its ban then we bring before our mind's eye the consequence of breaking the moral code and we what what might stop us from indulging in that is the that we experience the fear of the power of the community and we can and this is why it's a feeling being suppressed by a thought because we have to be able to conceive

of that later in the passage of time something worse will happen to us we have to be able to delay gratification or delay fulfillment of something or to even cancel out the fulfillment of a desire if it doesn't fit with the community's morality and this is all rather this is very i would say explanatory of many things and yet we haven't quite gotten to the bottom of things right? because when we might understand how each individual comes to possess these moral sentiments for all the means we've just discussed even though they're created as what are

effectively social constructs we still haven't really given an explanation for the activity of moralizing itself what is morality? why is mankind a moral animal? these questions remain unanswered and nietzsche's answer for this is found in zarathustra in the section called the thousand and one goals and i'm gonna read kaufman's translation "zarathustra saw many lands and many peoples thus he discovered the good and evil of many peoples and zarathustra found no greater power on earth than good and evil. no people could live without first esteeming, but if they want to preserve themselves then they must not

esteem as their neighbor esteems much that was good to one people was scorn and infamy to another thus i found it. much i found called evil here and decked with purple honors there. never did one neighbor understand the other, ever was his soul amazed at the neighbor's delusion and wickedness a tablet of the good hangs over every people behold it is the tablet of their overcomings behold it is the voice of their will to power praiseworthy is whatever seems difficult to a people whatever seems indispensable and difficult is called good and whatever liberates even out

of the deepest need the rarest and most difficult that they call holy whatever makes them rule and triumph and shine to the awe and envy of their neighbors that is to them the high the first the measure the meaning of all things verily my brother once you have recognized the need and land and sky and neighbors of a people you may also guess the law of their overcomings and why they climbed to their hope on this ladder" and uh skipping a little further down into the passage zarathustra continues "verily men gave themselves all their good

and evil verily they did not take it they did not find it nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven only man placed values and things to preserve himself he alone created a meaning for things a human meaning therefore he calls himself man which means the esteemer to esteem is to create hear this you creators esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure through esteeming alone is there value and without esteeming the nut of existence would be hollow hear this you creator" so first thing here um when zarathustra says

he finds no power greater on earth than good and evil um i think that's one reason why it's a bit tongue-in-cheek when nietzsche calls himself an immoralist for example because the way that nietzsche is an immoralist is in his willingness to violate his own community's moral assumptions um in the course of his psychological investigations of mankind but those same psychological investigations are sort of attempts on nietzsche's part to get to the heart of understanding morality and and his project ultimately here is not to call morality itself bad or to regret or lament the existence of

this or that cultural morality that has existed or does exist he wants to understand the force that is morality and understand its power because it is the most powerful thing so far created on earth um and what he says the core of morality is um speaking here of morality as such of the human capacity for moralizing um it's self-overcoming that is what is at the heart of every morality that has ever existed each morality is the voice of a culture's self overcoming its um this is nietzsche's attempt to discover a genuine a genuine generic definition

of morality and um as for what that means i'm just gonna i'm gonna go ahead and quote from kaufman here uh in his book "nietzsche philosopher psychologist antichrist" this is it right at the beginning of chapter seven which is page 211 in the edition i have where he talks about the difference between creating a moral code and what nietzsche is doing which is creating a generic definition of what morality itself is and it's essential that we understand the difference in what we're talking about here so here's kaufman "what is at stake is clearly something different

from any attempt to develop a system of ethics even a very brief contrast with kant and mill shows this kant insisted that man is not morally good unless his conduct is marked by the total absence of any psychological inclination and motivated solely by respect for reason and kant opposed all other views of morality as sheer perversions jon stewart mill on the other hand did not similarly repudiate kant's ethics rather he claimed that quote to all those a priori moralists who deem it necessary to argue at all utilitarian arguments are indispensable end quote and deduce kant's

moral philosophy as his prime example to this extent at least mill instead of opposing his own utilitarianism to other conceptions of morality seems to have advanced it as a formulation of the essence of all moral codes end quote and then kaufman then includes a quotation from kant himself quote without any inclination solely from duty only then does it have genuine moral value end quote so just to make clear that kant believed in morality as a sort of purely rational activity of the human being that a moral act had to be strictly motivated by duty and

duty and the kantian ethos is uh something arrived at by reason moral acts cannot be calculated according to the pleasure advantage they give which is the way mill does it so um anyway back to the text kaufman goes on to say quote mill could include kant's ethics within the fold of utilitarianism only on the basis of a crucial misunderstanding of kant for expediency was not a matter of concern for kant as all moral worth was to his mind solely a function of the rationality i.e consistency of the maxim according to which the action was resolved

any inconsistency he thought might be made explicit by universalizing the maxim and determining whether it's universal adoption would give rise to a situation in which the maxim could no longer be applied whether kant's ethics is preferable to mills is not the question here but as a generic definition of morality utilitarianism would fail to include kant's morality nor is kant's the only one the force of his ethics is due in large part to the fact that he crystallized elements that had long been implicitly in the western religious tradition which commanded man to do good because god

willed it regardless of consequences end quote um and so yeah i think that's relatively clear um even you could because i could foresee the objection like oh well every moralist tries to come up with a generic definition of morality right but ultimately um when you look at the moral axioms they're operating from they are mutually exclusive and um that's not really what nietzsche has aimed at what he's looking for actually is an element a key element that exists in both systems the element that leads us to say that what kant was doing was morality and

