The Rise of Politics and Morality in Nietzsche's Genealogy: From Chaos to Conscience 1793608865, 9781793608864

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The Rise of Politics and Morality in Nietzsche’s Genealogy

The Rise of Politics and Morality in Nietzsche’s Genealogy From Chaos to Conscience Jeffrey Metzger

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950863 ISBN 9781793608864 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781793608871 (electronic : alk. paper) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my mother and father.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

A Note on Abbreviations and Translations

xi

Introduction

1

1 2 3 4 5

Nature and the Promising Animal: Sections 1–3 Sketches of Prehistoric Life: Sections 4–11 Philosophy and Morality in the World as Will to Power: Sections 12–15 An Animal Soul Turned against Itself: Sections 16–18 The Development and Moralization of the Bad Conscience: Sections 19–25

27 49 83 109 131

Conclusion

153

Bibliography

169

Index

175

About the Author

181

vii

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in gestation, during which time I have benefited from many teachers, friends, and colleagues—I regret that I cannot mention all of them here. For comments, guidance, and general assistance with the project I am grateful to Ronald Beiner, Catherine Zuckert, Thomas Pangle, Bill Parsons, and especially Clifford Orwin. I had many good teachers who contributed indirectly to this book; from among them I would like to recognize Mark Lutz and especially the late Robert Vacca. Much of the work on this manuscript was done during a sabbatical leave, and I thank Lance Janda, Von Underwood, and Cameron University for their support. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for Lexington Books who helped improve the manuscript and to Jana Hodges-Kluck for her interest in the project and for helping to steer it to completion. I am grateful to my parents and my brothers for their support and encouragement throughout my life. Finally, I am grateful to Nicole Nicholas for countless things, chief among them inspiring me with the Nietzschean virtues of courage and love of life, as well as love and patience (virtues less obviously Nietzschean but undeniably Nicolean). Much of chapter 4 was previously published as “How Deep Are the Roots of Nihilism? Nietzsche on the Creative Power of Nature and Morality” (125–142) in Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger (New York: Continuum, 2009) and is used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Parts of chapter 2 and a short section of chapter 1 were previously published as “Nietzsche’s New Naturalized Conception of Justice and Punishment” (172–198) in The Philosophy of Punishment and the History of Political Thought, edited by Peter Koritansky (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). ix

A Note on Abbreviations and Translations

I have used standard abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works based on the titles of their English translations, which are listed below. For the translations, see the first part of the bibliography. I have frequently modified the translation listed in the bibliography or substituted my own without announcing the fact. A

The Anti-Christ

BGE

Beyond Good and Evil

BT

The Birth of Tragedy

CW

The Case of Wagner

D

Daybreak

EH

Ecce Homo

GS

The Gay Science

GM

On the Genealogy of Morals

HAH

Human, All Too Human

SE

Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Meditations

TI

Twilight of the Idols

Z

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

xi

Introduction

I.1. NIETZSCHE AND THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL LIFE This book is focused on the Second Essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, in particular its account of the origin of political society, and so of human moral life and awareness, and the decisive early development of these things. 1 Despite the proliferation of academic works on Nietzsche, and on the Genealogy in particular, surprisingly little attention has been given to these questions and this text. In Maudemarie Clark’s introduction to the Genealogy, for instance, she devotes specific sections to the First and Third Essay but skips over the Second with just a paragraph at the end of her discussion of the First Essay (Clark 1998, xxxi). While this is an extreme case, even more expansive treatments of the Genealogy tend to give the Second Essay short shrift. It receives, for instance, only one full chapter in Christopher Janaway’s study of the Genealogy (Janaway 2007), and the shortest of the chapters dedicated to each essay in Brian Leiter’s book on Nietzsche’s moral thought (Leiter 2015). Similarly, in his study of Nietzsche’s ethics Simon May largely abstracts from the details of the Second Essay (May 1999, 55–80), which he maintains is possessed of a “palpable fictionality” (58). Despite this general aversion there has of course been considerable discussion of the Second Essay at this point; most of it, however, centers on the brief but suggestive mention of “the sovereign individual” early in the essay or on the question of how exactly we arrived at a distinctly “moralized” version of what Nietzsche calls “the bad conscience,” i.e., the impulse control required by society that constitutes the basic framework or seedbed of all morality. Beyond these more specialized inquiries, several very fine booklength works on the Genealogy have been published in recent years that treat the Second Essay as a whole; in addition to Janaway’s, there are those by 1

2

Introduction

Aaron Ridley (1998a), Lawrence Hatab (2008), Daniel Conway (2007), and David Owen (2007). Yet on the whole these tend to concentrate on the Second Essay’s treatment of what can broadly be called moral philosophy and psychology, giving little attention to the fairly detailed picture of the rise of political life Nietzsche paints in the first part of the essay, seeing it as secondary or even inessential. This work proposes the contrary, that this is an important, albeit often vexing and opaque, part of the work, and the one through which the rest of Nietzsche’s historical or genetic narrative should be read, including his obviously significant thoughts on morality. The Second Essay, particularly Nietzsche’s account of the development of political life, also receives surprisingly scant attention in many accounts of Nietzsche’s political thought. Yet the issues surrounding this theme—how and why political society originated, and what the answers to those questions mean for our lives in it—are canonical questions in political philosophy. Nietzsche plainly takes a stab at giving his own answer to these questions in an elaborate if at times also seemingly shambolic narrative that stretches across the Second Essay of the Genealogy. It is not surprising that work on Nietzsche’s political thought that appeared before the scholarly turn to the Genealogy largely ignored this particular text. 2 Yet even with the profusion of works on the Genealogy most writers have focused either on the specific moral questions raised by the work or have discussed Nietzsche’s political ideas, in the Second Essay and elsewhere, in terms of how they may contribute to an agonistic conception of politics. 3 It is not hard to understand the reasons for this lack of interest. Much of Nietzsche’s investigation is given over to the argument that the earliest political society derived or descended from the debtor-creditor relationship, as if such a contractual relationship—or, indeed, private property—could exist prior to or independently of a political and legal union. 4 Furthermore, Nietzsche’s inquiry into how and why political society materialized is bound up with a lengthy but desultory and often apparently self-contradictory consideration of the purpose and meaning of the earliest punishments. When the reader finally learns, in section fourteen of the Second Essay (more than halfway through), that punishment has nothing to do with the ostensible subject of the essay, guilt or the bad conscience, she may reasonably conclude that the proceeding sections serve no apparent purpose. In short, Nietzsche’s treatment of the emergence of the political community seems to exemplify the worst features of his writings. His claims are profoundly original and revolutionary, yes, but ultimately utterly incoherent. Throw in Nietzsche’s repeated and apparently laudatory references to cruelty, and it begins to look as if this discussion is best left in peace. I will argue, however, that Nietzsche’s account of the origins of political society is susceptible of a coherent interpretation, and that it is important to make that interpretation. At stake is not only the lucidity of a given stretch of

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3

Nietzschean text but Nietzsche’s contribution to one of the fundamental or foundational questions in the history of political philosophy, as well as one of his most substantial and illuminating discussions of the character of justice. Perhaps most importantly, Nietzsche’s entire account of the bad conscience and so of morality relies on his empirical or historical claim about the foundations of political society in II 16. To rest everything on an unargued assumption would be odd, and is clearly not what Nietzsche is doing in the Second Essay, where he spends so much time (albeit not always in the most straightforward or immediately comprehensible way) describing the prehistoric life out of which he claims our morality emerged. A comparison of Nietzsche with the classic state of nature theorists makes clear that he is doing something similar (though he arrives at very different conclusions). His account is far more detailed than Hobbes’s, and at least as developed as Locke’s; like Locke’s, it has a slightly mythic or ahistorical character. Nietzsche does not deal with the institutional consequences of his state of nature narrative in the Genealogy, in part because he seems to have far less interest in institutional questions than either of them (or than Rousseau, who returns in The Social Contract to propose institutional solutions to the problems raised by his narrative in The Discourse on Inequality). But much more fundamentally, this is because for Nietzsche people are fundamentally valuing, willing, moral creatures—and in the Genealogy he explicitly presses this point against the notion of social contract theory that they are primarily self-interested, self-preserving ones. From the state of nature Nietzsche traces not the emergence of institutions but morality, which he clearly takes to be the more elementary and vital phenomenon. The primitive political and moral anthropology Nietzsche sketches in the Second Essay further illustrates and underscores this point. Hobbes presents humans in their natural state as violent, fearful, and just clever and selfpreserving enough to work their way out of the nightmare in which nature places them; Locke sees them as basically rational, industrious, and selfinterested; Rousseau as peaceful and both compassionate and asocial. Nietzsche contrasts all these modern visions by positing a natural humanity that is violent but deeply reverent, far more interested in power as it is experienced through moral valuing than any material advantage (this is a major theme running through the Genealogy [I 2, III 7, III 28] and indeed all of Nietzsche’s work). The Second Essay is also of great importance to one of the major concerns of recent Nietzsche interpretation, the issue of Nietzsche’s naturalism, or of the resources Nietzsche’s texts provide for a naturalistic understanding of human beings, particularly our moral, social, and political life. One of the most important questions that any naturalistic account of human beings must answer, however one glosses the term “naturalism,” is how human beings have come to live in society. 5 Seeing Nietzsche’s answer to this question,

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and indeed that he has one, is thus of considerable significance for a wide range of questions concerning Nietzsche, political philosophy, and naturalism. Finally, and as noted above, Nietzsche’s critical inquiry into the value of morality is embedded in an historical account, and to some extent relies on it (cf. GM Pr. 4–7). It is therefore essential to the interpretation of the Genealogy, and so of Nietzsche’s thought generally, to see whether the historical account of the rise of political society he provides in the Second Essay is tenable. I.2. NATURALISM AND EXPLANATION It has become common in Anglo-American scholarly writing on Nietzsche to make at least passing obeisance to the notion that Nietzsche is a naturalist, even if the author means little more by that than that Nietzsche does not believe in the supernatural. Many works have contributed to the centrality of this theme to contemporary scholarship, but one of the most detailed and influential discussions is in Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality, which provides form and content to the ubiquitous references to Nietzsche’s naturalism. Ultimately I do not think Leiter is able successfully to defend his claims about Nietzsche’s naturalism from the criticisms set forth by Christopher Janaway, especially concerning Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards the modern sciences and the methodological assumptions undergirding them. My reading does, however, retain and indeed proceed upon the belief that Nietzsche is interested in offering causal explanations for the emergence, growth, and character of morality, particularly in the Genealogy (cf. Leiter 2015, 244–247). Leiter distinguishes between methodological naturalism, according to which “philosophical inquiry . . . should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences” in either methods or results (Leiter 2015, 2), and substantive naturalism, which is “either the (ontological) view that the only things that exist are natural (or perhaps simply physical) things; or the (semantic) view that a suitable philosophical analysis of any concept must show it to be amenable to empirical inquiry” (4). 6 Leiter argues that Nietzsche was a methodological naturalist but not a substantive naturalist, and that in fact Nietzsche clearly repudiated the latter. 7 Leiter’s treatment of these topics has generated a great deal of response, not all of it in agreement with his position. Perhaps the most searching critique, and certainly the most relevant for our purposes here, is given by Christopher Janaway in his book Beyond Selflessness (Janaway 2007, 34–53). Here I will mention only the two of Janaway’s objections. The first is his observation that, at least in the First and Second Essays of the Genealogy, “no scientific support or justification is given—or readily imaginable—

Introduction

5

for the central explanatory hypotheses that Nietzsche gives for the origins of our moral beliefs and attitudes” (36–37). Leiter replies that Nietzsche’s interest in giving a speculative but still naturalistic account of causes is enough to make him a methodological naturalist (Leiter 2015, 246–248), though this seems rather to water down Leiter’s original claim, and so what it actually means for Nietzsche to be a methodological naturalist, for reasons explained by Janaway (2007, 35–38). Janaway further notes that it is difficult to see Nietzsche as a methods naturalist given how severely critical he is of the modern scientific method (e.g., BGE 22, GM II 12; Janaway 2007, 38–39). On the whole, I think Janaway is correct about Nietzsche’s apparent commitments: Nietzsche is deeply critical of the scientific method, and he seems to care little for scientific or scholarly support for his arguments in the First and Second Essays. 8 At the same time, Janaway’s criticisms of Leiter’s approach do not disqualify the possibility that the Genealogy is meant to explain the emergence of morality; indeed, this is part of Janaway’s own reading of the Genealogy, though overall Janaway thinks this purpose is clearly secondary to the project of evaluation and revaluation. 9 This is also what Nietzsche himself stresses in his brief review of the book in Ecce Homo (EH, “Books,” GM). I therefore think it is best to take the debate over Nietzsche’s naturalism as settled and approach the Genealogy simply as an attempt, or a series of attempts, to explain the existence and character of morality. A more radical critique of Leiter’s reading is given by Christa Davis Acampora, and it calls into question even this scaled back notion of Nietzsche as trying to offer an explanatory account of morality. Acampora argues that Nietzsche disputes the existence of essential features of the modern scientific method like enduring substances and especially the reality of causation (BGE 21, GS 112), so he cannot be a methods naturalist or indeed be interested in giving explanations that rely on the concepts of cause and effect (Acampora 2006a). 10 Do we then need to abandon any conception of Nietzsche trying to account for the existence and effects of morality, for the simple but decisive reason that he rejects the possibility of causal explanation altogether? While Nietzsche is skeptical of the existence of causation, especially in The Gay Science he suggests that his objection concerns separating out individual parts or moments from a continuum and identifying each isolated part as a cause or effect. Yet Nietzsche can reject this fictional isolation but still believe there is an essential connection between, say, ressentiment and “slave morality” (or a morality that prizes equality and the alleviation of suffering), or between the turning inward of natural aggression and the development of moral awareness. He can, in other words, continue to use something very like the basic idea of causation without fully believing in it, just as he questions

6

Introduction

the concept of the will as a unity but continues to use that term throughout his writings (BGE 19). 11 Given then that the essays of the Genealogy are meant to explain morality—its different types, why each type originated to begin with, why each has developed and waxed or waned the way it has—what are we to make of the historical sketches given in each essay? Should they be taken as attempts at real history, or merely as fictional tales meant to illustrate something essential about our current morality? 12 Nietzsche stresses the importance of “real history” in the Preface to the Genealogy—“that is, what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of humanity!” (Pr. 7)—which suggests these are meant to be authentic historical accounts. By contrast, Nietzsche gives no indication anywhere that the stories in the Genealogy are meant to be taken as fictitious or even hypothetical, and indeed the emotional pitch of his claims in the Genealogy, especially at the finale or peak of the Second Essay, and his claims about the Genealogy in Ecce Homo suggest the opposite. The narratives of the Genealogy, therefore, seem intended by Nietzsche to be real, empirical history, though it makes relatively little difference for the interpretation presented below if we take them as fictions meant to aid in the conceptual analysis of morality. The details of the historical narrative of the Second Essay still must be puzzled out to make sense of whatever conceptual narrative and analysis is offered therein, and the crucial problem in either case, empirical or conceptual, concerns the will to power and its ability to serve as the principle or foundation of a coherent explanatory account of morality. Before moving on from this discussion of naturalism we must take note of the most essential aspect of Nietzsche’s commitment “to translate the human being back into nature” (BGE 230). Nature for Nietzsche—and this is a point that much be stressed again and again—is not simply a network of causes or a source for philosophic explanations. Lawrence Hatab makes this point splendidly in the most convincing account of Nietzsche’s naturalism I have seen, on which Nietzsche’s naturalism is both more encompassing and less amenable to rational explication and anatomization than the naturalism of contemporary philosophy. For Nietzsche, nature is more unstable and disruptive than science would allow; it includes forces, instincts, passions, and powers that are not reducible to objective, scientific categories. Stressing a darker sense of “nature red in tooth and claw,” Nietzsche claims that “the terrible . . . basic text of nature must again be recognized” (BGE 230). Nietzsche’s naturalism is consonant with scientific naturalism in rejecting “supernatural” beliefs, but the source of these beliefs, for Nietzsche, stems not from a lack or refusal of scientific thinking, but from an aversion to overwhelming and disintegrating forces in

Introduction

7

nature that science too suppresses and wants to overcome. Indeed, Nietzsche identifies nature with chaos. . . . At the same time, Nietzsche also rejects a romantic naturalism, which spurns science or reason and calls for a return to an original condition of innocence and harmony with nature. Naturalism, for Nietzsche, amounts to a kind of philosophical methodology, in that natural forces of becoming will be deployed to redescribe and account for all aspects of life, including cultural formations, even the emergence of seemingly antinatural constructions of “being.” The focus for this deployment can be located in Nietzsche’s concept of will to power. (Hatab 2008, 9–10)

Note how far we now are from methodological naturalism. The Wissenschaften, from physics to philology, are at best and only at times ancillary to Nietzsche’s real concerns; more often they are positively at odds with Nietzsche’s naturalist principles and ambitions for the fundamental reason that they misrepresent nature. Nietzsche’s naturalism, in my view, encompasses and employs the sciences rather than simply rebutting or excluding them, but they take their place, including in Nietzsche’s explanatory projects, in a broader and richer conception of nature than they can fully reckon. At bottom this is because, as Hatab indicates at the end of that passage, Nietzsche’s conception of nature cannot be understood apart from his teaching of the will to power. We now turn to understanding that crucial concept and its role in Nietzsche’s account of the rise of political and moral life. I.3. THE WILL TO POWER AND NATURE The will to power, if it is understood as anything other than a purely psychological thesis, is in some sense a metaphysical doctrine. There was a time when commenters considered Nietzsche fundamentally opposed to anything resembling “metaphysics,” when he was thought to belong above all among those he describes as “we godless anti-metaphysicians” (GS 344). Nietzsche famously attacks or dismisses any conception of a metaphysical order that comprises a realm of existence of “higher” reality and importance than the world we experience. With this critique of traditional metaphysics Nietzsche wants above all to reverse or dissolve the classical metaphysical valuation animating both Plato and Christianity (and thus Western civilization), which “affirm[s] another world than the world of life, nature, and history” (GS 344); he wants to affirm precisely this world, “our world,” the world negated by metaphysics or philosophy, and thus to translate humanity “back” into nature, rejecting notions of humanity as having a “higher” origin or being of a different and higher kind than the rest of nature (BGE 230). Likewise, Nietzsche rejects the conception of metaphysics or systematic philosophy that seeks to secure, in Karl Löwith’s phrase, “truth not in the sense of discoveredness but truth in the sense of certainty” (Löwith 1997, 15). This

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Introduction

does not mean, however, that he stops giving descriptions or accounts of the world, and specifically of life, nature, and history; he does not abandon or condemn the traditional activity and even subject matter of philosophy and metaphysics, just the valuations and desires expressed in its previous selfunderstanding. In this second sense of metaphysics, Nietzsche still practices it—he does not stop attempting to describe and explain the world, to understand its character and what this character means for us as human beings. His metaphysics, however, remain fundamentally this-worldly, and they center on the concept of the will to power. 13 The will to power is obviously central to Nietzsche’s thought and writings, but one must clarify the status and scope of this term. 14 Maudemarie Clark has challenged the traditional notion that Nietzsche believed that “the will to power” permeates or otherwise defines all things, or at least all natural things; she even denies that Nietzsche can meaningfully be said to think the will to power informs all human motivations. Clark’s objections run along two major lines of attack, one philosophic and the other textual or interpretive. She raises philosophic objections against both the “cosmological” doctrine of will to power and the psychological doctrine of will to power. The argument against the cosmological doctrine is that the notion of a will to power permeating and moving all things, even all organic things, is a philosophical embarrassment (Leiter, who largely follows Clark on these points, calls it “the crackpot metaphysics of will to power” [Leiter 2015, 260] 15). 16 The argument against the psychological doctrine of will to power is that simply assigning every human drive or interest a motive of power is meaningless. As Clark puts it, “the enlightening character of explanations of behavior in terms of the desire for power is dependent on an implicit contrast with other motives, and is therefore lost as soon as all other motives are interpreted as expressions of will to power” (Clark 1990, 210). Clark therefore argues for a reduced understanding of the will to power “as a secondorder desire for the ability to satisfy one’s other, or first-order, desires” (Clark 1990, 211). The textual argument, which is meant to rebut the cosmic metaphysics of will to power, is that Nietzsche advances this “strong” version of the argument only once in his published writings, section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil, and there it is meant ironically (Clark 1990, 212–227). To this Leiter adds an observation that is more limited but that also has better textual support, namely that Nietzsche sometimes speaks of the will to power as lacking in certain instances, something that would be impossible if the will to power pervaded everything, or even just every human drive (Leiter 2015, 114–115). The passages in which Nietzsche does this, however, are all in his late works, particularly The Antichrist(ian). This accords with the fact, demonstrated by Mazzino Montinari, that by the time of his collapse Nietzsche had abandoned the plan to publish a magnum opus (or a book of

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any sort) titled The Will to Power, replacing it instead with the five brief works he wrote at the very end of his sane life (Montinari 2003, 80–102). Even in these cases, however, Nietzsche is still plainly using the will to power as his standard of evaluation, which is the more central point for the concerns and argument of this book. Moreover, these instances all appear in Nietzsche’s late works; the case is quite different with the Genealogy, particularly the Second Essay. Leiter himself admits that Nietzsche sometimes plainly embraces the “stronger claim” for the will to power, but maintains that in these cases “we must simply take Nietzsche to have overstated his case . . . something his penchant for hyperbolic rhetoric and polemics often leads him to do” (Leiter 2015, 115–116). To return to Clark’s wider objections, Christopher Janaway has given a careful consideration of the idea of “the world as will to power,” in the course of which he provides a refutation of Clark’s arguments that is, I think, decisive, both as to the philosophic concerns and the interpretive strategy of reading Beyond Good and Evil 36 as ironic (Janaway 2007, 150–164). 17 I will not rehearse it here, in large part because my argument in the rest of the book does not really concern the cosmological doctrine of will to power. 18 Nietzsche makes an emphatic and unambiguous statement in the Genealogy that “the will of life . . . is bent upon power” (II 11), and spends the rest of that section and most of the following illustrating what is meant by that claim. 19 It is clear that in the Genealogy Nietzsche believes the will to power permeates biological life (II 12, III 7), and that he seeks to ground his normative approach to society and morality on the basis of this defining feature of life. The Genealogy is fundamentally concerned with explaining how apparently unegoistic or life-denying values—values that seem clearly to contradict the notion of the will to power as the fundamental psychological reality and source or standard of value—can be explained in terms of the will to power (or, in other words, of how the undeniable existence of these values does not refute the will to power as either a comprehensive explanatory or evaluative thesis). The Second Essay, in particular, is clearly focused on explaining how an original condition defined by the will to power, in the form of chaotic violence, could develop into society. Nietzsche maintains that this was possible only through the intensely violent imposition of laws, i.e., the will to power of the founders (itself an expression of a more fundamental natural imperative), and that the terror and violence of the founding in turn gave rise to the bad conscience, another form of the will to power. In short, there is no question of the centrality of the will to power in this account. Yet what exactly is meant by “the will to power” still must be clarified. An essential feature of it is identified by Janaway in his response to Clark, specifically to her concern that it is meaningless to call every drive or desire a will to power. Janaway begins by explaining that Nietzsche is likely taking

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Introduction

his language and concepts from Schopenhauer, who speaks of the “will to life” rather than the “will to power.” In Schopenhauer’s doctrine of will to life “will” is not a psychological term, and is certainly not equivalent to “desire”; it denotes a tendency to end-directed behavior throughout nature, only one of whose manifestations—albeit the most familiar to us because of its occurrence in self-consciousness—is the psychological phenomenon of desire. Schopenhauer would say that desires are but one specialized instance of the will in nature, and indeed he remarks as misguided the attempt to see every kind of will throughout nature as a kind of desiring. . . . We do desire life, both instinctively and rationally, but in Schopenhauer’s scheme will to life is an organizing principle that is explanatorily more basic than any desire. . . . [“Will to power,” then, may refer to] some natural tendency more primitive, less psychological than desiring. . . . [W]hen Nietzsche gives psychological explanations of human behaviors and valuations in terms of will to power, he need not be explaining them in terms of a desire for power. (Janaway 2007, 157)

The first major point to note here is Janaway’s explanation of how the will to power can permeate all drives, even ones that have nothing to do with a specific desire for power. Drawing on John Richardson’s discussion of the will to power in Nietzsche’s System (Richardson 1996, 21–28), Janaway argues that all drives display or embody the will to power by seeking to dominate other drives, even if this means nothing more than achieving their end at the expense of those of other drives (again, note the necessity of enddirected activity and of our comprehension of that end-directedness). Thus hunger, sexual desire, and intellectual curiosity can all manifest the will to power, even if none of them are drives or desires for actual power. There are, however, problems with this solution. While it allows motives other than power to explain human actions, in a crucial sense it simply pushes the issue back one level. Sexual desire and intellectual curiosity (or, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, the will to truth) are for Nietzsche often, perhaps always, motivated more by power than is commonly thought. Even hunger, Nietzsche would argue, to the extent that it serves survival is in fact in the service of “the will of life, which is bent upon power . . . [and the “total goal” of which is] creating greater units of power” (GM II 11). In other words, and to use Clark’s terms, power is ultimately always the first-order desire (if not always consciously recognized or avowed as such), the superficial goals of traditional or common sense understanding the second-order desires of which the will to life makes use in its pursuit of greater power. At the level of human psychology, at least as it is usually consciously experienced, there are motives other than power. But at the level of metaphysics or ontology, and even of psychology if it is correctly understood, there is only one motive or drive, the will to power. 20

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This is especially the case with morality as it is presented in the Genealogy. Each of the three major narratives, especially that of the Second Essay, centers on explaining morality in terms of the will to power. This runs from the simplest, physical form of power (the violence of the pre-political masses) up to the self-renunciation of Christianity. The slave revolt in morals, the bad conscience, the embrace of asceticism by the priest (and for that matter by the artist and philosopher)—these are all stabs at power, whether real or illusory, not just the will to power exhibiting itself as an attribute of another drive. Moreover, the Genealogy as a whole is meant to explain how apparently self-denying or altruistic morality can be explained as will to power. If all that Nietzsche means by this is that even ascetics and compassionate altruists want to achieve their ends successfully, his account would lose whatever critical or deflationary power it has (and indeed probably any interest of any sort). This does, however, create problems for Nietzsche. In the first place, if all human drives and even all organic functions and processes are ultimately explicable in terms of power then, as Clark notes, it is not clear how this is actually a meaningful explanation. Of course, it is meant to be meaningful in part by its contrast to other explanations, and the same objection to the will to power could be raised against any other account of organic and specifically of human life that reduces it to one principle, whether that principle is survival, reproduction, pleasure, equilibrium, or anything else. More importantly, then, if all morality is motivated by or serves the will to power, how can some forms of the will to power be bad, for instance those of the slaves and priests? Put somewhat differently, how can some forms of power be noble (expansive, affirmative), while others are slavish or otherwise objectionable (vengeful, reactive)? This is of course an old problem for understanding Nietzsche. A more extended consideration of Nietzsche’s comment about the will of life in II 11 leads me to accept the criticism of Nietzsche made by Stanley Rosen on this point (2.3 below). The other major feature of Janaway’s discussion of the will to power is that nature is, as Janaway puts it, “end-directed.” This is already implied in the very name “will to power,” and while Janaway, like many other commentators, notes Nietzsche’s mockery of anthropomorphic language and his desire to move beyond it, he also rightly observes that “in practice Nietzsche repeatedly resorts to descriptions which apply intentionalistic, anthropomorphic language to sub-personal and organic processes, and seems unable to do without them.” 21 The will to power, in short, is a teleological concept, though it expresses a teleology that attempts to do justice to the modern conception of a purposeless universe and natural world. This has particular significance for Nietzsche’s attempt to make sense of human socialization in terms of the will to power, which will emerge in the body of the book.

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It may sound strange to hear teleological views ascribed to Nietzsche, given his frequent attacks on the concept. What Nietzsche objects to in the concept of teleology, however, is the notion of historical or developmental teleology, the idea that history, or organic development, has followed a natural path that has necessarily culminated in the advent of humanity (see 3.1 below). But whether one speaks of teleology, or end-directedness, or intention or purposiveness, or, as Nietzsche himself does, of will, the conclusion is the same: things in nature, including human beings and their constituent parts, act to realize ends that are intrinsic to the kind of thing they are. Elaine Miller sums up Nietzsche’s position well: [I]n sketching out ideas for an ontology of will to power, Nietzsche was concerned with not just how human beings should live, but how best to think about the natural world that gives rise to human being and ultimately supersedes it. . . . If will to power is not purposive per se, it does have intentionality, and thus it manifests purposiveness as one of its multiple possibilities. Organic life is one possibility, a possibility that in its resistance to incorporation perhaps allows will to power to express itself more richly. (Miller 2006, 73; see 68–73 generally) 22

Here we come to the real significance of the will to power and its existence in the natural world for Nietzsche. The will to power serves both explanatory and normative purposes. Nietzsche is a teleologist in recognizing ends in nature but even more in trying to base human life on the purposive or enddirected activity of nature, which is, even if only in a partial or restricted domain of nature, will to power. There is a clear and cardinal difference here between (a) a teleological principle explaining the nature and action of individual things in terms of the ends they pursue and (b) a teleological principle explaining historical development in terms of an ultimate goal. Nietzsche affirms the first and rejects the second, and the crucial difference between the two may be further illustrated with examples. When I cut my hand, the blood clots because of the actions of the platelets in it. This is the nature of platelets (though Nietzsche is more likely to use Wesen than Natur in this context), to begin to form a blood clot when necessary, just as it is the nature of wolves to form packs and hunt (among other things) and the nature of plants to convert sunlight to chemical energy through photosynthesis (among other things). 23 What Nietzsche objects to in the conception of teleology coming from Aristotle and the tradition following him is not the notion of individual natures directed to specific ends but rather the notion that those natures are permanent and, even more, the notion that they aim at the good rather than at power—an idea that, if not explicitly moralistic in itself, quickly lends itself to moralism and paves the way for projecting moral concepts and concerns onto nature. To describe nature in the way Nietzsche does, as composed of individual

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things (natures or essences) that consistently act to achieve certain ends is quite different from describing nature as a process or development moving toward a certain goal, and the first does not entail the second. Nietzsche strongly rejects this latter notion of natural development as directed toward a specific goal, and thus rejects both the belief that it is guided by a transcendent power and authority—whether God, History, or something else—as well as the notion that we could meaningfully distinguish between mature and immature versions of humanity, as for instance Kant does in “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant 1991, 54). On the contrary, Nietzsche judges people and peoples not in terms of where they fall in the course of historical development but of how well they instantiate and realize the will to power; hence his admiration for a whole range of cultures and individuals appearing in all times and places. Consider another concrete contrast, the difference between the cacophony of sounds one would hear from the animals in a forest on the one hand and a symphony on the other—though to be more faithful to Nietzsche’s thought it would be better to describe the first as the free, innocent play of sounds. The world, now and always, is the interplay of natures directed toward the end of amassing, discharging, and, perhaps especially, experiencing power—attacking, defending, interpreting, incorporating, learning how to better do these things. Nature in this case is defined and driven by the will to power. It therefore creates forms that seek power and ultimately to overcome themselves, but the overall process of growth and change in nature is still chaotic, violent, accidental, lacking all sense of reason and purpose, justified only by the operations of the will to power realizing itself in every moment of it. 24 Just as the centrality of the will to power to the Genealogy is evident, so in the Genealogy the will to power receives some of its most clearly teleological formulations. Perhaps the strongest statement comes in III 7: “Every animal . . . instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power.” Nietzsche also speaks of nature as having purposes, or rather tasks, in II 1, though as we will see he has already set this idea forth in Beyond Good and Evil 188. He further identifies the will to power at work in all organic processes in II 12, where he maintains that the will to power has a clear purpose or end, namely producing its own interpretations. Yet this view finds support outside of the Genealogy as well, for instance in Beyond Good and Evil 13, where Nietzsche rejects self-preservation as a “superfluous teleological principle.” In the context, the meaning is plain—Nietzsche objects to the principle of self-preservation because it is superfluous, not because it is teleological, and it is superfluous because the teleological principle of will to power already explains everything about organic beings. What does this concept of the will to power mean for Nietzsche, and specifically for this study of him? Much of what follows is devoted to a

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detailed and sequential commentary on the Second Essay of the Genealogy, reading individual sections and passages to show that Nietzsche does indeed offer a coherent and original account of the origin of political society and morality, of the sort presented by Aristotle in The Politics and Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality. The following comments, though they are very broad claims I cannot establish here, provide some of the fundamental background that helps explain the interpretation given in the body of the book and which that interpretation in turn supports. Nietzsche is in one respect a very traditional thinker, for he, like the ancients, seeks to make nature a theoretical and especially a normative standard of illumination and guidance. He sees nature as end-directed, to use minimally anthropomorphic language, though as we will see Nietzsche himself frequently speaks of nature’s intentions or purposes and even tasks. Nietzsche is therefore, and in contrast to most modern philosophers, a teleologist, one basing himself on ends in nature, not history. This is expressed in many places, most obviously in the concept of the will to power. The significance and essence of the will to power can be summed up by saying it is teleology without the good. This is where Nietzsche obviously departs from the tradition of ancient and medieval philosophy. He does not think the good exists, even as something relative to individual species or natures, and he certainly does not think the good exists as a property of or reality in nature. Thus the will seeks power, to discharge itself, not the good. The absence of the good in nature, combined with the attempt to find guidance and grounding in nature, leads Nietzsche to the will to power. Nature still speaks to us, nature still seeks to achieve its ends and goals through human beings, and thus we should attempt to live in accord with nature. But there is nothing in nature that we can recognize as “the good,” and very little that we would ordinarily recognize as good at all, especially by the light of our current, decaying but still dominant values. Nature is rather magnificently, terrifyingly creative, and what it especially strives to create is “greater units of power.” The theoretical and normative principle of human life, in short, should be the will to power. Nietzsche, then, not only sees the will to power as fundamental to humanity but regards it as a kind of teleological principle, a manifest and defining quality by which things in nature are directed to a particular end, but one that drives living things toward greater power, not toward the good or the fulfillment of any kind of permanent nature or essence. This picture is already present in the first section of the Second Essay, where nature appears turned against itself. Nature and especially human nature is originally formless and chaotic (II 16), yet an impulse imbedded within nature itself causes it to begin to create forms. It does this, however, only by binding its primordial formless energies into some distinct form, violently forcing those energies to take a particular shape (BGE 188). These forms develop not by realizing the

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good proper to their nature but by overcoming themselves in a long, senseless, violent, and wasteful process that is not guided by any morality or reason (cf. II 12, GS 357 and 346). This truth is as evident in the history of human civilization and morality as it is in the natural world which has seen the extinction of countless species and in which animals literally eat each other alive. 25 Nietzsche highlights this dynamic in the opening lines of the Second Essay, writing that with humanity nature has set itself the task of breeding an animal that is permitted to promise, which means impelling humanity towards an end that is contrary to happiness by opposing and destroying the primal human need to forget. The will to power remains central in the long discussion of early punishment and contracts that takes up much of the first half of the essay, where Nietzsche traces even the origin of trade not to the desire for survival or utility but to the desire for superiority and power (II 8). But the character of the will to power—at once creative, purposive, and utterly devoid any concern with the good—is most clear in his acount of the formation of the bad conscience, which then runs its own course, serving or expressing the will to power thwarted and turned inward by political founding but developing in unexpected and improvidential ways (II 16–18). Throughout we see this wasteful, disorderly process of creation and selfovercoming driven by the will to power, or by the will of life to build greater units of power (II 11), spiritually and psychologically as well as in the formation and growth of political society. The book as a whole seeks to balance exposition of this argument with the necessarily detailed and meticulous reading of the Second Essay. The course it takes is sketched in the following section. I.4. PLAN OF THE BOOK Chapter 1 deals with the first three sections of the Second Essay, which give a profound and encompassing frame for the rest of the Essay. Nietzsche here gives a sketch of the work of nature in “breeding an animal that is permitted to promise,” discussing nature in intentional terms as having set itself a task. The picture of nature that emerges from these sections, especially when taken in conjunction with a crucial passage in Beyond Good and Evil with which they communicate, is clear and vital. Nature is completely amoral—or, in Nietzsche’s terms, completely innocent—and for that reason is perhaps the purest exemplar and source of creativity. Nature produces forms, but only by binding and even mutilating its basic formless, chaotic activity. This is especially true in the case of human beings, where such wasteful creation takes the form of morality and, ultimately, the overcoming of morality in forms like philosophy and art. Here we see how Nietzsche depicts nature as teleo-

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logical, but in a radical new way that focuses on purposes in nature without any sense or conception of the good as the end at which nature aims. The picture of nature Nietzsche presents here is the necessary background for understanding the rest of his narrative account in the Second Essay. Chapter 2 deals with sections four through eleven. This part of the Second Essay is largely devoted to various remarks and proposals concerning what early society must have been like, and in particular what the character and motive of punishment must have been. These remarks can easily seem haphazard and even self-contradictory, but they are essential for piecing together Nietzsche’s account of the first social and economic arrangements among human beings. I accordingly give a careful reconstruction of Nietzsche’s views here, focusing especially on his account of specifically political or social developments on the one hand and of specifically moral ones on the other. The key to making sense of Nietzsche’s various and often conflicting sketches is his discussion of justice and the will to power in section eleven, which provides the highest, most comprehensive, and most definitive ordering of the various perspectives on punishment and its motives scattered throughout the previous sections. It makes sense of them in terms of the will to power and the will of life, and also shows that for Nietzsche political organization is an activity by which the will of life engages in its essential activity, creating new and living power structures. Nietzsche’s especially clear and forceful statement of his will to power doctrine at the end of section eleven provides an opportunity to register some important and indeed perhaps decisive criticisms of the core of Nietzsche’s thought. The chapter closes with comments on Nietzsche’s treatment of suffering and meaning in section seven, an obvious but illuminating digression from the rest of the Essay. Chapter 3 deals with sections twelve through fifteen. These sections contain a somewhat systematic statement of Nietzsche’s theoretical principles in the twelfth section, and also mark the turning point of the Second Essay as a whole, from the fairly rambling discussion of punishment in prehistoric society to the much more focused account of the origins of the bad conscience and its elaboration, especially in religion, that begins in the sixteenth section. Although the twelfth section is relatively well-trod ground at this point, I first discuss the major arguments set forth there, before considering what they mean for Nietzsche’s analysis of punishment. These sections end that analysis, with two major conclusions: punishment has no inherent meaning or purpose, for it has been used for countless purposes throughout history (many of which perdure in the undefinable tangle of its present meaning), and punishment does nothing to elicit a sense of guilt or moral introspection and self-criticism. Nietzsche’s statements in these sections then raise two fundamental questions about his philosophy as a whole. If punishment has no distinct or coherent meaning, can morality? And if it cannot, how can Nietzs-

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che discuss it, much less explain, criticize, or try to change it? Secondly, if all meaning or interpretation is simply a function of the will to power, how can Nietzsche ground his own thought? Chapter 4 discusses the heart of Nietzsche’s account of the origin of political life and morality, his discussion of the beginnings of the bad conscience (II 16), the founding of the first “state” (II 17), and the character of the new form of creativity thus brought into being (II 18). The first step in understanding Nietzsche’s account is clarifying exactly what moral phenomenon the bad conscience describes (unsurprisingly, Nietzsche does not stop to define it). The next step is making sense of the historical claim Nietzsche makes about the inception of the bad conscience, and in particular sketching out how such a thing might have been possible in the terms of Nietzsche’s psychology. Nietzsche’s claim that the bad conscience arose when vastly more powerful invaders imposed order on a subjected populace raises the question of whether the bad conscience is simply a form of ressentiment. I argue that it is not, looking first at the details of the political founding Nietzsche describes and then at his comments about the new type of creativity, and the emergence of beauty, fostered by the bad conscience. Chapter 5 discusses sections nineteen to twenty-five, Nietzsche’s overview of how the rudimentary bad conscience developed into Christian and post-Christian guilt. This is the weakest part of Nietzsche’s exposition, and much of my discussion is necessarily critical. His explanation for the emergence of belief in the gods, for instance, is oddly muddled and unconvincing, and other important parts of his narrative rely on unargued assumptions. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the particulars of his criticism of Christianity in these sections are hard to square with his earlier portrayal of the bad conscience. That portrayal would seem to suggest that something like Christianity was an inevitable development of the bad conscience, and while in these sections Nietzsche regards this development with dismay bordering on horror, its basic operation is similar to what he praised about the bad conscience earlier, especially in section eighteen. The invidious contrast between Christianity and the Greeks only heightens these issues, but there are indications there that the Greeks, at least in his version, are not Nietzsche’s ideal in any case. In short, some of the normative exaggerations or inconsistencies that appear in this segment are perhaps simply rhetorical overkill. The theoretical issues in Nietzsche’s account, however, cannot readily be explained or dispatched. The conclusion begins by situating the Second Essay in the historical and argumentative structure of the Genealogy as a whole, then returns to the question of how the Genealogy attempts to furnish explanations for the existence of morality and considers its success in doing so. It closes by considering the strengths and weaknesses of Nietzsche’s account of the origins of politics and morality in the Second Essay.

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Before setting off on this itinerary there is one last question that must be discussed: how to read Nietzsche, a writer capable of surpassing beauty and subtlety but also of frustrating vagueness and, at times, apparent cavalier disregard for basic standards of definition and consistency. Perhaps the most serious issue in approaching Nietzsche’s writing, however, concerns not his apparent inconsistencies but the effect and intention of his often emotionally charged styles of expression. I.5. READING NIETZSCHE: AFFECTS AND ARGUMENTS Nietzsche’s texts are almost unique in the history of philosophy for the volume and the intensity, and indeed the variety, of their rhetorical effects; for many years the major objections to reading Nietzsche as a significant philosopher were his aphoristic style and his poetic way of writing. One approach to this issue is to try to discern an exoteric and an esoteric teaching in Nietzsche’s texts; this approach, familiar from commentators like Stanley Rosen, Laurence Lampert, and Geoff Waite, is based on Nietzsche’s own discussion of exoteric and esoteric teachings in Beyond Good and Evil (30). The chief objection to this seems to me to be the almost total lack of unanimity about the basic meaning of Nietzsche’s writings—it is impossible to have an exoteric teaching when there is no consensus about the surface meaning of a text. If Nietzsche did try to construct or deploy an exoteric façade, he seems to have been rather inept. Moreover, if Nietzsche does have an exoteric teaching, I think Werner Dannhauser is right about its character: “If traditionally the exoteric teaching was noncontroversial, acceptable, and edifying as opposed to the more radical, controversial, and perhaps shocking esoteric teaching, then Nietzsche must be said to practice a reverse esotericism. The more shocking pronouncements stand out and the delicacy is left for the happy few to appreciate” (Dannhauser 1974, 202). But if this is the case, and Nietzsche’s more intemperate and incendiary statements are intended to form the core or basis for an exoteric, popular understanding of his work, then his work would necessarily and by design have a chiefly destructive or reactionary influence. In this case the best readings of Nietzsche would be those offered by Stanley Rosen and Geoff Waite, both of whom argue that Nietzsche uses his considerable rhetorical powers to persuade or deceive his readers into embracing either a destructive politics meant to clear the way for new cultural creation (Rosen) or a regressive and anti-egalitarian politics that does not balk at genocide and slavery (Waite). 26 If this is true, then the proper approach to Nietzsche would be a critical or even purely antagonistic one. A rather different response to Nietzsche’s often extravagant rhetoric is to see it as pedagogical or therapeutic, meant to lead the reader to greater selfawareness rather than to manipulate him into half-wittingly carrying out

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Nietzsche’s destructive or at least reactionary projects. This tactic is adopted in its general outlines by Christopher Janaway, Ken Gemes, David Owen, and Brian Leiter. 27 Janaway’s reading is especially ingenious. He argues that, for Nietzsche, morality is often more a matter of feeling than of thinking, and Nietzsche therefore must fully engage his readers’ affects to free them from the hold of contemporary or conventional morality. A particularly complex version of this operation happens in the First Essay of the Genealogy, where Nietzsche takes the reader through a narrative where the brutish, unapologetic exercise of power by the nobles and the mendacious, vengeful quest for power by the slaves leave the reader unable simply to identify with either. Ultimately, though, the uneasiness or repulsion initially felt for the loutish nobles is transferred to the underhanded and hypocritical slaves, and the reader is wrenched from her allegiance to the contemporary morality of altruism and equality. This is all achieved in a decisive and transformative way that would never be possible through a dry, orderly argument for the same conclusions (Janaway 2007, 99–106). This is a fine reading indeed, nuanced and insightful. There seem to me, however, to be two chief problems with this approach. The first, while obviously a matter of individual judgment, is that this seems too hopeful or naïve a view of the effects of Nietzsche’s fiery denunciations of the weak and sick, as well as of democracy, equality, compassion, and related modern ideals. If we grant that this rhetoric will have a serious effect on Nietzsche’s readers, commenters like Rosen and Waite seem to me closer to identifying what that effect will actually be. Malcolm Bull gives a nice summation of the case that Nietzsche’s readers will end up siding with the obvious “winners” in his texts. Through the act of reading, Nietzsche flatteringly offers identification with the masters to anyone, but not to everyone. Identification with the masters means imaginative liberation from all the social, moral and economic constraints within which individuals are usually confined; identification with “the rest” [whom Nietzsche contrasts with his “rightful readers”] involves reading one’s way through many pages of abuse directed at people like oneself. Unsurprisingly, people of all political persuasions and social positions have more readily discovered themselves to belong to the former category. For who, in the privacy of reading, can fail to find within themselves some of those qualities of honesty and courage and loftiness of soul that Nietzsche describes? (Bull 2011, 31) 28

Even if Nietzsche’s “true” readers were meant to have the reaction Janaway outlines, the majority have not been nearly as thoughtful or self-critical, as Nietzsche must have anticipated if he had the perfectly calibrated mastery of his rhetoric, and the almost infallible understanding of its effects, that he must have had on this reading. How then will a steady identification with

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“the winners” in Nietzsche’s texts affect or change his readers? 29 This is obviously not a question with one simple answer, or perhaps any answer at all, given Nietzsche’s popularity with almost any imaginable political or social faction under the sun. 30 Undoubtedly, though, many of them become callous snobs, or worse. 31 While this may have been a price Nietzsche was willing to pay to work the trick Janaway describes, I think a reading of this sort must explain how this consequence fits into Nietzsche’s intentions. The point can be made in somewhat different terms by noting a comparison made by Janaway, who suggests that “to think that Nietzsche was unable to write in the conventional form of connected arguments running from premiss to conclusion . . . would be like treating Arnold Schoenberg as someone who never quite mastered major and minor scales” (Janaway 2007, 97). 32 This may be an apt analogy for Nietzsche’s aphorisms and for the intentionally ambiguous and allusive character of much of his writing, but it does not apply to the cruder polemical modes of the Genealogy, which at times are almost demagogic. Especially in parts of the First Essay and similar passages, Nietzsche is neither Bach nor Schoenberg so much as Andrew Lloyd Webber. The second problem with this interpretation of Nietzsche’s rhetoric is that it requires him to pay an enormous price in terms of basic comprehension of his philosophic positions. While Nietzsche is now taken to be a more coherent and generally “traditional” philosophic writer than ever before, at least in the English-speaking academic world, for the better part of the century following his death his thought was widely seen as basically illogical, whether intentionally or otherwise. Even among those who mostly agree on how to read Nietzsche, debate remains about major questions such as whether he was a moral realist or meant to advance a consistent metaphysics, as well as on more specific points such as those discussed above, whether or what kind of a naturalist he might have been and what he meant by the will to power. While it is possible that this is another price Nietzsche was willing to pay for the educative effects Janaway describes, these accounts must explain why he was willing to pay it. 33 Imagine serious, fair-minded, and inexhaustible debates about whether Kant was serious about the categorical imperative, or whether Augustine really believed in sin. Or take the example of Aristotle, whose writings have mostly come down to us in a fragmentary state. Imagine if his readers could not reach consensus on whether he intended hylomorphism to apply to all matter, or only to living things, or only to human beings—or, on a different front, whether he thought there are objective ethical truths. It is hard to imagine any of these hypothetical philosophers, who failed to make themselves clear on some of the most fundamental principles of their thought, being somehow better or making greater contributions to philosophy than the ones we know. 34

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There are two other approaches to this mixture of rhetorical intensity and conceptual tension (if not logical confusion) in Nietzsche’s works. The first comes from Lawrence Hatab, who suggests that “the posture of any philosophy, even Nietzsche’s, dwells within and runs up against life forces that outstrip reflection . . . even a philosophy of natural life is always exceeded by life” (Hatab 2008, 27). For Hatab “this self-limiting character of philosophy is caught up in Nietzsche’s unorthodox styles of writing” (ibid.), his way of embodying “his warning against oppositional thinking by deliberately disturbing a fixed position through the insertion of a counter-position. . . . [Nietzsche’s] hyperbolic attacks can be seen as a rhetorical strategy to unsettle thinking and reveal possibilities otherwise concealed by commonplace assumptions” (Hatab 2008, 16). In this context it is worth noting that all the famous philosophical doctrines mentioned above—the categorical imperative, the concept of sin, the notion that nature is intelligible to us because of permanent forms inherent to nature itself, and the proposition that there is a particular set and order of virtues that are good for all possessed of a common human nature—are doctrines that Nietzsche himself plainly rejects. This is perhaps the most promising way to approach Nietzsche’s apparent contradictions, at least if we want to see him as something other than either sinister or muddle-headed, but it does leave two questions unanswered. The first is how to distinguish Nietzsche’s main line of argument, assuming that he has such a thing and does not simply want to present us with an assortment of perspectives meant to shake us out of our sleepy conventionalism. Why, for instance, is the will to power the central concept in Nietzsche’s thought, and how do we know it has, or is meant to have, the unitary meaning necessary for it to play that role? Along the same lines one has to ask if this notion of Nietzsche testing out various perspectives (and doing so in overheated ways in order to overturn received opinion) accounts for the intensity and sense of conviction he often seems to have in these passages. Both of these questions, it seems to me, loom especially large in the Genealogy and the short works Nietzsche completed after it. These questions bring us to the final interpretive approach to the ostensible contradictions in Nietzsche’s texts, that presented by Henry Staten in his book Nietzsche’s Voice. Staten identifies what I think is the crucial matter at the very heart of reading Nietzsche, the tension in his texts between two poles of thought and expression, between which Nietzsche himself moves frequently. 35 At one pole Nietzsche writes in a mood of expansive affirmation, and his ideal is a kind of self-squandering in harmony with the great economy of the whole (cf. GS 1). The other pole is defined by a contracted, reactive mood in which Nietzsche praises self-augmentation rather than squandering, and in which he sees the self-aggrandizement of the nobles as the end goal of the process he elsewhere describes as the great economy.

