I Want to Talk About Nietzsche

Introduction

I want to talk about Nietzsche.

When I read Nietzsche for the first time in my undergrad, I did not understand him at all. Nietzsche is surprisingly pleasant to read, compared to many philosophers. His writing is poetic rather than systematic, and he loves to write scathing insults. Consider the following quotes:

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

“The Christian faith… is… the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.”

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus… man… developed what was… called his 'soul.

The difficulty I had with Nietzsche was due, I think, to the foreignness of the ideas he presented. Nietzsche is critical of many ideas that seem self-evident. For example, he is hugely critical of utilitarian philosophy, or ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.

Over the past couple of months, I have read two of Nietzsche’s works: Beyond Good and Evil and On The Genealogy of Morals, and I found that I read them with new understanding. In this post, I want to explore my understanding of Nietzschean morality and its significance to me.

Disclaimer: I am not a Nietzsche scholar and everything I say could be wrong.

Morality in Neitzche

1. Against Objective Morality

One of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas is his criticism of modern morality. Nietzsche says that philosophers have a bad habit of constructing complex moral systems to justify their moral intuitions. The problem is not their lack of objectivity, but rather their failure to acknowledge that they are working from their moral intuitions. Nietzsche is much less interested in people ‘being good’ and much more interested in people self-actualizing.

2. Master and Slave Morality

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche gives a narrative of how our current utilitarian Christian morality came to be. In ye olden times, morality was defined by the strong, and moral was that which they did. Consider the Iliad. It is not a story of good verses evil, but a war over the most beautiful woman in the world. The heroes of the Iliad were primarily concerned with honour and deeds, rather than ‘doing good’.

This is what Nietzsche thought of as Master Morality. Master Morality is primarily concerned with action and capacity, in the achievement of great things. Often these great deeds included the oppression of others (e.g., conquest, building monuments, etc.). These oppressed others developed Slave Morality in reaction to the morality of their masters and oppressors. Rather than finding goodness in greatness, the oppressed found goodness in restraint. Goodness was not about what one does, but rather in what one does not. This is exemplified in Christian morality, which Nietzsche considers to be slave morality personified. The ten commandments, for example, are all about things you will not do. That is not to say that it is solely religious. Nietzsche diagnosis atheists of his time as carrying on the slave morality tradition, just in a different form (e.g., utilitarianism).

For reasons that I will not go into here, Nietzsche argues that Slave Morality gradually supplanted Master Morality, and is now the dominant form of morality.

3. Goodness verses Greatness

In putting forward this account, I understand Nietzsche to be speaking to those who he views as capable of rising above Slave Morality. He is not interested in speaking to everyone: the majority of people will remain mediocre. Instead, Nietzsche is specifically speaking to people with a potential for greatness, a generation of philosophers who will explore new realms of what it means to be actualized human beings. Nietzsche is not interested in the well-being of the masses. He is interested in people achieving great things, in heroic self-actualization.

4. Slave Morality, Inner Life and Art

The thing I found most impactful, on a personal level, was Nietzsche’s reflection on our inner lives. By Nietzsche’s account, the oppressed classes have significantly more nuanced and complex inner lives than their oppressors. If you can do things, then you do them. If you cannot, you turn inward.

The slave revolt in morality begins when 'ressentiment' itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.

The development of this inner life has repercussions. The more we think about the world, the more anxiety it induces in us. It is this kind of reflection that led us to both create God and kill him.

Art is a way of coping with this anxiety. Through art we attain an active outlet for the complexity of thought that has welled up inside of us.

What I find most interesting here is the idea that we cultivate an inner life when we are unable to thrive in our outer life. Due to the pandemic, I have been forced to live in my own head even more than usual, and as a result I was quite unwell for a great deal of 2020. A significant part of this was feeling like I was lost in my own head, and I have been feeling amazingly well ever since I’ve been really able to focus on creative work.

5. Summary

I am not persuaded that we should not care about the wellbeing of others, but on a second reading of these two texts I found myself much more engaged with the narrative that Nietzsche was putting forward. Ultimately, I felt like Nietzsche’s point was to get us to question our assumptions about the nature of morality. I also do find his critique of negative-morality quite appealing. It seems right to me that we should seek morality in action rather than inaction or conformity.