On the Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche | Notes & Summary
Preface
1
Similar to Rousseau in the second discourse he laments that we do not understand ourselves. It's the knowers especially (?) who do not understand. It's ironic that in the age where knowledge has never been more praised we are still unknown to ourselves.
2
Nietzsche traces the time when he first had the ideas of the Geneaology -- topic is origins of morality.
He has a will to truth that has made him refine these ideas, demanding something ever more precise.
Fatalism: we become who we are with the necessity which a tree bears a fruit.
3
Nietzsche first questioned morality at 13. He blamed Evil on God.
His maturity now comes form the fact that he does not seek Evil behind this world but in this world, psychology specifically.
He is interested in two questions:
Under what conditions did man invent those value judgments good and evil. (origin)
And what value do they themselves have. (foundation)
4
Nietzsche explains what was the efficient cause for writing the Geneaology (note: for publishing and sharing it, not for conceiving it) its because he read a bad (English) book that provided a contrary interpretation: The Origin of Moral Sensations.
This book shares affinities with Nietzsche in that it creates a cynical account of how morality came to be. But it diverges by claiming it to be self-interest (narrowly conceived) that we praise others when they do altruistic actions because it benefits us.
5
Nietzsche needed to rebel from Schopenhauer and his valuing of compassion.
Up until that point people had quite a low regard for compassion: Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant all did (quite an interesting observation that for these thinkers, morality does not mean compassion).
He sees compassion as being the greatest danger to humanity worried that it will create a new Buddhism in Europe.
6
Value of compassion seems isolated but is tangled with bunch of questions around the value of values.
Nietzsche hints that perhaps morality itself is to blame. It is the cause of regression.
7
The problem with Dr.Dee (the author of the aforementioned British treatise on the origin of morals) is that he is not historical. He transposes a naïve British utilitarianism and projects it on morality. The correct method is to go back into history and trace out how morals developed.
Nietzsche thinks that the reward for this, for seeing the true origin of morality, is cheerfulness.
8
Nietzsche assumes the reader of this work will have read his others (funny as at this moment no one was reading his books).
His style is difficult because it is the aphoristic form. Aphorisms are not deciphered when they have been read. There is an art of interpretation. This is a lost art and, so, Nietzsche thinks it will be a long time before his writings are "readable".
First Treatise
1
The english psychologists are trying to highlight the shameful side of human nature. (this of course is a great similarity between Nietzsche and the psychologists but I think Nietzsche would say he is highlighting the "suspicious" and not the "shameful" side. What Nietzsche faults these psychologists on isn't their cynicism but the baseness of motivations they attribute to man)
Nietzsche speculates why they do this: pessimism, anti-Christian sentiments, taste for the questionable parts of existence.
Nietzsche has heard that the real reason is that they are "boring frogs" who are themselves so base and low-minded but he says he wished he didn't know and preferred to think of them as brave explorers who sacrificed everything for truth.
2
The issue with these English psychologists is that they are unhistorical. Meaning that they are myopically constrained to their own culture and moment in history.
Their explanation is that "good" was labeled on by those who were benefiting from "good" actions. But this was then forgotten.
Nietzsche's explanation is that the noble, powerful, high-minded labeled themselves "good" (not by others). The viewpoint of utility is completely foreign to these people.
It is from this distance. This "pathos of distance" between high and low that we initially get "good" and "bad."
He seems to give two arguments for this view:
The first one is that Lords have the power to give names to things
The second one is that in the outset the word "good" does not attach itself to "unegoistic" actions … only later on are those things combined.
3
The other reason that "good" cannot merely be what is "useful" to the community is that how can this be "forgotten"? If "good" actions appeared so undeniably "useful" for society, how did we "forget" this? Surely this would still be very obvious.
4
The "right" path was shown to Nietzsche by investigating the etymology of these terms. "Good" originally related to nobility. "Bad" originally connoted "commonness."
He says that modern democratic "prejudices" have an inhibiting influence on questions of all origins.
5
Nietzsche traces etymology of how the nobility/conquering races derived their own names: as a characteristic trait they were proud of (e.g. possessing money, blonde-haired, the ones who know truth) and how the conquered races were also named after a trait they were looked-down for (e.g. black-haired).
He laments that in Europe the conquered races now have the upper hand and it is due to their ascendance that we get "democracy" and inclination toward the "commune."
6.
The general rule (permits exceptions) is that superior caste means superior soul
The priestly ruling caste calls itself as "pure" and others as "impure." In the beginning all of our value distinctions were extremely simple and, thus, this just meant basic restrictions around sex, eating, etc.
It is through the priestly class that value judgements of "good" and "bad" do not track castes anymore.
The priestly class is naturally diseased:
"ones turned away from action, partly brooding, partly emotionally explosive, habits that have as a consequence the intestinal disease and neurasthenia that almost unavoidably clings to the priests of all ages."
But the cure they invented for their own disease has haunted humanity ever since. Some examples
Fasting
Anti-sensuality
Longing for the other world (takes its heightened form in Buddhism, the desire to be nothing)
Everything became more dangerous but also humans became interesting and uniquely man. Nietzsche considers depth and evil are how man is superior over creatures:
"on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil—and these are, after all, the two basic forms of the previous superiority of man over other creatures!"
7
The knight/aristocrat/master values need a life of powerful physicality. Overflowing health.
The priests are the greatest haters because they are the most powerless. The hate of the powerless.
The jews were the original priestly people who, being powerless, exacted their revenge through a revaluation of values. They flipped the values (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy) to an alternate set (good = miserable = poor = powerless = lowly).
We are all inheritors of the jewish revolt (Christendom).
8
It is from jewish hate (the deepest and most sublime hate, a hate that is able to remold values) that a just as incomparable a new love. This love wasn't a negation of revenge it was revenge itself.
Jesus of Nazareth, for Nietzsche, was not the end of Judaism it was the completion of Judaism. What appeared to be Israel's enemy universalized the values of Israel. By persecuting Jesus, Israel enabled the world to take on this bait without thinking twice.
9
The Jews, the Christians, the mob -- they all represent this set of ideals that favors the common man at the expense of the great man.
