Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Modern Morality

Late in his life, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown, and was transferred to the care of his sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, despite Nietzsche’s many falling outs with her. Elizabeth, along with her husband Bernhard Förster, were virulently anti-Semitic. So much so, in fact, that they even eventually founded a Utopian “Aryan” colony in the Paraguayan jungle called Nueva Germania in 1887 (needless to say, it did not last long. Bernhard committed suicide in 2 years and Elizabeth returned to Germany in 6).

Once Nietzsche was placed in their care, they began doctoring his works and publishing them to take advantage of his popularity in order to further their Aryan-supremacist agenda. They added passages of their own writing, removed Nietzsche’s passages that were explicitly against anti-Semitism, and otherwise changed passages to align his philosophy with theirs. Elizabeth even falsified letters he wrote later in life. Of the collection of 505 of her brother’s letters that Förster-Nietzsche published in 1909, just 60 were the original versions and 32 of them were entirely made up (source).

This tragic misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s philosophy has stained his legacy. Hitler and the Nazi party selectively read Nietzsche’s works in order to bolster their regime, and white supremacists today do much the same thing. So read his works carefully, and be weary of media portrayals of Nietzsche.

“It must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and disturbances – in short, slight attacks of stupidity – pass over the spirit of a people that suffers and WANTS to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition: for instance, among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly…” (Beyond Good & Evil, section 251)

“This most anti-cultural sickness and unreason there is, nationalism, this nervose nationale with which Europe is sick, this perpetuation of European particularism, of petty politics…is a dead-end street.” (Ecce Homo)

“Since then I’ve had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I’ve so long felt toward you. The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world?…Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse’s Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!” (draft of a letter from Nietzsche to his sister)

The relationship of a debtor to his creditor in civil law, about which I have written at length already, was for a second time transformed through interpretation, in a historically extremely strange and curious manner, into… the relationship of the present generation to their forebears. Within the original tribal association… the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation towards the earlier generation, and in particular towards the earliest, which founded the tribe. There is a prevailing conviction that the tribe exists only because of the sacrifices and deeds of the forefathers, and that these have to be paid back with sacrifices and deeds: people recognize an indebtedness… What can people give them in return? Sacrifices, feasts, chapels, tributes, above all, obedience – for all traditions are, as works of the ancestors, also their rules and orders. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows: from time to time it exacts a payment on a grand scale – the infamous sacrifice of the first-born, for example… (Genealogy 2:19)

Nietzsche claims that in society there exists ‘creditor-debtor’ social relationships, in which one person (the debtor), for whatever reason, owes something to another person (the creditor). There also exists, in virtually every society, a tendency to honor and remember their ancestors, especially the founders of the society, and to tell stories in praise of their feats and abilities. These two concepts combined to form the idea of ancestors and founders as creditors and descendants as debtors. He says people feel they owe a debt to the people who came before them, and this is repaid through various feasts, monuments, and above all obedience to tradition and laws.

For example, consider America’s relationship to its own founders. Is it not true that Americans feel indebted to them, seek to carry on their traditions, and build monuments honoring them? We even refer to them as our “Fathers”.  This is similar to Nietzsche’s point here.

All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards – this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his ‘soul’. The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gained depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed. (Genealogy 2:16)

Nietzsche is making a claim here about the fundamental psychology of a human being. He claims that when our urges, instincts, and desires are thwarted – say, if we lack the courage to carry them out or the object of our desires can’t be found – they don’t just dissipate. Rather, they turn inward and inflict harm on our psyche. This is the basic process of self-reflection at work, and it causes this psyche, or inner realm, to grow in the size and strength.  Eventually, it becomes so big that people think of it as its own entity, separate from the body, which they call the “soul.”

Modern psychologists have called this inner realm Nietzsche is describing by many names, such as “consciousness,” your “conscience,” and the “self.” Most notably, Sigmund Freud describes this repression of instincts and desires, or the “id,” as the origin of the “ego” and the “superego.” Like Nietzsche, he also claims that the failure or prevention of the satiation of desires and instincts causes harm to the psyche, and makes us do all sorts of things to rationalize and ignore our urges, things which he calls “defense mechanisms.” In fact, many aspects of Freud’s theories are prefigured in Nietzsche. Freud, who did the bulk of his writing shortly after Nietzsche, insists that he never read Nietzsche’s works.

