The Misinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche Based on His Essays

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and cultural critic. He published many of his works from 1870 through to 1880. He is well known for his strict criticisms of traditional European morality and religion as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. Nietzsche used his psychological analyses to support original theories about the nature of the self and provocative proposals suggesting new values that he thought would promote cultural renewal and improve social and psychological life by comparison to life under the traditional values he criticized (Lanier, 2017).

Although he grew up as the son of a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche later declared he had lost his faith and fervently critiques Christianity in his works (John Cameron. Personal Communication. January 16, 2019). Nietzsche like to write using a metaphorical style to express his ideas. While this resulted in a great writing style, it also opened Nietzsche up to a lot of misinterpretation (John Cameron. Personal Communication. January 16, 2019). . This essay will focus on the first two essays in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. More specifically, it will it interpret the main themes of ressentiment, slave morality, will to power, bad conscience and the Übermensch in regard to authoritarian regimes. While some if Nietzsches work has been construed with problematic connotations, his overall philosophy is one lacking the need of an authoritarian state.

Starting with the first essay in On the Genealogy of Morality; Good and Evil, Good and Bad. When thinking of Christian values, patience, humility, compassion and charity come to mind. They have been seen as a guide on how to live and carry significance and are now found as commonplace in the welfare state. Are they natural human values? Nietzsche would say no. What seems rational on the surface may have a deeper, hidden meaning. Take good and evil for example. Nobility used to use the term good to describe themselves as superior (Snelson, 2017). Good meant strong and bad meant simple. Nobility believed themselves to be strong, superior and good. If the weak are oppressed then they see the strength of the “good” as evil. The dichotomy found here is master morality and slave morality (Snelson, 2017).

Also found is ressentiment; which Nietzsche refers to as a poison “the beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, being denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge.” “Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, and ‘non-self’”(Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989) (Remley, 2016).

Nietzsche believed the slave morality began with the Jews saying, “only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people” (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). This passage has been used to demonstrate Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism. However, many other passages put this into question. For example, he also said that ‘the history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intelligence of the powerless injected into it’ (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). Furthermore, he said that ‘the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority- and they are also more intelligent’ (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). Nietzsche isn’t unconditionally rejecting the slave morality but asking us to put it into question (Lindstedt, 1997). And although he asked us to question whether god is dead, he really means that belief in god is dying. He wants to think about rekindling that noble morality, but he also argues that we must be careful (Lindstedt, 1997).

We may well be justified in retaining our fear in master morality at the center of every noble race and remain on our guard. Rather than emphasizing how thoughts have coalesced around opposites like good and evil, instead we should be focused on ‘differences of degree’ as he calls it (Lindstedt, 1997). There is a sense that there aren’t any absolute answers to what we value morally but always movement, always questions, always creativity (Lindstedt, 1997). Symbolically, god is an absolute and so if you derive values from an idea of God than they too are theoretically absolute (Cybulska, 2015). They stifle new, fluid, and malleable thinking (Cybulska, 2015). While not mentioned in this essay this is where Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch comes in. This is someone who understands both of these sides of valuation and experiments to push humanity and morality forward continually working out new ways to live (Cybulska, 2015). There was no doubt though that for Nietzsche, what would replace the values of God would be the values of the strong, the aristocratic, the new Übermensch (Cybulska, 2015). On balance this comes through more than anything, but the nuance involved in this conclusion is far from as authoritarian as some have claimed.

Moving on to the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality; Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters. The main arguments are that guilt is the price humans pay for entering society and morality has its roots in power not justice. Nietzsche starts this essay by saying that one of the fundamental traits that raises humans above animals is our ability to make promises. This means remembering to do something. He sees this as the basis of morality, the origins of responsibility. Promising, acting and responsibility all make up man’s conscience. Guilt is then born of breaking promises, actual or metaphorical. Pride on the other hand, grows out of keeping them (Risse, 2001).

In tribal times, Nietzsche theorizes a promise was like a debt to be paid to a creditor (Risse, 2001). “I promise to do something for you in return you doing something for me.” Promises and guilt are then born out of the relationship between the creditor and the debtor (Risse, 2001). If I break my promise I must be punished. The tribe or community is galvanized by promises and so the creditor-debtor relationship becomes the basis for social rules and politics as a whole (Risse, 2001). In punishment for broken promises a certain pleasure must be extracted by the wronged creditor. Which creates the imbalanced dynamic of the powerful extracting from the powerless (Risse, 2001). The pleasure is shown to remind the community not to break promises. Nietzsche says, ‘to make someone suffer is pleasure in its highest form’, ‘a true feast’ (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). He cites public executions and torture as evidence of this.

