A review of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals

In our hypersensitive era, where feelings sometimes impair the ability to read disinterestedly, one wonders how some students are able to read the works of Nietzsche. In the Genealogy of Morals he attempts to trace and assess basic ideas of right and wrong, but in the process attacks the taken for granted assumptions and orthodoxies that characterize the contemporary world: diversity, equality, secularism, religion, science, and much else. I found myself cringing when reading certain passages, even though I am of the generation that, unlike today’s, did not really find things offensive. This emotional reaction was salutary, because it forced me ask why he produced that effect. After some reflection, my tentative conclusions are first, that he forces me (and most readers, I suspect) to face their deepest and unquestioned assumptions about morality and social order, and second, that he does this with an exhilarating style of writing that is rhetorically vertiginous and conceptually effluvial; at times, one has the sensation of spinning in a whirlpool of ideas that are both repulsive and fascinating.

This blog post is animated by the principle that his ideas deserve to be taken seriously despite their repugnance. This means avoiding the common contemporary practice of finding offense when an author expresses things that are shocking or outrageous. It is in this spirit that I will address the following aspects of the Genealogy of Morals: his argument on the origin of our (i.e. Western) morality and its ideological offshoots; his assertions of its emasculating and detrimental impact on society; the style of prose through which his arguments are made; and, lastly, his concluding argument on the difficulty of reconciling romance/family with the vocation of the philosopher/scholar.

Axiom of Evil

As a trained philologist and classicist with an impressive knowledge of ancient and Eastern civilizations, Nietzsche approaches the puzzle of the origin of morality through the identification of the etymological origins of moral language, and via the cross-cultural comparison between contemporary Western Europe and ancient Greek, Roman, and Hindu civilizations. His conclusion is stark: modern Western civilization embodies the triumph of “slave morality”, which replaced—from Nietzsche’s point of view—the far superior “master morality”.

As the above implies, Nietzsche rejected any idea of objective and universal morality, whether the religious kind assumed by monotheism, or the secular versions of the Enlightenment (e.g. Kant’s categorical imperative, or utilitarianism). In fact, he rejects any idea of the existence of some external, objective truth upon which morality must be based. Rather, the essential, defining, and unmistakable feature of all organic life, including humans’, is what he calls the will to power, defined as the natural propensity to exert force, strength, cruelty, and domination. Not all humans have this function, however. It is the purview of what he calls the “master race”, which he defines as the Aryan, blond beasts of prey who conquer, enslave, rape, murder and—get ready for it—enjoy this aspect of their animal, instinctual drives. Those on the receiving end of this ceaseless struggle for conquest and domination, Nietzsche tells us, are the weak, oppressed, swarthy and dark-haired beings who are fated to be slaves (presumably that includes swarthy dark haired Southern Italians like me). It is from this binary opposition that Nietzsche adduces the existence of two moralities—that of the master and the slave. The question about particular epochs and civilizations, then, is which morality reigns supreme.

Antiquity was characterized with, among other things, the master morality, and the language of that period reflects this. In the ancient world, the concepts “Good” and “Bad” did not designate abstract moral principles. Rather, they referred to value judgments of one of the two groups mentioned above. Good meant membership to the natural aristocracy of the master race, while bad meant belonging to the weaker, “inferior” group. Under these conditions, Nietzsche believed, man lived in a halcyon era where excellence, happiness, and strength flourished. It was a time when man was closer to his animal and instinctive nature, and could experience the instinctual joy of conquest, cruelty, and subjection. The strongest elements of the aristocracy could, without moral consideration, indifferent to danger and oblivious to the fear of death, satisfy their lust for war, victory, and enslavement. Here, Nietzsche believed, true greatness could flourish.

But two thousand years ago, the aristocratic and conquering morality of the master race—which, he repeatedly affirms, is organic and natural—was beginning to crumble. That date, not coincidently, coincides with the emergence of Christianity in world history, which Nietzsche blames for the overturning of the master morality and replacing it with the moral system of the oppressed, “inferior” slaves. The culprit was the group from which Jesus arose, namely, the Jews, who successfully and completely overturned the moral system of the conquering Aryans by asserting the moral value of the weak and oppressed. As Nietzsche says:

“It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods) ventured, with an awesome consistency, to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to hold fast to it with the teeth of the most profound hatred born of weakness this contrary equation, namely, ‘the wretched are alone the good; the poor, the weak, the lowly are alone the good; the suffering, the needy, the sick, the loathsome are the only ones who are pious, the only ones who are blessed, salvation is for them alone – but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats, you men of power, you are for all eternity evil, the horrible, the covetous, the insatiate the godless.”

