11: Master & Slave Morality

This is the Nietzsche Podcast. Today, we're getting into one of the most popular ideas of Nietzsche, the master and 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 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 10 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 might say the stereotypical image of the philosopher is that he's...

measuring the relative 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 a reason why Nietzsche 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 contradistinction to the idea of the ego consciousness as this voluntarily governing free will, making rational decisions. 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 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 moments of devilish humor where he calls himself an immoralist or speaks on behalf of we immoralists, because he recognizes how truth-seeking, 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.

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 in the understanding of those moral systems and moral values changed

He explains in the preface of Twilight of Idols, Twilight of Idols is subtitled, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. 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 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 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. 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.

Sorry, this is just a tangent. 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 really... the book. 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 La Rochefoucauld or Giacomo Lepardi. And these 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 Rochefoucauld did. And Nietzsche had no disrespect for these little observations, right? In 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 la riche foucault and le party 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, The concept of good and evil has a double prehistory. 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 cast 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." 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 all to human he lays out the description

of how the noble classes of antiquity viewed morality. Morality is based in this 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. And 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... 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 um you know in contrast what nietzsche calls the mass they cannot requite um even if they want to at least not reliably so 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.

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 master or slave morality, the association 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.

You know, in the morality of the oppressed, I almost called them a cast, even though Nietzsche says 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 a 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's self-conception of one's own good or one's own value as the defining pole around which you orient the whole system

In 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 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, a 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 at 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. He's not just claiming it. As Kaufman says in a footnote to Beyond 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 prehistory. 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 AD. So before this, Nietzsche would argue,

And there are all sorts of variations in what different peoples valued and the details of their morality. And there are passages where he talks about that. 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.

which is fear-based and externally oriented that already existed. But these religions took things to a new level, as we'll see. 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, 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 to Human. And it's going to happen again here. We're not going to stay with them for as long, but it's interesting. There's another passage just like the one we just examined from Human All to 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 All to Human came out, that was supposed to be a presentation of his whole philosophy, covering all the major topics that are of concern to him. And so he does mostly the same thing in Beyond Good and Evil. And so... A lot of those ideas that rattled around in his head for eight years end up re-expressed in Beyond Good and Evil in a more developed form. And so we see the master and slave morality appear again in 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 the actual, the irreconcilable differences and the origin of moral ideas that we hold. 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 in the master and slave morality.

That's what Nietzsche is talking about. So we could talk, 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. But Nietzsche, he's Eurocentrist. I mean, that's the time and 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. And so he goes on in this passage in 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, 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." So the moral axis here, we may notice, is just slightly different. Nietzsche chooses here to emphasize rather than the element of simply the master morality, you know, being oriented around being powerful.

um 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. One conceals or dissembles.

when their strength is not enough to say what they want to honestly say. Or if saying the honest truth would be dangerous or 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 an honest... description of what your, you know, your words matching your deeds. And so we can see the sense in this, I think. Most people can. But again, we must remember it's not as simple.

Is 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 and our morality to...

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 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 we are not the ancient Greeks. We have to live with both living within us. And it wouldn't represent... acceptance of ourselves a love of ourselves that's demanded by the idea of amorphity 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 questions 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 and of itself. End quote. So 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 of 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 is 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 it grand universal scale about all mankind based on the thoughts and feelings and beliefs 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, except for the 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 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 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. They're not being compelled by some divine story of how they have to behave or else. It's the mark of a noble soul that they just sort of...

overflow with generosity. Because 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 now that we've outlined the master morality quite thoroughly, we're still in the same passage in 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 can obviously see where he's going at the end of that passage and who he's talking about there. Nietzsche was generally just dismissive of utilitarianism. He sees in it just as he sees in deontological ethics and Kantianism, an aspect of Christianity, which is to say the slave morality. So utilitarianism shares the pity.

of Christianity and sees the relief of suffering is 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 regards morality. You know, you can't...

You can't have a morality that is just for 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. It must be universalized. Nietzsche doesn't think you can universalize morality. And so moving on. Some other elements he discusses towards the end of the passage, I'm not going to read, 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, the nobility have what he calls an enthusiastic reverence and a sense of devotion. They're always looking for difficult things to overcome. 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.

And so on the other hand, it's the slave morality 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 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, quote, wherever slave morality becomes preponderant.

Language tends to bring the words good and stupid closer together. 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 Beyond 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 sources that Nietzsche cites among his own work in the preface to Genealogy of 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. drawing on some of the past ideas of Nietzsche's books that came before this one. 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 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 monolithic entities. These are whole genealogical lines of descendants spanning... centuries and millennia their families of moral thought would 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 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 Deleuze, 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 Deleuze is totally correct and very insightful to point out that Nietzsche did reject the dialectic and that Hegel was sort of this...

figure that he was largely silently hostile towards. But when we speak genetically, when we speak genealogically, that is not a model or a metaphor that stresses incompatible differences. um 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 doing the genealogy of our morality through our male and female parent, so to speak, 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 1, aphorism 4, 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 a soul of high order with a 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 Schlecht or bad in English. The word Schlecht itself, which is identical with Schlecht, which means plain, simple, compare with Schlechtweg, which means plainly, schlechterdings which means simply and originally designated the plane the common man as yet with no inculpatory implication and simply in contradistinction to the nobility

About the time of the Thirty Years' War, late enough therefore, this meaning changed into the one now customary, end quote. And before moving on...

