If you believe that good people can be recognized by the fact that they are nice or compassionate, that they are ‘’fair’’, that they are humble, that they sacrifice themselves for others, then you are living in a damn fantasy. If you carry such an attitude, then you are not only harming yourself, but also others around you. We will see why things aren’t like this in «On the Genealogy of Morals” by Friedrich Nietzsche, and now we will look at it together and then you will understand what I mean by this.
First of all, we have to clarify two important basic ideas:
1. What is actually meant here by the term morality?
Morality is the definition of moral values, i.e. what is good and what is bad or good and evil in a society.
2. Is morality not made by God or is it not simply inside us since birth, i.e. given by nature?
Nietzsche clearly says that morality is not something universal but it’s created by people, and you can see this in the fact that people’s perspective are what determine what’s ‘good” or “bad” in different cultures.
That means that people determine the values, what is good and what is bad in a society. At this point, of course, you are probably asking yourself with what intention they do that and who determines that? We will tackle this later, because it is crucial to understand.
Why does Nietzsche criticize morality? Morality is something good, and so we first ask ourselves what was moral back in Nietzsche’s time, and we see that it is the same thing that is still considered good and moral in our time. Nietzsche researches which philosophers have ever dealt with the subject of morality and he comes across Schopenhauer in particular, who did this intensively. Schopenhauer was also a role model of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was a great teacher
Schopenhauer titled the following values as positive, i.e. good moral values and namely the values: of the un-egoistic, of pity, of self-denial and self-sacrificial instincts. According to Schopenhauer, these are the great values par excellence. So everything that goes away from one’s own ego and where one sacrifices oneself, puts oneself behind and just renounces.
Nietzsche finds this simply terrible and sees there a very big problem within this type of behavior.
in these very instincts I saw the beginning of the end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes backwards, the will turning against Life, the last illness announcing itself with its own mincing melancholy: I realised that the morality of pity which spread wider and wider, and whose grip infected even philosophers with its disease, was the most sinister symptom of our modern European civilisation;
So Nietzsche describes here the good, which makes one ill, as something very bad. This is a very blatant contradiction and we also find hints in the quotation as to why this is so. He calls the existing morality the beginning of the end, a standing still and looking back tiredness. We are no longer developing. Of course, one can understand that Nietzsche sees a danger in this, because in nature everything is naturally designed in such a way that everything develops and evloves further. If it doesn’t develop further, then it just dies. That’s how evolution works, and now you can ask yourself why this morality should lead to society standing still and not evolving. And I want to explain this to you with a very concrete example. So an example would be, you are a person who wants to have a more attractive partner and you see perhaps women or men that you find particularly attractive and you know, at the moment it is not so that I can realistically get such a partner to settle with me. That’s why you have such a certain pain and then you start to optimize yourself. You ask yourself, what do I have to become, what do I have to do to look attractive to such a partner that I want to have. Then you’ve created the natural foundation to develop yourself. So you have a very primitive and selfish need and you just want to have an attractive partner. But that leads you to create a better version of yourself and develop yourself. But if you say, I am such a moral person and I don’t care about appearances, then you don’t need to develop. Then you can win a partner with your current status who is simply not attractive and then you can still position yourself as a moral person. Another example would be, you want to have more money, which is also somewhat egoistic, something quite natural instinctive, because the more resources you have, the better your odds of survival. Of course you want to have that, but on the other hand it’s also a bit morally frowned upon to say, “I want to have more money or I want to be rich.”
That’s why you might say, “no I’m a moral person. I’m content with what I have. I’m grateful for what I have at the moment. I’m a humble person. I don’t need that much.” Then you position yourself as a moral, as a good person, but you feel comfortable not putting more work in order to acquire more resources such as money. Because theoretically you would then have to look at what are the present problems that need to be solved and come up with the solution that people need so that they are happy to give me their money to fix their problems. Because that would also be connected with the fact that we have to acquire new skills, we have to acquire new knowledge. But by being such an agent of morality, you don’t develop – you stand still.