I look on bad conscience as a serious illness to which man was forced to succumb by the pressure of the most fundamental of all changes which he experienced – that change whereby he finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of society and peace (Genealogy 2:16)

It is not easy to get a hearing for this hypothesis and it needs to be pondered, watched, and slept on. (Genealogy 2:16)

This passage is at once beautiful, horrifying, and hard to understand. So let’s break it down: Bad conscience is the internalization of man that happens when people form a society.  In order to form a peaceful society, people must curtail some of their basic instincts in exchange for safety, community, and mutual assistance. No more taking whatever you want, mating whenever you can, or flinging feces around like our primate cousins – we live in a society now, with rules and painful consequences for breaking those rules. Our instincts are further curtailed by our feeling of indebtedness to the founding ancestors of our society, and the need we feel to carry on their customs and repay our debts to them. But our brains are not adapted to live in this world of office buildings and traffic lines; we still have the instincts and desires from our days wandering the African plains. And as society curtails more of these instincts, the inner realm grows in size and intensity, creating ever more disdain for oneself and one’s natural urges. Bad conscience is precisely this internalized self-hatred caused by the entrance of people into a society which blocks them from expressing all of their instincts and desires. 

That imperious something which is popularly called “the spirit,” wishes to be master internally and externally, and to feel itself master… [It is] a binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will. It’s requirements and capacities here, are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the “outside world.” Its object thereby is the incorporation of new “experiences,” the assortment of new things in the old arrangements – in short, growth; or more properly, the FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power – is its object. (Beyond Good and Evil section 230)

The Will to Power is perhaps Nietzsche’s most quoted and most misunderstood concept. Nietzsche is claiming here that the fundamental drive for all living things is the urge to obtain and exercise power. Nietzsche is not thinking of power purely in the sense of physical, political, or economic domination, although those are forms the Will to Power can take. A plant taking in energy from the sun and incorporating it into itself is also a form of power, or a lion consuming a zebra. Even a scholar gaining knowledge about a particular object, time, or phenomenon is a way of exerting power over that thing. Anything that makes you feel like you are master over something can be the object of your Will to Power.

In practice, this will builds up a system of knowing and interacting with the world, and as you experience new things, your Will to Power incorporates these new things into your already constructed system. This is why the Will to Power is sometimes self-deceiving – it highlights or ignores certain aspects of the world in order to fit it into your preconceived system and maintain your feeling of superiority. Think of psychological concepts like cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and echo chambers. What do you do when reality does not mesh with your prior notions? Do you reinterpret reality or rethink your notions about reality?

In sections 4-11 of part 1 of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Nietzsche claims that there are two fundamental tendencies of humans, the noble and the ignoble. Of course, both tendencies exist in all modern people in varying degrees. But to present a more simplified narrative, Nietzsche creates a thought experiment, similar to social contract theorists like Glaucon or Thomas Hobbes or John Locke. He imagines a hypothetical distant past where the two tendencies existed separately in a purely noble class of people and an purely ignoble class. The Will to Power existed in both classes, but it manifested itself in different ways.

The Nobles had a “superabundance” of natural power so that whatever they desired they could obtain (Their will to power was never thwarted, and thus they never had to self-reflect, or reinterpret the world in self-deceiving terms). Consequently, they acted without pre-meditation, they gave little thought to slights against them, and they lived a life of luxury, activity, self-absorption, and blissful ignorance. Whatever they did, they described as ‘good,’ and whomever could not do what they did were simply lacking, or ‘bad.’ These were not moral terms, but merely descriptions of reality.

The Ignoble, on the other hand, are both oppressed and constitutionally weaker than the Nobles, and their Will to Power is blocked at every turn by these oppressors and by weakness. Consequently, they are unable to spontaneously see themselves or their lives in any positive way, as intrinsically “good,” like the Nobles can. The Ignoble develop a reactive and negative sentiment towards the oppressive Nobles which Nietzsche calls ressentiment. (Pronounced: Ray-zant-ay-mant). Because the Ignobles’ Will to Power is thwarted at first, the Ignoble are driven to self-reflect, and reimagine the world in a way that makes them feel like they are masters.  The form this re-imagination will take is the invention of a new form of valuation: ‘evil’.

