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The Radical Goals of Slave Morality in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2020

Thomas Meredith
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Abstract

This paper offers a new account of Nietzsche's critique of morality in the first treatise of his On the Genealogy of Morality. According to the general view, Nietzsche places political revenge at the center of slave morality: the priest invents slave morality in order to rule the noble. I argue that this view is incomplete, for Nietzsche's deeper critique reveals that the priest's revenge is not purely political but also radically ontological. Ultimately, the priest aims at supplanting not just the noble but also the rule of nature. This reading reveals the priest's attempt to transform the natural order of rank through imagining the human being as subject to the omnipotent God of monotheism, i.e., the “just God.” This interpretation not only broadens our understanding of Nietzsche's critique of morality but also clarifies its purpose, namely, to show us how the demand for morality can blind us to the world's truths.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , Spring 2020 , pp. 247 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2020

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Heinrich Meier, Clifford Orwin, Leigh Meredith, and the reviewers and editor of the Review of Politics for their instructive comments on early versions of this paper.

References

1 Citations to Nietzsche's works are given parenthetically in the text, referring to aphorism numbers or section headings, and using the following abbreviations AC = Antichrist; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; D = Daybreak; EH = Ecce Homo; HAH = Human, All Too Human; GM = On the Genealogy of Morality; KSA = Kritische Studienausgabe; SB = Sämtliche Briefe; TI = Twilight of the Idols; Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra; WS = The Wanderer and His Shadow. In the cases of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo, references are to the part and section numbers (Z II 20, GM III 12). The discussions of previous works in the third part of Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” are cited by the appropriate abbreviation followed by the section number (EH, “BGE” 2). References to the Nachlass in the Kritsche Studienausgabe are by volume, notebook, and section number——e.g., volume XIII, notebook 11, section 50, is 13: 11[50]. Translations of Nietzsche's works are my own.

2 Cf. Risse, Matthias, “The Second Treatise in the Genealogy of Morality: Nietzsche on the Origin of Bad Conscience,” European Journal of Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2001): 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Galchinsky, Michael, “Political Pamphlet,” in The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, ed. Burwick, Frederick et al. (Blackwell: Oxford, 2012), 1025–26Google Scholar.

4 Scheler, Max, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, ed. Frings, Manfred S. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2004)Google Scholar; Berkowitz, Peter, The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Strong, Tracy, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Reginster, Bernard, “Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 2 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Anderson, R. Lanier, “On the Nobility of Nietzsche's Priests,” in Nietzsche's “On the Genealogy of Morality”: A Critical Guide, ed. May, Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Jenkins, Scott, “Ressentiment, Imaginary Revenge, and the Slave Revolt,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96, no. 1 (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Maudemarie Clark, introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998): xxvii–xxxi; Berkowitz, Ethics of an Immoralist, 67–99; Owen, David, Nietzsche's “Genealogy of Morality” (London: Routledge, 2014), 109, 131; cf. 75–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leiter, Brian, Nietzsche On Morality (London: Routledge, 2015), 146–54Google Scholar.

6 Owen, Nietzsche's “Genealogy of Morality,” 109.

7 Ibid., 131–32.

8 SB VIII 877; cf. also 878. For a general overview of the Genealogy’s publication history see Schaberg, William H., The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 122–26Google Scholar.

9 SB VIII 880; cf. also 881

10 SB VIII 897.

11 Reginster, “Ressentiment and Valuation,” 281–305 and Affirmation of Life, 251–60. Cf. also Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, 31–34; Berkowitz, Ethics of an Immoralist, 73–83; Strong, Politics of Transfiguration, 237–45; Anderson, “On the Nobility of Nietzsche's Priests,” 24–55; Jenkins, “Ressentiment, Imaginary Revenge, and the Slave Revolt,” 200–202.

12 Reginster, “Ressentiment and Valuation,” 296–97, and Affirmation of Life, 255–56.

13 Wallace, R. J., “Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making Sense of Nietzsche's Slave Revolt,” Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Leiter, Brian and Sinhababu, Neil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110–37Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 111.

15 Ibid., 130.

16 I borrow the term Binnenmoral from Max Weber. See his Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Abriss der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), 300–315, and Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1956), 214–18.

17 Nietzsche briefly sketches without examining the implications of the noble's Binnenmoral for the presence of “evil” in noble societies in section 11. However, he fleshes out those implications in the second treatise (cf. GM II 16–19).

