Nietzsche essay

I am so exited to finally have finished my esaay at 5:45am and because I have no one to tell about my exitement, I have decided to post my essay here…At least the world will appreciate my hard work! This is a non-revised version…but please! You cant expect me to start reading it again now!? nooooooo! I dont even expect you to read it anyways. This is jsut for my personal enjoyment.

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Nietzsche argues that a subject’s inability to gain personal security in the modern world results in production of ressentiment, where frustration becomes expressed as the indirect violence of resentful attempts to control others through morality claims. Critically evaluate the proposition that calls seeking our good behaviour are little more than tactics of power.

“We remain unknown to ourselves”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface of On the Genealogy of Morals

This aphorism, full of pessimism and permanency, is the opening line of the preface to one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most influential works, On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche’s entire philosophical thought is revealed to us in just a few words: he was a man haunted by the quest to self-knowledge, an awareness so close to the individual and yet so ungraspable. Indeed, it is common and natural to feel that the only certainty lies in the self; because everything around us slides under a slippery subjectivity, because it is part of our constant mal de vivre. The only thing we can affirm is that we are alive, and that only because we have an instinctive sense of being in this world. For Nietzsche however, we are still looking for an identity that does not seem to want to be found.
Through a historical approach of the transformations suffered by morality, Nietzsche presents moral values as truths that have established man’s false identity overtime. Nietzsche attributes this error to Christianity, for the diffusion of a sense of indebtedness in its faithful. Whereas in Ancient Greece, Gods were created to exculpate the common man, Christians must forever carry “the burden of still unpaid debts” and “the desire to be relieved from them” (Nietzsche, GMII, 20). Nietzsche understands that man should not have to bear this negative load. What is more, instead of being a man with “the right to make promises”, the individual should be doted with the gift of “forgetfulness” (Nietzsche, GMII, 1). However, considering the biological impossibility of this proposal, Nietzsche asserts “that the complete and definitive victory of atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty indebtedness towards its origin, its causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together” (Nietzsche, GMII, 20). In this radically anti-religious statement, Nietzsche proposes man’s return to a previous state of happy conformity with himself, when he experienced no penance or ressentiment.
Atheism found its public advent following the political changes enforced by radicals of the French Revolution. However, never before the 19th century, were they expressed so freely. Since then, its assent has been vertiginous to a point where today, it is easily found that younger generations of many developed countries believe themselves to be atheists (or at least a version of what they believe atheism means). Therefore, as our world increasingly denies the existence of God, can we say that our sense of guilt and indebtedness has begun to disappear? Have we stopped believing in a higher power to the extent that we have created particularized moral values for ourselves?
Departing from Nietzsche’s criticism of religion, this essay proposes the study of the applicability of Nietzsche’s theories of ressentiment and a sense of debt to modern society, with special emphasis on modern tactics of power and how these may subject man to imposed “good behaviour”, like Christianity seems to have done.

Before taking on the discussion about contemporary society in relation to Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment, it is important to engage with it in the time it was written.
According to Nietzsche, the fundament of man’s existence lies in a “psychological principle of human behaviour” in which “every being seeks to extend its sphere of action and influence: to consolidate itself” (Gane, 85). This idea, which Nietzsche found in Schopenhauer, is called The Will to Power. For these two philosophers, it is in man’s nature to want to dominate. In feudal systems, when the slave was under the command of his master and the latter was considered to have “good behaviour” as opposed to the former’s “bad behaviour”, the slave had to create his own mode of comparison. For Elias it was the appearance, in the Middle Ages, of the concept of courtesy and civilité (Elias, 53). For Nietzsche however, this transformation came from the slave’s knowledge of his position as weak, and a subsequent establishment of a moral good, which he dominated. Therefore the slave’s reactive values took place as a direct reply to the fear of the master. But his own Will to Power gave him the courage to stand up to that other “noble power” (Welshon, 21). In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes a similar process happening in the “community”, between creditor and debtor (Nietzsche, GMII, 9). But in this case, because the creditor creates a sense of indebtedness to his debtor (a consequence of “his right to make promises”), he develops a sense of guilt and ressentiment, where the individual develops unconscious feelings of frustration “by the sensed inferiority of one’s situation or personality”, which “frequently results in some kind of self-abasement” (“Ressentiment”, OED).

The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: it was here that one person first encountered another person, that one person first measured himself against another. (Nietzsche, GMII, 8)

This frustration is internalized and repressed (including the Will to Power), making the subject unhappy. For this reason, Nietzsche argues that the modern man lives a life of pain. It is in this context that Nietzsche’s idea of the conscience appears. It is a conscience that follows moral conventions of “good” and “bad” put in place by social conventions.