This revaluation succeeded.
This revaluation has been so thorough, in fact, that the church (institution of Christianity itself) is no longer needed.
10
Ressentiment/slave morality starts with the other and then tries to negate it. They are evil and we are good.
Master morality starts with itself as good and what is not itself as bad. That is why, in Greek, "bad" is synonymous with pitiful/unhappy/low. There is a sort of compassion the master feels for the slave. It is open and comfortable with itself.
Ressentiment requires a sort of lying. It requires a sort of falsification. I think it is falsification because they secretly desire what the master has.
Master is truthful and honest.
Because of this, because there is so much internally going on the slave has a lot more depth: "his soul looks obliquely at things; his spirit loves hiding places, secret passages and backdoors, everything hidden strikes him as his world, his security, his balm; he knows all about being silent, not forgetting, waiting, belittling oneself for the moment, humbling oneself. A race of such human beings of ressentiment in the end necessarily becomes more prudent than any noble race, it will also honor prudence in an entirely different measure: namely as a primary condition of existence."
Master morality on the other hand is quite simplistic. Think to the jock in highschool. So comfortable in his own skin: "To be unable for any length of time to take his enemies, his accidents, his misdeeds themselves seriously—that is the sign of strong, full natures in which there is an excess of formative, reconstructive, healing power that also makes one forget (a good example of this from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for 15 insults and base deeds committed against him and who was only unable to forgive because he—forgot)."
Surprisingly it is the master who is able to love one's enemies because he is so secured, because he is made noble by the obstacles he can overcome. Whereas the slaves they have to use words like "evil" because they are threatened by such a creature.
"Such a human is simply able to shake off with a single shrug a collection of worms that in others would dig itself in; here alone is also possible—assuming that it is at all possible on earth—the true “love of one’s enemies.” What great reverence for his 20 enemies a noble human being has!—and such reverence is already a bridge to love ... After all, he demands his enemy for himself, as his dis- tinction; he can stand no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to hold in contempt and a very great deal to honor! On the other hand, imagine “the enemy” as the human being of ressentiment conceives of him—and precisely here is his deed, his creation: he has conceived of “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” and this indeed as the basic concept, starting from which he now also thinks up, as reaction and counterpart, a “good one”—himself! ..."
11
Bad and Evil are completely different concepts.
Evil in good-and-evil is used to designate precisely the person who was considered good in good-and-bad.
This person is marked by a self-assuredness. They are almost marked by the innocence (interesting choice of word) of that of a rampaging child:
"they step back into the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, as jubilant monsters, who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, torture with such high spirits and equanimity that it seems as if they have only played a student prank, convinced that for years to come the poets will again have something to sing and to praise."
Nietzsche considers some races as master races and some races as slavish…
"At the base of all these noble races one cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast who roams about lusting after booty and victory; from time to time this hidden base needs to discharge itself, the animal must get out, must go back into the wilderness: Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—in this need they are all alike."
… and it is precisely these races that wreaked so much havoc on the slavish races where the term "barbarian" comes from.
Similar to Rousseau, Nietzsche sees civilization as a linear decrease also because of the introduction of "morality." Unlike Rousseau, it is precisely the expansion of equality of care and compassion for the weak and downtrodden which he sees as the ultimate knock against culture/civilization.
12
No one in Europe still yearns for more, for greatness. Nietzsche would just want one cultural exemplar to emerge to restore our faith in man.
13
Nietzsche uses the famous metaphor of the bird of prey and the lamb to show that in reality the masters cannot do anything but express their master morality.
Another core idea of Evil is freedom. Freedom was invented:
"For just as common people separate the lightning from its flash and take the latter as a doing, as an effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength as if there were behind the strong an indifferent substratum that is free to express strength—or not to. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind the doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is everything."
Freedom was invented to justify the punishment of higher men, to justify the hate felt towards them because they want to think of them as being able to do otherwise.
Example: vegetarians don't fault lions/eagles for eating meat. They fault humans because they can do otherwise.
Freedom was also invented to show that the slaves were not impotent they were "good" ie. It was through their own choice (and not because of their weak natures) that they don't act like the masters.
14
This paragraph is a series of subversions, a series of slave morality turning the bad to the good
Reiterate the point that through freedom, slaves are able to claim that they aren't powerless, they are "good":
“And the powerlessness that does not retaliate into kindness; fearful baseness into ‘humility’; subjection to those whom one hates into ‘obedience’ (namely to one whom they say orders this subjection—they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak one, cowardice itself, which he possesses in abundance, his standing-at-the-door, his unavoidable having- 5 to-wait, acquires good names here, such as ‘patience,’ it is even called virtue itself; not being able to avenge oneself is called not wanting to avenge oneself, perhaps even forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do—we alone know what they do!’). They also talk of ‘love of one’s enemies’—and sweat while doing so.”
They don't want "revenge" they want "justice," they disguise even their anger as "communal"
Lecture example: Effective Altruism / Carl Schmitt "he who invokes humanity wants to cheat."
"We good ones—we are the just’—what they demand they call not retaliation but rather ‘the triumph of justice’; what they hate is not their enemy, no! they hate ‘injustice,’ ‘ungodliness’; what they believe and hope for is not the hope for revenge, the drunkenness of sweet revenge (—already Homer called it ‘sweeter than honey’), but rather the victory of God, of the just God over the ungodly; what is left on earth for them to love are not their brothers in hate but rather their ‘brothers in love,’ as they say, all the good and just on earth.”
They transform their this-worldly failure as a sign of their next-worldly success.
15
This paragraph contains all the clues for Christians desiring vengeance.
The Christians want power. That's what they are really hoping for when they say that their "kingdom" shall also come. They are out to conqueror.
Important: tie this in with Socrates and his proposal of philosopher-king. To secure political power in an alternate way.
Dante writes on the gates of hell "I was made by eternal love." Of course, everything in the inferno is terrible and cruel and reflects the slave desire to exact revenge on all the people they were too weak to exact revenge on in real life. Most of the sins that are punished (gluttony, vanity, violence, etc.) were pagan virtues. What Dante should have written was "I was made by eternal hate."
