Translated from GegenStandpunkt publishers, München 1991]Friedrich Nietzsche –
God’s murderer, Hitler’s forefather, misogynist, genius, lunatic, or what?The commitment to higher values, the veneration and condemnation of oneself and others that this brings about, the delusion of people who think they are morally in the right and nobody else can ever be, the interpretation of this delusion into an entire worldview in which good and evil wage their fictitious battle – in short, morality and religion were deeply repugnant to Nietzsche. He so hated the hypocrisy of moralists and Christians that he decided to write a polemic that at times is as instructive as it is entertaining. Below are a few samples.
I. An analysis of the techniques of moral and religious self-deception
Nietzsche couldn’t stand the obvious ploy of the moral-minded people of his time who, no matter what, wanted to confuse self-criticism with a bad conscience and would rather slink off with their tails between their legs than admit to a mistake and let it go. He did not hold this behavior to be a matter of course, but rather a “disease” of his time that one had better not be infected by. As an historically educated person, he was aware that pre-bourgeois consciousness did not take punishment for an offense as a reason to be ashamed of one’s will.
(Slaves said) “not ‘I ought not to have done this’ – They submitted themselves to punishment, just as one submits one’s self to a disease, to a misfortune, or to death, with that stubborn and resigned fatalism . . .” (On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §15)
In contrast, bourgeois people manage to regularly condemn what they want and do. They not only know see their own interests as the guideline for their actions, but also call higher legal standards their own, which they want to meet and by which they measure their interests, and they worry about the deviations from their moral will that are expected again and again. “In morality man does not consider himself as individuum but as dividuum.” (Human, All Too Human, §57) As such, he judges himself and his actions according to a double standard: he wants something, knows and recognizes at the same time that he is not permitted this, wants it anyway, and gives himself a conscience about it.
In this case, self-condemnation is followed by the punishment of contrition, and with remorse, inner justice has once again been satisfied. So a bad conscience is the circuitous route to a good one.
Anyone who has concocted a good conscience in this way thinks he is in line with what decency and morality require, and is therefore capable of the gall that makes everyday bourgeoisie life with its people brimming over with righteousness so pleasant. Such a person not only takes it for granted that it’s ok to step on other people’s toes in the pursuit of his interests. He goes through the world as a role model for humanity, and that’s why it’s almost a moral duty for him to uphold himself as a judge of others; and as such, to wish every ill will on those who are not on the same level of quality.
“There, for example, is an ill-constituted man, who does not possess enough of intellect to be able to take pleasure in it, and just enough of culture to be aware of the fact; . . . one who is thoroughly ashamed of his existence – perhaps also harboring some vices – . . . gets at last into a habitual state of vengeance and inclination for vengeance . . . What do you think he finds necessary, absolutely necessary in order to give himself the appearance in his own eyes of superiority . . . ? It is always morality that he requires, one may wager on it; always the big moral words, always the high-sounding words: justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue . . . and whatever else the idealist-mantle is called, in which the incurable self-despisers and also the incurable conceited walk about.” (The Gay Science, §359)
Nietzsche was sharp enough not to “expose” the phenomenon of people justifying their most banal interests by appealing to the loftiest of titles as a double standard and to attribute this to an abuse of morality. He knew that double standards necessarily belong to morality because it can’t exist without calculation and deceit:
“The praise of the unselfish, self-sacrificing, virtuous person . . . this praise has in any case not originated out of the spirit of unselfishness! The ‘neighbor’ praises unselfishness because he profits by it! If the neighbor were ‘unselfishly’ disposed himself, he would reject that destruction of power, that injury for his advantage, he would thwart such inclinations in their origin, and above all he would manifest his unselfishness just by not giving it a good name! The fundamental contradiction in that morality which at present stands in high honor is here indicated: the motives to such a morality are in antithesis to its principle! That with which this morality wishes to prove itself, refutes it out of its criterion for what is moral! . . . As soon, however, as the neighbor recommended altruism on account of its utility, the precisely antithetical proposition, ‘Thou shalt seek thy advantage even at the expense of everybody else,’ was brought into use: accordingly ‘thou shalt,’ and ‘thou shalt not,’ are preached in one breath!” (The Gay Science, §21)
Here Nietzsche puts forward the discovery that the ideal of unselfishness, which belongs to all moral self-promotion, always puts interests in the proper light; and he knows that this contradiction is necessary. The purely negative imperative of unselfishness really can’t be put into practice. Not even moralists are as stupid as the moral-philosophical preachers of this ideal think they are, that they would declare their interests null and void in principle. That’s why when the advocates of this ideal justify it, they also require the opposite maxim – unselfishness has utility. However, this reason or “motive,” as Nietzsche says, puts the noble maxim in a dubious light. It is not a real motive – what really drives people is a completely different matter. Rather, it is a means of self-interpretation, of moral self-aggrandizement, for which a good dose of self-denial apparently provides the “argument.”