Values exist only because they are posited by life. The human creation of values within life is a manifestation of the will to power. Man relates to himself either authentically (adopting the master-morality) or unauthentically (adopting the slave-morality). The will to power has so to speak a two-fold appearance as power and lack of power. (Fink, 115)

In this summary of Nietzsche’s argument, Fink suggests that all human beings adopt the position of the master or the slave, creating a power struggle and an economy of pain.
Because Nietzsche describes a historical process that occur over the years, today’s Western society has adopted these feelings as second nature, to the extent that we consider guilt to be a polite reaction in some cases. The easiest example to analyse is what happens when a friend lends us money. In today’s society, the underlying pressure of being in debt to someone, is enough to make the debtor feel uncomfortable in the presence of his debtor until he pays what is due. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes how this comes about.
Through the use of his Will to Power, where he finds his courage, the debtor pressurizes his creditor in any way he pleases (verbal, psychological, physical). This constitutes a violent aggression, responsible of the above-written ressentiment salient in the debtor. Nietzsche describes this inclination to hurt the other as an instinctive drive in the human being. Indeed, he believed in the spectacle of violence and how this was a way of dealing with personal infringements and debts, which allowed all parties to deal with the pain and not internalize it, like it is seen in the modern man (Nietzsche, GMII, 7). Therefore

…if pain hurts more today, it simply requires a certain sublimation and subtilization, that is to say it has to appear translated into the imaginative and psychical and adorned with such innocent names that even the tenderest and most hypocritical conscience is not suspicious of them. (Nietzsche, GMII, 7)

All of the above are to be seen as tactics of power. From the spectacle that the Greeks used to employ, to the modern pressures of the debtor; all of these act as a means to make the subjected individual follow the will of the most powerful through punishment: “thus punishment tames men” and “all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward – this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul”” (Nietzsche, GMII, 16). This is the reason why Nietzsche’s desire is to constantly fight with the persistence of memory: “If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory” (Nietzsche, GMII, 3). Finally, according to Nietzsche, it is under these rules of triumph over the weaker that Christianity operates and from which he wishes to liberate man. Following this pattern, what does contemporary man need to free himself from?

