I’m reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality and I can’t figure out how Nietzsche’s view of the self (the strong express strength) ties in his with critique on morality.
My thoughts: Nietzsche’s view of the self ties in with his critique of slave morality to become the basis for his rejection of abstract ideal justice.
=> His view of self rejects justice and moral responsibility because of his view of self
Please tell me if my interpretation is what Nietzsche was expressing or if I have misconstructed what he’s trying to say
The self is completely the actions of the self and nothing more. There is no distinction between strength and the expression of strength. The strong cannot resist being strong and the weak cannot resist being weak.
Nietzsche beings his criticism with the history of how good and bad got their meanings. With master morality, good were those people that were superior while bad were those people that were inferior. Eventually the lower class began to resent their powerlessness and badness. The resentment of the inferiors was so great that they created a different moral code. Good was applied to the inferior people while evil was applied to the non-inferior people. The weak and powerless felt somewhat satisfied that they were now good. Thus the fundamental component of slave morality is resentment. Resentment has led to ascetic ideals. Slave morality intrinsically assumes that one secretly desires the evil things that one resents. Those desirables that are responsible for the resentment which caused slave morality ensure that the desirables are condemned by the people that desire the item. If the individual did not desire the item there would have been not resentment and no slave morality in the first place.
Nietzsche labels standard morality slave morality because he sees it as the morality of slaves; it limits our freedom by encouraging all people to become weak. Slave morality benefits those that are weak and powerless. The weak and powerless proclaim that they are good because they have managed to suppress their desires and suppressing desires is good because it is part of our conscience. However, the reality is that the powerless are only powerless. Slave morality has introduced the concept of good versus evil where good is the assumed intrinsic value of people and the world and evil is the behavior of people uninhibited by conscience.
If people and the world are naturally good then their actions should be good as well. The ideal that everything is innately good creates a sense of justice; there is a certain right way to act in this world. There are rules to follow. Those who do not follow the rules are breaking the law. Those that break the law suffer from guilt because if there is justice, there is a sense of moral responsibility to follow the justice. One needs to act justly because it is the moral thing to do. If it is not the moral thing to do, one feels guilty. Thus everyone belonging to slave morality is tied to justice and moral responsibility. The actions one can do are limited by his conscience.
Evil is invented by the weak and powerless to control the strong. Strong people are those who accumulate power with their strength, the natural way. Conscience, another invention of slave morality, is the suppression of human instincts; a desire to inflict pain onto others is a basic predator human instinct but because we are suppressed by slave morality, conscience tells us to inflict pain onto ourselves instead of others. Conscience stops us from doing evil; evil actions make people feel guilty. Evil actions are those that should not be done by people because people are innately good. Evil limits the actions that people can do. The sense of good and evil are limits which force people to become slaves to their morality.
The abstract idea of conscience leads moral responsibility. Inferior individuals manage to secure themselves against superior individuals using moral responsibility. They can level the playing field. The natural internal fear of being overwhelmed by a superior competitor that the inferior competitor feels is matched by the superior competitor’s feeling of guilt if he wins unconventionally. What is conventional and what is non-conventional is determined by guilt because the superior competitor has an obligation to follow certain rules. The feeling of guilt forcefully limits an individuals ability to express his skill by limiting the desire to perform the best of one’s ability. Nietzsche’s criticism here is that by limiting the expression of skill, the individual is thus limited in his own strength; the actions make the actor.
Moral responsibility stems from justice. Justice is also the invention of the powerless. Those who are not strong enough to exact revenge using their own might invented divine justice which would prove them right in heaven, if not on Earth. Justice relies on the idea that people are all good and thus should always be doing good things. When people are not doing good things they should feel guilty. Nietzsche disagrees with the idea of an abstract justice. We should not be accountable to a form of higher ideal justice. That will result with a weak species that always caters to the weak. Instead, we are accountable for our own actions because our actions define us, we should not be considered people essentially good. On what basis are people essentially good? Nietzsche would say people are not essentially good and that we have no essence. Goodness comes from the ability to excel at what you are good at. Goodness is measured in one’s ability to show his strength. This is not to say murderer or criminals are good because they express their strength. Murderers that would kill for money do not break any moral codes but rather prove their weakness as these murders were controlled by money. Thus these murderers are shown weak-willed and not strong.
Nietzsche cannot accept justice and must reject it because to have justice means that people are judged not only on the actions they commit but also on the type of people that they are. Good and evil do not exist outside of slave morality. Good and bad exist in a Darwinian way, the good is a way to describe the superior while bad is a way to describe inferior. Nietzsche’s belief that the actions define the actor is essential in rejecting the argument of justice.