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Perhaps the greatest virtue of this reading is that it does justice to the strange ambiguity of Nietzsche’s own texts, particularly the Genealogy. Nietzsche makes too many contradictory and otherwise problematic statements to accept all of them, but he seems too invested in the stories he’s telling to take them as mere thought experiments or hypotheticals meant to illustrate more abstract points. The disadvantage to Staten’s work, as Aaron Ridley has noted, is “the fact that there is almost nothing portable in Staten’s book—almost nothing that one can, as it were, recycle for one’s own use” (Ridley 1998a, 236). One can gesture admiringly at it, but it is difficult to do much beyond this that doesn’t amount to simply aping him. In the end, I am not sure there is a clear best or most convincing contender among these different proposals. Even more importantly, I think the Second Essay of the Genealogy has too many merely superficial contradictions to adopt any of them. I do not consider the affective effects of Nietzsche’s writing in what follows because, while individual parts of the Second Essay may provoke strong emotional reactions of various sorts, the overwhelming response to the essay as a whole is confusion. In line with the attempt to read Nietzsche as here offering explanatory accounts of the origin and development of morality in human political life—albiet one embedded in an intricate and at times confounding narrative—I attempt in what follows to provide a theoretical or analytic interpretation of Nietzsche, one that simply seeks to understand and make sense of his arguments (which of course will include explaining apparent contradictions where possible). Put somewhat differently, before we can make sense of Nietzsche’s contradictions and what they might mean, we must be certain of what those contradictions are and what fundamental commitments ultimately create them—and this turns out to be a substantial enough task for one book. This does not, obviously, do away with the problems raised in this section, it simply means that my reading will begin with Nietzsche’s philosophic arguments and explications, rather than with his most extreme rhetorical pronouncements, and to subordinate the latter to the former. Granting that this is far from the final word on the matter, it is the approach by which this study will proceed. I.6. NOTES 1. Roughly speaking, the origins of political society and its attendant creation of morality are discussed especially in sections 4–11 and 16–18, their critical early developments in sections 19–23. 2. See, for instance, Detwiler 1990, Thiele 1990, Schutte 1984, Ansell-Pearson 1994, Conway 1997, Appel 1999, and Strong 2000. Given the central place the Genealogy has assumed in recent discussions, its previous near total neglect is almost comic. More recent studies of Nietzsche’s political thought have largely continued this neglect, often for thematic reasons. See Shaw 2007, Emden 2008, Kirkland 2009, Church 2012, Ansell-Pearson 2013, Clark 2015, and Beiner 2018. Drochon 2016 is something of an exception, though Drochon focuses more

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on using the Genealogy to construct Nietzsche’s normative political views, not on the historical and explanatory account on which I concentrate in what follows. 3. This is the focus of Lawrence Hatab’s discussion of Nietzsche and political philosophy in his book on the Genealogy (Hatab 2008, 243–273) as well as in his earlier A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (Hatab 1995). For broader development of Nietzsche as an agonistic thinker, see Acampora 2013. 4. John Locke may seem to assert that it can and did, but he attributes many faculties and interests to humanity in the state of nature that Nietzsche clearly denies. 5. Although Nietzsche’s basic narrative, and the conceptual innovations and arguments bound up in it, is much more obscure and tangled in the Second Essay than in the other two, once it is clarified it provides a more concrete example of empirical naturalism than either the First or Third Essays, each of which paints in big, bold strokes but leaves the reader with fundamental questions about the relatively simple narrative it has traced (such as the exact nature and agency of the priest, or the question of how or why noble morality came to ruin). 6. See more generally the discussion of the various types of naturalism, 2–5. Leiter’s careful distinctions between the various ways in which Nietzsche might be a methodological or “Methods” naturalist are irrelevant for our purposes here, so I group them all together in referring to methodological naturalism. 7. Leiter’s discussion of how Nietzsche balances naturalism with his hostility to materialism is one of the strongest parts of his treatment (2015, 19–20; cf. 54). 8. There are times, however, when Nietzsche does seem to approve of and even rely on contemporary science. In the Third Essay of the Genealogy, for instance, Nietzsche sets forth a physiological explanation for the feeling of sin (III 15–19). This is perhaps a clear instance of methods naturalism, even (to use Leiter’s terms) results naturalism—though without a clear way to conceptualize and measure the feeling of sin, physiological depression, and the relation between the two, and then to apply that to the past events Nietzsche is discussing, it may look more like pseudoscience. 9. As indeed does Leiter (2015, 21–23, 248). 10. For further criticism of Leiter’s stance see Clark and Dudrick 2006, Schacht 2012, and Emden 2014, 60–66. On the topic of Nietzsche and naturalism see also Kail 2015 and Emden 2014, both of whom defend the general view that Nietzsche is committed to naturalism. 11. For further discussion of how Nietzsche can embrace a certain skepticism about traditional notions of causality but still give causal explanations, see Strawson 2015, 25–26 and Kail 2015, 217–218. 12. The best case for taking these stories as fictions is given by Simon May (May 1999, 51–52). May suggests that the real point of the Genealogy is not to give us an empirical account of actual historical actors and their role in creating morality, but rather, to use one of his examples, to show us that “ressentiment is associated with certain values (particularly, essential equality), with certain questions (notably, ‘why is there suffering at all?’), and with certain aims (above all, to abolish suffering and inequality)”; as May notes, “only conceptual, rather than historical, analysis can establish” these connections (May 1999, 51). On the notion of the histories in the Genealogy being chiefly fictional see also Gemes 2006, 204–206, and Williams 2000, 157–161. 13. On this aspect of the will to power see especially Müller-Lauter 1999, 130–147. In brief, “For every will to power relies on the conflict with other power-wills in order to be able to be will to power. The quality, ‘will to power,’ is not a real unity; this unity exists neither in any way for itself, nor is it ever the ‘ground of being.’ There is a ‘real’ unity only as organization and interplay of power-quanta . . . the power-will is not a principle or a metaphysical entity [133]. . . . [The will to power] is not an underlying foundation of the world that produces life or externalizes itself as art or realizes itself as mankind” (134). See also Cox 1999, 214–223, and, for a compendious statement of the point, Eagleton 2016, 109–110. 14. For important discussions that center on or involve the will to power in Nietzsche’s published works see, among others, Z I 15, II 12, 20; BGE 9, 13, 23, 36, 211, 257, 259; GM II 12, III 7.The will to power has of course attracted a great deal of commentary. Major works include Müller-Lauter 1999, Poellner 1995, especially 162–187 and 266–305, Richardson

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1996, especially 16–72, Cox 1999, 213–245, Reginster 2006, especially 103–147, Clark and Dudrick 2012, especially 137–244, Lightbody 2017, and Doyle 2018. 15. Part of the reason for Leiter’s hostility may be that a broader metaphysical notion of the will to power creates serious problems for his reading of Nietzsche as a methodological naturalist, for reasons shown by Janaway (2007, 38–39). 16. Though perhaps this reading is not the utter philosophic embarrassment it has been taken to be: see Strawson 2015 and Richardson 2015, 89–91. 17. Paul Loeb, in the course of a detailed reading of BGE 36, has also observed that Nietzsche in fact makes the cosmological claim for will to power in several published passages besides BGE 36 (Loeb 2015, 63–64 and 67–69). 18. It seems evident to me, though beside the point here, that Nietzsche is serious about the cosmological doctrine of the will to power, just as he is serious about the idea of the eternal recurrence being literally or empirically true, even if he is chiefly concerned with the psychological and ethical implications of each. 19. Given statements like this, which recur throughout section twelve, I do not distinguish between life and the will to power (“nature,” a term Nietzsche uses rather more selectively, is a different matter). As John Richardson puts it, life is Nietzsche’s “crucial notion, more basic than ‘will to power’—which is, after all, offered as a hypothesis about life” (Richardson 2015, 91). On life in the Genealogy and its connection with the will to power see also Hussain 2011. 20. Richardson argues that power in this sense for Nietzsche means success in realizing the end of some other drive or project, so that the power involved in will to power “can’t be a highest end [like pleasure or political power], because it’s not a concrete or ‘first-order’ end like them . . . power isn’t an independent state, that could be described without supposing some such effort as given. Pleasure, by contrast, is usually considered a concrete state, one that many activities can produce . . . [but that is] distinct from these causes or means. Nietzschean power can’t have this independence, because it is (roughly) improvement in whatever a drive’s activity already is” (1996, 23). As noted above, however, individuals do not need to consciously experience the power at which life aims for it to be a substantive and independent end, not merely the enhancement of the pursuit of another end. Moreover, at times Nietzsche speaks of a “feeling of power” (e.g., GM III 7), suggesting that it is indeed a concrete and independent experience like pleasure. Here the explanation of will to power offered by David Owen is helpful: “Nietzsche argues that human beings are continuous with other organic creatures in terms of being characterized by will to power, that is, in being governed by an architectonic interest in the feeling of power” (Owen 2007, 34). 21. On Nietzsche’s struggles with the apparent necessity of anthropomorphic language, see also Loeb 2015 and Staten 2006, 565–572. 22. On the will to power as teleological or end-directed, see also Poellner 1995, 162–173, Staten 2006, 565–574, Richardson 1996, 21–35, and Richardson 2004, 26–35, and passim. This last work, Richardson’s Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, deals with this theme in highly interesting ways, but it raises interpretive questions that cannot be dealt with here. (See the searching review by Jessica Berry [2005].) For a contrary interpretation of the will to power, see Cox 1999, 229–235. Cox draws on Georges Bataille to argue that for Nietzsche the will to power is not about acquisition but expenditure of power. This point is well taken, and Cox’s discussion repays reading in full, but expenditure, or even a dynamic balance between expenditure and acquisition, still provides an end or goal for the will to power (and the question of expenditure in Nietzsche’s texts is more complicated in any case: see Staten 1990, especially 10–15). 23. I use these examples advisedly, since Nietzsche is as interested in the way things like platelets or organs form larger wholes as he is in the nature of individual organisms. 24. Compare Z III 4, “Before Sunrise”; TI, “Errors,” 8, where Nietzsche says of this picture of the world “this alone is the great liberation—thus alone is the innocence of becoming (Unschuld des Werdens) restored”; and GM II 12 and 3.1 below). 25. Compare this passage from “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in which Nietzsche speaks of a “sudden illumination [in which] we gaze around us and behind us with a shudder: we behold the more subtle beasts of prey and there we are in the midst of them. The tremendous coming and going of men on the great wilderness of the earth, their founding of cities and states, their wars, their restless assembling and scattering again, their confused mingling, mutual imitations,

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mutual outwitting and downtreading, their wailing in distress, their howls of joy in victory—all this is a continuation of animality” (SE 5). 26. The best short expression of Rosen’s views on this subject is his essay “Nietzsche’s Revolution” (Rosen 1989). For Waite’s reading of Nietzsche’s esotericism see Waite 1996. For a similar reading of Nietzsche see also Bull 2011, especially 27–38. 27. See Janaway 2007, 44–50 and 90–106 and Janaway 2009; Gemes 2006; Owen 2007, 45–59; and Leiter 2015, 125–132 and 145–146. This is also a recurring theme of Daniel Conway’s book on the Genealogy (Conway 2007), though there is no sustained discussion of it there (see 6–7). For Conway’s views on this specific question see Conway 2009. Conway’s Nietzsche is less benign than that of Janaway and company, but is I think still closer to theirs than to the Nietzsche of Rosen or Waite. 28. Bull also quotes a somewhat more deflationary account of Nietzsche’s rhetorical legerdemain from Wyndham Lewis: “Nietzsche, got up to represent a Polish nobleman, with a berserker wildness in his eye, advertised the secrets of the world, and sold little vials containing blue ink, which he represented as drops of authentic blue blood, to the delighted populace. They went away, swallowed his prescriptions, and felt very noble almost at once” (ibid.). 29. Those who advance this reading of Nietzsche generally seem to think the affective and moral transformation at which he aims will happen purely in private life, with little effect on society as a whole. Leiter is explicit that the conversion of the “higher men” at which Nietzsche aims will be a purely private affair (2015, 234–238). In this way, he is surprisingly close to Waite’s position (see, e.g., Waite 1996, 71–75). For a further insightful reading of Nietzsche as anti-political, see Guay 2009. The issue is a little less clear with Janaway and Owen, but when they sketch Nietzsche’s positive program they focus mainly on a change in self-understanding which, however dramatic at the intellectual level, can probably be accomplished without significant change to contemporary society. See Janaway 2007, 245–267, and Owen 2007, 151–152. Gemes advances his reading in a shorter piece that does not consider the effects of these realizations (Gemes 2006). 30. On the breadth and variety of Nietzsche’s influence simply in Germany see Aschheim 1992. 31. We know this, of course, from the history of Nietzsche’s reception, but those reading this book also likely know it from their experience reading and teaching Nietzsche in the contemporary university setting. In this context, it is worth noting that the readers repulsed by Nietzsche’s evident elitism and praise for “the masters” are by no means always his worst readers, another price he must have been willing to pay on this account. 32. Composers provide illuminating analogies here. For interesting comments on Shostakovich and the question of exoteric and esoteric communication see Yack 2014. 33. While this treatment of Nietzsche’s rhetorical purposes and effects is at least potentially conceptually distinct from questions of clarity or coherence, those who advance it generally agree and even rely on the fact that Nietzsche’s writing, especially in the Genealogy, is meant to be confusing as part of this project (see, e.g., Janaway 2007, 92–93, and Gemes 2006). 34. For further reflections on this problem see Stern 2016. 35. Staten tracks this tension and movement throughout his book, but see especially 10–15 and 40–68.

Chapter One

Nature and the Promising Animal Sections 1–3

“To breed an animal that is permitted to promise—is that not the exact paradoxical task which nature has set itself in the case of the human being? Is that not the real problem of the human being?” I take this opening sentence of the Second Essay to be the defining thought or question of these sections, and in many ways of the Essay and the Genealogy as a whole. It provides a definition of humanity, as an animal permitted to promise, identifies the source or authority for that definition, nature, and distinguishes several crucial features of nature, that it has purposes, or rather tasks, and that it seeks to breed new animals. It further indicates that humanity is a problem, and that it is a problem precisely because of its nature or designation as a promising animal. The rest of the first section explains why promising is problematic: there is a deep need for human beings to forget, and promising means overcoming or countering that need with an active will to remember and to will the keeping of one’s promise. In order for this to happen, human beings, who were originally flighty and chaotic, had to be made regular, necessary, and predictable or calculable. The second section explains that this was the work of what Nietzsche calls the morality of mores, a terrible and brutal period of human history and especially prehistory that finds its justification in the appearance of the sovereign individual, who is free because he has overcome all morality and thus is master of his own will, which is to say that he obeys his conscience (though Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual, full of praise and admiration though it is, raises questions about how this individual can be understood in the terms of Nietzsche’s thought). The third section then asks how it was possible to create a memory for the human animal, and explains that this was accomplished chiefly through the use of excruciating 27

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punishments that burnt a memory into human beings, for “only what does not stop hurting stays in the memory.” In all this the crucial element is Nietzsche’s conception of nature. The term “nature,” though central to Western philosophy, can have many different senses or meanings, not all mutually exclusive with the others. It can refer to an original state, or be understood in terms of teleology, or in opposition to convention (physis against nomos), or simply as a physical reality or set of instincts or drives expressing itself in human beings or otherwise informing their thought and behavior. Perhaps the most compelling or deepest sense, common to ancient Greek philosophy, the natural law tradition, and the Enlightenment, is the notion of nature as the foundation or content of universal truth, truth on the basis of which one becomes enlightened and liberated—in short, truly human. Nietzsche is clearly using this sense of nature here, offering a universal definition of humanity and its relation to nature that transcends individual codes of morality, or individual promises human beings have been bred to keep. Yet ultimately this truth is not and cannot be emancipatory, according to Nietzsche; nature makes demands on human beings that they cannot evade if they are to be truly human. In this respect, he is perhaps closer to the natural law tradition than to any other major stream in the history of Western philosophy. Indeed, Nietzsche goes further, assigning an almost divine role or status to nature: for Nietzsche human beings are made not in the image of God but in the image of nature— we are at once creative and destructive beings who grow and create through acts of will—and we attain to such liberation as is possible for us through accepting and embracing the command to become what we are. The original is not the natural for Nietzsche, as we will see below, and he accepts or employs a highly novel and seemingly paradoxical version of the nature-convention distinction, according to which nature creates convention to advance its own ends but the conventional still tyrannizes and brutalizes nature—indeed, this is the means by which nature uses convention to create and realize new ends. As this formulation suggests, Nietzsche also conceives of nature in terms of teleology, but a teleology divorced from any notions of the good. The will is central to many of the systems of belief and morality which Nietzsche engages in the Genealogy, particularly Christianity and the philosophy of Schopenhauer. It is equally central to both nature and humanity as Nietzsche understands them—humanity is made in the image of nature in part because of will, which Nietzsche understands as the agent of creation in both humanity and nature. Nietzsche aims to reverse the value given to the will by both Buddhism and Schopenhauer, according to which the will is not only the cause of suffering but is fundamentally evil and delusional. Perhaps surprisingly, Nietzsche remains somewhat closer to Christianity, both in defining humanity in terms of will and in seeing this as a positive trait. 1 Yet for Nietzsche, in clear contrast to Christianity, the will is not rational and, above

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all, not directed at the good, for the good does not exist. In the absence of God or the good, will and creativity storm endlessly but can neither seek nor reproduce the good. 1.1. NATURE AND PROMISING Ein Thier heranzüchten, das versprechen darf (To breed an animal, that is permitted to promise)—thus begins the Second Essay of the Genealogy. 2 This fragment captures much of the paradoxical and knotty character of Nietzsche’s reflections on nature and its relation to humanity. The first words, “An animal,” suggest that Nietzsche is underlining humanity’s bestial, perhaps even purely biological character, and that the explanation of the moral phenomena indicated in the title of the essay will take place entirely or at least chiefly in these terms. 3 These words are immediately followed, however, by the verb heranzüchten, to breed or cultivate, which suggests intentional modification of nature by an intelligence with a set purpose or goal; 4 the animal mentioned at the outset of the essay is not one defined or simply animated by the spontaneous or original promptings and workings of its nature. This is made even more clear by the following words, das versprechen darf, “that is permitted to promise.” Both “permission” and “promising” are moral terms or concepts, and emphasize the human animal’s orientation towards the future and its general consciousness of and control over its basic impulses (something Nietzsche will indeed go on to highlight), making this animal seem even more inherently defined by morality and thought. Nietzsche’s aim is to understand human beings as animals but without the familiar forms of biologistic or materialist debunking and reductionism (cf. GS 109, 346). The first sentence of the Second Essay continues, ist das nicht gerade jene paradoxe Aufgabe selbst, welche sich die Natur in Hinsicht auf den Menschen gestellt hat? ist es nicht das eigentliche Problem vom Menschen? (is that not precisely that paradoxical task itself, which nature has set itself in regard to the human being? is it not the real problem of the human being?). Here nature is introduced, not just as a philosophic concept or category, but as an active, intentional force at work in the cosmos, or at least on earth. Endowed with a clear if surprising—and eminently moral—purpose that it strives to realize, nature does not merely direct an individual species to its proper end or perfection; it actively seeks to breed a particular type of animal in accord with its own inner direction; it is not only the ends or purposes inborn in individual species that are salient and important for Nietzsche, but those of nature as such. Nature, then, appears to exist and function not only as a set of material or formal causes but as something containing its own final cause and achieving it, or attempting to achieve it, through humanity. Several

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features of this opening sentence thus suggest a picture of nature as strongly teleological, if not providential. At the same time, and in clear contrast to Christian-Aristotelian teleology, while in this picture nature has moral purposes it is not itself static (it breeds new animals) and its final causes are not associated with the good. In other words, while nature operates in terms of goals or ends, it does not operate in terms of the good. Indeed, while for Aquinas morality or natural law is the means whereby humanity participates in the good of creation, here nature’s purpose (to breed an animal permitted to promise) is overtly moral but only good insofar as the moral is good—and Nietzsche goes on to argue that neither the specific ability to promise nor morality in general is at all “good” for human beings in any ordinary sense. Even so, however, nature sets itself a task, it creates a difficult goal that can only be achieved in the future and with great effort and expenditure; the task nature sets itself is, indeed, “paradoxical”—nature seems in some way to be divided or turned against itself. Thus while nature has ends or purposes, even intentions, it is not harmonious or unified. Likewise, the moral vocabulary Nietzsche uses here raises questions. What does it mean, for instance, to speak of an animal “that is permitted to promise”? Permitted by whom? By nature? That seems ultimately to be Nietzsche’s view, as we will see below, but the initial answer, especially as we read on in this section, seems to be permitted by himself, permitted by his conscience. Nature’s goal may therefore seem to be to breed an animal with a conscience. Nevertheless, Nietzsche speaks of “the problem of the human being,” and indeed the possession of or need for a conscience suggests a divided nature. Even with nature at the helm, humanity remains a problem—though perhaps it would be more faithful to Nietzsche’s thinking to say that humanity is a problem, as a concept and as a living species moving into the future, precisely because it is in some way actuated or guided by nature. To anticipate, the specific problem of the human being is that humans are originally forgetful, unreliable and irresponsible, but must become animals able or permitted to promise; the problem of the human being is the tension between its deep need to forget and indeed to be almost mindless and its apparently natural need to be a promising, selfgoverning, and moral animal. This opposition between nature and morality puts one in mind of Rousseau and his successors, but even at this schematic and superficial level there are two obvious differences between Rousseau and Nietzsche: Nietzsche seems to be arguing that the moral development of human beings is driven by nature rather than simply opposing or suffocating nature, and Nietzsche seems to consider the whole conscious life of the human being, the whole apparatus of memory and its overcoming or pushing back of forgetfulness, to be at least as important as the strictly moral aspect of human social existence. Moreover, while Nietzsche speaks of nature in this opening passage, he does not refer to the original condition of humanity as natural.

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What is the original condition, according to Nietzsche? He accents the profound forgetfulness of the original human animal, and insists that this is a condition of health and happiness. The necessity of error for life is a common theme in Nietzsche’s works, but here he maintains that life requires not only error but forgetting. The character of this forgetting is indicated by the word Kaufmann and Hollingdale translate “repression” (other translators have “suppression”), Hemmung (in Hemmungsvermögen). “Inhibition” may be the best translation, but its meanings range from inhibition to restraint, blockage, scruple, and repression or suppression. The basic idea is that there is a positive and active faculty working in human beings to block or inhibit memories from breaking into the conscious mind; this reading is supported by Nietzsche’s subsequent reference to forgetfulness as a closing of “the doors and windows of consciousness (Bewusstseins),” and as “a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic (seelischen) order, repose and etiquette.” Just as humanity’s “entire inner world” was once inconceivably thin and paltry (II 16), so the human animal’s conscious mind was originally a tiny, empty room. Human beings were originally “slaves of momentary affect and desire,” possessed of “partly obtuse, partly flighty mind[s] attuned only to the passing moment” (II 3); the active force of forgetfulness kept their minds blank and empty, free of anything other than the ephemeral passion gripping the animal at any given moment. It is easy to see the work of the will to power here, especially as Nietzsche describes it in II 12, in the way each desire or affect dominates the tiny mental space of the early human animal before being driven away or dispelled by a new one (the Hemmungsvermögen, as the condition of the momentary dominance of each emotion, is perhaps to be understood as an expression of the will to power at a more fundamental layer, one where a certain form or expression of the will to power has set the basic conditions for the functioning of a particular organism, only to eventually be itself supplanted or broken up by the breeding of an ability to remember and promise). The will itself is not actually mentioned in this section until Nietzsche begins to discuss the creation of a memory in human beings, after which some form of Wille or wollen is used eight times in one lengthy sentence detailing the meaning of memory. The will, perhaps the principal element in Nietzsche’s psychology and his philosophy as a whole, thus appears to belong not with happiness, spontaneity, immediacy, or living and acting unburdened by history and memory, but rather with memory, unhappiness and, perhaps unexpectedly, nature. Generally this passage harmonizes with the view, presented in Section Ten of the First Essay of the Genealogy, that a healthy or complete human being is one that can assimilate and incorporate experiences, which is to say interpret them, to serve its own ends; Nietzsche uses the word Natur to describe this ability in I 10. 5 Interestingly, however, Nietzsche refrains from using the word “nature” to describe this tendency

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here in II 1—again, the natural is not the spontaneous or original condition untouched by human civilization. Thus, for instance, Nietzsche refers to “this necessarily forgetful animal (dieses nothwendig vergessliche Thier),” suggesting that human beings’ animality consists more in their forgetfulness than in their ability to promise. Whatever was true of the human animal at its beginnings, nature is breeding it into a new kind of animal with fundamentally different abilities and characteristics. Also important here is what this passage indicates about the relation between memory and will. The parallel between experience and digestion that Nietzsche presents suggests in the first place that most of what we experience must be ignored or blocked out in order to concentrate on or experience anything, to have any sense of a “present” that is defined or focused rather than just a flood of impressions and half-thoughts. As he goes on, however, he compares the way we block out awareness of our digestion with the way we forget or repress memories, not just block out present experiences and stimuli. The implication, in other words, is that our conscious actions are produced above all by memory, but we cannot know or experience the process by which these countless memories produce our present actions or we will have no psychic peace and indeed be unable to decide and act at all. Note then that Nietzsche’s point here concerns not merely the need to forget mistakes, embarrassing moments, etc.; he is rather arguing that health requires unconscious activity and therefore active forgetting, a lack of awareness about the past events and experiences shaping our current actions; thus we act without memory just as we digest without awareness of the process. 6 Hence, Nietzsche goes on to say, remembering is usually unhealthy, dyspeptic, dysfunctional—the ideal, at least originally, was to have no memory, merely a mental space empty except for the one simple, dominant emotion or experience impelling one to action (though originally action would perhaps have been rare and so the human animal’s mind largely empty or still, as Rousseau also suggests). 7 Will is created and driven by memory—a claim which harmonizes with and illuminates Nietzsche’s rejection of the notion of free will as a causa sui or self-governing subject (BGE 21, GM I 7), as well as what is perhaps the cardinal argument of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that the will is defined and imprisoned by the past, and must be redeemed by willing the past that has created it (this being the only way that genuine freedom of the will is possible [Z 20]). The human animal was originally healthy because it had no memory, but therefore no will; nature breeds an unhappy animal with a memory and consequently a will, and our task, ultimately, is to become those animals more fully, to embrace memory and will and learn to redeem both. Action and will are the product of past experiences, but they cannot be effective or even exist unless those past experiences, and thus the grounds and process of creating action and will, are forgotten. In breeding a memory

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and will into human beings, nature thus drives them out of the state in which they are healthy and happy (cf. III 13): there “can be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness…this necessarily forgetful animal, in which forgetting represents a force (Kraft), a form of strong health, has bred into itself an opposing faculty (Gegenvermögen), a memory.” Here nature no longer figures as the breeder; it is instead the human animal who has bred or cultivated a memory in himself (hat sich…angezüchtet). 8 Here we seem to be moving towards a more familiar picture of convention suppressing or mutilating nature, or of an opposition between physis and nomos. This opposition, in many ways the defining theme of Western philosophy, has taken various forms. One basic possibility is a notion of nature as an original condition to which law does violence. Another is the notion of nature as a telos towards which humans must progress; good laws can help them move toward or realize that end (and may even be necessary to do so), while bad or corrupt laws interfere with or thwart that progress. Nietzsche may seem closer to the latter position but in fact adopts and combines both, saying both that nomoi destroyed an original physis but also that this was natural, that this is what led nature to its (always temporary) goal or telos. The process as a whole, however, has no aim or telos beyond expressing and augmenting the will to power (in this way Nietzsche is worlds apart from the second conception, that of classic natural law). Even as he adopts the basic concern of classical philosophy—the relation between nature and convention and the questions of whether and how nature provides guidance for human life—Nietzsche foregrounds his distance from ancient philosophy in the last sentence of the first section, where he emphasizes that one who promises stands surety for himself “in the future (literally, “as future,” für sich als Zukunft gut sagen).” As in the final two sections of the First Essay and in the discussion of nature’s task in the opening line of the Second Essay, the distance between this stress on the future and the classical conception of nature cannot be overstated. Nietzschean nature is concerned with the future; it acts or expresses itself in the horizon of the future or with an eye to the future attainment of a goal—or the completion of a task—it has apparently set itself. 9 Further evidence of the gulf between Nietzsche’s understanding of nature and that of the ancients comes in the first sentence of the second section, where Nietzsche underlines the word “responsibility (Verantwortlichkeit),” a concept that makes little sense in the context of ancient philosophy. If one naturally pursues the good, be it real or apparent, it is hard to see how one can be responsible for this decision. More generally, if human beings are embedded within a cosmic order, and are born with a particular, largely immutable nature, it is not clear what it would mean for them to attempt to take responsibility for what they are, which is the full sense of responsibility at which Nietzsche is driving here.

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After explaining the significance of breeding a will to remember, Nietzsche turns to explaining how this breeding was accomplished, or what had to happen historically for memory to exist. The necessary mental developments included practical operations like remembering an end and identifying the means to it, but also fundamental logical concepts like the distinction between the necessary and the accidental. The acquisition of these abilities required that human beings themselves become “calculable, regular, necessary”; the suggestion, especially when this passage is read in the light of the rest of the Second Essay, is that these conceptual grids or tools are not simply, and perhaps not at all, metaphysical realities or necessary logical conditions of thought existing independently of human beings that humans came to grasp in the course of their evolution and civilization. They are rather as much products of humanity’s work on itself, as much creations of humanity or reflections of a human soul or character made “calculable, regular, necessary,” as they are anything else. The story of how human beings became necessary and uniform occupies Nietzsche for at least the next two sections, and to some extent until section fourteen. 1.2. NATURE AND CREATIVITY The second section continues and tightens Nietzsche’s focus on the role of nature in human moral and social development, and thus on the character of nature itself. After the opening sentence introducing “the long story of the origin of responsibility,” Nietzsche again refers to “[t]hat task, to breed an animal that is permitted to promise (Jene Aufgabe, ein Thier heranzuzüchten, das versprechen darf),” and tells us that this task first required that human beings “be made to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular and therefore calculable.” It is by now plain that this involved doing enormous harm to the earliest human beings, those “necessarily forgetful animal[s],” as indeed Nietzsche goes on to explain in some detail. This making uniform and calculable was “[t]he monstrous work of what I have called ‘the morality of mores’ (Sittlichkeit der Sitte),” which “has here its sense, its great justification, however much hardness, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy also inhered in it.” 10 It is evident from the passages Nietzsche cites from Daybreak (9, 14, 16), if it was not from the sentence just quoted, that this morality of mores is roughly what the ancient philosophers called convention or law (nomos); indeed, the discussions in Daybreak suggest that Nietzsche’s view of custom is even darker or bleaker than that of the ancients. Even so, it is difficult to interpret this work of convention or of the morality of mores as simply the gruesome disfigurement or subjugation of nature. When Nietzsche elsewhere describes those who founded political

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societies (GM II 17, BGE 257), he seems to attribute their activity to nature, to the strength of their natures and thus to the strength of nature working within and through them. This harmonizes with the opening sentence of the Second Essay, and with important discussions elsewhere in his work. To state Nietzsche’s view as briefly as possible, if only partially and inadequately: to the extent that one can discern natural impulses or instincts in human beings, they call for or drive human beings to create, and above all to create forms of social and political life for themselves; in so doing, however, humans must necessarily destroy and mutilate a great deal of what is natural; in this way, nature induces or encourages a certain kind of activity in human beings, even though that activity is ruinous of much of what must be considered natural both in the sense of what is original and in the sense of possible ends or perfections toward which determinate forms of their nature could develop. The morality of mores therefore seems to be in some sense natural or caused by nature. Nietzsche’s treatment of this form of morality is further complicated by his claim that it eventually overcomes itself and produces the sovereign individual. The prehistoric work of the morality of mores was, as Nietzsche insists here, the necessary precondition or preparation for a human being who is permitted to promise, a formula Nietzsche uses again and again in this section, eventually identifying this ability to promise with individual sovereignty or autonomy. The morality of mores or the work of convention thus overcomes itself by producing it opposite, “the sovereign individual, like only to himself, again free of the morality of mores, that autonomous supramoral individual (das von der Sittlichkeit der Sitte wieder losgekommene, das autonome übersittliche Individuum).” 11 Note first that Nietzsche still speaks in distinctively modern terms of historical events and eras. Their meaning and ultimately their justification is derived from what they eventually produce and how that production contributes to historical development and progress. But what does this mean? When Nietzsche speaks of this as the “great justification” of the morality of mores, his point is not simply that convention or morality eventuates in an autonomous individual, something that sounds attractive to modern or post-modern ears. His point is rather that the morality of mores, the work of convention in the long prehistory of humanity, made human beings more powerful, it created greater units of power, both by making individuals more powerful and by making possible the creation of social units, which themselves became new locations, embodiments, concentrations, and stimuli of will and thus of power (cf. II 11). These greater units of power both required and then furthered the creation or breeding of a stronger will in human beings, something Nietzsche here ties very tightly to being permitted to promise, and which he emphasizes almost as much. The human being who is permitted to promise, who is able to see and plan into the distant future, and who has the strong and unbending will

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necessary to act successfully and consistently on those plans, achieves life’s purpose of creating greater units of power (the social complexes of power created by the morality of mores do the same). The conscious mental life forced upon human beings by the morality of mores necessitates but also thereby makes possible conscious, spiritual interpretations of life that provide a new focus for the human will and motivate it to become more powerful and more expansive. The will, and thus power and thus life, is therefore enhanced by the process and work of the morality of mores. This morality, moreover, eventually overcomes itself; like life in its speech to Zarathustra (Z II 12, “On Self-Overcoming”), or like justice or Christian dogma and morality in the Genealogy (II 10, III 27), the morality of mores overcomes itself, it ends by producing its opposite, it brings about its own destruction through an act of self-overcoming. To see it simply as an oppressive subjugation or crippling of nature therefore seems inadequate; the process of human socialization appears, at the very least, to be somehow organic, actuated by and serving the same vital impulses of life as any other human creation, and itself only a temporary stage in a larger organic process or evolution. But in what sense is this process or its conclusion natural? Does it make sense to describe any of this as the work of nature, even if the process is organic or living? The sovereign individual, after all, “with this mastery over himself, also necessarily has in hand mastery over circumstances, over nature (über die Natur) and all more short-willed (willenskürzeren) and unreliable creatures.” The animal into which a memory has been bred, the fruit of the tree of human evolution, attains mastery over nature. So far is he from realizing the perfection of his nature, from living according to nature, that he stands over against it and subdues it. Thus at the end of the second section Nietzsche presents the “proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility” as having “in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct.” The human animal can acquire new instincts over time. Its crucial or dominating instinct, the instinct that sets the most complete human beings apart from the rest, has been acquired, and in particular has been acquired through the agency of social convention. In what sense can any of this be described as natural, or indeed as anything other than profoundly anti-natural? The expectation that nature and convention are opposed and even in violent conflict with one another ultimately comes from classical philosophy. Nietzsche presents a more complex or contradictory picture that yet owes a great deal to that classical opposition and seems still to draw on it. The difference and its depth is first indicated by Nietzsche’s use of the word “breeding”; Nietzsche is not describing either a simple education or formation that can be contrasted with nature or even a suppression of nature, but rather an alteration and development of nature. Thus the breeding described here, the moral and intellectual education which turns human beings into

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animals permitted to promise, creates new instincts for the human animal, it does not simply order the ones already existing. 12 Even so, however, it is a grave mistake to interpret the work of convention or the morality of mores as simply a shaping or guiding of human nature; it is rather a transformation of the human being from a necessarily forgetful animal (nothwendig vergessliche Thier) to an animal permitted to promise; not only is the character of the human animal revolutionized, necessity itself is apparently overcome or crushed. The work Nietzsche is describing here, and apparently attributing to nature, is a violent reversal or transfiguration of human nature, the creation of an animal soul turned against itself (II 16). Thus, in the words of Leo Strauss, “Physis calls for nomoi while preserving the distinction, nay, opposition of physis and nomoi” (Strauss 1983, 183). Strauss is commenting on section 188 of Beyond Good and Evil, a passage well worth considering here. 13 There Nietzsche speaks of the “moral imperative of nature (der moralische Imperativ der Natur),” 14 which it addresses to “people, races, ages, classes, but above all to the whole animal ‘human being,’ to the human being.” This moral imperative seems to Nietzsche to be, “You shall obey, someone, and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself.” Nietzsche describes what this moral imperative has meant, especially for Europe, in language strongly reminiscent (or anticipatory) of the language used here in Genealogy II 2. The essential thing (Das Wesentliche), “in heaven and on earth,” as it seems, is, to say it again, that for a long time and in one direction one obeys: from this there emerges and has emerged over time always something for the sake of which it is worth living on earth: for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason (Vernunft), spirituality (Geistigkeit) 15—something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine. The long unfreedom of the spirit, the mistrustful constraint in the communicability of thoughts [cf. BGE 268], the discipline (die Zucht) thinkers imposed on themselves to think within the guiding principles laid down by a church or a court, or under Aristotelian presuppositions, the long spiritual will to interpret all events under a Christian schema and to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident—all this, however forced, capricious, hard, gruesome, and anti-rational (Widervernünftige), has turned out to be the means through which the European spirit has been bred (angezüchtet) to strength, ruthless curiosity, and subtle mobility, though granted that in the process an irreplaceable amount of strength and spirit also had to be crushed, choked, and ruined (for here, as everywhere, “nature” shows herself, as she is, in all her prodigal (verschwenderischen) and indifferent magnificence, which is outrageous, but noble). That for thousands of years European thinkers thought only in order to prove something . . . that the conclusions that should have come out of their most rigorous reflection were always settled from the start . . . this tyranny, this caprice, this rigorous and grandiose stupidity has educated the spirit. Slavery is, as it seems, in the cruder and in the more subtle sense the indispensable

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Both this passage and Genealogy II 1–3 emphasize breeding, but a very strange and perhaps contradictory notion of breeding. The breeding is in some sense carried out by nature, or is at least in some way driven or prompted by nature. At the same time, however, breeding here means obliterating, crushing, or mutilating a great deal of what appears to be natural, and what in any case appears to be precisely that quality or capacity that is bred into the human animal (spirit, strength, reason, will, etc.). 17 The breeding is accomplished, in other words, not through bringing human nature to its proper end or by arranging or harmonizing the human animal’s instincts, but through arbitrary, tyrannical, and stupid brutality. Even so, however, the breeding is not a simple attack on or repression of nature, but is rather an attempt to develop it in a particular direction, however wasteful that attempt may be. Nature’s method of breeding, indeed nature itself, is above all verschwenderisch, wasteful, squandering, extravagant, or prodigal, as Kaufmann has it (cf. the beginning of BGE 9). And, of course, in both cases the breeding that nature directs eventually produces its opposite, it eventually destroys itself through an act of self-overcoming. Thus Nietzsche continues to speak of nature, and apparently to use it as a normative principle or foundation, even as his conception of nature is wasteful and destructive beyond measure, sacrificing as it does so much human health, happiness, strength, and capability to its ends. Moreover, in Nietzsche’s view nature seems necessarily to destroy its own ends eventually; its ends or goals selfdestruct, because by their very nature they are destroyed once they are achieved (cf. BGE 126 and 73). In both Beyond Good and Evil 188 and the opening sections of the Second Essay nature also seems to have moral purposes; it directs or addresses a moral imperative to humanity, and it seeks to breed a particular type of animal, one that is permitted to promise. Of course, this must be understood as a use of heavily anthropomorphic language, or simply as a description of how nature or nature’s effects appear to human beings. Human beings can barely begin to grasp how immoral nature is—“wasteful (verschwenderisch) without measure, indifferent without measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power” (BGE 9)—but since human beings are moral creatures, or rather valuing creatures, nature works or expresses itself through their moral and valuing capacities in order to produce greater units and forms of power. Nature, in short, uses morality to create through human beings while itself being completely amoral. Nature has nothing that human beings can recognize as moral purposes or concerns, but precisely for that reason, it is magnificently creative, indeed

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perhaps the exemplar of creativity. It creates human civilizations and cultures, and it causes human beings to create—but humans can only create, they can only be truly artistic or creative, as a result of long compulsion, not from the spontaneous promptings or effusions of nature. Or, even more precisely and paradoxically, true spontaneity, including especially artistic inspiration, is only possible as the result of long unfreedom and compulsion, as Nietzsche stresses in Beyond Good and Evil 188. The point is not simply that nature and various cultural productions or creations overcome themselves, but that to achieve or breed one thing (e.g., freedom, sovereignty, spirituality, intellectual conscience or integrity, etc.), its opposite must be imposed ruthlessly and brutally for generations and even centuries, and thus a great many rudimentary forms or expressions of what will ultimately be achieved through successful breeding must be crushed and destroyed along the way. Very simply, to breed freedom, tyranny and constraint must be imposed for ages. Thus Nietzsche is not simply saying that, e.g., strength or spirit is a late development; on the contrary, his point is that to breed or create an advanced or subtle or complicated manifestation of any of the things Nietzsche mentions in these passages, nature had first to destroy an untold quantity of precisely that thing. This explains Nietzsche’s oft-remarked dictum that to create is also to destroy. He is not simply saying that to create something new one has always to replace and thus to destroy something old. He is rather saying something far more radical and disturbing, that when nature creates it also destroys—indeed, it perhaps destroys incalculably more than it creates, and it destroys precisely what it creates. The creation of things like spirit and strength, and especially of the forms they take in any given culture, requires an immeasurable amount of destruction and mutilation. It requires, as Nietzsche says, that an irreplaceable amount of spirit and strength be crushed, choked, and ruined, not only in the form of various individuals who are crushed in the process of breeding, but of a great deal of strength and spirit that resisted the form being imposed upon it by this process. The breeding of the European spirit as Nietzsche describes it in Beyond Good and Evil 188 thus entailed not only the destruction of a great many individuals but of countless other possibilities and directions of evolution or breeding. Thus, again, Nietzsche is not arguing for anything like the traditional view of a teleological nature; what is natural is a dynamic and ever-changing activity or process, not any kind of enduring form or structure. Even the natural possibilities or capacities that have been developed in the course of human evolution do not represent the essential core or sum of natural potentials, but rather only a very few possibilities that have been bred or developed for apparently purely arbitrary reasons. The crucial fact about nature for Nietzsche is its wastefulness and indifference, even or especially with and in itself. 18

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I therefore disagree with the interpretation of Nietzsche’s view of nature offered by Bernard Yack, or rather think it is radically incomplete: “Every day, nature tears down what it built the day before. It maims without purpose and destroys its greatest achievements. It is capable of producing a Raphael without hands or killing off Mozart at thirty-five” (Yack 1992, 363). In the first place, this statement emphasizes the fragility and transience of nature’s creations, and thus of human life and values. While this is obviously part of Nietzsche’s conception of nature and of human life, it is hardly original and is not the heart of his argument. Nor was Mozart or any other significant product of nature or culture “built the day before.” Major cultural figures like Mozart are rather the product of a long process of breeding and formation, and are made possible only by the annihilation of an immeasurable quantity of strength and spirit and an immeasurable number and range of qualitatively different potential forms or expressions for that spirit and strength. Thus nature’s wastefulness and indifference to individuals is manifested not in its refusal to prolong or safeguard the life of Mozart but precisely in his appearing at all, in the long and gruesome course of history—a progression even more gruesome spiritually and psychologically than physically—that made him possible and created him. This also means, however, that nature does not “maim without purpose”; its purpose is rather inseparable from its maiming activity. Nature thus creates living forms but in a way that is so wasteful and destructive that it looks almost like an accidental by-product of a basic chaotic raging and surging of purposeless activity. If, however, there were only chaos in the purest sense, there would be no forms and certainly no humanity; there would be only the extremely chaotic and violent world that cosmologists posit as immediately following the Big Bang. Even if these forms and their creation, growth, and transformation are only a tiny portion of the activity of nature, and are in a sense even inessential, they are what are of vital interest and importance to human beings. Thus, while it is probably true that for Nietzsche there is fundamentally only chaos or “becoming,” I think it is a mistake to infer from this that human creation, expressing as it does the imperative of nature, is thereby rendered meaningless or pointless. 19 It may seem insignificant or pointless when seen in the light of certain value judgments, but there is nothing necessary or indeed desirable about these judgments. 20 To return to Strauss’s suggestion that “[p]hysis calls for nomoi while preserving the distinction, nay, opposition of physis and nomoi,” there seems on the one hand to be no escape from convention to nature for Nietzsche, for nature’s imperative is contained or articulated in the conventional imperative to obey; one cannot live according to nature without living according to imperatives or tasks that manifest themselves in particular conventional, cultural situations and terms. Again, there is no eternal form of nature from

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which human beings can take their guidance. Yet Nietzsche’s position cannot be identified with simple conventionalism, in the first place because nature eventually drives the human animal to overcome and thus destroy whatever conventional imperative it had temporarily assumed as its form. There is still a nature more powerful than and, at least in due time, destructive of convention. Thus while convention, or rather the breeding accomplished through obedience to stupid and tyrannical conventional imperatives, destroys a great deal of what is natural, nature itself eventually destroys any conventional form in which it appears or is constrained, or in which it expresses itself by being constrained. Nature and convention remain opposed and indeed destructive of one another, but ultimately nature seems not merely to triumph but indeed to have only ever been using convention as a means to its own ends. 21 1.3. THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL Finally, a word on the sovereign individual, perhaps the most evocative but also the most questionable figure in these sections. 22 Nietzsche writes that the morality of mores culminates and overcomes itself in the sovereign individual, who is autonomous and supramoral. Nietzsche’s description of the sovereign individual represents an early rhetorical high point of the Second Essay, but it is not clear how such an individual can exist or be understood coherently in the terms of Nietzsche’s thought. The sovereign individual has mastery over himself, nature, circumstance, and so forth, but Nietzsche’s doctrine and ideal of amor fati seems to make true mastery over oneself impossible. We become what we are, and love the fate that has made us so, by acknowledging and embracing the fact that we are largely the product of accidents that cannot be changed or reversed—this is the whole point of Nietzsche’s mockery of the notion of the will as a causa sui (BGE 21). 23 What then is Nietzsche doing here? One possibility, of course, is that he is simply forgetting or contradicting himself, perhaps carried away by the ideal of mastery embodied in the sovereign individual. Another is that he is pointing to the need for illusion, and in particular to the need to recover the original illusion discussed above, the oblivion to the past, particularly the past that has made one what one is and so has formed and largely determined one’s will. Perhaps this passage is meant to point to the need to believe in one’s own will, sovereignty, and power over circumstances. In any case, it is bursting with emblematic Nietzsche emotive rhetoric, including visions of reactive violence at the end (beating and kicking those who don’t keep their promises): the free man possesses his measure of value in himself, he honors or despises based on others’ similarity or dissimilarity to him (but, in the larger context of this discussion, he is also warranted in so doing because

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nature itself has achieved its purposes in him; thus his sense of superiority and use of himself as a measure of others are fundamentally different than that of the vacuously self-satisfied). This account, in short, is one of the purer instances of rhetorical intensity (and perhaps theoretical instability) that appear throughout the Genealogy (and of course the rest of Nietzsche’s work). In this context it must be noted that the language, tropes, and tenor of the passage points toward a fairly reactive Nietzsche: he extolls a sense of mastery, superiority, and punitive or contemptuous violence. 24 But, returning to the issue of whether the sovereign individual makes sense in philosophical terms, what, if anything, can be retained from this passage? Less than is commonly thought, Chista Davis Acampora argues. She contends that Nietzsche cannot be endorsing the sovereign individual’s attempt to promise, and thus to will something over time and into the future, because doing so would contradict his critique of a metaphysical subject, or a neutral substratum which remains the same behind individual acts and acts of will. 25 “[H]ow could it be that the Nietzsche who so emphasizes becoming, and who is suspicious of the concept of the subject (as the ‘doer behind the deed’), could think that [it] is desirable—let alone possible—that a person could ensure his or her word in the future? How could one promise to do something, to stand security for something, that cannot be predicted and for which one is, in a sense, no longer the one who could be responsible for it?” (Acampora 2006c, 153). 26 This, however, seems to me to be overstating the matter. A philosophical position that denies the ability of human beings to will over time is, if not nonsensical, certainly profoundly at odds with the picture of humanity Nietzsche has presented throughout these first three sections. Moreover, the emphasis on will and the future is at least as important a concern in the rest of Nietzsche’s philosophy as is the notion of the self as perpetual striving or becoming. Regarding Nietzsche’s view of the subject, Acampora herself notes that “Nietzsche conceives of human beings, like all other organisms, as pluralities, as complexes of forces, not as discrete individual entities. This is not to say that there are no individuals; the particularity of the relations among (or arrangement of) the forces we are accounts for our individuality” (Acampora 2006c, 153). But these arrangements or relations can be relatively stable—certain parts or complexes can maintain their dominance over the others for long durations, even for the entirety of an individual’s life—and thus promising and willing into the future can easily be reconciled with Nietzsche’s critique of the subject and emphasis on becoming (even if he does not give a comprehensive account of how all this fits together here). The will, then, can be saved in this account, but Acampora’s (and Hatab’s) larger skepticism about sovereignty as an ideal for Nietzsche are welltaken. If sovereignty or autonomy is not Nietzsche’s ideal, at least in the strong sense in which he seems to present them here, in what way does the

