On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
by Friedrich Nietzsche
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Book Summary Information
Author: Friedrich NietzscheEditor: Walter Kaufmann
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1989-12-17
ISBN: 0679724621
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
Book Review: An Essay on Nietzsche
Summary: 5 Stars
To the eyes of a general reader, Nietzsche's intense energy might be overwhelming, and his theories intimidating. That blonde beast which seems ready to bite into any flesh without the pangs of conscious inevitably conjures up images of a ferocious maniac who would wreck the world, bringing with it infinite sufferings to the grocery-store-citizens and the corn-field-peasants. In fact, this weak peasant who plows his land and prays before his god and whom Nietzsche despises seems like a much more amiable character to the general reader. Certainly, this peasant will not have the will-to-power to reshape the world, but he will be more or less the relative peace of normal life.
Nietzsche, however, can not be so easily dismissed, and if one believes in the above description of the strong against the weak, he is missing the essence of Genealogy. In fact, Nietzsche's blonde beasts are not renegades against the world, instead, they are the masters of the world who recognize the inherent conditions of their environment; this grasp of reality gives them command over promise and forgetfulness, and allow them to set the directions of the world with whatever values they see fit. They are indeed strong, but they are not lawless monsters to be feared. The true renegades against this world are the people who follow the slave morality-they can not succeed in the world because they refuse to conform to the conditions of reality. Under the general rubric of empowerment established by Nietzsche, Weber follows in Politics as Vocation with a concrete example of self-empower in the role of the politician, and Plato also uses Nietzsche's methods in his search to understand the nature of man and society.
The Genealogy of morals is in fact a genealogy of human weakness and suffering. This suffering arises because the conditions of civil life require activities that are in contradiction to the traditional life of the independent savages. This suffering consequently results in "bad consciousness", from which arises a belief within the weakling that he is inherently sinful and bad. Nietzsche writes,
"I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace." (N, p84)
Nietzsche does not offer an outcast view on this point, and it is easy to imagine the decrease in freedom and increase in pain that men experienced when they turned from hunter and gathers to agriculturalists. When Ghengis Khan marched his horsemen into the lands of the Han or the Muscovites, the Mongolians horsemen despised the conquered natives for their pathetic existence as farmers who had to work all year long doing monotonous work but only to be disappointed by draught or flood.
The agricultural life is only one aspect of the constraint of life of civil man. Living in the state, the man is often deprived of land and is confronted by civil forces thousands of times greater. To lessen his pain, the provincial agriculturalist turns toward the hopes of religion and such, giving rise to the slave Morality which Nietzsche passionately accuses. Nietzsche writes,
"We stand before a discord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in this suffering and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its own presupposition, its physiological capacity for life, decreases." (p118)
The situation which propelled the suffering people to turn toward "bad consciousness" is precisely the situation of the man with toothache. One should find a dentist and fill cavities when he has toothache; but those who are too lazy to find a doctor, or refuse to eat less candies will continue to suffer until it is too late and their teeth have already rotten away. But during and at the end of this process, in order to justify one's existence despite his sickness, the sick man tells others that the pain in his mouth is actually a great joy to have and teeth are bad anyway. Despite this effort to manipulate psychology, the man can not escape facts of his body, which is that without teeth he can not chew.
The agriculturalists were forced into a new situation in which they suffered, and the solution was to turn to the morality of the weak. The morality of the weak, in fact, has become so prevalent that many feel it is the only way to live life despite the self-negation and hate inherent in it. As he points out this problem, Nietzsche does not offer a solution explicitly; rather than prescribing, Nietzsche describes an alternative way of life of the truthful and the noble-an alternative way to resolve the problems of civil life. These men do not suffer the pains of the weak, and the reader, desiring for relief from his corrupted existence, must feel a natural inclination toward the "nobler" way of life.
