Slave Morality, Socrates, and the Bushmen:
A Reading of the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals.1
Mark Migotti
Hamilton College
May 1996
In this paper I raise and offer provisional answers to three questions raised by the first
essay of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals[GM]. The leitmotif of that essay is the story of
"the slave revolt in morality" (GM I §10, 270/36),2 while a prominent ulterior aim is to articulate
a quite radical "critique of moral values" (ibid P §6, 253/20). My questions are: (1) Can
Nietzsche provide a satisfactory account of how the slave revolt could have begun to "poison the
consciences" of masters?; in other words: Is Nietzsche's story coherent?, (2) Does Nietzsche's
affinity for "master values" preclude him from acknowledging claims of justice that rest upon a
sense of equality among human beings?; alternatively: Does GM I's critique of moral values
license inhumanity?, and (3) What sort of evidence is relevant to the claim that a slave revolt in
morality actually occurred?; or: How does Nietzsche's story fare when looked on as (at least in
part) an empirical hypothesis? My answers are: yes, no, and: history, etymology, and
anthropology provide remarkably substantial support for Nietzsche’s thesis.
1. Barbarian Masters and Creative Slaves
GM is a polemic concerned to reveal "the origin of our moral prejudices" (GM P §2,
248/16). In outline, the story told by its first essay is this: In the beginning were the knightlyaristocratic "masters" who determined for themselves that they were "good", and that the weak
unfortunates who lacked masterly qualities were in consequence "bad". Not surprisingly, the
numerous and miserable bad grew increasingly resentful of their lot, until, in a surprising and
underdescribed stroke of genius, their ressentiment became creative. The fruit of this creative
ressentiment was an unheard of new morality --slave morality-- at the heart of which is the claim
that those who had previously been regarded as wretched and bad in fact embody all that is truly
good in and about humanity. The masters, meanwhile, their own firm assumption to the contrary
notwithstanding, are, it is said, not good but "evil". Shockingly enough, slave morality caught on
in a very big way. So successful has the slave revolt in morality been, that modern Europeans
tend to assume without further thought that certain tenets in fact specific to slave morality --for
example, the doctrine that altruism is good-- are constitutive of morality as such. Because of this
unwitting conflation, it requires considerable philosophico-genealogical patience, erudition,
acumen, and daring to bring to light the priority of master morality.3
The priority of noble morality is first mentioned in the middle of GM I §2. Having
briefly sketched a "bungled" kind of genealogy of morals attributed to certain unnamed "English
psychologists", Nietzsche declares that:
... the judgment "good" did not originate with those to whom "goodness” was
shown! Rather it was "the good" themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful,
high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their
actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all that is low,
low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they
first seized the right to create values and to coin names for things. (GM I §2,
254/25-6)
Above all else, then, noble morality is self-established; it "develops from a triumphant
affirmation of itself" (GM I §10, 270/36); it is the morality of “self-glorification”
(Selbstverherrlichung, BGE §260, 5:209/205). When English moral historians maintain, as
Nietzsche represents them as doing, that: "originally, ... one approved of unegoistic actions and
called them good from the point of view of those to whom they were done, that is to say, those to
whom they were useful" (GM I §2 254/25), they are, from Nietzsche's point of view, twice
mistaken. Not only is it wrong to think that morality originates in the favorable assessment of
self-sacrifice and of unegoistic behavior generally, it is also wrong to think that morality has
always rested upon the value of utility. According to Nietzsche, noble morality is essentially
bound up with an exuberant transcendence of the standpoint of utility, a lofty disregard for the
values of mere comfort and survival:
What [he writes] had [nobles] to do with utility! The viewpoint of utility is as
remote and inappropriate as it possibly could be in relation to such a burning
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eruption of the highest rank-ordering, rank-defining judgments: for here feeling
has attained the antithesis of that low degree of warmth which any calculating
prudence, any calculus of utility, presupposes --and not for once only, not for an
exceptional hour, but for good (für die Dauer). GM I §2 259/26)
A crucial part of what the nobles affirm about themselves, therefore, is their very ability
to raise themselves above the common crowd and its vulgar concern for comfort and survival.
Nevertheless, the emergence of nobles and their values would not be fully intelligible if they
were not grounded in independently specifiable features of noble lives. Let us grant that nobles
just are those who are spontaneously self-affirming and that one of the things they affirm about
themselves is this very habit of spontaneous self-affirmation, we still want to know what it was
about themselves that they affirmed in the first place. In GM I §7, Nietzsche tells us that: "the
knightly-aristocratic value judgments presuppose a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant,
even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting,
dancing, competitive sports (Kampfspiele), and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful
activity" (GM I §7, 266/33), and he speaks of an “aristocratic value-equation”, according to
which, "good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = God-beloved" (ibid, 267/34). We see
from these and other remarks that at the bottom of the self-affirmation of Nietzsche’s nobles is
their delight in their own abundant energy and abilities, their “feeling of fullness of power that
seeks to overflow, [their] happiness of high tension, [their] consciousness of wealth that would
give and bestow” (BGE §260, 5:209/205). Nobles seek to give expression to their felt fullness of
power by engaging in certain sorts of activity, initially ones that demand strenuous physical effort
and involve taking large and dramatic risks --war, adventure, and hunting, for example. By the
very fact that they choose to engage in them, nobles take themselves to honor such activities,4
and they then instinctively begin a cycle of self-reinforcement by honoring themselves for being
so good at these honorable pursuits. They set deliberately exigent standards of excellence and
then think well of themselves when they pass with supreme aplomb.
Because the criteria of nobility are self-appointed, nobles values are, in the end, selfgenerated and self-grounded. But because measuring up to these criteria is often a matter of
3
readily ascertainable fact, not debatable opinion, because superiority in respect of strength,
daring, or prowess, for example, can to a great degree be determined objectively, we can
nevertheless, specify certain features of noble lives that account for their favorable selfevaluation: namely, their ability to hit the targets that they have set for themselves.5 The most
important feature of the activities through which nobles characteristically manifest their zest for
life is, I suggest, that it is “free”, engaged in for its own sake, not demanded by material
circumstance or external authority.6 Noble morality, I shall say, is a morality of intrinsic value,
of lives lived for the sake of the happiness inseparable from engaging in actions and activities
deemed worthwhile in and of themselves, together with the honor consequent upon excelling at
such actions and activities in the eyes of one’s peers.7
The nobles described in GM I form a leisure class in Thorstein Veblen's sense of that
term; they belong to those classes that are "by custom exempt or excluded from industrial
occupations and are reserved for certain employments to which a degree of honor attaches."8 In
two salient respects, Nietzsche's primitive masters resemble to the point of indiscernibility
Veblen's leisured classes in the early stages of "barbarian culture": in their orientation towards
intrinsic value, with its disdain for the goods of mere survival and comfort, and in their
predilection for boisterous mayhem:
The institution of a leisure class [writes Veblen] is the outgrowth of an early
discrimination between employments according to which some employments are
worthy and others unworthy. Under this ancient distinction the worthy
employments are those which may be classed as exploit; unworthy are those
necessary everyday employments into which no appreciable element of exploit
enters. The conditions apparently necessary to [the] emergence [of a leisure class]
are: (1) the community must be of a predatory habit (war or the hunting of large
game or both); that is to say, the men who constitute the inchoate leisure class in
these cases must be habituated to the infliction of injury by force and stratagem;
(2) subsistence must be obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the
exemption of a considerable portion of the community from steady application to
a routine of labor.9
By "worthy" employments, Veblen does not simply mean "something that is worth doing". The
warrior-hunters under discussion need not be thought of as denying that the menial tasks required
for "elaborating the material means of life"10 are worth doing; in fact, they probably would agree
4
that such tasks are worth doing insofar as that means that it is good that the jobs be done. It is
just that they do not consider such employment worthy of them. The point that I take to be
common to Veblen and Nietzsche is that it is of the essence of the nobility to legislate an
"invidious" contrast between, on the one hand, the routine activity needed to sustain the material
conditions of life --valued only instrumentally, as a necessary precondition for something better-and on the other hand, the pursuit of "exploit", which is valued for itself and constitutes that for
the sake of which it is worth seeing to mundane matters.
The powerful physicality and hearty ferocity of Nietzsche's early nobles is of a piece with
their "crude, coarse, external, narrow, and altogether unsymbolical" (GM I §6, 265/32) habits of
mind.11 Although the masters do value distinguishable qualities and activities intrinsically, they
experience each element in their "value-equation" as part of an indivisible, tangible whole; they
experience the several elements through the filter of the single "Urwert" of "being and doing as
we are and do." As a result, readers of GM cannot experience life as Nietzsche imagines the
originators of noble morality to have experienced it; their form of life is practically inaccessible
to modern men and women. It does not follow from this, though, that the perspective of master
morality is epistemically unavailable to inhabitants of the modern world. Master values are not
so bizarre as to render it doubtful that we can understand what it might have been like to live in
accordance with them.
In GM I §5, we are informed that:
[I]n the majority of cases [those who feel themselves to be men of a higher rank]
designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as "the powerful", "the
masters", "the commanders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this
superiority, for example as "the rich", "the possessors". ... But they also do it by a
typical character trait: ... They call themselves, for instance, "the truthful" (GM
§5, 262/29).
Nietzsche's point here is not that the primitive nobles assumed strict causal connections
interlinking power, wealth, truthfulness and courage, nor that they regarded the relevant nouns as
synonymous terms. If they had held the latter view, it would be questionable whether we could
understand their form of life at all. Any group that could not see that being disposed to tell the
5
truth and being wealthy are two different things would be at least as odd as a group that seemed
to recognize no distinction between, say, being fleet of foot and being a good cook. If they had
held the former view, it would seem that they would have had to accept the truth of conditionals
such as: (a) if one who is poor and weak were to become rich and strong, he would then also
become truthful and courageous, or (b) if one who is cowardly and mendacious were to become
truthful and courageous, he would then also become rich and powerful. But on Nietzsche's
account, these conditionals would have been scarcely intelligible to anyone, master or slave,
living in the epoch of "pure" master morality. And if these claims could have been made
intelligible to the masters, they would have rejected them, just as the members of a present day
teenage "in crowd" would reject the claim that if one dresses like the in crowd, one will acquire
the other desired traits of its members.12 Nietzschean nobles before the advent of slave morality
tacitly held a very crude "unity of the virtues" thesis.
The early nobles are too intellectually primitive to be able to defend, or even articulate,
their sense that their several virtues naturally belong together, and it is just this incapacity that
will render their world vulnerable to the corrosive influence of slave morality. The inability
discursively to account for themselves certainly indicates that the early masters are unreflective;
but it does not entail that their favorable self-evaluation is merely a groundless prejudice. In fact,
we have seen above (p. 3) that Nietzsche's claim that the origin of the opposition of "good" to
"bad" is found in "the pathos of distance" presupposes that the self-exaltation of the masters has a
significant basis in fact rather than fiction or delusion. “‘The masters'", in Frithjof Bergmann's
words, "received bountifully from the enormously diverse and splendid mass of happy and
desirable attributes".13 Nietzsche is not committed to the noble identification of "superior in
certain respects" --better at running, jumping, hunting, dancing, fighting or commanding for
example-- with "just plain superior", "intrinsically better overall", but he clearly does regard the
achievements of the nobles in respect of the relevant activities and virtues to be real, matters of
(pre)-historical fact rather than sheer mystifications. It is indeed largely because of this basis in
fact that the pejorative view of the slavish "other" entailed by noble morality is held by Nietzsche
6
to be something of a logically necessary afterthought; to the nobles, "the bad" are simply those
who lack the distinctive ensemble of desirable qualities that they have. The distinction
introduced by the slave revolt in morality, between good and evil, marks a radically different sort
of contrast.