what mill was doing is morality even in spite of the differences between them right what is it about the activity of moral philosophy that is present in both works now what it kaufman does go to go on to say and his argument is that the key element both systems is a drum roll here self overcoming which is what um the way we've put it before so what do we mean by this what is the commonality between these incompatible moral systems of both kant and mill not to speak of you know christian morals and islamic morals

and buddhist morals and so on what is the thing that they're all doing even as each system which is individually produced can be reasonably said to be in competition in contra distinction to all the others right so that activity and the nietzschean argument is striving to overcome oneself which means to withhold some instincts or drives because remember your instincts and your drives are you they are inherent and inborn in the individual so withhold those from being fulfilled which means emphasizing some drives and diminishing or cancelling others it means setting bans and taboos on certain behaviors

while making others prestigious or praiseworthy this is what we mean when we're talking about self overcoming the individual strives not to preserve him or herself as they are um just as the community that applies the moral code is not striving to preserve itself um exactly in the same form either what morality is aimed at is not self-preservation but self-perfection in nietzsche's view one aims to discard their current imperfect form in favor of something which is more refined stronger healthier and ultimately more powerful and so this is nietzsche's explanation for morality then through things like asceticism

through denying oneself short-term pleasures and blind impulses or through devotion to duty or through cultivating patience through all of these things which are part of the moral activity of society morality has been mankind's attempt to become something greater than it is. it's not, contrary to what many moralists have claimed today, like an outflow of the urge to self-preservation in nietzsche's view it's quite the opposite it's the urge of becoming and the goal of this process of becoming is the expansion of power and i'm going to quote kaufman again page 213 because he puts it so

well quote that kant's ethic as well as say the ten commandments exhibits this character seems clear and the element of self-overcoming is no less essential to the utilitarian position the force and plausibility of utilitarianism are inseparable from its insistence that the individual must overcome himself and subordinate his own interests to those of the greatest number in so-called primitive moral codes, too, the element of self-control and the disciplining of the inclinations is invariably present self-overcoming may thus be considered the common essence of all moral codes from totem and taboo to the ethics of the buddha end

quote and a little further down kaufman uh says quote nietzsche's position can be established more firmly by considering the form a moral code would have to take to elude his generic definition such a code would not place any restraint on the individual and would have to permit him to act on impulse while this position is conceivable it would be in accordance with common usage to refuse to call it moral a man who adopted it might state his case thus i repudiate morality and prefer to act on impulse end quote so where does this lead us?

so: morality is self-overcoming what does that mean what is being overcome impulse impulse is overcome by by what though? by man's reason? well no if you recall from past episodes reason is not considered a governing force to nietzsche but rather is itself an instrument of man's will logic the intellect and the passions all of these are manifestations of the same thing which is the will and since the will the way that it manifests in our experience is as impulses which are themselves reducible to this will this means that impulse must overcome impulse which means the

will must overcome the will that's why it is self-overcoming and to what end? to become something greater: which is to say to become something more powerful if this feels all rather abstract at this point then i'd say let's i'll try i'll try and bring it down a little more to earth in terms of man's existing moral systems so nietzsche roundly criticizes asceticism in genealogy and morality, asceticism of course being you know the priests and the religious devotees of the major religions who deny themselves all sorts of earthly things like they took celibacy vows and ate

you know uh just the simplest you know flavorless foods persisting on barely anything and spend all their time meditating or in contemplative prayer or whatever or you know even in the more extreme examples there's like self mortification practices and fasting and all of that um so nietzsche criticizes asceticism in genealogy of morality he calls it the impulse for cruelty directed inward directed at oneself um but he also says in the final aphorism of that book that if not for the ascetic ideal man's life would never have acquired meaning and man would never have risen above

the other animals so what this means is that without the moral pressure of religions and remember religious taboos were the original form of morality without the moral example of the priests and the saints and these moral taboos without this like spiritualization of the overcoming of the impulses nietzsche says we never would have developed reason why so why does he say that well it's because the community's power depends on the individual being able to suppress their feelings with thoughts as we've said by thinking out his actions and recognizing you know um when they're when you're thinking

hey i might want to just take this food without paying for it because i'm hungry and i'm bigger than the guy who owns it right that's what that's a blind impulsive behavior and in the long term that kind of behavior you know that won't work out for the community if everyone behaves that way and so this has done the suppression of that kind of feeling that kind of desire fulfillment just saying i want this i'm going to take it um this is that suppression is done by the community making those actions bad or sinful and

threatening the individuals who do the bad actions and thus compelling the individuals to have to remember themselves to remember the community's morals and withhold gratification as we've gone over before to withhold from the fulfillment of their desires and so this creates a pressure for the development of self-knowledge and for the the capacity for delayed gratification and so those are human capacities which are shaped by morality and be somewhere in the application of those you have a pressure to become reasonable and that's reason is the form or or it's the fruit of the community self overcoming

through morality shaping its members into something more perfect which is to say the individuals begin to act in a way which is more harmonious with the goals of the community as a whole and as we said it's done through the fear of the community's power um there's a there's so without reading that passage again um in his notes where he talks about that there's a different passage in the dawn aphorism number 18 he makes it clear that this elevation of mankind was consequently achieved through cruelty and suffering quote the least step forward in the domain

