Sections 187 and 188 of Beyond Good and Evil have a common theme: obedience.
In section 187, Nietzsche notes that a philosopher’s moral claims reveal his personal psychological profile.
Again, think of Kant, whose categorical imperative tells us as much about Kant’s personality
as about moral obligation.
Additionally, writes Nietzsche, moral systems often attempt a task, such as public justification,
revenge, concealment, or self-transcendence.
Nietzsche concludes this short section with another observation about Kant.
His morality says “my ability to obey is valuable; you should be like me.”
Thus, Nietzsche writes, “moralities are also merely a sign language of the affects”
or emotions.
Note that Nietzsche here discusses moralities, in the plural, rather than morality, singular.
He is giving a natural history of past philosophers’ moral codes, considered independently of their truth.
Also note that for Nietzsche, each moral code reveals its author’s emotional life and
psychology, his will to power.
We may ask: does this pattern include Nietzsche’s ruminations on morality here, in this work?
Section 188 continues on the theme of obedience and discipline.
Every morality is a bit of tyranny, a “long compulsion,” that is, a self-discipline,
rather than a “letting alone.”
All freedom, all culture, Nietzsche writes, depend on seemingly arbitrary laws and restraints.
Working under restraint is what is “natural” to man, contrary to Rousseau’s and others’
celebration of “natural freedom.”
Artists, in particular, know that “letting alone” is deadly to art—one must obey
in order to create.
We may think here of how the strictures of the sonnet form enabled Shakespeare to produce
poems of lasting beauty.
Such greatness does not come through free verse.
All worthwhile things are the result of sustained obedience, Nietzsche tells us.
The long unfreedom of discipline under ancient and Christian systems of thought has generated
strength in the European spirit.
This was so, even as such discipline crushed and stifled other movements of the human spirit.
Here, as in Darwinian biology, Nature is wasteful.
The capricious tyranny of Christianity, interpreting all experiences in the framework of divine
care and action, has *disciplined* the European spirit, says Nietzsche.
Such mental slavery is an indispensable means of spiritual growth.
Every morality requires discipline, narrowed horizons, the tightening of possibilities,
rather than their opening, that is, “letting alone.”
In a certain sense, stupidity is a condition for life and growth.
“You shall obey” is an imperative addressed, not to individuals, but to peoples, races,
classes, to mankind itself.
In these thoughts on obedience, Nietzsche makes it clear that he is against a certain
type of freedom, the type he associates with utilitarians and the Last Man: ever-increasing
freedom from restraint, letting each individual will go to satisfy its own desires, whatever
they may be.
Rather, he insists on the need for constraint, rules, and self-discipline.
Laxity with oneself means spiritual decline, the path to the Last Man.
Nietzsche is searching for a post-Christian discipline, and he will not find it in democratic
politics, nor in the remnants of modernist religion.
It will come ultimately from the will to power, as we will see later in the work.
That’s my summary of and commentary on sections 187 and 188 of Beyond Good and Evil.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.