Nietzsche takes pains to emphasize that when slave moralists deny that the masters are
good, they are using a different sense of the word "good" from that embodied in master morality,
and that in order to think of the masters as evil, the slaves must first "dye [them] in another color,
interpret [them] in another fashion, see [them] in another way, through the venomous eye of
ressentiment" (GM I §11, 274/40). When the eye of ressentiment looks at the nobles, it does not
see the tightly wound skein of power, wealth, courage, truthfulness and the like that the nobles
themselves had perceived; it sees instead only cruelty, tyranny, lustfulness, insatiability, and
godlessness (GM I §7, 267/34). Once the ressentiment of the weak has become creative and
given birth to a new kind of morality, the slaves are able when they look at themselves no longer
to see unrelenting, unredeemed misery and wretchedness, but rather a new kind of goodness,
constituted by the voluntary cultivation of patience, humility and justice (ibid).
The most important accomplishment of slave morality for Nietzsche is not its turning the
tables on the masters and deeming the erstwhile bad to be good and the erstwhile good to be evil;
what is most important about slave morality is that it does this by inventing a new type of value,
impartial value. Slave morality is the morality of impartial value in that it is the morality of
value chosen by an (allegedly) impartial subject, more precisely a subject who is in himself
neither master nor slave but can freely choose to behave and to evaluate either as the one or as
the other. Slave moralists, says Nietzsche, "maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that
the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb --for thus they gain the right to
make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey" (GM I §13, 280/45).
The idealized relationship between nobles and subjects that Nietzsche imagines to have
been the norm throughout pre- and early history is most obviously exemplified in the pre-history
of one particular culture, that of classical Greece. Nietzsche's model for the ethos of primeval
7
man is unmistakably the ethos of Homeric man. So it is not surprising to find Nietzsche's central
claim splendidly illustrated by Odysseus's treatment of Thersites in Book Two of the Iliad. After
Thersites berates Agamemnon for his part in the quarrel with Achilles and bemoans the fate of
the Acheans in the war, Odysseus intervenes with the following pronouncement:
Fluent orator though you be, Thersites, your words are ill-considered. Stop, nor
stand up alone against princes. Out of all those who came beneath Ilion with
Atreides I assert there is no worse man than you are. Therefore, you shall not lift
up your mouth to argue with princes, cast reproaches into their teeth, nor sustain
the homegoing. ... You argue nothing but scandal. And this also I will tell you,
and it will be a thing accomplished. If once more I find you playing the fool as
you are now, nevermore let the head of Odysseus sit on his shoulders, let me
nevermore be called Telemachos' father, if I do not take you and strip away your
personal clothing, your mantle and your tunic that cover over your nakedness, and
send you thus bare and howling back to the fast ships, whipping you out of the
assembly place with the strokes of indignity. (Iliad, Lattimore translation, II, 246264)14
Odysseus' message is chillingly clear: neither the views nor the well-being of Thersites (and his
ilk) are of the slightest concern to the commanders and heroes. Odysseus does not argue the
point, he states it.
In light of the "pathos of distance" separating the nobles from their inferiors, it needs to
be asked how slave morality could ever have made its astonishing incursion into noble morality,
how this sublimely subtle slave revolt succeeded in a way unparalleled by any political or
economic revolt of the poor and the weak against the strong and the wealthy.15 The chief
explanatory mechanism offered by the Genealogy is guilt; masters lose their grip on their own
morality by being made to feel guilty for being masters and adhering to master morality. As
Nietzsche puts it in GM III, §14, “men of ressentiment” could achieve “the ultimate, subtlest,
sublimest triumph of revenge ... if they succeeded in forcing their own misery, forcing all misery,
into the consciences of the fortunate so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their
good fortune and perhaps said to one another: ‘it is disgraceful to be fortunate; there is too much
misery’” (370-1/124, emphases in original). How, though, was the job begun? It may be that the
first step is to persuade the nobles that they are accountable for their lives and their values, but it
8
still needs to be asked how masters could ever be persuaded of anything by slaves, given that
they rarely speak to them at all and tend, when they do, to remain in the imperative mood.
We will not find the solution to Nietzsche's puzzle if we follow Richard Rorty in thinking
of his bellicose masters as "narcissistic and inarticulate hunks of Bronze Age beefcake".16
Nietzsche's nobles are not inarticulate --Odysseus, for example, is disturbingly eloquent in his
excoriation of Thersites-- but rather dialectically incompetent. It is only because they are
articulate that they can be argued into granting that they are free to choose whether and how to
allow expression to their deepest urges to act, and it is only because they are dialectically
incompetent that they can be argued into granting this point, which Nietzsche himself believes to
be false, and indeed pernicious.
A precondition of the masters' being coaxed into examining the Trojan Horse of slave
morality was their having already developed amongst themselves the practice of settling certain
issues by persuasion rather than by force. Not only does Nietzsche represent his nobles as
articulate, he also describes them as, in their relations with one another, wonderfully "resourceful
[erfinderisch] in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship" (GM I §11,
274/40). By frightful contrast, in their relations with the bad or the alien they could (and often
apparently did) behave "not much better than uncaged beasts of prey" (ibid). Master morality
thus operates (without a second thought) according to a double standard; conduct that would not
become a noble in his dealings with peers is not regarded as similarly disgraceful vis à vis those
beyond the pale.17 Before the advent of slave morality, this double standard is held not to have
given the nobles any pause; they practiced it, Nietzsche would have us believe, with a good
conscience.
Nobles are infected with bad conscience when they become convinced --more accurately
"half-convinced"-- that they are not simply responsible for certain things as nobles, but are
responsible for being noble, for living the lives they do. When this happens, they are half way to
being (half)convinced that they are not justified in thinking of themselves in the way that they
had done. The inability of the masters to justify themselves before the bar of impartial value is
9
the result principally of their inability intellectually to defend two features of their outlook: the
double standard that allows the bad or the alien to be treated ignobly, and the powerful
physicality that infuses the activities that nobles value intrinsically.
10
2. Socrates and the Demise of the Ur-Nobles
In addition to recognizing amongst themselves the difference between persuasion and
force and to acknowledging a peer-relative sense of responsibility, Nietzsche's master class
typically contained within it a priestly caste. The priesthood, as Nietzsche presents it, is a species
of nobility that pays special attention to the value of purity. Initially, this element in the valueequation is, like all the others, construed in easily graspable, tangible terms. "The pure one'",
Nietzsche writes, "is from the beginning merely a person who washes himself, who forbids
himself certain foods that produce skin ailments, who does not sleep with the dirty women of the
lower strata, who has an aversion to blood --no more, not much more" (GM I §6, 265/32).18
Nevertheless, he goes on to say, "there is from the first something unhealthy in ... priestly
aristocracies and in the habits ruling in them which turn them away from action and alternate
between brooding and emotional explosions ... " (ibid). Because they become used to turning
away from action, priests begin ineluctably to spiritualize the notion of purity to the point at
which it demands as much abstention as possible from the physical and the sensual altogether. It
is because of this readiness to deprecate "merely" physical activity, that the "priestly mode of
valuation can [easily] branch off from the knightly aristocratic and then develop into its opposite"
(GM I §7, 266/33).
For the priestly mode of evaluation to develop into the opposite of the knightlyaristocratic mode is for it to develop into slave morality. Nietzsche thus finds in the very idea of
a priestly form of life the beginnings of a solution to his self-created puzzle, the beginnings of an
answer to the question, How do the nobles get persuaded by slave moralists in the first place?.
Nietzschean masters are rendered susceptible to the lure of slave morality by dint of their
familiarity with the priestly form of nobility. If, however, the presence of priests among masters
is to help explain the growth of slave morality, we would seem to need an account of how
brawny, marauding warlords ever could have come to harbor brooding, neurasthenic priests in
their midst. Although Nietzsche says nothing about this in the first essay of GM, the compressed
11
account of the origin of the belief in gods found in GM II §19 offers a starting point from which a
textually plausible view can be extrapolated.
According to GM II §19, pre-historic tribes "recognized a juridical duty towards earlier
generations" (327/88). The members of such tribes believed that "it is only through the sacrifices
and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists --and that one has to pay them back
with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater,
since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the
tribe new advantage and new strength" (ibid, 327/89). As long as the tribe prospers, therefore, so
waxes the debt that the living owe to the dead, especially the longest dead, the founders of the
tribe, until, Nietzsche maintains, "in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a
god" (ibid, 328/89). The role of priests and their characteristic value of purity can be accounted
for within this scheme along the following lines: initially, ancestors and gods may be propitiated
by sacrifices and accomplishments of a familiarly predatory and aggressive sort; with time,
though, there grows a sense that the metaphysical "otherness" of these specially powerful beings
demands that they be treated with commensurately refined and mysterious forms of respect, with
for example buildings, sights, sounds and smells dedicated to them alone.19 The priesthood thus
becomes that department of the nobility that takes charge of commerce with gods and spirits,
leaving the knightly aristocrats to deal with mortal humans and animals.
Nietzsche holds in GM I, that slave morality entered world history in the culture of
ancient Judaism20 and that its success is epitomized by the triumph of Christianity.21 Even if we
accept these claims for the sake of argument, however, we do not get much closer to a resolution
of the difficulty under consideration. The origination of slave morality in Hebrew theology
cannot account for its insinuation into masterly circles, for it was not through widespread
conversion to Judaism that slave morality achieved its conquests. Granted that Christianity
sought and achieved widespread conversion, its history can perhaps help in providing an
explanation of how the popularity of slave morality swelled to global proportions; but
conversions to Christianity cannot count as examples of slave morality’s reaching knightly-
12
aristocrats in the first place. The late Hellenistic and early Roman world within which
Christianity emerged and grew was already familiar with the crucial notions of impartial value
and anti-sensual purity, it was a culture within which master morality had already been
contaminated by slave morality's characteristic mode of evaluation. In fact, I do not think that
the key to Nietzsche's solution to his problem is to be found in the Genealogy itself; it is to be
found elsewhere in his work, in his interpretation of Socrates.
The earliest slave moralists were, it might be said, in need of a Thersites of genius, one
possessed not only of the audacity to talk back to his superiors, but equipped as well with a
powerful intelligence and great personal magnetism. Socrates, as Nietzsche portrays him, is just
such a figure, an ugly and irritating plebeian, whose characteristic mode of inquiry by crossexamination was impertinent by the standards of noble Athenian taste; he was, we read in the
Twilight of the Idols, "the buffoon that got himself taken seriously" (TI "The Problem of Socrates
[PS]" §5, 6:70/31). According to Nietzsche, Socrates got himself taken seriously by "discovering
a new kind of agon" (ibid, §8, 71/32), a dialectical agon; he "fascinated in that he touched the
agonistic drive of the ancient Hellene, --he introduced a variant form of wrestling between young
men and youths. Socrates was also a great erotic (Erotiker)" (ibid).