This is even more perverse than vengeance because even though it is just as personal it is disguised as "objective" justice.
Aquinas talks about the joy of the saints when they see the punished in hell. Summa Thealogiae:
"In order that the bliss of the saints may be more delightful for them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned."
This is like a colosseum, watching in joy as the "evil" are punished.
Nietzsche also cites Tertullian:
"That last day of judgment … how vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? what my derision? Which sight gives me joy? which rouses me to exultation? As I see so many illustrious monarchs. whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove (Zeus) himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world's wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in aught that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more "dissolute" in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers. not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows; unless even then I shall not care to attend to such ministers of sin, in my eager wish rather to fix a gaze insatiable on those whose fury vented itself against the Lord. "
16.
The most important battle EVER to have taken place is this tension between good/evil vs. good/bad. Nietzsche frames it as "Rome vs. Judae, Judae vs. Rome."
For Nietzsche the Jews are ambivalent, they started this revolt which he loathed but he recognizes their genius. Like two warring generals who respect each other: "The Jews, conversely, were that priestly people of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt a popular-moral genius without parallel. Just compare the peoples with related talents—for instance the Chinese or the Germans—with the Jews in order to feel what is first and what fifth rank."
He starts tracing out a history of this war:
Judae triumphed over Rome. The Pope sits in Rome, people everywhere worship 4 jews: Jesus, Peter, Paul, Mary.
The Renaissance was a resurgence of Rome.
Judae immediately triumphed again due to German and English Ressentiment (the Reformation). He said it represented an even more thorough victory of Judae (because Catholicism still has pagan elements?)
Judae had another victory in the french revolution because 17th/18th century France represented the last of political nobility
Napoleon (Rome) and the French revolution (Judae) which he co-opted represent another tension, another battle of these two competing ideals.
LECTURE: if we pushed this to the 20th century, fascism would be Rome, liberalism and communism would be Judae. So Judae secured another victory. I think in the 21st century he would think judae's domination is total. The furthest right you go is the libertarians who also hold a view of equality. And now there is not only a view that advocates for the majority but advocates for the minority (the exact opposite of the "higher men").
17
Nietzsche is trying to trace out a research program that applies his mode of investigation to all values. Any "thou shalt" (obligation) needs to be subjected to 1. physiological 2. psychological critique.
He wants us to start asking about the value of values in order to determine a "order of rank among values."
Second Treatise: “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and Related Matters
1
Nietzsche is now investigating how Man was able to made to keep promises, to be regular.
This is especially interesting as promise-keeping requires memory which is in direct tension with forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness is a core capacity:
It is positive.
It helps us "digest" all of our experiences surfacing up only the ones that are necessary. It is what makes us strong.
Memory is not just the absence of forgetfulness its something much stronger. Its not just about digesting all the PRESENT stimuli, it's about 1. being able to remember stimuli in the past (previous promises kept) 2. and imagine scenarios in the future (I will do XYZ).
Nietzsche's conclusion is that man must have first made himself calculable, regular and necessary.
2
Someone who honors promises is necessary/uniform/predictable.
This development is the "prehistoric" work of man. Meaning that history only started when man developed this capacity.
What's surprising about this paragraph is that Nietzsche is not just critical about this capacity.
IMPORTANT: its through morality and custom that man developed this (what Nietzsche is going to call "conscience"). But if an individual perfects this he will once again be freed of morality and custom because he is fully in control, fully capable of establishing one's own values.
With the help of the morality of custom and the social straightjacket man was made truly calculable. If, on the other hand, we place ourselves at the end of the enormous process, where the tree finally produces its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally brings to light that to which it was only the means: then we will find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, the individual resembling only himself, free again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supermoral (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive), in short, the human being with his own independent long will, the human being who is permitted to promise— and in him a proud consciousness, twitching in all his muscles, of what has finally been achieved and become flesh in him, a true consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the completion of man himself. This being who has become free, who is really permitted to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign—how could he not know what superiority he thus has over all else that is not permitted to promise and vouch for itself, how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he awakens—he “earns” all three—and how this mastery over himself also necessarily brings with it mastery over circumstances, over nature and all lesser-willed and more unreliable creatures? The “free” human being, the possessor of a long, unbreakable will, has in this possession his standard of value as well: looking from himself toward the others, he honors or holds in contempt; and just as necessarily as he honors the ones like him, the strong and reliable (those who are permitted to promise),—that is, everyone who promises like a sovereign, weightily, seldom, slowly, who is stingy with his trust, who conveys a mark of distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something on which one can rely because he knows himself to be strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even “against fate”—: just as necessarily he will hold his kick in readiness for the frail dogs who promise although they are not permitted to do so, and his switch for the liar who breaks his word already the moment it leaves his mouth.
IMPORTANT: Nietzsche is betraying himself to be the priest's priest. In this idea of the sovereign individual he is simply negating the Christian ideal:
Communitarian --> hyper individualistic
Citizen --> lord
Compassion --> contempt
3
Even if the perfection of conscience, the development of the "sovereign" individual is something to be celebrated, the pathway to developing such an individual is bad. It's unclear whether its bad because 1. the person who is confined by morality but not enough power to overcome it is despicable OR 2. the way that this conscience is formed is violent.
The most powerful mnemonics is pain. Nietzsche gives examples of the violence inherent in all promise-making activities in antiquity:
Whenever man considered it necessary to make a memory for himself it was never done without blood, torment, sacrifice; the most gruesome sacrifices and pledges (to which sacrifices of firstborn belong), the most repulsive mutilations (castrations, for example), the cruelest ritual forms of all religious cults (and all religions are in their deepest foundations systems of cruelties)—all of this has its origin in that instinct that intuited in pain the most powerful aid of mnemonics.
Nietzsche says this is also the logic of asceticism. To inflict so much pain in order to make certain ideas unforgettable.
The worse humans are at memory the more severe penal codes had to have been. Interesting, so the conclusion is that we aren't more moral in modernity, we are less forgetful?
Germans can be not-cruel and can breed a "people of thinkers" (closest to the last man) because of its historically strict penal code. It's only by searing it into memory through punishment do we remember.