of free thought in individual life has been achieved in all ages to the accompaniment of physical and intellectual tortures and not only the mere step forward no but every form of movement and change has rendered necessary innumerable martyrs throughout the entire course of thousands of years which sought their paths and laid down their foundation stones - years however which we do not think of when we speak about "world history": that ridiculously small division of mankind's existence and even in this so-called world history which which in the main is merely a great deal of noise about

the latest novelties there is no more important theme than the old old tragedy of the martyrs who tried to move the mire nothing has been more dearly bought than the minute portion of human reason and feeling of liberty upon which we now pride ourselves but it is this very pride which makes it almost impossible for us today to be conscious of that enormous lapse of time preceding the period of world history when morality of custom held the field and to consider this lapse of time as the real and decisive epoch that established the character of

mankind an epoch when suffering was considered as a virtue cruelty as a virtue hypocrisy as a virtue revenge as a virtue and the denial of reason as a virtue whereas on the other hand well-being was regarded as a danger longing for knowledge as a danger peace as a danger compassion as a danger an epoch when being pitied was looked upon as an insult work as an insult madness as a divine attribute and every kind of change as immoral and pregnant with ruin you imagine that all this has changed and that humanity must likewise have changed

its character oh ye poor psychologists learn to know yourselves better end quote i love that last line too because telling the psychologists to know themselves better which is right it is very ironic many of them don't seem to know themselves so this is another example of nietzsche differing from enlightenment thinkers on the origin of reason and by by extension on the origin of moral values um it's it's why he writes in beyond good and evil aphorism 23 of the the quote derivation of all good impulses from bad ones in quote and we've discussed this a

great deal throughout the podcast already but there's this repeated refrain in nietzsche not to be swindled by the false idea that what is rational must be essentially different from what is irrational in mankind but rather what is rational in us is a development or a product or perhaps a refinement of irrational processes. that every ounce of human decency of humaneness of charity of mercy of the capacity for self-sacrifice and the ability for true compassion and empathy everything we admire in people may in fact be a direct offshoot or growth from this root system of cruelty

suffering proud unreason and or proud ignorance tyrannical impulses and at the very very bottom of it all the will to power and so nietzsche writes in um beyond good and evil 229 quote almost everything we call higher culture rests on the spiritualization of and giving depth to cruelty end quote so this is an avowedly and intentionally um subversive assessment of human morality and it comes out of nietzsche's determination to reject the darwinist idea or we might even say like the popular conception of darwinism which is the idea of a self-preservative instinct at the bottom of

human motivations and to reject kantian ideas of reason as the driving force of human action to reject even hegel and his idea of this instinctual drive towards freedom this is because even though nietzsche saw the similarity of his will to power to the hegelian instinct towards freedom nietzsche is very aware of the double meaning of words and the power of connotation and of the human tendency to conflate multiple concepts under a single term and i think he chose to intentionally give a hard-nosed tough to swallow conception or or to give those connotations when describing the

driving force of mankind because i don't think and and i don't think nietzsche thought that um the will to power will inevitably lead to freedom for individuals or for whole peoples the way hegel did but rather to domination and to submission and to conflict and so he chooses not to associate his grand unifying concept for explaining human motivation with the instinct towards freedom um it's it's why he writes in genealogy of morality uh book three aphorism 19 quote why stroke the hypersensitive ears of our modern weaklings end quote um i'm gonna go back to kaufman

here um same chapter um where he sort of brings out i guess some of the the philosophical um disputes maybe that play out in the background of nietzsche's ideas here so he asks quote why nietzsche would not accept the traditional dualism of reason and impulse the answer is to be found not in sheer perversity but in nietzsche's method his monism was not derived from ratiocinations about schopenhauer's metaphysics rather he did not consider it legitimate to accept unquestioned the traditional belief in the supernatural status of reason having questioned god he felt obliged also to question the

supernatural origin of reason empirical studies moreover had led him to assume that all human behavior could be explained in terms of the will to power his own psychological observations coupled with historical studies especially of greek and renaissance culture both perhaps under the influence of burkhardt and augmented finally by a sketchy knowledge of the natural sciences had convinced nietzsche that quote the will to power is the most profound fact to which we penetrate end quote now he concluded that not only our passions but also our intellect might well be interpreted as an instrument of the will

to power intellect reason spirit or geist in german all seemed to him to be manifestations of the same basic drive to which our passions were reducible end quote so notice something else here which is very important um nietzsche presents knowledge as we said as something invented by mankind to serve its will to power reason is this faculty which is produced out of the self-overcoming of morality the social life and the demands of the social life the selection pressures determine which groups are going to reproduce themselves and which ones will not and so over time these

moralities take shape according to the needs of these various world cultures as a manifestation of this drive towards self-overcoming without which life can't really the concept of life doesn't even make sense right? and so as a result we now have these instruments such as conscious awareness and self-reflection and so on in order to act as this organizing force for one's drives and so again as kaufman says he doesn't fall into this simple dualism where reason must dominate the passions or um as schopenhauer would have said we must use the intellect to negate the will to

live um rather in nietzsche's um philosophy as we touched on before one of the means of doing this is sublimation: of organizing one's drives or rather engaging in moral self-overcoming we talked about that in episode nine the wisdom of the body you cancel a drive by channeling its energies into something else so you redirect the vehemence of one impulse into another activity this is like um you know if you believe that people have an inherent urge to to physically fight and conquer and kill you could channel that urge into an athletic career and and dominate