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will figure in his ideal? Here, the contrast with the nobles of the First Essay is instructive—in fact, the contrast seems to turn on the fact that the nobles represent sovereignty (illusory or otherwise) without will, while the sovereign individual is animated and defined by his exercise of will. Nietzsche describes the nobles in laudatory terms that rival those he applies the sovereign individual, but the two types he praises are sharply divergent. In the first place, the sovereign individual seems to experience a greater world of conscious mental activity. Granted, in II 2 Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual’s consciousness of his power and freedom as “quivering in every muscle (in allen Muskeln zuckendes Bewusstsein),” and this may seem to suggest that the sovereign individual’s “consciousness” is more a matter of physical feeling and instinct than of conscious, rational thoughts. It seems to me, however, that this is simply an instance of Nietzsche’s rejection of the body-soul dichotomy; the more fully something is consciously experienced, the more fully it will also be physically experienced. Indeed, in this sense the sovereign individual seems to realize Nietzsche’s ideal of obliterating the distinction between body and mind or soul. Furthermore, the words “consciousness” (Bewusstsein) and “knowledge” (Wissen) begin to appear more frequently in this passage, particularly in connection with pride; although it is true that knowledge remains largely instinctual, as with the “proud knowledge” described at the end of the second section, it is significant that instinct is now presented as conscious or consciously known or experienced, rather than simply as the subconscious determinant of conscious states. This greater emphasis on consciousness and knowledge highlights another, perhaps more fundamental difference between the sovereign individual and the nobles sketched in the First Essay, the basis and character of their respective acts of self-affirmation. The pride and self-affirmation of the sovereign individual flows from his ability to check or dominate himself, and thus ultimately to master contingencies and even “fate,” from his ability to promise and so to see, plan, and will into the future. The nobles of the First Essay, on the other hand, experience none of this; their valuing of themselves springs from a simple spontaneous feeling of self-affirmation born of the pathos of distance (I 2, 10). Consciousness, will, promising, and the future are all essential parts of what makes individual sovereignty possible, but they are hardly mentioned at all in Nietzsche’s account of the nobles in the First Essay (if anything, they had seemed to belong to the slaves or to ressentiment). The most notable exception is Nietzsche’s discussion of will in I 13, a discussion which must be significantly revised or expanded to cohere with Nietzsche’s analysis of sovereignty and promising here in II 1–3. 27 As we have also seen, the development of the will and the ability or permission to promise were achieved only through terrible violence and in fundamental opposition to the basic or original tendency of the “necessarily forgetful

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animal.” All of this seems entirely foreign to the nobles as Nietzsche portrayed them in the First Essay. Whatever this suggests about the narrative or argumentative structure of the Genealogy as a whole, it seems clearly to mean that the nobles are inferior to the sovereign individual. After all, the sovereign individual experiences in himself “a feeling of the perfection [or ‘completion’] of humanity as a whole (ein Vollendungs-Gefühl des Menschen überhaupt).” This, according to Nietzsche, is the work of the morality of mores, and while we have seen the problems with taking his depiction of the sovereign individual at face value, it is noteworthy that Nietzsche still presents the historical process and epoch of the morality of mores as finding an ultimate conclusion and justification in a new human product, albeit one that seems not a synthesis but a complete negation of the process. In this emphasis on finding purpose and justification in history Nietzsche remains very modern. And this justification is the development of humanity’s moral capacity: the sovereign individual, Nietzsche writes, acts according to his own conscience. 28 Yet as one would expect from Nietzsche, the conscience is unique and individual, not common or universally “human.” The process by which the conscience has been transmuted over time is Nietzsche’s focus in the following sections, in which he delineates the course nature followed in breeding an animal permitted to promise. 1.4. NOTES 1. This leads to one of the great contradictions (real or apparent, inadvertent or intentional) in Nietzsche’s thought, between his insistence that the will is the path or instrument of humanity’s salvation (e.g., Z II 20, “On Redemption”), and his insistence that the will is totally unfree and perhaps even a mere superstitious illusion (e.g., BGE 19). I will not attempt to resolve—or confirm—this contradiction here, but its outlines are perceptible in his description of the sovereign individual. 2. Ein Thier could also mean “one animal,” and thus suggest both that nature aims to produce a single animal of a particular kind and that it is extremely wasteful or inefficient in doing so (cf. the discussion of BGE 188 below). 3. Leiter rightly notes the naturalistic language in this passage (Leiter 2015, 180–181), but as we will see, Nietzsche’s conception of nature is much different than that presupposed by naturalism as it is understood by Leiter or contemporary philosophy. 4. A more literal translation of heranzüchten may be “to breed close” or “to breed up” (heranwachsen is “grow up”). 5. Nietzsche also uses the word Natur for a similar ability in the first section of “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in a discussion that in many respects parallels that here in GM II 1. 6. For a rather different reading on this point, see Hatab 2008, 69–74. For a different take on this passage as a whole and its implications see Lemm 2009, 30–47. 7. Here as elsewhere in his narrative Nietzsche seems to contradict himself. He suggests that forgetting is necessary for foresight and prediction, but these things are themselves only possible, according to Nietzsche, in animals with a memory (the ability to think of the future at all, much less to plan for it, being only a consequence of the memory painfully burned into early humanity by punishment). The claims about forgetting being necessary for foresight,

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however, seem to be part of his discussion of the healthy virtue of forgetting in humanity’s original state. While it may be true that thinking about the future is impossible if we are too overcome by or obsessed with the past, making this the (almost teleological) purpose of forgetting, as Nietzsche seems to do here, is impossible. In other words, Nietzsche sets up what seems to be a near-dichotomous opposition between memory and forgetting (both ontologically and chronologically), and then says forgetting is necessary for the sake of things that are only possible on the basis of memory. At the very least, this opposition seems to require a developmental account at which Nietzsche only hints here. 8. Robert Guay captures the paradoxical or questionable character of Nietzsche’s argument when he says that “a tremendous amount of work had to be done to make ourselves reflective and self-governing, and the impetus to do that work did not come naturally, and did not come exogenously” (Guay 2006, 362). Nietzsche’s depiction of nature here, however, suggests that for him this development was natural. The impetus, in other words, did not come from the spontaneous promptings of nature but from the work of civilization or the morality of mores, but nature somehow had a hand in creating these apparently anti-natural constructions and developments, as we will see shortly. 9. Obviously I am applying extremely anthropomorphic language to nature in this sentence, but I believe that in doing so I am only following the lead of Nietzsche himself, who describes nature as setting itself a task (see also I.3 above). Section 109 of The Gay Science is a crucial passage here. There Nietzsche shows that he was keenly aware of the tendency to speak of nature anthropomorphically, but that he was also above all eager “to begin to be permitted to ‘naturalize’ humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature,” not to avoid anthropomorphic language at all costs (GS 109). 10. Twice in this section Nietzsche describes this work as “monstrous,” ungeheuer. 11. For brief but useful comparisons of Nietzsche and Kant on morality and autonomy, see Ansell-Pearson 1994, 135–136, and n. 2:29 (pp. 121–122) of the Clark and Swensen translation of the Genealogy. 12. Consider this statement by Lawrence Hatab: “From his naturalistic standpoint, Nietzsche will insist that no familiar ‘spiritual’ phenomenon is or was already inscribed in reality (only needing to be discovered by us). Any such phenomenon had to emerge out of brute nature, and indeed by way of a struggle with that nature. Because of this agonistic structure, brute nature will always be the starting point and will remain implicated somehow in what emerges out of it” (Hatab 2008, 88). This is all the more true because “brute nature” is itself intrinsically creative and form-giving. 13. For further discussion of this section of Beyond Good and Evil see Lampert 2001, 151–153 and Acampora and Ansell-Pearson 2011, 114–115. 14. As Strauss notes (183), this is the only time in this section that Nietzsche uses the term nature without enclosing it in quotation marks (and even here he speaks cautiously or hesitantly, of what “seems [scheint]” to be the moral imperative of nature). This section appears in the chapter titled Zur Naturgeschichte der Moral; as in the title of the Genealogy, Zur Genealogie der Moral, the “Zur” could mean either “On the” or “Towards.” It could, in other words, suggest either an authoritative treatment of its subject or preliminary or provisional contributions to a project whose completion seems distant and difficult. 15. Compare the account of the origins of reason (Vernunft) at the end of II 3 and Nietzsche’s account of the initial relation between the spirit and political subjugation in I 7. 16. Nietzsche sometimes criticizes morality for being anti-natural or anti-nature (e.g., TI, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” EH, “Destiny,” 4, 7; cf. BGE 197). To the extent that morality seeks to diminish or extirpate the basic animal vitality and ferocity found in individuals like Cesare Borgia—and hence simply to tame, to produce orderly, predictable, and identical domesticated and undangerous human beings—it is anti-natural or based on a misunderstanding or falsification of nature. This is not because Cesare Borgia is the ideal or telos of either nature or Nietzsche, but because he embodies certain healthy natural forces and impulses that should be bred into something greater and more complicated, rather than simply tamed and reduced to an anodyne and harmless mediocrity. Thus Nietzsche can criticize morality for opposing or trying to eradicate the basic character of nature, but still find the tyranny against nature inherent in morality unobjectionable, as he does at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil 188, insofar as

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it expresses the moral imperative of nature by seeking to breed a particular type, rather than simply trying to eliminate violence or domination. There is thus a difference between morality as Widernatur and morality as “a bit of tyranny against ‘nature’ (gegen die ‘Natur’).” 17. Nietzsche’s comments in The Antichrist(ian) concerning the Laws of Manu may seem to contradict this statement. There Nietzsche is emphatic that the “order of castes, the supreme, the dominating law, is only the sanction of a natural order, natural legality (Natur-Ordnung, Natur-Gesetzlichkeit) of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness (Willkür), no ‘modern idea,’ has power (Gewalt). . . . Nature, not Manu, separates from one another the predominantly spiritual, the predominantly strong in muscle and temperament, and the third group, distinguished in neither the one nor the other, the mediocre. . . . In all this, to say it again, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing ‘artificial’ (Nichts ‘gemacht’); whatever is different, is artificial— nature is then confounded (die Natur ist dann zu Schanden gemacht)” (A 57). Here, however, I think that Nietzsche is simply saying that by nature human beings are different and unequal, not that there is a static natural order that the law or political life should aim to reflect or correspond to. Or rather, while there may be a natural difference between naturally spiritual types and the other types, the actual content or form of that spirituality is radically contingent and mutable, and thus human beings must be bred to each and every particular form of spirituality; there is no specific, distinct spiritual form or ethos existing naturally, independent of human action and an authoritative guide or goal for such action. 18. See, again, Lawrence Hatab’s discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalism in Hatab 2008, 9–10. 19. On the notion of primordial chaos in Nietzsche, see also Cox 1999, 204–208. 20. Stanley Rosen seems to think that Nietzsche does indeed accept the necessity of these value judgments, and thus that he never moves beyond a simply negative phase of nihilism, or the view that human life is essentially meaningless (as opposed to lacking only the sort of meaning traditional religion and metaphysics claimed it did or ought to have). See especially Rosen 1989, 196 ff.; Rosen 1993, 184–185; and Rosen 1995, xii, 58 ff. and passim. On Nietzsche and nihilism, see also Reginster 2006, especially 21–53, Metzger 2009, and Gillespie 1995, 174–254. 21. For further reflections on nature and breeding in these sections, see especially Conway 2007, 53–54. 22. The sovereign individual has attracted a great deal of comment, including Reginster 2018, which sees the sovereign individual as the key to the Second Essay as a whole, and several of the essays collected in Gemes and May 2009. Leiter 2011 provides a useful counterweight to many of the common assumptions in these discussions. 23. This point is made by Acampora 2006c, 150–152. For the argument that the sovereign individual’s mastery of fate is at odds with amor fati, Davis Acampora draws on Hatab 1995, 37–38. See also Hatab 2008, 75–82, especially his comparison of this passage with Beyond Good and Evil 32 (78). 24. See Hatab 2008, 81–82, for an argument that the “disdain” in this passage is a reflection of Nietzsche’s view that all life expresses an evaluative attitude, not necessarily a reflection of his own evaluative stance. 25. Note that this is not necessarily the same thing as the will as causa sui, a will or subject that somehow stands above or outside of the causal order of nature. Whether Nietzsche believes in “‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense” (BGE 21) and whether he believes in a subject or will stable enough to make promising possible are two different questions. On free will and the sovereign individual see also Gemes 2009. 26. Alan Schrift uses themes from Gilles Deleuze’s work to make a related but less thoroughgoing argument for regarding Nietzsche’s Übermensch as “a process of self-overcoming and increasing of will to power rather than an ideal form of subjectivity” (Schrift 1995, 73; see more generally 70–74). 27. Whatever Nietzsche means in I 13 by speaking of quanta of drive, will, and effect, and by ruling out a neutral substratum restraining those quanta, he apparently does not mean that these quanta can only form and discharge themselves immediately or spontaneously as acts of will. In II 1 Nietzsche speaks of “a real memory of the will (ein eigentliches Gedächtniss des Willens)” which means that “between the original ‘I will,’ ‘I shall do’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act (seinen Akt), a world of new strange things, circumstances, even acts of will

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(Willensakten) may be interposed without breaking this long chain of the will.” It may not be a metaphysical subject, but there is some order or economy in human beings which makes promising and delayed acts or discharges of the will possible (this indeed is also suggested by Nietzsche’s discussion in I 11 of the way even the strong are “held in check” or must repress their instincts in society). 28. Conway makes an interesting observation concerning Nietzsche’s apparent expectation that his reference to conscience here will surprise his readers (because they are familiar only with the bad conscience; Conway 2007, 58–59), and later makes a nice connection between this same sense of conscience and Nietzsche’s own statements about himself at the end of the Essay (98).

Chapter Two

Sketches of Prehistoric Life Sections 4–11

Section four finally brings us to the topics announced in the title of the essay, the consciousness of guilt (das Bewusstsein der Schuld) or the bad conscience, that other “gloomy thing” (II 4; the first apparently being reflection). Nietzsche begins his discussion of the bad conscience by assailing previous genealogists of morals for having “no knowledge, no will to knowledge (kein Wissen, kein Wille zum Wissen) of the past; still less an historical instinct, a ‘second sight’ which is necessary precisely here.” 1 Nietzsche’s superior knowledge and understanding of the past, so crucial to this essay and to the Genealogy as a whole, was already indicated in the first sentence of II 3, on the historical mutability of the conscience. The conscience, according to Nietzsche, “has a long history and a variety of forms (Form-Verwandlung) behind it”; far from being “the voice of God in man” (EH III, GM), or the medium through which human beings intuit eternal or transhistorical moral truths, the conscience, like everything else human, is purely contingent and historically variable. Nietzsche’s discussion of the development of the conscience, and more generally of political society and the sense of justice, is highly digressive and often seems discombobulated and self-contradictory. Many writers on the Genealogy pass over it quickly or even ignore it altogether, at least as a serious account of the origin of political society and moral psychology. In this chapter I will try to bring together the different threads and suggestions to construct a coherent account of the rise of political society, and an overall analysis of justice and the beginnings of morality, as it emerges from these sections. Whenever possible I try to tie the interpretation below to individual sections, both to make it more effective as a commentary and for the sake of 49

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consistency with the rest of the book, but overall I organize the interpretation around the conceptual questions Nietzsche is trying to answer in these sections. While this stretch of the Second Essay can be confusing and frustrating, it is Nietzsche’s most sustained discussion of the origin and character of primitive political community. Hence I try to understand first Nietzsche’s account of political and legal development, then how the same sections construct a prehistory of moral development. I then discuss two crucial passages in this part of the Second Essay, the first Nietzsche’s discussion of the character and will of life in the eleventh section, the second his comments on suffering and its justification in the seventh section. 2.1. THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY, LAW, AND PUNISHMENT In Nietzsche’s account, before the earliest humans could arrive at even the crudest form of the conscience, they had to learn to remember a few very elementary laws. “One burns something in, so that it stays in the memory: only what does not stop hurting stays in the memory;” only pain, not pleasure, stays in the memory (II 3). Nietzsche’s suggestion is that originally, at the very beginning of the use of punishment, terrifying and excruciating punishments were attached to a command simply to make the command memorable, not to make its transgression more fearful; humans had first to learn to remember commands before they could think of whether to obey or transgress them. Indeed, based on what Nietzsche has said earlier about the need forcibly to make human beings capable of thinking in terms of the future, the fear of punishment as a consequence would seem to have been a slightly later development, for in order to fear and try to avoid future pain, one has first to be able to conceive of the future and to plan for it, and indeed to understand cause and effect, and that is precisely what these earliest humans could not do. Initially the transgression of the command was inevitable; the aim of punishment was simply to remind the most primitive subjects of a few basic laws, then to make them afraid of breaking those laws, though this presumably first happened by means of simple association, a feeling of overwhelming terror when one remembered a certain command, not causal thinking, a reckoning that “if I break this law, I will suffer this punishment, therefore I will not break it.” All of this suggests what Nietzsche later makes explicit (II 17), that the earliest stages of human political development were dominated and suffused by terror. 2 Even after civil society had established itself and was somewhat secure, and well after human beings had learned not to kill each other on sight, the forms of justice and conscience were radically different from what they have been for almost all of recorded human history; whatever differences one may

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imagine or observe between different epochs of human history, Nietzsche here argues that the fundamental assumptions common to them all, particularly those concerning guilt, intention, and the justification of punishment, are very late developments or refinements. 3 Thus, according to Nietzsche, “that major moral concept ‘guilt’ (Schuld) has taken its origin from the very material concept ‘debt’ (Schuld).” Furthermore, and more importantly, “punishment as a requital (die Strafe als eine Vergeltung) developed completely apart from any presuppositions concerning freedom or unfreedom of the will . . . throughout the longest period of human history one absolutely did not punish because one made the instigator of evil (Übelanstifter) responsible for his act, thus not under the presupposition that only the guilty (der Schuldige) are to be punished” (II 4). Why then did one punish at this stage of human development? “[A]s parents punish their children even now, out of anger over an injury (Schaden) suffered, vented on the one who caused the injury (am Schädiger).” In this passage Nietzsche plays on the similarity between Schuldiger (which means only “guilty one,” not “debtor”) and Schädiger, but speaks only of the latter as the object or target of punishment. In this earlier stage one simply punished because someone had caused harm, not because one held that person “guilty” in any significant moral sense. In the fifth section of the Second Essay, the emphasis shifts even more to examining the purpose of these brutal early punishments. This examination, for Nietzsche, largely centers on the question of how or why Schmerz und Schuld, pain and debt or guilt, were first connected. The initial emphasis on making a memory for those who promised suggests that the objective of these horrific punishments was to ensure that the debts were repaid, and this indeed is what Nietzsche first identifies as the motive behind them. After emphasizing, however, that “from early times and all over” there were legal specifications of how much one could cut off the body of a debtor, Nietzsche says, “Let us make the logic of this whole form of compensation clear to ourselves: it is strange enough.” The fact that the law had to measure and control the administration of these punishments implies that they were treated as something good and pleasurable, something in which one might overindulge. Thus, Nietzsche begins to argue, the purpose of these legally sanctioned and indeed regulated tortures was not only to terrify the debtor into repaying his debt; it was also to provide the creditor with a pleasure to counterbalance his loss, and the displeasure (Unlust [II 6]) at this loss, in case the debtor could not repay. The pleasure the creditor derives from torturing the debtor “consists in a warrant for and title to cruelty”; it is “the pleasure of being permitted to vent (auslassen) his power safely (unbedenklich) on one who is powerless.” It is, in short, an intense and undeniable sensation of one’s own power. This pleasure (Wohlgefühl, Wollust, Genuss) “is valued all the more highly the deeper and lower the creditor stands in the order of society, and can easily appear to him as a delicious bite, indeed as a foretaste

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of a higher rank. By means of ‘punishing’ the debtor (Schuldner) the creditor takes part in a right of the masters: finally he also comes for once to the elevating feeling of being permitted to despise and maltreat a creature (ein Wesen) as ‘beneath him.’” One thinks, as perhaps Nietzsche himself did when writing these lines, of Shakespeare’s Shylock, and certainly of the passage from Tertullian cited in the First Essay (I 15). 4 This idea, Nietzsche says, of an equivalence between injury and pain (Schaden und Schmerz), and thus the notion that punishment can offset or recompense the damage done by the lawbreaker, draws its power from the contractual relation (Vertragsverhältniss) between creditor and debtor, which is as old as and indeed constitutive of the notion of “legal subjects (Rechtssubjekte)” (II 4). 5 Thus begins Nietzsche’s often freewheeling treatment of prehistoric punishment, its meaning, motivation, and relation to the rest of society. He begins by tracing the primitive forms and presuppositions of punishment back to the earliest forms of trade and exchange. At this very early stage of human political and social life, one did not punish because one thought a criminal deserved punishment for choosing to break the law, and thus not on the basis of anything that we would recognize as justice. One rather regarded punishment as the paying of a debt. The relationship between creditor and debtor, as Nietzsche says at the end of II 4, in turn points back to the basic forms (die Grundformen) of buying, selling, exchange, trade, and traffic. Nietzsche later explains that it was from this basic activity of setting prices, measuring values, contriving equivalences, exchanging, and the like that humanity first arrived at the belief that “everything has its price; all things can be paid back (abgezahlt)—the oldest and most naïve moral canon of justice” (II 8). This basic idea or belief was applied to the harm caused by criminal acts; the harm was interpreted as a kind of debt and the criminal was interpreted as indebted to the one he had harmed, especially, as Nietzsche eventually specifies, to the city or community itself (II 9). This is how we move, in Nietzsche’s account, from the most primitive form of economics to one of the most primitive forms of legality and punishment. The crucial question that Nietzsche raises in section four and devotes the next two to answering is, How did suffering come to be linked or entangled with damage or debt? Granted that primitive law codes treat crime as a kind of debt that must be paid off, how did they come to regard this debt as capable of being repaid or discharged through the suffering of the criminal? At the end of II 4 Nietzsche says that this idea that an injury (and thus a crime) can be repaid or requited through the suffering of the one who caused it “takes its power” from the primeval relation between debtor and creditor. Is Nietzsche suggesting that this connection was already present there, that this earliest contractual relationship was created for the sake of inflicting pain or suffering upon the debtor? Was cruelty or violence the primary force shaping and driving these first economic relations, and so the beginnings of

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society? This may make sense, given what Nietzsche says in these sections about how central and strongly desired cruelty was in primitive and ancient life, but it seems to me Nietzsche cannot be arguing that, given his claim that this contractual relationship predates any political society. In the absence of any central political power, one could attain the goal and pleasure of making another suffer simply by attacking him; there is no need to use a contract or economic relationship as an uncertain means to visit violence upon another. 6 To answer questions like this I think we must first step back and try to understand the character of the earliest humanity as Nietzsche has presented it here. Specifically, I think that Nietzsche’s narrative so far forces us to ask how these “flighty” and incalculable earliest humans could also devise trade and debt, or indeed any form of economic or social life. If the fundamental instincts of primeval humanity were, as Nietzsche later claims, thoroughly violent and volatile (II 16), or even if they were simply as forgetful as he maintains at the beginning of the essay, how could even as basic an institution or practice as barter exist prior to the founding of political society? I think the only way to answer this question is to suggest that Nietzsche is, for the most part, overstating just how violent and asocial the first humans were. For instance, Nietzsche abstracts entirely from the family throughout the Second Essay, presumably in order to throw into the sharpest relief possible his image of human beings as asocial or acommunal. 7 Nietzsche’s account can be made to cohere if we take these earliest humans’ life as including some basic but purely instinctual familial or tribal organization and an ability and willingness to cooperate for certain very limited purposes. One can still easily imagine, however, that the instincts of these earliest humans were too violent and unstable, and their conscious minds and impulse control still too crude, minuscule, and weak, for them to live in anything approaching a proper society, even if a basic mammalian family life and occasional barter or trade were possible for them. Let us then piece together the progression from pre-social humans to humans living in a political community that punishes. The earliest humans were “slaves of momentary affect and desire” (II 3), and most of their affects and desires were violent and explosive. They did, however, live together in family groups, perhaps even very primitive tribes, and sometimes bartered with one another. This still predominantly instinctual and forgetful life came to an end with the rise of political society (described in II 16–17), which began to burn a memory into its citizens through violent punishments. Eventually, the humans living in these communities attained a level of self-conscious awareness and a rudimentary ability to think about the future and keep their promises. At this stage, they began to use contracts, and to think of their relations to the community and to one another as governed or constituted by contracts. I cannot see how they could have conceived of or acted in accord with contracts before this point, and until a basic level of stability and secur-

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ity was achieved, the community’s sole reason for punishing was to brutalize the populace into obeying a few basic laws, not to institute a system of legal penalties counterbalancing private losses or damages with pleasures. A contract would be meaningless to human beings who couldn’t remember the most fundamental laws of society, so I think that it is only at this point that Nietzsche’s accounts of both punishment and debt, as contractual relationships in which suffering is exchanged as a commodity to offset or repay a material loss, can apply. Nietzsche develops these points in section eight of the Second Essay, which raises some of the same questions concerning the rise of political society and morality. “The feeling of guilt (Das Gefühl der Schuld), of personal obligation . . . has, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and most original relation between persons that there is, in the relation between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: here first stepped forth person against person, here person first measured himself against person.” Again it seems that although Nietzsche mentions buying and selling as well as debt, he can only mean the first as the oldest and most original form of human relation. 8 How, after all, can one conceive of borrowing and lending, of debt and credit, without an already existing society? As I have suggested above, one may be able to conceive of a very crude form of barter or exchange as possible before any other social relations, and indeed as the interaction, exchange, and relationship in which a human being first becomes self-aware, in which he is no longer simply guided by his instincts (though this requires seeing the first family forms as purely instinctual, an assumption for which Nietzsche does not argue). Barter or exchange may be the first human act and relationship which requires more than simple instinct; perhaps this is why Nietzsche calls it the first relation between persons (Personen-Verhältniss) rather than the first human relation; it was here, in the comparative measuring and valuing required for exchange, that the person was born. 9 To repeat, then, the relation of buyer and seller must have been the primary or original relationship, out of which the notions of debt and credit and thus the debtor-creditor relationship grew, but only after the founding of civil society. What, then, was the character of this first relation between persons? Above all, according to Nietzsche, it meant one person measuring himself against another: “[H]ere person first stepped forth against person, here person first measured himself against person (hier trat zuerst Person gegen Person, hier mass sich zuerst Person an Person).” But if this transaction was primarily a matter of one person measuring himself against another, did the actual material goods being exchanged here provide any independent standard of value, or did all sense of value governing the exchange simply emanate from the power of the individuals involved? In the first place, it would seem to be necessary that both parties are close to being of equal power, otherwise there would be no exchange or measuring at all, but one would

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simply take from the other; the semi-contractual nature of the relationship described here seems to imply something approaching equality (cf. II 9). Thus barter becomes physical violence by other means, as the people vie to assert themselves through their evaluations of the goods being traded. This, however, leads us back to the same question: did the goods themselves provide an external standard of value determining the quantitative and qualitative details of the exchange? It seems to me that they must have, that even Nietzsche seems to grant that the exchange was motivated by actual need, and thus that early barter and commerce were not simply vehicles for the will to power of the trading parties. Even so, however, it does seem that in Nietzsche’s account economic and intellectual measurements and thought processes proceed from the original impulse of an individual or group to measure its own power against that of another. This impulse continues to inform much of the intellectual operations required for economic exchange, as Nietzsche makes clear in the rest of section eight. Nietzsche further claims that something of this relation between buyer and seller, between two people measuring themselves against each other, is noticeable at even the crudest or “lowest (niedren)” grade of civilization. This relation of measuring oneself against another, and thus of beginning to value and assess, is somehow coeval with human sociability and even constitutes it. It has also, according to Nietzsche, largely constituted human thinking. “Making prices, measuring values, contriving equivalences, exchanging (tauschen)—this preoccupied the very first thinking of the human being to such an extent that in a certain sense it is thinking as such (das Denken): here was the oldest type of acumen bred (herangezüchtet); here, too, one may suppose, is the first sign of human pride, his feeling of priority (VorrangsGefühls) in regard to other animals.” Although Nietzsche refers to acumen (Scharfsinn) here, his stress is on the sense of pride that colored and grew out of these first acts of measuring and valuing, and indeed it is this pride and power which the earliest human acumen judged or appraised. 10 These first acts of human thinking were above all accompanied by a feeling of pride or superiority, not prudence or shrewdness; humans were proud of evaluating things (especially in distinction to the other animals), not primarily interested in the advantage to be gained by measuring and evaluating. 11 All of this, of course, chimes very well with Nietzsche’s account of the origins of values in the First Essay (I 2). There, as here, the focus is on moral valuing and affirmation, not on securing an advantage or utility, and least of all a material benefit. This sense of pride presumably continues to constitute human thinking, so that the mental determinations and movements Nietzsche describes are as much moral as conceptual or intellectual. Human thinking would thus largely mean assigning moral worth to things or infusing concepts or intellectual measurements with moral value and meaning, at least as much as it means

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engaging in the essentially false operations of logical thinking, such as carving the world up into calculable concepts and experiences, making unequal things equal, assimilating unusual or foreign things to already existing and familiar notions and ideas, and so forth. 12 Any attempt sharply to separate the two, the moral and the conceptual or intellectual operations of human thought, would thus be fundamentally wrong. This also, of course, means that human thinking has taken its forms from the external world only in a very crude and imprecise way, and certainly does not correspond to a metaphysical reality that exists independently of human beings. Thinking has rather been formed largely to serve human needs, beginning, to repeat, with the need for pride and self-affirmation, and thus with the need for moral valuation. In the same vein, it is worth noting that Nietzsche describes the human pride in itself as the valuing animal as a “self-feeling (Selbstgefühl)”; the means of relating to itself that defines humanity is largely, perhaps primarily, a matter of feeling, not of rational judgment or apprehension. According to Nietzsche the first notions of political life and justice also came directly from these earliest economic relationships. “Buying and selling, together with their psychological accompaniments, are older than even the beginnings of any forms of social organization and unions: it was rather from the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights (Personen-Rechts) that the budding feeling of exchange, contract, debt (Schuld), right (Recht), obligation, settlement first transferred itself to the crudest and most inchoate social complexes (in their relation with similar complexes).” As so often, Nietzsche’s exposition here is less than ideally clear. Nietzsche seems first to be suggesting that elementary notions of Schuld, obligation and the like existed before any kind of political society, and transferred themselves from these pre-political contracts to the first political or social organizations. He then, however, says that this only happened in the case of these earliest social complexes’ relations with other such complexes. As I have argued above, I do not think that Nietzsche can intelligibly speak of a pre-political contract. It is the political community that first imposes the most basic requirements on human beings, that first begins to make them, through the most savage means imaginable, regular and calculable. On Nietzsche’s account, a pre-political contract could be neither imagined nor enforced. It rather seems that the community itself must introduce the notion of contracts and debt or guilt, as indeed Nietzsche goes on to argue in the ninth section (without ever quite making it explicit that contracts must originate with the political community or state). I therefore think that, to the extent that he suggests otherwise here (and that suggestion is at best ambiguous or contradictory), Nietzsche must be taken as overstating the matter and leaving the fuller explanation until the ninth section. Doing this enables Nietzsche to discuss the consequences of this view that political life and justice originate in the most primitive economic rela-

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tions separately, to detail the meaning and consequences of this view over the following sections. Despite the difficulties of Nietzsche’s presentation, we should not lose sight of the fundamental point that he makes in the second half of the eighth section, that the basic principle of economic activity, that everything has its price, that everything can be paid for with some kind of equivalent, took over and became the form or the driving logic of our understanding of justice. Contracts may have been created by the state or political community, but the basic notion of exchange and equivalencies predates political life. This basic idea of justice as a kind of exchange or settling of accounts continues, according to Nietzsche, to determine the assumptions and dynamic of our sense of justice even today. The following sections are to a large extent a gloss upon the final few sentences of the eighth section, an elaboration of what it means for justice to be an extrapolation of these basic economic terms and interactions, and what it means not only for justice but for “objectivity,” which Nietzsche here explicitly links with justice, to have originated in this way, and indeed what it means for these two things to be related so closely. 13 Nietzsche closes the eighth section with an argument or sentiment familiar from Thucydides’s presentation of the Melian dialogue (cf. HAH I 92), saying that justice at this stage is “the good will among roughly equal powers to come to terms with one another, to reach an ‘understanding’ through a settlement—and, in reference to lesser powers, to compel them to reach an agreement among themselves.” This description applies especially and in the first place to the early city or political community. As Nietzsche will make even more clear in section nine, the community begins by establishing certain norms, particularly in the case of crime and punishment, and compelling its members to adhere to those norms. It thus creates justice, and in so doing creates a stable community, the source and guarantor of profound benefits and protections which have never existed before and which could only be produced and maintained by the community. 14 The community is therefore the first entity able to put someone into its debt, to give someone advantages so great that its trading partner cannot possibly trade anything of equal value, or even ever repay the debt. The community creates debt, by being able to confer such an almost unlimited good or service upon its members. It also, then, begins to create or breed the memory into human beings that they require if they are to abide by the quasi-economic agreement governing their membership in the community—in short, it begins to punish. Thus when someone commits a crime, “[i]t is least of all a matter of the immediate damage which the damager (Schädiger) has instigated: still apart from that, the criminal (der Verbrecher) is above all a ‘breaker’ (‘Brecher’), a breaker of his contract and word against the whole. . . . The criminal is a debtor who not only does not repay the advantages and protections shown to him, but even attacks his creditor.” The criminal is therefore not only de-

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prived of these advantages and protections, he is reminded what they are worth, by being thrust outside the protection of the city, where “every type of hostility may be vented upon him.” “‘Punishment’ is at this level of civilization simply a copy, a mimus of the normal attitude toward the hated, defenseless, crushed enemy, who has lost not only every right and protection, but also every mercy.” Punishment has a different character or meaning at different stages of civilization (cf. II 13); at this extremely primitive stage, where the community is still fragile and unsteady, punishment seems to be motivated more by fear than anything else (certainly more than by the pleasure in cruelty described earlier), genuine and profound fear stemming from the realization that the criminal can still destabilize or simply destroy the community, and thus is to be hated and feared as an enemy. This perhaps explains why, in Nietzsche’s account, the punishment of the early community consists simply in removing its protection from the criminal, as if it is not the city or community that will do the punishing but random passers-by, or as if the community’s sole act of punishment is literally thrusting the criminal beyond its walls. “Punishment” would ordinarily require the agency of a legitimate authority, but here it seems almost as if punishment at this point consists simply in the community’s removing its protection from an individual. This is presumably because the majority of the members of the community, keenly aware of the benefits and protections which only the community can provide, perceive the criminal as a mortal enemy, as one who would destroy the community and thus inspires a fury born of terror. The other members of the community, in attacking the criminal, thus “vent” (auslassen, a word Nietzsche uses repeatedly in the Second Essay) both their fearful anger at the threat posed by the criminal and their intrinsic but usually suppressed instincts of aggression. 15 Nietzsche begins the tenth section by explaining that as a community becomes more powerful, it takes the transgressions of the individual less seriously, since they are no longer as dangerous to the community’s existence. 16 The community rather starts acting to protect the criminal and to control the explosion of anger against him, and thus to consolidate and augment its own power: [T]he general anger is no more permitted to vent (auslassen) itself upon him as unrestrainedly as earlier—rather from now on the whole is careful to defend and protect the evil-doer against this anger, especially that of the one immediately injured. The compromise with the anger of those first affected by the evil-doer; an effort to localize the case and to prevent a wider or even general participation and alarm; attempts to find equivalences and to settle the whole matter (compositio); above all the ever more determined will to take every offence as in some sense repayable (abzahlbar), thus, at least to a certain extent, to isolate the criminal and his deed from one another. (GM II 10)

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We thus see that it is the community or “the whole” that from the beginning devises and administers the particular legal punishments Nietzsche had mentioned earlier; the suggestion Nietzsche had seemed to make at the beginning of II 5, that individual creditors began to take a hand in inventing these contracts and punishments, and thus to exist independently of or as the source of the law, was clearly a ruse (as indeed we have already seen it must have been). The community is the only force or actor that has the power to create law and so to do the things described here, and it does them in its own interest, to increase its stability and power. The taste for cruelty that finds expression in individual acts of punishment now seems petty, disruptive, and reactive, as Nietzsche will stress even more in section eleven. The legal regulations of violent punishments that Nietzsche mentioned earlier were not, as he seemed to indicate then, for the sake of satisfying cruelty but rather served the exact opposite purpose, that of restraining retributive anger and cruelty. The law thus exists as both an expression of the community’s power and an instrument to increase that power; the more powerful the community becomes, Nietzsche argues, the less need it has of its laws, or at least the more mild its punishments become, the less stringently and frantically it enforces its laws. “As the power and self-confidence 17 of a community grow, the penal law always becomes milder; every weakening and deeper endangering of the former brings the harsher forms of the latter again to light.” 18 The community and its justice therefore end by overcoming themselves, if they can attain to a sufficient level of power and strength. Justice is an expression of the power of the community, but overcoming justice, replacing it with mercy, is a further and in a sense an ultimate expression of power. Justice, like all other powerful and hard-won human achievements, must obey the law of life and overcome itself (cf. Z II 12); the community must overcome the expression and creation of its own strength, the justice it has produced, through a greater and more difficult display of strength and power. “This self-abolition (Selbstaufhebung) of justice: one knows the beautiful name by which it calls itself—Mercy; it remains, as is readily understood, the prerogative (Vorrecht) of the most powerful, still better, his beyond the law (Jenseits des Rechts).” The ninth section had ended by describing the earliest stage of justice and punishment, in which the criminal is treated as a defeated enemy who has lost all hope of mercy; the tenth ends by imagining a plenitude of strength and power at which justice and punishment are left behind or transform themselves into mercy, into the self-negation or self-abolition of justice.

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2.2. MORAL DEVELOPMENT: JUSTICE AND RESSENTIMENT Let us shift now from Nietzsche’s account of purely political and social development to his account of moral development, first pausing to sum up the basic historical conclusions we can draw from the portrayal of the origins of political society in these sections. Although initially Nietzsche seems to suggest political society grew out of earlier relations between debtor and creditor (which he even suggests are the original and fundamental human relations), as he goes on it becomes clear that this could not have been the case. His view, at least as we can piece it together to make something coherent, seems rather to be that human beings first lived in familial or tribal groups, in which they were still dominated (perhaps exclusively) by their instincts, which were chiefly violent and chaotic. Once actual political society and its laws are imposed on this primordial populace (by external invaders, as Nietzsche explains in II 16), law, debt, and punishment begin to exist. At this point the political community begins to build itself and grow in power, and in doing so develops the (still very rude) intellectual and moral capacities of its subjects. The specifically moral significance of this development is illustrated above all by the evolution of the concept and sense of justice. 19 Nietzsche first takes up the question of justice when he suggests that the retributive impulse, at least in its most primitive form, is simply anger at an injury or loss (II 4), something perhaps akin to a dog snapping at someone trying to take food away from it. 20 This initial or spontaneous anger seems more or less synonymous with “the senseless raging of ressentiment,” the “feeling of being aggrieved (Gefühle des Verletzt-seins)” that Nietzsche later describes (II 11). There is some sense of justice attending this feeling, but it is merely a very crude and narcissistic sense of outrage at being harmed, pure ressentiment, an angry conviction that anything that injures or inconveniences oneself is morally wrong. At this stage of moral consciousness, one will likely react angrily to any harm or insult; if one is hit, one will likely hit back. Yet Nietzsche pushes beyond this stage when he begins discussing contracts stipulating torture as a kind of repayment, and thus instituting a legal, moral, and psychological economy of retribution. Nietzsche dismisses the notion of “revenge” as an explanation for any of this, for talk of revenge simply leads back to the same question, “How can making suffer be a satisfaction (Genugthuung)?” Nietzsche is here asking particularly about these early contracts, but one can easily apply his question to the entire sense of retributive justice, the notion that a criminal should be punished, made to suffer, for his crime, that this somehow restores a larger moral order or balance and should provide not only the victim of the crime but all moral people and society as a whole with a sense of satisfaction. What is the source or meaning of this satisfaction?

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Nietzsche’s answer in the specific context of these ancient contracts is clearly that “to make suffer did one good in the highest degree.” Throughout the sixth section Nietzsche emphasizes how “normal” and innocent (unschuldig) cruelty seemed to the ancients, and even as recently as the seventeenth century, when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. One may wonder if retributive justice is therefore always at least partly animated by this pleasure in cruelty and perhaps simply a disguised form of it. Nietzsche, however, seems to suggest the contrary by saying that the pleasure in cruelty, as a pleasure, counterbalances or soothes the angry sense of loss that seems the source of (at least the earliest form of) retributive justice; cruelty and justice, pleasure and anger, seem simply heterogeneous and opposed, like two poisons that can be used to counteract each other. Thus although it is tempting to think that Nietzsche is suggesting that the sense of retributive justice is simply a sublimated form of the desire for cruelty—only one such sublimated form, of course, and in competition with others—he seems rather to be suggesting the opposite. In all of this, the description or phenomenology of retributive anger, one must remember that the center of gravity for Nietzsche is the will to power— it is the will to power that is expressing itself through the otherwise seemingly distinct and at times conflicting emotions of retributive anger and disinterested cruelty. This is particularly significant for Nietzsche’s understanding of retributive justice: retributive anger, the feeling that what harms one must be morally wrong, the possible moralistic tinge in even the most instinctive angry defensive reaction, serves and emanates from the will to power—it does not in any way limit or oppose it. In these passages Nietzsche is much less interested in unmasking our sense of justice (by arguing that all concern for justice is just sublimated cruelty, for instance) than he is in distinguishing a genuinely just disposition from the posturings of ressentiment, and from retributive justice more generally. Although he does not say a great deal about what actually constitutes justice, Nietzsche, like Plato, sees it primarily as a matter of psychic health or harmony, and at times has recourse to something like a teleological view of human psychology and morality (though, again, the crucial details of what this means, and specifically of what exactly justice is, remain largely undeveloped). 21 Nietzsche’s account, in section ten, of the overcoming of justice in the context of the community and its law is relevant to the character of justice understood in individual moral-psychological terms as well. Obviously justice cannot overcome or transform itself in the way Nietzsche describes if it is animated solely by retributive or reactive impulses; everything Nietzsche says in section ten about justice precludes or runs counter to a purely retributive sense of justice. Having argued in section ten that justice and eventually mercy grow out of strength and affirmation, Nietzsche devotes the eleventh section to addressing and rebutting claims that justice grows out of ressenti-

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ment. Nietzsche begins this rebuttal by noting that ressentiment “now blooms most beautifully among anarchists and anti-Semites, just as, incidentally, it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violet, although with a different scent.” Particular, historically situated expressions of ressentiment may differ profoundly in content, style, and target, but Nietzsche suggests that the basic character of ressentiment as well as the conditions giving rise to it remain the same; in this respect, at least, Nietzsche seems fairly essentialist about ressentiment. The psychological and social causes of ressentiment (being confronted with the superiority or success of another, feelings of weakness and alienation so strong one requires secrecy and subterfuge), its structure or character (feelings of rage and violent anger repressed by prudential considerations stemming from awareness of one’s weakness), and its effects (attempts to dress up or “sanctify” the desire for revenge as concern for an impartial and even superhuman “justice,” and to seek a purely imaginary revenge) seem the same in all cases, however different the forms or articulations they assume. 22 “And as like must always follow from like,” Nietzsche continues, it is no surprise to see attempts in such circles “to sanctify revenge with the name of justice—as if justice were fundamentally only a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved (Gefühle des Verletzt-seins)—and with revenge also to bring honor to the reactive affects overall and altogether.” Nietzsche then gives a rather cryptic commendation of this effort, saying that the value of these affects in terms of “the whole biological problem” has been underestimated; an attempt to rehabilitate these affects is thus “a merit.” This brief salute to the reactive affects is presumably a reference to their necessity in the economy of the whole or of life (cf. GS 1), but Nietzsche himself does nothing here to contribute to this meritorious project. 23 On the contrary, the rest of the section continues in his usual vein of censure of the reactive affects: Nietzsche almost immediately subordinates the reactive affects to the active affects, “such as lust to rule (Herrschsucht), greed and the like.” These are of “still higher biological value,” and therefore are all the more deserving of being “scientifically” appraised and esteemed, although Nietzsche gives no indication of how either set of affects can be “scientifically” evaluated or assessed. Indeed, whatever the enigmatic formulation “the whole biological problem” refers to, Nietzsche here suggests that even biology is a problem, not a field of study or a stratum of existence which yields clear directives or standards. So far is justice from growing out of ressentiment, Nietzsche argues, that the two are in fact diametrical and hostile opposites: “the last ground (Boden) which is conquered by the spirit of justice is the ground of the reactive feelings!” Nietzsche then stresses that justice means not merely remaining “cold, moderate, remote (fremd), indifferent”—it is not merely an absence of retributive anger or reactive feelings—but is “always a positive attitude.”