We have paid a great deal for "good things."
Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the 5 affects, this entire gloomy matter called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been paid for! how much blood and horror there is at the base of all “good things”!
4
The current genealogists of morality are committing the same mistake of projecting the modern experience to the origin.
Their issue this time is NOT that they use a modern notion of usefulness/utility to explain historical psychology, it is that they project the notion of freedom, that someone could have done otherwise, back into history.
People didn't punish because the evil-doer deserved to be punished. They punished because they themselves were angry.
What the relationship is is a relationship of debt, between creditor and debtor.
5
This relation is where/how memories were made. The debtor (criminal/transgressor) promises something valuable to give to the creditor. The debtor is in pain and a memory is made.
Under this lens however, punishment had more function than just retribution it was also preventative: to seer a memory into the debtor so that he does not transgress -- Nietzsche does not focus on that in this passage.
Property, livestock, families were offered. But the most common offering to the creditor was the body of the debtor. The creditor was given the ability to mutilate the body of the debtor in correspondence with the crime.
This constitutes a repayment because the creditor has a feeling of satisfaction from the punishment. The enjoyment of doing violence. Cruelty is the compensation.
Example: colosseum is an enjoyment of cruelty. There's an even modern example, where the victim's family feels that "radical" has been done.
6
Nietzsche realizes that the claim that cruelty is enjoyable seems alien to us so he is using this paragraph to defend that claim:
"Asking once again: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making-suffer felt good, and in the highest degree; to the extent that the injured one exchanged for what was lost, including the displeasure over the loss, an extraordinary counter-pleasure: making-suf- fer,—a true festival, something that, as stated, stood that much higher in 30 price, the more it contradicted the rank and social standing of the creditor."
Examples he gives to support his point:
Chimps are said to delight in violence.
Even today we can see the spiritualization and deification of cruelty in high culture (example of this be hollywood and violence?)
Today we read Don Quixote with bitter taste. But in the old days, they read his suffering with light-heartedness and great joy.
7
The more that humans were NOT ashamed of cruelty (the more they celebrated it, reveled in it) the more lighthearted they were.
We moderns on the other hand who dislike any form of violence are extreme pessimists. We find the world unbearable and shameful.
IMPORTANT: the broader point is that Nietzsche thinks modernity suffers through a life-denial, denying natural/necessary tendencies of man.
Now we treat suffering as an argument against existence. The ancients treated suffering (ability to inflict it on others) the argument for existence, ie. Why life was worth living.
What makes suffering unbearable is not just the suffering itself but the senselessness of suffering/the meaninglessness of suffering.
Christianity gave suffering a meaning, even stronger than the Greeks because it was shown to be the logic of salvation in the next life.
Greeks also gave suffering a meaning because things like the Trojan wars were seen as spectacles for the Gods.
What's consistent between the two is the idea of recognition for one's suffering. Suffering had to be a public (viewed by community or God) to be given a meaning.
8
Guilt/obligation finds its roots in the oldest relationship there is: between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor.
This relationship is about measuring one person against another person. Gauging values and prices among peers.
It is in this comparing ability that pride was first formed (like Rousseau). The word "man" (close to manas) expresses that man is the measuring/valuing/esteeming creature.
Because of this comparing/measuring capacity, the earliest moralities concluded that "every thing has its price; everything can be paid off."
Justice and settling started off meaning the same thing.
9
The relationship between community and individual is also that between creditor and debtor.
The community presents so many advantages to the individual and shields the individual from the "outside": safety and protection is what Nietzsche has in mind mostly here.
Someone who transgresses the community forfeits all this security and protection, all their rights and priviledges. They are cast back into the state of nature and the community can do to them what they see fit.
10
The stronger the community the less seriously they take the individual transgressions because it becomes less threatening to the community.
The focus now is more on making sure people get even, making sure that the anger does not spiral out of control.
Both of these wants to make us isolate the criminal from the deed (invention of freedom, that people can change).
Just as the society becomes more lax the more powerful it becomes, the creditor also becomes more "humane" (exact less cruel punishments) the more powerful he becomes.
There comes a point where the debtor is let go for "free" this is called mercy and is the privilege of the most powerful (of course this is a critique of Christianity, as the Christians who are merciful):
It would not be impossible to imagine a consciousness of power in society such that society might allow itself the noblest luxury there is for it—to leave the one who injures it unpunished. “What concern are my parasites to me?” it might then say. “Let them live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!” ... The justice that began with “everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,”ends by looking the other way and letting the one unable to pay go free.
11
This paragraph is about trying to establish justice on top of ressentiment.
Nietzsche claims that ressentiment blooms most beautifully among anarchists and antisemites.
Today, justice is confused with ressentiment with reactive rather than active sentiments … whoever gets injured is just.
If justice is about viewing things "objectively" without too much personal feelings involved, then the active man (conqueror, greedy person, the one who desires to rule) is much more just than the reactive/resentful one. This proceeds from Nietzsche's discussion in the last paragraph about how the strong alone can afford not to care.
All states that have this type of justice see the active force trying to repress the reactive force.
The most powerful tool against ressentiment that states have is establishing of the law. When you break the law, the focus is on your transgression against this higher force and not against specific people. Ressentiment wants to unleash itself against specific people, so this counteracts that.
Only with the law can we talk about justice and injustice. There is no injustice in the state of nature.
Even thought law has a positive side (it restrains ressentiment), it also constrains the will to power:
"The true will of life—which is out after power—and subordinating themselves as individual means to its overall end: that is, as means for creating greater units of power."
12
Nietzsche comments on the mistaken form of "previous genealogists," the mistake is to confuse the "origin" and the contemporary "purpose" of a practice.
E.g. The purpose of law may be revenge of deterrence now. But that was not its original cause.
IMPORTANT: is Nietzsche's own book subject to this critique? The critique of Nietzsche is slightly different its between origin and current foundation not current purpose. Foundation is what sustains an activity and the critique of Nietzsche is that what might have been its original foundation is not its current foundation. Purpose is different from this, purpose is about what people interpret something to be useful for. I suppose another critique of Nietzsche is to confuse origin with truthfulness ie. Christians can be both resentful and right.