Incidentally, the same also applies in the opposite case, in which a person who has just suffered a damage lies about it and transforms it into a selfless act.
* This ploy of imagining oneself to be the self-confident subject of a situation in which one is obviously not the subject inspired Nietzsche’s criticism religion and Christianity in particular. The combination of voluntary self-abasement and self-righteousness displayed by Christians was simply too much for him. He therefore didn’t spend too much time on the lame denial of the existence of God, which merely tinkers with the doubts that Christians themselves harbor, but rather took on the content of the believers’ ideas.
What Christians do with their minds he considered pretty much the lowest form of intellectual exercise, and his comparison with the desire to numb oneself with drugs is not very far-fetched. Christians have mastered the trick of lying about their relationship to the world and portraying its hardships as a test invented especially for them; in this way, they transform real evil into an invented good:
“When misfortune overtakes us we can either pass it over so lightly that its cause is removed, or so that the result which it has on our temperament is altered, through a changing, therefore, of the evil into a good, the utility of which is perhaps not visible until later on. Religion and art (also metaphysical philosophy) work upon the changing of temperament, partly by the changing of our judgment on events . . . , partly through the awakening of a pleasure in pain . . . The more a man is inclined to twist and arrange meanings the less he will grasp the causes of evil and disperse them; the momentary mitigation and influence of a narcotic, as for example in toothache, suffices him even in more serious sufferings. The more the dominion of creeds and all arts dispense with narcotics, the more strictly men attend to the actual removing of the evil . . .” (Human, All Too Human, §108)
Now he stands there, the Christian, before his test, and is allowed to beat his breast for his transgressions:
“It is a clever stroke on the part of Christianity to teach the utter unworthiness, sinfulness and despicableness of mankind so loudly that the disdain of their fellowmen is no longer possible. ‘He may sin as much as he likes, he is not essentially different from me – it is I who am unworthy and despicable in every way,’ says the Christian to himself. But even this feeling has lost its sharpest sting, because the Christian no longer believes in his individual despicableness; he is bad as men are generally, and comforts himself a little with the axiom, ‘We are all of one kind.’” (Human, All Too Human, §117)
Nietzsche was therefore familiar with the Christian’s transition from self-abasement to the self-righteousness. It lies in the confession of one’s own sinfulness, with which Christians know they are on the righteous path and elevate themselves above the rest of humanity. What a pathetic figure he cuts in the process one can look up again in Nietzsche. The contradiction between the standard of an anti-materialist afterlife and coming to terms with the unholy here and now brings forth the everyday Christian whose hypocrisy Nietzsche regarded as a very logical stupidity, almost unworthy of his criticism:
“If Christianity were right, with its theories of an avenging God, of general sinfulness, of redemption, and the danger of eternal damnation, it would be a sign of weak character and lack of intellect not to become a priest, apostle or hermit, and to work only with fear and trembling for ones own salvation; it would be senseless thus to neglect eternal benefits for temporary comfort. Taking it for granted that there is belief, the commonplace Christian is a miserable figure, a man that really cannot add two and two together, and who, moreover, just because of his mental incapacity for irresponsibility, did not deserve to be so severely punished as Christianity has decreed.” (Human, All Too Human, §116)
* And because he could not stand these techniques of moral self-abasement and religious self-righteousness, Nietzsche also criticized the professional praisers of these ploys. He discovered in his philosophizing colleagues the banal need to justify with learned phrases the attitude toward submission practiced on all sides.