Socrates commanded the attention of nobles by presenting them with an incontestably
impressive yet deeply perplexing form of life. In virtue of their inability to understand him or to
defeat him in the game of question and answer, Socrates' noble contemporaries were forced to
admit that where Socrates was concerned, they were no longer in charge of the situation. Since
being a noble, being "one of us excellent specimens of humanity", was supposed to include
within it precisely the wherewithal always to be in charge insofar as that was humanly possible,
this admission brings with it, to use a helpful anachronism, a jarring dose of cognitive
dissonance.
For example, when Alcibiades declares that Socrates is the only man capable of making
him feel ashamed of himself, Nietzsche would, on my interpretation, propose a two level account
of this phenomenon. First, Alcibiades is ashamed of himself by the standards of master morality.
13
The nobles whose favorable self-evaluations constituted master morality took "one of us" to be
extensionally equivalent to "one good at anything humanly worth being good at". Since
Alcibiades can't "prove Socrates wrong" when the latter "compels him to agree" that he is living
his life according to priorities that he cannot defend,22 he would, if Nietzsche is right, have to
conclude either: (a) that he was not as noble as he had thought, which would occasion shame, or
(b) that the practice of justifying one's choices with reason and argument was not something
worth a nobleman's attention, or (c) that he, the noble Alcibiades, need not care whether or not he
is able intellectually to defend himself against the plebeian Socrates. Option two is foreclosed
for Alcibiades because he (presumably) does recognize that it is frequently incumbent upon
nobles to justify actions and decisions to other nobles, for example in councils of war or on other
matters of public policy. The problem with option three is that Alcibiades has already been
seduced into caring very much how he fares in the eyes of Socrates; he has been smitten by
Socrates's strange new brand of eroticism, and the experience of shame by his own noble
standards therefore follows naturally upon his being at a loss for words in the face of Socratic
interrogation.
For Nietzsche, the inability of an Alcibiades to close his mind to the demands of Socratic
dialectic is already symptomatic of decay on the part of the noble morality of fifth century
Athens. Socrates, he writes, “understood ...[that] the old Athens was coming to an end, ... [that]
the instincts were everywhere in anarchy”, and that as a result “all the world had need of him”
(TI, PS §9, 6:71/32-3).23 We discover, in short, that the robust appearance of noble morality was
deceptive; its naive exuberance and unexamined self-confidence turn out to have been inherently
fragile and subject to endogenous disintegration.24
Because of the undiagnosed and only inchoately felt degeneration of fifth century
Athenian noble instincts and values, Socrates was able to radicalize the practice of defending
oneself with reasons in two ways: he demanded that his interlocutors justify themselves to
Socrates, a plebeian, and he demanded that they justify the fundamental principles according to
14
which they lived, rather than simply justifying particular, local matters against the background of
an unquestioned code of noble conduct.
Once ashamed as a noble in virtue of not being able to defeat Socrates in his novel agon
of the elenchus, a figure like Alcibiades is ripe for experiencing further shame --this time
bordering on guilt-- for not adopting the standards of evaluation Socrates is proposing. When, in
the Symposium, Alcibiades bemoans his "personal shortcomings", he is speaking as one already
in
some way convinced by Socrates, one who has been forced to agree that "reason=virtue=happiness"
(ibid, 69/31), that one should never voluntarily harm another, even if one has been wronged, and
that the established exemplars of wisdom, courage, piety and justice are in fact ignorant of what
wisdom, courage, piety and justice truly are. Alcibiades’ problem is that he is not wholehearted
in his commitment to Socratic principles.
...the moment I leave [Socrates's] side, [he explains], I go back to my old ways: I
cave in to my desire to please the crowd. My whole life has become one constant
effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply
ashamed, because I'm doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already
agreed with him that I should.25
Alcibiades thus bears witness, not only to the loosening grip of noble values on their adherents,
but also to the emerging con-fusion of master and slave morality, for he himself does not separate
the two distinct sources of shame that a Nietzschean analysis reveals, but speaks rather of a
single disconcerting experience of inadequacy in the face of Socrates.
3. Justice, Equality, and the Pathos of Distance
In this section, I turn from issues internal to Nietzsche's account of the dual origins of
modern morality to a question concerned with the nature and consequences of his objections to
slave morality. I do this, in the first place to buttress the claim that GM I is not, certain textual
appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, primarily concerned to disparage the servile values
of "the thoroughly modern moral milk-sop" (GM I P §7, 254/21); its more subtle and interesting
15
aim is, I will suggest, to reveal to us that we (present day inheritors of European culture) are
confused about our moral condition. We assume that our basic principles of moral evaluation fit
together coherently, while if Nietzsche is right they do not;26 if Nietzsche is right, our moral
world includes two quite different sorts of value, the intrinsic and the impartial, with two quite
different sources, the spontaneous self-affirmation of the strong and the creative ressentiment of
the weak. The second reason for discussing Nietzsche's moral critique is that a widespread and
not wholly unfounded interpretation of it holds that Nietzsche himself, like his postulated Urnobles, is implacably hostile to any form of egalitarianism. But if the more enduring contribution
of GM I lies where I find it, in the diagnosis of confusion and the posing of problems rather than
in the propounding of a counter-ideology, then the question of just how objectionably elitist
Nietzsche himself is can be separated from the philosophically more pertinent question of
whether his best insights entail objectionably elitist consequences.
One must resist coming away from GM I with the impression that Nietzsche takes the
slave revolt in morality to have been entirely successful. In fact, he tells us that "the two
opposing values ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have been engaged in a fearful struggle on
earth for thousands of years; and although the latter value has certainly had the upper hand for a
long time, there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided" (GM I §16, 285/52).
Master morality, though long on the losing end of the struggle, has not yet been utterly defeated
or wholly assimilated; it is embattled, but not dead, less akin to Latin than to the avoidance of
split infinitives.
And just as it is wrong to think that Nietzsche regards the slave revolt in morality as
entirely successful, so it is wrong to think, with T. M. Scanlon, that he regards it as an
unambiguous "psychological disaster".27 Nietzsche does regard slave morality as psychologically
dubious in virtue of the fact that, as he sees it, its adherents are essentially deceived about the
originating and sustaining causes of their deepest moral attitudes. Nietzsche takes slave
moralists to be essentially deceived because their commitment to slave morality could not
survive recognition of their true motivations for endorsing it. Slave morality (unlike master
16
morality) does not recognize the desire for revenge as a morally acceptable justification of action
or judgment. So if it is true that slave values arise, not from a spontaneous (perhaps divinely
prompted) recognition that civilized morality must seek to transmute the primitive lust for
revenge into the impartial desire to see justice done, but rather from a thirst for revenge by the
weak against the strong, then the adherent of slave values cannot acknowledge this truth about
himself without being trapped in a pragmatic self-contradiction; his own morality would brand
the source of his commitment to it as unacceptable.28 The slave moralist convinced by
Nietzsche's diagnosis of his true motivations is, indeed, in the same predicament as that of the
erstwhile noble forced to recognize that he is at a loss to know how to reply to Socrates: in both
cases, someone is compelled to acknowledge in himself an irrecusable inadequacy according to
the standards of his accepted scheme of valuing, and in both cases this state of affairs ineluctably
prompts a reluctant re-evaluation of the scheme of valuing in question, in order to make the
inadequacy rectifiable, at least in principle.
To the extent therefore that Nietzsche straightforwardly disdains pure slave morality, he
does so largely because of what he takes to be its necessary dishonesty, the fact that believers in
it cannot (if Nietzsche is correct) allow themselves to confront their own motivations for
believing. At the same time, however, he regards slave morality as the vehicle through which
"man first became an interesting animal" (GM I §6, 266/33), and as that without which "human
history would be altogether too stupid a thing" (ibid §7, 267/33). So whatever his exact attitude
to pure slave morality and pure master morality, it cannot be captured in the crude terms of
wholesale approval or disapproval. He remarks, indeed, that "today there is perhaps no more
decisive mark of a "higher nature", a more spiritual nature, than that of being ... a genuine
battleground of these opposed schemes of value" (ibid §16, 286/52).
We must, then, distinguish between being scornful of slave morality as a whole, which
Nietzsche is, and being wholly scornful of slave morality, which he is not. Once we are clear
about this, I think we can begin to respond to the widespread perception that a Nietzschean
pathos of distance unequivocally precludes a universalistic commitment to the practice of justice.
17
In Philippa Foot's version of this criticism, what tells against Nietzsche's being sufficiently
concerned for universal justice is his approval of "the experience, the feeling ... of being not just
apart from but higher than those who belong to 'the herd'".29 Foot suggests that the pathos of
distance may be inimical to the practice of justice on the grounds that that practice may require "a
certain recognition of equality between human beings" (ibid). The sense of equality she has in
mind is said to have to do with "thinking that one is always, fundamentally, in the same boat as
everybody else, and therefore that it is quite unsuitable for anyone to see himself as grand" (ibid).
Since Foot distinguishes the sense of equality that she thinks may be required for justice
from "a pretence of equality of talents" (ibid), it would seem that the former sort of equality is
supposed to be acknowledged independently of skill. Perhaps what Foot is thinking of is an
equal worthiness of certain sorts of consideration independently of any differentially distributed
abilities. I suspect that Charles Taylor has something along these lines in mind when he speaks
of "the universal attribution of moral personality" as "one of the most fundamental insights of
modern Western civilization".30 According to Foot, then, Nietzsche's moral philosophy is
disturbing because it traces this (alleged) insight back to the ressentiment of slave moralists and
accordingly finds the idea of a skill-independent equality to be "utterly despicable".31 I think that
the second half of this conclusion is unproven at best.
In section ten of the Genealogy's first essay, Nietzsche urges his readers not to "overlook
the almost benevolent nuances that the Greek nobility for example bestows on all the words it
employs to distinguish the lower orders from itself; how they are continuously mingled and
sweetened with a kind of sorrow (Bedauern), consideration, and forbearance, so that finally
almost all the words referring to the common man have remained as expressions signifying
‘unhappy’, ‘pitiable’" (GM I §10, 271-2/37). Immediately before this passage, he favorably
compares contempt to hatred as far as the degree of "falsification" carried out on its object is
concerned. "There is", he writes, " ... too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much
looking away and impatience involved in contempt, even too much joyfulness, for it to be able to
transform its object into a real caricature and monster" (ibid). The attitude described here is
18
significantly more subtle than the haughty disdain of those who think themselves "grand" for
those whom they take to be contemptible and small that Foot sees in the pathos of distance.
Foot's Nietzscheans come very close to being the sort of people who put on airs, whereas
Nietzsche's "higher natures" are the sort of people whose sense of superiority comes so naturally
and gracefully that they have neither time nor need for putting on airs. Nietzsche's nobles, like
Max Scheler's, "ha[ve] a thoroughly naive, unreflected consciousness of self-worth and fullness
of being, a consciousness of these things that is obscurely present throughout [their] waking
li[ves]. This consciousness is entirely different from pride, which results precisely from the
experienced diminishment of this naive sense of self-worth and is a particularly artificial and
adaptive ‘clinging fast’ to one's own value".32
Foot insinuates that Nietzsche's approval of "some men looking down on others" brings
with it a willingness to "sacrifice" or "write off" the mediocre,33 thus paying no attention to the
"sorrow, consideration, and forbearance" that Nietzsche finds embodied in the vocabulary with
which Greek nobles described their inferiors. When Foot takes it that because they feel higher
than the herd, Nietzschean nobles, when looking down on its members, must do so with a sneer,
she misses the possibility, mentioned above, of looking, with distinctly mixed emotions, both
down at and away from them. In Nietzsche’s view, when nobles look away from those for whom
they have contempt, they are doing so precisely so as not to be tempted to sneer at them in the
sense that Foot, justifiably, finds obnoxious; “it is”, he writes in Daybreak, “often no small sign
of humanity not to wish to judge another and to refrain from thinking about him” (D §528,
3:303/209).