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Being just thus requires not merely being unmoved by an injury or bridling one’s anger, but rather a positive attitude dedicated to giving a fair and accurate judgment of the person who has injured one, including his virtues, honorable motives, and so forth. Justice, in short, is a matter of seeing and judging accurately, and thus of attaining to a positive attitude or vantage point unclouded by the reactive affects and effects stemming from an injury, not of developing one’s rancor into a claim about the character of justice. To be sure, Nietzsche is not suggesting that the aggressive or active man is wholly objective or that he sees things as they are simply, just as he does not say that of the noble (I 10). This is not because Nietzsche denies the possibility of objectivity but because the active and aggressive man, like the noble, also distorts reality; he also interprets the world in terms of his interests and advantages. His perceptions are colored by his affects and desires, in the first place because the most fundamental or vital perceptions concern what is of value and worth to us; in this regard there is no distinction between perception and judgment, or between description and prescription. 24 A piece of fruit, an orange, for instance, has value to humans as food, and is perceived as such, especially by an active and aggressive human being pursuing his own good. But this is obviously not in any way the intrinsic purpose of an orange; oranges are not somehow intended or designed to be consumed by human beings, this is simply the use and thus the value and meaning that we impose on them. More generally, throughout the Genealogy Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes the illusions, forgetfulness, and self-serving interpretations of noble and healthy natures. For all of this, however, the active and aggressive human being distorts and disfigures reality less than does someone dominated by ressentiment, which Nietzsche insists necessarily warps reality much more. There is something inherently dishonest or falsifying about ressentiment in Nietzsche’s view, for here in the eleventh section he is not describing a case of ressentiment paired with the kind of impotence characterizing the slaves or the priest, much less a case of ressentiment caused by this impotence. The ressentiment Nietzsche treats here in II 11 was able to secure actual, physical, violent revenge (otherwise it would not have been a threat to the community), but he still presents it as somehow more mendacious. 25 Finally, Nietzsche says, let us look around in history: “in which sphere then has the whole use of the law (Rechts), also the actual need for law so far been at home on earth? In the sphere of the reactive human beings, perhaps? By no means (Ganz und gar nicht): rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive. 26 Viewed historically, law (das Recht) represents on earth the struggle against the reactive feelings.” On this account, the first communities must have largely been warring masses not only of violent impulses but specifically of reactive impulses; primitive society was barely able to hold itself together and keep from imploding under the strain of

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various attacks and especially counter-attacks and vendettas. The active and aggressive powers used the law “to command a halt and measure to the excesses (der Ausschweifung) of the reactive pathos and to compel a settlement.” These are, however, “excesses” only from the point of view of an established legal or moral code; there does not seem to be a natural limit to ressentiment; its “senseless raging” is excessive only from the point of view of the strong and powerful, who must impose a limit on it. This also means that the strong can begin to grant some legitimacy to the reactive feelings precisely by setting limits or proportions to them; the raging of ressentiment within those bounds becomes legitimate and even justice itself, or at least retributive justice itself. All of this means that the desire for vengeance, and more generally the delight in cruelty and the lust to make another suffer, which Nietzsche had perhaps seemed to praise earlier in the essay, now appear as petty, slavish, and even destructive of life, insofar as they are small-minded obsessions with minor personal injuries that disrupt or retard attempts to build greater powercomplexes (politically and spiritually). The delight in cruelty now appears as “the senseless raging of ressentiment,” or at best as a means of appeasing and controlling that raging, and the specifications of particular punishments for particular injuries or debts, which Nietzsche had brought forth in II 5 to emphasize primitive cruelty with a good conscience (which he had seemed commend by contrasting it with contemporary hypocrisy, Tartufferie, and tameness), now appear as attempts by the powerful and active to restrain the lust for vengeance of those racked by ressentiment. The taste for cruelty, which Nietzsche had previously examined from the point of view of those in whom it is strongest (and thus had presented in a largely favorable light), here appears as just another tool for the powerful to use in building the rule of law and thus more stable and stronger, more active political communities. 27 This particular psychological penchant for cruelty, like the procedure of punishment (cf. II 13), now appears as something which has various meanings or uses, depending upon the perspective from which one views it or the system of purposes in which one employs it. Having made clear the rationale for the law, Nietzsche goes on to list the means by which stronger powers control the ressentiment of those under them; most of the examples involve redirecting and somehow restraining the ressentiment of the injured party, either by redirecting it towards “the enemies of peace” or of law and order, or simply by imposing limits on what ressentiment can demand and “elevating certain equivalents for injuries into norms to which from then on ressentiment is once and for all directed.” Thus the injured person demands this or that legally established recompense, rather than succumbing to “the senseless raging of ressentiment” and demanding some kind of infinite or in any case absurdly outsized punishment. Most or all of these measures, however, flow from the establishment of the legitima-

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cy of law, which Nietzsche calls “the most decisive thing, which the supreme power does and accomplishes against the predominance of grudges and rancor.” How exactly this decisive act is performed, however, is rather obscure. For “the establishment of law” is “the imperative declaration concerning what counts overall in its eyes as allowed, as just, what as forbidden, as unjust: with the establishment of law it treats encroachments and willful acts of individuals or of whole groups as sacrileges against the law, as rebellion against the highest power itself; it diverts the feeling of those under it from the nearest damage caused by such sacrileges.” But how does the law come to inspire such loyalty and legitimacy? Only by imposing itself on its subjects, by forcing them into its mold. Thus the law carves out channels for the emotions like ressentiment to run through, and after some time the emotions can find or know no other outlet or channel—but the channels are not there originally. The law acquires its power and authority not because there is a natural sense of justice (there is only the play of active and reactive forces in a ceaseless struggle for power) but because it impresses itself on the individual through the morality of mores or some equally brutal process. The institution of law not only brings relative stability to the community but also begins to breed objectivity, reason, “mastery over the affects” into human beings. But the most decisive thing, which the supreme power (Gewalt) does and accomplishes against the predominance of grudges and rancor (gegen die Übermacht der Gegen- und Nachgefühle)—it always does this, as soon as it is in any way strong enough for it—is the establishment of law (Gesetzes), the imperative declaration concerning what counts overall in its eyes as allowed, as just (recht), what as forbidden, as unjust (unrecht): with the establishment of law it treats encroachments and willful acts of individuals or of whole groups as sacrileges against the law, as rebellion against the highest power itself; it diverts the feeling of those under it from the nearest damage caused by such sacrileges, and thus achieves over time the opposite of what all vengeance wills, which sees only the viewpoint of the one injured, allows only it to count—from now on the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal appraisal of the deed, even the eye of the injured person himself (although this last of all, as was remarked before. [GM II 11])

Thus the mind can be clouded by passions or affects, by “blood,” but it can also be trained to identify, resist, and ultimately discount those passions. There are always forces pushing the mind away from objectivity, but it can be trained, as indeed it has been according to this passage, to recognize and master those pressures, and so attain to a fairly high degree of objectivity and impersonal evaluation, even of an act which harms oneself. At the same time, however, and despite Nietzsche’s decision to link objectivity and justice throughout this passage, objectivity does not include for

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him the ability to discern a universally binding justice in the nature of things. As Nietzsche makes clear at the end of the eleventh section, justice exists only within the framework of a particular code of law, which is to say that justice does not exist independently of the specific form it takes in an individual legal order. 28 There is no supralegal justice which the objective grasp by virtue of their objectivity. An ancient Athenian, a Roman, a Viking, a Christian, and a Confucian may all struggle and succeed in remaining objective and just even in the face of personal abuse, but each of these will be just according to the canons of his unique and radically contingent morality. 29 The objectivity that is possible, in other words, is an objective application of a particular law. To repeat, then, Nietzsche maintains that this training in impersonality, which especially includes or relies upon mentally isolating the criminal from his deed, in time achieves the opposite of what vengeance wills, and simply overcomes and masters the desire for vengeance and the other reactive affects. Aaron Ridley argues that this claim is “surely a piece of desperation, and false to boot. For it is perfectly clear that what is going on here is precisely that separation of doer from deed (the ‘error’ of the popular mind) which marks a crucial moment in the first stage of the slave revolt in morality” (Ridley 1998b, 52). 30 The distinction between agent and deed, however, like the notion of free will, is susceptible of multiple interpretations and uses. The act of isolating the criminal from his deed does not, as Ridley suggests, here serve the same purpose as it does in I 13—in fact it does the complete opposite. Here the point is not to make moral blame possible but to prevent the sense of injury from completely washing over the wrongdoer; it is to restrain and focus ressentiment, not to justify or rationalize it and still less to inflame it. In I 13 the operation of isolating the doer from the deed is used to make blame possible, to provide a space into which to write the neutral subject who is free not to be strong but chooses to be so because he is evil; in other words, the purpose is to facilitate a more intense hatred and anger towards the individual who performs an act. 31 Here the point of isolating the deed from the doer is to focus one’s anger on the act, not the agent; in other words, the purpose is to direct anger away from the individual who has performed the act, to encourage a sense of proportion, and is thus the exact reverse of the intention Nietzsche describes in I 13. Nietzsche returns to the origin of justice at the end of the section, both to state more fully and forcefully the consequences of the view of law he has propounded here and to further rebut Dühring. There is “just” (“Recht”) and “unjust” (“Unrecht”) only after the establishment of the law, according to Nietzsche. To speak of just and unjust in itself lacks all sense, in itself an injury, violation, exploitation, annihilation can naturally (natürlich) not be “unjust,” insofar as

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life essentially (das Leben essentiell), that is in its basic functions (Grundfunktionen) operates through injury, violation, exploitation, annihilation and can in no way be thought of without this character. One must even admit something still more alarming (Bedenklicheres): that, from the highest biological standpoint, 32 legal conditions (Rechtszustände) are always only permitted (dürfen) to be exceptional conditions, as partial restrictions of the actual life-will (eigentlichen Lebenswille), which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely as means to create greater units of power. (GM II 11) 33

The barrage of metaphysical language used here to describe the violence of life and the world does not contradict Nietzsche’s usual criticism of metaphysics, for what Nietzsche objects to in traditional metaphysics is not that it describes the world or reality but that it is used to escape from the violent world he describes here; Nietzsche’s metaphysical picture is, unlike those Nietzsche reproaches, not back-worldly (cf. Z I 3, “Von den Hinterweltlern,” “On the Backworldly,” or, as Kaufmann has it, “On the Afterworldly”). Thus ultimately the law only exists or should only exist “as a means in the struggle between power complexes,” not as a means to prevent struggle or to attain to conditions of peace. 34 Justice is justified for Nietzsche, so to speak, only to the extent that it is in the service of a higher power, namely life; to the extent that it begins to sap that power, Nietzsche views it with horror and hatred. Let me pause here and summarize Nietzsche’s argument in this extraordinarily dense and important section. Generally, and beginning almost immediately in this section, Nietzsche contrasts ressentiment, the keen sense of having been injured and demanding vengeance, with justice, which involves accurately or truthfully judging the meaning and value of someone’s action. Revenge focuses on the harm and the desire for retribution (“the feeling of being aggrieved”), while justice focuses on the larger good according to which one judges (even if that larger good is only the law as an expression and generator of greater power). Revenge remains locked in the perspective of sole concern for oneself and one’s injury and desire for vengeance, while justice has a much wider and freer view, looking towards the broader goal by which it orients itself, and measuring and judging acts, people, and anything else in the light of that larger and more encompassing source of value on the horizon. Historically, Nietzsche argues, justice does not grow out of ressentiment as its development or refinement, but is rather an impersonal evaluation that is the result of long breeding or training, and is thus the opposite of ressentiment in any form. Justice requires not only seeing a particular harmful or criminal act in proportion, but also seeing that the individual who committed the act is not defined by it. Justice exists only in the particular form given it by an individual law code and only for the sake of increasing the power of the community which it

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governs. Thus the law comes into existence not to mirror the order of justice written in the nature of things or to satisfy an innate human sense of justice, but only as “a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power,” and which uses the law “as a means to create greater units of power.” Law developed not out of the feeling of vengefulness or grievance, not as a way to articulate and hone the desire for retribution, but as a means for a more powerful force to organize, control, and direct social energies, and in particular to curb the trivial and irrational raging of ressentiment of those beneath it, specifically of those too petty and self-absorbed (and thus, almost by definition in Nietzsche’s view, too weak) to discipline and direct themselves towards the higher end ordained by the more powerful rulers of the community, and ultimately by the will of life. Again, law does not proceed from vengefulness or retribution, but from the desire to bring warring subordinates under control, to create harmony for the sake of greater power. This also suggests that law is often not created by equal powers but by a superior power, and, when it is created by equal powers, it is when they have put aside ressentiment or their individual desires for vengeance, and instead are looking to build something larger than themselves and their current communities. Let me also pause here and try to piece together Nietzsche’s various statements about the origin and nature of retributive justice. Nietzsche’s basic position is that the interpretation retributive justice gives of itself is false, indeed utterly unbelievable. One does not desire violent revenge to restore some cosmic balance or to satisfy an innate sense of justice 35—but then why does one desire revenge, what is the meaning of punitive or retributive justice? Nietzsche first discusses punishment in the Second Essay from the perspective of the primitive political community, which punishes in order to teach its members to obey a few basic and crucial laws (II 2–3). When he addresses retributive anger or justice as it is experienced by individuals, as an emotion that seeks satisfaction in punishment, he identifies two elements, anger at an injury suffered and a sense of pleasure in the suffering of the one who caused it, a pleasure that can offset or restrain the anger (II 4). Though obviously there is something cruel or violent about the initial anger, Nietzsche presents the pleasure in cruelty as somehow distinct from and indeed capable of placating or counterbalancing the anger. Thus both anger and cruelty, according to Nietzsche, feed into and give meaning to punishment; both are an integral part of the experience of retributive justice. And this seems to be true of the sense of retributive justice as such: the anger at the crime or wrong is mixed with a desire to see the criminal punished and a sense of satisfaction when he is. The anger seems clearly to be primary in Nietzsche’s account, both in the initial statement at II 4 and at II 9, where Nietzsche describes the earliest and most vulnerable community punishing the criminal from fear and anger. The anger Nietzsche first describes in section four, and to which he repeatedly

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returns, precedes the pleasure in cruelty he later discusses. One is genuinely angry and wants to vent one’s anger on the one who has caused the harm or who threatens one’s security; cruelty is not primary, but is only introduced to counterbalance and gain control over the initial anger. There is something cool, calculating, and self-aware about cruelty, while the original burst of anger is hot, explosive, immediate, self-forgetting (even though it is born of or expresses a [likely excessive] concern for oneself, a sense of one’s unique importance); indeed, it is only with the law’s introduction of particular amounts of cruelty as discrete equivalences and compensations that retributive anger begins to acquire a sense of proportion and thus to become somewhat rational. Where does this anger, the primary element in retributive justice, come from? If Nietzsche rejects the interpretation that retributive justice gives of itself as something self-explanatory or unproblematic, what is the meaning or object of this anger? There may well be a basic and irreducible sense of anger at an injury or attack, as there seems to be in dogs, for instance. According to Nietzsche, however, this anger is not purely irrational or purposeless, but nor is it for the sake of self-defense or self-preservation; it does not aim at frightening off the attacker so that one can be safe and at peace, but rather at regaining the sense of power and self-possession that one has lost through being attacked. 36 If the anger simply sought a return to peace and security, retributive justice would make no sense; there would be no desire to harm the criminal for his crime, only a desire to neutralize him and thus to restore order and peace. 37 Nietzsche’s usage at times suggests a distinction between anger (Zorn) and ressentiment, where the former is more irrational and the latter more closely tied to a sense of grievance masquerading as justice, but he does not develop this distinction, and it is not especially important here in any case. There is a clear and significant difference between (a) retributive anger or ressentiment as a motive for punishment and (b) cruelty as an amoral pleasure in another’s suffering. The motive or aim is the same in both cases, however, as it is in the case of humanity’s presocial instincts of aggression: an affective experience of power, the enhancement or restoration of one’s feeling of power. Even granting that one involuntarily continues to associate a criminal with the harm he has caused to oneself, and thus continues to feel the anger initially excited by the injury, this anger is not a pointless or inexplicable reflex but rather aims at a renewed sense of power, as Nietzsche stresses in II 6 when he dismisses “revenge” as a motive for the brutality of primitive punishments—“revenge itself leads back to precisely the same problem: ‘How can making suffer be a satisfaction?’” Why, for that matter, does one react to a loss or injury, for instance the murder of a loved one, with vengeful anger at all? Why not rather with sadness, fear, or any number of other emotions (obviously, one can and does, but the interpretation retribu-

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tive justice gives of itself suggests that the reaction of punitive anger is somehow essential and perhaps even most important)? The retributive impulse, for Nietzsche, can only be understood as an attempt to recoup the feeling of power one has lost as a result of the damage suffered. Yet although cruelty and ressentiment both inform and are to some extent curbed and given specific form by a code and system of punishments, neither has been completely tamed or mastered by society. Cruelty can and obviously does arise and express itself quite independently of any sense of justice, retributive or otherwise; cruelty is an expression of the fundamental instincts of aggression which have not been tamed by society, though Nietzsche also suggests that it can be exacerbated or intensified by greater repression, or that cruelty can at least become in part a reactive affect (e.g., I 14–15, II 5). Ressentiment or retributive anger, for its part, can also exceed the limits dictated to it by the law, overriding or manipulating the intellectual and moral restraints placed on it; if ressentiment tends to produce arguments or sentiments about its justice, those arguments are entirely in the service of ressentiment, not a check on it. 38 Nietzsche’s account is, I think, unclear on whether this tendency of retributive anger to overflow the channels into which the law directs it is due to ressentiment’s boundless and boundlessly irrational character, or because the ineradicable instincts of aggression, the basic desire to do harm and thus to feel more powerful, also find an outlet in retributive justice, so that there is a wholly other motive or drive expressing itself in retribution besides ressentiment. Either way, for Nietzsche much of our experience of retributive justice is simply a matter of feeling our desire for power running through the channels or circuits sanctioned by the law, through which they have been compelled to run for millennia now. Today our retributive impulse seems as natural and essential as our belief that criminals should be punished because they have chosen to do wrong, but both, according to Nietzsche, are the result of training or breeding, a long schooling and compulsion first only to permit the discharge of and finally only to experience certain powerful drives only under very limited conditions and in response to very specific triggers (though, again, even today this training has not completely succeeded). Finally, ressentiment or the sense of retributive justice, as a reactive affect, is in part a response to external pressures; as these external pressures diminish and eventually fade away altogether, as in the case of a community so powerful that no amount of external pressure can harm it, passions like anger and cruelty dissipate as well (II 10). Cruelty, anger, and punishment all aim at power, and can thus be overcome and abandoned when the community becomes strong enough to experience its power in other ways; retributive anger and pleasure in cruelty become unnecessary when a community or an individual feels its own power strongly enough without either. Thus, according to Nietzsche, the highest, noblest possibility for a community is to leave

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behind or abrogate the demands of justice as it itself has prescribed them. Retributive justice, a legal, moral, and affective instrument created by the political community, ultimately overcomes itself by producing a higher, fuller expression and experience of power. 2.3. CRITIQUING NIETZSCHE’S ACCOUNT An important idea for Nietzsche throughout his writings is that human beings seek a greater or more intense experience of life, not comfort or security. Probably by the time of Zarathustra and certainly by the time of the Genealogy this notion has come into focus for Nietzsche as the will to power, which is the guiding principle of Nietzsche’s entire portrayal of prehistoric humanity, and eventually of the development of Christian morality, in the Second Essay. This fundamental will to power, according to Nietzsche, explains the need for the extreme violence on display in so many early forms of punishment. Yet Nietzsche seems to prevaricate on this point: one possibility for the savagery of early punishments is that such brutality was necessary to compel obedience, since human beings are by nature violent, chaotic, and essentially anti-social and anti-political; another possibility, however, is that the savageness is an expression of the rage and fear felt by the members of the early community at the lawbreaker, who threatens the very existence of the community. In this second scenario, the majority of the members of early communities were in fact fairly peaceable and indeed desirous of the peace and security that only a rudimentary political structure and its laws could provide. This second picture, which Nietzsche himself sets forth and relies on in sections nine through eleven, is clearly at odds with the first, which Nietzsche stresses especially in sections sixteen and seventeen. The first better coheres with or advances Nietzsche’s fundamental theoretical picture and arguments, but the second seems to be a more integral part of his actual historical account. The most serious problem, however, may be with Nietzsche’s central notion of the will to power itself, and specifically the way he uses it to explain human nature and behavior. On the one hand, Nietzsche presents the fundamental human pursuit of power as completely amoral, and thus seems to value the pursuit of power as an activity that takes place beyond good and evil—or more precisely as an activity or goal that justifies whatever form it takes. He has only contempt for efforts to understand life and therefore the pursuit of power as in any way moral, a contempt he expresses at the end of the eleventh section, among countless other places in his writing. He would thus be left open to the criticism which Stanley Rosen frequently makes of him, that Nietzsche’s attempt to reduce nobility to the accumulation and discharge of force or power fails as a meaningful conception of nobility and

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indeed as a viable basis for any qualitative distinction. Rosen sets forth one version of this argument in his essay “Nietzsche’s Revolution.” There he holds that “Nietzsche advocates a return to the natural order, but not in a Platonic or Aristotelian sense. His paradigm at this level of his thought is instead Newtonian and Spinozist. Nature is power and, still more fundamentally, chaos. Health, vitality, and creativity are intrinsically quantitative” (Rosen 1989, 198). 39 Thus for Rosen Nietzsche is very much an heir of the Enlightenment, including its “virtual identification of reason and mathematics” (208). Yet “[d]ishonesty cannot be distinguished from honesty, or honesty from chaos, unless there is a natural distinction between the noble and the base. Otherwise, there can be no distinction between noble and base nihilism, or between life-enhancing and life-debasing immoralism. On this delicate point, the will to power is too coarse to illuminate us” (206). This criticism is not decisive in terms of pure logic or coherence: it is possible to understand nobility, creativity, and so forth as quantities of power, so that the difference between, say, Goethe and the most spiteful, dishonest, and impotent slave is ultimately the amount of power possessed by or discharging itself through each (the distinction between active and reactive would then, as indeed seems consistent with Nietzsche’s presentation of the matter, be largely a matter of the quantity of strength or power possessed by the active or reactive human being). It is not clear, however, that this is a convincing or desirable way to understand these things (surely the difference between nobility and baseness or justice and injustice must be at least in part qualitative), or what is gained to offset the cost of doing so. It is also worth noting and indeed stressing Rosen’s astute (and largely unique) observation linking Nietzsche’s attempt to understand all of life in terms of quanta of power to earlier versions of Enlightenment rationalism. One way to deal with this is to define the will to power as necessarily needing opposition and tension, which makes normative struggle positive and life-affirming rather than a struggle of the nobles against the base. On this reading, Nietzsche’s real objection to the slave revolt in morals is that it gave rise to a set of values that denied this fundamental feature of life and eventuated in contemporary nihilism. 40 The problem with this as an interpretive strategy is that it requires either ignoring or mostly rejecting Nietzsche’s evident normative positions and claims, especially in the Genealogy and later works. This means neglecting Nietzsche’s intense and sustained concern with nobility and hierarchy, and in particular with the task of creating and preserving noble values in the modern world, though this is a studied avoidance common to much academic writing on Nietzsche. As Rosen argues elsewhere, however, Nietzsche’s attempt to understand nobility in terms of the will to power may itself be fundamentally incoherent. In The Mask of Enlightenment Rosen writes that “[i]f one reserves the affirmative sense of power for noble creations, but glosses nobility as power, one

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has argued in a circle.” 41 If one attempts to avoid this pitfall by arguing, as Nietzsche often does, that human beings amorally pursue power as power, and that this amoral pursuit should be affirmed, then one has no basis for distinguishing between a loving father and an abusive one, or between Goethe and Hitler. 42 If the pursuit of power is primary, and should be affirmed as natural or at least inevitable in every case, then the quantity of power is secondary, and cannot furnish a meaningful basis for evaluation. Even if the slave revolt in morals ultimately leads to smaller quantities and complexes of power among human beings, expressed either collectively or in individuals or groups, why should that matter to the slaves, past or present, if that is the best vehicle for their own will to power? 43 If one tries to make the quantity of power primary, so that the will to power can only be affirmed when it passes a certain quantitative threshold, then one is back to the circularity of arguing that nobility is power but power can only be affirmed when it is an expression or condition of nobility. Moreover, if Nietzsche’s measure of value is the depth or intensity of the effect that an individual creates in the world (not self-evident but not an unreasonable reading, either [cf., e.g., TI, “The Hammer Speaks”), then one may even argue for the superiority of the Hitlers and Stalins of the world to the Goethes and Tolstoys. The same circularity that Rosen finds in Nietzsche’s account of nobility is evident in his treatment of mercy as well. The physically and politically weak can show mercy in the form of forgiveness, which if anything is more difficult than forbearing to punish someone over whom one has power (the paradigmatic example of course being Jesus on the cross, but also the Christians who followed his example). To stay true to Nietzsche’s definition of mercy, however, we would have to argue in a more or less vacuous circle: to show mercy one must have incredible power; therefore, if one shows mercy, one must be powerful, regardless of obvious external circumstances. One possible solution is to claim that no physically or politically weak person has ever genuinely forgiven someone more powerful, that such forgiveness has always been a mask or an instrument for something else. This suggestion, however, seems either absurd or so crudely and dogmatically reductive as not to be worth taking seriously. The other solution is to say that politically weak people can forgive others, Nietzsche simply passes over that fact here because it is irrelevant to both his historical account and his larger polemical purposes. But then we are back to the issue of circularity—mercy expresses great power, and we know this because one must be powerful to express mercy. Again, however, Nietzsche is driven to this position not by his inability to reason but by his prior and fundamental commitments to make sense of human life, in both theoretical and practical or moral terms, by grounding it in a modern conception of nature that lacks any purpose beyond the will to power. In reaching this impasse Nietzsche is not enacting a personal or

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idiosyncratic philosophical failure but showing the limits of modern philosophy as a whole. 2.4. NIETZSCHE ON SUFFERING AND MEANING Some of Nietzsche’s greatest insights in this stretch of the Genealogy come in section seven, a digression from his account of the origins of political society. Nietzsche here deals with the same knot of psychological and moral questions as in the surrounding sections, though his discussion centers less on cruelty than on humanity’s attitude toward suffering. Nietzsche begins by noting that life on earth was more cheerful before humanity had become ashamed of its cruelty and other instincts, and had thus begun to find life itself unappetizing (unschmackhaft)—there is, in other words, no necessary connection between the prevalence of cruelty and suffering on the one hand and world-weariness or pessimism on the other. Nietzsche suggests that cruelty is as active as ever in modern society in the form of self-inflicted cruelty, so the problem seems to be less the lack of cruelty in modern culture and more our attitude towards it, our pessimistic negation and disapproval of cruelty, suffering, and indeed the rest of humanity’s animal nature. The pessimist’s horror and dismay at cruelty seems to be based largely on his horror and dismay at suffering: because suffering is the worst thing in the world, creating more of it is exceptionally heinous. Nietzsche makes this point in one of the most brilliant lines in this section and in the Genealogy as a whole: “What really excites outrage against suffering is not suffering itself, but the senselessness of suffering” (cf. III 28). Thus, Nietzsche suggests, what really underlies the pessimist’s negation of suffering is not so much a distinctive moral stance as an inability to accept or to believe in any justification for suffering, any interpretation of existence that would give suffering sense or meaning. 44 To the pessimist, and indeed to almost all modern human beings who cannot accept previous religious interpretations and justifications of existence, suffering appears as something repellent, gruesome, and absurd, something that must be negated and eliminated from the world. Thus we now run the risk of vitiating life by eradicating one of its essential characteristics and conditions, suffering. When Nietzsche urges a relearning and even a partial rehabilitation of cruelty, therefore, he is not valorizing petty cruel acts by individuals, as becomes clear in section eleven. He is affirming the necessity of cruelty to “the amazing economy of the preservation of the species, of course an expensive, wasteful (verschwenderischen) and altogether most highly foolish economy” (GS 1). Even more fundamentally, what Nietzsche is urging is a relearning and rehabilitation of suffering, as a crucial, unavoidable quality and requirement of growth and life, as he makes clear when he says that it does

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one good to remember crueler ages precisely because today “suffering must always march forth as first among the arguments against existence, as the worst question mark.” What is essential for Nietzsche is interpreting and giving meaning to suffering, not eliminating it as the ultimate evil of existence. And, again, once one stops regarding suffering as the ultimate evil, one cannot regard cruelty as singularly atrocious; it is this judgment of suffering and so of cruelty that forms the common foundation of pessimism and humanitarianism, despite their radical differences concerning what one can hope for from human existence, and thus of Nietzsche’s intransigent opposition to both. Simon May has offered a thoughtful challenge to the project of “justifying suffering,” arguing that the project of justifying suffering conflicts with true affirmation of life (May 2011b). There are two basic parts of this objection I want to consider here. In the first place, May contends that affirming suffering as a means to another end (e.g., artistic creation) is not actually affirming suffering (May 2011b, 86–88). In the same way, if I affirm the existence of my children on account of the tax credits I receive for them, I am obviously not really affirming their existence at all. In other words, and to return to the seventh section of the Second Essay, if Nietzsche justifies suffering and cruelty because they are necessary to life this seems as likely to diminish our appreciation of life as it is to reconcile us to the necessity of suffering. Even if we can affirm suffering and cruelty because we love life, we must still reconcile ourselves to their necessity, as a means to the end of something we value. Yet when Nietzsche describes suffering as a necessary element or condition of life, he need not be trying to justify suffering as a means to the tax credit of life or even the tax credit of self-overcoming. Rather, if we see suffering as a basic, inherent part of life, rather than a senseless outrage to human dignity (which would entail regarding a dignified or meaningful life as one mostly free of suffering), we may genuinely accept at least some forms of suffering and no longer see them as standing in need of justification or even explanation. Some people, for instance, embrace even tedious and uncomfortable aspects of travel because they see them as part of an experience they value, and many parents enjoy their children’s senses of humor for their own sakes, not as a necessary developmental stage on the way to telling jokes that adults will find amusing. May further notes that the attitude of standing back and considering whether and how suffering can be justified is obviously at odds with true, joyous affirmation of life, at least of the sort to which Nietzsche seems clearly to aspire: “the desire for justification is inconsistent with the spirit of affirmation” (87)—we do not seek to justify something we truly love. I think, however, that this separation between justification and affirmation is an analytic one that is not meant to be an evident part of lived reality. The distinction Nietzsche makes here between suffering and the way ancient humanity

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justified it is one necessarily made much later, once that way of life had passed away. Ancient humanity did not think in terms of this distinction and relation, that suffering was justified only because it was of interest to the gods. These two things rather formed a unity at the core of their approach to life, which they affirmed as this unity (as indeed May sees Nietzsche trying to do in his best moments [May 2011b, 95–99]). 45 This unity must be borne in mind when considering Nietzsche’s explanation of how previous ages have apprehended and justified suffering. “[N]either for the Christian, who interpreted a whole secret machinery of salvation (geheime Heils-Maschinerie) into suffering, nor for the naïve human of ancient times, who understood to interpret all suffering in relation to a spectator or to one who makes suffer, was there any such senseless suffering at all.” Every instant and instance of suffering has meaning in both of these interpretations, in both cases because of divine interest in human beings. The crucial difference between the two interpretations is their relation to morality. The Christian interpretation is obviously governed by morality, while the ancient conception of the gods as friends of cruel spectacles, as interested in the suffering of human beings because suffering is interesting, is largely amoral, and certainly neither presupposes nor promotes any connection between suffering and guilt. To the ancient Greeks, suffering came from the gods because the gods enjoyed seeing humans suffer, not because they judged human beings guilty or sinful (cf. II 23). This portrayal of the origin of the gods contrasts sharply with that given in the First Essay, and even suggests an opposite source and motive for belief in the divine, even in the case of Christianity. Earlier Nietzsche had claimed that the biblical God, at least, began as a means to negate the powerful enemies of the ancient Jews; the invention of God was a necessary lever for the revaluation of noble values (I 7). Nietzsche develops this argument later, maintaining that belief in God is required for the weak and slavish to affirm themselves, and ultimately to believe that their enemies will suffer agonies in hell, thereby compensating themselves (if only in their imaginations) for the suffering and indignity of their actual lives (I 14–15). The gods Nietzsche describes in II 7, on the contrary, are not interested in revenge or in any kind of moralistic punishment, and this includes the Christian God. The pagan gods he describes are not angry or jealous; they simply enjoy the sufferings of human beings as a pleasant spice for their happiness. The humans who believed in these gods, for their part, did not seek to compensate themselves for their sufferings; they did not regard suffering as a loss that needed to be recouped. The entire purpose of their belief in the gods was rather to be able to embrace the life that brought them suffering, to believe it had meaning and was therefore valuable and worth experiencing, and thus to both affirm and mirror the grand, wasteful economy of nature. This affirmative attitude towards suffering is precisely what the slaves Nietzsche describes in the First

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Essay seem incapable of; their God considers suffering every bit as much of an unmitigated evil as they do, and he promises to recompense them for it if they follow the proper moral rules. Both the slaves and the divinity in which they believe negate and condemn suffering and the actual world in which we exist, as well as the powerful who lord it over the slaves (indeed, it seems to me to be one of the essential features of ressentiment that it seeks compensation or reparation for suffering). Given Nietzsche’s emphasis on the different uses to which the same belief can be put, it is worth emphasizing that Nietzsche here mentions the Christian conception of existence as one that gives suffering meaning, as one that is employed to affirm suffering and thus existence. The account of Judaism and Christianity in the First Essay is, in short, not exhaustive of the possibilities of that moral and religious interpretation, nor even of the uses to which it has been put historically. In order to achieve this affirmative stance towards suffering, ancient humanity was compelled to invent gods who would act as witnesses and interested spectators of human suffering. “So that hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering could be abolished from the world and sincerely (ehrlich) negated,” one was “compelled…to invent (genöthigt . . . zu erfinden)” gods and half-divine creatures (Zwischenwesen) who are everywhere and who watch the suffering of humans with interest. The honesty to which Nietzsche refers here consists in creating and believing something that makes suffering meaningful, not in abstaining from lying or fabricating (the word here is ehrlich, “honestly” or “sincerely,” not redlich, the word Nietzsche later uses to describe the honesty or probity bred by Christianity). The beliefs of ancient humanity were determined by what they needed to believe in order to justify existence, or, in another phrase Nietzsche uses here, by “the logic of feeling.” Thus, as in the case of those who create new moral values and then believe in their creations in the First Essay, religious and moral beliefs are the outgrowth of affective states, and serve the interests and needs of those states. Nietzsche adds that today life requires a new “trick (Kunststück)” or invention to justify itself, such as “life as riddle, life as Erkenntnissproblem.” Nietzsche thus indicates that the former, religious interpretations and invention of spiritual beings are no longer effective, even as the passage as a whole indicates that the present-day authority of knowledge which has displaced them has deeper roots and serves deeper needs and purposes, namely those of the logic of feeling, the necessity of justifying life’s suffering in terms that are compelling in the cultural context at hand. Finally, Nietzsche closes the seventh section with a discussion of the invention of free will by the ancient Greek philosophers. After describing Homer’s presentation of the Trojan War and “similar tragic terrors” as “festival plays for the gods,” he continues, “[n]ot differently did the moral philosophers of Greece later conceive of the eyes of the gods looking down on the moral struggles, on the heroism and the self-torture of the virtuous.” Greek

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moral philosophy grew out of Greek tragic poetry and served the same needs, or at least the same basic primal need, the need to justify human suffering by conceiving of it as a spectacle of interest to the gods. The philosophers in some sense made human beings more inward or complex, by stressing the freedom of their will or their “absolute spontaneity in good and in evil,” but this is all done for the sake of life, for the sake of justifying life and its suffering. As with the origin of the gods, we here have an account of the origin of the concept of free will that is completely different from the one offered in the First Essay (though in I 13 Nietzsche is not so much concerned with the origin of that belief as he is with the uses to which it has been put). The purpose of belief in free will is, according to this passage, not to make moral blame possible but to make the world more interesting for the gods, to assure human beings that they are of constant interest to the gods because their actions cannot be known or predicted in advance in accordance with a set of deterministic laws. The free will Nietzsche treats here appears to be the same conceptual apparatus described in the First Essay (and elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work), but here it is not intended or employed for moralistic purposes at all. It rather serves the interests of life; it identifies this world as the world of interest and value, and it has nothing to do with either moral blame or guilt, but only with allowing human beings to believe that they are of interest to the gods. 2.5. NOTES 1. The fact that Nietzsche only here turns to the review of his predecessors (however dismissive and unconventional that review) suggests that the first three sections of the essay have been in a sense a separate and more fundamental discussion than what follows. 2. Here, as elsewhere in Nietzsche’s account, one may question his procedure and occasional leaps of logic. The fact that there were fearful punishments does not mean that early humans were motivated only by fear, any more than the survival of cave paintings in some areas means that all members of those communities had artistic impulses. There may, in other words, have been some in these first communities that felt no temptation to break the law, and despite his assertions about prehistoric “mnemotechnics,” Nietzsche gives us no reason to think that there could not have been prehistoric humans who were conscious of and motivated by pleasure as much as by pain or fear. Nietzsche takes his inquiries in the direction he does not because he is hopelessly illogical but because he is trying to reject or supplant modern liberal social contract theories (cf. II 17), or more positively because he is trying to trace everything to the will to power (and thus ultimately posits the earliest humanity as violent, chaotic, and all but ungovernable). 3. I am here following Nietzsche and suggesting that these were, apparently everywhere, “late” developments in human culture or civilization, but Frithjof Bergmann has argued that profound differences exist between “advanced” systems of morality or law, precisely concerning the relation between punishment and the freedom of the will and thus moral guilt (Bergmann 1988, 32–33). 4. One might question this historical claim. The notion that cruelty would be a strong motive for creditors, and would be prized more highly the lower in the social order one stood, makes sense of Shylock, but this is a very specific—and rare—contingent situation in which a small religious minority was both the only group able to loan money at interest and also

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despised or downtrodden for other reasons. The notion of “participating in a right of the masters” seems largely meaningless or at least unnecessary for the wealthy who would be the creditors in most societies. 5. For a contemporary account of prehistoric debt, see Graeber 2014, 21–72. Interestingly, Graeber thinks that the Second Essay and its analysis of the relation between debt and morality is not meant to be taken seriously (“the premise is insane,” Graeber avows). He rather suggests that Nietzsche “is starting out from ordinary bourgeois assumptions [that economic exchange, and so debt, is the foundation of society] and driving them to a place where they can only shock a bourgeois audience” (78–79). 6. Most commentators miss this crucial point, even those who spend a fair amount discussing the psychology of punishment and related matters in these passages. I point this out not to find fault but to note how adept Nietzsche often is at moving his readers to a secondary or accepting stage of reading, where they are trying to make sense of the implications of his ideas without noticing their often highly questionable fundamental premises. 7. The closest Nietzsche comes to mentioning the family in the Second Essay is a passing reference to the debtor’s wife in II 5, as a piece of property the debtor can pledge for a loan (and even this may have been as much for the sake of the rhyme seinen Leib oder sein Weib as anything else). 8. It is worth stressing again that some kind of family structure would have had to predate even the most basic form of trade. Human infants cannot survive on their own, even with the opportunity to barter. 9. Conway 2007, 66–67, makes the interesting suggestion that these first people were emerging from the morality of mores. Though I tend to place this moment somewhat earlier in Nietzsche’s narrative, Conway’s proposal would make more sense of some of the economic activity Nietzsche describes in this passage. 10. How does one reconcile this assertion that acumen is an expression of pride with Nietzsche’s deprecation of prudence and spiritual and intellectual complexity in general in the First Essay (e.g., I 10; on Scharfsinn, see I 6)? The best answer seems to me to be that once a fairly basic level of intelligence or acumen is reached, no more is necessary, at least not for the nobles, who are distinguished by their political power and so by their emotional spontaneity and openness or candor; for these powerful and simple types, too much acumen, too much attention to utility or advantage, is ignoble. Thus acumen or prudence would have been an outlet for the will to power at a certain fairly early or rude level of civilization, but beyond a certain point it would have been the result of and a tool for weakness, rather than power or strength. 11. It is interesting that Rousseau, of whom Nietzsche is so critical in his later works, has an account of the origins of human pride that is both more sanguinary and probably more convincing or realistic than Nietzsche’s. Rather than trying to posit human pride as the primeval motivation for commerce, and thus hopelessly entangling an assertion of the primacy of pride with an account of early economic activity, Rousseau suggests that humans first felt pride visà-vis other animals when they devised weapons or tools to kill and eat them (Rousseau 1984, 110). Thus, driven by need, humans improvised tools; their resulting ability to kill other animals, as well as their ability to create weapons to do so, inspired the first sense of pride. This seems to me more convincing in both psychological and historical terms than Nietzsche’s account. 12. Cf. HAH I 19; GS 110, 111, 355; BGE 4 and 192; and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s treatment of this theme (1999, 7–12, and chapter 1 as a whole). As is often the case, in The Gay Science, especially in the first two sections cited here, Nietzsche attributes much of this activity to the need or instinct for self-preservation (as does Müller-Lauter’s reading); he tends to interpret life’s activity as aiming primarily at preserving and extending itself. But his basic arguments about the origin and untruth of many of our conceptions of knowledge and logic remain valid here in considering this passage from the Genealogy. 13. On the connection between the development of justice and objectivity, see Elgat 2017, 156–163.

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14. But then, in another apparent zigzag in Nietzsche’s account, the community would exist for the sake of protection or security, not an increase of power; this indeed is the underlying presupposition of II 9. 15. Or so it seems from this line (in light of which one could interpret Nietzsche’s reference to “the community” as a disappointed creditor here as meaning all the other members of the first city, not the legal or political authorities). Nietzsche will quickly explain in II 11 that those ruling the first city in fact administered the punishments and in particular were very intent on controlling and reining in those very instincts of aggression and ressentiment which seem to be driving the punishment of the first lawbreakers here. 16. One might think that the community’s willingness to let its members punish or brutalize a criminal is a sign of its weakness or the simple result of its inability to control the punitive anger of its members, but this passage seems to suggest that the community is more or less in control throughout, and makes something like a conscious decision first to let the general anger be vented upon him and then to restrain that anger. In this case the community would eventually start protecting the transgressor not because it is now strong enough to restrain its members but because it is now strong enough to begin to soften its punishments. 17. “Self-confidence” is the best translation for the German word Nietzsche uses here, Selbstbewusstsein, but it is interesting that his usage suggests that the community, like the sovereign individual, experiences an increase in its power as an increase in consciousness of itself. 18. It should be noted here that the power and self-confidence of a community can decrease while those of the larger community of which it is a part increase, at least in modern, pluralistic societies. Thus, for instance, a religious or ethnic community could become more retrograde and punitive while the secular and cosmopolitan society of which it is a part becomes more powerful, and indeed could do so precisely because of the growing power of the larger secular society. 19. For a fuller analysis of Nietzsche’s comments about justice here and throughout the Genealogy, see Elgat 2017, especially chapters 6 and 7. On justice as a virtue here and in Nietzsche’s work generally, see Cristy 2019. 20. Here and in what follows I am using “retributive justice” and related terms to refer to the specific belief that an unjust person or criminal deserves to suffer in some way as punishment, not the broader sense concerned with any aspect of or motive for punishment. 21. For a well-developed articulation of this view, see Swanton 2011. 22. Here Nietzsche is describing an initial and relatively undeveloped form of ressentiment, which seems almost interchangeable with ordinary revenge. He is not yet considering the “creative ressentiment” that creates entire new value systems, as he does especially in the First Essay (I 10–15). A great deal has been written on this creative, developed form of ressentiment, and specifically on its relation to questions of integrity and self-deception. See Bittner 1994, Reginster 1997, and Poellner 2011 and 2015. 23. At the same time, however, Nietzsche’s apparent praise or rehabilitation of the reactive effects “in respect to the entire biological problem” is strange—isn’t his criticism of ressentiment precisely that, by sparking the slave revolt in morals and the taming of humanity, it has weakened humanity (presumably biologically, as well)? The reactive affects, if they are triumphant, apparently then weaken or undo themselves, for the taming of humanity also tames or slackens its reactive affects. 24. Compare the discussion in II 12 of how purpose and so meaning is imposed on things by more powerful forces. 25. On ressentiment and self-deception see note 20 above. Nietzsche complicates matters here by referring to the “better conscience” of the “aggressive human being, as the stronger, more courageous, nobler,” and by saying that the human being of ressentiment has “the invention of the ‘bad conscience’ on his conscience.” These statements imply that both types know whether and to what degree they are lying, and that both are possessed of something like an innate and universal conscience informing them of this. I think, however, that based on the rest of Nietzsche’s treatment of these questions, this should be taken as a playful or loose usage of these terms, not a serious, integral part of his account of the origin and function of the conscience and human truthfulness.

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26. Again, there is here something of the paradox of the first three sections and of BGE 188, of nature against nature: the law, a partial restriction of the force of life, is engendered by “the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive”—spontaneity and aggression produce repression and control. 27. I therefore disagree with Robert Guay’s claims that the cruelty and violence in these early communities were enacted only by the nobles, that they were only for the sake of establishing and reinforcing noble values (though they surely did serve this end, they were also for the sake of making the community as a whole stronger), and that it is only from the imposition of this violent, cruel rule of the nobles that ressentiment was born (as we have seen, it already existed and indeed raged indiscriminately; it was rather the task of the nobles or the strong and powerful to rein it in and subdue it), though Guay is clearly right that the emergence of values born of ressentiment marks a major new stage in human moral evolution. Guay 2006, 358–359. 28. This is also indicated by Nietzsche’s speaking of law declaring what is right and wrong “in its eyes”; the law itself expresses a particular, embodied perspective. 29. This may also help to explain Nietzsche’s praise of objectivity and justice in this section; he writes that when, even under the pressure of personal attack and insult, “the exalted and clear objectivity, as penetrating as it is mild, of the just, the judging eye is not clouded, well, that is a piece of perfection and highest mastery on earth.” The objectivity Nietzsche lauds here requires mastery over the affects or passions; it is the product of immense spiritual tension, and thus is the opposite of the “castration of the intellect,” the absence or extirpation of the affects, that Nietzsche decries in III 12. Being just, as Nietzsche notes, “is always a positive attitude”; it is not simply coldness or indifference. In other words, as long as objectivity is tied to justice it is always in the service of a particular attitude towards the world or of a particular constellation of affects, and thus is still animated by passion. In this case objectivity does not attempt to ascend to the level of generality and abstractness, to escape from the particular affects and desires informing the justice which Nietzsche praises, as more ascetic and metaphysical understandings of justice and objectivity demand. 30. I also think Ridley is mistaken to suggest that the legal channelling and regulation of ressentiment “leaves the basic direction of ressentiment unaltered—it is still aimed outward, at the hostile external world and the injurious deeds it contains” (53). Indeed it is, but now both its focus and intensity are controlled in a way that greatly diminishes the threat it poses to the community and its power or stability. 31. See the discussion in Williams 1994, especially 243–245. 32. It is hard to know what to make of this sudden appeal to biology as a source of normative standards, especially since, as Nietzsche has made clear beginning in the preface to the Genealogy, modern Europe is embracing precisely the attitude towards law and justice that Nietzsche condemns here as “a principle hostile to life.” Whatever it means for Nietzsche to appeal to biology as a normative standard, it does not appear to mean that biology or physical nature can guarantee certain developments or outcomes. At the same time, however, I do not think that this contradicts or undercuts Nietzsche’s claim about the character of life; life continues to have this character, it is just diminished and enervated by the ascendancy of a sovereign and universal legal order. 33. For a good discussion of this passage see Hatab 2008, 96 (cf. also 262–264). In a nutshell, Hatab notes that “[l]egal provisions are ‘partial restrictions’ of natural forces of power, yet not on this account something ‘other’ or even ‘lesser’ than natural power . . . legal culture adds dimensions of power that nature alone does not exhibit” (96). 34. The opposition Nietzsche presents here is perhaps surprising: law exists either as an instrument or means of struggle, or as a means to end all struggle. This may indicate how deeply Nietzsche is locked into the presuppositions and parameters of modern thought: the only alternative to his view that he can see is law as the cessation of all struggle or violence. He does not seem to consider a notion of law as creating a justice that is something other than just the absence of violence, law leading humans to their proper end, virtue, etc. 35. It seems to me unlikely that one can defend retributive justice on a purely natural basis, i.e., without an eventual appeal to the supernatural, but in any case one can certainly not do so on the basis of nature or reality as Nietzsche presents it at the end of II 11.

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36. Which means that one may indeed desire or value security or safety, but at bottom only as an experience of power (which may be very intense in some cases, for instance when one first lives in society and enjoys its protections). 37. There is also Nietzsche’s interpretation of punishment as offering the injured party a kind of pleasure to balance and moderate their anger. Although it is probably not necessary that the exchange proposed by punishment be between two forms of the experience of power—in other words, that cruelty be able to counterbalance or placate anger because it offers an equivalent quantity of the same pleasure that has been lost—this certainly is the simplest explanation for the character of early punishment as Nietzsche describes it. 38. It is interesting to note the parallel and the difference between Plato and Nietzsche on this point. Both think that retributive justice is an imperfect grasping towards something higher and fuller—for Plato, a coherent account of justice (philosophy), for Nietzsche, an active, affirmative experience of the will to power. 39. Rex Welshon draws attention to Nietzsche’s opposition to mechanistic notions of quantity (Welshon 2015, 123–125), but this does not stop Nietzsche from accepting a more dynamic notion of quantity and quantification, as Welshon himself notes (137–138; cf. Müller-Lauter 1999, 133–134). Certainly in the eleventh section Nietzsche speaks in plainly quantitative terms of the will of life to build “greater units of power (grössere Macht-Einheiten).” 40. See the work of Lawrence Hatab. Another successful example of this basic approach is Cristoph Cox’s Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (Cox 1999). 41. Rosen 1995, 246; see more generally the Conclusion as a whole and passim. 42. Simon May notes that “with Nietzsche there is not even an attempt to produce a systematic safety net against cruelty, especially if one judges oneself to be a ‘higher’ type of person with life-enhancing pursuits—and, to this extent, his philosophy licenses the atrocities of a Hitler even though, by his personal table of values, he excoriates anti-Semitism and virulent nationalism” (May 1999, 132). May also notes, in an observation consonant with Rosen’s, that Nietzsche’s dismissal of a sovereign order of justice, along with his typically modern embrace of extreme, apolitical individualism, leaves him with no reason to think the weak and vengeful will not (or indeed should not) destroy the strong. “Nietzsche’s philosophy, in lacking a politics that could support his own conception of life-enhancement, relies on a romantic hope that the highest man must be possible, and that his asphyxiation by the vulgar is not inevitable” (ibid., 131). For further reflections on how Nietzsche’s lack of concrete political proposals undermines his hopes of cultural transformation, see Gillespie 2009, 35–36. 43. Traveling a rather different route than Rosen, John Richardson has recently arrived at a broadly similar conclusion, though for Richardson Nietzsche is basically aware of the necessity of dropping his normative judgments and concerns: he argues that Nietzsche’s “ultimate allegiance is to the monism [the view that one should affirm everything because everything is good, since everything is life and all life is wholly good], and the dualist excoriations of his opponents as ‘anti-life’ were recognized, in the back of his mind, as rhetorical and polemical. He knew that ‘this too is life—this too is on behalf of life.’ He regularly reminds himself that even sickness, and the ascetic ideal, and nihilism, arise and spread because they ‘serve life.’ At the individual level, they are a route to personal power. So too for societies or peoples. And at the species level they have all helped us humans get through the trauma of ‘domestication’ into cities—and agency” (Richardson 2015, 118). On the tension between affirmation and negation in Nietzsche, see also Staten 1990, especially 10–15, and May 2011b. 44. This, it seems to me, is why John Updike’s “Dog’s Death” is so poignant, because the reader sees that the puppy’s valiant but uncomprehending attempts to adhere to her training in the face of mortal injury and suffering were pointless. The innocent puppy ascribes an almost cosmic significance to these rules that they obviously lack, just as humans have done for millennia with moral codes and beliefs now seen as vain and senseless, irrational fabrications that only increased the essentially meaningless suffering of humanity. See Updike 1993, 51–52. 45. On these questions see also Janaway 2017.