One reason that Nietzsche thinks there is a break between purpose and origin is that the purpose of an activity gets reinterpreted by the dominant paradigm.
IMPORTANT, EXAMPLE: paradigm shifts.
Another reason is that Nietzsche thinks why something is useful (e.g. eye can see) and why it came into being (e.g. evolution, not because God made it so we could see) is different.
Things do not "progress" linearly, instead it is a series of paradigm shifts.
Therefore even loss and degenerating in so far as it represents a paradigmatic pivot can also be seen as progress:
"The magnitude of a “progress” is even measured by the mass of all that had to be sacrificed for it; humanity as mass sacrificed for the flourishing of a single stronger species of human being—that would be progress."
Our current paradigm is the democratic/egalitarian paradigm:
The democratic idiosyncrasy against everything that rules and desires to rule, the modern mis-archism (to create a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually transformed and disguised itself into something spiritual, most spiritual, to such an extent that today it is already penetrating, is allowed to penetrate, step by step into the most rigorous, apparently most objective sciences; indeed it appears to me already to have become lord over the whole of physiology and the doctrine of life—to its detriment, as goes without saying—by removing through sleight of hand one of its basic concepts, that of true activity.
13
We now return to topic of punishment. We are now going to discuss what is permanent in punishment and what is fluid in punishment.
Nietzsche says that it is impossible to say today why we punish because so many different purposes/meanings have been imbued through time and now it has been tangled. An interesting consequence of Nietzsche's view on the shifting of purpose/meaning is that "only that which ahs no history is definable").
Nietzsche is showing all the different interpretations of punishment:
Rendering-harmless (defanging)
Payment to injured party
Instilling fear
Tax to the benefits that the criminal has enjoyed
Elimination of a degenerating element
Festival (mocking)
Making a memory in the criminal/moral-improvement
As a clearing of the balance sheet to protect the criminal from revenge
As a compromise (letting one enact) the natural drive for revenge
Declaration of war
14
What Nietzsche wants to show with his previous list ^ is that there are so many different interpretations of punishment we should not cling on to the dominant modern one.
Today punishment is done because one is considered deserving one is guilty.
IMPORTANT: this relates to his claim of Dante that sinners are punished in the afterlife because this is what they really want, what they really desire.
To be precise, punishment is done so that the guilty may experience the feeling of guilt and have a "bad conscience."
This can't be right because 1. people who end up in prisons are not people who are likely to experience this sort of feeling 2. punishment, far from engendering guilt, gives people a dry gloomy seriousness, makes them hard and cold if not worse: it breaks their spirit.
In previous ages there was no talk about "guilt" his transgression as well as his punishment was fated.
15
Spinoza attempted to strongly defend a free will and God. But he slipped when reflecting one afternoon about the fatedness of evil.
Before the Christian era, many people felt no different than Spinoza only that "something has gone wrong here" not "I should not have done that." They dealt with their transgressions as if dealing with a sickness or misfortune.
For these people (nietzsche seems to agree with them) that punishment sharpens their prudence it doesn’t make them better. It was never about moral perfectibility.
16
Nietzsche gives us his account of where bad conscience comes from.
Bad conscience comes from man (does he mean all men or the strong specifically) finding themselves in society and peace. Even if he means all men surely the ones who were roaming free and murdering people as an outlet finds this most uncomfortable.
He compares the transition to when water animals evolve into being land animals. That before they could have water carry their weight and now they have to use their own legs (the water being the outlets of violence?)
The origin of bad conscience is men turning their aggression, now unable to be exerted outwards, internally within themselves:
"It’s just that it was difficult and seldom possible to yield to them: for the most part they had to seek new and as it were subterranean gratifications. All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves inwards—this is what I call the internalizing of man: thus first grows in man that which he later calls his 'soul.'"
But again, this is Nietzsche's ambivalence, the existence of such a soul, one turned against itself, made man interesting:
"Let us immediately add that, on the other hand, with the appearance on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, something so new, deep, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of future had come into being that the appearance of the earth 30 was thereby essentially changed."
17
Bad conscience grew suddenly not gradually.
It came from the sudden conquest by a race of conquerors over a conquered people.
Bad conscience did not start in these conquerors (implying that it eventually took over the conquerors?) but it was caused by the conquerors who took away the freedom of the conquered. This is bad conscience.
18
Nietzsche encourages us to not judge too harshly this bad conscience. Because this bad conscience is simply the internalization of a much more laudable drive: the desire to conquer.
This is the root of egolessness. Nietzsche identifies in selfless actions a desire for cruelty (towards oneself) … it's not as "moral" as it seems.
He called this drive the "artist's cruelty" and that it was the origin of beauty … I think its because this drive is the conscious recognition that "I am ugly" which sets up the contrast for beauty?
19
Bad conscience is a sickness but in the same way pregnancy is a sickness … it has physical downsides but is ultimately responsible for us entering into the world.
The relationship of creditor to debtor finds form in ancients' relationship with their ancestors especially the founding ancestors of a clan. They try to find ways to repay such ancestors (sacrificing first-born for example).
The stronger the clan the more is felt to be owed to the ancestors. The weaker the clan, the less the clan/ancestors are feared.
The strongest clan eventually turned these ancestors into gods.
20
On one hand, the community gave early members the good-and-bad distinction. On the other hand, they also imbued this massive amount of guilt. The feeling of guilt did not end as these communities ended.
There is a relationship between the type of community and the type of god. Universalist empires have universalist gods.
The Christian God who is the most powerful/total god so far came with a corresponding total guilt.
Nietzsche thinks that the end of Christianity will relieve us of this guilt, it will return us to a second innocence.
21
Nietzsche says that what he just said in the previous paragraph (about us being relieved from our bad conscience) is wrong. It's going to get worse or, at least, it will be at a standstill. What we missed is that this guilt/bad conscience has been "moralized" (I think he means that we consider it to be the result of freedom?)
This searing bad conscience will turn against everyone: the debtor (people themselves) but also the creditor (Adam, the original ancestor, is given "original sin").
Christianity's stroke of genius is God (the creditor) sacrificing himself to wipe away our sins.
22
God was invented (an all-powerful God) so that we may feel an all-powerful hate towards ourselves. It’s the desire to cause maximum pain to ourselves that God was invented.
It fully allows people to imagine that they themselves can be punished without ever being able to zero out the balances.
Nietzsche has a hydraulic view of the dark forces of human nature. If they aren't permitted to be expressed in action then they are expressed in idea.
23
There are more noble ways to invent Gods then to use them as tools of self-flagellation.
Differences:
The animal is deified in the Greek gods and myths.
EXAMPLE: Achilles comparing himself to a lion.
When people make mistakes its ill fortune its not because of "sin"
God is not the all good but sometime gods can be the cause of evil and negative emotions toward acts of ill-fortune/mistakes can be directed outwards and not inwards
EXAMPLE: Trojan war was started by the gods.
24
In order to bring forth new ideals we need to demolish bad conscience. Erecting new ideals always requires sacrificing of old ones.
The only person that can take us out of this swamp is someone powerful and with great health. He calls this person the "Anti-Christ."
25
Nietzsche is not this person … only someone "more future" than he will be free to help bring forth this radical future and get rid of our bad conscience.
Third Treatise: What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?
1
This paragraph is to give a summary of the answer that will be provided in this chapter on what ascetic ideals mean:
Artists mean nothing or too many different things
Philosophers and scholars it is their most favorable precondition for higher spirituality
Women it is a tool of seduction
For most people its to show that they are "too good" to want to care and engage
EXAMPLE: the idea try hard
Priests it is their best tool of power
Saints it is their desire towards nothingness
IMPORTANT this is the key insight that Nietzsche attempts to draw from the observation about how many meanings the ascetic ideal has taken on:
"[The human will] needs a goal,—and it would rather will nothingness than not will."
2
Nietzsche is trying to ask what do ascetic ideals mean for the artist (Wagner). Specifically, Wagner flipped completely from praising sensuality to worshiping chastity.
The height of Wagner was his depiction of the marriage of Luther. It showed that sensuality and chastity were not at odds and any good marriage is proof of this (either meaning sensual to one person and chaste to everyone else, or, first chaste and then sensual).
Its only in the lowly people (think incel) does the praise of chastity become an attack on sensuality:
"On the other hand it is only too clear that when swine who have come to ruin are once brought to the point of worshipping chastity—and there are such swine!—they will see and worship in it only their opposite, the opposite of swine come to ruin—oh with what tragic grunting and zeal!"
3
Wagner's last play Parsifal fell precisely into this chastity trap. It worshipped chastity at the expense of all sensuality.
4
We must judge the artists separately from the work.
The artist is the soil the manure upon which the work sprouts.
Wagner is compared to a woman giving birth. Just as to give birth to a child, the woman has to go through pain, Wagner was dragged through fundamental tensions (I think he refers to the eternal battle and competition of these two sets of ideals) to produce parsifal.
We need to guard against the idea that an artist is continuous with what he depicts. Even stronger:
"The situation is such that if he were precisely that, he would certainly not depict, think up, express it; a Homer would not have written an Achilles nor Goethe a Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust."
Why might this be? It might be because you need distance to depict something. It might be because you need to be a deep/priestly character to be able to depict the inner workings of someone?
Maybe its related to his claim in the untimely meditations about the dissolving effect of truth?
The artist is separated between the real and the ideal.
Some artists grew tired of this distance and then wanted to match the ideal with the real. This was the mistake of Wagner in Parsifal.
The interesting consequence of this view was that Wagner was always a Christian/slavish man in reality what changed wasn't Wagner the man but his relationship with art (namely art tried to match the real instead of projecting an ideal).
5
This paragraph answers the question: what do ascetic ideals mean in the artist?
Nietzsche's answer is that it does not mean anything because the artist is derivative of the philosopher. Wagner only had his "confidence" because of Schopenhauer.
Early Wagner treated music as a medium but drawing on Schopenhauerian philosophy he started to treat music as an end. Music was speaking the metaphysical language and so its little wonder that Wagner fell prey to ascetic ideals.
The whole point of this is to redirect the question to: what do ascetic ideals mean in the philosopher?
6
Schopenhauer followed Kant in interpreting that the essence of the beautiful to be disinterestedness. He wanted to honor beauty by giving it a similar status of philosophy/rationality (also marked by disinterestedness).
This (wrong) conclusion could only be drawn from the perspective of a spectator and not an artist. The artist knows that creation is deeply interested and personal.
Schopenhauer took on Kant's position that the beautiful is disinterestedness because he was plagued by sexual desire which he could not reconcile.
We now get one clue of what the ascetic ideal is for the philosopher: to break free from torture.
7
For Schopenhauer he needed his enemies because his enemies gave him a kind of vitality (those enemies being women/sensuality and Hegel).
He observes that no real philosopher has ever been married … that the Buddha considered his child a "burden" when his child first came to this world. Herein lies the meaning of the ascetic ideal for the philosopher: it creates a condition of life (freedom in the case of not getting married) most conducive to doing one's work.
8
When philosophers embrace ascetic ideals, it is to find conditions most compatible with their work.
Poverty, chastity, humility are not their virtues but simply conditions where they can most exert themselves.
"Whoever possess will be possessed" -- it is because of this and not "virtue" that they don't seek riches.
Philosophers are humble because they don’t want to stand out and be disturbed.
Philosophers are chast because their progeny is their work/the world. They have no need for children.
9
Philosophy has always been closely related to asceticism. It's imitating asceticism that philosophy knew how to take its "first steps."
Philosophy has always been viewed suspiciously from the perspective of the community/from moralists. Each of philosophies tendencies: to wait-and-see, to explore, etc.
Makes a general point about how vices and virtues have been flopped. Originally, marriage was considered a sin because it was about appropriating a woman from the community and making her "private."
10
Because philosophers were considered weird and dangerous by the community, they had to make people fear them if they were to be left alone. They developed ascetic ideals like self-flagellation in the same way a poisonous frog develops its color.
They also needed to do these things to fear themselves. Because within them the philosopher wants to invert all the values of the community while the social man wants to keep the values. Self-flagellation is a way for the man to learn to respect the philosopher (internally).