Let me call the view that Foot’s Nietzsche finds despicable --that a skill-independent
sense of equality has moral significance-- “moral egalitarianism”. So described, moral
egalitarianism acquires something approaching a definite meaning only to the extent that the
moral significance of equality is given some content. A weak moral egalitarian thesis is that
everyone is entitled to some sorts of consideration simply in virtue of being human; a stronger
one is that the consideration to which one is entitled in virtue of being human is paramount, so
19
that to refuse to bestow it, to violate a moral entitlement, is to behave in a distinctively heinous
way. The weaker moral egalitarianism can plausibly include an entitlement to be granted some
sort of worth by one’s fellows among those that belong to the human birthright. The stronger one
demands something like the Kantian view that the sort of worth that belongs to “humanity insofar
as it is capable of morality” surpasses in kind any other sort, so that people (and any other
rational beings there may be) have dignity, while anything else of value has only a price.34
It is not plausible to think that anything recognizably Nietzschean could be beaten into
compatibility with stronger forms of moral egalitarianism, but it would be hasty to dismiss out of
hand the possibility that Nietzsche’s moral critique is compatible with a weaker version of the
egalitarian outlook. I shall contend that certain prominent Nietzschean themes do in fact tend to
support judgments that are, in a crucial class of cases, extensionally compatible with those of a
weak moral egalitarianism. The judgments I have in mind are those that condemn violations of
universally held moral entitlements. I describe the Nietzschean condemnations, not as
coincident, but as extensionally compatible with those of a weak moral egalitarianism because I
want to acknowledge that Nietzschean grounds for condemnation will be different from those of
a true moral egalitarian. So strictly speaking what I defend is the compatibility of Nietzsche with
an ersatz weak moral egalitarianism, not with the thing itself. My claims are: (1) that Nietzsche
has the resources to condemn just those violations of universally held moral entitlements that will
be condemned by a moral egalitarian, but: (2) that his grounds for condemnation will not grant
the sort of importance to the concept of a universally held moral entitlement that is constitutive
of moral egalitarianism.
A morally egalitarian condemnation of A’s violation of a moral entitlement of B’s
demands a certain pride of place for B in the evaluative scheme of things; it requires that our
condemnation of A be anchored in his mistreatment of B. One might, however, disdain A’s
action on grounds that leave B more or less out of the picture; one might disapprove of what A
did because it was motivated by stinginess or pusillanimity or ressentiment. The latter sort of
response to violations of universally held moral entitlements is the one I want to advocate for
20
those of us attracted equally by the gist of Nietzsche’s moral critique and by the core of moral
egalitarianism.
That Nietzsche prizes strength and disparages weakness is scarcely controversial. That he
regards generosity and magnanimity as particularly admirable expressions of strength is a less
well appreciated fact,35 and this lack of appreciation invites uncharitable interpretations of his
notorious esteem for ambition, adventure and struggle.
Certainly [he writes in The Gay Science] the state in which we hurt others is rarely
as agreeable, in an unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others; it is a
sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of
this poverty. ... it is only for the most irritable and covetous of devotees of the
feeling of power that it is perhaps more pleasurable to imprint the seal of power on
a recalcitrant brow --those for whom the sight of those who are already subjugated
(the objects of benevolence) is a burden and boredom. ... An easy prey is
something contemptible for proud natures. They feel good only at the sight of
unbroken men who might become their enemies and at the sight of all possessions
that are hard to come by. (GS §13 3.385/87)36
According to this passage, a tendency to take advantage of the weakness of another, so far from
demonstrating a commendably extra-moral delight in one’s own strength, is in fact a sign of
insecurity, a contemptible refuge for those lacking sufficient pride in themselves and their
abilities.37
I do not pretend that the considerations I have advanced in the last few paragraphs suffice
to refute the charge of anti-egalitarianism that Foot and others level at Nietzsche. I do claim that
there is nothing glaringly incoherent about the project of trying to get "beyond good and evil"
while retaining a role for a weak form of moral egalitarianism; what one needs to do is affirm
that ways of treating people that violate their moral entitlements --for example, their entitlement
to security of life, limb and property, or more generally their right to be granted some sort of
worth simply in virtue of being human-- are bad; not "evil" with all the distinctive (and
distinctively hard to articulate) overtones of that concept, but rather: bad in the master morality
sense of base and contemptible. To aspire to a view of this sort would be to try to value
something prized by slave moralists, but to do so in the self-affirmative manner characteristic of
masters.38
21
4. Impartial Value, the Bushman, and the West
I need now to clarify a presupposition that has been guiding my interpretation from the
start: namely, that GM I is intended, inter alia, as an historically serious reconstruction of the
roots of modern Western ethical consciousness. In saying that Nietzsche means to be telling an
historically serious story, I mean that he commits himself to claims that demand evaluation in the
light of historical or anthropological evidence. Granted, GM is not simply a piece of historical
research. Nietzsche is more concerned to promote his moral critique than to further historical
understanding for its own sake. But if I am right in thinking that the philosophical heart of GM
I's moral critique is the claim that the idea of impartial value originated in self-estranged
ressentiment, while the phenomenon of intrinsic value originated in a self-affirming "active
force" (GM II §18, 325/87), then it follows that the soundness of the critique depends in large
part upon whether this crucial claim about origins is true.
I shall not here defend this view about the historical seriousness of GM I, nor will I offer
a full-dress argument for the truth of Nietzsche's central thesis about the origins of modern
morality. Rather, I will bring empirical evidence to bear on Nietzsche's "slave revolt hypothesis"
from two different directions. First I shall argue the hypothesis receives initial support from
certain enduring facts of language use in English and other European languages. In so doing, I
will be expanding upon suggestions found in GM I §§4 and 5, as well as in a modest way
responding to Nietzsche's proposed prize question: "What light does linguistics, and especially
the study of etymology, throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts?" (GM I, §17
289/55). I shall then state and contest an objection according to which the notably egalitarian
modes of life typical of foraging societies constitute a knock-down counter-example to
Nietzsche's conjecture. Such cultures appear to falsify the slave revolt hypothesis because they:
(a) never developed the distinction between superiors and inferiors that is an essential
precondition of a slave revolt, but (b) behave in ways that indicate a firm commitment to fairness
22
and equality that Nietzsche apparently regards as emerging only from a slave revolt in morality. I
discuss the moral attitudes and social practices of the erstwhile “Bushmen”, or San, of Southern
Africa as a case in point.39
i
According to Peirce, an hypothesis is an attempt to account for something that would
otherwise be surprising. In an 1878 paper, he offers the following as an example of the sort of
thing he has in mind: "fossils are found; say, remains like those of fishes, but far in the interior of
the country. To explain the phenomenon, we suppose the sea once washed over this land. This
is [an] hypothesis".40 Consider now the continued presence in English of a number of ambiguous
words and phrases that fit the following two descriptions:
(i) the central ambiguity in question is that between an evaluative and a descriptive sense.
(ii) from the perspective of a wholeheartedly egalitarian morality, the evaluative content
runs directly contrary what would have been expected on the basis of the descriptive
sense.
The words "noble" and "common" can serve as examples. The Oxford English
Dictionary [OED] has as the second entry under "noble": "illustrious by rank, title, or birth;
belonging to that class of the community which as a titular pre-eminence over the others", and as
the fourth: "having high moral qualities or ideals; of great or lofty character." The potential for
discrepancy between the two senses is nicely exploited in a citation, dated 1829, from a work by
Kenelm H. Digby entitled The Broad Stone of Honour, or the True Sense and Practice of
Chivalry. "The soldiers of Pavia", writes Digby, "were far more noble than their Emperor,
Friedrich II, when they remonstrated against his barbarous execution of the Parmesan prisoners."
Under "common", the OED has twenty-three entries, divided into three main groups. The first
group (of nine) entries rings changes on the general sense "belonging equally to more than
one,"41 the second group (of six) is introduced with the phrase "of ordinary occurrence and
quality, hence mean, cheap", while the final grouping contains various technical senses, from
mathematics and the law amongst other areas. The homonymy covering the first two groups is
23
pretty clearly not accidental, but conforms to the following logic: nothing that is too common, in
the sense of shared equally by many, can be very distinguished(!) or desirable. The most
revealing of entries in the second group is sense fourteen, according to which, "common" when
predicated of "ordinary persons, life, language, etc." means "lower class, vulgar, unrefined."42
These ambiguities of "noble" and "common" cannot be explained away as a theoretically
unpromising peculiarity of the English language, as the ambiguity of "poor" between "indigent"
and "substandard" can perhaps be; for the same ambiguity occurs in other European languages;
in, for example, the German "vornehm" and "gemein"43 and the French "noble" and "commun".
Why should single words yoke together, on the one hand a politico-genealogical conception of
superiority with a meritocratic, characterological one, and on the other hand, an evaluatively
innocuous concept of being shared with an evaluatively charged term of moral and social
opprobrium? The slave revolt hypothesis interprets these ambiguities as what the English
anthropologist E. B. Tylor called "survivals": remnants of a time before good and evil, linguistic
analogues of Peirce's inland fish fossils. What today might seem a grossly tendentious yoking of
disparate senses was once, according to Nietzsche, the unhesitating fusion of elements regarded
as natural brethren.
In GM I §5, Nietzsche adverts to the distinctive and not easily translatable meanings of
the ancient Greek "agathos", "esthlos", "deilos", and "kakos" in support of this view. The Liddell
and Scott Greek-English Lexicon [L&S] gives four primary meanings for agathos: (1) well-born,
gentle, (2) brave, valiant, (3) good, serviceable, and (4) good in a moral sense; two for esthlos:
(1) brave, stout, noble, and (2) morally good, faithful; three for deilos: (1) cowardly, hence vile,
worthless, (2) low-born, mean, (3) miserable, wretched, with a compassionate sense;44 and five
for kakos: (1) ugly, (2) ill-born, (3) craven, base, (4) worthless, sorry, unskilled, (5) morally evil,
pernicious. From a Nietzschean perspective, the distinctions made by L&S are useful and
intelligible only to us, inheritors of the slave revolt trying to understand the language and culture
of ancient Greece. What is notable about the way the words were used in their natural habitat is
the fact that they unproblematically blend together aesthetic, ethical, and socio-economic
24
qualities.45 If Nietzsche is right, the very possibility of sharply distinguishing the descriptive
from the evaluative senses of terms of this sort does not become a live option until slave morality
has developed to a suitably sophisticated level.46
Etymology and usage cannot on their own establish the crucial Nietzschean connection
between the emergence of impartial value and the expression of ressentiment. What systematic
ambiguities of the sort I have looked at can show is: (a) that our (still) current moral language is
not monolithic, but stratified, and (b) that the older semantic stratum embodies an aristocratic
scheme of value, while the younger one shows an accelerating tendency to identify the truly
moral with a distinctively impartial, egalitarian mode of evaluation. Such ambiguities alone
cannot show: (c) that it was ressentiment that sparked the formation and spread of the egalitarian
scheme of value.47
Since (c) is evidently a more controversial and characteristically Nietzschean thesis than
is (a) or (b), the interest of the evidence I have been portraying as favorable to the slave revolt
hypothesis might appear to be disappointingly scant. In fact such an appearance would betray an
overly crude understanding of what (a) and (b) amount to in the context of Nietzsche's overall
project.
