Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
The slave revolt in morality arose from the ressentiment of the downtrodden caste, a bitterness and hatred from being denied true vengeance through deed. This ressentiment “becomes creative and gives birth to values,”[1] taking an illusory retribution on the noble oppressors by reversing their values—thus its movement is primarily reactive, its values defined in relation to the external enemy.[2] In §13 Nietzsche turns to the problematic origin of “good” as devised by “the man of ressentiment.” Ressentiment capitalizes on ‘free will’ as a justification for holding the strong morally responsible for their maltreatment, and subsequently as the basis for the slave’s construction of “good,” lauding humility, submission, and meekness as a choice made by those who are truly virtuous. In his critique of slave morality, Nietzsche drills down into its fundamental metaphysical error: the imaginary distinction between act and actor, and the subsequent fabrication of ‘free will’ as the causa sui of action. This deep-rooted assumption has grown out of the soil of language itself.
Nietzsche attacks the very concept of the “self” in slave morality through an allegorical metaphor in which a flock of lambsis being hunted and killed off by birds of prey flying overhead. The lambs feel anger toward the birds of prey that swoop down and eat them up. In their frustration, they construe the birds of prey as “evil,” while anyone who is least like a bird of prey is commended as “good.” Nietzsche holds that there is nothing inherently wrong in this valuation—what is absurd is for the lambs to resent the “great birds of prey” for devouring the lambs at all. This “ought” implies “can,” an attempt by the lamb to hold the bird of prey morally responsible for its predation. This is essentially a “demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a desire to overwhelm, a desire to cast down, a desire to become lord […] [which] is just as nonsensical as to demand of weakness that it express itself as strength.” Nietzsche writes “to demand of strength,” not “to demand of the bird of prey”—this wording pinpoints the fundamental error of the sheep; they understand the bird of prey as an entity metaphysically distinct from its predation. Rather, the bird of prey is nothing but its rapacious drives, desires and effects; it has an internal teleology that makes its ‘doing’ coequal with its ‘being.’ To demand the bird of prey divorce itself from its rapacity is equivalent to annulling its very existence. This is not because it has no free will- rather, there is no bird of prey independent of its will.
Nietzsche points to the “seduction of language” as the source of the lamb’s erroneous belief that the bird of prey could choose to negate its rapacity. The grammatical contingency between subject and predicate has “petrified” the unfounded belief that all effects are conditioned on an effecting subject, thus grounding the fiction of a monolithic self that is the sole and necessary source of action. This linguistic structure is essential to the formation of slave morality; in order to attribute sin or virtue, it is necessary to be able to point to a unified subject that is the sole cause of the effect it produces. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche elaborates on the dangers of the unsubstantiated portrayal of the soul as a monad.[3] Rather, the body closer resembles a “society of souls,” writhing mass of competing drives and desires. What we experience as “free will” is actually an internal battle of commanding and obeying; one merely identifies with the winner and says that “I” willed X, thus glossing over the fundamental plurality of this process.[4]
Thus, Nietzsche rejects the concept of “subject” completely, instead characterizing the bird’s strength as a “quantum of power” amassed from an ever-flowing stream of drives, wills, and effects, that is precisely ”nothing other than this very driving, willing and effecting,” Nietzsche’s oscillation between verbs and nouns to describe the same phenomena indicates that neither form provides a sufficient account by itself. Forced to squeeze his pluralistic account of power into discrete units of nouns and verbs, writing within the very grammatical structures he critiques, Nietzsche has to fight with language itself in order to get his point across. This is exactly why the metaphor is so integral to Nietzsche’s literary technique: it allows him to figuratively evoke his philosophical account rather than bastardize his thoughts with explicit language that inevitably sterilizes and flattens.
The grammatical and subsequent moral isolation of the subject from its predicate effect lays the groundwork for the next logical abomination[5] seized upon by slave morality: cause and effect. Nietzsche illustrates the perceived causal relationship between the actor and act through the metaphor of a lighting strike. To the common people, the lightning is the doer which effects the flash, its doing. To Nietzsche, this distinction artificially imposes the concept of cause/doer and effect/doing onto a phenomenon that is purely a current of electrical force, thereby effectively doubling the lightning strike; “this is a doing-doing.”[6] Similarly, the morality of “free will” abuses causality by preposterously framing the subject as the causa sui of the will[7], “as if there were behind the strong some indifferent substratum that is free to express strength- or not to.”[8] Ressentiment exploits this belief in the claim that “the strong one is free to be weak, and the bird of prey to be a lamb,” thereby asserting that the bird of prey can be held accountable for its very essence.
“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” (Romans 12:19) This divine ‘command’ epitomizes the dishonesty of slave morality, whereby the lamb conceals its inability to take revenge on the powerful behind the mask of virtue. The essential weakness of the weak is entombed in the illusion of free will, whereby “good” comes to mean humility and pacifism deliberately chosen by a neutral subject. Meanwhile, ressentiment finds an outlet in divine justice—faith in the Lord will ensure that the birds of prey will pay for their ‘sins’ by burning deep in hell for eternity.
[1] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark. (Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), §10
[2] Ibid.
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge University Press, 2001), §12
[4] Ibid, §19
[5] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §21
[6] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, §13
[7] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §21
[8] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, §13
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