To a certain extent, it is not a surprise that religion has evolved in the direction that it has. Looking back in time, it seems that many of the faiths, beliefs, cultural or sexual orientations that once were considered heresy or taboo, have found a way to flourish. The same can be said about racial issues or the emancipation of women. In all of these cases, I believe that Nietzsche’s theory of the master/slave dichotomy is applicable. If we are to abide by the theory of the Will to Power inherent in every human being, then it is to be expected that the weaker parties will fight for the imposition of their beliefs. Some will triumph like the feminist movement, some will find their cause takes time to be accepted like the Carl Whitman’s Gay Manifesto, some will never live to see their ideas take an important part of social and political thought even if their cause is considered implausible. This final example is obviously referring to Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
In the case of religion, it is unlikely that atheism and Christianity were only at odds against each other. There are so many faiths in the world that it would be somewhat selfish to limit ourselves to only those two. How it happened is of little importance in this essay, however, its repercussions are crucial. In the western world and especially in poorer countries (with the exception of maybe Italy and Spain), it is true that religion still had a big impact on our parent’s generation (if anything forced by their own parents). But especially in countries touched by liberal movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, there seems to be exist a departure from conventional ideas of power and religion. This goes hand in hand with the development of genetic science.
Nevertheless, this loss of religious tradition does not imply that we have gone back to the “second innocence” Nietzsche speaks of. Just like the idea of “good behaviour” has been transferable from the emergence of civility to the good repentant Christian, so guilt has become ingrained in man and exists in all areas of his life. This is why it is possible now to give the example of Christianity as well as that of the friends that owe money to each other. The world changes, our lives change, but despite the fact that atheism has increased, we still lead lives of pain and shame.
Following the religious institution, it would seem that the family nucleus is the next pillar of power capable of tying down the individual in Nietzsche’s view and forcing him into good behaviour. For the most part, this is still an applicable alternative, at least in theory. Parents have the capacity of moulding their children into good behaviour, if anything through the fear of physical repercussions upon the child. This is an instance where tactics of power are not used to harm the individual, but only in order to educate and edify a personality. Yet, it is still likely that Nietzsche would have been against this form of power, because he would have considered it an infringement of the individual’s right to uniqueness and not “calculable, regular and necessary” (Nietzsche, GMII, 1). Furthermore, it is important to say, if anything for the sake of supporting Nietzsche’s argument, that although modern society desperately seeks alternatives to punishment, it is an observed fact that in the United States, where children have been giving the authority to act against their parents, more physical violence and disrespect of authority has erupted. This could be an instance of return to the “second innocence”, where individuals act on their natural instinct to deal with their pain and anger and not act through their socially constructed conscience. However today, it is true that these undisciplined children but would be considered to have “bad conscience”, but this for Nietzsche is a tautology (Shapiro, seminar). All conscience is bad because it is socially constructed. Nietzsche would argue that these violent children have acted as human beings, but it is impossible for us as a society to judge these aggressions as a mere exteriorization of pain, because we have become “tame domestic animals” (Nietzsche, GMII, 6).
In present society, above the institution of the family, new powers seem to form, that according to society itself are taking over all other areas susceptible to have an influence on the individual. We belong to an era of mass media that in a way is creating much fear and instability because man has been completely enveloped and dragged into it, almost without any knowledge of it happening. Every day there is a new gadget out in stores, and he who does now possess it faces the scrutiny of the market but also of his peers. The media has united to capitalism exerting a considerable amount of power on the individual. The tactics of power in this case are the tactics of the market against which it is hard to compete because of the velocity at which they move. The good behaviour to which individuals are submitted consists in abiding by the rules of the market, by buying the latest trends, increasing the capital and making a few people rich. But increasing particular wealth is not the only reason why the mere individual is the biggest competitor of capitalism. Once again, Nietzsche’s theory of the Will to Power is here applicable. In this example, the market acts as the creditor (or master) and the common western man as the debtor (or slave). The master needs to constantly maintain his tactics of power in order to keep the slave subject to him. The danger is that in time, the debtor could come up with a new set of moral values and position himself above the master’s scale of “good behaviour” by demanding “good morals”. One of the most ever-lasting examples of today’s society has been the question of Internet piracy that started with Napster a few years ago. With the development of digital technology it has been very easy to make music (first) and them films available for free on the net before they become available to the general public. The general fear is that these modern thefts will cause the collapse of the music and/or film industry (Shapiro, seminar). But in reality, the fear is – and it has already started to happen – is that the common man has been able to set a new order for the market. Capitalist response? To throw on a market of buying and selling the same music and films on the net, now downloadable to the latest music devices. The question is, how would Nietzsche propose to eradicate this new Christianity? Although we cannot find the answer in his essay, through his metaphorically lyrical style, he does seem to anticipate the perpetual repetitiveness of this historical process by ending his essay by saying: “A temple must be erected, a temple must be destroyed” (Nietzsche, GMII, 24).

To conclude, this analysis has revealed the interactions between the weak and the powerful, society and the common western man. Power struggle through guilt and violence acts at the level of the individual as well as at the level of the individual and his community. As a philologist, Nietzsche is constructing his idea of society linked to his idea of morality. He embarks on a “journey across the wide expanse of morality, so distant and so inaccessible – morality which has actually existed, which has actually been lived – a journey with nothing but new questions and with fresh eyes as it were” (Nietzsche, GM Preface, 8). However, what his work and this essay reveal is that, no matter at which point of history one finds oneself, morality is not transcendental. Morality is a group belief (Gane, 52). There is not one truth for all of us, but several, according to which point in time we find ourselves in. What does seem to move together in a dancing movement is the relationship between the slave and the master, tied by the rope of the Will to Power. If anything is perdurable for Nietzsche, it is this idea of our undeniable desire to dominate. Therefore, for eternity, new masters and new slaves will continue to appear. If the new Christianity found in Media and Capitalism ever sees a decline, who will be the new master and how will he subjugate his slave to his tactics of power? Nietzsche is still writing history with his work, because the world keeps changing, we keep reinventing ourselves and “we remain [forever] unknown to ourselves”. Perhaps that is the only Truth.

Bibliography

Primary Reading

Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Second Essay “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like”. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Secondary Reading

Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, c1995.

Fink, Eugen. Nietzsche’s philosophy. London: Continuum, 2003.

Gane, Laurence and Piero. Introducing Nietzsche. Cambridge: Icon Books UK, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (trans. Douglas Smith). On the Genealogy of Morals: a Polemic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

“Ressentiment”. Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Second Edition 1989 (electronic source). Oxford University Press. 15 December 2005.

Shapiro, Stephen. “Nietzsche and Elias”. Humanities building. University of Warwick, 5 October 2005.

Welshon, Rex. The philosophy of Nietzsche. Chesham: Acumen, 2004.

: 14 Jan 2006 05:52 |  Tags: Nietzsche |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem