"ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS"
=============================
First Essay: “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Wolran Kim
March 2014
Nietzsche criticizes the philosophy and civilization of modern Western society in his book, On the Genealogy of Morals. As he shows in the subtitle, A Polemic, he attacks the history and existing value of moral positions. His Preface states, “we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason,” because “we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves” (451). Here, “The origin of our moral prejudices” began with self-contradiction and the lack of self-criticism. He separates theological prejudice from moral prejudice, and devises the value judgments of good and evil through asking, “What value do they themselves possess?” (453).
“But what if the reverse were true?” (456), this question is the beginning of his “dialectical” turn to find the value of value. According to him, this subversion might have caused the sacrifice of the future for the present, and this tragedy would be blamed on dangerous morality. On the Genealogy of Morals is seen as the staging of a revaluation of all existing notions and beliefs. His aphorism could be the beginning of an exegesis toward all IDEAS and people should ruminate as a cow in Nietzsche’s words. This essay is going to show how he demands to overturn or suspend many of our assumptions through genealogical methods. In Nietzsche’s distinction, we realize how we are generally tempted to see inherent meanings, such as the opposite notions of “good and bad” and “good and evil.”
Nietzsche’s aphorism or controversy seems to be warnings like “do not drink the water.” People think their water is clean enough to drink, but he wants to show that it may not be clean at all. The “water” could be all normal thoughts and fixed concepts. He shows how the moral evaluation and the phenomenon that people usually never question things of this sort may have been distorted and mutilated. People see only one side, often the front, but Nietzsche emphasizes the need for conversion of the valuation from showing both sides, including the back. In this sense, it is indeed ironic that his theory is distorted and misinterpreted for Nazism and Fascism.
His essay gives a feeling of uneasiness and a troubled mind to the readers, because “which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time?” (451), as is his inquiry. However, this troubled mind is the beginning of the establishment of a real, true value system. Shaking and digging the roots of the values is the most significant purpose of Nietzsche’s book, and this intention has a tacit understanding of his concept of “the superman (Übermensch).” The concept of superman gives us consideration of how a man should be more than just human-all-too-human.
The superman, who was described by Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is willing to risk all for the sake of the enhancement of humanity. The superman has his own values, independent of others, and lives without any predetermined values. Nietzsche’s superman figure appears to be like the oriental saint of Buddha while there is no existence of the Christian God in the East. Eastern ideas take the human’s self-examination more seriously above the eager desire for the Absolute.
The First Essay, “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad,” shows how and why “good and evil” trans-valuates into “good and bad,” and establishes them as modern concepts and values. Human values and consciousness have had fixed ideas and stereotypes through history and social systems, thus this book might be seen as staging the impossibility of all cases. “Good and bad” is one of the most basic and primitive notions used to express human values. This belief in the notion of “good and bad” is the beginning of thought, almost undoubtedly the same as the firm equation 1+1=2. However, Nietzsche overturns this simple (actually never simple) belief, and shows examples of transvaluation and established values.
Nietzsche tries to show the REAL origins of our good and evil, and the value of value. All human’s constructive notions have moral prejudices, so people judge unjustly. His Genealogical Method uses etymology, physiology, psychology, medicine, ethnic studies, evolutionary biology, the British Genealogy, and even a utilitarian approach to show paradoxes, self-contradictions, slippages, and overstatements of inherent meanings. His social, political, and religious analysis may be collected as a physiology of history, because history is made from the dominant thought, the authority of power. Also, his notion of the Ground Truth refers to Nihilism because there is no origin of good and bad; it came from society and power relations. The distorted origin is transferred by heredity through self-deceiving humans and humans as a society.
Nietzsche, firstly, lays his finger on the paradoxes of the English psychologists calling them “living riddles.” They are making mistakes by seeking truly effective and directing agents in the place of passive and ignorant grounds. Nietzsche doubts if their fallacies possibly come from self-deceiving instincts for belittling man, and pessimistic suspicions or mistrustfulness of idealists. He hopes that they may be brave toward repellent, unchristian, and immoral truths. “But it is, unhappily, certain that the historical spirit itself is lacking in them, that precisely all the good spirits of history itself have left them in the lurch!” (461).
He criticizes their unhistorical thinking and immature moral genealogy. They seek the origin of the concepts and place the judgment of “good” in the wrong place. The definition of “good” did not originate with un-egoistic actions of people who are called good, but it was “the good” themselves. This pathos of distance is the real origin of the opposition between “good” and “bad.” The antithesis concept of “egoistic” and “unegoistic” is consciously aroused when aristocratic value judgments are declined. This herd instinct becomes moral evaluation, just as fixed ideas and brain-sickness; such is the equivalent concept between moral, unegoistic, and disinterested. There is historical untenability in the value judgment of “good.”