your opponent um through competition rather than by actual warfare or you could take the urge to acquire social power you know maybe you have a domineering urge to wield power and influence maybe there are some personality types who apply that to becoming say an expert in the sciences you know you gain you gain social prestige by other means um and so there are other methods too other than sublimation that nietzsche talks about um even though sublimation i would say and i think kaufman argues is the main one but it talks about spiritualizing a drive um

perhaps an example of this you know you you place certain restrictions or limitations on the satisfaction of a drive while simultaneously making it holy and so we might consider the rituals at the temple of eleusis uh where ancient greeks would go and eat magic mushrooms and get incredibly drunk as a means of affecting ego death they didn't think it was socially acceptable to get drunk and do mushrooms all the time this was a sacred activity that was done on a yearly basis and so that's one way of containing or dealing with a drive right um

the drive to dissolution or ego death or what have you is satisfied within this the restrictions and limitations of this ritual context or you could castrate a drive that's how the christians for example handled sexuality um so christianity regards the sexual impulse as sinful and only acceptable as a means of procreation and even then that's just that's the next best thing to celibacy um in the words of paul "better to marry than to burn", right? and so the the christian aesthetics completely cut off the sexual impulse from being fulfilled in any way whatever so nietzsche

tends to think that's an unhealthy way to manage a drive but nevertheless it's still a method um and there is that passage um the six ways of dealing with the vehemence of an impulse in the dawn that we talked about last time or i think i guess a couple episodes ago now and so this is the situation to briefly recap reason as a tool of self-overcoming it's developed through this perfection of man that was affected by the group and by the imposition of morality on human beings and through that faculty of reason we now have

this power to manage our drives in a way that the animals do not and nietzsche far from being like in this irrationalist in the absolute sense as he's somehow portrayed he instead respects the person of education the person of letters the man of duty and of conscience as being this person of higher culture he reminds us that you know he's reminding us what the the immoral and lower things that this higher culture is a product of but he's not repudiating or discarding mankind's achievement of this higher culture rather he celebrates it he thinks he thinks

we also shouldn't be ungrateful to all that in mankind which gave us the higher culture and this is the real this is a real problem actually it's one of the central conflicts that he's trying to solve because morality in a sense it is that rejection it is that contempt that disgust for those drives which are considered ugly or undesirable right? that's how the refinement of man was achieved after all so understand the nuance here nietzsche thinks that christianity for example was unhealthy because it afflicted mankind with guilt and a bad conscience about himself and about

his own nature including his most basic needs like the sexual impulse and as such it demanded these pathological responses to the passions such as castrating those passions which means cutting them off entirely which has all these bad effects on the psyche but this same underlying tendency which was we we could say exaggerated to such a great degree in christianity it exists in all moral systems at least to some degree which is to employ guilt or bad conscience to motivate human behavior as a means of perfecting people and so nietzsche writes in genealogy of morality this

is essay 2 section 18 quote and uh when he says sorry i'm not quoting yet he says um this whole phenomenon the phenomenon he's referring to is bad conscience aka guilt so quote we must be wary of thinking disparagingly about this whole phenomenon because it is inherently ugly and painful fundamentally it is the same active force as the one that is at work on a grand scale and those artists of violence and organizers and that build states which here internally and on a smaller pettier scale turned backwards in the labyrinth of the breast as goethe

would say creates bad conscience for itself and builds negative ideals it is that very instinct for freedom put into my language the will to power except that the material on which the formative and rapacious nature of this force vents itself is precisely man himself his whole animal old self end quote and then i'm going to skip a little further down in the same passage where nietzsche says quote this uncanny terrible but joyous labor of a soul voluntarily split within itself which makes itself suffer out of the pleasure of making suffer this whole act of bad

conscience has finally we have already guessed as true womb of ideal and imaginative events brought a wealth of novel disconcerting beauty and affirmation to light and perhaps for the first time beauty itself what would be beautiful if the contrary to it had not first come to awareness of itself if ugliness had not first said to itself i am ugly end quote and so this is a difference this is perhaps the terminology one could use to distinguish nietzsche from hegel which is to say nietzsche always emphasizes the negative aspect of overcoming he emphasizes the need to

to reject and to come into conflict and to annihilate resistance that is the language he chooses to frame his principle for explaining human behavior whereas someone like hegel um you know imagines that mankind is always struggling towards some sort of self-realization and and tends to think in terms of the entire monistic unit the whole picture whereas nietzsche emphasizes that every individual manifestation of power will eternally demand the overthrow of other powers and so this conflict this overcoming is endless self-reflection and knowledge are as much manifestations of the will to power as every other aspect of

mankind and rather than being a goal of a dialectical process they can disappear just as quickly and as easily as they emerged and so nietzsche he recognizes the necessity of morality as a force to shape mankind this is why zarathustra recognizes good and evil as the greatest power but nietzsche's project he doesn't want to refute morality he wants to overcome morality as we discussed in past episodes he has his prediction for the extramoral age of mankind overcoming morality does not mean simply to reject it but rather in this case it involves the total comprehension of

morality the total perception of what morality is and by understanding that morality is ultimately driven by this need for self-overcoming what if we could then perhaps measure all the forms of morality all the forms that morality has taken in human culture what if we could measure all these individual moralities against the same principle the principle of self-overcoming and so when you hear people talk about the revaluation of all values this is the basis of that idea and it brings us to a strange place because in one sense nietzsche here is being as descriptive and detached