Nietzsche repeatedly reminds us that this moral equation is the metaphysical basis not only of Christianity, but of liberalism, socialism, feminism, and any ideology that includes ideas of justice understood as human equality. 

According to Nietzsche, these ideas of equality and justice, whether religious or secular, have obtained hegemony in the modern world, and this represents nothing less than the triumph and normalization of the slave morality, or the Judeaization of life. One of the ways he represents this development is through the historical struggle between Rome and its Jewish subjects. For Nietzsche, Rome is one of the best expressions of aristocratic, or master, morality: conquering, dominating, enslaving, destroying and creating. It is no coincidence, he tells us, that we are mesmerized by the artistic achievements of the Romans. Their willingness to inflict pain and cruelty, their celebration of strength and superiority, their deification of the animal instincts, were the conditions that allowed greatness to flourish. The Jews, in contrast, were, Nietzsche says, a moralizing and priestly nation obsessed with rules and questions of justice. Unable to defeat the Romans physically, they triumphed over them morally.

Of course this begs the question of how such a feat was achieved. For Nietzsche, there were two conditions that allowed the triumph of the slave morality: commerce and its associated psychological habits, and the priestly members of the aristocracy. Regarding the first, commerce created the distinction between creditor and debtor, as well as the calculation that is an essential aspect of moral conscience. This provided fertile ground for ideas of universal morality. On the latter, all aristocracies have priestly elements who practice and preach asceticism. In the distant past, their functions included mediating and moralizing the relationships between creditors and debtors that were the inevitable result of commerce. Nietzsche argues that Christian theology fit comfortably in this context, since Christians believe that humans were sinners who deserve punishment for the debt they owed to God. But they could not repay, hence the need for a redeemer who loves humans so much that he pays the debt. This redeemer, of course, is Jesus, the God incarnate. If I understand Nietzsche’s argument correctly, it was the priestly class of the Roman aristocracy that successfully brought these Jewish ideas to Rome, and these efforts were successful in part because of the psychological habits (calculation) and categories (creditor-debtor) induced by commercial activity.

This is a complex theory and it is beyond my competence to evaluate it professionally (that is, with the philological and cross-cultural techniques employed by experts like Nietzsche). I can say that it challenges some of the most popular (and perhaps tendentious) explanations of the spread of Christianity. The main puzzle is this: how could the ideas of a Jewish heretic (i.e. Jesus) successfully spread across the Roman world and profoundly change history (which is all the more remarkable when we consider that during antiquity Christianity competed with hundreds of other Eastern belief systems, most of which either went extinct or remained marginal). More common explanations point to its early non-political character, and the successful proselytizing efforts of the early believers, who were willing to die savagely for their beliefs, and who persuaded many marginalized groups, such as women and slaves, to adopt the belief system because it conferred to them a dignity that was absent in the paganism of the ancient world. Nietzsche casts doubt on this and presents a more cynical account of the rise of what he calls the “slave morality” of Christianity. In the process, he forces the reader to think deeper about the puzzle of how this religion succeeded in overturning the preceding moral order.

Nietzsche’s German origins, his incessant assertions on the pernicious influence of Jews, and his celebration of master Aryan races, of violence, conquest, and hierarchy, naturally lead one to question whether his ideas were a precursor to Nazism. It is no coincidence, one might surmise, that Hitler and Goebbels were known to have been thoroughly immersed in the works of Nietzsche. The last’s sister, moreover, was a known Nazi sympathizer who propounded the idea that her brother’s philosophy was in accordance with Hitler’s National Socialism. There are undoubtedly many parallels, especially the emphasis on the superiority of Aryans and their duty to rule, not to mention the attacks on Jews and glorification of war. But I think the evidence is more mixed. Elsewhere in Nietzsche’s writings, such as Beyond Good and Evil, he expresses admiration for the intelligence of Jews and their capacity to have such transformative effects on the course of history. In the Genealogy of Morals, moreover, he recognizes how remarkable it was that a Jewish heresy (i.e. Christianity) was able to conquer and subdue the most powerful empire in history, at least in the realm of ideas and morality. Lastly, my sense is that Nietzsche would reject two cardinal aspects of Nazism, namely, nationalism and socialism. The reason is that both ideologies endorse the equality of members of the nation. Nietzsche would probably say that this is the slave morality but smuggled in through the back door, as it were. He exalts the aristocratic element of nature that divides organic life into predators and prey, strong and weak, or masters and slaves, and I found no evidence that he would somehow accept this division on the basis of that political form we call nation (which, in any event, is a modern invention).