He gives the Brahmins as the paradigmatic example of this.
When the philosopher first appeared he had to disguise himself as an ascetic (the ascetic type existed before the philosophical type).
Nietzsche says that perhaps that the philosopher can roam free today without taking on the ascetic form represents a self-confidence of the community/world (that they no longer feel threatened by philosophy).
11
Just as we dismissed investigating the ascetic ideal in the artist in favor of investigating the ascetic ideal in the philosopher. We now dismiss the philosopher in favor of investigating it in the ascetic priest because it was shown that the philosopher took on the strategies of the priest.
The ascetic's conclusion is that life is the wrong path … the tendency is to go against life. Nietzsche calls it a self-contradiction because the ascetic ideal flips everything on its head.
A curious question that Nietzsche raises is how does the ascetic priest reproduce itself. Its not through hereditary means.
The will-to-power reading is that it is a desire to establish power over life itself.
12
This is the famous paragraph on perspectivism.
"There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to disconnect the affects one and all, supposing that we were capable of this: what? Would that not be to castrate the intellect?"
Nietzsche asks what would an ascetic say about truth if he were asked to philosophize. The ascetic would give us exactly the wrong type of truth: the type of truth that is "in-itself" that is "objective" that does not have any subjectivity imbued. Nietzsche's point is that all knowledge is perspectival and to will this objective standpoint is to will nothingness (death of the subject).
What is real "objectivity" is being able to move around in many different perspectives and see things from more angles.
13
The priest appears to represent a contradiction: life against life. But this is merely a surface level contradiction in reality the priest says "yes" precisely when he says "no."
The ascetic ideal are for creatures who are "degenerating" the diseased and its an ingenious solution for this type of creature to feel power over life. He is able to lead an entire "flock" of diseased people.
14
Lecture: great rhetoric in this paragraph.
To be diseased (and therfore tempted by the ascetic ideal) is what is normal for humans. It is only with strokes of great luck that men come out not diseased.
Important: for Nietzsche it is the weak who harm the strong and not the strong who harm the weak. The weak harm the strong by spreading their ascetic ideals onto the strong, through contamination.
The sick are look down upon anything healthy.
The danger is if the healthy start believing the rhetoric of the sick. The two have to be kept far apart. The healthy shouldn't even make it a goal to tend the sick because its improper for the higher to tend to the lower.
"they alone are the guarantors of the future, they alone have been given responsibility for the human future. What they can do, what they should do, a sick person can never and should never do: but in order for them to be able to do what only they should do, how could they be free to choose to be physician, comforter, “savior” for the sick? ... And therefore good air! good air." Passages like this make it sound like the "higher men" are desired because of their ability to help the collective but its clear he just has an aesthetic delight in forming these figures … because his advice is NOT to help the lower men, he wants to rid the higher men of " the great compassion for man!"
15
If you understood why the healthy cannot tend to the sick, then you must understand why those who tend to the sick are sick themselves. The priests therefore are sickly.
The priests are a mix of slave and master. They are just as weak and timid as the slave…
"He must be sick himself, he must be related to the sick and short-changed from the ground up in order to understand them—in order to get along with them; but he must also be strong, lord over himself more than over others, with his will to power intact, so that he has the confidence and the fear of the sick, so that for them he can be a foothold, resistance, support, compulsion, disciplinarian, tyrant, god."
… but they have just as strong as will to power as the master, they also have something in addition to the master: intellect.
"He will not be spared waging war with the beasts of prey, a war of cunning (of the “spirit”) more than of force, as goes without saying—to this end he will perhaps need almost to develop in himself, at least to signify, a new type of beast of prey—a new animal terribleness in which the polar bear, the lithe cold wait-and-see tiger cat, and not least of all the fox appear to be bound into a unity just as attractive as it is fear-inspiring."
He is able to tame the beast of prey:
"He brings along ointments and balm, no doubt; but he first needs to wound in order to be a physician; as he then stills the pain that the wound causes, he poisons the wound at the same time—for in this above all he is an expert, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, in whose vicinity everything healthy necessarily becomes sick and everything sick, tame."
The role of the priest is to direct the direction of ressentiment to make sure it doesn’t blow up the herd or the priest.
IMPORTANT: Nietzsche here talks about the origin of ressentiment. Ressentiment is because whenever people suffer we seek a meaning to that suffering, a guilt party to be blamed for that suffering.
"It is here alone, according to my surmise, that one finds the true physiological causality of ressentiment, of revenge, and of their relatives—that is, in a longing for anesthetization of pain through affect."
"'Someone must be to blame for the fact that I feel bad'—this kind of reasoning is characteristic of all those who are diseased."
The twist is that the priest tells his diseased sheep that they themselves are to blame. This is how the priest keeps the flock in control.
Question: but doesn’t the priest redirect that blame to others (first essay) as well?
This paragraph is helpful because the priest can turn the healthy sick (master to slave) and the sick tame (by making them feel guilt).
16
The ascetic priest turns ressentiment inward.
This is not a healing, this is about controlling the herd, keeping them away.
Nietzsche thinks that "sin" corresponds more to an emotional state/hallucinated belief than genuine state of affairs.
17
Priest is not a physician. He treats not suffering itself but the listlessness of suffering (the meaninglessness of it) EXAMPLE: someone who prescribes anti-depressants without treating the root causes of that depression.
All major religions are about combating this tiredness and listlessness (I take that to mean a meaninglessness).
Cultures can become listless.
Listlessness is combatted through reducing all feelings of life: no sex, no money, …
In the priest/in the extreme this is a will to nothingness, its why many religions consider the final state of rest to be freedom from.
18
Another cure than this will to nothingness which is much more common is mechanical activity: meaningless work being prescribed.
Another cure is small joy. The form of joy often prescribed is the joy of giving joy in small acts of kindness like helping one's neighbor. This joy/kindness is actually expression of will to power of one being superior to others.
Another cure is group formation because this distracts the weak. The weak love banding together, the strong always want to be left alone.