Just before the weak gets ready to embark on a new life, however, they might be shocked back by Nietzsche vigorous depiction of the strong which makes them intimidating and unruly. But in fact, despite their strong "physicality", the strong are not anti-social monsters, but people who are the most willing to conform to the conditions of civil life. To understand their nature, we must delve into their qualities of strength, memory and forgetfulness. Nietzsche writes,
"The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physically, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity." (p33)
This passage must not be taken to mean that one must be a Napoleon to be strong, or one who has the right blood pressure and cholesterol level will be strong, or that those who are naturally smaller have no chances in salvation. Real physical health could indeed be beneficial, but the physicality here implies a physicality of the mind-It is the experiences from war and adventure which strengthen one's understanding of the world and of himself that Nietzsche cares about, not the acts of war or adventure themselves. The man of physicality is a man who knows his environment and who can take advantages of its situation to fulfill his ends,
Nietzsche elucidates the specific quality of the strong when he describes their ability to forget and to remember. On forgetting, Nietzsche writes, forgetting offers
"a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries..." (p58)
This forgetfulness at the core is an understanding over the situations of the world, it is about forgetting the senseless worries which only make man impotent. The weakling, after a disaster, will simply dwell upon the horrors of the disaster without understanding the natural causes. He will sink into a world of doubts and superstition, and as Nietzsche writes, he will think that he has done things intrinsically evil against his gods or ancestors. The strong person, on the other hand, has gained a knowledge of the world, and knows that there is no gods behind the clouds. Hence, they might worry, but they will not feel bitter or gain a "bad conscious" against themselves because of the rain. Eradicating worries-this is the essence of forgetfulness. Worry is passion-consuming, and only when the man is independent from can he have the mental capacity left over to gain a greater understanding of the world-he has more time to experience the reality of this world through adventure, through wars.
The ability to make promises arises naturally from the lack of worry; the scientists who knows how clouds form can "promise" their coming. This promise could be for any ends which the active desire of the strong man wills. As Nietzsche writes, memory of the strong is "an active desire not to rid oneself, a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will." (p58)
Nietzsche also describes the memory of the slave morality and its relation to punishment, but this is a different memory than the strong man's memory. Nietzsche writes that the ascetic people's memory is "unforgettable, `fixed,' with the aim of hypnotizing the entire nervous and intellectual system with these `fixed ideas'" (p61) The strong memory is proactive, for it is "an active desire", the weak memory is reactive, for it is about "hypnotizing" the mind. One is used to help the will all its directions, while the wills in only one direction-the abyss into suffering.
This individual who possesses the control over past and future, memory and promises, is the "emancipated individual". This person is liberated "from morality of customs". This emancipation is not accomplished through killing the innocents or running naked, but through the ability to set "measure of value" (p60) based on reality. Nietzsche writes, "...this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures." Nietzsche is calling people to become "masters" over circumstances, not to destroy circumstances. The swordsman who is a master over his sword does not use his hands to fight, but is a master precisely because he uses the sword and knows where to find the best sword and how to use it the best.
The difficulty of this mastery is precisely the difficulties of acquiring new languages: it is hard for an adult thrown into a different country to learn the native tongue, but unlike those of the slave morality who give up and blame oneself for inherent inability or blame the language for being evil, the strong people will patiently learn the language. All this requires is a little bravery! Nietzsche writes, man's suffering is
"the result of a forcible sundering from his animal past, as it were a leap and plunge into new surroundings and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy and terribleness had rested hitherto." (P85)
Indeed, instinct is the ability of man to react quickly to familiar environment, but the civil man's life requires a new set of skills and understandings, new instincts. Just like the strong with their new tongue can now express themselves in anyway way they desire, the strong man in the greater world will be a master of the "language" of the civil society and thus gain the ability to set values and fulfill wills.
The above ideas draw a positive conclusion from the genealogy, and offers hope to those who are brave, but the Genealogy is a pessimistic book. Nietzsche writes,
"Man has all too long had an `evil eye' for his natural inclinations, so that they have finally become inseparable from his `bad conscience.' An attempt at the reverse would in itself be possible-but who is strong enough for it?... The attainment of this goal would require a different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in this present age..." (p96)
Reading this, it seems that our age is doomed, and the essay in front of you has been promoting a pointless hope that even the hope's supposed originator does not have. But Nietzsche's words are no mere pessimism, they carry a pessimism that is angry at the "bad air" in life, it is pessimism with passion! Nietzsche is an angry mother telling her son that he has no future at all because he only drinks himself to death in a bar every night. The world perhaps has been dark, but this anger will be the lightening rod which shakes away the shells of our complacent irreverence toward truth and nature!