Agreed, it is no news to point out that Western culture was once warmly hospitable to
aristocratic modes of life that have fallen since into severe disrepute. Nietzsche is offering
something more subtle than this. He is, on the present interpretation, drawing attention to the
subterranean persistence of the older scheme of value within a culture that is on the whole ever
more self-consciously committed both to purifying the moral realm of contamination from
considerations of brute force, or wealth, or beauty, or mental or physical dexterity, ... or anything
else that does not belong properly to morality, and to championing the moral equality of persons.
Once aware of the stratification of our moral language, we could of course take steps to expunge
the anomalous evaluative usages in an effort to carry on ethical life in the exclusive terms of an
austerely impartial, rigorously purified conception of moral value; or we can begin to rethink the
25
nature and foundations of moral value. The latter response requires us, in Nietzsche's terms, to
open ourselves to the battle between noble and slave modes of evaluation.
Nietzsche notoriously holds that the cost of response number one, of trying to carry on
ethical life in ever more purely egalitarian and impartial terms, is a descent into a ruinous and
pathetic form of nihilism, and one reason he is convinced of this is that he believes (c). My own
more modest claims on his behalf are: (1) that if (a) and (b) are true then the question, What is it
that accounts for the emergence of the impartial, egalitarian mode of evaluation? needs to be
asked, and (2) that Nietzsche’s answer --call it “the creative ressentiment conjecture”-- has much
to recommend it. I should perhaps add that a full defence of this second claim would require
more argument than I can provide here; for present purposes I maintain only that it has an initial
plausibility.48
ii
If the story told in GM I is meant to be history of some sort on some level, what exactly is
it supposed to be a history of?49 The short answer implied throughout this paper is that it is a
history of Western morality. Using an outdated but more revealing designation, GM I can be
described as attempting to lay bare the ethical significance of Christendom by laying bare its true
origins. Just as Homer provides Nietzsche with the model for his terminus a quo, the knightlyaristocratic mode of living and valuing, so is his terminus ad quem, the "modern moral milksop", unmistakably represented by that familiar nineteenth century intellectual who responds to a
waning conviction in the truth of Christian metaphysics with an ever more rationalized and
spiritualized "cling[ing] ... to Christian morality" (TI Expeditions of an Untimely Man, §5
6:113/69). In spite of this historically and geographically specific ambit, however, certain of GM
I's central claims seem to have wider implications. For example, the view that impartial value
emerges from the slave revolt in morality appears on the face of it to entail that no culture
untouched by such a revolt should be familiar with that sort of value; and this in turn entails that
the presence of impartial value requires the prior existence of the severely hierarchical social
climate in which master values flourish.
26
It is because of these consequences that the egalitarian peoples such as the San of
southern Africa seem to constitute a knock-down counter-example to the thesis that a conception
of impartial value depends upon a slave revolt in morality. For it is widely agreed (1) that such
peoples have never developed the sort of hierarchically organized form of life that is supposed to
be necessary for the existence of noble values, and (2) that they demonstrate in their most firmly
entrenched customs a strikingly high regard for peaceable and equitable group relations; they
appear not simply to have happened not to develop distinctions of rank amongst themselves, they
actively see to it that "there are no distinct haves and have-nots",50 that physical hostilities are
rare, and that actions or attitudes likely to increase the risk of hostility in any form are
assiduously discouraged by "unspoken social laws"51. Richard Lee goes so far as to say that the
egalitarianism of the San “is not simply the absence of a headman and other authority figures, but
a positive insistence on the essential equality of all people and a refusal to bow to the authority of
others.”52 In short, the San seem to abide by something very like an impartial respect for each
other, even though this outlook cannot have originated in a slave revolt in morality.53
To make matters worse, there are elements of San culture more reminiscent of
Nietzschean nobles than of his slaves. The San take an intense and vital delight in music and
dance,54 are immensely skilled and enthusiastic hunters, are known for their elaborate and
beautiful paintings on the walls of caves and on rockfaces, and are inveterate story-tellers. Their
world, in other words, despite the absence of political hierarchy and economic complexity suffers
from no lack of "vigorous, free, joyful activity" of just the variety Nietzsche prizes when it is
engaged in by Homeric Greeks and their like.55 And it is hard to imagine that they do not value
these self-expressive sorts of activity intrinsically by contrast with the (presumably instrumental)
value accorded to the "menial tasks" devoted to "elaborating the material means of life". But if
the Sittlichkeit of the San is to qualify as a form of master morality, it is a master morality
without masters, since there is no evidence that San contrast themselves and their excellences
with anything perceived as "low, low-minded, or plebeian".
27
To be sure, if a commitment to peacable egalitarianism entails a commitment to the
impartial value characteristic of slave morality, then the nature of San culture falsifies the slave
revolt hypothesis. But what of the conditional that grounds the damaging inference?
One reason to think that Nietzsche would not have accepted it is that his own moral
anthropology recognizes an epoch of peacable egalitarianism that precedes the emergence of
master morality. In GM I §5 he refers to "the commune" as "the most primitive form of society"
(264/31); in Beyond Good and Evil, he distinguishes the "pre-moral" phase of human history,
during which "the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences", from the
genuinely moral phase, governed by the aristocratic habit of determining the value of an action
by reference to its "ancestry" or "origin" (Herkunft) (BGE §231, 5:50/44-5); and in Human All
Too Human he characterizes the first stage of human morality, "the first sign that an animal has
become human", as that in which "behavior is no longer directed to ... momentary comfort, but
rather to ... enduring comfort", and contrasts it with a "higher stage" in which "man acts
according to the principle of honor" (HTH I §94, 2:91/50). For Nietzsche, in other words, we
find in the very beginning of moral history groups of early humans struggling to survive and
reproduce, and doing so in conformity with "The First Principle of Civilization", that "any
custom is better than no custom" (D §16, 3:29/16). Though different particular groups developed
different particular customs, all of them agreed on two fundamental ideas: "that the community is
more important than the individual and that a lasting advantage is preferable to a transient one"
(HTH II §89, 2:412/231). Only after the human species had maintained itself in groups of this
kind for some time did the knightly-aristocratic inventors of master morality emerge onto the
scene. Nietzsche’s description of this earliest form of ethical life as that of “the commune”
strongly suggests that he takes it to be egalitarian in nature.
Nietzsche’s willingness to allow that a morality of, as they might be called, urcommunities constitutes a form of ethical life distinct from both the master morality that breaks
from it, and the slave morality that in turn breaks from master morality, means that he need not
be troubled by the discovery of groups such as the San whose attitudes and behavior cannot be
28
smoothly assimilated either to the ethos of the masters, nor to that of the slave revolt. In fact,
adding the hypothesis of a morality of ur-communities to Nietzsche’s theoretical framework
enables at least two striking features of San culture to be turn up on the credit rather than the
debit side of Nietzsche’s theoretical ledger.
The nature of Nietzschean ressentiment, and the brief account of the origins of the state
found in GM II §17, should lead us to expect ur-communities to be marked by the relative
absence of the sort of ressentiment alleged to have engineered the slave revolt in morality, and by
the presence of forms of political power that function without recourse to a state. According to
GM II §17, the function of the oldest “state” (the scare quotation marks are Nietzsche’s) was to
“weld ... a hitherto unimpeded and unshaped populace into a fixed form” (324/86). The scare
quotation marks are there, Nietzsche explains, because he takes himself to be talking about
nothing more than “some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which,
organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a
population perhaps vastly superior in numbers but still formless and nomad” (ibid). What we
know as the state, in other words, is descended from something invented by barbarian nobles,
and so cannot be supposed to figure in the lives of communities that have experienced no
admixture of master morality.56
If conformity to custom is not enforced by a super-ordinate authority such as the state, it
must presumably be enforced by all against each and each against all. It follows from this, I
think, that the bonds that bind egalitarian ur-communities together could not long survive any
significant growth in ressentiment on the part of its members. Not that Nietzsche would portray
ur-communities as free of ressentiment as such; that would run counter to his view that the
experience of ressentiment is strictly coeval with the emergence of a distinctively human
animal.57 What is variable across time and type according to Nietzsche is the manner in which
ressentiment is experienced and handled. In GM I §10, for example, we are told that when
ressentiment appears in a noble, “[it] consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction,
and therefore does not poison” (273/39). It is the latter, venomous form of ressentiment that
29
would be intolerable in an ur-community. For supposing it to crop up in an individual or subgroup, it would be directed either against other individuals or sub-groups, or in some generalized
way, against the community as a whole. In either case, the persistence of “undischarged”
ressentiment would severely handicap the mechanisms of consensual decision making and
behavior enforcement demanded by a morality of ur-communities. We should, consequently,
expect the members of ur-communities to share with nobles the habit of dealing with
immediately experienced ressentiment --the immediate response to perceived encroachments,
humiliations, inequities and the like-- by means of similarly immediate, outwardly directed
action.
When measured against these two consequences of Nietzsche’s overall scheme, the San
turn out to fit the profile of an ur-community rather nicely. That the San have no indigenous
counterparts to state power and authority, as these are understood in the West, is beyond serious
dispute. One simple and compelling reason for this, as George Silberbauer notes, is that the
San’s basic political unit, the band, is subject to regular dispersal into smaller household-like
groups during seasons of scarcity. “A centralized, hierarchical structure, with specialized
personnel and roles would”, Silberbauer observes cogently, “be unable to function when the band
separates.”58
More remarkable than the absence of a state within San culture is its pointed refusal to
tolerate just the sorts of festering grievance that feed the poisonous ressentiment ascribed by
Nietzsche to the originators of slave morality. An impressive number of San ethnographers have
drawn special attention to a variety of “venting” practices that serve to sustain cooperative
harmony and inhibit pernicious hostility.
Silberbauer, for example, divides the relationships that an individual G/wi has with his or
her kin (which will typically include the entire band to which the individual belongs) into “joking
relationships” and “avoidance/respect relationships”. Avoidance/respect holds between an
individual and his or her parents, opposite sex siblings, and children past the age of seven or
30
eight; while joking relatives include the individual’s grandparents, same sex siblings, opposite
sex siblings-in-law, and cousins.
An avoidance/respect relationship [writes Silberbauer] ... requires that those so
related should ≠ao (v.t., to be reserved or respectful toward, to be scared of) one
another. Their proper behavior is characterized by:
Not sitting close together and generally avoiding bodily contact if
not of the same sex.
Being careful not to swear or make bawdy remarks in the obvious
hearing of those in an avoidance relationship.
