Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

from inferior things like monkeys by a distinctly chancy process that might just as easily not have happened wasn’t just a new fact to take on board, like the existence of one more previously undiscovered planet; it was a slap in the face for human dignity and their conception of their own worth—which was why it was doggedly resisted then and is resisted by some to this day. No doubt about it: under the right circumstances, genealogies can be just as explosive as Nietzsche intended—so back to the question about moral values.
Many believed, and some still do, that moral values were of similar origin: handed down to human beings direct from God. Nietzsche, who in spite of his clerical home background once described himself as an atheist by instinct, had no interest whatever in that story; he sought the origin of human values in human needs and human psychology. (Human, all too Human is the pregnant title of one of his earlier books.)
He wasn’t the first to do so, as becomes clear in preface §4. In fact, there was already a tradition of it, and Nietzsche took its central thesis, broadly stated, to be something along the following lines: when humans found certain types of behaviour (on the part of individuals) advantageous to them and the smooth running of their society, they called them ‘good’, and strongly encouraged them; where they found them disadvantageous, the reverse. That, simply, is how behaving for the good of others rather than one’s own came to be regarded as good—the others declared it to be good, because of the benefit they received.
On the face of it that sounds quite plausible: a society reinforces what is beneficial to it. But Nietzsche regarded it as sentimental, unhistorical claptrap. Drawing on his expert knowledge of ancient languages (he had had, and then abandoned, a meteoric academic career) he told a very different tale. Far from its being those who received benefits from the behaviour of others who then called those others (and their behaviour) ‘good’, it was the upper classes, the aristocracy, the nobility, the rulers of ancient societies who first called themselves (and their way of life) good and the ordinary people, the slaves, the subject population, bad. Early good/bad distinctions are perhaps better understood as distinctions between ‘noble’ and ‘base’, free and enslaved, leaders and led, the washed and the unwashed. They were the words in which the top dogs celebrated themselves, their strength, and their own way of life, and expressed the extent of the gap that they felt between themselves and the weak, impoverished, servile masses.
That’s also pretty plausible—you can just imagine them thinking and talking that way. (You can still hear it going on nowadays if you get into the right company.) But it was the next step which, according to Nietzsche, was the decisive one for the next two thousand years and more of European morality: the worm turned, the masses revolted. He isn’t talking about violent revolution, armed struggle, for which the underclasses were generally too weak, both materially and spiritually, but about something much subtler and much more insidious. They relieved their frustration and resentment in one of the very few ways that were open to them, namely by developing their own system of values in which everything about their oppressors was ‘bad’ and they themselves, whose lives contrasted with theirs in so many ways, were ‘good’.
So this value-system was not God-given, and it was not the outcome of some intuitive perception of its truth, or intrinsic ‘rightness’. It was a vengeful, retaliatory device, born of the weak’s resentment of the strong. All that commitment to charity, compassion, and love was actually fuelled by hate. This kind of thought is entirely typical of Nietzsche, who loved to stand popular conceptions on their head. Just when you thought your house was in good order, along comes a Nietzschean ‘explosion’ and suddenly your roof has changed places with your cellar. This is philosophy at its most challenging. Natural iconoclasts will just love it, but anyone can admire the fireworks.
Just these facts (as he believed) about the origins of the morality of love and compassion wouldn’t have made Nietzsche so profoundly mistrustful of it as he actually was. After all, in adopting and promoting it the masses were trying, in the only way open to them, to gain power over the strong, and he has nothing against that—all life, in his view, is a manifestation of the will to power, and no tiny little human moralist has any business pronouncing on life in general. What he most dislikes about ‘herd morality’ is that it arose not through affirmation of their own way of life (like the codes of the higher classes) but through the negation of someone else’s: they looked at the vigorous, free, proud, self-assured, self-assertive people who ruled them, resentfully declared their qualities to be bad and hence the opposite qualities, such as passivity, servitude, humility, unselfishness, to be good. Herd morality is life-denying, in Nietzsche’s estimation.
14. What to blow up next? Gazing fiercely at the world over the amazing moustache, Nietzsche always looks as if he is about to light some fuse or other.
Those who espoused this morality were now in a very strained position. As living beings they embodied the same instinctive will to power as did the ruling class, but unlike them they had no natural outlet for it. So when their instincts led them to seek a different kind of power by pronouncing their masters’ masterful instincts to be vices they were in fact turning against their own instincts as well. To add to the fact that they were needy and oppressed, these people were psychologically sick, inwardly divided. And they felt pretty wretched.
But help—of a sort—is at hand, in the form of a figure known to every culture and epoch and of intense interest to Nietzsche: the ascetic priest, committed to poverty, humility, and chastity, and in some cases practising quite extreme forms