“That which philosophers called ‘giving a basis to morality,’ and endeavoring to realize, has, when seen in a right light, proved merely a learned form of good faith in prevailing morality, a new means of its expression, consequently just a matter-of-fact within the sphere of a definite morality, yea, in its ultimate motive, a sort of denial that it is lawful for this morality to be called in question – and in any case the reverse of the testing, analyzing, doubting, and vivisecting of this very faith.” (Beyond Good and Evil, §186)
It’s a strange science that has morality as its object and refuses to analyze its object simply because it does not want to let anything be said against morality. Nietzsche found it rather ridiculous that they go all out and try to give morality enormous significance:
“ . . . all systems of ethics hitherto have been foolish and anti-natural to such a degree that mankind would have been ruined by any one of them had it gotten the upper hand . . .” (The Gay Science, §1)
* Slowly, of course, some questions would have been called for: what brings rational beings to such feats of irrationality, why do moralists always judge doubly, wanting to allow their interests to only count under the reservation of higher standards and in turn bringing these standards to bear very self-confidently in accordance with their own interests? The answer to this question would have involved thinking further about the contradiction that Nietzsche beat over the heads of a moralizing humanity: He regarded it as degrading and disgraceful that they argued for their own permission. This contradiction is in fact anything but self-evident and also not moored in human nature. It comes from a world in which a law-making authority licenses the pursuit of private interests; in which the conditions that every private subject must accept, if they want to pursue their interests, are formulated in the state’s laws; and in which the question of what is permissible is therefore present in all considerations and provides the guideline according to which interests are justified. Anyone who feels at home in these conditions also acquires the corresponding reasoning in his willingness to cope with them: He argues in the spirit of justification and self-confidently applies the standards of what is permitted as if he had come up with them himself. For him, real law and imaginary law are now completely confused, but this is of no further importance because he is still compelled in practice to adhere to the former, and his moral considerations only give substance to the added self-deception that the obedience he must cope with is based on his deeper insight and that he is only pursuing his freedom in doing so.
Any such reduction of the sphere of moral delusions to the ground of fact never occurred to the author of a “genealogy of morals.” In contrast to his findings on the strange behavior of his contemporaries, his explanation of morality looks entirely within the world of ideas and delusions that make up the moral-philosophical concept of man. So much for “beyond good and evil”!
II. Anti-morality – The opposition between reason and interest reversed
Where moral philosophy divides man into an animal who follows his baser instincts and a rational being who is capable of higher things; where a Kant postulates in the “law of reason” that man should act “not from inclination, but from duty”; in short: whereas moral-philosophical instructors assert a fundamental opposition between reason and interest and announce this with a lot of fancy talk as their truth – Nietzsche takes the following standpoint:
“The falseness of an opinion is for us not any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions . . . are the most indispensable ones to us . . . To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.” (Beyond Good and Evil, §4)
How does one actually come to this conclusion? Nietzsche’s question: “Granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?” (Beyond Good and Evil, §1) is not that difficult to answer: Anyone who doesn’t know the score about the circumstances in which he finds himself doesn’t need to even attempt to make his interests correspond with them. Anyone who prefers uncertainty can accompany their actions with pious wishes and wonder why they never come true. And anyone who starts from false ideas can assess his damages afterwards. Nietzsche seems to have his doubts about this. He raises the question of whether the truth is not hostile to life and whether perhaps the most false judgment might therefore be much more beneficial. What he has in mind here is the “Truth” “of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect”; their “truth” is usually the standpoint of moral duty, of disregard for interests and an attitude hostile to life. Nietzsche refers to this moral-philosophical equation of truth and hostility to life and comes to the conclusion: “If this is truth, I am against the truth and for life.” And that’s pretty uncritical for someone who makes fun of what philosophers praise with their pathos of truth:
“That which causes philosophers to be regarded half-distrustfully and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are – how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, how childish and childlike they are – but that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner.” (Beyond Good and Evil, §5)
With his plea for life and against truth, Nietzsche shares the moral philosophical lie that truth and life, reason and interest are opposites. He only takes the other side of this false opposition, and that is not any smarter:
“Man has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an ‘evil eye,’ so that eventually they have become in his system affiliated to a bad conscience. A converse endeavor would be intrinsically feasible – but who is strong enough to attempt it? Namely, to affiliate to the bad conscience all those unnatural proclivities, all those transcendental aspirations, contrary to sense, instinct, nature, and animalism – in short, all past and present ideals, which are all ideals opposed to life, and traducing the world.” (On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §24)
“. . . we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values is for the first time to be called into question . . . The value of these values was taken as an indisputable fact, which was beyond all question. No one has, up to the present, exhibited the faintest doubt or hesitation in judging the ‘good man’ to be of higher value than the ‘evil man,’ of a higher value specifically with regard to human progress, utility, and prosperity generally, not forgetting the future. What? Suppose the converse were the truth! What? Suppose there lurked in the ‘good man’ a symptom of retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison . . . So that morality would really be saddled with the guilt, if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendor of the human species were never to be attained?” (On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface, §6)