and objective about morality as one can be and in another sense he's looking for a basis for a prescriptive morality right that he's thus he's employing his reasoning this interpretation of morality towards his own ends this is where the ought and the is intersect that's and that's nietzsche's project here to understand what morality is and thereby perform a sort of meta-analysis by which we could evaluate moral systems and decide which ones are healthy or unhealthy or decide what about certain systems what aspects of certain systems are healthy and which aspects are unhealthy because the elements

of self repudiation and guilt and bad conscience and pity all of these that we inherit from christianity these are very unhealthy but nietzsche in some sense he's looking for a way to retain the elevation of mankind that all of those elements brought forth and then abolish all those pathological aspects to transcend this current model um and therefore shed all of those negative things that were sort of the cost of mankind's elevation in the dawn aphorism number 202 this is a section i actually quoted at length from in one of our past episodes but nietzsche writes

quote let us free the world from this idea of sin and take care to cast out with it the idea of punishment end quote and in genealogy of morality essay 2 section 19 he says quote it is a disease the bad conscience that is not subject to doubt - but a disease like pregnancy is a disease end quote i think that's an incredibly informative metaphor to use the sense of guilt used by religious morality to elevate mankind is perhaps the birth pangs the the pain of which something out of which sorry the pain out of

which something new can be porn and perhaps this this thing that shall be brought forth is this new age of the extra-moral man as nietzsche talks about elsewhere so i hope it's clear by now it's not enough to simply say that nietzsche was an amoralist or an immoralist or that he critiqued morality or what have you um even though nietzsche himself is guilty of this kind of talk because what he's actually doing is to so thoroughly penetrate into the reality of morality and moral thinking in order to produce a generic definition a general understanding of

it to perform this meta analysis and then evaluate moral systems according to whether whether or not they're facilitating self-overcoming and in a healthy manner or not and what we mean by a healthy manner is whether the morality promotes self-overcoming in a way which is not self-destructive because you can badly manage your impulses and end up pursuing a self-destructive course on either the group level or on the individual level and so another difference between this type of philosophical activity in the work of moralists like kant or hegel or mill is that nietzsche advances no systematic theory

of values and he also does not hold that that he alone has discovered the moral code which would be sufficient uh for this self-overcoming for you know all of mankind um rather to quote william blake uh one law for both the lion and the ox is oppression and so nietzsche does not have his set of values that he personally esteems or that that he then he does have that but he doesn't have one that he thinks um every that all the world should esteem his values his wish but he does have his values that he

personally esteems um he doesn't think they should be universalized um you know we discussed in the last episode he thinks that qualities like politeness and honesty are a sign of a noble individual we've also discussed how he believes the free spirit the man who passes through multiple convictions and is bound to none of them it's like the intellectual jewel made possible by our higher cultures right and so he doesn't attempt to as kant does outline a series of actions or virtues that are universal and necessarily lead to the increase of self overcoming to nietzsche that

project would probably he would see that as nonsense the good of the owl cannot ever be equivalent to the good of the mouse the law for the lion will never be the same as the law for the the oxen and so this is why i think most often uh nietzsche once again expresses himself in negative terms whenever he talks about moral systems rather than you know in affirmative terms so he writes in beyond good and evil number 225 quote whether it be hedonism or pessimism or utilitarianism or eudaimonism all these modes of thought which assess

the value of things according to pleasure and suffering that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena are foreground modes of thought and naivete of which anyone conscious of creative powers and an artist's conscience will look down on with derision end quote so a couple things to note in that passage for one pleasure and suffering are secondary phenomena as nietzsche says in passages that we went over in episode nine [redemption of the body] suffering and pleasure are not objective experiences they're subjectively generated experiences that are produced by the will in order to push the

individual or pull the individual and so again since will the power is the key concept behind all human motivation pleasure and pain exists so that the individual may overcome themselves and they don't exist as an end unto themselves pleasure and pain are instruments to motivate you and not the goal in and of themselves and so secondly here in this passage also notice he says it's those with creative power who will easily recognize these theories of utilitarianism or hedonism or pessimism as oversimplified and superficial explanations the creative person recognizes this because overcoming is just as much

of a creative process as it is a destructive process and so while you may recognize you know there's plenty of similarity here to the theories of evolution by natural selection again nietzsche is staunchly against the idea this has anything to do with preservation he thinks it's about everything except that the the caterpillar gives up its existence as a caterpillar to become a butterfly something even more you know beautiful and parents who will sacrifice their lives to protect their children or the the salmon sacrifices its life as it you know wears itself down to a pulp

swimming up river to spawn and people too you know sacrifice things like their sexual impulse if they go and take a vow of celibacy or their impulses for desire fulfillment all these things people sacrifice in pursuit of asceticism whether you know that takes the form of becoming a fakir or a monk or a guru or whatever and nietzsche believes this is driven by the same underlying longing to be reborn into a more perfect and more beautiful form you know and what is the ultimate power what is the ultimate elevation of man eternal life immortality and

so while it may have been a mistake to aim for this insofar as the world beyond isn't real and all the effort poured into attaining morality that way could be seen as basically just like pouring one's life force off into a funeral urn on the other hand it was a means of instruction for mankind in the art of self-overcoming and the people today who still possess a talent for this nietzsche says are the artists and the philosophers the souls which still possess a creative spark he thinks these types will have it in them to overcome