There is also psychological absurdity in the value of “good”; the origin of “good,” the utility of the unegoistic action, have been impressed on the consciousness more clearly instead of being forgotten. In fact, Epicurism (Epicurus’s Hedonism) was accepted as the majority utility in the British Empiricism. The meaning “good” shows the same conceptual transformation in the etymological significance as well; it is developed as “nobel,” “aristocratic,” “with a soul of a high order,” and “with a privileged soul.” On the contrary, the concept “bad” refers to “common,” “plebeian,” and “low,” as parallels run and necessary development occurs. This prejudice was erupted as a vulgar eloquence in the English plebeianism, and here is the psychological paradox of the notion “good.”
Nietzsche doubts the etymological derivation of “good” and “bad,” and thinks all European “commune”—modern democracy and anarchism— may signify tremendous counterattacks dreaming of the conqueror and master race. According to his hypothesis, there is no assurance of the Aryan’s physiological superiority. The etymological origin of words were “ripe and sweet (466)” as was the desire of power. The root words of “good” have the same nuance as virtue, noble, or higher rank; “Granted that, in the majority of cases, they designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the commander”)“ (465).
The Greek word, esthlos becomes a slogan of reality, actual, and true, and entirely transforms the sense of the word ”noble.“ The words, kakos and deilos are meanings of the plebeian in contradistinction to the agathos, an emphasized cowardice. The Latin, malus may designate the black-haired and dark-colored man, distinguished from the pre-Aryan, the blond. Therefore Nietzsche assumes that German gut [good] may even signify ”the godlike,“ or ”godlike race,“ as having the same origin of ancient Rome’s ”goodness.”
The concept of political superiority always transforms into the concept of spiritual superiority. Nietzsche criticizes human’s dangerous instinct, depth and evil compared to that of animals; “man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil” (469). In the priestly caste of political superiority, “good” and “bad” were developed as denotations of social status such as “pure” and “impure.”
The “pure one” meant one who washes himself, who forbids himself of certain foods, and who has an aversion to blood, but it becomes the mean authority of priests from unhealthy priestly aristocracies. Priests’ entire antisensualistic metaphysic—certain forms of diet, fasting, sexual continence, and flight into the wilderness—become more dangerous characters than “arrogance, revenge, acuteness, profligacy, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease (469).”
The priestly mode of valuation is easily developed as confrontation and conflict through detachment from the knightly-aristocratic. “The priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent” (469). Nietzsche shows the Jews as the most notable example of revenge against the powerful rulers through overturning their spiritual value. They subverted the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) into the slave morals (good = poor = impotent = low = suffering = deprived = sick = ugly = blessed by God).
According to Nietzsche, the slave revolt began with the Jews, and Christianity inherited this Jewish revaluation. “This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this ”Redeemer“ who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible” (471). Israel reached the purpose of divine revenge through this Redeemer. “Everything is visibly becoming Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized” (472). The Jews’—who had the most world-historic mission—religious ideology brought the victory to the people who were the slaves, the mob, or the herd.
Nietzsche analyzes ressentiment socially and psychology, from the slave revolts in morality; he brings this up as the genealogy of morals. Ressentiment is firstly, imaginary revenge by impotent people, thus this is not an automatic response, but a peculiar reaction. Secondly, this is a negative mentality; a denial subject comes only from an antagonistic relationship.
Thirdly, this is the product of reaction and the result of passive standing, thus it is outside action being affected first. Fourthly, this is reactionary; opposing people are setting up the “the Evil One” first, and identifying themselves as the “good one.” Here, conflict outside power is regarded as the enemy, and the implementation of revenge is specifically moral, the slave morality. Nietzsche describes ressentiment, “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values” (472).
Nietzsche asks then, who is the real “evil one” in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The noble man is contrary to the man of ressentiment who is neither upright nor naïve nor honest. “Evil” in slave morality is not the same as “bad” in noble morality; the concept of “evil” toward the powerful and noble man is just distorted by the eye of ressentiment. Thus, all these instincts of reaction and ressentiment are the meaning of all culture, and these “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to man and are the skeptical accusations of culture.