One should ask who is actually evil in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The stern reply is: precisely the ‘good’ person of the other morality, the noble, powerful, dominating one, but re-touched, re interpreted and reviewed through the poisonous eye of ressentiment. (Genealogy 11)

This is perhaps the most pivotal moment in the history of Western thought for Nietzsche. The Ignoble, finding their Will to Power thwarted at every turn by their own weakness or the oppression of the Nobles, whom they resent deeply for their freedom to exert their Will however they please, re-imagine the world in a way that makes them the masters. To do this, they look at the Noble way of life and say “No, we would not choose to be that way. That way is evil.” In doing this, they make themselves and the Nobles into conscious, freely choosing subjects who are responsible for what effects they choose to cause. Thus, the Ignoble create a whole new system of values, this time not merely descriptive but “normative,” in that the Noble way of life is a choice the Nobles made, not their nature, and their choice is the wrong one. By contrast, the Ignoble way of life is moral and “good.” Confidence becomes vanity, taking what you want becomes greed and gluttony, leisure becomes sloth, being passionate becomes wrath. By contrast, not getting what you want becomes temperance, being unattractive becomes chastity, having to work all day becomes diligence, not taking revenge becomes composure, etc. etc.

Characteristics of the Ignoble People (which become their values: Modest, Kind, Help Fellow Sufferers, Patient, Obedient, Pitying, Egalitarian, Resent Powerful.

Characteristics of the Noble People (which become their values): Brave, Confident, Reckless, Vain or Egocentric, Seek Vigorous Activities and Competition.

The Emergence of the Priests

In sections 6 and 7 of part 1, Nietzsche describes a split in the noble class between what he calls the “warriors” and “priests.” The warriors base their conception of superiority (what separates them from the Ignoble) on physical power, and thus desire things to maintain this vigor, such as war, adventure, dancing, and “everything else that contains strong, free, happy action.” The priests base their superiority on an obsession with purity, and thus desire cleanliness, reservation, safety, and all things that prevent the soiling of their purity.

Guilt and Sin

The main contrivance which the ascetic priest allowed himself to use in order to make the human soul resound with every kind of heartrending and ecstatic music was – as everyone knows – his utilization of the feeling of guilt. The previous essay indicated the descent of this feeling briefly – as a piece of animal-psychology, no more: there we encountered the feeling of guilt in its raw state, as it were. Only in the hands of the priest, this real artist in feelings of guilt, did it take shape – and what a shape! ‘Sin’ – for that is the name for the priestly reinterpretation of the animal ‘bad conscience’ (cruelty turned back on itself) – has been the greatest event in the history of the sick soul up till now: with sin, we have the most dangerous and disastrous trick of religious interpretation. Man, suffering from himself in some way, at all events physiologically, rather like an animal imprisoned in a cage, unclear as to why? what for? and yearning for reasons – reasons bring relief –, yearning for cures and narcotics as well, finally consults someone who knows hidden things too – and lo and behold! from this magician, the ascetic priest, he receives the first tip as to the ‘cause’ of his suffering: he should look for it within himself, in guilt, in a piece of the past, he should understand his suffering itself as a condition of punishment. (Genealogy 3:20)

What do you get when you combine bad conscience, Ignoble morality, and the priestly class? For Nietzsche, SIN. The priests, obsessed with self-purification, buy into the moralizing system of the Ignoble, in which actions are not merely the results of nature but the effects of subjects who made a conscious choice to be as they are. The Ignoble, now convinced that they are “good,” yet still suffering because they cannot fully express their instincts, desires, and Will to Power, long for release or at least justification for their suffering. The priests give this to them by telling them they suffer not simply because their desires were unfulfilled or their Will did not conquer its object, but because they desired wrongly, they exercised their will wrongly, and they are being punished for it. The priests redirect ressentiment, previously directed outward at the Nobles, to inward at the Ignoble themselves: it is your fault that you suffer. Your suffering is punishment for your wrongdoing, your sins. And who could possibly have the power to set and enforce objective standards of right and wrongdoing? God. God, the primeval ancestor, is created as an omnipotent, judgemental being who punishes the sinners and rewards the pure.