Not touching their possessions without permission; if an object is
to be passed between avoidance relatives, an intermediary should,
properly, be used and a direct transfer avoided.59
Because of the restricted nature of their interaction, direct conflict between avoidance relatives is,
Silberbauer notes, “effectively prevented.”60
It is within joking relationships, then, that G/wi conflicts will be articulated and resolved,
and it is of the essence of the joking relationship, Silberbauer argues, to allow disputes to be
conducted in such a way as to minimize the dangers of escalation and lasting resentment. “The
behavior appropriate to the joking relationship”, he explains, “permits free and trenchant public
criticism of the actions of a joking partner and imposes an obligation to accept the criticism
without the kind of resentment that might exacerbate the conflict.”61 Writing twenty years earlier
than Silberbauer about the Nyae Nyae !Kung, Lorna Marshall came to the entirely similar
conclusion that the !Kung’s vigilant attention to “getting things into words” is something that
“keeps everyone in touch with what others are thinking and feeling, releases tensions, and
prevents pressures from building up until they burst out in aggressive acts.”62 Richard Lee,
meanwhile, remarks of the Dobe !Kung, that:
they have evolved elaborate devices for puncturing the bubble of conceit and
enforcing humility. These leveling devices are in constant daily use --minimizing
the size of others’ kills, downplaying the value of others’ gifts, and treating one’s
own efforts in a self-deprecating way. Please and thank you are hardly ever found
in their vocabulary; in their stead is a vocabulary of rough humor, back-handed
compliments, put-downs, and damning with faint praise.63
31
On balance, then, the reasons for thinking that egalitarian peoples such as the San constitute
counter-examples to the slave revolt hypothesis do not appear to be strong; if such peoples are to
be located on Nietzsche’s conceptual map, they should be counted as living examples of urcommunities, not as practitioners of a slave morality without a slave revolt.64
If such is the proper response to the threat of falsification posed by peacably egalitarian
societies, it might justly be demanded that I provide a more richly specified account of the
concept of impartial value than that which I have relied upon so far. For if a strong commitment
to treating everyone alike together with a pronounced aversion to arrogance and a tendency to
shun competition do not add up to a commitment to impartial value, then just what does? What I
have to offer on this head in the remainder of this essay will be preliminary in character; just
enough, I hope, to justify confidence in the search for something more satisfying.
I begin by stipulating that a minimum condition for a moral outlook’s including a
commitment to impartial value is that it bear a sufficiently strong resemblance to the relevant
ideas of the obvious exemplars of Nietzschean slave morality: the Hebrew Bible, the New
Testament, and the central figures in Western moral philosophy from Socrates to Schopenhauer.
This stipulation presupposes that the canonical exemplars of slave morality exhibit enough unity
amongst them to make the proposed condition theoretically useful; a consequence that has (to my
mind) the merit of opening the slave revolt hypothesis to a further source of empirical evidence.
For if it were to turn out that what divided, say, Aquinas from Kant from Mill, was more
philosophically significant than anything that united them, that would be evidence that the
presupposition was false. By the same token, however, to identify a network of concepts or
commitments which there is reason to think are common to the canonical slave moralists and
which are of genuine philosophical interest, is to have the materials for a satisfying answer to the
question: What does it take to be committed to impartial value? The answer would be that it
takes familiarity with these concepts and commitment to these views, the ones integral to the
Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament, and Socrates, and all the others on the list.
32
When introduced in the first section of this paper, the concept of impartial value was
characterized as "value chosen by an impartial subject, one who is in himself neither master nor
slave, but can freely choose to behave and to evaluate either as the one or as the other" (cf. above,
p.7). This account implies that a commitment to impartial value is bound up with a commitment
to a certain conception of agency. Of a piece with impartial value is the conception of a
distinctively moral sense or locus of agency. What are the conditions of moral agency? What
are the legitimate grounds of appraisal of a distinctively moral --as opposed to aesthetic, athletic,
epistemic, prudential, ...-- sort? These are questions that will occupies thinkers within the culture
labeled by Nietzsche, with malice aforethought, the culture of slave morality. I suggest, in short,
that impartial value is an umbrella concept comprising the nest of ideas and assumptions about
value that generate the kind of question just listed. As a defence of the theoretical utility of this
notion that I am ascribing to slave morality and denying to the San, this, I hope, will do for a
start.
By examining and rejecting the idea that the egalitarian culture of the San might pose a
knock-down counter-example to the slave revolt hypothesis, we have, it seems to me, been
brought to recognize a deeper and more precise sense in which the history of GM I is a history of
western morality. For it is evident, I think, that Nietzsche's most interesting and defensible
historical claim is that it is distinctive of our culture, the culture that has roots in both the Hebrew
Bible and the Homeric epics, that self-affirmation and intrinsic value entered it by way of a
knightly-aristocratic leisure class, and that it underwent a slave revolt that introduced a reactive
morality of impartial value. Whether having this history is our fortune or our misfortune is as
maybe; more to the point for Nietzsche as I read him is that it is our fate.
CONCLUSION
I have argued: (1) that Nietzsche can provide a satisfactory account of how slave morality
could have got off the ground, (2) that his taste for noble values does not preclude him (more
33
pertinently, someone influenced by his views) from acknowledging claims of justice that rest
upon a sense of equality amongst human beings, and (3) that the conjecture that the moral
consciousness of the modern West has been decisively shaped by a slave revolt in Nietzsche’s
sense has enough empirical support to warrant further investigation. Central amongst the
historical questions to be pursued in such future inquiry will be that of what evidence there is that
ressentiment plays the role that Nietzsche assigns to it in generating the ideals of slave morality.
Central amongst the ethical questions will be that of the role to assign to notions such as that of
equality in a skill-independent sense or of a moral entitlement within a scheme of value that is
self-affirming and free of self-deceptive ressentiment. In addition, we are left with the exegetical
issue of identifying more precisely Nietzsche's views with regard to the historical and the ethical
questions. I hope in this paper to have broken the surface on these matters; I make no claim to
have plumbed the depths.
34
1
I would like to thank audiences at Bishop's University, The University of Miami, The Canadian
and American Philosophical Associations, and Hamilton College for questions that helped me
improve earlier drafts of this paper. I would like most especially to thank Rüdiger Bittner, Jean
Grondin, Susan Haack, Aimee MacDonald, Eric Saidel, James Stayer, Allen Wood, and an
anonymous referee for this journal for detailed criticisms and helpful suggestions.
2
I refer to the first essay of the Genealogy by section number, followed by two page numbers, the
first to volume five of the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA], and the second to
the English translation by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969). For other
works by Nietzsche I follow, mutatis mutandis, the same procedure, using the now standard
English acronyms for the titles of works and referring to the following English translations:
Human All Too Human I & II [HTHI & HTHII], translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986); Daybreak[D], translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982); The Gay Science[GS], translated by Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Random House, 1974); Thus Spake Zarathustra [Z[, translated by R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969); Beyond Good and Evil[BGE], translated by Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1989); Twilight of the Idols[TI], translated by R. J.
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968); The Will to Power[WP], translated by
Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York. Random House, 1969). I have often altered
the translation of particular words and phrases.
3
As Alexander Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press,1985] 254) points out, Nietzsche only uses the phrase "master morality" once in his
published works (in BGE §260). Nevertheless, he speaks often enough of "noble morality" (GM
I §10 and A §24), "aristocratic values and value judgments" (GM I, §§ 2, 7, 16) and "nobler
ideals" (ibid, §9), and he identifies nobles with masters unambiguously enough to warrant the use
of the term as a natural and convenient contrast to "slave morality". I shall, in any case, use
"master morality" as synonymous with "noble morality".
Cf. BGE §260, 5:209/205: “The noble type of man ... knows itself to be that which first accords
honor to things; ... Everything it knows as part of itself it honors.”
4
5
Cf. p. 6 below.
The inclusion of war on Nietzsche’s list of characteristic noble activities might seem to count
against the suggestion that these activities are all engaged in for their own sakes. With Aristotle,
it might be thought that “nobody chooses to make war or provoke it for the sake of making war; a
man would be regarded as a bloodthirsty monster if he made his friends into enemies in order to
bring about battles and slaughter” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. J. A. K. Thompson, trans.,
Hugh Tredennick, revised trans. [New York: Penguin Books, 1979] X 1177b10). One of
Nietzsche’s chief aims, however, is precisely to highlight the gulf between a scheme of value that
regards Aristotle’s remark as an ethical truism and the scheme that governed the lives of
barbarian nobles. To adherents of the former scheme, those of the latter must indeed often
appear to be “bloodthirsty monsters”. Nietzsche writes that the nobles’ “indifference to and
contempt for security, body, life, comfort, their appalling cheerfulness (entsetzliche Heiterkeit)
6
35
and profound joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty --all this
came together in the minds of those who suffered from it, in the image of the ‘barbarian’, the
‘evil enemy’, perhaps as the ‘Goths’, the ‘Vandals’” (GM I §11, 275/42). Now there is nothing
in the thesis that, as Arthur Danto puts it, Nietzschean nobles take warmaking to be “not so much
what [they] do but what [they] are, so that it is not a matter of warring for, but as, an end”
(“Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals, in Richard Schacht, ed. Nietzsche, Genealogy,
Morality: Essays on On The Genealogy of Morals, [Berkeley: University of California Press] 13),
that precludes acknowledgement that nobles might also have valued war for the sake of extrinsic
goods such as territory, plunder, and honor that can be obtained by waging it successfully. The
case is entirely akin to, for example, valuing athletic ability both for its intrinsic rewards and for
its conduciveness to good health. Cf. on the intrinsic value of war, Zarathustra, “Of War and
Warriors”: “You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that
hallows every cause” (Z 4:59/74).
7
My characterization of master morality as a morality of intrinsic value has evident affinities
with Danto’s description of it as a morality of “absolute and unconditioned value” and the
“categorical good” (Nietzsche as Philosopher, [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980],
159). But I think that Danto is mistaken to add that the contrast between master and slave
morality "reduce[s] to a fairly simple and, since Kant, routine distinction between an absolute
and unconditional value, and a hypothetical or contingent value" (ibid.). The unconditioned good
for Kant is very different from the intrinsic goods of noble morality. For Kant, the unconditioned
good must be independent of circumstance or restriction of any kind, including restrictions
having to do with contingent features of us. So for Kant a truly unconditioned good could not
possibly be good for some but not for others, while the goods valued intrinsically by Nietzsche’s
nobles fit just this description, they are thought to be good for nobles, but not for commoners.
Just as the former view menial employments as unworthy of them, so they view slaves as
unworthy of honorable activity. For a Nietzschean noble, the fact that he takes e.g. leading the
troops into battle to be an intrinsically valuable thing to do does not entail that it would be good
for one of the troops to attempt the same feat. At root, the difference between Kantian
unconditioned value and the intrinsic value I am attributing to Nietzsche’s nobles is the
difference between: a “value in itself” identified by contrast to mere “value for us”, and a “value
in itself” identified by reference to “us nobles”; as Nietzsche puts it in BGE: “the noble type of
man ... judges, ‘what is harmful to me is harmful in itself’” (§260, 5:209/205).
8
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Random House, 1934), 1.
9
ibid., pp. 7-8.
10
ibid., 10.
11
Cf. Quine's charming bit of doggerel: "The unrefined and sluggish mind/Of Homo
Javinensis/Could only treat of things concrete/And present to the senses". ("Identity, Ostension,
Hypostasis", in From a Logical Point of View, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980], 77).
12
At GM II §23, Nietzsche tacitly admits that ancient Greek nobles were capable of acts that they
themselves would deem disgraceful. He insists, however, that such occurrences had to be rare,
36
and that their possibility had to be explained by appeal to a puzzling sort of divine intervention:
“‘[H]ow is it possible?, How could it actually have happened to heads such as we have, we men
of aristocratic descent, of the best society, happy, well-constituted, noble, and virtuous?’ --thus
noble Greeks asked themselves for centuries in the face of every incomprehensible atrocity or
wantonness with which one of their kind had polluted himself. 'He must have been deluded by a
god', they concluded finally, shaking their heads ..." (334/94).