the old morality which means to perfect it into something new something beyond all those old pathologies and his his vision is for something extra moral and this can never be the same kind of project as that of the kantian though because it's it's so defiantly anti-universal in accord with the underlying principles of will to power because will to power is fundamentally and and self-overcoming is fundamentally a drive to be different to make oneself stand out to make judgments and distinctions and to become something beyond what one is um and to constantly expand and overcome and

so it's conflict it's inherently conflict and so um you may recall the episode we did on heraclitus this is where i think there is a a commonality in nietzschean thought and heraclitaean thought "strife is justice", "war is the father of all" and there's a single unifying principle behind everything right so go back to that episode episode five if you haven't heard that or interested in that there's an excellent passage in the spoke zarathustra where nietzsche has zarathustra relate a conversation with the personification of life itself and life uh taught all its secrets to zarathustra which

are essentially that will to power is life, and life is that which must overcome itself so this is in book two of zarathustra um which i believe it's the twelfth part quote and life confided the secret to me behold it said i am that which must always overcome itself indeed you call it a will to procreate or a drive or an end to something higher farther more manifold but all this is one and one secret rather would i perish than forswear this and verily where there is perishing and a falling of leaves behold there life

sacrifices itself for power that i must be struggle and becoming and an end and in opposition to ends alas whoever guesses what is my will should also guess on what crooked paths it must proceed whatever i create and however much i love it soon i must oppose it in my love thus my will wills it and you too lover of knowledge are only a path and a footprint of my will verily my will to power walks also on the heels of your will to truth indeed the truth was not hit by him who shot at

it with the word of the will to existence that will does not exist for what does not exist cannot will but what is in existence how could that still want existence only where there is life is there also will not will to life but thus i teach you will to power end quote and so there we have it this is the summation of everything we've talked about up to this point morality the drive to seek truth all the activities of human life they're all will to power will to power walks at the heels of everything

we do it's a force that's synonymous with life and life itself it's always willing to squander even that which it loves in order to serve what it loves most of all um which is the thing that makes loving possible esteeming possible which makes valuing even possible which is will to power and so what life loves the most is to overcome itself to engage in this never-ending activity of self-perfection and the creation of power and beauty and to squander what came before in the pursuit of even greater things and so while this definition is fairly poetic

probably a bit too poetic for the scientifically minded amongst you this definition essentially works i would say as a description of evolution by natural selection as we understand it i i see no contradiction in the doctrines there and so in any case this definition and this anchoring of nietzsche's moral system if we can even call it that with uh with self-overcoming that's led to some arguments over the years amongst uh philosophers and scholars because nietzsche's explanation here can be taken as monistic which is to say using one force or one principle to explain all phenomena

which may seem odd because it's nietzsche um and he always seems to be questioning simple explanations but he he says for example that schopenhauer is using the wrong principle because that's a reference to schopenhauer saying you know when you tried to hit the target with the arrow marked with the will to exist um or you know the will to live um that's schopenhauer's principle of what he says is behind all life uh nietzsche says no that's the wrong principle it's not a will to live because everything which can will is already alive right so it's

the will to power which is far more explanatory because it even explains behaviors in which sacrifice or self-destruction are involved but so what he he he's willing to criticize monisms which he thinks gets it wrong but it does certainly seem like he is uh perfectly comfortable with putting forward a monism putting forward a single principle in the form of will to power and um he kind of he explains how he arrives at this monism in beyond good and evil aphorism 36 where he says that we have to ask quote whether all mechanical occurrences are not

insofar as a force is active in them will force effects of will end quote and then he goes on to say quote suppose finally we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will namely of the will to power as my proposition has it suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment (it is one problem) then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient

force univocally as will to power the world viewed from inside the world defined and determined according to its intelligible character would be will to power and nothing besides end quote and so i think one could justifiably question at this point why one ought to like want to reduce our explanation of all life to a single factor in the first place but i think just to to provide to steelman nietzsche's argument here nietzsche's goal i don't think is to make things simpler than they have to be i think what he's doing actually he's trying to find

as few starting axioms as few starting principles as possible and the fewest you could have is one right but the fewest axioms you need to do from which you can derive all the other principles right and so i don't think he's trying to erase all the other motivations and factors he's trying to find a language for talking about motivation itself in a way that's as meaningful and as substantive as possible of explaining all the different drives of mankind in the same way of saying what is the common thread of what we call morality right what

do we mean i think he's saying well what do we mean when we talk about life and what is the defining factor of life as a as a phenomenon in this reality? and so that's how i think he comes to this explanation of life and of drives and of man's moral drive in terms of this one principle and yet this monism seems to kind of have to split doesn't it? because then you have to split it into the impulses that must be suppressed and the impulses that must prevail so if life is overcoming must there

be something that is doing the overcoming and another thing which is being overcome? uh i'm gonna go back to walter kaufman here this is on page 238 because he has an interpretation of this um quote the will to power is the heir of dionysus and apollo it is a ceaseless striving but it has an inherent capacity to give form to itself because its way of manifesting itself is ever new in ever new guises is one of its most striking characteristics nietzsche speaks of its "proteus nature" and overcoming or sublimating itself it appears in a strange

dual capacity it is both that which overcomes for example reason and that which is overcome for example impulse in aristotelian terms it is both matter and form in hegel's it is both substance and subject end quote uh i do want to stress at this point um i felt it necessary to sort of bring that up and talk about it but i think that whether one expresses will to power in monistic or dualistic terms or or the argument over whether it's best expressed one way or the other i don't think that debate matters all that much