“The sight of man now make us weary—what is nihilism today if it is not that?--We are weary of man” (480). Nietzsche says that the diminution and leveling of European man hide our greatest danger, and make us tired of man. In this nihilistic result, he criticizes the misinterpretation of the seduction of language. He emphasizes that fossilized distorted language to regain reason, and to see the fundamental errors of reason. The fundamental errors are that counterfeit and self-deception of impotence wear the quiet virtue.
Nietzsche scornfully satirizes about how ideals are made on earth; “and impotence which does not requite into ‘goodness of heart’; anxious lowliness into ‘humility’; subjection to those one hates into ‘obedience’ (that is, to one of whom they say he commands this subjection—they call him God)” (483).
The inoffensiveness and the cowardice of the weak man acquire names of patience and virtue. The weak man’s desire is called victory of justice, not revenge. They call all the suffering of life the anticipated future bliss and ‘the Last Judgment.’ “His inability for revenge is called unwillingness to revenge, perhaps even forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do—we alone know what they do!’) (483). Here, Nietzsche seems to be mocking the Bible verse from Luke 23:34, ”Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
This part is convincing of why he is classified as an atheist, and people say that he went mad because he was not a believer in God. “But think of what awaits us on the day of his return, the day of his triumph!” (485); this serious inquiry about the bliss of Paradise—the kingdom of God—expresses general skepticism of religion and the Christian belief. A theist and an atheist can never understand each other because faith cannot be explained or verified. Religious belief is often consoled by the act of belief itself rather than the absolute being.
Interestingly, Nietzsche alludes to Napoleon as the “supreme rights of the few” against the “supreme rights of the majority.” He sees Napoleon as a “synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman,” and this view could be regarded as him preferring master morality above slave morality, concerning his ideal of the superman. As Nietzsche mentions in the last section, the train of thought will not reach the end easily even though we are left at his point. Also his words, “Must the ancient fire not someday flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation?” (490), seem to be the prediction of the Holocaust, frightfully.
However, he does not express anything about anti-Semitism; rather, he uses the Jews as a method of physiological investigation here, On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche examines the origins and meanings of our different moral concepts. “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad” contrasts with his notion of “master morality” and “slave morality.” “Good and Evil” is not an opposing notion by his genealogical method, rather, it is seen as conceptual schemes that all ideation takes place from particular perspectives. The opposite concept of “Good and Bad” originated from the confrontation between the masters and the slaves in social systems.
=============================
First Essay: “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Wolran Kim
March 2014
Nietzsche criticizes the philosophy and civilization of modern Western society in his book, On the Genealogy of Morals. As he shows in the subtitle, A Polemic, he attacks the history and existing value of moral positions. His Preface states, “we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason,” because “we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves” (451). Here, “The origin of our moral prejudices” began with self-contradiction and the lack of self-criticism. He separates theological prejudice from moral prejudice, and devises the value judgments of good and evil through asking, “What value do they themselves possess?” (453).
“But what if the reverse were true?” (456), this question is the beginning of his “dialectical” turn to find the value of value. According to him, this subversion might have caused the sacrifice of the future for the present, and this tragedy would be blamed on dangerous morality. On the Genealogy of Morals is seen as the staging of a revaluation of all existing notions and beliefs. His aphorism could be the beginning of an exegesis toward all IDEAS and people should ruminate as a cow in Nietzsche’s words. This essay is going to show how he demands to overturn or suspend many of our assumptions through genealogical methods. In Nietzsche’s distinction, we realize how we are generally tempted to see inherent meanings, such as the opposite notions of “good and bad” and “good and evil.”
Nietzsche’s aphorism or controversy seems to be warnings like “do not drink the water.” People think their water is clean enough to drink, but he wants to show that it may not be clean at all. The “water” could be all normal thoughts and fixed concepts. He shows how the moral evaluation and the phenomenon that people usually never question things of this sort may have been distorted and mutilated. People see only one side, often the front, but Nietzsche emphasizes the need for conversion of the valuation from showing both sides, including the back. In this sense, it is indeed ironic that his theory is distorted and misinterpreted for Nazism and Fascism.
His essay gives a feeling of uneasiness and a troubled mind to the readers, because “which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time?” (451), as is his inquiry. However, this troubled mind is the beginning of the establishment of a real, true value system. Shaking and digging the roots of the values is the most significant purpose of Nietzsche’s book, and this intention has a tacit understanding of his concept of “the superman (Übermensch).” The concept of superman gives us consideration of how a man should be more than just human-all-too-human.