Shocking and Aweing the Reader

The Genealogy of Morals is not a standard scholarly text characterized with dry and measured prose. Rather, it reads almost like a proclamation expressed with the certainty and emotional energy of a prophet or religious fanatic. The copious use of the exclamation mark creates the sensation of agitation and neurotic excitement. In this regard, a typical statement is the following. The strong and the fit need “good air! good air! and away, from any rate, from the madhouses and hospitals of culture! And we therefore want good company, our own company, or solitude, if it must be so! But away, at any rate, from the noxious fumes of internal corruption and the hidden putrefaction of disease!” He is not speaking literally, of course. He is referring to the slave morality which, throughout the text, he repeatedly affirms has poisoned culture. But this way of expressing it discombobulates, startles, and provokes.

There are also turns of phrase that have similar effects. A few examples will illustrate: “to witness suffering does one good, to inflict suffering does one even more good”; “at the time when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life in the world was brighter, more cheerful, than it is nowadays, when pessimists abound”; “to speak of intrinsic right and wrong is absolutely nonsensical…life is essentially something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and destroying”; the reader has “understood my reasons completely—and I insist that you grasp and understand them thoroughly”[emphasis his].

It seems that, at least in his writing style, humility and modesty were not among Nietzsche’s strong points. This seems to not chime with his discussion of the vocation of the scholar, which I will now address. In the third and final essay of Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche lays out the conditions which he believes are necessary for scholars to flourish and produce genuinely original thought. First, the scholar must avoid marriage. It is no coincidence, he tells us, that history’s great thinkers—Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer—never married and, as far as we know, avoided romantic entanglements. The reason, Nietzsche says, is that the emotional demands of family and romance compete, and are difficult to reconcile, with the intellectual and emotional commitments that truly great scholarship necessitates. Nietzsche also says that philosophers and scholars must practice poverty and humility and avoid ostentatious things like fame and the company of “princes” (in our own time, elites). Women, sex, money, seeking approval and aiming for material success—all, according to Nietzsche, must be avoided if one wants to pursue a productive scholarly life.

On this he is not completely incorrect. Romantic relationships are indeed emotionally and intellectually demanding: they take time and effort, and this conflicts with the commitments required to teach full time while producing research. This might be less true for, say, the experimental scientist who mainly executes established scientific techniques and presents the results. But for the theorist or philosopher, whose task is to produce genuinely original thought, the demands of romance and family can pose a challenge to the activities necessary to make a significant scholarly contribution: intense, sustained, isolated, and focused reading, and incessant writing, revising, and writing again.

I also think Nietzsche is right that the truly original scholar must avoid seeking ostentatious things, abjure the company of elites, and steer away from fame and other forms of approval-seeking. The works of Nietzsche—which, although repugnant, did significantly contribute to philosophical debate—would not have been possible had he wanted to please anybody. He had to be indifferent to what others, elites or otherwise, thought of him. He was driven, not by the urge for material comfort or acceptance of the powerful, but by the desire to attack the comforting shibboleths of his age. Anything else would have been nothing less than following the herd. This part of the Genealogy of Morals is especially relevant in our social-media narcoticized milieu characterized with stultifying conformity and tribalism that rewards the seeking of approval rather than the challenging of orthodoxy.

Concluding remarks

I leave it to readers to decide whether Nietzsche’s answer to the central puzzle mentioned earlier, namely, how the Jewish heresy of Christianity conquered the earlier pagan order, is convincing. Even if one is not convinced, there is value is posing the question and trying to answer it, because it is hard to deny that Judeaization of the Roman world was a truly remarkable development. I will take a greater liberty in challenging Nietzsche’s normative conclusions of this development. From my perspective, the replacement of the “master morality” was an unalloyed good because, to be frank, that system seems to have been truly awful for anybody who was not a member of the aristocratic class. If Nietzsche were alive, he might say “No! That seems awful only because you are immersed in the slave morality of the West! It’s all a comfortable illusion that denies the liberty of the strong to oppress the weak!” Whereas I might reply that there is nothing necessarily wrong with illusions, especially if they are essential for a decent social order and a dignified life. If a purely naturalist and organic conception of life leads to Nietzsche’s dark conclusions, than to hell it with it. Much preferable is the comfortable illusion of the slave morality, especially for a swarthy dark-haired person like me.