Chapter Three

Philosophy and Morality in the World as Will to Power Sections 12–15

The eleventh section ends with Nietzsche’s powerful and compressed articulation of his views on justice, power, and the will of life; the following sections in some ways develop those comments and in others mark a transition to the second part of the Second Essay, where Nietzsche finally turns to a sustained discussion of the origin and development of guilt and the bad conscience. Section twelve gives a fuller discussion of the basic principle Nietzsche enunciates at the end of section eleven, and section thirteen applies that discussion to the specific question of punishment. This application opens the way for the contention on which the Second Essay, perhaps unexpectedly, actually hinges, Nietzsche’s claim that punishment in fact does nothing to produce or inspire guilt in the one punished, as he argues in sections fourteen and fifteen. This chapter first discusses what Nietzsche says in section twelve about the emergence, development, and organization of things in the organic world and so in history, then examines the consequences of his views for the subject of (at least) the previous eight sections, punishment. In expounding his ideas Nietzsche raises several questions about how exactly to understand his broader theoretical claims here, especially in section twelve. Nietzsche’s treatment of morality, historical change, and the will to power in II 12 raise two major questions, what this treatment means for the critical analysis of morality, and specifically whether it makes such analysis impossible, and how Nietzsche grounds his own thought if all interpretations of the world are ultimately simply a function of the will to power. 83

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I do not, however, say much on the subject of Nietzsche’s genealogical method. In keeping with the custom of much academic commentary on Nietzsche (but not Nietzsche’s own custom), I do frequently use the word “genealogy” to refer to his historical investigations of morality, especially in section four below. The major significance of these passages, however, particularly the twelfth section, is not so much the arrival or announcement of a new method of “genealogy” (a word Nietzsche does not even use here), but the account of history and evolution in terms of the will to power. The emphasis on Nietzsche’s “genealogy” therefore seems to me somewhat overblown: from his earliest writings (The Birth of Tragedy and even before) Nietzsche is interested in discovering the origins of morality and other things he values (e.g., tragedy or philosophy), and of understanding those origins both in terms of specific historical precipitants and metaphysical or causal principles. To the extent that Nietzsche practices a “genealogical method,” and to the extent that such a method is anything other than a natural history of morals, he does so throughout his work—the Genealogy marks neither a radical departure from his previous work (indeed, one can barely make sense of what he says about genealogy in this book without appealing to his previous work) nor a new beginning or methodological anchor (there is no obvious “genealogical method” informing or defining his later work in contradistinction to his earlier writings). 1 3.1. LIFE, HISTORY, AND THE WILL TO POWER: FLUID MEANINGS, FLUID FORMS Nietzsche begins the twelfth section by echoing the beginning of the eleventh section (Hier ein ablehnendes Wort gegen [11] . . . Hier noch ein Wort über Ursprung und Zweck der Strafe [12]), suggesting that the twelfth section is somehow a restatement or development of the eleventh. Most obviously, the twelfth section provides an example of the claim that Nietzsche makes at the end of the eleventh section. The history of punishment shows that it has been used and given a meaning by a series of more powerful forces, and thus that the import or aim of punishment, as well as the understanding of justice it presupposes, do not exist independently of a particular system of purposes. The various meanings punishment has had through history illustrate the character of existence as Nietzsche describes it at the end of section eleven, showing in particular that there is no sovereign or transcendent justice. Here in section twelve Nietzsche offers the theoretical underpinning not only of his rejection of such a conception of justice and law, but also of his account of how a political entity, as it grows in power, takes up both the practice of punishment and the individual interests and passions that swirl around it, reconstituting and redirecting both. The twelfth section, in short, explains

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both Nietzsche’s rejection of sovereign and universal notions of justice and his account of historical development. “Here still a word on the origin (Ursprung) and purpose (Zweck) of punishment—two problems, which fall or should fall apart from one another (die auseinander fallen oder fallen sollten): unfortunately one usually throws them together into one (leider wirft man sie gewöhnlich in Eins).” Nietzsche’s formulation suggests that it is only due to a willful misinterpretation that this fairly self-evident fact is not seen; among those who make this mistake are the previous genealogists of morals, who here as always proceed (treiben) naïvely. They unsuspectingly find some purpose for punishment, such as revenge or deterrence, and place it at the beginning as the cause of the origin of punishment. Nietzsche’s critique here is thus like his critique at the beginning of the First Essay; there the previous genealogists had assumed that the same connotation had always attached to the relatively stable but vacuous term “good,” while here they assume that punishment, like the value judgment “good,” has always had the same meaning, and indeed was invented only in order to serve or express that meaning. Nietzsche’s dismissal of earlier genealogists of morals here is thus another variation on the theme of their lack of the historical sense. Note, however, that Nietzsche is in no way arguing that an earlier meaning of either punishment or the value judgment “good” continues to determine its current meaning or function in some accidental, senseless, and residual manner, as the English psychologists had argued in the case of the word “good” (I 1; cf. 3.3 below). It is tempting simply to quote Nietzsche at length here, as he sets forth some of his most fundamental ideas with incomparable verve and precision. But that is unnecessary, as Nietzsche’s meaning is clear enough and this passage has been discussed well in other commentaries (see, e.g., Hatab 2008, 96–98, Conway 2007, 72–74). In this section, therefore, I will simply give a brief discussion and illustration of some of the chief points in the argument of the twelfth section. Nietzsche’s basic thesis insists, in contrast to both the English psychologists and the ruling democratic instinct he will shortly criticize, that human life, especially in its development or evolution, is not utterly random and senseless, the result of a thoroughly mindless and mechanistic process. The evolution of something in the organic world, and thus the process whereby it becomes severed completely from its original purpose or use, is driven by a struggle for power, but this struggle is a struggle of interpretations; power in the organic world consists of or operates through interpretations. Meaning and interpretation are simply a function of the will to power, but that is also to say that the will to power essentially expresses itself through creating meaning and interpretations. Nietzsche goes on to stress that the present utility of something (a “physiological organ . . . also a legal institution, a societal custom, a political

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practice, a form in art or in religious cults”) tells us nothing about its emergence, “however uncomfortable and unpleasant this may sound to older ears—for one had always believed to grasp in the demonstrable purpose, in the utility of a thing, a form, an institution also the reason for its emergence (Entstehungsgrund), the eye being made to see, the hand being made to grasp.” 2 Thus so many religious forms and practices were taken up and given a completely different meaning and purpose by Christianity as it spread; one can also think of how the same musical instruments have been employed in different types of music, each of which itself has a different significance in different historical or cultural fields. Language furnishes another example of Nietzsche’s argument, one all the more apt given his emphasis on meaning and interpretation in this process. Language has not been devised by human beings in order to represent the physical or metaphysical world accurately, nor to allow them to exercise an inborn capacity for reason or for philosophic or religious speculation. 3 There is, in short, no stable, universal meaning or purpose for human language. Individual languages are continually growing and changing, adopting new words from other languages, coining new words and phrases, inventing words to describe new realities (inventions, social and artistic phenomena, etc.), even meshing with another language, especially that of an invader; meanwhile its political meaning may change drastically (e.g., the native language of a colonized people), different pronunciations come to have different meanings (e.g., as indicators of class or regional origin or ethnic or national membership) which are themselves ever changing (e.g., in the interplay between ethnicity and class), feeding into and being shaped in turn by the larger, fluid social and political world. Nietzsche expounds his argument, making explicit mention of the will to power. But all purposes, all utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master over something of lesser power and has stamped upon it the meaning (Sinn) of a function; and the whole history of a “thing,” an organ, a practice can in this way be a continual sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations, whose causes do not even need to be connected to each other, but rather may follow after and replace one another purely accidentally. (GM II 12)

The many separate causes that led to the creation of modern Germany, for instance, or to the emergence of homo sapiens as a species, have no necessary connection, even if they did lead to a single result in each case. This then also explains Nietzsche’s confusing and seemingly contradictory presentation of the history of punishment thus far in the Genealogy, his strange procedure of asserting various and obviously incompatible or contradictory purposes, motives, and origins for punishment. 4 He was representing the various uses to which punishment had been put, often at the same time, by different forces or perspectives throughout its history (e.g., vengeful credi-

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tors against powerful rulers); his seemingly jumbled hodgepodge of origins and meanings in fact simply reflected the manifold and dappled history of punishment—though this does not, of course, entail either evaluative or theoretical relativism. The will to power serves to ground and orient both Nietzsche’s value judgments and his theoretical account of the world, history, psychology, and so forth. Nietzsche continues by giving an especially brilliant and compelling summary of his argument. [The] “evolution” (“Entwicklung”) of a thing, a practice, an organ is accordingly not in the least its progressus towards a goal, still less a logical and shortest progressus, achieved with the smallest expenditure of force and cost—but rather a succession of more or less profound, more or less independent processes of overpowering (Überwältigungsprozessen) playing themselves out, together with the resistances employed against them each time, the attempted transformations of form (Form-Verwandlungen) for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the “meaning” (der “Sinn”) is more so. (GM II 12)

Again we see that, for Nietzsche, the organic process is wasteful, violent, indifferent, squandering. 5 It has no ordained end or goal, and its movement is neither logical nor efficient nor reasonable. The immediate causes shaping the history of something may come from completely outside its previous path of evolution and may bear no logical relation to the other causes spurring and directing its development; indeed they may even be directly opposed to them. The development of religious doctrine, for instance, is driven not only internally by doctrinal tensions or debates between different sects or major theological figures but from outside pressures from political and economic forces, the pressures of other religions (or the rise of schisms within the religion in question), social trends, attempts to convert new peoples. The university is another example—founded by the Church, eventually taken over or reshaped to serve national, scientific, and other secular (but by no means harmonious or homogenous) ends, it has always been and continues to be shaped both by intellectual and ideological conflicts within the university itself and by those outside of it, as well as by the material interests which sustain and enhance it (governments, corporations, etc.). “The form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ is more so.” This sentence is an especially compressed but cogent critique of Platonism. Nietzsche rejects Platonism not so much because the “form,” the eidos or the idea, has been shown by the fossil record and modern historiography to be fluid and unstable (although it has), but because the meaning which attaches to the form is even more fluid and unstable. The emphasis of philosophy needs to shift from a realm of forms or ideas that somehow determine the meaning of particular, concrete forms to the act of human interpretation through which meaning is assigned to these forms (which themselves stand in the stream of

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history and are constantly, though less dramatically, being reshaped by that stream). More generally, the picture of human evolution with which Nietzsche wants to present us is clear: although it is pervaded and driven by wills to power, and so fundamentally by the will to power as the only observable quality, and is thus not simply mechanistic or senseless, it is purely accidental and illogical. Neither history, nature, nor God made this evolution necessary or assured, in either its form or its end-point, and nothing except the collapse of life in humanity (i.e., the last man) could make its present form permanent. As life itself says to Zarathustra, “That I must be struggle and a becoming and an end (Zweck) and an opposition to ends—alas, whoever has guessed my will should also guess on what crooked paths it must proceed” (Z II 12). Nietzsche next applies his argument to individual organisms, and in doing so specifies that the conception he is advancing entails struggle and even death, the sacrificing of the less powerful to the more powerful, the growth and expansion of the latter at the expense of the former. This takes place even within individual organisms, “for our organism is an oligarchy” (denn unser Organismus ist oligarchisch eingerichtet [II 1]). 6 The same point can be applied to political or social bodies as well as to biological ones, whether to the various aristocratic classes dotted across Europe during the Middle Ages or to the coalition comprising a contemporary political party. In this passage Nietzsche also emphasizes that his teaching on life and the will to power is in no way democratic, although it may at first sound like a radically democratic or socialist doctrine, at least insofar as it destabilizes some of the structures which conservative thought takes as given and immutable (cf. Z II 7). Indeed, Nietzsche goes so far as to write that “humanity as a mass sacrificed for the thriving of a single stronger human species—that would be an advance” (one thinks, of course, of the Übermensch and of the terrible wars and suffering Nietzsche says will be necessary to achieve him). A process this senseless, destructive, and chaotic obviously has no place for a notion of the sanctity of the individual. Nietzsche closes by specifically identifying and rebuking the democratic instinct and its hatred of anything that “rules and wants to rule,” which would rather make do with “the absolute accidental character (Zufälligkeit), indeed the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than with the theory of a power-will (Macht-Willens) playing itself out in all events”; this instinct would rather believe that life is stupid and pointless than admit that there may be a basic impulse to rule and establish hierarchies. The irony, of course, is that this democratic instinct itself seeks power and dominance, and indeed has established its mastery over contemporary intellectual and spiritual life, including even physiology and the doctrine of life. In doing so it foregrounds “adaptation,” a purely reactive and accidental operation, ignoring life’s will to power, the priority of the

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“spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, newly-interpreting, newly-directing and shaping forces.” 7 Nietzsche’s positive vision here centers on the will to power as a form of teleology without permanent forms and therefore without permanent ends or final causes, but above all without the good. The temporary forms that do exist—be they organs, animals, or species, individuals, classes, or nations— must be understood in terms of the will, and so in terms of end-directed activity. But the end is power, even at the price of self-destruction, never the good. 3.2. PUNISHMENT AND MORALITY In section twelve Nietzsche had given his teaching the most sharply paradoxical expression possible: “Thus one also conceived of punishing as invented to punish.” In section thirteen he discusses in some detail the various meanings or purposes punishment has borne throughout history, and thus illustrates the argument of II 12 using the example of punishment. Nietzsche begins by returning to the distinction between two aspects of punishment: “on the one hand the relatively permanent in it, the practice, the act, the ‘drama,’ a certain strict sequence of procedures, on the other the fluid in it, the meaning (Sinn), the purpose (Zweck), the expectation tied up with the execution of such procedures.” 8 The former, the procedure, is older than its meaning or use as punishment; the meaning “is projected and interpreted into the procedure (which has long existed but been employed in another sense).” Nietzsche soon develops a very radical consequence of this point: As for that other element in punishment, the fluid element, its “meaning,” in a very late condition of culture (for example in present-day Europe) the concept “punishment” in fact no longer represents one meaning, but a whole synthesis of “meanings”: the previous history of punishment overall, the history of its employment for the most diverse purposes, crystalizes at last into a sort (Art) of unity, which is hard to dissolve, hard to analyze and, what one must emphasize, totally and utterly undefinable. (It is today impossible to say for certain why people are really punished: all concepts in which an entire semiotic process is concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history can be defined [definirbar ist nur Das, was keine Geschichte hat].) (GM II 13)

At an earlier stage of development, on the other hand, the “synthesis of ‘meaning’” still appears as both more soluble and more changeable, and one can see the individual elements of the synthesis alter their valence (Wertigkeit) and reorder themselves at different times, with certain elements at times dominating and even eclipsing the others. In the fourteenth section Nietzsche springs deftly from the astonishing and brilliantly stated argument of the previous two sections to an equally

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astonishing and brilliantly argued thesis—that punishment, for all the other meanings and purposes it has, does not elicit feelings of guilt. Punishment does nothing of the kind, Nietzsche insists, both today and throughout history, especially during the earliest periods of human social or political life. After closing the thirteenth section with a diverse but “certainly not complete” list of uses to which punishment has been put, Nietzsche continues into section fourteen by noting that, given all the utilities with which punishment has been “overloaded,” one is permitted to deduct a “supposed utility from it.” “Punishment is supposed to (soll) have the value of awakening the feeling of guilt in the guilty one, one seeks in it the actual instrumentum of that psychic (seelischen) reaction which is called ‘bad conscience,’ ‘conscience bites.’” In thinking this, however, one drastically misunderstands reality and psychology even today, and much more so in the case of prehistory; one does not find the “gnawing worm” of the bad conscience in prisons, “all conscientious (gewissenhaften) observers” agree on that, in many cases reluctantly. Nietzsche then explains the actual results of punishment in superbly compressed and precise prose: “Generally speaking, punishment makes hard and cold; it concentrates; is sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the powers of resistance. If it does happen that it breaks one’s energy and brings about a miserable prostration and self-abasement, such a result is certainly even less pleasant than the usual effect of punishment, which is characterized by a dry, gloomy seriousness.” 9 Nietzsche concludes the fourteenth section by arguing that even those judging and punishing the primitive criminals did not think of them as “guilty” in any morally significant sense, just as the criminals themselves suffered no “inward pain” but merely regarded punishment as “a terrible natural event (Naturereignisses)”; the earliest humans on both sides of the law had a completely amoral view of crime and punishment. Nietzsche develops this view in section fifteen, further arguing that primitive, pre-moral humans felt no sense of guilt when punished. Nietzsche’s basic contention is that the violence of punishment does nothing to make the criminal feel guilt or indeed to educe any moral experience or development at all; on the contrary, punishment only makes a criminal a better criminal, by making him more prudent and careful. “Without question we must seek the real effect of punishment above all in a heightening of prudence (Klugheit), in a lengthening of memory, in a will henceforth to go to work more carefully, more mistrustfully, more secretly, in the insight that one is once-and-for-all too weak for many things, in a type of improvement of self-criticism.” As the mention of memory makes clear, the type of punishment carried out by the earliest political community, which aims at breeding a memory in its members, may create people who prudently remember to obey a few laws, but they feel no more guilt about their basic instincts or desires than do animals

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who have been tamed by punishment. Punishment, in short, does nothing to begin producing genuinely moral behavior, reflection, or self-criticism. 3.3. GENEALOGY AND THE UNITY OF MORAL INTERPRETATIONS Nietzsche’s coruscating argument that punishment today represents a whole synthesis of meanings that cannot be disentangled, and thus that there is no single purpose or sense for punishment, explains why debates over the purpose of punishment are endless—because they are by their nature insoluble. It does, however, also raise questions about Nietzsche’s attempted critiques of morality. If it is now impossible to discern a definite or cohesive meaning for punishment, much less to change that meaning, is this true of morality as well? After all, one may expect that morality is a much more complicated phenomenon than punishment; indeed, it is the phenomenon or set of phenomena that gives punishment its manifold and conflicting meaning. Yet if there can be no real meaning for punishment because it is overladen with so many previous meanings, can there be any “meaning” for morality at all? Or is all morality simply a motley patchwork of previous interpretations and purposes that have somehow lived on in a more or less distinct but hopelessly muddled set of beliefs? Consider two statements, each making the same basic point in a different idiom. “One can’t give a ‘definition’ of Christianity if one means by that an account of a purported essential meaning (or purpose or function) which is invariably characteristic of Christianity” (Geuss 1999, 13). “[I]f the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (Foucault 1984, 78). There is obviously something correct in these statements, but how far should we take them? Can one in fact identify a clear and intelligible form of morality, now or at any point in recorded history? Or has Nietzsche rather genealogized himself out of business? One can identify distinct and coherent forms of morality, and Nietzsche is still in business, because in Nietzsche’s view morality is, at least ideally, pure meaning or interpretation; it is one of the powerful, interpreting forces that take up individual forms or practices, like punishment, and give them new shape, direction, and above all meaning. The purpose of a form, practice, or procedure flows from the meaning: “[a]ll purposes, all utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master over something of lesser power and stamped upon it the meaning (Sinn) of a function” (II 12). Hence the confusion of purposes that attaches to punishment is a sign that, as a practice or

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procedure, it has been employed and so given meaning by a series of different moralities or other interpretive systems. In the case of punishment, the meaning it has been given necessarily implies a larger moral picture; punishment has a different function or meaning depending on the view of human beings and human capacities upon which it is predicated. Even if, for instance, one understands punishment as existing solely for the sake of retribution, the exact meaning and purpose of retribution, and thus of punishment, will still vary greatly depending on whether or not one believes the criminal deserves punishment because he chose to commit the crime, or indeed on whether or not one believes the criminal has free will. And, of course, punishment is even more dependent on a larger moral context for its meaning if one understands it as aiming at “reformation,” for the very form to which punishment is trying to return the criminal exists only in that context. The form or procedure of punishment may not change much from one moral perspective to another, but its meaning and purpose will vary greatly, and this can only be the case if individual moralities are sense-imparting forces constituted by specific centers of power and definite hierarchical relations between concepts and values within that morality, a configuration that makes its interpretive power possible (which means, among other things, that it must attain to at least a minimum level of logical coherence). This is true even granted that the origins and development of every morality are contingent and disjointed, and even if particular instances of morality are always unstable and changing, either increasing or decreasing in their power and reach. To interpret and give meaning, moralities must be ordered like all healthy organic things as Nietzsche describes them in II 12, but they are indeed among these organic things that produce their own interpretations. For all Nietzsche’s emphasis on the discontinuities and variations in Christian teaching and morality over the years (to take probably the most important example for Nietzsche), and the largely accidental or extraneous origins of these variations (e.g., the way Catholic doctrine was transformed to serve the purposes of the Counter-Reformation), he does seem clearly to think that there is an underlying and animating unitary essence of Christian or Christian-Platonic morality and intellectual valuation. Nietzsche’s analysis and critique of contemporary nihilism as the inevitable result of Christian morality seems to rely decisively, indeed entirely, on such an abiding fundamental unity. 10 Obviously, this is not to claim that such a unity is of supernatural or metaphysical origin, that it is, in Foucault’s terms, somehow an “immobile form” that precedes “the external world of accident and succession” (Foucault 1984, 78). It is simply to say that the Christian-Platonic system of moral and intellectual valuations is not a mere hash of unrelated forms but has an essential unity or core. This does not mean that it has an essential or unvarying purpose or function (on this Geuss is correct): Nietzsche is clear that the world-denying character of Christianity can be an expression of or

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means to great strength and power, and not just a means of conserving what little strength and life one has (BGE 60, 51, 46). But the fundamentals of Christianity (or of Judeo-Christianity) remain the same. It is, in short, a mistake to assimilate Nietzsche’s treatment of morality too much to his treatment of punishment. 11 The problems one has with determining the meaning of punishment are due to its being a form or practice, and thus inherently meaningless, rather than an interpretation; meanings or interpretations themselves are, on Nietzsche’s view, (potentially) consistent and comprehensible on their own terms. Of course, particular moralities as they exist in historical practice may be logically scrambled in some way or another, may be amalgams of two or more distinct and even opposed moralities, or any number of other things that mean they are not perfectly consistent. Furthermore, Nietzsche’s own emphasis on unavowed and unconscious purposes means that the interpretations motivating people will not always be apparent to those individuals or nations. They may be masked by relatively superficial and false interpretations, for instance those contemporary Germans give of themselves (BGE 244); though it may also be the case, as Nietzsche himself often stresses, that there is more than one morality active and governing us today (e.g., GM I 16; BGE 215, 244, 260, beginning; CW, Epilogue). 12 But the crucial point is that even these unacknowledged or undetected values still possess force as meanings, as living, willing, interpreting forces (like unconscious drives), not simply as mindless historical remainders (as the “English psychologists” and others would have it). When one learns of or detects their influence, one experiences a shock of recognition, an awareness that this is, indeed, what has been motivating one, not a sense of embarrassment or confusion that something so obviously irrational and at cross-purposes with one’s avowed aims should really have been molding and directing one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions without one’s knowledge. What does it mean, in concrete terms, for morality to be an active, interpreting meaning rather than an inert, inherently senseless form? Let us take as an example the basic practices and mental habits that make up what we call modesty or humility. They are largely the same whether they are employed as a path to God by Christians or as a path to worldly success by the bourgeoisie (as counseled and exemplified, for instance, by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography). 13 Yet this basic disposition or set of practices, the form of humility, can change its meaning and even in some way its form without becoming multivalent in the same way that punishment is for Nietzsche. Humility has meant very different things and had very different values in Roman, Christian, and modern liberal moralities, and even been constituted or defined to some extent by different acts, attitudes, and so forth (“[t]he form is fluid, but the ‘meaning’ is more so”), but its present meaning is very much the meaning it has solely in the presently reigning morality, not

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a farrago of meanings and purposes it has had throughout its history. Nietzsche would not claim that humility is a virtue in liberal, bourgeois morality because of the lingering but forgotten influence of Christianity (one sees similar virtues promoted in moralities with similar aims or ideals but that have no relation to Christianity), any more than he would suggest that chastity was displaced as a virtue in recent liberal morality because ancient value judgments had somehow perdured in Christian morality and society without anyone’s knowledge and suddenly reasserted themselves. To put the same point somewhat differently, one can give a definition of humility (or courage, etc.), even though it has quite a long history. The same is true of individual beliefs. The belief in free will, for instance, has remained mostly stable in its basics but has been put to very different uses, according to Nietzsche, in ancient Greek and Christian moralities (as we saw in 2.4). One could make the same argument using the examples of guilt or, indeed, the conscience itself, both of which are affective-intellectual practices that can be given widely different content and direction by diverse moralities. None of this, however, entails that these individual moralities themselves do not have clear and relatively stable meanings (which is not, of course, to suggest that a stable meaning in any way ensures or even promotes the continued existence of the morality in question). Clearly this does not mean that it is somehow impossible for an individual or an institution to be motivated by two or more different moralities at once, and thus to practice, say, both liberal modesty and Christian humility at the same time, and perhaps even to be unable himself to say which he is practicing or in what measure he is trying to practice each. But this is, again, because Christian morality has not been completely obliterated or overwritten by liberal morality, so that it continues to animate individuals and other entities (churches, universities, charities, etc.) even in a predominantly liberal, secular society, not because Christian morality somehow continues to be present in liberal morality itself, though without anyone being able to perceive or experience this. 14 Two moralities can exist side-by-side and both be active or influential, but this is because each still exerts power over the moral, social, and political world, not because one cannot separate the two, or say clearly which morality is actually being practiced. Against those who prefer a senseless and absolutely accidental world to one ruled and animated by the will to power, Nietzsche denies that a value judgment or moral interpretation comes into being and then travels through history continuing to dominate and structure people’s thinking and affective attitudes simply through habit, forgetfulness, inertia, or any of the other things that dictate the English psychologists’ thinking about the history of morality (I 1–2). We can expand on Nietzsche’s relatively terse account by distinguishing between forms, meanings, and composites of form and meaning, though Nietzsche speaks only of the first two. Using the example of punishment, he

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distinguishes between “on the one hand, that in it which is relatively enduring, the custom, the act, the ‘drama,’ a certain strict sequence of procedures; on the other, that in it which is fluid, the meaning, the purpose, the expectation associated with the performance of such procedures” (II 13). There are, however, many things in the human moral and social world that fall between pure procedure and pure meaning, so we must extrapolate from Nietzsche’s relatively skeletal comments. In the first place we have a form, a particular procedure used for punishment, for instance. The procedure or form is relatively stable (though it can and will change over time), but it is given its meaning by the interpretive or sense-making system of morality that employs it. The meaning or significance given to the procedure by morality will be still more fluid, as morality itself changes through the invasion and more or less successful incorporation of new wills, i.e., new interpretations and meanings. Much of what we recognize in the moral world are combinations of form and meaning. The conscience, for instance, is recognizable as a form, though it is more a capacity or habit than “a certain strict sequence of procedures.” At the same time, however, and unlike pure forms or procedures, the conscience requires some sense or meaning to operate at all, even if that sense is radically contingent (on culture, history, etc.). There are various other cultural-mental capacities that have this same general character, such as a sense of humor or feelings of sympathy or romantic love. Various virtues also fall into this composite category. We have already discussed modesty or humility; physical courage is another virtue that retains a certain obvious form and, to some extent, meaning. Yet the larger significance of courage, as well as how it fits into an overarching system of morality, will change based on the meaning that is given to it by the governing morality or religion. The acts that constitute physical courage will always be roughly the same, but the sense and value of those acts will depend on the morality that assigns them meaning. Finally, beliefs can also be such mixtures of form and meaning. Consider, for instance, the belief that the criminal deserves to suffer because he chose to do wrong. This basic proposition will have the same rough form everywhere it is believed, but the real sense and power of that belief, especially as a spur to action, comes from the content given to each crucial word in the proposition—“criminal,” “deserves,” “suffer,” “chose,” “wrong.” And the content or significance of these words is given by the ruling, encompassing morality, and is again subject to change even if the proposition itself remains the same and continues to be affirmed by adherents of the new or altered morality. At the highest level, so to speak, is morality or religion considered as ideal meaning or interpretive power, for instance Christianity or modern liberal morality. They may have originally taken shape as haphazard and

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piecemeal constructions, and they are fluid over longer stretches of time, but (at least in principle) coherent as meaning. They are what interpret and give sense and direction to both intellectual-affective powers like the conscience and pure procedures like punishment. To sum up and recapitulate, then, there is a clear difference between the meaning, purpose, or interpretation of a morality, and that attaching to a form or practice like punishment. The final and perhaps decisive sign that there is such a difference in Nietzsche’s mind is his continued interest in the history and indeed present meaning and possibilities for morality. If morality were simply an undefinable tangle, as punishment is for Nietzsche, there would seem to be no point to his genealogical inquiries or his attempts to assess the meaning and value of contemporary morality, apparently with a view to transforming it (Nietzsche simply drops the topic of punishment after declaring that its present meaning cannot be defined). 3.4. THE WILL TO POWER, CONSCIENCE, AND NIETZSCHE’S FOUNDATIONS The centrality of the will to power to all life, and especially to all interpretation, raises a supremely important question about Nietzsche’s thought: if all interpretations flow from or serve the will to power, how and for whom can Nietzsche’s philosophy be true? 15 This is a question that continues to plague commentary on Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, and it can be phrased in different ways. In the first place, are Nietzsche’s critical historical or genealogical accounts of morality meant to be (at least in principle) convincing to adherents of the beliefs being criticized, or are they rather only of interest to Nietzsche and those who already share his evaluative and/or theoretical commitments? One possibility is that Nietzsche simply sees the existence of apparently unegoistic or altruistic morality, whether it be Christianity, Buddhism, or Schopenhauer’s pessimism, as a challenge to his philosophy, one that he wants to explain in the terms of his own thought but is happy to leave untouched and untroubled. In this case his genealogies would be primarily “defensive,” meant simply to defend Nietzsche’s own position against apparent refutation, either by seemingly inexplicable countercases or by rival theoretical positions (e.g., that of Plato or Rousseau). The other possibility is that Nietzsche’s genealogies are meant to be primarily “offensive,” and to convince adherents of these moralities, and rival theoretical stances, to abandon them and embrace Nietzsche’s. Put somewhat differently, are the genealogies meant to be explanatory, but only for Nietzsche and his disciples, or are they rather intended as critical forays designed to expose the marked deficiencies in self-understanding at the center of traditional morality and philosophy?

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Obviously, they could be both: the critical or offensive aspect of Nietzsche’s argument could turn on its explanatory power. Yet despite the obvious centrality of this question to Nietzsche’s work, especially in the Genealogy, there is nothing approaching consensus on this question. On the one hand there is Brian Leiter, who argues that Nietzsche does not believe in moral truths, and that his objections to certain forms of morality concern only their deleterious effects on the “higher men” for whom his writings show such intense and consistent concern (Leiter 2015, 103–126). Therefore Nietzsche’s critiques of morality, genealogical or otherwise, are meant only for those who share his “evaluative taste” (121–122); this includes not only the critiques themselves but their foundational concepts like the will to power (116). Indeed, even Nietzsche’s naturalist program is only in the service of this project of freeing “nascent higher types” from the snares of conventional morality (21–23, 248). If we accept his reading, one odd consequence is that Nietzsche’s naturalist project, which presumably yields insights that he regards as true in some important sense, is in the service of moral beliefs that are untrue, perhaps even delusional. There is no question that Nietzsche sometimes writes as a moral anti-realist, but when he does he often treats morality not as an area of personal taste but as a form of contemptible delusion and falsification of reality (e.g., GS 335, 346; BGE 186, 187, 198, 219; TI, “Ancients,” 2). As Nietzsche puts it in Twilight of the Idols, “Morality has always been a bed of Procrustes” (“Expeditions,” 43). This reading also ignores the fact that Nietzsche consistently defines humanity in terms of its ability—and indeed its need—to value or appraise (e.g., GM II 8; GS 346; Z I 15, II 12). This is the fundamental principle underlying Nietzsche’s analysis of ascetic ideals in the Third Essay. “Man would rather will nothingness than not will” (III 27). The will is essential to humanity, and in order to will human beings need values, even if those values negate all actual existence. 16 This does not mean that Nietzsche is a moral realist. As Zarathustra says, “[M]en gave themselves their good and evil…they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself—he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore he calls himself ‘man,’ which means: the esteemer (der Schätzende)” (Z I 15). As this last sentence suggests, however, willing and valuing are too essential to Nietzsche’s picture of human beings for them to be relatively peripheral matters of personal preference. As Zarathustra goes on to say, “To esteem is to create (Schätzen ist Schaffen): hear this, you creators! Esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure. Through esteeming alone is there value: and without esteeming, the nut of existence would be hollow” (Z I 15). 17 At the other end of the scale from Leiter is Raymond Geuss, who suggests that Nietzsche’s chronicle of the origins and rise of Christianity will be

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convincing and indeed calamitous for reflective Christians, not because it can establish the truth or priority of Nietzsche’s evaluative stance but because it sets forth a superior, and obviously devastating, account of the emergence of Christianity (Geuss 1999, 20–22). Paul Katsafanas stresses that Christians will not be moved by Nietzsche’s claim that Christian values thwart worldly flourishing, for the thoughtful Christian rejects such flourishing as a good, and certainly as a paramount good. But, Katsafanas argues, Nietzsche shows how Judeo-Christian morality actually diminishes power through the very beliefs and behaviors that its adherents think enhance their power (Katsafanas 2011). In making this point, however, Katsafanas slides from actual Christians to “Judeo-Christian morality” and its contemporary descendent, the morality that prizes equality and reduction of suffering above all. This slide to contemporary morality is essential, for this is the audience for whom Nietzsche’s genealogies might be genuinely challenging or transformative. For as Geuss and Katsafanas both indicate, any evaluative force these accounts have—indeed any transformative or revaluing ambition they may have—relies on their explanatory power, and Nietzsche gives serious Christians, as well as followers of rival philosophers like Plato, Rousseau, or Schopenhauer, no reason to accept his explanatory account (more on this in a moment). Nietzsche does appeal to certain commonly held values in his genealogical criticisms of morality, but this will only be effective with secular, postChristian contemporaries who have not thought through the full implications of the death of God (the definitive text here is of course section 125 of The Gay Science). 18 Present-day adherents of conventional morality who continue to affirm certain Christian beliefs only out of feeling or habit (and without being able to assent to their essential foundations in Christian faith) may very well be shaken by Nietzsche’s account, for they see the logical connections between certain principles that their way of feeling has prevented them from seeing before. And they are made to see this in large part because they are made to feel it, through the force of Nietzsche’s writing and rhetoric—and here Christopher Janaway is surely right in his comments on the affective response at which Nietzsche aims in the Genealogy (see Janaway 2007, 44–50 and 90–106 and I.4 above). These contemporaries of Nietzsche, who are secular or atheist but remain mostly committed to Christian morality, may now be forced to see that the abandonment of Christianity, and so of the belief that all human beings have dignity because they are made in the image of God, means they are left with no rational basis for their egalitarian beliefs, or that the rejection of providential notions of history means historical teleology or the belief in “progress” makes no sense (especially in view of the picture of historical development Nietzsche sketches in II 12), or that rejection of the belief that “God is the truth, that truth is divine” (GS 344) means the modern scientific and atheistic conviction that truth is the ultimate value

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or authority has no rational basis, and various other conclusions. 19 Likewise, the radical contingency of our moral beliefs and practices, which Nietzsche highlights especially in sections twelve and thirteen, may be a powerful objection to a secular understanding and affirmation of contemporary, postChristian morality, for this radical contingency shows that there is no inherent or necessary connection among the different parts of what we now take “morality” to be. Here the different strands in understanding genealogy mentioned in note 1 above come together: naturalistic explanation and an awareness that we are malleable and can begin to shape our future, in part by discarding certain current values or beliefs that we can now see have no essential tie to other values, and indeed may even be in important respects in tension with them. But why would I suggest that Christians—or Platonists, or pessimists in the stamp of Schopenhauer—are immune to the critical thrust of Nietzsche’s genealogies? Because he gives them no reason to accept his genealogies at all. 20 As Aaron Ridley notes, a critique of a system of values on the basis of concerns wholly external to that system is bound to be unsuccessful (Ridley 2006, 81–83): “From the perspective of traditional morality itself, after all, it is hardly much of an objection to a given value that it indirectly inhibits the emergence of types who, from that perspective, are a bad thing, however much Nietzsche might insist that the types so inhibited are higher and healthier. Indeed, from the traditional perspective, this form of re-evaluation—if it isn’t just discounted outright—is altogether more likely to look like an inadvertent demonstration that a certain kind of fringe benefit attends the intrinsic values under attack. (82)

But what about the historical story Nietzsche is telling, that so overwhelmed his atheist confrères? Wouldn’t this be just as devastating for the Christian, the Platonist, etc.? Only if we assume that they are unable to give their own account of that same history, and thus must accept Nietzsche’s—but they are plainly so able. The historical narrative was overwhelming for Nietzsche’s not-entirely-thoughtful contemporaries, who already accepted some of Nietzsche’s central premises, but ultimately it was only a means to force them to confront the groundlessness of their own cardinal moral beliefs. If the historical claims were meant to be decisive for them, Nietzsche, as is commonly observed, would be guilty of the genetic fallacy. For Nietzsche’s genealogies to refute Christianity, they would need to demonstrate to the Christian either their historical truth (Geuss) or their psychological truth (Katsafanas). 21 They cannot do this, in part because of Nietzsche’s willingness, even eagerness, to claim the status of interpretation for his own doctrine: “Supposing that this also [the application of the concept of ‘the will to power’ to

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physics] is only an interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better” (BGE 22). Nietzsche’s insistence that there can be only interpretations is the necessary consequence of his rejection of any metaphysical order towards which the human mind is somehow naturally directed or with which it has a special or intrinsic relationship—humanity is just an animal species that has made itself sick, and thus is in no way directed towards or part of a metaphysical order which can ground and illuminate human thought. 22 Even if one disavows a strong reading of that passage, however, Nietzsche has no trump card he can lay down against his serious and consistent adversaries, be they religious or philosophical. Nor can the question be answered by observing that Nietzsche’s interpretation engages with and critiques other interpretations, often offering internal critiques of other positions in terms of their consistency or coherence. 23 For the most important rival interpretations, like those of Christianity or Platonism, are not vulnerable in this way—or, in any case, Nietzsche does not oppose them by means of internal critiques. Here it is worth noting that Nietzsche offers no new arguments against the existence of God, and rarely refers to classic arguments against it. 24 He refers to something like the problem of evil in various passages (e.g., GS 344 and 357), but as a matter of experience, not as a deductive argument meant to persuade anyone who doesn’t already know or indeed feel the truth of what he’s saying. As Nietzsche writes in the Preface of the Genealogy, “What have I to do with refutations!” (4). Nor is it a simple matter of Nietzsche’s interpretation of, e.g., nature being self-evidently truer than or otherwise superior to that of Plato or Christianity. This may be the case in relatively specific instances in particular contexts (e.g., the English psychologists), but when it comes to something as vast and varied as nature or human nature, the object of interpretation does not clearly command a particular interpretation, for instance that of Nietzsche over that of Plato or Christianity (especially when one considers Nietzsche’s admiration for Dostoevsky and, polemical excesses aside, Socrates, Plato, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and others). One cannot appeal to “human nature” to decide whether the essential human need or impulse is the will to power or the desire for God or the love of wisdom, for human nature is precisely what is at issue in this dispute; to assert that human nature proves the truth of one position over another is simply to argue in a vacuous circle. Even Nietzsche’s account of historical development in section twelve, powerful as his articulation is, does not prove the truth of his view, and does not even rule out or disprove the truth of rival views. Christian doctrine, for instance, and even versions of atheism that hold that humanity is essentially religious, will give their own interpretation of pagan cults being taken up and transformed by Christianity. Both might argue that while the form changes slightly, and the institutional context of the cult or practice much more so, the

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fundamental reality that it expresses, the central human desire to seek and worship the divine, remains unaltered. Likewise, Hegelians and Marxists would not be shocked by Nietzsche’s description of Entstehungsgeschichte, they would simply interpret the same history differently, focusing more on large, unifying movements and organizing patterns in history, less on unexpected discontinuity and redirection. 25 Hence things like the will to power and particular understandings of nature, life, and so forth ground Nietzsche’s interpretation internally, in the sense of being the basis on which he judges other things like morality, Christianity, democracy, and so forth, but these concepts do not ground his interpretation in the sense of somehow existing outside of or “beyond” interpretation, giving his interpretation its form or substance and making it true or false. When, for instance, Nietzsche suggests that the Christian experience of sin is just a misinterpretation of a physiological state (e.g., GM III 15–16; D 10, 83, 86; TI, “Four Great Errors,” “Improvers,” 1), he cannot be simply appealing to the physiological or biological interpretation as the “true” one, as if there is some obvious or indisputable reason to take the physiological description as exhaustive or definitive (cf. GS 373). 26 Nietzsche himself acknowledges and indeed stresses this point: “I proceed in this essay, as one sees, on a presupposition that I do not first have to demonstrate (begründen) to readers like I need: that man’s ‘sinfulness’ is no fact (Thatbestand), but merely the interpretation of a fact, namely of physiological depression—the latter viewed in a moral-religious perspective that is no longer binding on us” (III 16). Here, I think, we come to the basis on which Nietzsche founds his interpretation, or the criteria by which he judges it truer than any other. Nietzsche traces the truth of his view to the (historically variable) conscience, for morality and conscience are the means by which the will to power expresses itself in human beings. The historical epoch or dispensation in which Nietzsche is living is, of course, defined by the death of God; the “moral-religious perspective” that reigned for nearly two millennia is “no longer binding on us.” It is not simply that it has somehow fallen away, like scales from the eyes of Paul on the road to Damascus. It is rather that it now has the conscience against it, as Nietzsche argues in the crucial passage in The Gay Science that he recapitulates at the end of the Genealogy (GS 357; cf. also 122, 319; GM III 27; D, Preface). Zarathustra couches his contemptuous rebuke to his apostate disciples in the same terms. “We have become pious again”—so these apostates confess; and some among them are even too cowardly to confess it. Those I look in the eye, and then I say it to their faces and to their blushing cheeks: you are such as pray again.

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Nietzsche thus grounds the superiority of his philosophy, its superior cogency or force, in the complex and historically constituted phenomenon of the conscience. In these passages Nietzsche does, of course, maintain and even highlight the truth of his view or of the views of the good Europeans. But much more than that he stresses, in these and in many other passages, that what is important about his interpretation of the world, what makes it more binding or compelling for him and those like him, is not so much its greater explanatory power or coherence but its greater honesty, its greater willingness to face harsh, unpleasant, and even destructive truth, and thus to obey the great moral imperative of the age, to embrace and advance the self-overcoming of the Christian God and ultimately of Christian morality itself. Nietzsche’s philosophic teaching, while drawing on many of the findings and saluting many of the methods of contemporary science (philology as much as the natural sciences), is more than anything based on observations and realities that have always been accessible to human beings—the wasteful and destructive character of nature, the immoral wellsprings and motives of moral feelings and actions, the accidental, often violent and in any case certainly not providential character of human existence, the prevalence of change and even chaos at all levels of life and the world. 27 It is only due to the imperative of honesty or intellectual cleanliness that humans have begun to devise the sciences and focus them on highlighting these features of existence: “Hurray for physics! And even more for that which compels us to turn to physics— our honesty (Redlichkeit)!” (GS 335). 28 Nietzsche believes that certain interpretations are truer or more compelling than others because they are grounded in historical experience, and thus in something very deeply known and felt, if not capable of purely rational or scientific demonstration (something belonging to the domain of Wissen but not Erkenntniss, to use a distinction often found in Nietzsche’s texts). However useful and necessary it is to determine the details of Nietzsche’s naturalism, ultimately naturalism takes its identity and significance from denying the supernatural. Nietzsche’s project, however, is emphatically not simply one of reactive explanation but of active, creative overcoming of the death of God. At the same time Nietzsche is also, as a philosopher and thus “of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow,” the “bad conscience of his

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time,” who aims to know “of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement,” and who thus says to his contemporaries, “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home” (BGE 212; cf. also the description of Dionysus in BGE 295, and GS 377 and 382). Hence the image of the madman announcing the death of God, who is light years ahead of his contemporaries, who despises and wants to rouse them from their complacency and their self-satisfied interpretation of the death of God (GS 125; cf. 343). Nietzsche’s ambition is not at all to embody the truth of his time, and if his philosophy is grounded in a certain historical reality or a certain moment in the historical evolution of the human conscience, that does not mean a simple contented affirmation of the conventional wisdom of the age. On the contrary, it is the reality of the age as it is experienced by a very few choice spirits (the “we” Nietzsche frequently addresses, and whom his writings are no doubt intended to help create) who are above all concerned with transforming their age, and thus driving humanity further and higher. In short, Nietzsche understands his writings as informed in important ways by the prevailing historical dispensation or ethos, and in particular by the particular articulation of conscience animating and defining it, though he is more concerned with trying to overcome or radicalize and thus move beyond that ethos than he is with trying to express its unique truth. In summing all of this up it becomes apparent that Nietzsche’s position is as complex and ambiguous as nature itself. We accept and digest the truth about nature not because nature is our final or ultimate authority, but because we have been bred by history and culture to seek the truth about nature and to attempt to build our thought and lives on that truth. We have now arrived at a view of nature which foregrounds its most destructive, wasteful, and indifferent aspects; our accession to this view of nature, and the collapse of the previous, Christian-Platonic view, is in large part what Nietzsche means by nihilism. Accepting this conception of nature and incorporating it into our lives is the great challenge of our age, the most difficult prospect for us—and thus precisely what we must do. We must do this because it is the challenge that we know with an intuitive knowledge to be the greatest for us, and to shirk it would be defeat. It is not so much that we must serve or achieve an abstract vitality as that this particular, concrete task and trial calls to us, and our conscience hears the call and demands that we respond. Nietzsche does not “prefer” honesty through an arbitrary choice or because of some personal fact about him. It is the one virtue that remains to us and from which we cannot get away (BGE 227), the virtue that our conscience demands that we practice. 29 Nature expresses itself through culture and history, but obviously not every culture has eventuated in the Nietzschean view of nature. Indeed, and in a paradox typical of Nietzsche’s presentation of nature, humanity has been brought to its truest view of nature only by an extraordinarily unnatural

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historical and cultural evolution. The immense complexity of consciousness and conscience in late modern Europe, a burden under which its bearers are in danger of collapsing, is precisely the sort of larger power complex that nature, life, or the will to power aims to create and breed—but nature has been able to create it only by severely restricting and indeed mutilating nature (cf. again BGE 188 and 1.2 above), and the restrictions necessary to create this complicated and finely tuned intellectual-affective complex are now on the verge of suffocating nature or life completely. All of this is experienced in conscious terms as the struggle to accept the immoral view of nature, and maintain our vitality and ability to will and revere, amidst the collapse of the previous system of justification for human suffering. Thus the imperative Nietzsche obeys, that of honesty, is an historical imperative while also being a particular, culturally conditioned imperative of nature. It is the imperative to move beyond the present cultural order, and thus to strengthen and expand the complex of power created by both nature and culture, by incorporating the knowledge of nature’s immorality that we now confront. 30 3.5. NOTES 1. I therefore will mostly pass over the immense secondary literature on Nietzsche and genealogy. One of the major themes of recent work on this topic has been the naturalistic or explanatory motive of Nietzschean genealogy (see, for instance, Clark 1998, xxi–xxiii, Leiter 2015, 138–139, and Kail 2011). Yet in addition to the explanatory and therefore necessarily backward-looking aspect of genealogy there is a forward-looking aspect focused on revaluation; as Robert Guay explains, “We have made ourselves into malleable, historical animals, and what is at stake is not the genetic story of how we got here, but the forward-looking issues of how to construe the meaning of our historical inheritance and the character of our self-determination” (Guay 2006, 362). On this second aspect see also Ansell-Pearson 1994, 121 ff., especially 122–123. 2. Compare Jürgen Habermas’s claim that the Genealogy seeks to show that “[w]hat is older is earlier in the generational chain and nearer to the origin. The more primordial is considered the more worthy of honor, the preferable, the more unspoiled, the purer: It is deemed better. Derivation and descent serve as criteria of rank, in both the social and the logical senses” (Habermas 2000, 125–126). This may make sense of the First Essay (or may not, given Nietzsche’s ambivalence about the nobles), but here in II 12 Nietzsche is clearly and emphatically making a different argument. See also Geuss 1999, 1–6, for further rebuttal of this view. 3. On the contrary, it has been invented to express basic and common needs, and fails ever more completely the rarer the experiences it tries to capture or convey: cf. GS 354, BGE 268. 4. Though not some of the strange incoherencies in the account itself (e.g., positing contracts as existing before society) or the deeper problems with the will to power discussed in the previous chapter. 5. One can of course only speculate on why Nietzsche does not mention nature specifically in this section, but it may be in part because he here foregrounds the will to power, the more fundamental and encompassing quality that exhibits itself in both nature and life and that gives them their particular character. 6. On this point and on Nietzsche’s closing argument about the priority of activity and spontaneous, form-giving, interpreting forces, see chapter 9 of Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s Nietzsche, “The Organism as Inner Struggle: Wilhelm Roux’s Influence on Nietzsche” (MüllerLauter 1999, 161–182).

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7. Janaway also notes Nietzsche’s “typically clever reflexive move” here, whereby the “mechanistic ideology” Nietzsche decries exemplifies “the very process it refuses to find in nature as a whole” (Janaway 2007, 149). 8. Actually, he begins the thirteenth section by saying that he is returning to “the subject, namely to punishment,” thus suggesting that II 12 has been a digression within a digression, since the lengthy discussion of punishment seems to be a digression from the supposed subject of the essay, the bad conscience. 9. It seems to me highly likely that Nietzsche was here influenced by Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, which he read in the months before writing the Genealogy (see Kaufmann’s note 8 on III 24); Nietzsche’s assertion resembles both Dostoevsky’s insistence that he could find no remorse or guilt for their crimes among his fellow prisoners and his description of the effects of punishment on the prisoners (Dostoevsky 2004, 11–12 and 143 ff.). Dostoevsky returns to the theme of corporal punishment and its effect at various points in the first three chapters of the second part, and the lack of repentance among the convicts is mentioned repeatedly throughout the novel. 10. The same is true of Platonism, Buddhism, and (less often) Hinduism, all of which Nietzsche seems comfortable speaking about as if they possess relatively stable and defining essences. 11. To put the matter in somewhat different terms, there is some possible tension between a therapeutic Nietzsche, who is primarily concerned with dissolving the apparent unity or problem of morality, and a naturalist Nietzsche who can explain human beings in terms of the causative powers of their normative or moral beliefs. 12. This indeed seems to be an inherent feature of morality for Nietzsche. Originally morality may have been simply one or two beliefs, or one or two commands, but life seeks to build greater complexes of power (II 11), and therefore moralities become more complex, and ultimately more capable of embracing opposites and thus generating greater tension and greater productive and creative power (I 16–17, BGE Pr.). 13. In fact, one would really want to distinguish between Christian humility and bourgeois or liberal modesty, in terms of both form and meaning, but that is not necessary for the broad point I am making here, that it is the active, interpreting force of morality that gives meaning to forms (as noted in what follows, virtues like humility or courage are best understood as composites of form and meaning). 14. Nietzsche of course argues that modern liberal or humanitarian morality still relies on Christian presuppositions that can no longer be affirmed and that this invalidates the whole of post-Christian morality. But these presuppositions (equality, compassion, the value of the individual) are affirmed consciously, if unthinkingly or mendaciously. Thus morality remains the active source of meaning, not simply a byproduct of inertia or forgotten historical accidents and nonsense. 15. Foucault, with his recurring emphasis on domination, throws this question into particularly sharp relief. A typical statement: “Genealogy . . . seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection: not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations (Foucault 1984, 83). While at the level of history or culture I think Nietzsche’s position is different from Foucault’s, Foucault is probably right that, at the deepest level, Nietzsche does conceive of this movement from one interpretation to the next as purely a matter of domination (as Nietzsche himself stresses at the end of II 11 and in much of II 12). 16. For further criticism of Leiter’s reading see Ridley 2006, 81–83. As I will argue presently, however, Leiter is not as mistaken as all this may suggest. And it is only fair to note that in many of the passages in which Nietzsche dismisses morality as an embarrassing fabrication it is not entirely clear whether he is dismissing morality altogether or only the conceptual framework of traditional morality (e.g., GS 335). 17. Though, given Leiter’s comments about the importance of revaluation for Nietzsche, perhaps the difference with Leiter here is as much one of emphasis as of substance (see Leiter 2015, 21–23, 248). 18. On the purpose and limitations of genealogy see also Kail 2011, 221–230, and Janaway 2007, 6–9.