i don't think nietzsche himself was really committed to insisting on will to power as a single principle as a sort of like ontological true reality and i don't think he would have objected to expressing it in dualistic terms if that was appropriate as kaufman says he might have been struggling towards the same insight when he wrote about dionysus and apollo as this sort of dual force of artistic power in greek tragedy and that's all the way back in his first book and so it's simply a different way or different degrees of refinement of talking about

the same thing and i think nietzsche made it clear enough in well in a lot of different places in his work but particularly in beyond good and evil these conceptual frameworks are instruments which we use and we should not confuse them for having some sort of objective reality so my position on the debate about whether will to power is monistic um you know or not it ultimately breaks down into dualism or whether it's monistic and i don't think it really matters i think the only possibility for full understanding almost demands that you ignore all these

attempts to like easily summarize nietzsche's positions with a single term and so with that being said maybe you're wondering at this point is there any clear concrete takeaway from these considerations about morality and this nietzschean model of the human being because if we're not going to get a a moral system out of it so to speak because ultimately you know we've said that while nietzsche has his own personal evaluations or personal moral preferences we can't produce a single universal moral code is there anything of practical value we can derive from this for the this what

i've called a moral meta-analysis based on the will to power principle well yes i believe there are several things and i think if you followed along from the beginning of the podcast all the way up to this point this is where i think a lot of the groundwork will bear fruit and you'll be able to use nietzsche's method of analysis from now on at your leisure so let's consider the end of the first aphorism of the antichrist nietzsche writes quote the formula of our happiness a yes a nay a straight line a goal end quote

very straightforward but just to comment on it unlike a lot of the old moral philosophers nietzsche is not going to tell you what the goal is he cannot really tell you what the goal is in fact but we can say that a goal and more than that a clear line to the goal that is synonymous with happiness which means the goal has to be both discovered and created it has to be discovered from within your own drives that must be examined under the light of reason so you can understand what is the most worthwhile goal

at which all my drives aim what's your goal among all your goals to which all the others can be subordinated nietzsche is saying find that and then don't be afraid to say definitively and stubbornly yes this goal not the others the others are secondary superficial and unnecessary compared with this my ultimate goal so for you that could manifest as anything the desire to have children or to have a successful career or to be an artist whatever it is you have to discover that and then make this goal definitive and non-negotiable and spiritual for you nietzsche

gets even more direct in the next aphorism and the antichrist and by the way um i think the reason for this is that the antichrist was supposed to originally be the first installment in a series on the topic of will to power this planned magnum opus but he includes his own definitions of what is good and what is evil speaking in the sense of this meta-analysis of morality that we've been talking about so antichrist aphorism 2 quote what is good? whatever augments the feeling of power the will to power power itself in man what is

evil? whatever springs from weakness what is happiness? the feeling that power increases that resistance is overcome not contentment but more power not peace at any price but war not virtue but efficiency (virtue in the renaissance sense: virtu - virtue free of moralic acid) end quote so the goal is virtue but it's virtue freed from moralic acid again we have to juggle these multiple uses of terms here because what he's talking about is virtue liberated from these pathologies of things like guilt and bad conscience even though those things were the birth pangs of all the grand

opportunities for man that lie before us now and so now that we have the understanding that all morality was really deep down it was this self-overcoming we can cut through all the false explanations that past moralists offered and go straight to the deepest level what is good what is happiness and nietzsche says it's overcoming resistance and it's the expansion of power we can then use that those measurements these guiding ideas to evaluate world historical moral systems and we could even diagnose them so to speak so nietzsche explains how one does this in twilight of idols

morality as anti-nature #4, quote i reduce a principle to a formula every naturalism in morality that is every healthy morality is dominated by an instinct of life some commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate cannon of shalt and shalt not some inhibition and hostile element on the path of life is thus removed anti-natural morality - that is almost every morality which has so far been taught - revered and preached turns conversely against the instincts of life it is condemnation of these instincts now secret now outspoken and impudent end quote so what he means when

he says that anti-natural morality is what every morality teaches and reveres um i think what he's pointing to is that every morality has in its striving for the perfection or elevation of mankind damaged mankind in the process um and i think he perhaps he would exclude some ancient moralities from this i think he's referring more to the dominant moralities of today in the past couple thousand years the moralities of the major world religions because there's always been some element that has denied the world or denied the passions um you know not mastering out of this

mastering these passions out of this healthy um you know this good noble conscience that the greeks did or as nietzsche perhaps imagined they did but there's always the element of making man sinful right of nourishing these negative and self-defeating elements of the psyche like vindictiveness and pity and so on and so to continue you know... all the things that that brings up whereas perhaps before you might see nietzsche's rejection of things like vindictiveness or pity as arbitrary or as mere preferences we now see how these positions of nietzsche's flow forth from this meta-analysis of morality

he's not just arbitrarily attacking these aspects of christian morality he's diagnosing them as unhealthy which is to say self-undermining not conducive to the self-overcoming which is what morality itself is supposed to aim at there's an excellent post on the the nietzsche subreddit which is included in the the wiki there which i recommend you you go check out it's by lebensmaller it's called "the polysemy of the word morality in nietzsche's writing" um and he shows in that post there's at least four different ways nietzsche uses the word so there's like the individual's morality there are culturally