So this is supposed to be the counterpart to the anti-materialism of moral philosophy? With his “reevaluation of all values,” Nietzsche remains right in the middle of the moral image of man. He casts his vote for the animalistic evil in man and thus for those invented characteristics that moral philosophers attach to man in order to “derive” from them the necessity of their moral imperatives. In the case of the good, he claims to have seen through the fact that it belongs to the sphere of mendacious idealizations, but evil, the mere carbon copy of it, he considers to be the real nature of man which should not be suppressed. And in the end he even accepts the belief of moral philosophy that this spiritual battle between morality and evil also determines the course of the world and the fate of mankind! Evil is no more real than good. One is labeled evil when one violates generally accepted standards. But this is not an evaluation of an interest, but a condemnation: that’s just not done. Thus, a comparison is made with a standard that is supposed to apply but does not, and the deviation from it is imputed as an intention to the “evil” will. Not even crimes are committed for the motive of breaking the law. And when they are nevertheless judged in this way, a legal fanaticism is at work that no longer knows any other criterion of judgment than the validity of the law. And Nietzsche wants to turn, of all things, this spawn of moral delusions of persecution into a reality. It may shock moral souls to be confronted with their own delusions, but Nietzsche’s anti-morality shouldn’t be confused with materialism. The figures he imagines and chooses as his ideal are very deliberately modeled on the current moral ideas about what is categorically forbidden. Their actions do not exactly demonstrate that the irrationalism of evil is a criticism of the hostility of morality to interests; Nietzsche can’t think of anything more than the fuddy-duddy’s idea of letting off steam once in a while as an alternative to morality:
“. . . they revert to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who perhaps come about from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student’s prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an ample theme to sing and celebrate. It is impossible not to recognize at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blonde brute . . . This audacity of the aristocratic races, mad, absurd, and spasmodic as may be its expression; the incalculable and fantastic nature of their enterprises . . . their nonchalance and contempt for safety, body, life, and comfort, their awful joy and intense delight in all destruction, in all the ecstasies of victory and cruelty . . .” (On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §11)
Excursus: Nietzsche and Hitler – an absurd comparison
The story of the “blond brute,” his reveling in the idea of the “master race” brought to full splendor, his contempt for the Jews whose morality he thought was destroying the world – “everything is obviously becoming Judaized, or Christianized, or vulgarized” (Genealogy, I, §9) – all of this has earned Nietzsche the accusation, or at least the suspicion, of being an intellectual ancestor of Hitler: “Nietzsche the thinker – Hitler the perpetrator” was once a headline in Der Spiegel. This comparison is absurd on both sides. Nietzsche would not have been enthusiastic about a state program that demanded total submission from the people and propagandized for this demand by praising all the moral virtues of a slave. Nor was Hitler in favor of a philosophy that preached the unfettered individual and his right to disregard everything that the community spirit declares sacred. But please, if you want to make a comparison, read what Hitler says about the master race:
“The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it. . . . In giving one’s own life for the existence of the community lies the crown of all sense of sacrifice.” (Mein Kampf)
The ideal figure that Hitler stylizes into a member of the master race is the total subordinate who is committed to serving the state up to the point of losing his life, who doesn’t have to be promised anything for it because he understands that being ruthless with his own life gives his life meaning, a useful idiot who is probably happy when his leader praises him because anyone can really use him for anything and forgives him for his lack of mental greatness. Hitler with his heroic figure can’t be accused of being the least bit at odds with the moral ideals everyone is familiar with – the virtue of selflessness, the value of the community one gets nothing from, and understanding for the connection between nobility of character and willingness to make sacrifices come extensively into effect. It is also unlikely that he did not keep his promises in his actions when he announced his moral intentions – given the promises! So what about the “immorality” of the Third Reich and its leader?! It is more likely that records from this period show what can be “justified” with moral ideals. If Hitler is nevertheless suspected of having betrayed moral values, then one can confidently draw the lesson from this that a moral right extends pretty much as far as the success of the cause that this right exalts; and having messed this up is Hitler’s only moral failure, albeit an unforgivable one for nationalists.
But what does all this have to do with Nietzsche? Firstly: nothing! Secondly, the mic drop argument “like Hitler!” shows the radicalism that good moralists are capable of when someone insults their morality. Thirdly, it is a completely different matter to explain what prompted Nietzsche’s racist outbursts. Like everyone who believes that their demands on the rest of humanity are enormously in the right – clearly and obviously “right” – and who therefore assumes that everyone must conform to these demands, Nietzsche also uses this right to fabricate his concept of human nature. Whenever this appears as an argument, it is always defined by the claims someone has and includes in it. And with the characteristics of “human” deduced in this way, his ability to comply with these claims is first fixed so that the subsequent sorting of humanity according to this criterion into members of the same human species and those who fall under the verdict of non-human and unfit to be human is only logical, and the recommendation to deal with them accordingly is almost inevitable. The justification of this is ultimately the entire content of arguments that are based on human nature.