The superman, who was described by Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is willing to risk all for the sake of the enhancement of humanity. The superman has his own values, independent of others, and lives without any predetermined values. Nietzsche’s superman figure appears to be like the oriental saint of Buddha while there is no existence of the Christian God in the East. Eastern ideas take the human’s self-examination more seriously above the eager desire for the Absolute.
The First Essay, “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad,” shows how and why “good and evil” trans-valuates into “good and bad,” and establishes them as modern concepts and values. Human values and consciousness have had fixed ideas and stereotypes through history and social systems, thus this book might be seen as staging the impossibility of all cases. “Good and bad” is one of the most basic and primitive notions used to express human values. This belief in the notion of “good and bad” is the beginning of thought, almost undoubtedly the same as the firm equation 1+1=2. However, Nietzsche overturns this simple (actually never simple) belief, and shows examples of transvaluation and established values.
Nietzsche tries to show the REAL origins of our good and evil, and the value of value. All human’s constructive notions have moral prejudices, so people judge unjustly. His Genealogical Method uses etymology, physiology, psychology, medicine, ethnic studies, evolutionary biology, the British Genealogy, and even a utilitarian approach to show paradoxes, self-contradictions, slippages, and overstatements of inherent meanings. His social, political, and religious analysis may be collected as a physiology of history, because history is made from the dominant thought, the authority of power. Also, his notion of the Ground Truth refers to Nihilism because there is no origin of good and bad; it came from society and power relations. The distorted origin is transferred by heredity through self-deceiving humans and humans as a society.
Nietzsche, firstly, lays his finger on the paradoxes of the English psychologists calling them “living riddles.” They are making mistakes by seeking truly effective and directing agents in the place of passive and ignorant grounds. Nietzsche doubts if their fallacies possibly come from self-deceiving instincts for belittling man, and pessimistic suspicions or mistrustfulness of idealists. He hopes that they may be brave toward repellent, unchristian, and immoral truths. “But it is, unhappily, certain that the historical spirit itself is lacking in them, that precisely all the good spirits of history itself have left them in the lurch!” (461).
He criticizes their unhistorical thinking and immature moral genealogy. They seek the origin of the concepts and place the judgment of “good” in the wrong place. The definition of “good” did not originate with un-egoistic actions of people who are called good, but it was “the good” themselves. This pathos of distance is the real origin of the opposition between “good” and “bad.” The antithesis concept of “egoistic” and “unegoistic” is consciously aroused when aristocratic value judgments are declined. This herd instinct becomes moral evaluation, just as fixed ideas and brain-sickness; such is the equivalent concept between moral, unegoistic, and disinterested. There is historical untenability in the value judgment of “good.”
There is also psychological absurdity in the value of “good”; the origin of “good,” the utility of the unegoistic action, have been impressed on the consciousness more clearly instead of being forgotten. In fact, Epicurism (Epicurus’s Hedonism) was accepted as the majority utility in the British Empiricism. The meaning “good” shows the same conceptual transformation in the etymological significance as well; it is developed as “nobel,” “aristocratic,” “with a soul of a high order,” and “with a privileged soul.” On the contrary, the concept “bad” refers to “common,” “plebeian,” and “low,” as parallels run and necessary development occurs. This prejudice was erupted as a vulgar eloquence in the English plebeianism, and here is the psychological paradox of the notion “good.”
Nietzsche doubts the etymological derivation of “good” and “bad,” and thinks all European “commune”—modern democracy and anarchism— may signify tremendous counterattacks dreaming of the conqueror and master race. According to his hypothesis, there is no assurance of the Aryan’s physiological superiority. The etymological origin of words were “ripe and sweet (466)” as was the desire of power. The root words of “good” have the same nuance as virtue, noble, or higher rank; “Granted that, in the majority of cases, they designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the commander”)“ (465).
The Greek word, esthlos becomes a slogan of reality, actual, and true, and entirely transforms the sense of the word ”noble.“ The words, kakos and deilos are meanings of the plebeian in contradistinction to the agathos, an emphasized cowardice. The Latin, malus may designate the black-haired and dark-colored man, distinguished from the pre-Aryan, the blond. Therefore Nietzsche assumes that German gut [good] may even signify ”the godlike,“ or ”godlike race,“ as having the same origin of ancient Rome’s ”goodness.”
The concept of political superiority always transforms into the concept of spiritual superiority. Nietzsche criticizes human’s dangerous instinct, depth and evil compared to that of animals; “man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil” (469). In the priestly caste of political superiority, “good” and “bad” were developed as denotations of social status such as “pure” and “impure.”