Christianity

Is Nietzsche wrong about human nature, about the fundamentals of reality, about the history of Western thought? If you think he is, then he pressures you to describe an alternative genealogy. Tell us where Christianity really came from, explain history in a different way, and give an alternative account of human nature that does not include repressed instincts or the Will to Power. Genealogical arguments succeed only when the genealogies they provide are the best explanation of some principle and demonstrate that the principle need not be true to seem true to us.The enduring question for Nietzsche is whether his genealogy is the best explanation for religious belief.  So we must ask where history and biology support his claims, and where his speculations were off.

Remember that even for a Nietzschean, just because Christianity has this history does not necessarily mean it is wrong to follow it, provided that you are honest with yourself about what it is and what it does for you. In fact, Nietzsche was in some ways quite fond of Jesus Christ. On Nietzsche’s interpretation, Jesus was a radical, mobilizing the masses against the noble priests and all their moralizing sentiments about guilt, atonement, and salvation through faith alone. Nietzsche believed that Jesus presented goodness as a way of life, somewhat like the nobles who found happiness and goodness in action. So if you identify with Nietzsche but still want to be a Christian, live like Jesus lived! Question authority! Live a life of action! Love everyone, and don’t be judgemental of others or of yourself.

The Secular World

“That which philosophers called “giving a basis to morality,”… has proved merely a learned form of good faith in prevailing morality, a new means of its expression… in its ultimate motive, a sort of denial that it is lawful for this morality to be called in question.” (Beyond Good & Evil section 186)

It might seem like Nietzsche was only describing a particular religion’s worldview, but in fact he believed all of Western society was infected with the germ of Christianity. The Ignoble morality ultimately won, and democratic nations, philosophers, scientists, and even atheists of his time were all various iterations of the same moral paradigm – a paradigm in which reason and truth are valued above everything else, instincts and passions are suppressed and scorned, and unseen, transcendental, objective morals and supernatural beings are outside of the world yet govern the world. For Nietzsche, this paradigm is the problem; Christianity is merely the progenitor. Everywhere the paradigm is given new phrasing and justification, but nowhere is the paradigm itself questioned.

“We have found that in all principal moral judgments, Europe has become unanimous, including likewise the countries where European influence prevails, in Europe people evidently know what Socrates thought he did not know, and what the famous serpent of old once promised to teach – they “know” today what is good and evil.” (Beyond Good & Evil section 202)

“Where have we to fix our hopes? In New Philosophers – there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert ‘eternal valuations'” (Beyond Good & Evil section 203)

So if our whole inherited moral paradigm is wrong because it abstracts from the reality of experience, it causes us to feel guilt and to hate ourselves and our instincts, and it compels us to think we possess objective morals that can be used to judge and exclude others, what alternative way of life does Nietzsche propose?

Well, he certainly does not think the answer is a return to Noble morality and purely obeying any and all of our instincts. First of all, Nietzsche does not even think this is possible – humans have lived in society too long and are too corrupted by the Christian moral paradigm to go back to living like animals. Second, living like animals is ugly. The Ignoble’s self-reflection, self-consciousness, and self-torture, Nietzsche says, are what made the human animal beautiful and interesting! Without these tendencies, there would be no science, no religion, no philosophy, no culture, no art – all things that make human life worth living.

The problem is Ignoble morality created this rich life out of an unhealthy mindset – guilty conscience and ressentiment. So what we should strive for, then, is a rich, self-reflective life created from a more positive mindset that is not laden with all these life-denying and self-hating notions. A mindset that affirms life, that takes its guidance for action not from some external realm of gods and objectivity, but from within the world, within experience, and within the fullness of our instincts. A mindset that is above all a creator of values. Does this mean that we lose “Objective” morality? Well, yes, but Nietzsche would say we never had it to begin with! We were living under an illusory master we created ourselves, and now we have the knowledge, the experience, and the mental fortitude to turn our backs on this master. That is what Nietzsche meant when he famously declared:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.