19
This paragraph begins by saying that the tactics of the priest listed previously are "innocent" tactics and that now he wants to talk about the "guilty" tactics which are tactics that arouse strong emotions.
But most of the paragraph is about how the modern mind is weak and not strong enough to take on "truth." Its conception of "good" is just meekness.
20
Now he's gonna get back on topic, about the release of emotions. He ends his discussion against the modern mind by saying that we need to distrust our first intuitions that we gain from modernity.
He claims that great emotions discharged at once is the solution for listlessness: anger, fear, lust, revenge.
But this emotional excess makes the sick sicker: why?
But the goal is not to heal the sick its to make people not listless.
The trick that the priest used was to use guilt.
Man's sickness is physiological (so I don’t think there can be a cure?) but without guilt its listless.
Question: why couldn't they blame it on the master?
Great paragraph:
"Everywhere that wanting-to-misunderstand-suffering made into life’s meaning, the reinterpretation of suffering into feelings of guilt, fear, and punishment; everywhere the whip, the hair shirt, the starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the cruel wheels of a restless, diseased-lascivious conscience; everywhere mute torment, extreme fear, the agony of a tortured heart, the cramps of an unknown happiness, the cry for “redemption.” Indeed, through this system of procedures the old depression, heaviness, and tiredness was thoroughly over- come, life became very interesting again: awake, eternally awake, in need of sleep, glowing, charred, exhausted and still not tired—this is what the human being looked like, “the sinner” who was initiated into these mysteries."
This is where otherworldliness comes from:
"Every emotional excess that caused pain, everything that shattered, toppled, crushed, entranced, enraptured, the secret of places of torture, the inventiveness of hell itself—everything had now been discovered, guessed, exploited, everything stood at the disposal of the magician, everything served henceforth to the victory of his ideal, of the ascetic ideal ... 'My kingdom is not of this world.' "
21
The priest has not made the patient better but worse, more sick: more emasculated, more tamed.
Nietzsche gives as example how wherever the priest pops up, the culture gets sick.
22
Ascetic ideal also ruined taste in art and literature.
The Church fathers thought that their literature surpassed the Greeks.
Nietzsche prefers the old testament to the new. This lines well with the idea that Christianity took jewish intuition to its furthest. Jewish legalism was a step in the direction of slave morality (the strong do not observe laws, like Achilles) but Christianity took it even further "turn thy right cheek also."
"I take my hat off to the Old Testament! In it I find great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something most rare on earth, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart; still more, I find a people. In the New, on the other hand, nothing but petty sectarian economy, nothing but rococo of the soul, nothing but embellishment, crookedness, oddness, nothing but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional breath of bucolic cloyingness that belongs to that epoch (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic."
What he dislikes about Christianity is the feigned humility in combination with the pompousness.
23
Nietzsche asks us what are we to make of the enormity of this ideal that it seems to have no opposing force. It is the ideal that wants to judge all other ideals by.
Some people claim that science is this other competing ideal.
Nietzsche's claim is that 1. science does not have an ideal outside itself 2. in so far as it appears passionate and forceful it is because "it is not the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and noblest form."
His issue with science seems to be that science is a form of sedation:
"science today is a hiding place for every kind of ill-humor, unbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui, bad conscience—it is the very unrest of being without an ideal, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent in an involuntary contentedness … Science as a means of self-anesthetization: are you acquainted with that?"
24
IMPORTANT: now he goes on to examine the atheistic philosophers who don't believe in God/Christianity. Are these people perhaps a counter-ideal to the ascetic?
No! This is how total the victory of the ascetic ideal is. Even the atheistic philosophers who attack god who attack metaphysicians even they are metaphysical in that they believe that truth has value in itself.
EXAMPLE: one of the famous atheists says I want to know the truth even if it is depressing. Nietzsche wants to ask why?
These people disguise themselves as free spirits but they still worship a god: truth. Modern science does the same, we need to know more.
Nietzsche says that the most free spirits are this order of assassins in the orient and their code was “nothing is true, everything is permitted."
Science and atheism still rest on a bedrock of faith … namely in truth. Neither one can justify themselves.
Nietzsche wants to ask: what is the value of truth.
25
Science/philosophy is on the side of asceticism/religion against art which is embodied. That is why Plato was so against Homer.
Science/scholarship also grows on the same sickness as religion. It inevitably means that a culture is in decline (Rousseau's First Discourse).
Science, like asceticism makes man to be more based, more lowly than even religion. The scientific view makes us lose even more self-respect.
The agnostics are no better, they worship the question mark.
26
This paragraph begins by critiquing historiography and "objectivity" (untimely meditations). He is saying that objectivity is an ultimate form of asceticism it is the ultimate form of nihilism. It refuses to read any teleology into history.
The paragraph continues to a whole list of people he criticizes.
27
IMPORTANT: Atheism is a Christian phenomena
"What actually triumphed over the Christian god? The answer is found in my Gay Science (section 357); “Christian morality itself, the ever more strictly understood concept of truthfulness, the father-confessor subtlety of the Chris tian conscience, translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price."
IMPORTANT: Nietzsche says that Christian forms has already perished, Christian morality will also perish (Leiter thinks he is wrong). By Christian morality I think Nietzsche does not mean slave morality but rather the will to truth. Eventually the will to truth is going to ask: what is the value of the will to truth? This is so interesting because Nietzsche is the one who asks this question so he represents the end of Christianity but also Christian truthfulness. In other words, he is attacking Christianity but form the inside; he is confessing here that he too has a will to truth.
"In this manner Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality; in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish—we stand at the threshold of this event. Now that Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, in the end it draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; this occurs, however, when it poses the question, “what does all will to truth mean?” ... And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (—for I as yet know of no friends): what meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us this will to truth has come to a consciousness of itself as a problem? ... It is from the will to truth’s becoming conscious of itself that from now on—there is no doubt about it—morality will gradually perish: that great spectacle in a hundred acts that is reserved for Europe’s next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles."
28
Summary of this treatise.
Animal man had no meaning for his suffering which is the worst.
By feeling guilty, this suffering was given a meaning, given a sense.
This enabled him to will nothingness, to will against all life. This created more suffering but it was better than not willing.