13
Frithjof Bergmann, "Nietzsche and Analytic Ethics", in Schacht ed., 78.
14
The Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961),
Book II, lines 246-264.
15
Rüdiger Bittner has argued that slave morality cannot have originated in a slave revolt of the
sort Nietzsche imagines. According to Bittner, Nietzsche has to be wrong, because his story
demands that the earliest slave moralists invented slave morality as a means of compensating
themselves for their wretched lives. "But", Bittner claims, "[the slaves] cannot actually
compensate themselves with a revenge they themselves consider imaginary" ("Ressentiment", in
Schacht, ed., op cit., 133). He infers, first that either the compensation or the invention "has to
go", and second that the one to go has to be the idea that the slaves deliberately invented slave
morality. It is, he argues, hard to believe that [our metaphysical and moral convictions] ... in the
last resort derive from a cooked-up story" (ibid). Bittner concludes that "there is no slave revolt;
ressentiment is not creative; and the revenge is imaginary but not known to be so" (ibid). I think
that Bittner neglects the degree to which the revenge of the slaves is, in effect, represented by
Nietzsche as a case of collective Schadenfreude: the slaves make themselves happy by making
the masters unhappy, and in order to do this, they need only convince masters, not themselves.
The deepest disagreement between Bittner and me, however, concerns Nietzsche’s conception of
creativity. Bittner thinks that if we are to speak of creative ressentiment and a slave revolt, we
must imagine the earliest slave moralists to be in a situation analogous to La Fontaine's fox; they
must look at the lives of nobles, "know" that such lives are healthier and happier than their own,
and yet convince themselves (and others) that the masters are in fact worse off than themselves. I
think it more charitable to interpret Nietzsche as holding, with Bittner himself, that the evolution
of slave morality was a long, slow process. Why exactly could Nietzsche not agree that slave
morality "may have dawned on the slaves and grown on them, without ever having been set up
expressly" (ibid)? Bittner’s answer is that his "pathos of creativity" demands that a slave revolt
spring from a creative act and something's being the result of a creative act is incompatible with
its "just growing on us". Though I am not prepared to argue the point here, this last assumption
strikes me as dubious. The nub of Bittner's criticism, in any case, is that a creative slave revolt
requires fully-fledged Sartrean self-deception, and I think that this is false. It is enough that the
slaves actually be motivated by their desire to exact revenge on the masters; it is not crucial that
they be aware of their true motivations.
16
Richard Rorty, "Against Belatedness", London Review of Books, 16 June-6 July, 1983: 3.
17
In GM I's most incendiary passage concerning the propensity of nobles periodically to exempt
themselves from their own standards of civilized behavior and return to the innocence of a
"predator conscience" (GM §11, 275/40), Nietzsche speaks of the nobles' releasing their pent-up
37
aggression on "das Fremde" (the foreign or alien), rather than on their inferiors. Furthermore, the
fact that the marauding warriors are depicted as "returning from a disgusting procession of
murder, arson, molestation, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more
than a student prank, convinced that the poets will have much to sing about for a long time to
come" (ibid), suggests that Nietzsche has in mind an expedition such as that of the Greeks to
Troy rather than a day to day diet of less dramatic brutalities inflicted upon the weak by the
strong. I do not, therefore, think it obvious that master morality's double standard entailed that
dealings between nobles and their subordinates were governed by no remotely humane standards
at all. As Moses Finley says, a propos of life in the world depicted by Homer, "we simply do not
know how rights were determined when commoners were involved, whether between noble and
commoner or between commoner and commoner. Neither Homer nor his audience cared about
such matters and we have no other source of information" (The World of Odysseus, revised
edition, [New York: The Viking Press, 1978], 112).
18
It would, I shall state dogmatically, be uncharitable to take these and kindred remarks as
conclusive evidence of what William James aptly called "medical materialism" (In The Varieties
of Religious Experience, [New York: University Books, 1963], 10 ff.). As far as the point at
hand is concerned, Nietzsche is clearly concerned to claim an important link between
ritualistically enforced physical cleanliness and priestly authority; but he shares neither the crude
reductionism, nor the crude progressivism characteristic of so many late nineteenth and early
twentieth century attempts to identify the confusion of hygienic with spiritual categories as a
distinctive mark of primitive culture. Simplistic attempts of this sort have been ably criticized by
Mary Douglas (in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, [London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966], chapter one, and Nietzsche's advocacy of "the most amicable
and fruitful exchange [between e.g.] philosophy, physiology and medicine" (GM I §17 ) has, I
would argue, more in common with Douglas's subtle approach to the theme of purity and
pollution than it does with the views she attacks. At the very least, Nietzsche seems to have been
proven right in the contention that the relationship between physical and spiritual purity provides
a useful angle for the study of cultural anthropology. See, for example, the detailed and
fascinating study of the relationship between purity and pollution in the worldview of the Nahua
of Mesoamerica, found in Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue
in Sixteenth Century Mexico, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), chapter four.
19
Once again, Nietzsche's conjecture finds support from an up-to-date authority. The Homeric
scholar G. S. Kirk speaks of the Olympian gods undergoing a process of "de-carnalization"
between pre-Homeric times and the epoch that witnessed the composition of The Iliad and The
Odyssey. A striking example of this process is the transition from a conception of animal
sacrifice as serving the gods in the most visceral and literal way imaginable, to a conception of it
as functioning in a more symbolic, gestural way. At one time, Kirk writes, sacrifice was
conducted in the belief that the gods depended upon mortals for "the coarse hunger-allaying
smell and smoke of burning suet, spiraling to heaven from the fat-encased thigh-bones roasted in
preliminary ritual down below" (The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume II, [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990], 10). Homer, by conspicuous contrast, "spares his audience any
suggestion of meat-savour-sniffing in the golden halls of Olympos" (ibid.). When Homer's gods
require sustenance, they turn to nectar and ambrosia, nourishment that is uniquely suitable for
them and forbidden to mortals, and when Homeric heroes dedicate oxen and so forth to the gods,
38
they are presumably manifesting piety by sacrificing something important to them, the humans,
not by giving the gods something that they, the gods, need in any straightforward or literal sense.
Cf. GM I §7: “In connection with the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative provided
by the Jews through this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the proposition that
I arrived at on a previous occasion (BGE §195) --that with the Jews there begins the slave revolt
in morality”.(268/34).
20
Cf. GM I §8: “What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo [viz, Christianity] Israel, with its
vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other
ideals, over all nobler ideals” (269/35).
21
Plato, Symposium. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)
216b-c.
22
Cf. also the remark from the lecture ‘Socrates and Tragedy”, held at Basel on the second of
February 1870, that “Socratism is older than Socrates” (KSA 1, 545).
23
I would like to thank the referee for this journal for alerting me to the relevance of this line of
Nietzschean thought to my purposes.
24
25
Ibid, 216c.
26
Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, both of whom are criticized in GM, are quite explicit
about their confidence in this assumption. Kant famously asserts that "ordinary knowledge of
morality" is sufficient of itself "to discern what I have to do in order that my will may be morally
good" (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, James W. Ellington Trans., [Indianapolis:
Hackett Press, 1981], 15/Ak403), while Schopenhauer maintains that, despite the "different
forms" in which they may "clothe" it, all moral systems in fact agree on the "fundamental
principle of morality", which is most concisely expressed in the formula: "Neminem laede, imo
omnes, quantum potes, juva" ("Harm no one, but help everyone whenever you can"). (On the
Basis of Morality, E. F. J. Payne trans. [Providence RI: Bergahn Books, 1995], 69). From
Nietzsche's perspective, Kant, Schopenhauer and the whole tradition of post-Socratic Western
ethics have tried to run before they could walk; they have assumed that the difficult philosophical
problem was that
of justifying morality, rather than that of identifying and understanding it. Cf. Bergmann, op cit,
91.
27
T. M. Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism", in Utilitarianism and Beyond, Amartya
Sen and Bernard Williams eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 106.
In an unpublished note from the fall of 1887 Nietzsche describes as ”liberating” the insight that
“morality is just as “immoral” as any other thing on earth; morality is itself a form of immorality”
(WP §308/12:9[140], 415). He means that lucidity about the conflict between the actual
motivations of slave moralists and the standards of evaluation endorsed by slave morality can and
should free one from “slavish” adherence to the latter. Further passages that emphasize the self28
39
deception required by slave morality’s “revaluation of values” are found in GM I §14 and WP
§306 and §311 (12:7[6], 273 and 12:9[147], 421-2).
29
Philippa Foot, "Nietzsche's Immoralism", in Schacht ed. op cit, 9.
30
Charles Taylor, "The Diversity of Goods", in Sen and Williams eds. op cit, 130.
31
Foot, op cit, 9.
32
Max Scheler, "Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen", in Gesammelte Werke III, (Bern:
Francke Verlag, 1955), 46-7. Cf. BGE §287: “Among artists and scholars today one finds
enough of those who betray by their works how they are impelled by a profound desire for what
is noble; but just this need for what is noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the
noble soul itself and actually the eloquent and dangerous mark of its lack”.” (5:233/228).
33
Foot, op cit. 7.
34
Kant, op cit. 40/435.
Cf. D §556: “The good four. --Honest toward ourselves and whoever else is a friend to us;
brave towards the enemy; magnanimous towards the defeated; polite --always: this is what the
four cardinal virtues want us to be.” (3:325/561).
35
Cf. GM I §10: “How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies! ... For he desires his
enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom
there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! (273/39).
36
Martha Nussbaum draws attention to this aspect of Nietzsche’s conception of strength in her
insightful article “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism” (in Schacht, op cit, 139-167, esp.,151).
I share Nussbaum’s conviction that the real Nietzsche is neither tough but unsubtle, nor tender
but soggy. Like her, I do not think that Nietzsche’s moral critique can be properly understand
and fruitfully debated as long as the principal choice is assumed to be that between a “boot-inthe-face Fascist” on the one hand, and a “noble and innocuous quasi-Christian moralist” on the
other (ibid., 140).
37
Cf. GM II §23: "... ‘folly’, a little ‘disturbance in the head’, this much even the Greeks of the
strongest, bravest, age conceded of themselves as the reason for much that was bad and
calamitous --foolishness, not sin! do you grasp that?" (334/94).
38
The term “Bushman” derives from the Dutch “Bojesman”, and was used by the Dutch settlers
of southern Africa to refer to one of the two quite different native groups that they had found
upon arrival. I have retained the word in my titles because, as Richard Lee observes, it is the
name by which these people “became known to the world” (The !Kung San, [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979], 29). But I have chosen to refer to them as the San in the
text, since there seems to be a consensus amongst those who work on and with the people in
question, that the term “Bushman” has acquired a unpleasantly derogatory connotation (see Lee
op cit, 29-31 and Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled With Flies, [Chicago: University of Chicago
39
40
Press, 1989] 26-32; but note that George Silberbauer in his 1981 Hunter and Habitat in the
Central Kalahari Desert [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] chooses Bushman over San to
refer to the larger group to which the G/wi, who are the focus of his study, belong) . As it
happens, even San is not, as Lee remarks, “an entirely satisfactory term”, since it has a
connotation signifying “rascal” in Khoi-Khoi, the language spoken by the other native people
found by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, and it is not used by any of the people referred to
by it to refer to themselves. But in the absence of any single term that does cover just the people
under discussion and is used by those people themselves, it seems to me that “San” is, at the risk
of sounding mealy-mouthed, the “safest” term there is for my purposes.