It is passages like this where we find Nietzsche at his most problematic. It is a problem of polemical emphasis, where you can easily see why his works are so easily co-opted by authoritarians like the National Socialist Party. That being said, you don’t have to agree with this for the rest of Nietzsche’s arguments to make sense. You could say that it is important to see promise breakers punished in some way without arguing that is was pleasurable or enjoyable. Then again, maybe there is some pleasure in seeing someone get their just desserts.

Either way, Nietzsche writes ‘A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something which continues to hurt stays in the memory’ (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). He goes on to say that ‘A few ideas come to be made ineradicable, omnipresent, unforgettable, “fixed, ” in order to hypnotize the whole nervous and intellectual system through these “fixed ideas” – and ascetic procedures and lifestyles are a method for freeing those ideas from competition with all other ideas, of making them “unforgettable’” (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). Here is a psychologizing of morality which involves turning inward into our own consciousness. Bad actions are to be celebrated if society is to remember not to do them (Risse, 2001).

When the strong punish the weak they are level-headed because they are punishing the act and are not fearful or resentful of the weak. They are not bothered by the weak man. The strong says you have broken a promise; you must be punished but I am not fearful of you. You do not mean anything to me so I will punish you and move on. I’m focused on myself. But when the weak punishes the strong for breaking promises, he is a man of resentment, ressentiment; a man of revenge, as was mentioned in the first essay. In ancient times, the promise-breaker was punished, pain was extracted, and everyone returned to their lives, but with ressentiment or slave morality we keep strength and power in check so as not to let the strong take power over us. Nietzsche calls this internalization bad conscience (Risse, 2001).

To understand why Nietzsche thinks it is bad there is a need to know something of his idea of the will to power, which is seen throughout his work. For Nietzsche, all life, plant and animal, develops through the will to power. Which is the desire to grow, be stronger, become safer, spread and reproduce, and humans are no different (Rydenfelt, 2013). This bad conscience then, this ressentiment, the revenge of the weak over the strong, the limiting of power, limits the will to power. And once a system of moral codes, language, aesthetics, art, courts, laws and culture arise around this bad conscience, they contain that seed of revenge of wanting to limit the power of the strong. But that strength applies to other people and to ourselves as well (Rydenfelt, 2013).

We limit the strength within us. It makes us question our actions all of the time. It makes us limit our own power. Which in turn creates a kind of introverted reality and makes is all weak. Nietzsche says that punishment of this sort tames us rather than making us better. His argument, if considered in the context of his first essay, is that our understanding of morality today is based on the weak protecting themselves against the strong, leading to bad conscience. If Christian morality is based on weakness and humility, then our consciences are weak too. Nietzsche wants a morality based on strength so that we can push forward.

Problematically, Nietzsche doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that slave morality, limiting one’s power, keeping avarice in check, and abhorring greed, is a rational psychological mechanism behind a cohesive and strong community, that it is completely necessary. Alternatively, it could be argued that Nietzsche wants a community based on everyone’s strength. That the very structure of a morality based on weakness was one that keeps us weak whereas one based on strength will make us strong (Lindstedt, 1997). For example, Nietzsche says that ‘bad conscience is a sickness, there is no point in denying it, but a sickness rather like pregnancy’ (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). In this way there is something good in it. There is possibility in it. He is not saying we should go backwards to the morality of the strong to, to the pre-civilized, to the tribal, but that there is something new to be discovered, a new type of justice of morality (Lindstedt, 1997).

Nietzsche ends with a call to tear down this bad conscience saying ‘this anti-christ, this anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and nothingness- he must come one day…’ (Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1989). What Nietzsche wants is the possibility for us all to be strong, moral and powerful in some way. However, he is not saying he has all the answers. As was mentioned before, the problems with this essay are mainly ones of polemical emphasis. While power itself is a nebulous and inexact analytical concept, the world’s power can have nefarious connotations whether you mean it to or not.

Similarly, the possibilities of the powerful enforcing their justice on the powerless is just as much a distortion of bad conscience as the weak enforcing their justice on the strong. Moreover, allusions to pain being better than guilt, swift violence being better than drawn out worry or the authority of the strong being better than the softness of democracy have obvious and worrying connotations. It is easy to think of authoritarian regimes when he writes like this. But read with his other works in mind, it is useful to think of Nietzsche as if he were talking about psychology and culture. It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of Nietzsche’s work. He wants to draw out, controversialize and problematize what we think of as normal or natural, so as to shine a light on our cultural disposition so as to find power this forward. The challenge is to draw out what it important whilst reinterpreting or fixing the speculative parts that may be tainted with Nietzsche’s own biases.