Simply Nietzsche, page 11
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1 More things are required than this, but we won’t go into this issue here.
The Invention of the Sick Animal
On the Genealogy of Morality
Nietzsche called On the Genealogy of Morality (GM) a “A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil.”
I already indicated that GM is a supplement to BGE in the previous chapter. There is a certain kind of morality, a morality of good and evil, which Nietzsche sought to explain (and evaluate), and GM offers an account of the creation of that morality. The account in GM is brilliant, complicated, and immensely subtle, and, as with his other works, it is only possible to give the merest of sketches. It is a “sickness” or a “madness,” which potentially leads to a lack of meaning for human existence. The stridency of the language Nietzsche adopted in this work reflects his polemical purposes. He wanted to change our attitude to our morality, and see it as something potentially harmful.
The work comprises a preface and three treatises. The first treatise, “‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad,’” describes what is central to the genesis of the values distinctive of modern Western morality. The second, “‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad conscience’ and related matters,” explains how guilt and bad conscience arise. The third, “What do ascetic ideals mean?” is difficult to explain in a single phrase, so we shall return to that a little later. All three treatises are interconnected as well, thus making pithy summaries rather difficult. Let us begin with the preface.
Questions of morality
Nietzsche mentioned two key questions (GM preface 3). Under what conditions did man invent those value judgments—good and evil? And what value do they themselves have? The second question relates to Nietzsche’s overall project of the “re-valuation of values.” Our moral values, he thought, are potentially harmful and should themselves be revalued. I will return to this idea at the end of this chapter.
The first question is the primary subject of GM, at least in my view, and its task is to explain our morality not as some timeless thing, but as something that the humans have invented. Recall, also from the previous chapter, Nietzsche’s belief that there are many different moralities and what the GM is primarily, though not exclusively, concerned about is one particular morality, which he variously calls “modern,” “slave,” “herd,” or “Christian,” He aimed to explain how that morality emerged and had become dominant. Nietzsche recognized that others had tried to explain morality, but their approaches had been wrongheaded, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that other philosophers hadn’t been sufficiently attuned to historical fact. They tried to explain morality as it was in their time, mistakenly thinking that was how morality had always been. But Nietzsche turned his eye to the ancient world to see a morality rather different from the modern one, trying to show how our morality is a relatively new one that formed in reaction to that ancient one. Now, this fact is important in connection with the task of revaluing values. Unless we become convinced that, at the very least, an alternative morality is possible, let alone that human beings have actually lived by a different morality, then we might find it difficult to conceive of an alternative to our present morality. Modern morality “stubbornly and ruthlessly declares ‘I am morality itself and nothing else is moral!’” (BGE 202). I shall return to this, but I want to jump first to the second treatise of GM, which is an attempt to explain something that predates all this and which is fundamental to humanity, namely the notion of a “bad conscience.”
The “true problem of man”
All morality is about evaluation, about things, at the greatest level of abstraction, being good, bad, better, worse, right or wrong. It involves standards one can meet, fail to meet, or to which one can aspire. Sometimes, when we fail to do what we should, we suffer from guilt, a horrible feeling of moral failure. Nietzsche had a complicated and yet brilliant account of how guilt appears in the human being.
The second treatise opens with a seemingly odd question about how it is possible to “breed an animal which is permitted to make promises.” He called this “the true problem of man,” and I will explain why that is so. Now, to make a promise involves being able to regulate one’s behavior. If I say, “I promise to meet you Tuesday,” then I must be able to guide my behavior in accordance with that promise. Nietzsche mentioned that memory is required, which it obviously is, and here he alluded to training by pain. Suppose I am training a dog not to urinate on the carpet. One way to do this is to get the dog to associate pain with the act of urination in that area: every time he urinates, one pulls the scruff of his neck, until he “catches on.” His behavior then becomes modified (he remembers the pain) and doesn’t urinate on the carpet anymore. There is, however, a key difference between humans and dogs. We can regulate what we do by consciousness of something’s being a rule or its being a requirement, whereas the dog does not stop urinating on the carpet because it is conscious of a rule—he has to be trained to adopt a certain behavior. Our consciousness of a rule comes with a consciousness of having failed to follow a rule, sometimes causing guilt. We are conscious of things being the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do: the dog is not. It learns to behave in ways we think of as right or wrong, but the dog doesn’t think in those terms the way we do. To be an animal with a right to make promises, something more is required—namely, consciousness of things being right or required, or better or worse things to do. It requires the animal not merely to be conscious of its environment, as the dog is, but to be also conscious of itself as someone attempting to do what is right or required. It needs to be a self-conscious or self-aware animal. That is the “true problem of man.”