18 Reginster, “Ressentiment and Valuation,” 281–305.

19 Anderson, “Nobility of Nietzsche's Priests,” 24–55.

20 Snelson, Avery, “The History, Origin, and Meaning of Nietzsche's Slave Revolt in Morality,” Inquiry 60, nos. 1–2 (2017): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Reginster, “Ressentiment and Valuation,” 286–88, and Affirmation of Life, 254–55; Anderson, “Nobility of Nietzsche's Priests,” 52; Snelson, “History, Origin, and Meaning,” 24.

22 Reginster, “Ressentiment and Valuation,” 289; Anderson, “Nobility of Nietzsche's Priests,” 30–31; Snelson, “History, Origin, and Meaning,” 12.

23 Reginster, “Ressentiment and Valuation,” 286; Anderson, “Nobility of Nietzsche's Priests,” 48–49; Snelson, “History, Origin, and Meaning,” 8.

24 Loeb, Paul S., “The Priestly Slave Revolt in Morality,” Nietzsche-Studien 47, no. 1 (2018): 100–139CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Ibid., 116–28.

26 Ibid., 127.

27 Ibid. Cf. also 109, 111, 123, and 137.

28 Ibid., 111.

29 Cf. BGE 51 and Nietzsche's Spring 1887 note from the Nachlass: “The priest occasionally the god himself, at the very least his proxy / In itself ascetic habits and practices are far from indicating an antinatural and existence-hostile [daseinsfeindliche] attitude: just as little degeneracy and disease / Self-overcoming, with severe and dreadful inventions: a means of having and demanding reverence of oneself: asceticism as means of power / The priest as representative of a suprahuman feeling of power, even as a good player of a god, which is his calling to represent, grasps instinctively after such means by which he attains a certain formidableness in control over himself” (KSA 12: 7[5]).

30 Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, 31–34; Strong, Politics of Transfiguration, 237–45; Peter Berkowitz, Ethics of an Immoralist, 73–83.

31 Meier, Heinrich, Was ist Nietzsches Zarathustra? Eine philosophische Auseinandersetzung (Munich: Beck, 2017), 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Aaron Ridley presents an alternative to my reading of the subject in GM I as a transcendental subject. According to him, Nietzsche identifies two distinct though related conceptions of free will: whereas GM I analyzes a material subject, GM III analyzes a transcendental subject. He argues that the invention of the transcendental subject represents a development in slave morality beyond what Nietzsche describes in the first treatise. See Ridley, Nietzsche's Conscience, 26–37 and 54–57. However, Ridley's reading is made problematic by the fact that the transcendental subject is present in GM I insofar as the revenge fantasy of the weak, i.e., the Last Judgment, presupposes it: eternal punishment requires an eternal soul (cf. GM I 14–15). Furthermore, the first treatise no less than the third tells a “transcendental” story. In the first the slave is rewarded for his worldy suffering in the next with the spectacle of the noble's eternal suffering in hell; in the third he comes to understand himself as a “sinner” and therefore deserving of his own suffering. In both cases, though in different respects, the slave interprets “a whole mysterious machinery of salvation into suffering” (GM II 7). Nietzsche's double presentation of free will then reveals different features of the same phenomenon, not, as Ridley suggests, two distinct formulations of it.

33 Consider Nietzsche's Fall 1887 note from the Nachlass: “On the Psychology of Metaphysics / This world is seeming—consequently there is a true world. This world is conditional—consequently there is an absolute world. This world is contradictory—consequently there is a world without contradiction. This world is becoming—consequently there is a world of being. All wrong conclusions (blind trust in reason: if A is then its counterconcept B must also be) / Suffering inspires these conclusions: they are essentially wishes that there must be such a world; likewise the hatred of a world that makes suffer is expressed in the fact that another is imagined, a valuable one: the ressentiment of the metaphysician toward the world is creative here” (KSA 12: 8[2]).

34 The editor of the Loeb Classic Library's edition of The Annals notes that “Jewish ‘misanthropy’—which was proverbial—may have suggested the charge” (The Annals of Tacitus, ed. John Jackson [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937], 285n2).

35 See Daniel, Jerry L., “Anti-Semitism in the Hellenistic-Roman Period,” Journal of Biblical Studies 98, no. 1 (1979): 58–62Google Scholar.

36 Translation from The Four Gospels and the Revelation, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Dorsett, 1979), 284–85.