Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A REVALUATION OF VALUES - Nietzsche

A constant theme in Nietzsche’s thought is a radical revaluation of moral conceptions. In Human, All Too Human, he introduces a crucial distinction between two kinds of morality. One, the earliest source of these concepts, is the creation of ruling groups and individuals. ‘Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer the Trojan and Greek are both good. It is not he who does us harm but who is contemptible who counts as bad’ (Human, All Too Human, section 45). The second kind is that of the subjected and the powerless, the system of moral concepts that rationalizes their lack of power. Nietzsche returns to this theme in Beyond Good and Evil; but it is in The Genealogy of Morals—the last work he published, and one of his most daring—that the theory is fully elaborated. Each of its three long essays develops a central moral theme in terms of the concept of the will to power. There are two types of morality, ‘master morality’ and ‘slave morality’, though Nietzsche adds that ‘at times they occur directly alongside each other—even in the same human being, within a single soul’ (Beyond Good and Evil, section 260). In the first case, a ruling group posits its own sense of nobility and superiority as valuable and good. Here ‘good’ means ‘noble’, whereas ‘bad’ means ‘common’. In the second case, the weak establish their own values, in which strength is regarded as ‘evil’. At the most fundamental level, the distinction is a ‘physiological’ one, between active impulses, spontaneous expressions of one’s own energy, and the ‘reactive’ impulses, which by their nature are directed against something, an external danger. In fact, the noble are really not much interested in the ignoble; but the weak are preoccupied with the strong. Nietzsche uses the French word ressentiment for their attitude. ‘The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of action, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.’ Christian morality is the most successful instance of such a system. But since the weak lack the power to take revenge directly, their revenge has to be mediated by a long and indirect process of deceitful conceptual manipulation which induces the strong to value respect and pity for the weak, and to condemn their own virtues.