We have to wait until GM II: 16 for Nietzsche’s explanation of how a self-conscious animal is possible. This is in his account of “bad conscience,” that is, painful awareness of one’s self-being somehow morally deficient or corrupt. It is a terrible sense of one’s self being deeply wrong. Obviously, this is a form of self-awareness, albeit a horrible and painful one. In an outline, Nietzsche explained how such a “gloomy thing” (GM II: 4) comes into being in the following way: prior to bad conscience, humans roamed the environment, governed by instinct. However, Nietzsche supposed, one group enslaved another, imprisoning them in a “state”—not a state in the political sense, but one in which one group of warriors took control of another segment of population. In doing so, the instincts of the enslaved population were curbed. They could no longer express their instincts in the way that they had previously been able to do. Nevertheless, the instincts remained and had to be “discharged;”
Nietzsche claimed that those instincts became part of the enslaved creatures. The central instinct here is the instinct of cruelty, of the delight of inflicting pain on others. This instinct, turned on its own possessors, is the origin of bad conscience, and with it comes our basic capacity for self-awareness. Let me explain this extraordinary thought a little further.
Nietzsche highlighted, both earlier in the second treatise of the GM, and in other works, the inescapable fact that human beings enjoy cruelty. It is a fact, furthermore, that fits well with Nietzsche’s view that drives express the will to power. In being cruel to another creature, one is dominating and controlling that creature. Cruelty is the key drive that cannot be expressed by those imprisoned in the state, and so they turn against their possessors. There are, no doubt, many ways in which cruelty can be self-directed, but for Nietzsche, the key one was psychological. Self-cruelty leads to the “internalization” of man. That cruelty is turned against one’s own drives by being conscious of them as things that are to be hated, despised, or as ugly. One’s cruelty is directed at one’s self and results in becoming aware of one’s self—becoming self-aware in a self-hating way.
As terrible as bad conscience might be—it is something that introduced a whole new kind of pain into the world—it also signals a “momentous” event. It is a “forceful separation from his [man’s ] animal past,” creating something “new and enigmatic,” “full of the future,” and with it “first grows in man that which he would later call his ‘soul’” (GM II: 16). This is because self-consciousness allows one to consider one’s self as a potentially better human being, a thing in need of change and improvement. It is, as Nietzsche put it “the true womb of ideal and imaginary events.” Humanity cannot aspire to “beauty” without a view of itself as “ugly.” “For what would be ‘beautiful’…. if the ugly had not first said to itself ‘I am ugly’.” (GM II: 18)
Because of bad conscience, the human animal becomes at once both “sick” and “interesting.” Interesting because he is now self-aware and able to think in terms of ideals, sick because it is an animal that is now burdened with constant, painful dissatisfaction with itself. It is a creature for whom its existence is “a problem.” Bad conscience also brings with it guilt, the painful feeling of having failed in some reprehensible way. Just how that emerges, and its relation to bad conscience is a complicated matter that takes up a good deal of the second treatise. All that I shall say here is that it involves a notion of indebtedness, which, as we shall see when we talk about ascetic ideals, Nietzsche thought was misunderstood in a very serious and harmful way. But there is also the hint of something positive in the second treatise, a figure called “the sovereign individual.” Now, this figure is described in such hyperbolic language—he is, for example, called the “lord of free will”—that some commentators, not implausibly, took Nietzsche to be satirizing the ideal of a liberal free individual. But it is striking that this “late fruit,” as Nietzsche put it, has not a bad conscience, but a conscience nevertheless. The sovereign individual has “consciousness of power over [himself] and fate, [that] has sunk into his lowest depth and has become instinct, the dominant instinct.” (GM II:2) That is to say, he has an evaluative form of self-awareness, but one which is proud rather than wracked with self-hatred. It is not implausible to see this person as the “free” individual we alluded to in the previous chapter, one with a dominant drive, and aware of themselves as such, and without any bad conscience.
Bad conscience yields a capacity to evaluate one’s self, and, importantly, it is a negative, painful evaluation. It is virulent among those who have been imprisoned in a “state” by the powerful. Turning now to the first treatise of the GM, Nietzsche worked with a contrast between powerful types—the “masters”—and the oppressed and the weak, that is, the “slaves.” The reader will recall that in the previous chapter, I discussed Nietzsche’s view of two generic forms of morality, “master” morality and “slave” morality briefly. The “masters” are those who are marked by a confidence, who express their drives in a straightforward manner, in acquisition, conquest, and a great deal more besides. These nobles are taken to be what constitutes “good:” they are highborn, wealthy, and powerful. In contrast, the “slaves” are weak, sick, and, crucially, impotent. They cannot acquire what they need or want and are simply the subjects of the masters. What Nietzsche described here, in an admittedly highly abstract form, were the socio-economic conditions of the ancient world of the West, and the value system it embodied. He tried to explain why that value system became replaced with the one which we now inhabit.