I'm not aware that anyone has ever disproven Nietzsche's linguistic scholarship on 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 derived from these etymological organ or origins um that he posits no one really disagrees with that i don't think um

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 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 and power as the powerful the masters the commanders or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as the rich, the possessors. This is the meaning of aria 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 aria 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, duonus. Compare bellum to dwellum, to dwindlin, which seems to me to contain duonus. 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 gut 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. Gott 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.

and 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 seventh and sixth centuries on the other hand the antithesis grows common in theogenes 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 view is found in language and how the Greeks as 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 of morality essay one part six nietzsche talks about

how this reversal under Christianity came to pass. He says that one of the key elements in what he calls the slave revolt in morality is the priestly caste. Every society has had a priestly caste, the caste of people charged with defining the spirituality of the people, defining their religious laws, interpreting their religious scriptures, and so on.

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. 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 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 overawed even the nobility in their presence. And so Nietzsche says that originally, to talk about 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. And 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.

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. and so on. The priest gains authority among the populace by 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 altihuman 143 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 Nietzsche mentions, and then I remembered, 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, overexcited nerves. What he means by overexcited nerves is, you know, these people are withholding 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, 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 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 of valuation can branch off from the knightly aristocratic and then develop into its opposite this is particularly likely when the priestly caste and the warrior caste 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 us 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 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, 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 um 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.

Or you might have rivalries or someone you see as a worthy adversary. 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 type of hatred that he's describing, the type of hatred that was given its fullest, most powerful, and most clever voice is the hatred of the priests. And so there's 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 an externally directed soul. The means of understanding, I guess, are of 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 um 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 a disgust at 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.

And so out of the morality of the masses comes the figure of the priest. He takes it to... to an extreme um 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 impure 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... 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 seem like Nietzsche is about to speak negatively about the Jews, but he references one of his own aphorisms. So while he's writing in Genealogy of 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 aphorism I wrote just to be clear. Because remember, genealogy and morality is a sort of addendum to Beyond Good and Evil.

And so one of the things in that passage that he writes in Beyond Good and Evil 195 is that, quote, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums their profits 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. Which is why he says in another passage in Beyond Good and Evil 250 that Europe owes many things, both good and bad, to the Jews, and that as a free spirit he regards them with gratitude.

and just as a quick aside nietzsche despised anti-semites that's not what he he's driving at here um 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, 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 arian or he he he puts forward the theory that he was an arian if i recall correctly it was bernard fuster but there was this odd tension therefore in german christianity particularly among the lutheran nationalist anti-semitic style of thinking

Were 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 story so that Jesus was not a Jew, but an Arian 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 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 require harm with harm. That remains long after one has experienced, you know, having harm done to them. And so when people 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. And the episode, Weakness Corrupts. But as I looked over the passage that introduces resentment, I don't think I could find a better chunk to quote from than this one that I already quoted from.

So if you've 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 slave's revolt in 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 resentment 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 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 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 divine judgment on all mankind, according to the standards set by the anti-worldly priestly caste.

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 good news is eventually Jesus is going to come and melt the faces off all the unbelievers. 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. 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 such animals were to have a morality. So this is 113, quote.

That lambs 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 is 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. So again, I want to stress, we're not saying the nobles and commoners are literally like different species.

What they are is 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. And so the analogy he uses is 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 so 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, hopeless 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's 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 bird 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. They essentialize the person as the moral agent, as the doer of the deed.

It's a linguistic prejudice, is what he says. This very construction in language separates the doer from the deed. So Nietzsche would argue this is a trick. Language and 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. 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 single unitary entity, but a multiplicity. The self is a body and 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 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. Because 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.

This is also why he calls genealogy of morality a polemic. 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, 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 effecting 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 latter 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. And then I'll skip further down where he says, quote, No wonder the submerged, darkly glowering 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, this is why I've chosen to cover the material in the order we have, because Nietzsche's here reminding us

why the will is not free, and furthermore, 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 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 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 Circe. 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. And so we're coming to the conclusion here. As I said, we're not going to go through all of genealogy and morality. 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.

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 1.16, 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 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 Beyond Good and Evil.

and so this is genealogy one six quote or 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 shouldn't have even used the word synthesis earlier now that I think about it, because it's really not. It's a... What he's saying is our genealogy, our moral genealogy has produced an intractable conflict in some sense. 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 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 at the end of this essay, to ask questions. 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 rediscover... a lot of the good of the of the of the master morality once again um you know He's now using the term morality, I think, in a slightly different sense, 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 talks about at the very end here this is genealogy of morality What he talks about is, I don't know, rediscovery of our capacity for self-creativity, the creation of our own values. This can be our morality, our personal morality as free spirits, right? In spite of how the world historical genealogy of our morality has been handed down to us.

And so 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.