Section 260 of
Beyond Good and Evil is where we get the famous distinction between master morality and slave morality.
This section is important and it's worth reading closely.
Master and slave morality, Nietzsche tells us, are two ideal types which we find not isolated
but present in mixture in different historical moral codes and in different individual moral codes.
So it may be that a single individual or a religion or nation may have in its morality a combination of master and slave influences.
It may have some master moral elements and some slave moral elements to it.
The key distinction between these two moral types
is the origin of value, how it is that human beings create or assign value to actions and people.
Do moral values originate in a ruling group which is conscious of and affirms its distance from those below it,
which possesses that pathos of distance which was discussed earlier in Part Nine?
Or do morals originate from an enslaved or subjugated group?
And this is the origin of what Nietzsche will call slave morality.
Master morality we will discuss first.
This is the moral valuation pattern that comes from a ruling group, an elite, a conquering elite perhaps,
which delights in its pathos of distance, in its external triumph over people who are far beneath it, which embraces and affirms that distance.
And in doing so, affirms itself and its own typical states: its state of nobility, of confidence, of creativity,
of using power to accomplish things.
The master moralist then defines these qualities as "good," good meaning then, "similar to us, we superior ones."
So the good for the master moralist is a kind of self-knowledge and self-affirmation.
It is a saying yes to oneself and one's will to power.
Bad, then, is defined as a secondary concept in master morality, in opposition
to the primary concept of good: bad is the opposite of the good.
So bad would mean not strong but weak. Not noble, but base. Not superior, but petty.
And so bad people and bad qualities are held in contempt by the master moralist, by master moralizing.
Nietzsche notes that in master moralizing at least, moral valuation is applied first to persons and only afterwards to actions,
not what we might think is the opposite, where we first say
certain actions are good and one who does those actions habitually becomes a good person through doing them.
Nietzsche says instead, one is not good because he does good actions.
His actions are valued and defined as good because of the value he attaches to himself, because they are the actions of a good man.
Nietzsche says in this part, the noble type of man experiences itself as determining values.
It has a self-knowledge of the role of its own will to power in creating and assigning the values and the value categories that it uses.
So the master moralist knows itself, knows its will to power as the real source of value in the world.
And this is the way in which I think the master moralist
is in touch with the truth and is able to say yes to the truth about morality in a way that the slave moralist is in denial.
We'll see that later on.
Nietzsche tells us that the master moralist has no need for the approval of others
since his morality is generated from within himself, and he has no room for pity in his moral code.
Master morality is a morality of self-affirmation, and so it reacts with hostility and irony towards
selflessness and altruism, towards goods which we might associate with the dominant historical morality of Christian Europe.
The master moralist, though, is also able to practice reverence for tradition and for his ancestors,
as those historical forces which made it possible for him to be what he is: since he values himself, he values his past.
He values those to whom he owes this debt of tradition.
This is quite in contrast to the valuing of new modern ideas.
As we'll see, it's the slavish type of moral valuation which values modern ideas,
which will come and overturn tradition, which will make things different from the way that they have been.
The master moralist feels duties only to his peers.
He has no duties to those below him, towards whom he would act with indifference, that is to say beyond good and evil.
The way to think about this may be that the master moralist knows that his morality is of a higher order and simply is not comparable
with or commensurable with his treatment of people who are far beneath him, at the other end of this pathos of distance.
Master moralists are able to practice, Nietzsche says, long gratitude and long revenge.
They are able to stretch out over time both positive and negative reactions.
And they also have a need for enemies to define themselves against, to triumph over.
Let's turn now to slave morality.
Nietzsche says: suppose the violated, the oppressed, the suffering, the unfree,
those who are uncertain of themselves and weary, suppose they moralize, what will their moral evaluations have in common?
I think the key to slave morality is that as human beings, this type of person
has no self-possession, and so they moralize from a position of weakness and from a position of psychological passivity.
What do their moral evaluations have in common?
Pessimism, suspicion, and skepticism about the human condition.
A general feeling that on the whole, it's not that good a thing to be human.
Being human means suffering, it means enduring what you cannot change. And so it's really not that great.
This suspicion is extended especially towards the virtues of the strong, what the strong people call good.
And we'll see, this emerges in the psychology of resentment, of ressentiment, of the feeling that whatever the strong have,
it can't really be that good. It can't really be worth having, really.
So there must be some way in which the morality of the strong is a lie, is a deception, is not truly
the real source and nature of value and of goodness.
So the slave moralist would like to believe that the strong are not truly happy in their will to power self-affirmation.
There's something deeply wrong with them.
What does the slave moralist call good, then? He calls "good"
those qualities which will ease the suffering of the wretched, his own suffering and the suffering of his fellow oppressed peoples.
Qualities like compassion, patience, humility, kindness and pity. Perhaps most of all, pity.
Notice what's happening here is that the valuation pattern is that the slave values
what qualities *the master* might possess, which would make life easier for the slave.
So Nietzsche says: slave morality is essentially a morality of utility.
I might say it's not a morality of creation or of affirmation or of being oneself.
It's a morality of getting by, of trying to mitigate the harmful and dangerous influences in one's life.
It's a morality of trying to get out from under even to a slight, a slightly greater degree.
And it's from this slave moralism that we find the opposition of good and evil.
For the slave moralist the
category of evil encompasses all that is powerful, fear-inspiring, cruel and dangerous.
In other words, everything that is the master as seen from the eyes of the oppressed slave.
It's not possible for a human being to feel contempt from this position; only fear and hatred and resentment.
And I think this is crucial: Nietzsche says eventually even slave morality's quality of good,
the useful, the safe, is eventually viewed with a kind of disdain, as simple minded or foolish.
That is, what qualities are most useful to me as a slave in a master ruling over me?
The qualities that make the master to be kind of simple minded and stupid, a kind of goody two shoes, pity and the like.
And so another quote from Nietzsche from this passage:
wherever slave morality becomes preponderant language tends to bring the words "good" and "stupid" closer together.
To be good is to be naive. To be good is to not make use of your power.
That, of course, is precisely what the slave moralist wants, that's his ideal condition.
Rather than a reverence for
tradition or one's ancestors and an affirmation of the past, we find instead in slave enslaved moral codes a longing for freedom,
specifically freedom from the present order, which includes oppression and pain and suffering for the lower orders.
I think it's in this sense that we can see slave morality taking humanity towards this ideal
of the Last Man, the one who lives comfortably and safely and well but has no higher concern.
It's the slave moralist who would say to Zarathustra: "Give us this Last Man!
We want to be the Last Man!
We want to have no more concerns.
'One herd and no shepherd,' that's what we want."
Let's finish this part by thinking about the psychological profiles of the master moralist and the slave moralist.
The master moralist thinks and behaves towards the good with a kind of pride and self-affirmation.
He is active and creative
because in valuing things as good, he is affirming himself and extending the reach of his mind and his psyche out into the world.
Towards things the master moralist assigns the value bad, he feels contemptuous or ultimately indifferent.
They are of such a vastly lower order from himself and his good that he can afford to ignore them.
This, we might say, is the privilege of the master in relation to the slave. The slave, however, can never completely ignore the master.
And so we find in slave morality towards what they call "evil" attitudes of fear, of hate,
of seeking to mitigate or escape, to achieve a kind of freedom from what the evil would do to us.
And then towards "good" a kind of welcome (since one really wants the good, one wants safety and release from suffering,)
but tinged with an element of disdain, a feeling that really what I need, really need, is for the master to be less masterful,
to be less good, to be less fully himself.
So that brings us to the end of section 260.
We'll take a look at the following sections in the next video. Thanks for watching today. Goodbye.