He said that there was a “slave revolt”—not an actual one, but an “imaginary” and “conceptual” one. Impotent and poor slaves cannot become powerful or rich, but they can think of their poor, impotent situation in new terms. Rather than regarding their impotence as a negative thing, a lack in comparison to the strength of the masters, they can think of it as an admirable “peacefulness” or “gentleness.” Timidity and the desperate need for the comfort of others become instead “meekness” and “kindness.” What is previously “bad” becomes viewed as good. Conversely, the sexual abandon which the masters can enjoy becomes characterized as animal “lust,” their appetite as “gluttony,” and their wealth as “avarice.” The goods, and the masters’ capacity to acquire them, now become viewed as morally bad or “evil.”
This slave revolt, as Nietzsche called it, is an “imaginary revenge.” Recall that bad conscience means that human beings are in a standing state of psychological distress. In Nietzsche’s account of the slave revolt, he added a further, painful, psychological postulate—that of ressentiment (Nietzsche used the French word to distinguish this state from mere resentment). This is the powerful pain of frustration or impotence felt by the slaves, a pain brought about in reaction to things that block their drives, and their incapacity to gain what the masters possess. Since the slaves cannot acquire what they want, they suffer ressentiment; to be rid of it, they unconsciously invent this new order of values. They come to conceive the world in this new way and, in doing so, they reduce the pain of bad conscience and ressentiment because it provides a way of thinking of themselves as morally superior to the nobles.
Further interpretations
The first treatise provokes a number of reactions, including claims that the account is too abstract or impressionistic. Nietzsche offered some etymological evidence in support, some allusions to different cultures but not what one might call detailed historical evidence. Instead, he accounted for a detectable shift in morality in terms of general psychological kinds explaining that shift. It is a psychological conjecture about this shift in valuation. In any case, the first treatise is incomplete; Nietzsche elaborated on the GM with the discussion about the figure of the “priest” in the third treatise, and it is to that which we now turn.
As BGE 260 makes clear, the epithets “master” and “slave” characterize many different things and “moralities.” One thing they characterize is the general tendency of any person’s character. A masterly type is confident and resolute, whereas slave types are uncertain, full of self-doubt, and dependent upon others. The “priest” is another character type, mentioned in the first treatise, but whose crucial role only comes to the fore in the third. The priest type is one who is centrally “hostile to life” (GM III: 11), a hostility that shows itself in condemnation of existence; his practices express withdrawal from the world and, indeed, seem harmful to themselves (Nietzsche mentioned self-flagellation in this connection). The general disposition of the priests is to be repelled by the world in which we live. The priestly type, Nietzsche noted, seemed to embody a paradox, which he expressed as the idea of “life against life” (GM II: 13). How could something be against its own existence, and, indeed, existence itself? But this paradox is merely apparent. The priestly type’s hostility to life, his condemnation of existence, expresses something essential to life, namely will to power. The priest expresses his own desire for control and appropriation by giving an overall interpretation of meaning of existence, one which teaches not only the condemnation of this worldly existence, but also the promise of a different form of existence altogether, another world in which the suffering and pain of this one will be left behind. The priest’s hostility to life relates to his power because he can offer an interpretation of the constant suffering felt by humanity. He gains control both of himself and others by offering an entire interpretation of human nature and persuades the rest of humanity of it; this interpretation fits rather neatly with the values of the slave revolt.
How? Recall that the ressentiment of the slaves led them to invert the values of “master morality.” The riches, power, pleasure, and indifference to the general run of humanity of the master types began to be conceptualized as avarice, greed, self-centeredness, gluttony, and lust. The timidity and weakness of the slaves turned into meekness, gentleness, and kindness. This inversion offers imaginary compensation for what is, in fact, the lowly and dispossessed position of the lumpen lot of humanity. Nevertheless, the suffering remains, and the slave’s imaginary revolt only goes so far. What the priestly type can do is add to the rebellion an overall interpretation of human existence that justifies the values of the revolt and gives sense to the slaves’ suffering. Their negative evaluation of the masters’ good fortune fits well with the sense that this world is a temporary place and that there is a greater, spiritual reward waiting in another realm. The truly virtuous deny themselves what is otherwise appealing in this world—power, fortune, satisfaction of our sensual desires—because they “understand” that such things are illusory—mere temptations that beguile the morally weak. The slave’s values, born of ressentiment directed at the fortunate, are ripe for an interpretation in line with the priest’s hostility to life.
But what of the slaves’ suffering? Axiomatic to Nietzsche’s philosophy is the thesis that human beings cannot bear meaningless suffering, and, by the same token, they can bear any amount of suffering as long as it has a meaning. The priest offers such a meaning by exploiting the ordinary feelings of guilt and the ressentiment of the slaves, and by explaining their suffering in terms of sin and corruption. Human nature is inherently corrupt—we have fallen from grace—and we stand guilty before God. But, Nietzsche contended, while this overall interpretation gives meaning to suffering, it does so at the expense of increasing suffering. The ordinary misfortunes of the human animal, such as loss, pain, injury, or sickness, are overlaid with guilt and a sense of responsibility, together with a nondischargeable debt to God. The ascetic priest, who presents himself as offering a cure for the sick, actually makes that person sicker.
