In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  FRANCES WOOD: Even in things like the family having to pay for the bullet if one of its members is shot as a criminal. Things like slander – you can’t slander for three generations back – that’s got all sorts of resonances that are very Confucian. It hasn’t been used in any sort of self-strengthening yet, but they have started re-doing the rituals at Confucius’s birth place. They play music that is 3,000 years old and dance to strange rituals. There will be another coming of Confucianism.

  NIETZSCHE’S ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALITY

  What price have human animals paid to become civilised? That’s one of the questions posed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, which he published in 1887 towards the end of his working life. In three essays, he argued that: having a guilty conscience was the price of living in society with other humans; Christian morality, with its consideration for others, grew as an act of revenge by the weak against their masters, the ‘blond beasts of prey’, as he calls them; and the price for that revolt is endless self-loathing. These and other ideas were picked up by later thinkers, perhaps most significantly by Sigmund Freud, who further explored the tensions between civilisation and the individual set out in Nietzsche’s essays.

  With Melvyn to discuss Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality were: Stephen Mulhall, professor of philosophy and a fellow and tutor at New College, Oxford; Fiona Hughes, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex; and Keith Ansell-Pearson, professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick.

  Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Saxony, a province of Prussia, and his father and grandfather were both Lutheran ministers with connections to the royal court and the government.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: His father died when he was five, as did his only brother, and that meant that the family suffered various kinds of financial difficulties. Nevertheless, they put him on the standard track, educationally, to go to university and that meant he went to a very reputable boarding school at which he acquired a great facility with languages.

  That led Nietzsche to an interest in philology, a study of language, which he pursued at university, first at Bonn and then at Leipzig, initially with theology, although he soon dropped that. At the age of twenty-four, which was incredibly young, he was offered a chair in classical philology at the University of Basel. He was regarded as an extremely promising philologist until, in 1872, he published his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: That received a generally very lukewarm reception, but one very eminent scholar wrote a ferocious critique of it. And, at that point, the possibility of going onwards and upwards as a philologist was pretty much closed to him. Although he spent a lot of time in Basel and did a regular amount of teaching, his health got a great deal worse and he became increasingly disenchanted with academic philology; he took the chance to retire in 1879.

  Nietzsche became an independent scholar, travelling around Europe on a small pension, with bouts of ill health that were to worsen drastically in later life.

  As a young child, he had been very comfortable with his Lutheran upbringing and seemed to have been very dutiful and obedient.

  KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON: His schoolfriends and family called him the ‘little pastor’, such was his earnestness; but things began to change quite dramatically when he went to Pforta, the boarding school. That’s between the ages of fourteen and twenty and, in the middle of that period, when he is seventeen (so it is 1861), he has a religious crisis, a crisis of faith.

  Nietzsche was moving from a fundamentally religious orientation, based on belief and imagination, to a critical orientation, where the emphasis was put on reason and evidence. In the first year at Bonn, he wrote to his sister, Elizabeth, ‘If you want peace of mind and happiness, then believe; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then you should search.’

  KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON: The Lutheran religion leaves its mark on Nietzsche’s subsequent thinking. In one of his mature texts, The Gay Science, from 1882, he says: what does your conscience say? And he answers: you should become the one that you are. And that’s a sort of Lutheran idea, that what’s really important, having an individual conscience, having an individual relationship to God and the Bible.

  For him, the conscience that was at stake was not so much a moral conscience as what he called an intellectual conscience. He thought mankind had the duty to marvel at the fundamentally enigmatic character of existence and to keep questioning existence.

  Nietzsche produced On the Genealogy of Morality in 1887 in the later stages of his career. After the congenial texts of his middle period, this later work was aggressive and polemical. He was concerned that Europe was about to enter a period of decadence and nihilism and that all the illusions people suffered from, as modern human beings, needed exposing and attacking.

  The overall project of On the Genealogy of Morality, Fiona Hughes explained, was to evaluate morality, its value and worth. There are three essays within the work and, in the first, Nietzsche focuses on putting forward a contrast between noble morality and slave morality. The nobles are the masters of society, who he also called the ‘blond beasts’ initially, and they are the instinctive, powerful individuals who determine their own fates, and they have values rather than morals.

  FIONA HUGHES: Their morality is that of creating their own values, on the basis of their own interests. For them, values come from themselves, they are self-regarding values. They are not really very interested in those who are not powerful. They want to have power over those other powerless people, but they are basically interested in controlling their own fates and, in order to do that, controlling those around them so that they don’t get in their way.

  It is possible to argue that this description does not necessarily capture the identity of a particular social class, it may be more to do with a mentality.

  The slave morality is a morality, or believes itself to be a morality, and it is a reaction against the noble values, with a belief that it is good to restrain the self, which is presented as particularly developed within Judaeo-Christianity.

