UNDERLYING FORCES

SUBTERRANEAN FORCES THREE: NIETZSCHE AND THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

There are three grand theories in the 19th century that have scientific pretensions. Only Darwin's ideas about natural selection still have such a status. Marx's dialectical materialism has fallen on hard times because of the failures associated with the regimes that claimed to embrace and enact its visions. But scholars and political analysts still argue that, as a method of analysis, Marx's views can yield powerful results. See Marx as a tool for analysis, not, as Marx intended, as a tool for changing the world.

In similar vein, Freud's psychoanalysis has not been adopted as a scientific model for the human psyche. It has in fact been rejected by almost all American professional psychologists, although it survives in two important ways: psychoanalysis persists as a kind of ghostly background, a medium in which ordinary people think their lives. The ideas of neurosis, oedipal complex, penis envy, the role of desire in human life, the importance of dreams, the whole idea of the unconscious, and more, all operate to some untestable degree as a general background in many peoples' thinking despite the fact that therapists rarely use Freudian terms or his methods of analysis.  Second, Freud's view of human being has persisted as a model for a very influential post-Freudian version of psychoanalysis practiced by the late French therapist, Jacques Lacan. Lacan's influence extends far beyond his practice; his public lectures/seminars drew virtually every major French intellectual of his era (Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, inter alia), and through them influenced American literary theorists, gender theorists and philosophers. The influential Slavoj Zizek, whose influence extends into political theory and the study of film and popular culture, keeps Lacan important for certain sectors of American intellectual life. 

But there is a fourth theorist whose ideas have never been seen as scientific theory, although recently the American philosopher Brian Leiter has argued for a naturalistic interpretation of his work, aligning it with Darwin's theories without arguing that it is a form of science.

This fourth theorist is Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the same time as earlier Freud and whom influenced Freud who regarded Nietzsche as a psychological talent of the first order.

Why include Nietzsche? Nietzsche matters because he too saw personal identity as an historical-biological deposit, not as something given immediately in experience, as was Descartes' thinking thing. For our purposes, Nietzsche built up identity as a deposit of moral concepts; who we are is a result of a certain moral history, rather than of the operation of unseen forces of desire or class conflict or natural selection. (Nietzsche is probably closest to Darwin, as we shall see.)

Nietzsche's hunch was that the moral concepts that we consider to be as timeless as Descartes' thinking thing or the Christian soul - isn't 'good' pretty steady in its meaning, across time and culture? -- have their own hidden history, such that the original meanings of these crucial terms was sometimes exactly the opposite of how those terms mean in the present day. 

Nietzsche's idea - or, one of them -- was that in the beginnings of human, or European, society, the 'good' people were the warriors, those who ruled and led by force and courage. These people had neither forethought nor memory: they acted as 'blond beasts', that is, as perfectly natural beings who gave gifts, killed, loved or pillaged as they willed, when they willed, and whatever they did was considered right because they did it and could back their actions with force. 

Thus, 'good' and 'bad' were originally descriptions of what the rulers did, and of course under this description 'bad' meant what people did who did not win, or, what people did who were conquered or enslaved or intimidated. In short, the original 'bad' meant the sort of self-effacing, accommodating behavior that we today often call 'good', while the warriors' acts of self-assertion which often involved violence we would call 'bad'. Nietzsche's question is: if what the winners and warriors once called 'good' is not often called 'bad', how did the definition change over time? 

Nietzsche then tells a complex story that he reconstructs as the most likely one to have been true about the shift in meaning of 'good' to 'bad', and vice versa. The analysis hinges on the role of the people he calls 'ascetics', those who often made up the priestly class. These were not the ordinary people, who one imagines accepted the warriors' definitions of good and bad without murmuring, because they were resigned to being the people who bore the burdens of supporting the warriors and form time to time benefitted from the warriors' magnificence and greatness of heart. But the ordinary people had little control over either their fate or the meaning of words. They endured because they had to and they were sufficiently intimidated by the superior courage and recklessness of the warriors to forego resistance. 

But the  ascetics, those who made up the class of priests, were a different sort of people. Nietzsche is here assuming that these different kinds of people occur naturally, that they are types thrown up by evolution. The ascetics were people of superior abilities -- intelligent, power-hungry, much like the warriors in many ways, but different in one essential way: they had no ability to act decisively because they were afflicted by internal organic weakness. They were essentially cowards, physically weak and afraid, incapable, either psychologically or physically, of challenging the rulers.

But they also wanted to rule and, because they were cowards, and afraid to act, they developed a rich inner life based on what Nietzsche calls "resentment' (ressentiment in French, which means 're-feeling' of all feelings). The idea was that when these people were challenged by those who were stronger and more decisive they would inevitably back down. When they backed down, their whole bodies would be ready for confrontation, in what we would call the fight or flight syndrome. But rather than do either they would take their humiliation, often with a smile, and use the energy generated by their state of arousal to re-feel their hatred of their warrior betters over and over. From re-feeling, and rethinking, the circumstances under which they had been humiliated, these people developed a sharp intelligence, which was much more developed than that of the warriors because the warriors, being winners, did not have to think very much. Thus, over time, the weaker priests became more and more intelligent, and what they thought about was how to gain power over the warriors without besting them in combat.

What they figured out was a complex system for making the warriors doubt their power and naturalness. They did this by creating the idea of a God who demanded submission to his will, and who valued this submission as a virtue. Submission to God meant a denial of the warriors' instincts; they came to see their exuberance as something defective, and as something that was subject to God's laws. 

God's laws, as thew ascetic/priests read them (made them up) required that self-assertion be considered a sin. This diod not so much change how the warriors acted - they were still after all warriors and naturally acted as they always had. But it made them rethink and second-guess their actions and when they did this they began to develop an inward lack of confidence, a self-questioning, and thuis a need tro ask the priests for advice and guidance. This gave the priests the power they had always desired and effectively changed the meaning of 'good' and 'bad'. 

Nietzsche sees this shift happen especially in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jewish God was one who Nietzsche saw as devised by the priests to hobble and control the Israelite kings, and to develop their inner self-torment via setting up rules that the priests could help them to internalize as if these rules were parts of their nature.

The fullest possible development of this God and of priestly control was the Christian proposal in which God sent his only son to suffer and die for the wrongdoing of the warriors. Thus the noblest of men had to die because the misdeeds of the warriors, and his saving them by this act incurred an eternal and unpayable debt. The warriors were thereby forever beholden to the dead and risen God, and the priests, who controlled access to this God, had finally won.