The “pure one” meant one who washes himself, who forbids himself of certain foods, and who has an aversion to blood, but it becomes the mean authority of priests from unhealthy priestly aristocracies. Priests’ entire antisensualistic metaphysic—certain forms of diet, fasting, sexual continence, and flight into the wilderness—become more dangerous characters than “arrogance, revenge, acuteness, profligacy, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease (469).”
The priestly mode of valuation is easily developed as confrontation and conflict through detachment from the knightly-aristocratic. “The priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent” (469). Nietzsche shows the Jews as the most notable example of revenge against the powerful rulers through overturning their spiritual value. They subverted the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) into the slave morals (good = poor = impotent = low = suffering = deprived = sick = ugly = blessed by God).
According to Nietzsche, the slave revolt began with the Jews, and Christianity inherited this Jewish revaluation. “This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this ”Redeemer“ who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible” (471). Israel reached the purpose of divine revenge through this Redeemer. “Everything is visibly becoming Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized” (472). The Jews’—who had the most world-historic mission—religious ideology brought the victory to the people who were the slaves, the mob, or the herd.
Nietzsche analyzes ressentiment socially and psychology, from the slave revolts in morality; he brings this up as the genealogy of morals. Ressentiment is firstly, imaginary revenge by impotent people, thus this is not an automatic response, but a peculiar reaction. Secondly, this is a negative mentality; a denial subject comes only from an antagonistic relationship.
Thirdly, this is the product of reaction and the result of passive standing, thus it is outside action being affected first. Fourthly, this is reactionary; opposing people are setting up the “the Evil One” first, and identifying themselves as the “good one.” Here, conflict outside power is regarded as the enemy, and the implementation of revenge is specifically moral, the slave morality. Nietzsche describes ressentiment, “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values” (472).
Nietzsche asks then, who is the real “evil one” in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The noble man is contrary to the man of ressentiment who is neither upright nor naïve nor honest. “Evil” in slave morality is not the same as “bad” in noble morality; the concept of “evil” toward the powerful and noble man is just distorted by the eye of ressentiment. Thus, all these instincts of reaction and ressentiment are the meaning of all culture, and these “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to man and are the skeptical accusations of culture.
“The sight of man now make us weary—what is nihilism today if it is not that?--We are weary of man” (480). Nietzsche says that the diminution and leveling of European man hide our greatest danger, and make us tired of man. In this nihilistic result, he criticizes the misinterpretation of the seduction of language. He emphasizes that fossilized distorted language to regain reason, and to see the fundamental errors of reason. The fundamental errors are that counterfeit and self-deception of impotence wear the quiet virtue.
Nietzsche scornfully satirizes about how ideals are made on earth; “and impotence which does not requite into ‘goodness of heart’; anxious lowliness into ‘humility’; subjection to those one hates into ‘obedience’ (that is, to one of whom they say he commands this subjection—they call him God)” (483).
The inoffensiveness and the cowardice of the weak man acquire names of patience and virtue. The weak man’s desire is called victory of justice, not revenge. They call all the suffering of life the anticipated future bliss and ‘the Last Judgment.’ “His inability for revenge is called unwillingness to revenge, perhaps even forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do—we alone know what they do!’) (483). Here, Nietzsche seems to be mocking the Bible verse from Luke 23:34, ”Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
This part is convincing of why he is classified as an atheist, and people say that he went mad because he was not a believer in God. “But think of what awaits us on the day of his return, the day of his triumph!” (485); this serious inquiry about the bliss of Paradise—the kingdom of God—expresses general skepticism of religion and the Christian belief. A theist and an atheist can never understand each other because faith cannot be explained or verified. Religious belief is often consoled by the act of belief itself rather than the absolute being.
Interestingly, Nietzsche alludes to Napoleon as the “supreme rights of the few” against the “supreme rights of the majority.” He sees Napoleon as a “synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman,” and this view could be regarded as him preferring master morality above slave morality, concerning his ideal of the superman. As Nietzsche mentions in the last section, the train of thought will not reach the end easily even though we are left at his point. Also his words, “Must the ancient fire not someday flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation?” (490), seem to be the prediction of the Holocaust, frightfully.
However, he does not express anything about anti-Semitism; rather, he uses the Jews as a method of physiological investigation here, On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche examines the origins and meanings of our different moral concepts. “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad” contrasts with his notion of “master morality” and “slave morality.” “Good and Evil” is not an opposing notion by his genealogical method, rather, it is seen as conceptual schemes that all ideation takes place from particular perspectives. The opposite concept of “Good and Bad” originated from the confrontation between the masters and the slaves in social systems.