  FIONA HUGHES: There is a negative strength in that redefining of what is good, and the introduction of what, from the slave morality’s perspective, is now called evil, rather than bad. The evil, from the slave morality’s perspective, is strength, is powerfulness, is exactly what the nobles would have thought of as good. There has been a reversal of what counts as good and, in that respect, the slaves have a strength; but the problem about it, in Nietzsche’s view, is that supposed strength is directed in a negative way not only against the nobles, but against themselves.

  Stephen Mulhall, following on from this, said it was no accident that what slave morality defined as evil was what the master morality defined as good, and vice versa. You just have to look at it from the perspective of the slaves, the weak and feeble.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: They are in a master morality world, they are disdained by the masters, they just get kicked into the gutter, while the masters go about their business. If they are going to improve their situation, they don’t have the direct, physical, natural endowment to do it directly. What they want to do is create an environment in which forms of behaviour that are to the advantage of the weak and the feeble are praised, celebrated, affirmed as the good way of living. All the forms of behaviour that are to the disadvantage of the weak, they get redefined as evil.

  Since Nietzsche thought that master morality was not just historically prior but, in a certain sense, a more fundamental expression of what human life is, what vitality is, then that meant slave morality was a negative phenomenon.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: It is basically expressing a kind of hatred of life. You have a paradoxical situation where, on the one hand, the slaves are manifesting strength by imposing themselves on the world, redefining it in terms that are to their own advantage. On the other hand, they do it by presenting a code in which, as it were, life is denied and a certain kind of negative force is imposed.

 
Sigmund Freud further explored the tensions between civilisation and the individual set out in Nietzsche’s essays.

  The slaves had been in a weak position but, in Nietzsche’s view, within the space of a few decades of that redefinition, the whole world was turned upside down and it was suddenly great for the weak and feeble. That change centred around the role of the priest because, according to Nietzsche’s account, the priests were a branch of the aristocracy, a kind of noble, but without the direct physical force to back them up. They still wanted to have power, so they used intelligence, they sought indirect ways of winning the battle against the other branch of the nobles.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: The way they do that is by recruiting the slaves to bring about this revolution. They put themselves at the head of the revolution, that gives them power, but, in order to achieve that revolution, they need the masses behind them, and sheer volume of numbers is going to allow them to win the battle, but only under the leadership of the priest. A certain sort of internal fracturing of the nobles led to a complete inversion of the value system that they were originally living under.

  What drove the slave revolt was an attitude or sentiment of ressentiment, a word that Nietzsche had encountered in a text of 1875 by a German thinker, Eugen Dühring, called The Value of Life. It meant something different from resentment or revenge, pure and simple, where a direct hitting-back at the source of hurt might prove cathartic.

  KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON: Ressentiment is different, it is the lingering sentiment of a poisonous revenge. You are impotent, you are powerless, you are not in a position to actually carry out your resentment, so it poisons your system and you compensate yourselves with an imaginary revenge.

  Nietzsche saw himself as a psychologist as well as a historian. What he really wanted, Fiona Hughes thought, was to identify certain ideal types rather than any particular period. He looked back to Greek history, he talked about the Celts and the Vikings, and he also suggested that the Romans were the noble type.

  FIONA HUGHES: It is absolutely clear, if anything can be absolutely clear in Nietzsche, that he thinks that the noble type is healthy, whereas the slave type is unhealthy, is sick. But the relationship between these two groups has a certain amount of ambivalence in it, because the slaves are the interesting human beings. It is once we become resentful, in the precise sense of ressentiment that Keith was talking about, that we begin to turn our attention back into ourselves.

  The blond beasts were not really self-reflective; the advantage of the slaves was that they were intelligent, reflective beings and Nietzsche had a sympathy with that, even though he was also critical of it.

  These ideas had to do, partly, with the construction of the very idea of an inner life as something distinct from one’s external public life. If you think about someone like Achilles, Stephen Mulhall suggested, you do not imagine him having a rich and complex interior life. It is part of Nietzsche’s story that a confluence of entry into society and the restructuring of that society, by the values of slave morality, introduced a much sharper distinction between the inner and the outer in our lives.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: Christianity places a great value on that idea of self-examination and, in a certain way, it encourages you to believe that there is this rich, interior life for you to explore and perhaps partly to construct as you explore it. You are being told that seeking the truth about yourself is part of being a good person, the only way in which you can establish the right relationship to God. That’s built into a context in which you are creating an occasion for punishing yourself, and for feeling guilty.

  There could be a system of punishment in which the only thing that mattered was whether or not you did something bad. With Christianity, following Nietzsche, you have to think not just about the actions you perform, but whether you have bad intentions. After all, Christ said that, if you contemplate adultery in your heart, you have committed the sin of adultery. That was a radical extension of the domain of guilt and punishment.