Nietzsche now does something very exciting, and that is he looks at the words good and bad, or good and evil, and wants to understand where these terms originated. What were they meant to mean when they were created. Because then you can see, what does this term mean at all. Unfortunately it is so that we humans tend to reinterpret the terms then with the time. Depending on how it serves us, so especially ideologists like to do something similar, for example they interpret terms like racism, sexism differently than what it was meant in the origin, so that they can reproach others for example. We also have this problem with morality here and Nietzsche now looks at it very soberly and in different languages, where does the term come from and how was it to be interpreted.
the concept “good” is sought and located in the wrong place: the judgment “good” did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Much[Pg 20] rather has it been the good themselves, that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good, that is to say of the first order, in contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian.
That is actually a scandalous discovery that he made there. That it has nothing at all to do with kindness, whether someone is a good person. Kind would be that one sacrifices oneself for others and is well-disposed to them and is nice. But this has nothing to do with the term good, but good simply means that you belong to the good in a social sense. That is, among those above, among the powerful, the higher-minded. So that has something to do with social rank, and bad is what is attached to the rabble. This is how the concepts of good and bad came into being. You have to keep this in mind, it may sound a bit harsh to say that the powerful are automatically the good just because they are powerful. But it is also quite logical if you stop looking at it morally.
If you go to the gym and look around and think like this, who in there is doing their thing right, who could still teach me something about muscle building and of course you look to the one who has the most muscles. That’s the powerful one, the dominant one in the gym and he has the results you’re looking to have. That means he dictates what is good and right. The way he trains and the way he keeps his values up is now good in this sub-sector and the people who stay fat, who don’t build up muscles, are bad. “So of course, looking at society as a whole and actually it’s a very rational look at it to say the ones who get good results are the powerful ones, the rich ones who also live longer, etc. These are the good guys, and those who don’t get it right are the bad guys – even if that sounds very crude, obviously. And there is also the problem behind it, the question is of course if it was defined in the beginning in this way what is good and bad, why do we see it completely differently today? We not only see it differently, we see it in stark contrast. If I tell you the powerful good rich and strong who dominate others, those are the good in the moral sense, then maybe it’s even hard to believe, because today we live in a world where they promote being weak, staying weak. Thus having compassion, caring for others, giving up yourself and so on, those are just the good things.
How did it come about that such a reversal of values crept in and that’s because, as I already mentioned, it’s so brutal when these powerful people dictate the values and the poor, the weak and the sick below are humiliated by it. So they are offended by the powerful and this naturally creates an impulse for revenge. One wants to take revenge on the powerful and every human being and that is important, you have to understand that, otherwise you can’t really understand the whole concept, every human being strives for power. Even the one who pretends to be so quite moral and good. That’s just his strategy to strive for power and of course the weak can’t just go to the powerful and dominate them in turn. So not so in the obvious way, because they are in an inferior position. That’s why they do it stealthily, reformulate the morals and always say the powerful are the bad guys and then, conversely, they position themselves as the good guys because they are the opposite of the powerful, i.e. the opposite of bad. Maybe you find this hard to believe, because how can a weak person say that being weak, poor, rich and powerful is evil. It works by changing the terms a little bit and tweaking the meaning behind it.
Nietzsche calls this the slave morality, this is the morality that comes from the weak and that dominates today in our society. Even then, it gained the upper hand. Then one commits a fraud. You don’t say nowadays that being weak is good, but you say maybe something like being prudent or being peaceful is good. So, the weak, they are then no longer weak, but peaceful or the poor are not poor, but are modest. The cowardly are not cowardly, but are those who forgive their enemies. So, there is this value reversal in morality and this leads to the fact that the representatives of this slave morality representing everything that is weak as good and everything that leads to power, strength and to a good life as evil.
Now she can listen in for you and ask you if you haven’t already experienced that yourself, that you celebrate yourself when you are self-confident, when you are strong and demonstrate a strength and then are ashamed of it and want to go back to modesty since you are afraid of being punished by society somehow, of making yourself unpopular somehow. That is exactly the mechanism that takes effect and that is why these people, who are considered good from today’s perspective, that is, morally good, cause more people to be weak, to remain weak, to remain poor, to remain fearful and to be ashamed of being successful. If you just also this this clear morality in the tricks and represents then you are part of this movement and part of the movement that destroy this world.
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