Charles Sanders Peirce, ”Deduction, Induction, Hypothesis”, in Collected Papers, Volume 2.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932) paragraph 625.
40
41
The definition is Dr. Johnson's.
42
"Vulgar" is itself a word that exhibits the ambiguity under discussion, and it is not therefore
surprising to find that "common" appears regularly in the OED's entries for it. Many of these
sense are evaluatively neutral, for example, "common or usual language, vernacular, "in common
or general use", "of common or general kind", while others are strongly disparaging, for example
entry thirteen: "having a common and offensively mean character; coarsely commonplace;
lacking in refinement or good taste; uncultured, ill-bred". While we're at it, "mean" (as an
adjective) offers yet another instance of the phenomenon. It has a large number of senses
clustering around "intermediate", "moderate", "of average value, as in ‘mean pressure,
temperature’ etc", and it can also be predicated of things to mean "poor in quality, of little value,
inferior, petty, unimportant, inconsiderable" and of persons, their characters and actions to mean
"destitute of moral dignity or elevation, ignoble, small-minded."
43
According to the etymological conjectures favored by the OED and others, "gemein" is cognate
both with "common" ("ge-mein", like "co-mon") and with "mean".
44
Note in passing the support that this third sense gives to Nietzsche's contention, canvassed
above, that "almost all the [ancient Greek] words referring to the common man have remained as
expressions signifying ‘unhappy’, ‘pitiable’" (GM I §10, 271-2/37).
45
The modern lexicographer's need to provide, for agathos, esthlos, and kakos, a separate entry
stressing that the words can mean "morally" good or bad as the case may be, is for the
Nietzschean a particularly apt example of the lack of philosophico-historical depth that GM
attempts to combat. When, for example, Liddell and Scott offer as citations illustrating the
fourth listed sense of agathos, passages from Theognis and Plato, as if in the same breath, they
are, according to Nietzsche, eliding exactly the gulf to which attention needs to be drawn. If
Nietzsche is right, when Theognis is a spokesman for noble values, while Plato is involved in a
campaign to undermine them.
46
As to the question whether Nietzsche is right on this point, there seems something of a
scholarly consensus that he is. Walter Kaufmann's translation of GM includes, at I §5, an
editorial footnote that cites Gerald Else in support of Nietzsche's view. Else writes, inter alia,
41
that "Greek thinking begins with and for a long time holds to the proposition that mankind is
divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and these terms are quite as much social, political, and economic
as they are moral" (Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1957], 75). To Else could be added Moses Finley, op cit, and William Prior, Virtue and
Knowledge: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Ethics, (New York: Routledge, 1991). The
former notes that in the world of the Homeric poems, “‘warrior’ and ‘hero’ are synonyms, and
the main theme of a warrior culture is constructed on two notes --prowess and honour. The one
is the hero's essential attribute, the other his essential aim. Every value, every judgment, every
action, all skills and talents have the function of either defining honour or realizing it" (113), and
maintains as well that "it is self-evident that the gods of the Iliad were the gods of heroes, or,
plainly spoken, of the princes and the heads of the great households" (ibid, 139). The latter
characterizes the Homeric hero as "a person of noble rank who functions in a highly stratified
society according to a strict code of conduct. He lives for glory, which he achieves by the display
of virtue or excellence, particularly excellence in combat, and which is accorded to him by his
fellow heroes in the form of gifts and renown" (9).
It is perhaps worth anticipating an objection to the effect that the Nietzschean view for
which I am claiming scholarly confirmation is in fact so well-known and accepted as to be
insignificant rather than striking. It seems to me sufficient in reply to point out that Nietzsche
expounded these ideas at a time in which no less an aficionado than Gladstone was able to find in
Homer, not only "the ‘essential germ’ of the form of constitution enjoyed in Britain and
America" (Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, [Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1980), 202), but also a remarkable degree of convergence with Christian
theology. Richard Jenkyns reports that Gladstone thought it "evident that Jupiter, Neptune and
Pluto (he used the Roman names) were a memory [sic!] of the Trinity, Apollo was a relic of
belief in a Messiah, as can be seen from his double character as Saviour and Destroyer (a page is
allotted to demonstrating that Apollo's rape of Marpessa was ‘not of a sensual character’). Was
Minerva the Logos or the Holy Spirit? Did Latona represent Eve or the Virgin Mary? How
curious that the poems contained no mention of the Sabbath!” (ibid, 203).
47
I am grateful to Allen Wood for showing me the force of this point.
In GM I §15 Nietzsche cites Thomas Aquinas and Tertullian in support of his account of the
role of ressentiment in the formation of slave values in general and Christian values in particular.
What Nietzsche finds self-incriminating in these authors is their evident glee at the thought that
prominent among the joys of the saved in heaven will be the pleasure of witnessing the tortures
of the damned, in particular those of erstwhile persecutors of the faithful.
48
49
I owe this way of putting things to Susan Haack, as indeed I owe to her the whole idea of
testing Nietzsche’s claims against the example of the Bushmen/San.
50
Lorna Marshall, "Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions among the !Kung",
in Richard B. Lee, and Irven DeVore, eds., Kalahari Hunter Gatherers, (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1976), 357.
51
Ibid, 351 and 370-1.
42
52
Lee, op cit, 457.
The view of San life that I am taking as canonical is not universally shared. Edwin Wilmsen,
for one, argues at length that the San are not nearly so “fiercely egalitarian” (Lee, op cit 24), as
they are standardly portrayed to be. He maintains that the San today can appear “even to careful
observers [to be] ... superficially classless” only because “they are incorporated as an underclass
in a wider social formation that includes Batswana, Ovaherero, and others” (Wilmsen, op cit,
270), and he attributes the long entrenched “myth” of the primitively peacable and egalitarian
San to, roughly speaking, a desire to find concrete examples upon which to build a “critique of
civilization.” For Wilmsen, in short, the image of the San that I accept here is scarcely more
solidly grounded in the actual lives and history of the people in question than was the 18th and
19th century image of the noble savage. As far as I can see, if Wilmsen is right, then the San do
not pose nearly as direct a threat to the slave revolt hypothesis as I am assuming they do for the
sake of argument. So I do not think that I need take a stand as between Wilmsen on the one hand
and Lee and Marshall on the other.
53
54
Van der Post writes that "music was as vital as water, food, and fire to [the Bushmen]. ... We
never found a group so poor or desperate that they did not have some musical instrument with
them. And all their music, song, sense of rhythm, and movement achieved its greatest expression
in their dancing (op cit, 225-6).
55
In addition to all this, Laurens van der Post provides evidence that, while they may not have
developed a barbarian fondness for conquest on their own, the San can respond to attacks from
others in the manner of masters rather than slaves.
What, indeed, [writes van der Post] could be prouder than the Bushman's reply to
the young Martin du Plessis, a boy of fourteen who was sent into a great cave in a
mountain near my home ... where the Bushman was surrounded in his last
stronghold by a powerful commando? The boy, almost in tears, besought him to
surrender, promising to walk out in front of him as a live shield against any
treacherous bullets. At last, impatient that his refusal was not accepted, the
Bushman scornfully said: "Go! Be gone! Tell your chief I have a strong heart!
Go! Be gone! Tell him my last words are that not only is my quiver full of arrows
but that I shall resist and defend myself as long as I have life left. Go! Go! Be
gone!". (Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari. [Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1958] 46).
The preference for death before cowardice and dishonor exhibited here is seems entirely of a
piece with that of an Achilles, a Hector, or the heroes of the Norse or Irish sagas. Note, though,
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's contrary conclusion that "it is not in [the] nature of [Bushmen] to
fight" and that "they would much rather run, hide, and wait until a menace has passed than to
defend themselves forcefully" (Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People. [New York:
Alfred A., Knopf, 1970] 21). Marshall Thomas goes so far as to say that "Bushmen deplore and
misunderstand bravery. The heroes of their legends are always little jackals who trick, lie, and
narrowly escape, rather than larger animals such as lions (who in the Kalahari are something of a
master race)" (ibid, 22). Wilmsen would take Marshall-Thomas’s evidence to be indicative, not
43
of anything intrinsic to San culture as such, but rather of the subjugated position into which the
San have been forced over the past several hundred years by other native Africans and by
Europeans.
It might be thought that Nietzsche’s references to pre-noble ur-communities are inconsistent
with his account of the origin of the state in GM II, §17. For that account is developed in the
course of articulating “a first, provisional statement of [an] hypothesis concerning the origin of
‘bad conscience’” (321/84), and according to that hypothesis bad conscience was ”a serious
illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever
experienced --that change which occurred when he found himself finally (endgültig) enclosed
within the walls (in den Bann) of society and peace” (ibid). Does this mention of “society and
peace” not imply that Nietzsche here identifies the origin of the state with the origin of
socialization überhaupt, that he sees no substantial difference between hierarchically structured
human society and human society as such? In a word, no.
Notice, for a start, that Nietzsche, translated more literally than he is by Kaufmann,
speaks of man finding himself “conclusively under the spell of society and peace”, and notice
also that he refers twice in the opening sentences of GM II §17 to identifiable “populations”
(Bevölkerungen) that are conquered, subjugated, and re-formed by more powerful and
hierarchically minded invaders. Notice, finally, that Nietzsche maintains that punishments figure
prominently among the “fearful bulwarks with which the political (staatliche) organization
protected itself against the old instincts of freedom” (ibid). These three points, it seems to me,
not only permit, but positively encourage a reading of Nietzsche’s argument in GM II §§16-17
according to which life in primordial egalitarian communities precedes life in hierarchically
structured state-governed communities, while it is the cataclysmic advent of the latter form of
society that demands the instinctual repression responsible for the growth of bad conscience.
Life in a pre-hierarchical state is comparatively unformed, not yet fully ”under the spell of society
and peace”, which is to say that such communities lack the sort of sharply defined political
identity made possible by the institutionalized authority of law and the state. Chief among the
“bulwarks” of social order we can expect to be missing from ur-communities will be publicly
enforced and codified practices of punishment. Kaufmann’s free translation of “in den Bann der
Gesellschaft und Frieden” as “within the walls of society and peace” makes the interpretation I
wish to defend rather hard to bring into view, for it would seem that groups must be located
either inside or outside such walls, with no third location possible. On my view Nietzsche’s
language draws attention, not only to the fact of being in a condition of society and peace, but
also to the means by which this condition is achieved; namely by a kind of mental captivation
reminiscent of a magical spell. This subtlety allows one to hold that egalitarian ur-communities
are peaceful societies (rather more peaceful in fact than the militaristic societies that succeed
them) without yet being “conclusively under the spell of society and peace”, i.e. without
regarding society and peace as conditions that have to be --the phrase is for once le most juste-hegemonically enforced. I would like to thank the reviewer for this journal for bringing this
point to my attention.
56
I am assuming here that ressentiment in its most generic form can be identified with the turning
inward of an instinct denied outward discharge spoken of in GM II §16.
57
58
Silberbauer, op cit., 168.
44
59
ibid. 143.
60
ibid. 175.
61
ibid, 172.
62
Marshall, op cit. 355.
63
Lee, op cit. 458.
I do not suggest that Nietzsche himself had a clear idea of the ways in which life in egalitarian
communities such as the San can be brought to bear on his slave revolt hypothesis; my point is
just that it can be so brought to bear and that it is instructive to do so.
64
45