When a reader is confounded by the world which Nietzsche depicts, he may turn to Politics as Vocation by Weber. In this essay, Weber paints a specific case of the grandiose problem of adaptation, or survival in new environments, in the person of the conflicted politician.
Politics as Vocation inherits the essence of Genealogy of Morals in calling for the politician's mastery over circumstances. The politician must both be a master of his internal conditions, and his external conditions. Internally, for the politician to be a politician, he must have "passionate devotion to a `cause'". This passion, or excessive energy, however, can lead to vanity and then the "striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication" (p116). In order to counterbalance this tendency, Weber says that the politician must have a "cool sense of proportion" (p115). One's ardent political passion is the fire that will draw the hearts of a thousands followers, however, if he gets carried away by the worshipping crowds, then the fire has burnt onto himself. In another word, there is no strength in the ecstasy of self-adulation, there is no power when one does not even notice the reality within himself and is merely fooled by vanity. Although the context is different, Weber is asking exactly what Nietzsche asked: the politician must know what words of praises he should forget and always know what he needs to remember to keep his crowds in control; he needs to constantly adapt to the changing conditions of the crowd so that he will always know its language and express his Will with this tongue.
Extending this into a greater sphere, politicians must rely on the support of businessmen and interest groups, and he necessarily have to use his power to bring to his backers a profit on their investments. Living in this reality, Weber advises the politician to gain mastery over the situation, to know the goals of their political life with a clarity, and to pursue this goal with a sense of responsibility to the goal. In Nietzsche's terms, the politician must learn to forget and not fall into the moral trap of self-deprecation against every "unethical" act that he necessarily takes, but he must also always remember his promised end which he will reach with his mastery over the tools of politics.
Behinds Webber, Plato also has similar things to say as Nietzsche. Nietzsche offers his readers hope with the model of the truthful he erects which all who have a little bravery could follow. Despite differences that can not be discussed here, Plato's creation of the noble city with the noble people could be regarded as an imaginary application of Nietzche's theory (although 2000 earlier).
The whole of Republic is about understanding man and the world. Plato writes, "this very thing, good judgment, is clearly some kind of knowledge, for it's through knowledge, not ignorance, that people judge well." (IV, 426e) The ultimate search for knowledge rests in understanding the light from the "sun", but practically speaking, Plato has made it his duty to search for human nature and the social nature of the Greek-state. The "tripartite soul" conclusion that he draws from the natural conditions of his world is contentious today, and Nietzsche certainly has much to say against it, however, the resolute search for understanding the internal and external conditions of man, however, is the same.
Furthermore, in building his world, Plato asks his nobles to be able to forget certain things with the noble lie. The goal here is precisely the same as Nietzsche's: Plato wanted to leave the inessentials in the past, and prevent obsession with the "dark" things that gods supposed did or the petty accounts of who was truly "silver" or "gold", stories and accounts that will elude man on their journey for greater power. With their passion freed from the foolishness of the past, from the plays of dark shadows reflected from the fires in the cage, men and society as a whole is better positioned to get out of the hole of the past and embrace the glory of truth.
In all, Nietzsche's strong men are not scary. The weak ones of the slave morality are not scary either, it is merely so sad to behold them that catapulted Nietzsche writes about them with such vehement anger. Nietzsche never says that the strong should be followed, and perhaps in other books of his one can draw differing conclusions about what Nietzsche really is promoting, however, from the Genealogy, it is clear that the contrast between the strong and the weak makes the strong a more appropriate role model. Again, one does not need to be scared of them, they are merely adroit adaptationists, masters of their environment, not destroyers.
Summary of On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
The great philosopher's major work on ethics, along with ECCE HOMO, Nietzche's remarkable review of his life and works. Translated by Walter Kaufmann.Philosophy Books
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