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19. By “rational basis” in this sentence I only mean that the belief in question can be grounded in another, more fundamental belief, regardless of whether that more fundamental belief is “rational” in any relevant sense. Recall from the previous section that moralities can and do possess coherence and intelligibility based on values like rational consistency, so that coming to see that one has abandoned a fundamental plank of a given morality puts pressure on one to abandon the beliefs that followed from it (assuming that one has no other reason to affirm them). 20. On this see Poellner 1995, 173–187. 21. There is also the question of efficacy. As Janaway notes, if Nietzsche’s intent was to persuade serious Christians, a blistering polemic would seem to be a poor choice of method (Janaway 2007, 7). 22. On the significance of interpretation for Nietzsche see Cox 1999, especially 69–168 and 239–245. 23. Though of course he does this as well: see Ridley 2006 and Owen 2007, 131–144. 24. Peter Poellner suggests another, perhaps deeper, reason for this: for Nietzsche “views involving quite different propositional contents may, and do, express the same kind of ‘ruling drive.’ This is arguably one of the main reasons why he rarely engages in the sort of detailed criticism of particular doctrines or systems which is the daily bread of more traditional philosophers. For even if one succeeds—a very rare feat indeed—in what is generally agreed to be a conclusive refutation of a particular philosophical doctrine or position, the same ‘ruling drive’ merely tends to reappear in a new philosophical guise. But, for Nietzsche, what matters about philosophical doctrines is primarily what ‘drives,’ what values, they give expression to” (Poellner 1995, 176). 25. Of course, Nietzsche may still try to convert them to his cause by other means, for instance his psychological acumen and his diagnosis of the dangers and needs of modernity, his intense concern for honesty, generosity, and other forms of nobility, and even the sheer beauty of his writing. The first point is worth stressing: readers who are first struck and convinced by Nietzsche’s critical analysis of contemporary morality and the nihilism at its core may be drawn on to accept Nietzsche’s investigations into the origins of that nihilism. 26. Likewise, Christian readers could object that when Nietzsche introduces the will to power to explain apparently disinterested religious or moral feelings and actions, he is simply introducing something that does not exist to explain occurrences that are perfectly intelligible according to the interpretations Christians themselves give of them. While the will to power is in a sense reductive, in another sense it is arguably inflationary. It is not simply aggression, as indeed it cannot be, since for Nietzsche it causes or explains things like morality and consciousness, and more generally is creative and expansive in a way that simple aggression is not. 27. See, again, Hatab 2008, 9–10. 28. Compare the following statement by Gianni Vattimo: “The ‘end of modernity,’ or in any case its crisis, has also been accompanied by the dissolution of the main philosophical theories that claimed to have done away with religion: positivist scientism, Hegelian and then Marxist historicism. Today there are no longer strong, plausible philosophical reasons to be atheist, or at any rate to dismiss religion. Atheistic rationalism had taken two forms in modernity: belief in the exclusive truth of the experimental natural sciences, and faith in history’s progress towards the full emancipation of humanity from any transcendent authority . . . the untenability of scientistic and historicist rationalism—both of which repudiated the very possibility of religion—has been widely accepted as given in our culture” (Vattimo 1999, 28–29). In my reading, Nietzsche’s atheism, and his philosophy or interpretation as a whole, does not instantiate or rely upon any rationalism of the type Vattimo describes here. I do not think that Nietzsche’s argument is that a modern form of rationalism has disproved or displaced religion but rather that the severe and uncompromising honesty to which we have been bred has forced us to admit that the theological and providential interpretation of reality is false, a comforting but untenable lie. It is not that we now know so much more than our ancestors, either quantitatively (though we clearly do) or qualitatively through the emergence of a new system of thought. It is rather that we can no longer ignore or explain away the violent and senseless character of the natural world, and indeed of so much of the human world, the obviously accidental and chance character of history and existence generally, and related matters. Even major and disquieting

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discoveries like Darwin’s are significant not because they are integrated or synthesized into an overarching and totalizing rationalism, but because they are a further spur to (and are likely only made possible by) rigorous and unsentimental introspection. 29. I am here writing as if Nietzsche’s thought is marked throughout by a simple and unqualified commitment to Redlichkeit, but the Third Essay, with its critique of the ascetic ideal and its call to overcome the will to truth, obviously call this into question. A fuller picture may show that Nietzsche’s devotion to Redlichkeit is at least in part rhetorical or tempered by commitments to other values. For further discussion of these questions see Siemens and Hay 2015 and Lane 2007. 30. On incorporation in Nietzsche’s thought see Ansell-Pearson 2006b. Cf. also May 2011b, 94: “Creativity is just this: forging, for example, new forms of art, or thought, or statecraft out of the world we inherit, incorporating what we might loathe or fear or despise into a whole that we affirm” (but see May’s essay as a whole for why this may not be sufficient for Nietzsche’s project).

Chapter Four

An Animal Soul Turned against Itself Sections 16–18

The sixteenth section introduces Nietzsche’s hypothesis concerning the origin of the bad conscience, and thus finally addresses the professed subject of the essay. Nietzsche introduces this discussion with a strange but suggestive and even foreboding sentence. “At this point it is no longer to be evaded, helping my own hypothesis on the origin of the bad conscience to a first, provisional expression: it is not easy to hear (zu Gehör zu bringen) and wants to be pondered, guarded, and slept with (bedacht, bewacht und beschlafen) for a long time.” Nietzsche’s suggestion, so monstrous he has been avoiding it until now, has a will of its own, and once one hears it, it makes demands on one. This chapter will consider it in detail. In an odd but typical procedure, Nietzsche never pauses to give a precise (or indeed imprecise) definition of the bad conscience, so the first order of business in what follows is to figure out what exactly that term means. The bad conscience, according to Nietzsche, is the creation of moral self-awareness and the capacity for moral self-criticism and self-transformation (following Nietzsche’s usage in the text of the Second Essay, though not in the title, I do not place the term in quotation marks). The bad conscience was called into existence because of the instinctual repression required and enacted when human beings first lived within the bounds of an organized social and legal order. Once we are clear on exactly what that means and how it happened, we move to what is in many ways the essential question of Nietzsche’s account of the bad conscience and so of the Second Essay as a whole: is the bad conscience ultimately creative or reactive, an expression of the productive forces of the will to power or of the toxic, life-denying pull of ressentiment? 109

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This is the crucial question not only for understanding the Second Essay but also, in several respects, Nietzsche’s intentions in the Genealogy as a whole. Ressentiment, perhaps the most important and illuminating conceptual innovation of the Genealogy, only receives a brief mention in section eleven of the Second Essay. This raises the question of how the Second Essay relates to the other two or, to put the matter differently, of the explanatory depth or scope of the concept of ressentiment. This second formulation hits on what is really at stake here: if the bad conscience, and so civilized morality itself, is essentially suffused or driven by ressentiment, then Nietzsche’s attitude toward it must be in some decisive sense negative. This would then seem to lead to the reading of Nietzsche proposed by Stanley Rosen and discussed in the introduction (I.4), according to which Nietzsche’s hope is to inspire the destruction of the current social and moral order with the aim of returning humanity to a rejuvenating primal chaos. I will argue, however, that the bad conscience is not an expression of ressentiment or even essentially colored by it in any way, and that Nietzsche’s description of the bad conscience as a sickness in section eighteen does not prevent him from seeing it as tremendously creative and even a healthy manifestation of the will to power. 4.1. WHAT IS THE BAD CONSCIENCE? The title of the Second Essay, “‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and Related Matters” may lead one to expect a careful analysis of the nature of guilt or a phenomenology of one’s experience of it. In fact, however, the Second Essay offers nothing of the sort—to the extent that it deals with the terms mentioned in its title its focus is almost exclusively on historical speculation and the early history of society and morality, so much so that it never seems to occur to Nietzsche to pause and provide a systematic description or even a basic definition of the bad conscience (though this is hardly unusual for Nietzsche). The character of the bad conscience as Nietzsche is discussing it here seems to be indicated by his earlier argument, in section fourteen, that punishment does nothing to cause or educe guilt, and that whatever the origin of the feeling of guilt or the bad conscience it is completely separate from the experience of punishment. This fact, Nietzsche contends, is a simple matter of observation and empirical fact today, and was even more true in prehistory, when “it was precisely through punishment that the development (Entwicklung) of the feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered—at least in the victims (die Opfer) upon whom the punitive force was vented (die strafende Gewalt ausliess).” For since the city practices all sorts of crimes to catch and punish criminals, it is impossible for the criminal himself “to feel (empfinden) his deed, the type of his action as such, reprehensible.” 1 Hence

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the type of bad conscience Nietzsche has in mind is apparently that arising from a view of this or that deed as inherently bad or evil, rather than one dwelling on the results of that deed. One could in principle feel guilt for committing an act that harms the city, towards which one is supposed to feel indebtedness and loyalty. Given the rest of Nietzsche’s picture of primitive humanity and of the effects of punishment upon it, however, we can see why he rejects this type of bad conscience as the earliest. It is only by first forcing human beings into a relationship with the city that these later feelings of loyalty and guilt can be created, but the original punishments did not and were not intended to promote these feelings. Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes that the earliest forms of personal obligation or responsibility (financial, political, religious), and so of guilt or debt, were motivated purely by fear. It was, according to Nietzsche, generations or perhaps centuries before human beings began to infuse these once amoral relationships with moral feeling and intensity. Moral life for humanity began with the avoidance of a few specific acts, which required the development of the first conscious thoughts, reminding people that those acts were forbidden. As we will see below, the development of these very basic capacities soon required, on Nietzsche’s account, that these primeval humans freight their newly acquired instinct of avoidance with moral emotion and meaning. Only much later, however, could they apply this same moral feeling to personal, political, or religious relationships. Nietzsche is concerned with this type of bad conscience or moral evaluation because of the purpose it serves for a newly socialized humanity, as he explains in these sections. This understanding of the bad conscience, in which one views one’s deeds as such as reprehensible (and eventually also their psychological or affective wellsprings [anger, lust, desire to dominate, greed, etc.]), is far more severe and rigorous than one which condemns only acts that harm the city (or, later, the family, Church, or some other authority). It is thus precisely this type of moral evaluation that the bad conscience creates for itself. By identifying a series of inevitable acts and emotions as abhorrent by themselves, in any circumstance, the animal instincts of one afflicted with the bad conscience never lack an opportunity to lacerate themselves. At the same time, however, this type of moral evaluation also makes possible a much greater degree of autonomy, or at least points towards such autonomy, for one begins to evaluate one’s deeds as such, on their own terms and using only one’s own judgment, not on the basis of their relation to an external authority.

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4.2. THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE BAD CONSCIENCE Nietzsche’s hypothesis regarding the origin of the bad conscience is that it is a “sickness” that consists of humanity’s most basic animal instincts being turned back inward upon their possessor; these most basic instincts, in Nietzsche’s account, are aggression and violence, a desire for destruction and change. The humans in whom the bad conscience first developed were “halfanimals (Halbthieren) well-adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling about (Herumschweifen), to adventure.” Thus, in the superb simile Nietzsche offers here, pre-political humans were borne along in the wilderness by their instincts, like fish borne along by water. The image of sea animals walking on land beautifully illustrates how profound the change from pre-political to political life was for the earliest humans. In particular, this transition forced them to become conscious of all their actions, even the simplest and smallest, and thus to stop relying on or being “borne along” by their instincts; in time, however, all of this conscious activity was again returned to the unconscious, just as so much of social and moral life now has been for human beings. The intellectual and moral abilities our ancestors had to learn so painfully and haltingly are now as much a matter of subconscious instinct for us as are standing and walking. The bad conscience, then, is the “deep sickness” which humanity was bound to fall into (verfallen) under the pressure of the “most fundamental of all the changes it has ever experienced,” that change that occurred when the human being “finally found himself enclosed in the spell of society and peace (endgültig in den Bann der Gesellschaft und des Friedens eingeschlossen fand).” As I have argued above (2.1), Nietzsche’s earlier account seems to imply some kind of pre-political, tribal social existence, which predated the sudden and violent imposition of a political order described in II 17; Nietzsche’s mention of “previously unchecked [or ‘uninhibited,’ ungehemmten] and unshaped populations” in II 17 further supports this reading. These earlier communities would likely have been governed almost entirely by instinct, with the humans living in them having not yet attained to a level of consciousness at which they would either need or be able to formulate or comprehend even the simplest of customs. 2 Based on what Nietzsche says here in II 16, these communities must have been extremely aggressive and violent towards the outside world, for Nietzsche’s entire theory of the bad conscience relies on a basic fund of violent instincts which needed to be suppressed by society and law. In other words, Nietzsche’s argument is the reverse of Rousseau’s—he is not arguing that an originally or naturally peaceful humanity has been made cruel and thus sick by society, but that an originally or naturally violent humanity has been made peaceful and thus sick by society. For Nietzsche, the “instincts of freedom” that society had to suppress were instincts that desired attack and violence, not to be left alone

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or to be free from domination. The bad conscience is then the deep sickness that the human being was bound to fall into when he found himself enclosed or trapped in the spell of society and peace once and for all (“endgültig”), with no hope of going back or reversing the process. Humanity first contracted the sickness of the bad conscience when it left behind the instinctual tribal life of a “necessarily forgetful animal,” a “slave of momentary affect and desire,” to become an animal enchanted or bewitched by the authority of society, learning to obey the law and thus to “suspend” or repress its instincts, and ultimately to think, to infer, to reason, to promise (cf. II 1–3). Nietzsche explains the deeper or more defining process at work here after emphasizing the extreme discomfort of these humans newly enclosed within political society. I believe that never on earth has there existed such a feeling of misery (ElendsGefühl), 3 such a leaden uneasiness (Missbehagen)—and at the same time those old instincts had not suddenly stopped making their demands! Only it was difficult and seldom possible to give them their way (ihnen zu Wille zu sein): in the main they had to seek new and as it were subterranean satisfactions. All instincts, which do not discharge themselves outwardly, turn themselves inward—this is what I call the internalization of the human being: with it there first grows up in the human being that which one later calls his “soul” (Seele). The entire inner world, originally as thin as if stretched between two membranes, has expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth and height, in the same measure as outward discharge of the human being has been inhibited (gehemmt). Those fearful bulwarks, with which the political (staatliche) organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishment belongs above all to these bulwarks—brought it to pass that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling human beings turned themselves backwards, turned themselves against the human being himself. Enmity, cruelty, pleasure in persecution, in attack, in change, in destruction—all that turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the “bad conscience.” (GM II 16)

The picture then that seems to emerge from Nietzsche’s discussion of the origins of the bad conscience is that “that uncanny and possibly insoluble intertwining of the ideas ‘guilt and suffering (Schuld und Leid)’ was first effected” (II 6) by the repression of instinct. As Bernard Reginster puts it, “since socialization requires the suppression of cruelty, but cannot eliminate its ‘demand’ for discharge, it makes good ‘economic’ sense (to borrow a Freudian concept) to make its own suppression an occasion for discharge” (Reginster 2001, 64). One was unable to discharge or satisfy one’s basic desires or instincts, especially one’s violent impulses, and so one turned against them and tortured oneself for having them. Thus it becomes clear that the moralization of Schuld, the intertwining of legal and moral guilt and thus

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of guilt/debt and suffering, began almost immediately with the advent of political society. Through the process described above, one began to turn against one’s basic aggressive instincts and to attack them, and thus to attack oneself for having them. Nietzsche’s earlier suggestions that there was a premoral stage of society must therefore be taken as referring only to the prepolitical, tribal, and instinctual kind of society sketched above (2.1). If a fully developed moralized sense of guilt is not as old as society itself, the construction or formation of that sense of guilt begins shortly after the imposition of law and consequent repression or inhibition of instinct. 4 Let us consider in greater detail how and whether this could have actually happened. What would it mean for the instincts of aggression and violence to turn against themselves or against their possessor? Imagine that I am one of those human beings who have just been violently enclosed in the enforced peace of a new political society. I am walking down the street, or whatever sort of thoroughfare has been established by our new artist-lawgiver overlords, when suddenly I see some toothless, stoopshouldered, sunken-chested old geezer, easily twenty-five years old if he’s a day, gumming a glob of rancid meat in imbecile contentment. I have the strong urge to rush up to him, smash his head against the ground, and eat his food myself—or, to stay closer to Nietzsche’s own account, simply to kill some random passer-by. But I have some vague but powerful premonition that this will not end well for me. So I restrain myself, but it is not possible simply to dissolve or expunge the furious, primordial rush of this instinct of pure aggression. It can only turn back on itself; I can only restrain myself by forcing my aggression back on itself, somehow splitting off some part or sense of that instinct and experience of aggression, or perhaps accessing the deeper source of that individual impulse, and using it to attack this particular instance of aggression. It seems to me that this would happen immediately, that only by turning this instinct against itself could I control it; in other words, only by violently repressing this instinct, and thus in some sense satisfying it, could I repress or check this first, particular instance of the aggressive instinct—my desire to kill the geezer and take his food, or kill the able-bodied passer-by for the sheer joy of it—at all. Thus already some division is created within myself, and it seems to me likely that, in Nietzsche’s view, the experience of the violent repression of instinct, the extremely crude and half-conscious affect that has been separated off from the original instinct of aggression, constitutes a new mind or sense of self, and thus instantly becomes a new locus of power, meaning, and value, the one that will become augmented by the development of the bad conscience. After this initial operation has been successfully performed a few times, and I begin to restrain or check my aggression more successfully, the original, simple, outwardly directed form of it begins to ache and long for expression, for satisfaction, for a sense of play, mastery, venting, self-enjoyment. The momen-

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tary and largely prudentially motivated discharge of the drive against itself is insufficient. Thus it turns on itself in a much deeper and more serious way; it begins to attack itself morally and psychologically, and indeed to attack all of my basic animal instincts (though this may be more likely to happen over several generations or even centuries rather than in a single lifetime). It does so in the form of this new sense of self, the conscience, that has been created by repression. 5 Thus the “bad conscience,” the feeling of guilt at all of my desires and instincts as such, begins to form and grow, and this new part of myself swells in power without recognizing itself for what it is, an expression of the very instinct of aggression that it is trying to repress. 6 Concomitant with this process is the development of human consciousness; while originally the conscious mind had no awareness of the instincts, which simply asserted and discharged themselves without any need for reflection or even basic conscious awareness, with the emergence of the bad conscience the conscious mind begins to expand as it is forced to become cognizant of and to exercise conscious control over a few coarse but extremely powerful instincts. Thus one begins to become consciously aware of one’s violent or aggressive instincts, and also of the need to control them; this awareness necessitates or is perhaps identical with a conscious effort to check these instincts, an effort which sets in motion an auxiliary thought process. From here one not only starts to make value judgments about the different instincts or drives; one also begins to develop the ability to think, reckon, infer, and generally to reason, to think about the future, as well as to think in a more general or “theoretical” way, thinking after all being merely the relation of one drive to another (BGE 36). Thus the first step not only toward any moral life for human beings but also toward even the most basic intellectual life is the inhibition of instinct or drive, which forces one to become conscious of the drive and thus to judge it—initially on purely prudential grounds (to avoid punishment), but soon enough in a manner charged with moral intensity and self-inflicted cruelty—and to think in an intellectual sense, however crude that sense may have been originally (am I more hungry or thirsty? which is stronger, my desire to kill this person or my fear of being tortured to death as a result?—though even such questions as these would have first been asked and answered with only a simple pre-verbal relation and comparison, i.e., struggle and rank-ordering, of the drives). Nietzsche’s attitude toward the bad conscience as he describes it here is, as might be expected, somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand he seems to be seized with something like pity for “this fool, this yearning and despairing prisoner [who] became the inventor of the ‘bad conscience,’” and he repeatedly refers to the bad conscience as a terrible illness, indeed as “the greatest and most uncanny illness, from which humanity has so far not recovered, the suffering of the human being at the human, at himself.” Even more, however, Nietzsche uses laudatory language to describe the bad conscience and its

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effects, maintaining especially that it is only with the bad conscience that humanity first becomes creative, that it first begins to have a future and indeed to point beyond itself. “The fact of an animal soul (Thierseele) on earth turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, deep, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory and full of future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. In fact, divine witnesses were needed to appreciate the spectacle. . . . The human being henceforth counts as included among the most unexpected and most exciting lucky throws which the ‘great child’ of Heraclitus, be he called ‘Zeus’ or ‘chance (Zufall),’ plays.” Particularly noteworthy here is Nietzsche’s suggestion that the bad conscience is or can be appreciated as an amoral creative phenomenon. If the gods were created by the bad conscience, they were not meant as escapes from this world or as agents of vengeance but as spectators who view it with the same innocent, playful interest with which a child views a game of chance. Nietzsche ends the sixteenth section by noting that with the bad conscience the human being awakens “an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something is announcing itself, something preparing, as if the human being is no end, but only a path, an episode, a bridge, a great promise . . .” Here we see the fuller sense in which the human being is “an animal permitted to promise”: in the best case, the work of the bad conscience will transform the human being as such, the human species as a whole, into an animal permitted to promise something further and greater, the conscious achievement of something superhuman. Section seventeen moves to the particulars of this first founding of political society and its effects, and does so by stating two presuppositions of Nietzsche’s hypothesis. The first is that the transition from pre-political to political life was “not gradual, not voluntary (freiwillige) and did not represent an organic growing into new conditions, but a break, a leap, a compulsion, an ineluctable disaster (Verhängniss), against which there is no struggle and not even ressentiment.” As Nietzsche goes on to explain, those trapped in society and the bad conscience feel no ressentiment because the violent imposition of law has been too savage and too sudden; the founding of a political order leaves its members too dazed and traumatized to feel vengefulness or ressentiment towards the “fearsome tyranny . . . [the] crushing and remorseless machine” of the early state. Thus while ressentiment was explosive and nearly ubiquitous in primitive society, as Nietzsche suggested earlier (see 2.2), it was directed at other members of the community, not at the state or law or those in power, who constituted a merciless and terrifying structure of domination. The second presupposition, which indeed seems to ground the first, is that “the adaptation (Einfügung) of a previously unchecked (ungehmmten) and unshaped population to a fixed form, takes its beginning from an act of violence (Gewaltakt) and is led to its end only by pure acts of violence—that

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the oldest ‘state’ accordingly appeared as a terrible tyranny, as a crushing and remorseless machine, and continued working until this raw material of people (Volk) and half-animals was finally not only thoroughly kneaded and compliant but also formed.” Nietzsche quickly explains what the first “state” must have been in this case: “some pack of blond beasts of prey (Raubthiere), a conqueror and master race, which, organized for war and with the power (Kraft) to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible paws (Tatzen) upon a population perhaps enormously superior in numbers but still shapeless, still prowling (schweifende).” If the pre-political Volk was a mass of “half-animals,” Nietzsche figures the founders of the first state as still wholly animal (cf. BGE 257: those who founded the first hierarchical or aristocratic societies were “more whole human beings [which at every level also means ‘more whole beasts’]”). On the one hand, this language highlights the greater animality and thus naturalness of these lawgiving blond beasts (and indeed Nietzsche is about to describe the lawgiver or political founder as “by nature ‘master’”); on the other, it again highlights Nietzsche’s paradoxical conception of nature, for to be more natural and more animal means, in the case of a human being, to create and found a political society, and thus to sever a great mass of human beings from their natural (or at least primal or original) animal instincts and existence. For the human being to be most fully or vitally the animal that it is means something radically different from what that means for any other animal. Hence even with this vivid animal imagery, Nietzsche’s lawgiving pack of blond beasts is above all concerned with organization (organized and with the power to organize), as becomes even more clear shortly. Unlike the nobles of I 11, this master race does not delight or take pleasure in simple destruction—it seeks to form and organize other humans. Nietzsche then immediately adds, “This, after all, is the beginning of the ‘state’ on earth: I think that enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) which has it begin with a ‘contract’ is finished.” Let us begin with what appears to be the historical claim in this sentence. Nietzsche’s contemptuous rejection of the notion that the state began in a contract seems to apply equally well to his own earlier claims that political life somehow grew out of the contractual relation between debtor and creditor (II 4, II 8). Here at II 17, however, Nietzsche dismisses not only the belief that society originated in a contract but also the possibility of any kind of organic evolution from the first economic or social arrangements to the embryonic political community. I have argued above that Nietzsche’s claims about the primacy of the contractual relation between debtor and creditor can be made to cohere and find their place in his overall account of the development of the earliest society and the forces active in that development (2.1); in particular, I have tried to show how the debtor-creditor relationship could fit into a pre-political, predominantly instinctual form of tribal society. I think that all of that explanation

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remains valid, although clearly we must abandon the impression Nietzsche gives earlier that one arrived at the first political community by a gradual organic progression, or even by a rapid or sudden leap that was nonetheless prompted and directed by some inner logic of pre-political society. Nietzsche now maintains that political society was instituted by a sudden act of violence, and that this represented a total, radical, and cataclysmic transformation of the human animal. Nietzsche continues, “One who can command, who is by nature ‘master’ (wer von Natur ‘Herr’ ist), who steps forth violent in work and gesture (wer gewaltthätig in Werk und Gebärde auftritt)—what has he to do (zu schaffen) with contracts!” Nietzsche thus shows that he has not clumsily mistaken social contract theories for actual historical hypotheses. Nietzsche’s argument is not simply or even primarily that historically the state did not begin with a contract; his argument is rather that nature does not warrant or underwrite any conception of equal rights or a sovereign legal order in which all individuals are treated as equal and inviolable. On the contrary, nature makes some masters, makes them capable of violently commanding and molding others. 7 But what does it mean to be “by nature ‘master’”? What does nature create or achieve in and through such a person? In the first place, it creates living structures, it organizes, it creates a new, organic whole. The one who is by nature “master” does not simply lord it over others or use them to satisfy his desires for pleasure or even recognition or honor. He creates. Thus nature is creative, but this creation must be violent and terrible. The prepolitical populace is formless, nature gives it no form or direction, in fact nature seems only to give it a formless chaos as its nature, but it must be formed into something—nature itself demands that it be formed into something. Thus the pre-political populace must be formed through violence, it must be given a definite form by acts of violence, like a stone being smashed and cut into a sculpture. At the same time, violence here is formative or creative, not simply destructive, as it appears in the portrait of the nobles in the First Essay (I 11); hence the “blond beasts” described here are not simply destructive (Viking raids, barbarian invasions, etc.); they rather roam and raid in order to impose a form on the conquered populace. The motivation of the artist-lawgivers of this passage is thus somehow distinct from the joy in destruction attributed both to the aristocratic blond beasts at I 11 and to prepolitical humanity in II 16. Nietzsche, however, employs the word “nature” only to describe the violent artist-lawgiver, not the formless pre-political populace, just as he describes those who found aristocracies in Beyond Good and Evil as “human beings with a still natural nature (Menschen mit einer noch natürlichen Natur)” (BGE 257); it appears that the violent but formgiving artist is what is natural, not the violent but formless original or primeval mass of people (again, cf. BGE 188).

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The artist-lawgivers’ creation exemplifies Nietzsche’s discussion of interpretation and the giving of meaning in II 12, as he makes clear in his description of their activity and its meaning. Their work is an instinctive form-creating, form-imprinting (ein instinktives Formen-schaffen, Formen-aufdrücken), they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are (es sind die unfreiwilligsten, unbewusstesten Künstler, die es giebt)—soon something new stands there, where they appear, a ruling-structure that lives (ein Herrschafts-Gebilde, das lebt), in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in which nothing at all finds a place which is not first assigned a “meaning” in regard to the whole. They do not know what guilt, what responsibility, what consideration is, these born organizers; at work in them is that terrible artist-egoism. . . . It is not in them that the “bad conscience” has grown, that is understood at once—but it would not have grown without them. (GM II 17)

This passage may seem familiar enough at first. The artist-lawgivers, like the nobles of the First Essay, are powerful, violent, and unrepressed, indeed governed by their unconscious and involuntary instincts. One might think that they are the same people or at least the same human type at different points in time. As we have just seen, however, the nobles retain the prepolitical populace’s joy in destruction; indeed their ability to revert to “the wild” and vent or discharge the pressure caused by socialization prevents the bad conscience from affecting them nearly as profoundly as it does their social inferiors (I 10–11). The nobles lack the tension and sense of dissatisfaction necessary to envision new ideals and forms of life; in short, the nobles do not create. 8 The artist-lawgivers do not appear to be the same as the self-satisfied but sporadically violent nobles, who mainly occupy themselves with slapping themselves and each other on the back, occasionally going out to kill and torture when the tension spawned by the demand for reciprocal admiration grows too great. 9 The nobles, in short, are able to take a self-affirming attitude towards themselves and thus towards life and the world, which fills them with gratitude and love for existence. These are obviously good things, but the nobles take their place within a social order already established by others—indeed their affirmative stance towards themselves and life is entirely dependent upon their place in that order—and tend to be fixed and conservative elements within the living structure they inhabit. 10 Their emotional or affective experience is one of self-affirmation, but the organized whole in which they live as well as the content of their beliefs and their form of life are determined by the artist-lawgivers who founded the community.

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4.3. THE BAD CONSCIENCE AND RESSENTIMENT There is one other major question raised by the seventeenth section that must be addressed. Henry Staten and, following him, Aaron Ridley have argued that Nietzsche’s claim that the founders of states are free from the bad conscience is incoherent, and that his account of the bad conscience shows that all of humanity, or at least all of humanity living in society, is subject to the same repression of instinct as the slaves Nietzsche had depicted in the First Essay. This also means that all of humanity, to the extent that it lives in society and thus suffers repression of instinct, is animated by ressentiment, not merely the weak and vengeful slaves, as Nietzsche had suggested previously (I 10–15). 11 There are two different arguments here; the first, made only by Staten, is that ressentiment necessarily flows from repression of instinct, so that what Nietzsche describes in the Second Essay as the bad conscience is another instance or manifestation of ressentiment. This would mean that ressentiment is one of the fundamental constituents of the mental and affective life of every human being living in society, and thus that the noble-slave dichotomy or typology Nietzsche had constructed in the First Essay is ultimately untenable. The second, more limited, contention, made by both authors, is that Nietzsche’s claim here in II 17 is confused; although Nietzsche proclaims that the founders of political society brought the bad conscience into being without experiencing it themselves, this assertion is simply impossible on Nietzsche’s own terms. The first argument is very attractive; it is certainly tempting to read the Genealogy as a whole as a sustained investigation of ressentiment, one that identifies ressentiment at ever deeper levels of human consciousness and morality. The book as a whole would thus move from the relatively superficial case of ressentiment directed at political superiors and producing a particular form of morality to the more profound case of ressentiment directed towards oneself and one’s animal instincts and permeating all of civilized life and morality, and finally show how ressentiment has been directed against the very conditions of our existence itself, and has suffused and defined ascetic religion and even the scientific will to truth. This reading is obviously intellectually satisfying, and helps to tie together the three essays. But Nietzsche explicitly and emphatically maintains that this is not his argument, that the bad conscience represents an active force, indeed the same active force at work in the founders of states, not the reactive force of ressentiment (cf. I 10). One should take care against thinking poorly of this whole phenomenon merely because it is ugly and painful from the beginning. Fundamentally it is after all the same active force (aktive Kraft) that is at work on a grander scale in those artists of violence and organizers and that builds states, which here,

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internally, on a smaller and pettier scale, directed backwards, in the “labyrinth of the breast,” to speak with Goethe, creates for itself the bad conscience and builds negative ideals—it is precisely that instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power): only the material on which the form-giving and violating nature (Natur) of this force vents itself is here precisely the human being himself, his whole animal ancient self—and not, as in that greater and more obvious phenomenon, the other human being, other human beings. (GM II 18)

Nietzsche goes on to lavish the bad conscience with some of the highest praise found anywhere in the Genealogy: “this entire active ‘bad conscience’ has ultimately—one could guess it already—as the actual womb of ideal and imaginative events (Ereignisse) also brought to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation and perhaps even for the first time beauty itself.” Thus Nietzsche makes it clear that, no matter how appealing the above reading may be, it does not represent his position; the bad conscience is not an instance or effect of ressentiment, and the Second Essay as a whole is not a further exploration of the meaning and manifestations of ressentiment. The bad conscience, or at least the phenomenon Nietzsche describes with that name in II 16–18, is the expression of an active, creative, form-giving force. One may well object, however, and Staten does object, that of course Nietzsche remembers to use the proper terminology, but the point is that the distinction between active and reactive, and so Nietzsche’s claim that the process depicted here is free of ressentiment, makes no sense in this case; how can the repression of instinct, specifically of the instinctual urge for power and revenge, poison with ressentiment in one case but not in the other? What are the differences between slave morality on the one hand and the bad conscience on the other that make the distinction viable? In the first place Nietzsche argues that the transition from the pre-political to the political state is “a break, a leap, a compulsion, an ineluctable disaster, against which there is no struggle and not even any ressentiment” (II 17). The law, the rule of the “fearful tyranny” of the “crushing and remorseless machinery” of the earliest state, is a piece of fate, a disaster, something too great, and specifically too terrible and terrifying, for one to feel ressentiment towards it. The situation was therefore not that the desire for revenge was thwarted and needed to be suppressed and satisfied covertly, but rather that there simply was no desire for revenge, only a kind of stupefied terror and acceptance of the dictates of the law and rulers. 12 It is worth noting in passing here that in his explanation of why the imposition of a political or legal form does not provoke ressentiment, Nietzsche emphasizes the horrific violence of the first state and the dread that violence aroused, rather than the finality or the lack of intention inherent in the catastrophe he describes. The founding of political society is a disaster or a piece of fate, as is “time and its ‘it was,’” but the latter is still able to inspire

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ressentiment or, as Zarathustra calls it, “the spirit of revenge” (Z, II 20). The tyranny of the first state did not trigger ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, not because human beings are too rational to resent such an enormous, overwhelming, and impersonal process, but rather purely because of the logic of the affects, purely because ressentiment cannot coexist with or spring from such intense and absolute fear. Likewise, Zarathustra teaches not resignation to or reconciliation with the inexorable necessity of time’s passage, but rather redemption through creative willing and affirmation. Yet there is another, deeper or more important reason why the bad conscience is not driven by ressentiment in Nietzsche’s view, or why the creation of negative ideals need not always be informed by ressentiment. Considered purely in its own terms and not with reference to its origins or the other emotions that would have been experienced at the beginning of political life, the bad conscience is not an attempt to get revenge on anyone, but an attempt to discharge or gratify the animal instincts of aggression that have been repressed. These instincts do indeed find something to work over and mold, namely “the human being himself, his whole animal ancient self”; the fact that the individual’s will to power is thus exercised in this case saves him from ressentiment, from a stymied and hence rancorous lust for dominance and revenge. Ressentiment, in contrast to the instincts and drives which constitute the bad conscience, must content itself with a purely imaginary revenge, which is to say with a purely imaginary effect. Most simply, the bad conscience is not ressentiment because it is an actual form of mastery and power, while ressentiment is not, and is indeed born of an experience of impotence. Thus what is most significant about the slave revolt in morals, or the rise of a morality of ressentiment, is not that the slaves’ will to power needed to find a secret outlet and satisfaction, but rather that this will was poisoned by ressentiment, by the desire for vengeance; the poisoning effect of ressentiment is crucial. This also then means that the cardinal failing of the slaves—as opposed to the priests—is not simply their lack of political power and so of an external outlet for their aggression, but their weakness with regard to themselves, their inability to turn those instincts inward and refashion or reshape themselves. Another look at the actual mechanics of the bad conscience and its development will help clarify this point. In the first place, it is important to note that Nietzsche specifically identifies “the same active force . . . namely, the instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power)” as the power driving and shaping the bad conscience; he is, in other words, not simply describing violent impulses, whether purely mindless or possessing a degree of calculation and control. The instinct for freedom manifests itself in all the violent instincts that must be suppressed in society, but is not exhausted by them. The will to power, in other words, and its form-giving, interpreting capacity is somehow present in all of the most fundamental drives, and is

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thus able to create a bad conscience and negative ideals, while it is not clear that simple violent impulses could do anything of the sort. If one simply had violent impulses, one could at best suppress them for prudential reasons, like a kind of Pavlovian response. But because the violent impulses are in fact somehow tied to or informed by the instinct for freedom, that instinct takes over and begins reworking the “ancient animal self” from which it emanates. This then explains how the basic psychological substance or drive which gives rise to the bad conscience is more than simple cruelty or aggression, and why it is active rather than reactive. But if, as Nietzsche claims in II 18, this fundamental urge for freedom or power “creates a bad conscience for itself and builds negative ideals,” how can this still be considered an expression of an active, affirmative impulse? How can negative ideals not be inherently reactive or evidence of ressentiment? Because, as Nietzsche makes clear in section eighteen, the bad conscience is profoundly creative. “This entire active ‘bad conscience’ . . . [is] the actual womb of all ideal and imaginative events”—just as the priest must create a new ideal with which to negate and ultimately to achieve the spiritual subjugation of the nobles, so here it is not enough simply to negate, in this case to negate the “ancient animal self” and its drives and instincts; one must create an ideal with which to negate what exists, and then strive to attain that ideal. Again, however, in this case even if one is negating or creating “negative ideals,” the force which does so is still active, not a vengeful or reactive manifestation of ressentiment. The key point is that the basic active force of the will to power is at work in the bad conscience, creating new ideals and imposing its forms and directions on the animal self from which it has alienated itself; that active force has been compelled to turn inward but not poisoned by ressentiment; legal and social constraint have forced the will to power to change its direction and objects, but the force shaping and driving the bad conscience does not originate in a vengeful reaction to this constraint. The ressentiment of the slaves, by contrast, the force or energy that drives their creation of values and ideals, originates in a negative, resentful reaction to another, in particular to their political superiors. Thus the whole of slave morality is an attempt to gain some kind of compensation or solace for one’s impotence and inferiority by negating the more powerful cause of one’s subordination (though this requires an escape into fantasy). It is an attempt to convince oneself that one does not really want to satisfy one’s most basic need or desire, rather than, as in the case of the bad conscience, the actual satisfaction of that need and desire, in however involuted and painful a form. 13 For these two reasons, then, the bad conscience is not simply another, deeper experience or product of ressentiment. The cause of the bad conscience, the imposition of law and social order and thus the external compulsion forcing one to turn one’s instincts inward, is too savage and too terrify-

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ing to permit of any kind of reaction even approaching ressentiment. Secondly and more importantly, once those instincts turn inward, they find something on which to vent themselves, and are thus able to experience themselves as powerful, as discharging themselves on something and molding it into something new. This experience of power thus prevents the impotent rage and vengefulness that creates ressentiment. Thus even after the initial terror of the founding of political life there is no necessary reason why the bad conscience, or the internalization of the instincts of aggression that Nietzsche describes with that name, must generate or fuse with ressentiment. As for the second objection, that Nietzsche is mistaken to claim that the founders of states caused the bad conscience to grow without being subject to it themselves, it does seem hard to understand how a group of people “organized for war and with the power to organize” could be so highly socialized and regimented without having acquired the bad conscience. Part of the problem is the lack of historical examples. If Nietzsche is suggesting that an entire tribe or, even less plausibly, a class of a settled urban populace is somehow suddenly and collectively seized by this form-giving unconscious activity, then this certainly seems unpersuasive. But it may be possible to make sense out of Nietzsche’s statements if we take him to be suggesting that the law code being imposed on one people (or a series of peoples) is experienced by the subjected population as an oppressive restriction, but by the conquerors as a vehicle for their will to power, in the form of this unconscious form-giving activity. Elsewhere Nietzsche emphasizes the constraint of a poet or a musician who must work within certain forms and who must obey a “thousandfold laws” in the act of creating, but who only thereby can attain the highest feeling of mastery, the fullest exercise and realization of his creative powers (BGE 188; cf. EH, “Books,” Z 3, GS 354). Likewise, the founders of states are “the most involuntary (unfeiwillgsten), most unconscious artists there are” (II 17). The freedom from the bad conscience, then, is perhaps best understood not as a lack of all constraint or the free expression of every instinct, but as the channeling and molding, and thus necessarily the partial compulsion and constriction, of the instincts of freedom or the will to power into a specific creative activity. The artist-lawgivers themselves are the purest example of this phenomenon, but their followers, the rest of the “pack of blond beasts” who violently found states and impose lawcodes and political structures, also participate in it. 4.4. THE BAD CONSCIENCE, CRUELTY, AND CREATIVITY Connected to these questions about ressentiment and the bad conscience is the question of how cruelty relates to the bad conscience. Is the instinct for freedom or the active form-giving force, what Nietzsche here calls the will to

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power, simply motivated by cruelty, or is this instinct fundamentally the desire to create? Is there a difference between the two manifestations of this desire to create—the grander, outwardly-directed version and the smaller, inwardly-directed one—such that the former is relatively free of cruelty while the latter is much more steeped in cruelty, or perhaps identical with it? In short, which is primary to the will to power and so to human beings, creation or cruelty? These specific questions involve not only the bad conscience but the creation of morality and culture generally. At times Nietzsche seems to suggest that cruelty is an integral part of this drive to create and form that he also identifies as the will to power. For instance, Nietzsche groups cruelty (die Grausamkeit) among the primal instincts denied outward expression and consequently turned inward by the advent of society (II 16); these “instincts of freedom” which the first political human beings had to check seem to be synonymous with the will to power, to include all the forms of the will to power that Nietzsche later names and ascribes to the lawgivers. On the other hand, in his extended description of those who found states in II 17, Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes their capacity for violence but does not attribute cruelty to them; violence is necessary for them to create, but they are not, according to this passage, actuated by cruelty, by the desire to inflict pain on others. Thus “under the pressure of their hammer blows and artists’ violence (Künstler-Gewaltsamkeit)” an untold quantity of freedom was expelled from the world or at least repressed and forced to find release and satisfaction inwardly, within the individual’s psychic economy. But in this passage the artist-lawgivers’ motive is clearly to create, to fashion a “new . . . ruling structure that lives,” not to experience or enhance their own power through acts of cruelty. Thus pre-political humanity seems to have been cruel, but not the artistlawgivers who found states; these latter were physically violent and imposed their forms with the same amoral certainty of purpose, or ruthlessness, as any other artist, but were indifferent to the suffering they caused rather than gratified or exhilarated by it. Even in the case of pre-political humanity, however, Nietzsche may be speaking too loosely when he says they were moved by cruelty. After all, cruelty in the strict sense seems to require a much greater degree of self-consciousness, of awareness of oneself as a particular and distinct entity separate from the rest of the world and engaged in antagonistic relations with the other entities in that world, than these first humans possessed according to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s use of the word “cruelty” may then be a polemical overstatement or anachronism, intended to impress upon his readers how violent and pitiless the original human beings were, and thus to underscore his differences not only with contemporary sensibilities but also with previous thinkers like Rousseau.

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It is when Nietzsche turns to portraying the effects or workings of the bad conscience, or to illuminating the bad conscience “from the inside,” so to speak, that he begins to foreground cruelty. Fundamentally it is after all the same active force that is at work on a grander scale in those artists of violence and organizers and that builds states, which here, internally, on a smaller and pettier scale, directed backwards, in the “labyrinth of the breast,” to speak with Goethe, creates for itself the bad conscience and builds negative ideals—it is precisely that instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power): only the material on which the formgiving and violating nature (Natur) of this force vents itself is here precisely the human being himself, his whole animal ancient self. . . . This secret selfviolation, this artists’ cruelty (Künstler-Grausamkeit), this pleasure in giving a form to oneself as a hard, reluctant, suffering substance, in burning in (einzubrennen) a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a no, this uncanny and horribly pleasurable work of a soul willingly in conflict with itself, which makes itself suffer out of pleasure in making suffer, this entire active “bad conscience” finally—one could guess it already—as the actual womb of ideal and imaginative events also brought to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation, and perhaps even for the first time beauty itself. (GM II 18)

Those who found states are artists of violence (Gewalt-Künstlern), and are distinguished by “that terrible artists’ egoism (Künstler-Egoismus) that has the look of bronze and knows itself justified to all eternity in its ‘work,’ like a mother in her child” (II 17); although this egoism is hard and amoral, it is not particularly cruel or sadistic; it is concerned with the beauty and perfection of its creation, not with glorying in the pain it causes to others. Those who live in these states, on the other hand, and who are thus afflicted with the bad conscience, are animated by an artists’ cruelty (Künstler-Grausamkeit). Again and again in this passage Nietzsche stresses the pleasure (Lust) in cruelty and in making suffer that inspires and permeates the work of the bad conscience, and so the capacity for moral self-criticism and self-reformation that it brings into existence. Thus, to ask it again, which is primary, creation or cruelty? What is the true motive of the will to power, the urge to create highlighted in II 17 or the lust for cruelty which Nietzsche foregrounds in II 18? The best reading, in my view, holds that creation is primary, that the will to power is principally a will to create and to give or impose forms, and that Nietzsche’s emphasis on cruelty in II 18 is chiefly for the sake of making a point about the character of morality, and in particular a polemical point about the origin and purpose of the morality of selflessness. Cruelty, as a sensation of power or mastery, may be an attendant pleasure to the artistic activity described in these passages, but to say that cruelty is the sole or even the primary motivation of creativity, that people write poetry or symphonies only because they enjoy the cruelty

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of forcing themselves to keep to a particular form, seems to me both too grim and too crude to be Nietzsche’s position, and as I will argue below, the text does not support this reading in any case. I think it is first of all important to remember that, as we saw above, the substance of the bad conscience is not simple mindless cruelty or violence. The active force Nietzsche is describing is form-giving and artistic, not simply violent (in fact, it seems opposed to the simple, self-forgetting and destructive violence of pre-political humanity, since it restricts and represses it); the formation of the bad conscience is ultimately powered by this active, form-giving force, not by simple violence or cruelty turned inward. Moreover, if cruelty is the primary motive of human creation and valuing, then self-affirmation seems impossible, since one is always acting based on one’s reaction to another, and even if that reaction is impulsively aggressive without being vengeful, it is still not self-affirming but rather oriented towards another from the outset. Put somewhat differently, if cruelty were primary Nietzsche’s creators would suffer from the same problem as Hegel’s masters. This reading is further supported by the example of the artist-lawgivers, the purest embodiments of the active, creative power Nietzsche treats in these passages. Nietzsche stresses their artistic and creative activity, rather than any pleasure they derive from cruelty or even from their experience of power over others. They find their satisfaction and justification in their artistic creation. Furthermore, however commanding or masterful the artist-lawgivers are, the will to power or the will of life is greater than them and only using them as instruments. Thus although they feel some sense of power and dominance both over others and within themselves (as one part of them dominates over the others), their aim is not merely to subjugate and brutalize others but to discharge this larger will making itself felt and acting through them; their own sense of power is then not the essential aspect of their activity or experience. In short, creation is such an integral part of power as Nietzsche understands it that cruelty without creation is merely a sterile and inferior expression of the will to power. Finally, I believe that this interpretation is confirmed by Nietzsche’s description of “the form-giving and violating nature (formbildende und vergewaltigende Natur) of this force” that creates both states and political life and the individual bad conscience. I think it is clear from Nietzsche’s account of the nature and activity of this force that it violates because it is form-giving, it does not form in order to violate; the violence and destruction of the artistlawgivers is in the service of their creation and imposition of new forms. Here, moreover, Nietzsche again uses the word nature to describe the creative action of the will to power, not the simply destructive or chaotic. However much the instincts of freedom or the will to power also delight in attack, destruction, change, and so forth, Nietzsche only describes the will to power as natural when it is building and establishing new forms.

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Yet even granting all of this, there is no denying that Nietzsche repeatedly underlines the importance of cruelty in section eighteen. This emphasis, however, seems above all to be another instance of Nietzsche’s tendency to overstate his negative or polemical point. Perhaps the most significant example of this tendency is his question, “After all, what would be ‘beautiful’ if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself: ‘I am ugly’?” According to this formulation there would be no natural, primary, or spontaneous experience of beauty, only the negation or turning against one’s basic impulses or instincts (and thus a judgment that “I am ugly”). Yet Nietzsche goes on to qualify or restrict this claim by saying that “[t]his hint will at least make less enigmatic” how selflessness, selfdenial or self-sacrifice could come to signify an ideal or a form of beauty; the “at least (Zum Mindesten)” suggests that his radical claim that beauty is only a secondary and negative phenomenon is an overstatement, and indeed it contradicts other claims Nietzsche advances elsewhere with at least equal vigor (cf., e.g., TI, “Expeditions,” 20). 14 When Nietzsche turns to the topic of the unegoistic and the morality of self-sacrifice, he reinforces the impression that he has been exaggerating the role of cruelty in human creativity for the sake of debunking this morality, saying that the foregoing makes clear “the type of the pleasure (Lust) that the selfless man, the self-denier, the selfsacrificer feels from the first: this pleasure belongs to cruelty.” Thus perhaps some of the stress on cruelty in this section, rather than on a positive creative impulse or goal, is due to Nietzsche’s attempt to conclude with an explanation and demystification of the unegoistic, or of the negation of one’s instinctual demands, and to explain that it owes its allure and indeed its very possibility to (self-inflicted) cruelty: “only the bad conscience, only the will to self-maltreatment provided the presupposition for the value of the unegoistic.” Nietzsche remains consistent here in the considerable praise he confers on the bad conscience. He describes the bad conscience as “the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena”; this is a compressed formulation, but it suggests that all “ideals” and even all imagination is the result of the inhibition or repression of humanity’s basic animal instincts, and in particular its violent and aggressive instincts. More broadly, in the case of the bad conscience “the form-giving and violating nature of this force” is turned inward, but also directed toward something much more general, “the human being itself”; in a sense, this is more impressive and “pregnant with a future” than simply molding this or that group of men into a social or political order; the bad conscience starts to change or rework humanity as such.