  In the first instance, Nietzsche thought that we use guilt in order to try to make people morally better, but he considered that this approach was a mistake. Punishment actually makes people harder, more resistant, more alienated, rather than making them morally better. He gave the example of prisons, saying that prisons were not full of people with very finely tuned moral consciences; punishment tended to tame people, rather than to reform them.

  FIONA HUGHES: At a deeper level, he thinks that the ascetic priests use guilt in order to try to manage our horror in the face of suffering. Human beings, according to Nietzsche, find it intolerable that not only do we suffer, but that our suffering is meaningless. To introduce the idea of guilt gives us a handle on this, in that [someone] can think: ‘Well, at least it is explicable that I am suffering, it may not make it feel better, but at least I can understand why I am suffering. I am suffering because I am guilty, because I am sinful.’

  Nietzsche’s rejoinder was that suffering is just not explicable in that way, and that all that guilt helps us do is deal with the fear of suffering, not with the suffering itself.

  Melvyn was keen to clarify whether the notional slave revolt could be associated with a particular period – for example, the development of Christianity where ‘they walk in the doors in 100 BC and walk out the door in AD 100 and it is a different world, because of what’s happened’. His guests thought it tended to be more general.

  KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON: That kind of history repeats itself, throughout history. He sees the French Revolution as the modern equivalent of another slave revolt of morality. He says, ‘Yes, the slaves have won, the slaves have been successful, the weak have inherited the earth.’ The French Revolution for him is a great symbol of that.

  On the one hand, Stephen Mulhall added, Nietzsche was tempted at various points to say that certain historically datable events were fundamental in the inception of this revolution. On the other hand, Nietzsche thought, partly because of the point that Keith Ansell-Pearson had made about the poisonous nature of ressentiment, that the slaves never felt as if they had won.

  Nietzsche introduced the notion of the ascetic ideal primarily in the third of the three essays that make up The Genealogy. It was his label for the various ways in which slave morality, in its Judaeo-Christian religious form, mutated and evolved and permeated the culture of western Europe.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: It is perfectly possible for slave morality to be real and effective in the world without any theological trappings attached to it at all. Merely denying that God exists, while remaining committed to a value system that privileges altruism, compassion for the weak and so on, as good and evil as all the forms of behaviour that the masters naturally manifest, that would be a further form of slave morality, another form of asceticism.

  Slave morality has its non-religious forms, Nietzsche argued, and it also has forms in which a certain sense of what matters in the world, and what does not, is manifest in parts of culture that are not obviously moral. He talked extensively about art, science and philosophy. And he tried to identify, in each of those three cases, where it was that an ascetic, life-denying attitude to the world could be seen, even though none of those artists, scientists or philosophers would recognise themselves as having evaluative commitments.

  To Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche himself displayed, as a philosopher, certain ascetic practices and was implicating himself in what he analysed.

  KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON: He has a certain investment in truth, he wants to find out the truth about our history, the truth about Christianity; and yet he realises that, if it becomes an unconditional value, then it is ultimately ascetic and life-denying. Why should truth be the unconditional value of life?

  In science, with its attention to seeking facts, and in the scholar’s objectivity, there are ascetic traits, life-denying traits, and Nietzsche was really worried about these developments and what they meant for intellectual activity. Science and even atheism are not the enemies of the ascetic ideal, they are fully implicate
d in it. That is why Nietzsche thought that truth was not the sole important value in philosophy; he was quite radical in this respect, since we tend to associate the philosopher with the investment in truth and the concern for truth. He wanted a knowledge placed in the service of some new future life, Keith Ansell-Pearson continued, and that is why he wanted to carry out this genealogy, to revitalise history.

  The issue here, for Stephen Mulhall, was not so much that seeking truth in itself is always ascetic. The question was where you find yourself locating the truth, and how much self-sacrifice you are willing to impose on yourself in order to achieve it. Much modern science, on Nietzsche’s controversial account of the matter, locates the underlying nature of reality in realms that transcend the one that is open to our everyday senses.

  STEPHEN MULHALL: Modern science tells us you shouldn’t believe what the senses tell you because they are misleading. We think things are coloured? Turns out they aren’t. We think they have tastes? Well, they don’t really have tastes, they just have these primary qualities. Then, as science develops, it locates the truth about things in a more and more distant realm. It is taking it away from what Nietzsche thinks of as the immediate, empirical world of becoming.

  Philosophy itself, for Nietzsche, was an ascetic discipline that involved turning away from the senses and cultivating a much more spiritual approach to things.

  FIONA HUGHES: At the same time, there is a possibility within philosophy, as Keith was saying, for a more vitalistic approach. Philosophy, in fact, becomes a very productive place to look for the new nobles, the nobles who are the successors of those blond beasts, but who now have a much more complex internal life and who are able to be much more playful, to laugh, to dance, to sing.