specific types of morality so such as we might say christian morality english morality european morality there are super historical classifications of morality such as the master in slave morality and then there's morality itself and so we can understand nietzsche might use the term morality in one sense which is a very negative sense for example in the gay science 116 quote morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function end quote so what is nietzsche talking about in that passage he's describing the power of

morality as it acts upon the individual according to its function of serving the self-overcoming of the community of the whole community which is the herd morality right so that's achieved by making the individual and his many drives into mere functions so if you're an individualist as many nietzscheans are you probably look at that passage and you would say morality just as a concept he just says morality right it's presented in a negative light as the herd instinct whereas we might contrast this with beyond good and evil aphorism 32 quote the overcoming of of morality in

a certain sense even the self-overcoming of morality let this be the name for that long secret work which has been saved up for the finest and most honest also the most malicious conscious consciences of today as living touchstones of the soul end quote and so here nietzsche is talking about morality in a way that doesn't make the moral project seem negative or a herd instinct but the work of the most noble type of individual the finest and most honest and also malicious conscientious consciences of today sorry butchered that word twice in a row but rather

than merely accepting the community's morality as by the herd instinct the independent spirit perceives morality for what it is and it works towards morality's own overcoming um and this is because the free spirit recognizes that self-overcoming is his nature as a living thing and thus determines that the very thing to be overcome next was once the most powerful force for overcoming so this is why people can often get confused about nietzsche's moral positions because on one level he's exactly the immoralist he purports to be and on another level he's the most supreme of moralists and

that even that might still be a little difficult to understand but maybe by analogy uh to zarathustra i could explain it i i can't remember at the moment if we've just discussed it yet on the podcast but nietzsche explains in ecce homo why he chose zarathustra as the prophet of his of his whole philosophy and the reason he gives is that zarathustra is said to be the figure who first distinguished between good and evil and set them apart as opposed in essence and so naturally as he was the first to make the mistake he would

be the first to recognize the mistake and so nietzsche chooses to put his philosophy his explanation for man and mankind's nature into the mouth of the oldest moralist but he's the man who moralizes so purely that he gets to the heart of the very activity of morality and then by that same token he transcends it and so we arrive at the overcoming of morality by the road of morality itself and this is that's the trans-valuation of values or the revaluation of all values it's a creative act in the creation of something new but it's accomplished

as it always is through not as a rejection of what came before but it's perfection and its transcendence the point at which a drive becomes fulfilled so perfectly that it undoes itself it becomes transformed the creator of new values is just like an artistic creator they're not constrained by the laws of tradition or convention but yet you know rarely if ever is there a true innovation that doesn't build upon what came before and so jesus jesus himself said famously he came not to abolish the old law but to fulfill it jesus is actually the perfect

metaphor for how the old law can be so completely fulfilled as to be transcended by that same act right through being sacrificed the entire moral system of legalistic servitude set forth in the old testament is overcome and nietzsche uses just this analogy of jesus in beyond good and evil aphorism 164 quote jesus said to his jews "the law was for slaves love god as i love him as his son what are morals to us sons of god?" end quote um and i think nietzsche is interpolating a little bit there but i do recall that passage

where he says does it not say in your law that all of you are gods um but so as a final note uh we might be wondering what what form will this creation of new values take then what is the practical reality of the trans-valuation of values is nietzsche talking about starting new religions? is he talking about imposing one's will or one's ideology? is he talking about proselytizing to the masses about his new extramoral age? this new understanding of morality? um and in short the answer to all these questions is that for most of you

probably not i mean just consider whether you think it's likely you're ever going to do any of those things maybe you will i don't know but more importantly whether you think it would be worthwhile to do those things i think even beyond that consideration nietzsche is not expounding these insights on morality so that you might go on a moral crusade that's something externally directed and wrapped up with these ideas of like progress and social critique and all that he says the audience he's writing to are the free spirits these people who have the opportunity to

to shape their own character to apply reason as this organizing force as we've been talking about upon all these contradictory wild impulses and so first and foremost before you even can think about embarking on some moral crusade um i think the the first task of the revaluation of values has to be something that occurs inwardly as regards oneself one's own morality one's own relationship to their will to power and the goals of their self overcoming that all has to be understood first and so we'll conclude now with a reading on that very topic um and

uh this is from the gay science it's number 290 it's an aphorism called one thing is needful and here's the entire thing to close this out quote one thing is needful to give style to one's character a great and rare art it is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses to light the eye here a large mass of second nature has been added there a piece of original nature has

been removed both times through long practice and daily work at it here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views it is meant to beckon for beckoned toward the far and immeasurable in the end when the work is finished it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose if only it was

a single taste it will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaeity and such constraint and perfection under a law of their own the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of an all-stylized nature of all conquered and serving nature even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demure at giving nature freedom conversely it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style they feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned they become slaves as

soon as they serve they hate to serve such spirits and they may be of the first rank are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature wild arbitrary fantastic disorderly and surprising and they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves for one thing is needful that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art only then as a human being at all tolerable to behold whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready

for revenge and we others will be his victims if only by having to endure his ugly sight for the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy end quote all right that's all everyone go create yourselves anew into something you can be satisfied with and i'll see you next week if you enjoyed the nietzsche podcast or found it helpful you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com untimelyreflections the link is in the description or just share the show with any of your friends that you think might enjoy it or on social

media thank you for your support