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4.5. NOTES 1. Nietzsche suggests that these earliest criminals perceive the violence and deception practiced by the city as “not even excused (entschuldigte) by affect.” This reference to a notion of affect or emotion partially excusing crime seems an anachronism on Nietzsche’s part, since distinguishing between acts committed under emotional strain and those done in cold blood seems a rather late and subtle distinction, revolving as it does around questions of conscious intention, and thus, on Nietzsche’s own account, precisely not the sort of thing that would have occurred to anyone in the time frame which Nietzsche is describing here. 2. For a somewhat different reconstruction of these communities in the Genealogy, see Migotti 2006. 3. Here Nietzsche plays on his earlier mention of the word Elend in II 9, where he had been describing the misery of being exiled or cut off from the community. Long before such a thing could be miserable or painful, being in the community at all was at least an equal misery, indeed an exile from the human animal’s first home. 4. Since I quote Reginster above I should note that his account differs from mine here. See note 5 below. 5. For a different reading of this development see Reginster 2011, 63. Reginster suggests that the purely prudential control over the instincts—which can no longer be “trusted,” as acting on them leads to ruin—is the only type of control initially and that it continues to play the central role for much of the process. 6. Though it is unclear why this blindness would be necessary. This is a crucial step in Nietzsche’s argument—this blindness is necessary for the creation of morality rather than simple self-mastery. This is particularly puzzling since, for Nietzsche especially (though also as a matter of common experience), the experience of power should be enough to motivate this operation, and enough for us to explain it. Perhaps the idea is that the terror inspired by the founders leads to an acceptance of their commands as legitimate, indeed as morality itself, rather than simply as demands that one follows for prudential reasons. The necessary brutality and publicity of the punishments Nietzsche cites, however, suggest that it was difficult enough to force obedience, much less internalization of these commands. So far as I can see, there is no obvious convincing way to make sense of this vital but unargued point in Nietzsche’s account, i.e., how or why we go from prudence to morality (to use a Kantian distinction in a very unKantian context). 7. As Keith Ansell-Pearson puts it, Nietzsche “is very much concerned with combating what he takes to be a ‘reactive’ view on this question: the view that the origins of social order lie in the passions and needs of weak and insecure individuals” (Ansell-Pearson 1994, 138). 8. Nietzsche says that the nobles seek release from “the tension (Spannung) engendered by protracted confinement and enclosure within the peace of society” (I 11). The problem with the nobles seems to be that they find that release, that they are able to relieve their tension before it becomes creative. Nietzsche usually employs the word “tension” (Spannung) in favorable contexts. One notable example appears in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche writes that the struggle against Plato and Christianity has “created in Europe a magnificent tension (Spannung) of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense (gespannten) a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals.” Tension is here associated with vision, creativity, and going beyond oneself. For the ancient nobles, on the other hand, tension is an unpleasant symptom of living in society, but one which they are able to assuage by returning to the wilderness. By slackening their tension through uninhibited violence, the nobles close off any possibility of overcoming themselves; they remain what they are, politically powerful and self-affirming but one-dimensional and stagnant. 9. At least this is how Nietzsche presents them in the First Essay of the Genealogy. Elsewhere Nietzsche presents the noble classes of societies as somewhat more spiritually complex and sophisticated, as for instance when he says that the troubadour ideal of love as passion is of noble origin (BGE 260), a suggestion somewhat at odds with the portrait of vacant self-congratulation which Nietzsche paints in the First Essay of his polemic. 10. Compare the definition of conscience Aaron Ridley uses in his book on the Genealogy: “To have a conscience, then, good or bad, is to be not merely conscious but self-conscious: it is

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to have the capacity to make oneself the object of one’s own consciousness and a corresponding potential to make oneself the object of one’s own will” (Ridley 1998, 15). The nobles, at least as Nietzsche presents them in the First Essay, are self-conscious enough—though barely, and perhaps not always—to be the object of their own (self-affirming) consciousness, but have little or no reason to make themselves the objects of their own transformative will (and are not presented as doing so in Nietzsche’s account). They have, in this sense, half a conscience. See further Ridley’s discussion of why the original nobles are not Nietzsche’s models or goals (Ridley 1998b, 131–134). 11. Staten 1990, 51 ff., Ridley 1998b, 17 ff. 12. One might also think that the sense of self was too rudimentary or nonexistent for those being terrorized to experience the sense of personal aggrievement and rancor that are necessary to ressentiment. But the rest of Nietzsche’s treatment of ressentiment, especially his discussion of its relation to the earliest law codes in II 11, suggests that the sense of self is well-developed enough to allow for ressentiment from almost the first instance of human sociability (cf. 2.2 above). Thus however primitive the sense of self and therefore of ressentiment at the founding of a political society, it is still a possibility, and its absence in those coerced by the law must be explained in another way. 13. On the essential connection between ressentiment and self-deception, and how the latter is especially what makes ressentiment so poisonous in Nietzsche’s eyes, see especially Reginster 1997 and Poellner 2011. 14. On beauty in the Genealogy as a whole see Ridley 2011, which, among other things, shows that this is in fact not Nietzsche’s view throughout the Genealogy (or elsewhere).

Chapter Five

The Development and Moralization of the Bad Conscience Sections 19–25

Nietzsche’s basic argument in the final sections of the Second Essay is easy enough to follow. Once human beings began to live in society, they had to repress their basic animal instincts of aggression. Since, however, they could not simply discard or expunge these instincts, they turned them back on themselves and began attacking their full range of animal drives (II 16–17). This is what Nietzsche calls the bad conscience, and this is how humanity began to transform itself (II 18). When human beings began living in society they also began to believe in the power of the spirits of their dead ancestors (II 19), and began to feel a fearful sense of debt to them for the sacrifices they had performed to found and sustain the tribe—the movement from the surveillance and reworking of instinct to a feeling of fear and debt toward the ancestors apparently being driven by the long-lived fear of the founders and their laws (cf. II 16–17). In any case, as this sense of Schuld grows with the power of the tribe, it becomes greater and stronger and more invincible (II 19). Eventually it spreads out from noble tribes to others (II 20), and all of humanity begins to feel this sense of guilt, in particular guilt toward its origin, which includes not only the ancestor-founders of individual tribes but the universe itself (II 21). The bad conscience, i.e., the instincts of aggression masquerading as moral guilt, seizes upon this sense of guilt and further intensifies it to satisfy itself and its need for cruelty and self-torture. This increases until it reaches a fever pitch of madness, at which point Christianity proposes an insane but brilliantly effective solution: the creditor takes the debt upon himself, and sacrifices himself for his debtor (II 21–22). Yet the 131

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unhealthy self-abuse of Christianity is not the only possible use for belief in the divine, as the glorious and guilt-free ancient Greeks show (II 23). Unfortunately, this part of the Second Essay is the weakest part of Nietzsche’s account of the rise and development of morality, which is perhaps not surprising. Any attempt to compress the entire history of morality and religion from prehistory to the present day into a few paragraphs is bound to be incomplete at best. The problems, however, go well beyond historical lacunae or leaps of logic. They include Nietzsche’s explanation for the origin of belief in the gods, his somewhat spotty sketch of humanity’s moral development, and his characterizations of Christianity and especially ancient Greek religion, an ideal that he holds out as a beacon of hope but which, in the terms in which he describes it here, seems impossible according to his own analysis of morality and the bad conscience. Be that as it may, I will try in what follows to present the best possible case for what I take to be Nietzsche’s position, while still noting what seem to me to be the irremediable problems with it, as well as the questions it simply leaves unanswered. I will also try to consider whether or in what way these problems and omissions create difficulties for the larger argument and narrative of the Second Essay of the Genealogy. 1 5.1. SCHULD, EARLY COMMUNITIES, AND THE NATURALNESS OF MORALITY In the nineteenth section Nietzsche turns to consider the history of the bad conscience and “the conditions under which this illness has reached its most terrible and most sublime peak—we will then see what has really thereby made its entrance into the world.” Here Nietzsche suggests, in a surprisingly Aristotelian turn, that the fully developed form of the bad conscience will give us the truest picture of what it is. Accordingly, in this and the following sections Nietzsche passes over a more detailed treatment of how precisely the bad conscience or moral faculties developed out of humanity’s primal violent instincts, something that obviously detracts from his attempts to give an explanatory, causal account of that development (or perhaps cuts against the interpretation that he is doing so). In any case, in discussing the fully developed form of the bad conscience Nietzsche remains consistent in his views on nature and creation. Repeatedly in these sections Nietzsche refers to the bad conscience as both a pregnancy and an illness, thus recalling his discussion of the priest in the First Essay (especially I 6) as well as illustrating the painful and sickly character of even organic or natural creation in Nietzsche’s view. Even when nature creates, it does so by violating the integrity of one of its own forms, breaking it open so as to produce or draw forth something beyond it.

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Nietzsche begins this investigation by noting that the “private law (privatrechtliche)” relationship of a debtor to his creditor has “once again” been interpreted into a relationship in which it is “most unintelligible” to us moderns. The particular relationship that Nietzsche focuses on here is that between a primitive or prehistoric tribal community and its ancestors and especially its founders, and the basic argument of section nineteen is that the earliest communities recognized a debt or legal obligation to their ancestors, whom they believed continued to exist as powerful spirits and to protect the community and increase its power. An integral part of Nietzsche’s argument is that the more powerful a tribe or community became the more primitive humanity believed in and feared the power of the ancestors, while a decline in the fortunes of the community was experienced almost as a liberation from their power, or in any case made one fear and esteem the ancestors less. These claims may be true, but Nietzsche offers no particular evidence for them, and it is not clear if he is referring to facts he takes as established and widely known or if he is simply asserting all of this. “Within the original tribal community (der ursprünglichen Geschlechtsgenossenschaft)—we are speaking of primeval times—the living generation always recognized a juridical duty towards earlier generations, and especially towards the earliest, which founded the tribe (geschlecht-begründende).” The first and most obvious question raised by this statement concerns the time period or stage of civilization of which Nietzsche is here speaking. 2 Despite some of the indications Nietzsche gives that he is here describing a prepolitical, primarily familial and thus more “organic” form of community than that depicted in II 16–18, I think that he is in fact describing a time after the founding of political society. In the first place, the existence of some sense or conception of debt, in however crude or vague a form, the notion of a specific, concrete good for which the present generation owes its ancestors (even as gross or all-encompassing a good as its survival), implies that a more powerful group has already appeared and imposed the legal interpretation of the concepts of equivalences and debt on the tribe. When Nietzsche mentions festivals as well as the statutes and commands of the ancestor-founders, it becomes even more apparent that he is describing a political community with clearly defined laws, not a nomad population still unformed and unchecked by a law code and political structure. It is then easy to see how the violent and terrifying origin of political society described in II 17 would lead to the religious fear of the ancestors described here (though the “ancestors” would in fact then be foreign conquerors), and how the founders of the tribe and its law would later be conceived of as heroes emerging from and imposing order upon the anarchic world predating the religious and political systems governing the tribe (though in recorded religious history these founders often act with the help or direction of a god or gods, in Nietzsche’s account they become the gods rather than being instructed by them).

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This reading also helps to explain the extreme fearfulness Nietzsche attributes to these early humans. In primeval times, Nietzsche argues, an increase in power did not, as we moderns may think, lead to an increase in the feeling of independence and freedom, but rather to an increase in superstitious fear, for these prehistoric humans did not believe that they could be the cause of their own success or power (Nietzsche’s emphasis here on the mere survival of the tribe and on the “prudence, foresight, and present power” of the ancestors makes clear just how Hobbesian this part of his account is— and how it again pulls against his assertion that life and the will to power are fundamentally active and aggressive, not defensive or reactive [II 11–12; but cf. II 9]). But why should they have been so fearful, and does this abject cringing leave any room for the will to power? There is, after all, no obvious reason why they should be plagued or haunted by the “suspicion” that they have not repaid their ancestors sufficiently, much less why that suspicion should “remain and grow.” The answer seems to be that the memory of the terrible and astonishingly violent founding of the political community still lives in their memory (in the somewhat transfigured form of a religious terror or dread of the founders and ancestors). This would also then have been during the epoch of the morality of mores, which both indicates that the members of these tribes were probably still more violent and chaotic than Nietzsche’s brief sketch here may suggest, and thus also explains the need for the enormous fear and angst attending the customs imposed on the tribe (see the discussions of the morality of mores in Daybreak 9, 14, 16). In short, the people living at this stage of political and cultural development were presumably wild and savage enough that they needed this kind of intense fear as a bulwark or constraint to keep them from tearing the still relatively embryonic political community to shreds. Given this background, it is relatively easy to see how, on Nietzsche’s account, Schuld as obligation became Schuld as guilt. The fear these earliest political subjects felt, springing from their sense of Schuld as simple debt, did not preclude or obliterate the other, more violent and aggressive drives and instincts, but rather had to counter and master them. At the same time, in this earliest incarnation of the bad conscience the instincts of aggression were being turned against precisely these unruly and disobedient impulses (i.e., against themselves), and it was against these most fundamental urges for freedom or chaotic autonomy that the bad conscience would have directed its sense of hostility and abuse, and for which these earliest humans would have first begun to feel guilty. They would have needed to condemn and wage war against their basic violent impulses in order to exist in society, but it would have been in terms of defiance against the ancestors and their laws that they would have first conceived of and experienced actual guilt or moral selfcensure (obviously mixed with a large dose of simple fear).

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Here, however, a serious problem emerges in Nietzsche’s account, one that was already implicit in his discussion of the bad conscience in section sixteen but which here becomes explicit and threatens to derail his entire argument. The sense of Schuld as a debt to be paid to the ancestors in the form of obedience transforms into Schuld as moral guilt (in however crude or rudimentary a form). But how could this identification have been made at the (near) beginning of social or political life if, as Nietzsche maintains earlier in the essay, a sense of Schuld as moral guilt only comes later in human development and derives from a purely material or monetary sense of Schuld as debt (II 4)? Presumably the idea is that the debtor-creditor relationship predated society, but there are three problems with this. First, Nietzsche’s earlier discussion in sections four and five stated that the older, purely economic sense of Schuld remains the primary (and perhaps sole) meaning of Schuld well into the era of recorded history, as Nietzsche takes the contracts and laws he cites to show. 3 Moreover, and as we have seen, the notion that the debtor-creditor relationship somehow precedes political society is incoherent, both in general terms—for how could there be contracts without a civil power of some sort to enforce them?—and in the particular terms of Nietzsche’s account—for he seems to believe the motivation of these contracts was to allow those already constrained by society to vent their aggression on the debtors, which obviously presupposes society, and, even if we imagine there somehow was not yet any society, the goal of venting aggression could have been much more easily met by simply attacking the (prospective) debtor. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, a moral interpretation of Schuld is already presupposed by the claim that obedience (for its own sake and not as a means to achieve some other good) was the payment the first socialized human beings rendered their ancestors. The Schuld Nietzsche discussed in sections four and five is literally just a monetary debt, and the actions the debtors undertake to pay the debt back are seen by them and everyone else as the (purely amoral) fulfillment of a contract. Nietzsche argues that obedience to the ancestors was the same, just the fearful fulfillment of a contract, but that presupposes that “obedience” was a concept that already existed and could be used as a term in the contract. And “obey the ancestors” is a fundamentally different kind of injunction from “pay back this debt” or “do not attack your neighbor”—it implies a moral vocabulary or experience, however crude, as well as a sense of communal identity and relation to other human beings that Nietzsche ignores and otherwise denies. Therefore in placing the moral rather than purely economic or material interpretation of Schuld at the very beginning of society, as the model or interpretation that governed the individual’s relationship or indebtedness to society (II 9) and/or to the tribe’s founding ancestors (II 19), Nietzsche seems to grant the primacy of the moral interpretation of Schuld over the material one (as indeed would seem to follow from his broader comments about

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economics in II 8: moral valuation, not material interest, is primary). Nietzsche’s account does not quite break up here, but it does make his earlier claim that the material notion of Schuld was primary, and that the moral sense of Schuld derives from it in a seemingly accidental and secondary way, impossible to retain. In other words, Nietzsche’s basic historical account can survive in a coherent form, but only at the price of abandoning what he appears to take as one of his most significant claims, the notion that the moral impulse in humanity—not just individual contingent moral forms and concepts but morality itself—arises only in the course of humanity’s socialized development, and that human beings were originally devoid of any moral sense at all. In sum, then, Nietzsche’s account seems to require human beings to have been moral, and so in some sense sociable, from the beginning. This near-fatal contradiction in Nietzsche’s argument arises from some of his most essential commitments and their vexed relationship to the rest of modern philosophy. Nietzsche wants (or accepts) the notion of humans as devoid of any natural sociability, or any teleological direction toward political life (and so perhaps toward the traditional virtues), in part because he embraces the modern view of nature as lacking purpose or final causes. 4 So to avoid the notion of humanity as naturally directed toward social and political life he posits an originally formless and violent mass that is eventually given moral shape and purpose by the largely contingent form of the debtorcreditor relationship, understood as deriving either from necessity (primitive trade and economics) or the will to power. Yet despite his occasional indications that material need or interest is primary, Nietzsche especially wants to avoid the reactive or merely prudential view of human sociability and the foundations of society put forth by philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. Thus he at times has an act of willing and valuing at the root of even economic activity (II 8), and stages the deus ex machina of the founder artists to explain how society comes to exist and have a particular moral form and direction, rather than just being a slow and senseless accretion of contingent, accidental features that originally served purely adaptive purposes. If, however, moral valuation is there from the beginning, then human beings seem to be much more inherently moral animals than Nietzsche wants to suggest in much of the Second Essay (though he freely avows it on occasion, in section eight and elsewhere in his writings). This contradiction can perhaps be made to harmonize with Nietzsche’s view of nature as inherently turned against itself. This proposition about nature, however, while it makes a kind of sense in the abstract, and is perhaps even attractive, is hard to put into practice in this case without falling into incoherence. Either human beings are naturally directed to live together in societies or they are not. Nietzsche is thus torn between trying to eschew all teleology and trying to eschew a reactive, adaptive, prudential origin and purpose for society; his aversion to the latter conception is stronger, so he is

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driven to explain the founding and growth of society in terms of the (at least) quasi-teleological will to power. 5.2. SCHULD AND THE ORIGINS OF BELIEF IN THE GODS This helps, I think, to make sense of and to fill out Nietzsche’s account of the earliest society and the origin of the bad conscience. Yet there is another fundamental problem with his account in section nineteen. Nietzsche maintains that in these primeval societies or unions, the living generations feel indebted towards their ancestors and especially towards the earliest generation of the tribe for their “sacrifices and accomplishments (Opfer und Leistungen)”: “Here reigns the conviction 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 (Schuld) that constantly grows greater, since these forebears, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, do not stop affording the tribe new advantages and advance payments (Vorschüsse) by means of their strength.” This claim raises the question of how exactly the founders’ and forebears’ sacrifices and achievements come to be seen as the cause of the power of later generations. It is not entirely clear what the achievements or contributions (Leistungen) of the ancestors were, but the prominence Nietzsche assigns to their sacrifices (Opfer) suggests that suffering was a crucial part of the power the ancestors built up and possessed as spirits (he cannot be referring to ritual or material sacrifices to the gods, since the entire point of his account here is that belief in the gods did not yet exist). This is consistent with Nietzsche’s earlier and repeated claims that suffering was a form of payment or credit among prehistoric humanity, but in this case one must ask, to whom is the payment being made? Did primitive humanity simply read this into the order of things, as if suffering won the sufferer credit with the universe? Nothing else Nietzsche says anywhere in the Second Essay (or in his other writings) suggests this. 5 On the contrary, as Nietzsche says in section seven, ancient humanity understood all suffering in relation to a spectator, as justified or given meaning to the extent that it was observed and found interesting. This also would have prevented the religious beliefs of humanity at this relatively early stage of the bad conscience from being too moralized (a central premise of Nietzsche’s narrative), for the ancestors won their power not by submission to a legal or financial order, not because they “deserved” or “earned” this posthumous power as a compensation for their suffering, but because they were interesting to the gods. But in this case it seems as if the gods must have already existed in people’s imaginations, and indeed been seen as more powerful than the spirits of the ancestors; hence the suggestion that Nietzsche later makes that the gods originated from this early

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view of the ancestors as powerful spirits seems untenable, and even flatly contradicted by the rest of his account, including this portion that proceeds it by just a few lines. The central fulcrum of Nietzsche’s argument here is the unspeakable prehistoric fear of the ancestors, but he cannot explain why this fear should exist without recourse to belief in the gods, or, even more dubiously, a belief that the universe has a strong and clear moral order. In short, Nietzsche’s attempt to explain the origin of belief in the supernatural presupposes the existence of that belief. Nietzsche’s basic claim that the belief in the gods, and in fact the very concept of a god, first sprang from the awesome and deranging fear of the ancestors is unpersuasive and generally a weak point of his presentation here. In addition to the fact that prehistoric humanity’s fear of the ancestors itself seems to rely on a belief in gods who are more powerful than the ancestors, it is unclear why they should believe in a supernatural or numinous realm of spirits that survive death (and are perhaps immortal) but not in gods. It is also odd that Nietzsche seems to take his proposal here, that belief in the gods originated in fear, as so novel and daring when similar arguments had been advanced earlier by Lucretius and especially Thomas Hobbes. With Nietzsche’s emphasis here on the concern for simple preservation he is in fact unusually close to Hobbes, though the latter characteristically focuses more on the human desire for control than on moralized fear and guilt. Even given these differences, however, Nietzsche’s basic claim that belief in the gods arose out of fear is not as original or as audacious as he seems to think it is. Leaving aside Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the gods, which he admittedly presents in somewhat hypothetical or speculative terms, one cannot help but wonder if the “juridical [or ‘legal’] duty (eine juristische Verpflichtung)” that prehistoric humanity recognized towards its ancestors was really as contractual or legalistic as Nietzsche makes it out to be. To be sure, Nietzsche is probably right to emphasize the purely legalistic, ceremonial, and even contractual character of early religion, especially compared to Christianity. But did filial piety play no part in the ancestor worship he describes, either in its origins or in its development and lasting strength? As he did earlier in his account of the origin of political society, Nietzsche here abstracts completely from the family and makes ancestor worship into a purely economic-contractual matter. Again, Nietzsche may well be right that early religion was chiefly a matter of fear, certainly in comparison to more modern religious experience, but the extent to which he denies any other motivation or meaning for this primeval ancestor worship is surprising, if not distorting (in more positive terms, it certainly helps to throw Nietzsche’s position into sharper relief). It is, of course, difficult to contest Nietzsche’s claim that these early humans honored the “statutes and commands” of their ancestors solely out of fearful obedience, since he is apparently speaking of prehistory, and there are thus no records to which one can appeal. But cer-

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tainly written history contains many examples of ancestral laws that claimed to be binding on members of a particular group both because the laws themselves constituted that group and because the laws were good or useful. In other words, and to put the matter in Socratic terms, Nietzsche seems to deny or prescind entirely from both the love of one’s own and the love of the good. This is in keeping with Nietzsche’s presentation of the character of the morality of mores and of primitive society in Daybreak (D 16; the section is titled “First Proposition of Civilization”). The first principle of civilization is not to seek the good or even to seek greater security or comfort but rather simply to establish custom in order to make settled communal life possible at all. Thus Nietzsche’s presentation of prehistoric religion and ancestor-worship is consistent with his own thought but perhaps somewhat tendentious. 5.3. NIETZSCHE’S CRITICISM OF THE BAD CONSCIENCE: CHRISTIANS AND GREEKS The final sections of the Second Essay are devoted to tracing the development of the bad conscience and presenting the ancient Greeks as a counterpoint and possible ideal. While there are problems with Nietzsche’s argument here as well, it is best to explicate his account of the development of the bad conscience before detailing its shortcomings. In the twentieth section Nietzsche sketches the transition from communities based on familial or blood bonds to larger political communities, and affirms that the feeling of Schuld towards the deity did not end with this transition. Nietzsche indicates that the primitive tribal nobility he describes in the twentieth section does not belong to the period of noble reverence for the gods he mentions later (II 23); this follows from the claim that just as humanity has inherited from “the tribal aristocracy (Geschlechts-Adel) the concepts ‘good and bad’…(together with its psychological propensity (Grundhange) to establish orders of rank),” so too it has acquired, “along with the inheritance of the tribal and family divinities (Geschlechts- und Stammgottheiten), also the pressure of still unpaid debts and the longing to be relieved (Ablösung) of them.” If the rest of humanity inherited this sense of indebtedness to the gods, and the earliest form of this Schuldgefühl was fearful obedience devoid of any sense of reverence or piety, then the tribal aristocracy with which this feeling originates is clearly a different aristocracy or nobility from that which later ennobles the gods. 6 Hence despite the fact that, as Nietzsche explicitly states here, this prehistoric tribal aristocracy made the distinctions between “good” and “bad” that Nietzsche treats in the First Essay, it still viewed the gods with fear, as angry and terrible creditors, not yet as a means for these aristocrats to affirm themselves. These earliest nobles would have been self-affirming but still superstitious and fearful, and

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thus only self-affirming vis-à-vis the lower orders of their own society (perhaps like the Spartans as described by Thucydides). The later “noble tribes” ennobled the gods by using them to affirm themselves, which meant in the first place making the gods the source of human “guilt” or mistakes, rather than moralistic observers rendering judgment and punishment on human sin; by contrast, these early tribal aristocracies which have been the focus of Nietzsche’s attention here in sections nineteen and twenty still feared the punishment of the ancestor-gods. Thus, as Nietzsche says at the end of the nineteenth section, pietät, reverence or piety, arrives only with the noble tribes, who treated the gods as objects of reverence rather than of simple fear; only these later nobles affirmed themselves in their gods by using the gods to maintain their own sense of self-worth and self-affirmation, by reading their own noble qualities into the gods, and by seeking to repay the gods by manifesting those noble qualities in themselves (II 23). Nietzsche concludes his reflections about the relation between the feeling for divinity and the feeling of guilt by proposing that with the end of belief in the Christian God, this human feeling of guilt may also be doomed. More specifically, Nietzsche suggests at the end of section twenty that the loss of faith in God may do away with humanity’s feeling of Schuld “toward its beginning (Anfang), its causa prima.” Yet, as we learn at once in the twentyfirst section, this optimistic suggestion is simply false; humanity has developed a moralized sense of Schuld towards its origin or first cause even when that cause is understood as impersonal and amoral, and therefore the way remains blocked to the easy recovery of innocence (Unschuld) that Nietzsche had held out at the end of II 20 as a happy consequence of the death of God. In other words, at the end of section twenty Nietzsche describes only a very crude and amoral concept of indebtedness, explaining how it came to be coupled with religious presuppositions, and more specifically how it has affected people’s attitudes toward the gods or God. The basic concept with which he was working was one of a debt which people wanted to discharge, not a moralized sense of guilt. In section twenty-one he turns, as he puts it, to the moralization of these concepts, their becoming bound up with the conscience and in particular with the bad conscience, the will to self-maltreatment of the socialized human animal. We move from an external sense of debt which one wants to discharge and be relieved of to an internal sense of guilt which, because of its very nature or purpose, can never be discharged. The aim of this moralization, in short, is to make it impossible for humanity ever to discharge its debt, ever to be rid of its guilt or Schuldgefühl. The goal here is to produce a view and feeling of oneself as irredeemable, of humanity as irredeemable, and of existence as irredeemable, to declare and experience all of these things to be purely evil and only to be negated, in order to serve the bad conscience, to negate and attempt to destroy what actually exists,

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making war against one’s natural impulses as strenuously and thoroughly as possible. Nietzsche spells out the consequences of this maneuver brilliantly: One will have guessed already what has really happened with all of this and under all of this: that will to self-torment, that repressed cruelty of the human animal made inward and chased back into himself, locked up in the “state” so as to be tamed, who invented the bad conscience in order to hurt himself after the more natural outlet (natürlichere Ausweg) for this will-to-hurt was blocked—this human being of the bad conscience seized upon religious presuppositions in order to drive his self-torture to its most horrible height and severity. Guilt before God: this thought becomes for him an instrument of torture. He apprehends in “God” the ultimate antitheses that he can find to his actual and irremovable (unablöslichen) animal instincts, he interprets these instincts themselves as guilt (Schuld) before God (as hostility, rebellion, revolt against the “Master,” the “Father,” the ancestor and beginning of the world), he stretches himself upon the contradiction “God” and “Devil,” all of the No he says to himself, to nature, to naturalness, to the actuality of his essence, 7 he casts out from himself as a Yes, as something existent, real (leibhaft), actual, as God, as the holiness of God, as God the Judge, as God the Executioner, as beyond, as eternity, as torture without end, as hell, as the immeasurability of punishment and of guilt (Schuld). (GM II 22) 8

As in section eighteen, the negation of one’s self, of one’s naturalness or natural instincts, is itself the creation of an ideal, and in this case not only an ideal of conduct but a superhuman judge and punisher, a judge and punisher who is “holy,” who is free from all the naturalness of the human. God is the antithesis of the qualities of humanity, but the divine attributes are considered superior to or exalted above the human only because they are the opposite of the natural instincts of the one forced to negate those instincts and make war on himself; there is no natural, logical, or independent basis for preferring or honoring the characteristics attributed to God, it is merely a matter of identifying and valuing the opposite of what humanity possesses and feels—what it is—in itself. There is no reason, for instance, to value the eternal over the temporal, and indeed there is good reason to value and prefer the temporal, since that is what actually exists, and since one could argue that nothing is eternal. But precisely because this is what exists, precisely because this is what characterizes humanity and its existence, the bad conscience condemns and negates it and makes an ideal and perfection out of its opposite. 9 Some important steps in Nietzsche’s account are asserted without any real argument or historical support, for instance his assertion that “the progress toward universal empires is always also the progress toward universal divinities; despotism, with its subjugation of the independent aristocracy always also paves the way for some kind of monotheism,” a claim that he perhaps takes as widely accepted or otherwise uncontroversial. 10 The more signifi-

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cant problem in this passage, however, centers on his presentation of Christianity’s appearance and triumph in the waning Roman Empire. The despotism of the late Roman Empire presumably provided the fertile ground for the emergence and rise of Christianity, but Nietzsche here describes the Christian god as “the maximum God (Maximal-Gottes) attained so far.” But why should this be so? If, as Nietzsche suggests in II 19, the fear of the gods or the belief in their power grows with the power of the tribe, why should the Judeo-Christian God have been the most powerful, since its tribe clearly was not? The answer must be that the guilty moralization of the gods and eventually the world had reached a point where the guilty conscience eclipsed or overflowed political or tribal consciousness and the need for the solution proposed by Christianity was felt by both Jews and Romans. Yet Nietzsche says nothing about this decisive process, beyond implying that it happened. The need for a detailed explanation is, however, all the more pressing given that in this very passage Nietzsche seems to assign an essential role to political reality in determining religious belief. 11 To put the matter somewhat differently, why should Christianity have been the religion to emerge from the Roman empire? And, for that matter, how does Nietzsche’s account of the progress of religious belief and feeling here, as a necessary consequence of the first experience of the bad conscience, square with his discussion of the rise of Judeo-Christian morality in the First Essay? There Nietzsche says nothing to suggest that Judeo-Christian morality was a necessary consequence of the bad conscience or the founding of political society—on the contrary, in the First Essay Nietzsche maintains that Judeo-Christian morality, including and indeed especially Christian love, flowed from political weakness and that the priest was the unique agent exploiting this situation and leading the emergence of that new morality. 12 Questions about the historical-psychological process that Nietzsche limns here are not the only ones elicited by this passage. For instance, what does it mean to say that the Christian God is the “maximum God”? If there is only one type of God, and the Christian God is the maximum form or type of that God, then the difference between the Christian God and the Greek gods seems a relatively trivial difference of degree, and Nietzsche’s later insistence that there is a cardinal difference in kind between the two seems either exaggerated or simply nonsensical. Yet this conclusion that there is fundamentally only one type of god is in keeping with Nietzsche’s presentation of the bad conscience as a sickness that afflicts or constitutes every human being living in society. Similarly, Nietzsche says here that the feeling of guilty indebtedness (Schuldgefühl) towards the divinity “always increases in the same measure as the concept of God and the feeling for God (der Gottesbegriff und das Gottesgefühl) increased on earth and was carried to the heights.” Presumably this means the holiness of God, at least if the Christian God is the maximum god attained so far. This, indeed, seems to be what

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Nietzsche goes on to argue: the more holy, the more exalted above earthly existence, one imagined God to be, the more abject and intense the feeling of Schuld before him. Again, however, this seems to suggest a single kind or type of “feeling for divinity” which is carried to its highest pitch or furthest limit in the case of Christianity; in this case a species of gods that deify the animal in man rather than negating it, as Nietzsche later claims the Greek gods did (II 23), seems impossible. Therefore I do not, as so many commentators do, take the moralization of the bad conscience as a mysterious historical event that must be placed somewhere in Nietzsche’s patchy narrative in these sections and then explained (why was the sense of Schuld moralized? How did this happen?). The moralization of Schuld is more or less coeval with political life and is driven by the basic force of self-inflicted cruelty which constitutes the bad conscience from the beginning, which Nietzsche describes in detail in section eighteen at the latest. He separates out mention of this moralization here not because it has a definite point of chronological emergence—if it did, it would die away with belief in the Christian God—but because it is conceptually distinct and is indeed the crucial factor that makes Schuld and the bad conscience so fatal for contemporary humanity. The attempts to explain this moralization as a discrete moment or event are too many to canvas or even list here, but perhaps the best case is made by Bernard Reginster. He argues that “Christian guilt is . . . not the ordinary moral emotion of guilt, responsive to reasons, but what I shall call a rational passion, by which I mean a passion to which only a rational being is susceptible because it essentially exploits his responsiveness to reason, and which, unlike other passions, not only overrides, but actually corrupts, this responsiveness to reason” (Reginster 2011, 57). This formulation clearly captures what is perhaps the essential point about Christian guilt as Nietzsche describes it, and identifies why he finds it both so powerful and so horrifying. But, as is evident from this statement, the notion that Christian guilt is exceptional in this regard relies on distinguishing it from another form of guilt that is free of the drive to self-inflicted cruelty that constitutes the bad conscience for Nietzsche; Reginster suggests that, under this form of guilt, a guilty individual embraces his punishment as a means of demonstrating his responsibility (73–75). I do not see this form of guilt or this distinction in the Second Essay. On the contrary, I see the bad conscience or civilized morality as being “a passion to which only a rational being is susceptible” but which “overrides” and “corrupts” his reason almost from the beginning. At the very origins of political life the bad conscience must create the simplest forms of obedience and from that the elementary capacity for reason. Once reason exists, however, the bad conscience begins to override it—but not to corrupt it, since reason was created in large part to serve or express the bad conscience. The key activity of the bad conscience is creating new forms, and

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therefore bringing “to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation” (II 18). Reason is part of this process but not a privileged part and certainly not the end goal or governing principle. If there are unique problems with Christianity for Nietzsche they are its embrace of “slave morality” and the fact that, through its insistence on truthfulness and its devaluing of everything worldly, it has bred the conditions for contemporary nihilism. It is easy to see, however, how Nietzsche’s appalled tone in this passage suggests that there is something singularly ghastly about the Christian instantiation of guilt and the bad conscience. The twenty-second section ends with an impressive rhetorical flourish, which seems to express more genuine horror and even pity than polemical furor, but again this seems to be a one-sided account of Christianity and of the bad conscience more generally. To the extent that Nietzsche’s statements in this section, in many ways the rhetorical climax of the essay or at least its most fervid passage, clash with his earlier, more fully argued and elaborated treatment of the bad conscience, I think that they should be ignored. 13 But this means ignoring a fair amount in these closing sections of the Second Essay, where Nietzsche’s criticisms of the bad conscience often seem overstated and even controverted by his earlier discussions. The most important question raised concerns the relation between the bad conscience and nature, in particular Nietzsche’s criticisms of the bad conscience here for being opposed to nature. This tension begins to come to the fore in the twenty-second section, which largely makes the same point as the eighteenth section, only now with a polemical thrust. Nietzsche emphasizes in II 22 that the bad conscience forces a human being to turn his negation of himself into an affirmation and an ideal, and is harshly critical of this fact. But isn’t that precisely what Nietzsche had praised the bad conscience for doing in section eighteen? Moreover, Nietzsche emphasizes here that the bad conscience denies “nature, naturalness, and actuality,” but based on everything he has said previously in the Second Essay, the bad conscience seems to be as much an expression of nature and actuality (Thatsächlichkeit) as is anything. Although Nietzsche does not explicitly say that the bad conscience is natural or caused by nature, he does refer to “the form-giving and violating nature (formbildende und vergewaltigende Natur) of this force” that creates both states and political life and the individual bad conscience (II 18), implying that the force itself, the instinct for freedom or the will to power, is natural, or at least that its nature remains intact or undeformed even when it expresses itself in the bad conscience. Thus the “more natural outlet for this will-to-hurt” of which Nietzsche speaks here in II 22 may be more natural in the sense of more basic or more spontaneous, but, as Nietzsche insisted in II 18, the same basic active force is at work in both cases. So his discussion of the bad conscience here seems rather one-sided, concentrating on only one part of its activity and significance, the part that negates a certain basic set of

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natural drives, but ignoring the ways in which doing so is itself an articulation of the nature of the will to power. There is, more generally, the fact that nature itself seems to desire to create, and thus to create the same inhibitions and impositions which constitute the bad conscience. Both the artist-lawgivers in II 17 and the founders of aristocratic societies in Beyond Good and Evil 257 are distinguished by their naturalness, but they act to found society, to impose forms on nature. It is therefore important to understand that Nietzsche is not simply contrasting the pre-political, “natural” state of humanity with its later civilized or moralized state, and arguing that the first was superior (though at times he obviously seems to be). Nietzsche laments and is horrified by the “anti-nature (Widernatur)” exemplified in the Christian form of the bad conscience, but this is because the bad conscience eventually begins to choke or wither the active force of the will to power that operates in its earlier forms. In other words, some imposition of forms, and thus inhibition and even destruction of primal energies and powers, is necessary and indeed natural (cf. BGE 188 and 1.2 above). If nature were pure chaos or flux, then there would be no forms at all, not even ephemeral and changing forms. The bad conscience, or the moral effect of socialization and the form-giving work of the founders of states, thus forces the primordial chaotic raging into some shape and direction, and thus executes the intentions of nature. In time, however, the bad conscience goes too far, so to speak, and turns against the basic vital and changing process of life itself, and erects what Nietzsche will call in the next essay the ascetic ideal, which attempts to oppose or negate the basic character of life itself; the healthy moral or creative life is somewhere between pure senseless and destructive chaos and a sterile, petrified, and mummified asceticism, a belief in eternal forms and an attempt to judge life using those forms as the standard. The latter, however, is the ultimate or end stage of the development of the bad conscience as Nietzsche describes it in the Second Essay, not the character of the bad conscience or civilized morality as such. But does Nietzsche not here present this development or conclusion as necessary? He does indeed, and while this is in tension with various claims he makes about the past (both here and elsewhere), the vital point to grasp here is that this is the crisis he is addressing and this is why the crisis is of such magnitude: we have reached the dessicated end of the ideals by which humanity has thus far defined and ennobled itself, and now we must selfconsciously overcome them. This may seem at odds with Nietzsche’s claim about the universal and unvarying nature of the bad conscience, but again, this is precisely the challenge: to use the energies and mechanisms of the bad conscience to self-consciously affirm and live by this-worldly ideals. Now we have reached a stage where we can, with full knowledge and conscious choice, direct the ancient animal aggression toward valuing and living in this

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way, toward reversing the previous other-worldly, ascetic values, as Nietzsche indicates here at the end of the essay (II 24). This project is relevant for how we interpret the apparent contradictions between sections eighteen and twenty-two regarding the evolution of the bad conscience. I have suggested that Nietzsche presents the growth of the bad conscience as the necessary unfolding of a process that he initially portrays as creative and praiseworthy (II 18), but then, in a more or less blatant contradiction, criticizes when it reaches a certain inevitable point (II 22). It is also possible, however, that the rhetorical excesses that seem to carry Nietzsche into contradiction in section twenty-two are in fact meant to highlight the discord between our original animal self and what we have become, not for the sake of a simple excoriation of the latter or call for return to the former but rather for the sake of ultimately pushing us to incorporate the animal self into the conscientious individuals we have become. 14 One could take this reading in an agonistic direction, where what Nietzsche wants is to maintain the tension between the two as far as possible, because that tension is creative and a necessary part of our historical awareness. 15 Or one could take Nietzsche’s concerns here as based on his vision for the future of humanity, in which he foresees and devoutly wishes for a harmonious integration of our ancient animal selves into the civilized, moral creatures we have become, on the basis of which we can plan for even greater things as a species (cf. BGE, Pr.). This could be the path to the overcoming of humanity for Nietzsche, or perhaps if this integration were ever successfully accomplished it would itself mark the overcoming of humanity. 16 A final possibility is that Nietzsche recognizes that something like Christianity was an inevitable development of the bad conscience but condemns it here to prepare the reader for the Third Essay, in which Nietzsche will urge us to move beyond the purest, most durable remnant of the Christian ideal, the will to truth. In this case he is not pressing us to turn against the bad conscience but rather to overcome its most recent manifestation (cf. BGE 212). In the twenty-fourth section Nietzsche explains the significance of Greek piety for the bad conscience, focusing on two aspects of the (probably archaic) Greeks’ belief in the gods: that the Greeks’ misdeeds or atrocities were caused by foolishness or folly (Unverstand), not sin or evil, and that the gods themselves were ultimately the cause of this folly. Understanding ethical fault as folly rather than sin may seem strikingly amoral or serene when compared to the moral and religious worldview of Christianity, but this by itself was not enough to allow the Greeks fully to affirm themselves—even the relatively amoral concept of foolishness still indicates an imperfection or fault, and the noble Greeks could not accept this about themselves. Looking at Nietzsche’s overall account of the formation of political society and of the bad conscience, however, one wonders how this could ever be possible. Granted, Nietzsche here puts the term “bad conscience” in quotation marks,

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as if he is referring only to the Christian version of the bad conscience and classifying it as only one instance of the effects of socialization, but so far he has written as if the attack on the animal instincts, and the feeling of guilt engendered by that attack, is the essence of the bad conscience in its broadest sense, or is the essence of the human animal’s experience in society. Christianity, as we have seen above, thus appears as only the most intense stage of the bad conscience, the stage that takes the basic, intrinsic logic of the bad conscience to its highest point, but not a separate branch that is essentially different from any other variation. To live in society means to make war against one’s animal instincts, according to everything Nietzsche has said so far; how then is it possible for anyone to deify the animal in themselves and to prevent it from tearing at and raging against itself? Put somewhat differently, to believe in gods of any kind one must have attained to a level of humanity as opposed to primeval animality, and humanity is produced or defined only in war-like opposition to and negation of the original animal instincts of the human being. Nietzsche’s attempt to sketch the significance of the Greek gods, and use them as a standard by which to criticize Christianity, traps him in another snarl of contradictions, though these are more peripheral and less serious. In the first place, it is unclear how the noble tribes develop piety and try to “repay” the gods with fearless and glorious nobility. It is not a question of political nobility or the pathos of distance working the transformation, since Nietzsche makes clear that the noble tribes discussed in section twenty have every condition he elsewhere ascribes to political nobility yet are still fearful of the gods. So how do we get the Homeric Greeks? Nietzsche gives us no idea. 17 Moreover, the contrast between the Greeks and the Christian God, or rather the deprecation of the latter, doesn’t hold up, for reasons already noted. Nietzsche’s attack on Christian guilt seems to run against his previous praise of the bad conscience, which after all seems to be just an earlier version of that guilt (and one that, on Nietzsche’s own account here at the end of the essay, will necessarily develop into something like this intense version). The Christian God as “maximum God” seems to point to this same thing: this is the inherent and necessary development of this process. Finally, the Greek gods in Nietzsche’s telling “take upon themselves not the punishment but, what is nobler, the guilt”—but how can Nietzsche fail to see that this is precisely what the Christian God does? The mechanism may be different but the principle is the same, and in fact the progress toward divinity in Christianity is arguably a far more exalted picture of humanity than that of the Greeks. In sum, then, there are three major problems with Nietzsche’s presentation of the ancient Greeks as his ideal or even as a possible reality in the terms of his own thought: (1) the Greek gods as he describes them here are not possible, either as something that develops from the noble tribes Nietzs-

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che describes in section twenty or in purely conceptual terms; (2) the critique of Christianity in this passage falls afoul of his (admittedly ambiguous) earlier praise of the bad conscience; and (3) the critique of Christianity makes no sense, insofar as Christian guilt and morality seems to be the logical and inevitable outcome, again according to Nietzsche’s own argument, of the whole process Nietzsche is describing. Even apart from whether such amoral self-affirmation is possible, however, there is the question of whether it is Nietzsche’s goal. Can such invincible self-congratulation as Nietzsche ascribes to the Greeks really be his ideal? Can he expect any among his readers, the best of whom practice the virtue of honesty or probity, to accept it as such? The answer seems to me most likely to be “no.” Nietzsche himself perhaps indicates this by referring to the Greeks as “splendid and lion-hearted children (prachtvollen und löwenmüthigen Kindsköpfe)”; the word he uses for “children,” Kindsköpfe, is affectionate but slightly patronizing or even contemptuous. The final, larger question that I think is raised both by the twenty-third and the twenty-fourth sections concerns not the relation between the human and the divine but that between the human and the animal. Much of what Nietzsche says about the Greeks suggests that he wants to deify the animal in man, or sees this as somehow desirable. Likewise, in the twenty-fourth section, he writes of a possible attempt to reverse the work or direction of the bad conscience. “An attempt at the reverse would in itself be possible—but who is strong enough for it?—that is, to wed the bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which runs counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short all ideals hitherto, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the world.” Nietzsche here seems to group “nature” with “the animal” and to suggest that he is hoping for a return to both. As we have seen repeatedly, however, the bad conscience or something similar seems to be natural in Nietzsche’s view; the creativity that only the bad conscience makes possible is natural, it expresses or simply is the intention of nature. On the one hand, then, there is no essential difference in kind between animals and human beings in Nietzsche’s view, but then this also means that when he praises the animal, he is not praising something radically or profoundly different from the human. The animal vitality, or the natural vitality of the animal, Nietzsche admires and wants to promote, but this is only because of the creative power of nature. The animal in human beings is both amoral and violent, but also creative, and this is what Nietzsche seeks to recover and strengthen. This means then that he wants human beings who harness their animal vitality and use it to create in social, human terms, not that he wants a simple return to a bucolic, pre-political world of bestial harmony and satisfaction (since, indeed, Nietzsche does not believe that any such world ever existed), nor to a pre-political world of chaotic violence and

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mindless savagery. If Nietzsche wants a return to nature, it is a return to the creative (and thus also destructive) power and splendor of nature, not to a time before creation and destruction. And, for human beings, creation means social, moral, and political creation; it means having much of their animal nature and vitality destroyed and mutilated. It is when a morality makes war on or tries to extirpate humanity’s animal nature, its natural fund of animal energy and vigor, that Nietzsche opposes it. All of this is indicated even here in section twenty-four, where Nietzsche discusses the extreme difficulty and danger of the goal he is proposing as well as the rarity of the human beings who would be capable of achieving it, and thus shows again that he is not advocating a simple return to a pre-political or pre-human animality. Moreover, although Nietzsche emphasizes war, conquest, adventure, and the like in this passage, he also emphasizes knowledge and indeed lays a special stress on redemption and the future (as at the end of the First Essay), both throughout the latter part of section twenty-four and in section twentyfive. In other words, Nietzsche focuses especially on elements that cannot be read as part of any simple “return” to a pre-Christian or pre-moral stage of human evolution (on the contrary, the concern with redemption is clearly a legacy of Christianity, as is the concern with knowledge [as the reader of the Genealogy as a whole knows]). In short, Nietzsche is here clearly describing a further step forward, not a regression or undoing. 5.4. NOTES 1. Nietzsche’s summary overview here inevitably gives rise to other well thought-out interpretations. See especially Conway 2007, 85–98. 2. The word that Nietzsche uses for this form or phase of society and which Kaufmann and Hollingdale translate as “tribe,” Geschlecht, perhaps suggests above all a form of social organization based on blood lines or lineage (a reading further supported by the opening of the twentieth section), but it could also mean race or species, and Nietzsche here twice uses the phrase Menschengeschlechts, the human race. At the end of section nineteen Nietzsche speaks of noble races, vornehmen Geschlechter, by which he appears to mean the ancient Greeks (compare the end of II 19 with II 23). He has then apparently purposely chosen the word Geschlecht because of its capaciousness or flexibility, in order to facilitate his narration of the history of this sense of guilt or obligation toward the ancestors (and then the gods) from prehistory to at least the time of the ancient Greeks. In other words, the terminology by itself settles nothing. 3. As so often, Nietzsche’s presentation here is less than ideally clear. He briefly mentions that a moral sense of Schuld derives from a material sense of Schuld, then immediately begins discussing the relation between belief in free will and punishment. In section five he returns to discussing contracts that involved forms of punishment for nonpayment of material Schulden. Although he never details the connection between the evolution of Schuld and the rest of the discussion in sections four and five, it seems as if they are all meant to be related, given the centrality of Schuld to the essay. 4. We have seen that matters are a bit more complicated than this, but Nietzsche does reject two essential components of the Aristotelian or natural law account of teleology and so of political and moral life: (1) the notion of stable natures with determinate ends or final causes, and (2) the notion that whatever teleology may be found in nature is directed toward the good

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in any sense, particularly the good for the nature pursuing its end, rather than the exercise or expression of power. 5. The reverse rather seems to be the case: Nietzsche maintains that humanity eventually projected the moralized sense of guilt and gloom before the gods onto the universe as a whole (II 21). Matthias Risse (2001) attempts to explain how this happened, but he misses the crucial fact that the moralized concept of Schuld, applied to the ancestors as well as to the community, must have existed from the beginning in Nietzsche’s account. 6. One wonders why it should have been these prehistoric nobles from which this feeling and set of beliefs emanated. Why should the feeling of indebtedness towards the ancestors not have been universal to begin with? I think Nietzsche’s answer would be that the highest class of society had the most power and hence the most for which to feel indebted, and that it was thus in this caste that the bad conscience first began to take this particular form. 7. Or, “the No he says to himself, to the nature, the naturalness, the actuality of his essence (Alles Nein, das er zu sich selbst, zur Natur, Natürlichkeit, Thatsächlichkeit seines Wesens sagt).” 8. Nietzsche is here critiquing a specific version of the Christian teaching on redemption. This version holds that sin is a kind of debt incurred by humanity that must be paid to God, one which humanity is unable to pay and of which we are relieved by Christ’s passion, i.e., his free decision to pay our debt by suffering and dying on the cross (II 21). This is a common—if simplistic—view of the Christian understanding of atonement and one which may have been held by many of Nietzsche’s peers and contemporaries, making it a suitable target for his polemic. It is quite different, however, from the view of the nature and effects of atonement as taught by Thomas Aquinas (see Stump 1988 for an excellent elucidation), which is largely immune to Nietzsche’s challenge and indeed creates serious problems for it. 9. On this see especially May 2011b, particularly 82–85 and 92–93. 10. Likewise, Nietzsche’s contention that “the confused genealogies (Genealogien-Wirrwarr)” of the gods, “the sagas of the gods’ struggles, victories and reconciliations,” are the product or reflection of the racial or ethnic struggles that have occurred in the history of a people seems a major proposition, especially if the essay is a genuine attempt at history or at shaping future scholarly research. Nietzsche, however, simply tosses it out offhandedly and indeed parenthetically, without evidence or elaboration. 11. This move is itself suspect. Henri de Lubac acknowledges that there is a type of monotheism that emerges from polytheism during times of imperial consolidation, but notes that this was clearly not the case with Judaism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism (de Lubac 1996, 26–29). 12. Mathias Risse suggests that the problem for Nietzsche is even greater, as his argument here in II 19 implies that the decline in the power of the Jewish people should have made their belief in their own god fade, not grow into a heightened, Christian form and eventually conquer the Romans. Nietzsche’s account in II 19, then, not only contradicts that in I 6–8 but renders it seemingly impossible (Risse 2001, 73–74, n. 9). In fact, as de Lubac notes, still earlier in Jewish history the Babylonian exile did nothing to diminish belief in the God of Israel, which not only endured but—Nietzsche’s own measure of strength or health—successfully incorporated many aspects of the conquering culture (de Lubac 1996, 29). So Nietzsche contradicts his own explanatory principle, but it is just as well since that principle is defective. Nietzsche would presumably reply that this “logic of fear” applies only to prehistory and had dissipated by the time of the Jews and especially by the first century of the common era. This avoids contradiction, but only at the price of calling attention to a gaping hole in Nietzsche’s account, namely his silence on how or why the fear of, and so the belief in, the ancestors and then the gods stopped depending on the power of the tribe. 13. Nietzsche himself suggests in section twenty-four that a great deal of reality must be “slandered and misunderstood” in order to destroy the previously existing temple and to make way for new ideals. 14. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me. 15. For an interesting discussion of what would be at stake in this reading and why it is important to Nietzsche, see Hatab 2008, 107–112.

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16. For a brief sketch of this reading see Eagleton 2016, 111–112. In fine, “the Overman . . . will incorporate his animal spirits into his reason, rather than using his reason to repress his instincts” (112). 17. Conway connects the Greeks with the noble tribes discussed earlier as part of his account of these sections and the history Nietzsche presents therein. But Conway says nothing about how the transformation from fearful, indebted nobles to self-affirming Greeks happens (2007, 94–95).

Conclusion

We have now seen how the Second Essay forms a coherent (if not always successful) account of the origin and decisive early development of political life, morality, and religion. We have also seen how Nietzsche’s unique conception of nature informs and underpins this account. Nature, for Nietzsche, creates forms out of its own initial chaos or formlessness, but it does so only by harshly limiting and so destroying this initial amorphous character and omnivarious potential. This natural impulse—or “moral imperative,” to use Nietzsche’s words from Beyond Good and Evil 188—is manifested in the creation and development of human society. From the original, chaotic, and violent form of pre-political humanity the “first state” is created through the violent imposition of law, giving birth to a political order that is a living form or structure. This violent founding both creates a specific political or organization structure in its immediate aftermath and, over time, creates the much more important apparatus and functioning of the bad conscience, which makes possible and indeed guarantees a perpetual production and self-overcoming of new forms and directions of human moral evolution. Of course, we know from the rest of Nietzsche’s work that something has gone seriously awry, and this process is now in danger of reaching an ignoble end which sees us dwindle into subhuman but supremely contented homunculi in which the forces of life have expired. But how is this possible, if nature or life underwrites this process in some fundamental sense? This question leads us on to the matter of integrating the Second Essay into the Genealogy as a whole, a task I attempt in the first section below. After that I return to the persistent issue of whether and how to understand the Second Essay as an explanatory account of the origins of politics, morality, and religion. The second section below reopens a question considered in the introduction: is Nietzsche best understood as a naturalist— 153

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and if so, what sort? As noted in the introduction, the term is frequently applied to Nietzsche but its meaning can vary significantly from one interpreter to the next (when it is not simply trivial). I therefore reconsider one of the more substantial accounts of Nietzsche’s naturalism, Brian Leiter’s, and ask whether Nietzsche’s attempts in the Genealogy to give specific causal explanations for discrete moral phenomena are successful. I conclude that they are not, then turn in the final section to consider some of the broader problems we have seen with Nietzsche’s narrative in the Second Essay. How fundamental are the flaws we discovered in Nietzsche’s account, and what do they mean for its overall success? Or, to put this last question somewhat differently, if these flaws are serious enough that certain crucial planks in Nietzsche’s account need to be abandoned, what can be retained? I examine the strengths and weaknesses of Nietzsche’s account and consider what can be kept and built upon. C.1. INTEGRATING THE SECOND ESSAY INTO THE GENEALOGY AS A WHOLE One obvious question we may want to answer at this point concerns how the Second Essay fits into the narrative presented in the Genealogy as a whole. Does it come before or after the events discussed in the First and Third Essays? Since the Second Essay ranges from the earliest glimmers of prehistoric humanity up to present-day atheism this is perhaps not the best way to put the question. At what point, then, in the history traced in the Second Essay did the events of the First and Third Essay occur? The First and Third Essays are relatively straightforward compared to the Second, but they still raise some questions that I will necessarily gloss over in this bird’s eye view sketch (e.g., why does the priest take up the cause of the slaves and embrace or promote the morality of equality, despite the fact that it so obviously runs counter to his own hierarchical concern with higher and lower states?). The key figure tying the First and Third Essays together is the ascetic priest, but trying to identify the specifics of his historical role may at first seem hopeless. The priest’s emergence, and his somewhat shadowy rise to power, presumably took place during the crucial period of time Nietzsche glosses over in the Second Essay in a couple of sections (if not a couple of sentences). Moreover, trying to trace any more definite narrative of the priest’s ascendance, and the concomitant eclipse of the knightly aristocrats (cf. GM I 6), runs up against deep and perhaps unanswerable questions about that process. Why did the warriors fall under the priest’s spell; why or how was he able to make them sick? One answer is that the warrior nobles, like everyone else who lives in society, were already sick, and so the priest was able to work his magic on them (cf. III 15). As we have seen, however,

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Nietzsche does not take such a dim view of the bad conscience; in other words, the bad conscience or civilized morality does not automatically make one sick in the declining or decadent rather than the creative sense. Furthermore, Nietzsche’s repeated and to all appearances quite genuine (if sometimes exaggerated) praise of the Greeks and Romans makes no sense if they were just already-sick Christians in the making. 1 Not answering this question, however, means leaving a gaping hole in the explanatory framework of the Genealogy. If one responds that the explanatory work here is subordinate to the proselytizing or revaluative work, one still must accept that readers have no reason to accept Nietzsche’s normative revaluation unless they have already accepted his diagnosis. In other words, the explanatory work may ultimately be subordinate to the transformative work, but the transformative work relies on the explanatory work to be effective (see 3.4 above—Nietzsche is not so much seeking to convert committed adherents of other fully developed positions as he is trying to bring half-hearted Nietzscheans fully into his fold—and for them, some kind of diagnostic and genetic account will be important, indeed perhaps decisive). One might reply that Nietzsche’s best readers, “the kind he needs” (cf. III 16), will already be fully aware of the crisis he means to analyze and overcome, unlike such well-fed academic epigones as the author of this book (and perhaps a few of its readers). To this, however, one must reply that (a) Nietzsche himself seems intent on educating or creating such readers (consider the structure and conclusion of the Genealogy as a whole—it culminates with teaching the “knowers” addressed in the very first words of the preface the meaning of their commitment to knowledge 2), (b) Nietzsche never seems so confident in the arrival of such readers—consider the madman of The Gay Science 125, whose despairing intensity is perhaps echoed in the increasing shrillness of Nietzsche’s last works, 3 and (c) if he can assume agreement or conviction on the existence and nature of the crisis, at least among the readers he really wants to reach, one would expect him to spend far more time detailing the solution (which in Nietzsche’s writings always remains rather vague and visionary) rather than merely sketching the occasional (and somewhat misleading) paean to the Greeks or Romans. How, then, can the three essays of the Genealogy be brought together? Let us return to the figure of the priest. Given that he is not mentioned at all in the Second Essay, I assume that the essential events recounted therein took place before his arrival on the scene. Obviously he is there by the time we get to Christianity (II 20–21), but that is long after the time period to which most of the essay is devoted, and Nietzsche presents his horrified comments on Christianity almost as a kind of coda to the rest of the essay, an exclamatory illustration of the extremes the bad conscience will eventually reach. The forms of religion described in II 19 (the first real discussion of religion in the essay), which are still much closer in time to the rest of Nietzsche’s account

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and much more central to understanding his picture of the earliest society, seem to me decidedly antecedent to the arrival of the ascetic priest. There are gods, but they are still tribal gods, and the attitude toward them is simply fearful indebtedness for the tribe’s good fortune (II 19). There may well have been priests, but there is no indication that they were the priests who based their life on the distinction between the pure and impure or practiced the kind of ritual cleanliness and brooding meditation Nietzsche describes in the First Essay (I 6). Moreover, as we saw above (4.2), the nobles described in the First Essay exist in the political and moral world created by the founders to whom Nietzsche attributes the creation of the bad conscience (II 16–17). They were vacuous but healthy and self-affirming artifacts of the founders’ legislation, from whom the priest eventually emerged. 4 This indeed goes along with Nietzsche’s views on how the nearness of danger both keeps a people unified and strong and prevents the emergence of individuals or variations (BGE 262). The tribes at this point were still dominated by fear for their very continued existence (II 19), so the contemplative, ascetic priests would have emerged somewhat later in time, once the tribes became more settled, more secure, and able both to produce and tolerate the type of the contemplative (or the ascetic and so contemplative) priest. 5 In the concern with purity Nietzsche describes in the First Essay (I 6), in the first place apparently ritual purity, we see the transformation from the ceremonial priest of the tribe to the embryonic form of the contemplative, ascetic priest. Who is Nietzsche’s ascetic priest? The paradigmatic example of the priest for Nietzsche is clearly the Christian priest, who combines concern for purity (I 6) with what we might call an ethic of non-violence (I 7, born of his inability to wage war successfully [I 6]) and with an ascetic judgment on the world, namely that it is merely a path to another world, the true world, which stands in opposition to and as a judgment on the actual world of nature and reality as we experience it (III 11). Perhaps most importantly, the Christian priest becomes a shepherd—or, in less favorable terms, the leader of a herd—of the great, misshapen, suffering masses (III 15). The Christian priest shares all these characteristics, particularly the crucial last one, not so much with the Jewish priests or the Brahmins but with Buddhist monks. There is a parallel development in both cases, as a more universal, proselytizing but fundamentally ascetic religion governed by priests emerges from a more exclusive but still priestly foundation. 6 In the cases of Christianity and Buddhism, asceticism is a means not only for the priests to maintain their own power both internally or spiritually and externally or politically, but also to lead and give meaning to the lives of the suffering masses in a more or less benevolent fashion; the Christian and Buddhist priests exemplify not only the ascetic renunciation of the world but the movement to take this message to the people and become the guide and protector of all those who suffer. 7

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Having then gained greater clarity on the priest—who he is, when he enters the picture, what he accomplishes and how—let us attempt to draw out Nietzsche’s narrative as a whole. The original state for human beings is chaotic violence, the will to power in its most basic or crudest form. As noted above (2.1), human beings must have lived in some kind of communal state at this stage in Nietzsche’s account, but the community, like everything else, must have been primarily a matter of instinct and not have made significant demands on the basic fund of chaotic aggression that defined these first humans. Then (one of the fatal flaws in Nietzsche’s narrative), a race of foreign conquerors, somehow already organized into a political unit, attacks and conquers this primitive population. The consequent violence and repression, always in the service of creating a living structure (II 17), produced the bad conscience, the phenomenon whereby the original basic instinct of aggression is turned inward and given a moral charge to police and ultimately reorder the basic instincts of the members of this subjugated population. This bad conscience becomes the matrix or seedbed of all further moral development, and indeed all further ideal development (apparently including art), and is itself active, an affirmative if more gnarled and clandestine expression of the same will to power operating in the founders (II 18). The founders create “a ruling structure that lives, in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a place that has not first been assigned a ‘meaning’ in relation to the whole” (II 17); it seems clear that Nietzsche is here describing a hierarchical or aristocratic structure (cf. II 12). This living, hierarchical structure includes a religion in which the ancestors (probably the violent founders) are worshipped as gods (see 5.1 above). This hierarchical tribe was dominated by fear for its very existence, but in time it became more secure and settled. At that point, the contemplative, ascetic priest began to emerge, either from an earlier class of purely ceremonial priests or, if we take our bearings from Nietzsche’s comments in the First Essay, from the warriors ruling the society. In the First Essay Nietzsche writes that the priest is originally distinguished by things like avoiding sex with “the dirty women of the lower strata (niederen Volkes)” (I 6). From this we learn both that the caste system predates the priests and that they come from the upper caste, which initially seems to have been a warrior caste. They ultimately gain their power not because the warriors themselves are as sick as everyone else but rather because the priests create and then cultivate a new form of inner expansion and power, which draws even the noblest exemplars of warrior virtue (BGE 51; cf. GM III 15; D 113). The caste system already existed, but it is only the priest who creates, out of himself, anything more than the dimmest spark of the pathos of distance (compare GM I 6 with BGE 257). Presumably because they are the earliest, and thus necessarily still the fiercest (cf. III 10), the Brahmins succeed in becoming a ruling caste, though

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Nietzsche insists that they still represent the ascetic will to nothingness (I 6, III 17). Although Nietzsche calls the Jews “that priestly people” (I 7), he seems to have regarded their priestly period, around the time of the Second Temple, as a degeneration from the biblical era. 8 In any case, it is the Jews who initiate the slave revolt in morals, the inversion of noble values, that is carried through by Christianity (or by Christianity as the secret revenge of Jewish hatred). Yet there is another, arguably more momentous way in which Christianity is unique. Like all ascetic religions, it locates true value in a beyond, in an otherworldly, ideal realm that exists completely apart from and negates this actual world. Yet because Christianity is Platonism for the people (BGE, Pr.), and thus shares Plato’s belief that “God is the truth, truth is divine” (GS 344), it institutes truth as a central part of this ultimate, otherworldly good. It therefore breeds radical, rigorous, unyielding probity as a good and indeed as perhaps its essential virtue or ethical demand. This ultimately destroys Christianity, but at the current stage of that destruction we can also see that the faith in the absolute value of truth, the faith which destroyed Christianity and which offers the highest ideal of our age and continues to animate the “last idealists of knowledge,” is itself a product of Christianity, and thus ultimately of asceticism and the ascetic denial of the world (III 27). Why would nature create the ascetic ideal? This is perhaps a clumsy way to put the matter but the basic question follows from the interpretation I have offered. The answer has to be that asceticism creates new forms and directions of power, and that Nietzsche’s suggestions to the contrary in the Genealogy are part of the polemical nature of the work. The issue is not with asceticism as such but with the pass to which it has now brought us. Indeed, asceticism served the purpose of life in enhancing power and creating new ideals for the priest and those like him (including, ultimately, other contemplative types like the philosopher) while also providing protection for the weak and those declining in life or health, and thus making a social bond between creative rulers and weak, sterile ruled possible (hence the need, in Nietzsche’s view, not only for new values but for a new social order and indeed a new conception of social order). Hence we move from prehistory to the crisis of the present, the most complete and necessarily final stage in the unfolding of the inner logic of the ascetic ideal, at least in the form it has taken in the Christian and postChristian West. The movement, in Nietzsche’s account, is one from the primeval joy in change and destruction of pre-political humanity to the absolute devotion to an unchanging world of asceticism, whether as conceived by religion or by modern atheistic science. What stops Nietzsche’s position from being merely destructive or reactionary is his generally positive view of the bad conscience, which ultimately is just another name for the human capacity for moral and artistic creativity.

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C.2. NATURALISM AND EXPLANATIONS REVISITED We have now seen how the historical account Nietzsche gives in the Second Essay can provide the roots or basis for a complete and coherent, if necessarily severely abbreviated, history of humanity’s moral development. How successful, however, is it in its ostensible purpose of explaining the existence and evolution of morality? We can begin to answer this question by considering the specific causal explanations Nietzsche offers in the course of his historical account, turning to the work of Brian Leiter to help us flesh out what distinct or exact causal explanations might mean in this context. In the introduction we saw some of the limitations with Leiter’s version of Nietzsche’s naturalism, limitations that touch on the fundamental question of Nietzsche’s attitude toward modern science and on the even more fundamental question of Nietzsche’s conception of nature itself (I.2). Yet Leiter’s approach, whatever its faults, has the great virtue of showing how Nietzsche’s thought might be tied to a larger and more significant naturalist project, something missing from many of the ubiquitous references to Nietzsche’s naturalism. How successful, then, is the Genealogy as an explanation or set of explanations for the existence and character of morality? As we saw in the introduction, Leiter suggests that Nietzsche’s naturalism is best understood as a speculative naturalism that seeks to be continuous with the natural sciences in offering speculative causal hypotheses that explain human behavior, specifically moral behavior, in naturalist terms. We can appraise this attempt using the cases Leiter himself chooses. Responding to Janaway, Leiter draws on the First Essay of the Genealogy for his examples: Nietzsche elicits a variety of kinds of evidence of his own in support of the existence of this psychological mechanism [the mechanism by which political or social impotence and ressentiment create Christianity (and unegoistic morality generally)]: for example, the facts about the etymology of the terms “good” and “bad”; the general historical fact that Christianity took root among the oppressed classes in the Roman Empire; and the rhetoric of the early Church Fathers. Here we see Nietzsche arguing for a characteristically scientific kind of inference: namely to believe in the causal role of a particular psychological mechanism, for which there is ample independent evidence, on the basis of its wide explanatory scope, i.e., its ability to make sense of a variety of different data points. (Leiter 2015, 247)

Let us take these in turn. First there are “the facts about the etymology of the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad.’” If “the facts” are simply that etymology suggests a story closer to Nietzsche’s—namely that terms of ethical praise and blame derived from words that signified the ruling and lower classes respectively—

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than to that of the “English psychologists,” then this is the strongest of Nietzsche’s claims, though he hardly demonstrates that this has happened “everywhere [überall]” and “necessarily [mit Nothwendigkeit]” (I 4). The evidence of etymology, however, only points to the origin of moral valuation among the ruling classes of antiquity; it is silent on the possibility of ressentiment giving rise to a countervailing set of values, which is the causal argument Nietzsche is making on Leiter’s account. 9 The etymological evidence, in short, gives strong but not conclusive support to the first part of Nietzsche’s account of valuation (though Nietzsche perhaps overstates how definitive that support is), but does little more than set the stage for the crucial step in Nietzsche’s explanatory argument, the notion that unegoistic morality arose among the lower classes out of a spirit of ressentiment. Next is “the general historical fact that Christianity took root among the oppressed classes in the Roman Empire.” While undoubtedly a major part of Nietzsche’s account, this is a banal observation that lacks “wide explanatory scope.” There were many oppressed nations and classes in the Roman Empire: why did Christianity, or anything like it, only take root among one? Or where is the evidence that “slave morality” emerged among other oppressed classes in the Roman Empire (or elsewhere)—if the claim is that ressentiment has broad explanatory scope, at least in certain political situations, we should expect to see it producing the same results again and again in other places—as Nietzsche himself insists (GM II 11). 10 Or, to put the matter in different terms, why did the Palestinian Jews not pursue the much more common route of trying to assimilate themselves to Roman religious and political life? 11 Perhaps most significantly, why did this morality of ressentiment eventually conquer the Romans themselves (this is of course a difficult question for any reading of the Genealogy)? Finally we come to “the rhetoric of the early Church Fathers.” Nietzsche quotes two authors out of dozens of “early Church Fathers,” both of whom wrote volumes upon volumes (especially Aquinas 12), and one of whom left the early Church and is now remembered in part as a heretic, albeit for reasons unrelated to the passage Nietzsche cites. Nietzsche’s reduction of millennia of Hinduism to a few paragraphs is even more absurd. To generalize on the basis of dramatic but exceedingly rare examples, which is precisely what Nietzsche does here, runs against the fundamental principles of scientific methodology. Moreover, the notion that a complex event like the emergence of Christian morality can be explained simply by ressentiment seems a crudely monocausal blunder. Nietzsche adds to it, however, with the principle that “the advance toward universal empires is always [immer] also an advance toward universal divinities” (II 20), discussed above in 5.3. This is a rather bold claim, and though it is generally consonant with Nietzsche’s other claims about the relation between “spiritual” phenomena like morality and

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political power (especially in the cases of both ressentiment and the pathos of distance), he does not explain why or how this should be the case. Even so, this is clearly an attempt at the kind of universal causal explanation Leiter describes, and it fails miserably. First of all, it is not true in the case Nietzsche is discussing, that of ancient Rome. Traditional Roman religion as well as new cults flourished under the Roman Empire, including the various mystery cults to which early Christianity is sometimes compared. Other examples of polytheistic empires include the Aztecs, Mayans, and ancient Egypt and Babylon, and the long histories of China and especially India provide many examples of polytheism and even religious pluralism thriving in periods of imperial consolidation. Meanwhile, as noted in chapter 5.3, Judaism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism all emerged in decidedly unimperial environs, 13 and Christianity thrived during the European Middle Ages with its various independent nobilities and fractured territories. So this attempt at causal explanation (a) is underdeveloped and largely unargued and (b) immediately and decisively refuted by overwhelming empirical evidence. 14 Leiter is, I think, correct about what Nietzsche is trying to do in these cases. Nietzsche seems clearly to be anchoring his narratives in concrete events from the actual historical record, something that cuts against the notion that these are meant as fictional or mythological tales meant to teach us something about our present attachment to morality rather than its causal origins. 15 The issue is not with the interpretation of Nietzsche as offering speculative causal explanations but with the notion that this project somehow meets with success. In sum, the attempt to trace major moral developments to specific, discrete causes fails in Nietzsche’s case. What about the larger principles at work in his narrative? To repeat the thumbnail sketch of Nietzsche’s account given above, the will to power is originally manifest in the violent chaos of primeval humanity, but then is driven underground by the violence of the first political founders. This subterranean will to power becomes the bad conscience, the matrix for all of humanity’s subsequent moral and artistic development. What parts of this story hold, and how? C.3. NIETZSCHE ON THE RISE OF POLITICS AND MORALITY: PROBLEMS AND PROMISES As we have seen above, the fundamental problems with Nietzsche’s historical account come not in the long, initially confusing stretch dealing with prehistoric punishment and community but in the relatively straightforward discussions of political founding and the origin of religion in the last third of the essay. It is there that Nietzsche’s vision of the rise of political society becomes hopelessly circular, with his insistence that the movement into po-

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litical life was a sudden and violent break with the pre-political state executed by a group of conquerors who are themselves somehow already politically organized and directed. The teaching of the will to power combined with the modern conviction that nature lacks purposes requires that the state of nature, to use the language of social contract theory, was violent and chaotic, but then the only way to explain the emergence of civil society is through the deus ex machina of the artist-lawgivers—a characteristically Nietzschean counter to the calculating, self-interested contractors who originated political life for Hobbes and Locke. In fine, human beings cannot have moved from a pre-political state primarily shaped or defined by aggression to an organized social state if they were driven purely by aggression (as noted above, a pre-political state of pure aggression is inconceivable, even if Nietzsche occasionally seems to bruit such a notion about). Either there was something more than aggression creating or forming the basis of human community from the very beginning (even if it was only the “herd instinct” Nietzsche decries), such that some kind of communal life or existence is as fundamental to human beings as aggression, or along with the aggression there was an inherent—one would have to say natural—capacity not just for overcoming aggression and its chaotic or centrifugal tendencies but also for creating and adhering to social forms (and the moral forms or practices they require). To put the matter in somewhat different terms, in returning to the origins of human social and moral life Nietzsche is confronted not with a smirking ape but with either a woolly, egalitarian community (something like the communes for which the socialists of Nietzsche’s day hankered [I 5]), or with Aristotle’s conception of human beings as naturally political, as naturally possessing both the capacity and the inclination to create political forms and live according to them. As I have argued above, especially in chapter 1, while Nietzsche is obviously not plainly or purely Aristotelian, he sees purposes in nature and thinks that human beings should live according to them. Where he departs radically from Aristotle is in refusing to accept that these purposes are “good” in any meaningful sense, least of all for the creatures or natures in which they appear and whose actions they direct, and in refusing to think these natures are stable. These two points are closely connected: individual natures do not seek the good because they seek to overcome themselves in a fertile but selfdestructive manner that also makes them transitory or fluid. Nietzsche’s inability to make sense of the picture to which he often seems committed, in which aggression is the fundamental and driving force of human development, shows the inherent impossibility of doing so. This is still a picture that holds some attraction for contemporary theorizing about human social development, wherein human social organization arose out of aggression or at least in the service of organized violence against other groups. 16 Yet Nietzsche, in being forced to posit the existence of already

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organized and form-giving conquerors, shows such an account is untenable. Even if aggression is a central driving factor in human life, informing social organizations and, ultimately, art and other forms of cultural expression, there must also be a natural, ineradicable form-creating capacity in human beings (as indeed Nietzsche suggests there is in nature, though he cannot find a place for it in his account of how human beings move from primordial violent chaos to even a very rudimentary and unsteady social structure). This form-creating capacity must exist in any explanation of the origins of human community. Even if, for instance, the formation of the first social groups was purely adaptive (say, in response to an environmental change that made food much scarcer), which Nietzsche would obviously want to deny, there would have to be some natural capacity to make that adaptation. 17 The aims and limitations of Nietzsche’s account can be further clarified by comparing it with Rousseau’s. Despite the pot shots Nietzsche felt compelled to take at Rousseau at the end of his writing life, Rousseau’s speculative account of how an apolitical humanity moved from the state of nature to an ordered civil society is much more realistic and tough-minded than Nietzsche’s. Consider, for instance, Rousseau’s thoughts on how and why human beings first made weapons for hunting and how this gave rise to the first feeling of pride (Rousseau 1984, 110), or how pre-political humans first built shelters and why they did not fight over them (112). Nietzsche does not even consider either of these obviously important moments in human development, and when he discusses the origins of human pride he simply asserts it as the motive for the first instances of trade (II 8), despite the fact that he seems aware at various points in the surrounding passages that practical concerns of safety would have been paramount for (at least many) early humans. Yet, like Nietzsche, Rousseau’s insistence that humanity is naturally apolitical and indeed completely individualistic deprives his account of support from what we now know about human evolution (though at times Nietzsche seems to want to combine the fundamental modern assumption that human beings are apolitical and individualistic with a greater awareness of the fact that some sort of communal life seems coeval with humanity itself). Rousseau and Nietzsche both believe humanity’s original, natural condition continues to define them today and decisively inform their experience of social, moral, and political life. Both also offer powerful, incisive critiques of that life and how it deforms and deranges humanity. But those critiques cannot be based on the genetic narratives they tell about political society and morality, for the foundational modern assumption on that point seems to have been decisively refuted by empirical evidence. What then survives of Nietzsche’s account? The notion that aggression is the sole or even primary human drive is not tenable, for reasons we have seen. Yet in exploring the notion of aggression

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as the fundamental human experience or drive Nietzsche starts to trace out how aggression could compose and develop the human mind (even if a fully satisfactory account would need to balance this with other factors or drives). More promising then is a view of aggression as a central constitutive part of human culture, perhaps of a sort that suggests an intimate connection between aggression and human reverence or religiosity. In other words, is aggression, as we might commonly think and as the modern liberal tradition absolutely thinks, simply a sub-rational or anti-rational emotion that is fundamentally opposed to and destructive of all culture, including even basic rationality? Or is it rather an intrinsic, determining part of human culture, indeed of the basic forms of human thought and moral feeling? And can it help to explain and otherwise illuminate human development provided we understand it in some way other than the obviously unhelpful formulation of all human moral, cultural, and political development being a simple matter of a lone original drive of aggression turned inward and somehow transformed or sublimated? Nietzsche’s focus on valuing as a central human activity, where valuing includes things like reverence, is an essential insight here. It is true that, especially in his more polemical moments, Nietzsche often both draws on and seems to reinforce a fairly crude Enlightenment dichotomy between religion and superstition on the one hand and reason and science on the other. The deeper picture that Nietzsche traces out and allows us to complete, however, is more nuanced, more interesting, and almost certainly truer, especially when we are considering humanity’s origins. In this picture reason appears not as a disembodied dispenser of truth, scientific or otherwise, but as part of a rich, complex whole that includes various drives and emotions. Reason and indeed science have a unique authority for us now, or rather the concept of truth and truthfulness that has emerged from our two thousand years of “training in Christian truthfulness” has unique authority, a concept that largely relies on the difficulty or unpleasantness of the truth to be faced, and the courage and probity required to face it (not on the methodology by which one arrives at it). So truth, for Nietzsche, is not as simple as what the Enlightenment (or at least the caricature version of Enlightenment rationalism) suggests; the issue is not what is scientifically verifiable but rather what it is difficult for us to accept, embrace, and incorporate, i.e., what requires our greatest virtue and self-overcoming to embrace. And whatever our future, and so our understanding of the past, is to be, it must involve incorporating that reason, and the truth it finds, within a larger, fuller whole that includes reverence as well as distrust, as Nietzsche explains in a passage from The Gay Science that in many ways encapsulates his philosophic situation and challenges (GS 346). 18 If we drop the polemics that ultimately do more to obscure Nietzsche’s position, his conception of man as the reverent animal does justice to the

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early and central religious activity of the first humans—in this way Nietzsche’s rejections of the early modern emphasis on self-preservation and comfort bear fruit. 19 His emphasis on the equally elemental human characteristic of mistrust is traced through his comments on the emergence of contemplative types and his discussion of Socrates (in addition to the discussion in C.1 above see especially Beyond Good and Evil 212). In seeing human cultural and spiritual development as a tension or dialectic between reverence and mistrust we are obviously retreating from anything that can be easily confirmed or disconfirmed. 20 The notion of reverence and mistrust being fundamental to human beings, and in particular fundamental to the very first humans and their emergence into something like a recognizably human communal life, provides a better if less precise or methodical means of understanding human development—and one continuous with the best parts of Nietzsche’s thought and its explanatory power, his focus on the causal power of drives and affects, including ressentiment. 21 When we bring all of this together there also seems to be a strong and clear basis for one of Nietzsche’s most important contentions or concerns in the Genealogy, the notion that mental as well as moral consciousness and activity may have been largely driven by a fundamental aggression or at least by an active, form-creating force rather than by passive “adaptation” to new circumstances. I have focused throughout this book on Nietzsche’s attempts to explain the origins and character of morality because that seems to be his chief ambition in the Genealogy. We should not, however, completely lose sight of Nietzsche’s insight in “Schopenhauer as Educator” that “The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words” (SE 8). What would it mean to live according to Nietzsche’s philosophy? What would the foundations of such a life be? There would no doubt be many, but we can close here with some the most vital: the awareness of ressentiment in oneself and others, whether direct or mediated, and the determination to reject and overcome it; the honesty which insists on seeing and indeed embracing the difficult and even gruesome aspects of life, and a resolve to build one’s table of values on that vision rather than on a fantasy meant to dishonestly obscure it; and the will to approach life with wonder and gratitude and to refuse to let one’s own suffering become an excuse to poison or slander the world. C.4. NOTES 1. For further reflection on this problem see Hatab 2011, especially 207–213. 2. On this point see Gemes 2006.

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3. As Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy, “for as yet I know of no friend” (III 27). 4. As Nietzsche makes clear in I 7, “the priestly mode of valuation can branch off from the knightly aristocratic and then develop into its opposite (die priesterliche Werthungs-Weise von der ritterlich-aristokratischen abzweigen und dann zu deren Gegensatze fortentwickeln kann).” On the nobility of the priests see also Anderson 2011. 5. For a sense of what the emergence of the contemplative or ascetic priest may have been like, see Daybreak 14 (which is broadly consonant with Nietzsche’s other descriptions of the emergence of contemplative types, including the philosopher [cf. D 18, 41–42; GM III 9–10]). 6. On a different correspondence between Christianity and Buddhism see GM III 27. 7. On the basic benevolence of the priest toward “his sick herd” see especially III 15. 8. On Nietzsche’s admiration for biblical Judaism, or at least the Hebrew Bible, see GM III 22 and BGE 52. On the decline into the priestly period of Jewish history, see A 25–27 and Yovel 1998, 152–158. 9. Nietzsche perhaps indicates this deficiency with his Note at the end of the First Essay calling for further philological research on the relation between language and morality, though the relation of this note to the rest of the Essay is open to interpretation. Does Nietzsche think he has already laid down the decisive lines along which such research should run, or is he (as even the weakest commitment to scientific methodology would require) open to such research revising and even refuting the account he has given? 10. Leiter would presumably respond that, in his role as philosophic therapist, Nietzsche omits providing such evidence because it distracts from his goal of emotionally wrenching the reader out of her loyalty to a poisonous morality (Leiter 2015, 144–146, 248–252). If this is so, however, then it seems that the therapeutic Nietzsche undercuts the naturalist Nietzsche. Grandiose claims about the nature of things that are unsupported—or plainly contradicted—by evidence may be therapeutic, but they are clearly not naturalistic. 11. One way to make sense of this is to suggest that the Jews, having already descended into the priestly phase of their history, were already brimming with ressentiment that then spilled over into the creation of Christianity, which spread among the various oppressed underclasses of the Roman Empire (A 51). Yet the notion of priestly ressentiment explaining anything about the origin or spread of Christianity seems impossible given that Nietzsche makes the Brahmin class, not the untouchables, the embodiments of ressentiment in Hinduism, at least in the Genealogy—the ascetic priest exists universally (III 11), and Nietzsche uses several examples from India and Hinduism to illustrate the nature and activity of the ascetic priest (I 6, III 17). Nietzsche seems to want to draw a very sharp distinction between Christianity and Hinduism in his discussion of the Laws of Manu in The Antichrist(ian) (56–57), but this requires much of the argument of the Third Essay of the Genealogy to be revised or even abandoned. 12. The Summa Theologiae alone runs to thousands of pages—Nietzsche quotes twelve words. 13. Nietzsche claims that movements towards universal empires always leads to monotheism as well, not that it is the only condition under which monotheism emerges. So while these examples do not directly contradict his claim, it is striking that the exceptions vastly outnumber the confirmations (if indeed ancient Rome can somehow be counted as a confirmation of his thesis). 14. Simon May describes it as “a deeply unconvincing hypothesis given that not one of the three great monotheisms originated among imperial masters and that many empires, from the early Roman to the Mongol, were polytheistic” (May 1999, 58). 15. For an interesting counter to this see Gemes 2006, 204–206. It is worth mentioning, however, that Gemes refers to “the absence of all the scholarly apparatus typical of a historical work (references, footnotes and the like)” as part of what creates the “uncanniness” of the Genealogy (204–205), and which is one indication that it is meant as a commentary on contemporary morality rather than its historical emergence (though Gemes does allow that Nietzsche “think[s] that his historical narratives in their broad outline contain a good deal of truth” [205]). The examples noted above, while perhaps not quite typical scholarly apparatus, do connect the narratives of the Genealogy to concrete historical events and to Nietzsche’s comments in the preface of the Genealogy on the importance of what has been documented about “morality that has actually existed, actually been lived” (7).

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16. For a fairly recent example see Wrangham and Peterson 1996. For detailed criticism of this general view, specifically concerning the centrality of war to human social existence and evolution, see Fry 2013. 17. This point is perhaps too speculative to be stated with certainty here, especially without a more fully developed sense of the relation between adaptation and inherent capacities. 18. On man as the reverent or valuing animal see also, e.g., GM II 8 and Z I 15 and II 12. 19. For a contemporary overview of prehistory see Renfrew 2008. On religion in prehistory see, among many others, Mithen 2009 and Ward 2009. 20. Though we were after all already there with some of Nietzsche’s more apparently “scientific” explanations, which are often facile or even undeniably wrong, despite offering more distinct, one-to-one causal explanations (see C.2 above). 21. For recent work on the drives as Nietzsche’s chief category of psychological explanation see, among others, Katsafanas 2013 and 2015 and Riccardi 2018. For skepticism regarding the project of retrieving a “theory of the drives” from Nietzsche’s work, see Stern 2015. Indeed, the overwhelming question hanging over all this is whether Nietzsche’s works can provide the resources for such a project rather than just endless debates about classification.

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Index

Acampora, Christa Davis, 5, 42 aggression, 58, 69–70, 81n26, 112, 157, 162–164, 165; and bad conscience, 114–115, 122–124, 128, 134, 157; and development of social and moral life, 162–164, 165; distinct from will to power, 106n26 amor fati, 41 ancient Greeks, 94, 148, 149n2, 151n17, 155; philosophy, 28, 77–78; religious beliefs, 76, 77–78, 132, 142–143, 146–148. See also gods anger: at criminal in early society, 58; retributive anger, 60–61, 62–63, 66; and retributive justice, 68–71 animal, animality, 24n25, 117, 147–149; ancient animal self, 121, 122, 123, 126, 146; and bad conscience, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 120, 122, 126, 128, 141, 147–149; nature breeding new, 27, 29, 32, 37; and promising, 27, 29, 37, 116 Ansell-Pearson, Keith, 104n1, 107n30, 129n7 anthropomorphic language, 11, 14, 38, 45n9 The Antichrist(ian), 8, 46n17, 166n11 Aquinas, Thomas, 30, 150n8, 160 Aristotle, 12, 20, 30, 72, 149n4, 162 ascetic priest, 11, 122, 123, 132, 141, 154, 155–156, 157–158, 166n11

asceticism, ascetic ideals, 11, 82n43, 97, 107n29, 120, 145–146, 156, 158 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 20 bad conscience, 3, 109, 119, 134, 146–148, 153; creativity of, 116, 123, 124–128, 132, 148; definition of, 110–111; development of, 139–146; distinct from ressentiment, 120–124; origins of, 112–118. See also conscience, guilt barter. See economic exchange Beyond Good and Evil, 6, 7, 13, 18, 41, 46n25, 99, 103, 115, 118, 129n8, 129n9, 145, 146, 157, 158, 165; Section 188, 14, 37–41, 45n16, 81n26, 104, 145, 153 biology, biological, 29, 62, 67, 80n23, 81n32. See also physiology breeding, 29, 30, 32–33, 36–38, 44n4, 46n21 Brahmins, 156, 157–158, 166n11 Buddhism, 28, 96, 105n10, 156, 166n6 Bull, Malcolm, 19 causes, causation, 5, 159–161 chaos: of nature, 7, 13, 14, 40, 46n19, 72, 88, 102, 110, 118, 127, 145, 153; of prepolitical humanity, 7, 9, 14, 27, 60, 71, 78n2, 134, 153, 157, 161, 162, 163 Christ, 73, 150n8

175

176

Index

Christianity, Christians, 7, 37, 73, 138, 149, 150n8, 155, 158, 166n11; and asceticism, 156, 158; and bad conscience, 142–144, 146, 147–148; contrast with Nietzsche on will, 28–29; contrasted with ancient Greek religion, 147–148; giving meaning to suffering, 76–77; in historical narrative of Genealogy, 156, 158, 159–161; morality of, 92–93, 93–94, 98–101; and nihilism, 92, 103; overcoming of, 102–103, 158; problems with Nietzsche’s account of, 142–144, 150n8, 159–161; as rival interpretation to Nietzsche’s, 96, 98–101, 106n26; and teleology, 30; and will to truth, 146, 158, 164 Clark, Maudemarie, 8 conscience, 30, 44, 49, 90, 94, 95, 101–104, 115, 129n10. See also bad conscience contracts: and origins of society and morality, 52–54, 56–57, 104n4, 117, 135–136, 138, 149n3 Conway, Daniel, 25n27, 46n21, 47n28, 79n9, 85, 149n1, 151n17 convention, 28, 33, 34–37, 40–41. See also morality of mores Cox, Christoph, 24n22, 46n19, 82n40 creativity, creation, 14, 28–29, 35, 38–40, 105n12, 109–110, 118; of the bad conscience, 116, 123, 124–128, 132, 148; of nature, 35, 38–40, 118, 132, 148–149, 153 cruelty, 59, 61, 64, 68–71, 74–75, 82n42, 113; and bad conscience, 124–128; as motive for early contracts, 51–53, 59, 78n4; and retributive justice, 68–71 Dannhauser, Werner, 18 Daybreak, 34, 134, 139, 166n5 debt, 54, 60, 79n5, 135, 139–140; to ancestors, 133, 135; and early punishments, 51–53; to prehistoric political community, 57; See also Schuld “Dog’s Death” (Updike poem), 82n44 Don Quixote, 61 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 100, 105n9

drive, drives, 10, 28, 70, 93, 106n24, 115, 122–123, 165 Ecce Homo, 5, 6 economic exchange, 15, 52–53, 54–55, 56, 57, 79n8. See also contracts Enlightenment, 28, 72, 164 esotericism, 18, 25n32 exoteric writing, 18, 25n32 family, 53, 54, 60, 79n7, 79n8, 133, 138, 139 Foucault, Michel, 91, 92, 105n15 Franklin, Benjamin, 93 free will, 32, 46n25, 51, 66, 77–78, 78n3, 94 The Gay Science, 5, 7, 21, 45n9, 74, 79n12, 98, 101, 102, 103, 155, 164 Gemes, Ken, 25n29, 166n15 genealogy, 84, 96–100, 99, 104n1 Geuss, Raymond, 91, 92, 97–98, 99, 104n2 God, 28, 29, 37, 100, 102, 158; and conscience, 49; death of, 98, 101, 102–103, 140; giving meaning to suffering, 76; as guiding historic development, 13, 88; and guilt, 140–143; human beings as image of, 28, 98; and revaluation of values, 76. See also gods; Christ; Christianity gods, 116, 137–138, 139–140, 147, 150n12, 156; ancient Greek, 76, 77–78, 132, 142–143, 146–148; as transformed ancestors, 133–135, 137–139 Graeber, David, 79n5 Guay, Robert, 25n29, 45n8, 81n27, 104n1 guilt, 51, 76, 94, 105n9, 110–111, 113–114, 140, 143, 147; punishment does not cause, 90–91 Habermas, Jürgen, 104n2 Hatab, Lawrence, 6–7, 21, 23n3, 45n12, 46n18, 46n23, 46n24, 81n33, 82n40, 85, 150n15 Heraclitus, 116 Hinduism, 105n10, 160, 166n11 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 136, 138, 162 Homer, 77

Index honesty, 102, 103–104, 106n28, 148, 165. See also probity, Redlichkeit incorporation, 31, 104, 107n30, 151n16, 164 instinct, 36, 43, 53, 54, 58, 69, 112–115, 120–124, 128, 134, 141, 157 Janaway, Christopher, 4–5, 9–10, 11, 19–20, 25n29, 98, 105n7, 106n21 Judaism, 76–77, 142, 150n11, 150n12, 156, 158, 161, 166n8, 166n11 justice, 52, 57, 59, 60–68, 70, 82n42, 84; retributive justice, 60–61, 64, 68–71, 81n35 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 20, 45n11 Katsafanas, Paul, 98, 99 law, 50, 52, 59, 60, 70, 81n34, 139; and creation of bad conscience, 113, 114, 116, 121, 124; and justice, 63–68, 81n34; and nature, 33, 46n17, 81n26; primitive law opposed to ressentiment, 63–69 lawgivers. See political founding Laws of Manu, 46n17, 166n11 Leiter, Brian, 4–5, 8–9, 25n29, 44n3, 97, 105n16, 105n17, 159–161, 166n10 Lewis, Wyndham, 25n28 life, 67, 71, 105n12, 158; self-overcoming of, 36, 59, 88; and suffering, 74–78; as wholly good, 82n43; and will to power, 24n19. See also will of life Locke, John, 3, 23n4, 136, 162 Löwith, Karl, 7 de Lubac, Henri, 150n11, 150n12 Manu. See Laws of Manu May, Simon, 23n12, 75–76, 82n42, 107n30, 166n14 metaphysics, 7–8, 10, 67, 100 Miller, Elaine, 12 monotheism, 141, 150n11, 160–161, 166n13 morality, 3, 12, 29–30, 38, 44, 45n16, 78, 82n44, 113–114, 126, 129n6, 149, 165; contemporary, 98–99; as expression of will to power, 11, 61; humanity as

177

originally moral, 55–56, 135–136; Nietzsche’s critique of, 96–101; and punishment, 90–91; prehistoric development of, 60–71; as unified meaning, 91–96, 105n11. See also morality of mores, value morality of mores (Sittlichkeit der Sitte), 27, 34–36, 37, 41, 44, 45n8, 65, 79n9, 134, 139. See also convention Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 40 Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang, 23n13, 79n12, 104n6 natural law, 28, 30, 33, 149n4 naturalism, 4–7, 102, 105n11, 159–161, 166n10 nature, 27–41, 45n12, 81n33, 102, 103–104, 127, 136–137, 158, 162–163; and bad conscience, 127, 141, 144–145, 148–149; creativity of, 35, 38–40, 118, 132, 148–149, 153; end-directed activity in, 10, 12–15; and human sociability, 136–137, 162–163; morality as anti-natural, 45n16; naturalizing humanity, 6–7, 7, 45n9; Nietzsche’s view of contrasted with that of contemporary naturalism, 6–7; Nietzsche’s view of as modern, 72; and political founding, 117, 118, 145, 153; purposes of, 13, 14, 27–28, 29–30, 38, 42, 145. See also chaos, creativity, life, will to power Nietzsche, Friedrich: philosophy of, 7–8, 101–104, 106n28, 165; rhetoric of, 18–22, 41–42, 144. See also individual works nihilism, 46n20, 72, 82n43, 92, 103, 106n25, 144 nobility, 37, 71–73, 106n25, 140, 147 nomos. See convention On the Genealogy of Morals: as fiction, 6, 23n12, 161, 166n15; First Essay, 19, 31, 33, 43–44, 52, 55, 76–77, 78, 79n10, 80n22, 85, 104n2, 119, 120, 129n9, 132, 139, 142, 149, 156, 157, 159; Preface, 6, 81n32, 100, 155, 166n15; as real history, not fiction, 6, 161, 166n15; Third Essay, 23n8, 97,

178

Index

101, 107n29, 146, 156, 157–158, 166n11; as unified narrative, 154–158 Owen, David, 24n20, 25n29 pathos of distance, 43, 147, 157, 161 philosophy, 86, 87; classical, 7, 33, 36; Nietzsche’s, 7–8, 101–104, 106n28, 165 physiology, physiological, 23n8, 88, 101. See also biology physis. See nature Plato, Platonism, 7, 61, 72, 82n38, 87, 92, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 129n8, 158 Poellner, Peter, 106n24 political community, 53–54, 56, 57–59, 64, 68, 71, 80n14, 80n16, 80n17, 116, 117, 129n3, 134 political founding, founders, 9, 53–54, 60, 116–119, 120–124, 125, 126, 133–134, 136, 156, 157 political nobles (First Essay), 19, 21, 63, 72, 79n10, 154; contrasted with founders, 117, 118, 119, 156; contrasted with sovereign individual, 43–44; and early religion, 139–140, 147, 150n6, 156; limitations of, 119, 129n8, 129n9, 129n10 probity, 77, 158, 164. See also honesty, Redlichkeit punishment, 50–52, 57–59, 64, 68, 71, 89–91, 92, 93, 96, 105n9; and bad conscience, 110–111, 113; different purposes for, 84–85, 86–87, 89, 92; does not produce guilt, 89–91, 105n9 Redlichkeit, 77, 102, 107n29. See also honesty, probity Reginster, Bernard, 113, 129n5, 143 ressentiment, 5, 23n12, 43, 77, 130n12, 165, 166n11; distinct from bad conscience, 109–110, 116, 120–124; distinct from justice, 60–71; as explaining rise of Christianity, 159–161 Richardson, John, 10, 24n20, 82n43 Ridley, Aaron, 22, 66, 81n30, 99, 105n16, 120, 129n10, 130n14 Risse, Matthias, 150n5, 150n12 Romans, 150n12, 155

Roman Empire, 142, 160, 161, 166n11, 166n14 Rosen, Stanley, 11, 18, 46n20, 71–73, 110 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 30, 32, 79n11, 96, 98, 100, 112, 125, 163 Schoenberg, Arnold, 20 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 10, 28, 96, 98, 99, 100 “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 24n25, 165 Schuld, 49, 51, 113–114, 134–136, 137, 139–143. See also debt science, sciences, 4–5, 6–7, 23n8, 62, 102, 106n28, 158, 159, 160, 164 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 25n32 Shylock, 52, 78n4 sin, 23n8, 76, 101, 140, 146, 150n8 slaves, 11, 19, 43, 63, 76–77, 120, 122, 123, 154 slave morality, slave revolt in morals, 5, 11, 66, 72–73, 80n23, 121, 122, 123, 144, 158, 160 Socrates, 100, 165 social contract, 3, 78n2, 118, 162. See also state of nature sovereign individual, 35, 36, 41–44 state of nature, 3, 162, 163. See also social contract Staten, Henry, 21–22, 24n22, 82n43, 120–121 Strauss, Leo, 37, 40, 45n14 Thucydides, 57, 140 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 32, 36, 67, 71, 88, 97, 101–102, 122 trade. See economic exchange Twilight of the Idols, 24n24, 97 Vattimo, Gianni, 106n28 value, valuing, 3, 38, 55–56, 63, 97, 164 Waite, Geoff, 18, 25n29 Welshon, Rex, 82n39 will, 3, 27–29, 31–33, 35–36, 42–43, 44n1, 46n25, 46n27, 129n10. See also free will will of life, 9, 10, 15, 67, 68, 82n39, 127 will to truth, 10, 107n29, 120, 146, 158

Index will to power, 7–15, 85–89, 96, 124, 136–137, 157, 161; anger as expression of, 61; creativity of, 126–127, 144–145; distinct from aggression, 106n26, 122–123; driving bad conscience, 121, 122–123, 124–128, 144–145, 157; and evolution, 85, 88, 89; and forgetfulness, 31; and interpretation, 13, 85–86, 87, 89, 91–92, 96, 104n6, 122; and lack of natural sociability, 78n2, 136–137; and life, 9, 71; morality as expression of, 11, 61, 157; and nature, 11–15, 33; as

179 Nietzsche’s philosophic foundation, 9, 96; and origins of political society, 78n2, 136–137, 145, 157; and prehistoric violence, 9, 71, 157, 161; problems with, 11, 71–74, 134; as teleology, 11–15, 33, 136–137. See also morality

Yack, Bernard, 25n32, 40 Zarathustra. See Thus Spoke Zarathustra

About the Author

Jeffrey Metzger is professor of government at Cameron University, the editor of Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, and the coeditor of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy.

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