It’s always inadequate to attach racism not to this way of arguing, but to try to expose it in the use of words such as “race,” “Jew,” etc. – as if the product of racism were the races themselves and not the justificatory treatment of them – and then suddenly no longer being able to recognize it when a moral philosopher or a modern politician invokes human nature.
* It is therefore not surprising that Nietzsche’s actual racism has not at all fallen into disrepute. The uncompromising critic of the lack of character of Christians and moralists at least argues very impartially with the image of man held by stuffy moral philosophers. They see human nature determined by a conflict between the noble moral Ought and the annoying inclinations that always get in the way of this Ought. So does Nietzsche, who just puts a reverse spin on this conflict.
III. The psychology of morality – All just a question of self-confidence
However, everything that Nietzsche takes note of, what he criticizes and what he proposes as overdue corrections takes place on the level of self-confidence, the idealized images that humanity makes of its real activities. When Nietzsche talks about factory work, he certainly mentions that people are exploited, that it is not good for them – but that is the least interesting thing for him; what he criticizes is the lack of character with which the exploited turn their damage into a virtue by lying to themselves. When he talks about the state, the purposes and means of this supreme power are not even mentioned – the objection is that it is a disgrace to quick witted people like Nietzsche. And as for marriage, only the rather vulgar images of man and woman come to his mind, according to which the strong protector guards home and family and a delicate being calls for subservience.
He explains everything psychologically: if someone doesn’t count for anything in real life, it’s because he has demeaned himself and therefore doesn’t really deserve any better. By contrast, someone who makes an impression proves his ability to assert himself and has character. In both cases, he turns the mendacious self-justification, the idealistic interpretation of failure and success given afterwards, into the real reason for why an individual is able to assert himself. The two cornerstones of his psychological theory are exactly the same as in moral philosophy: what Nietzsche calls natural selfishness, which should be limited by virtue, is “the will to power” which must ensure that it does not allow itself to be hindered by the pitfalls of moral pressure. The explanatory power of this theory is not excessive. It is limited to the tautological information that a self does not come into its own as long as it denies itself, and Nietzsche finds the latter so humanly understandable that he can only imagine the overcoming of the ploys of moral self-denial as an act of an extraordinary will, which only a few strong minds, but not the masses of the weak, are capable of. That is how much Nietzsche clings to morality. And that’s how useless his criticism of morality is.
* His categorical imperative is: “More backbone, people!” – which demands honesty and a will that is not ashamed of itself, but stands by what it has set out to do:
“While the aristocratic man lived in confidence and openness with himself . . ., the resentful man, on the other hand, is neither sincere nor naive, nor honest and candid with himself.” (On the Genealogy of Morals, I, §10)
Nietzsche does not break with the spirit of justification with its double standard of desire and permission, the mendacity of which had struck him as so disagreeable. His “aristocratic man” embodies nothing but ideals that belong to the idea of justification itself: he ultimately wants to believe in the hypocrisies of morality; thus sincerity and honesty are his mendacious ideals. Nietzsche begins to justify himself in their names: Whoever openly says what he wants and stands by it may do so:
“ . . . the sovereign individual, that resembles only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the autonomous ‘super-moral’ individual (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive terms) – in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, competent to promise – and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre) of what has been at last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really competent to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign – how is it possible for him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes – he ‘deserves’ all three – not to know that with this mastery over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters?” (On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §2)
This reversal of the double standard – not that permission should justify desire, but that desire should justify permission – is an extremely stupid alternative to the current morality that Nietzsche doesn’t like. After all, his maxim “I am permitted, because I want to” is nothing more than a refusal to examine the reasonableness of a will and the usefulness of its actions. So any absurdity is permitted if it is merely desired, and any harm is acceptable if “the sovereign individual” has decided to do it. We have already talked about the irrationalism of an evil that Nietzsche wanted to use to frighten humanity out of its moral bias. But what does his aristocratic man, finally freed from the “chains” of morality, do when he acts out his nobility and freedom? He chooses . . . duties:
“Signs of nobility: never to think of lowering our duties to the rank of duties for everybody; to be unwilling to renounce or to share our responsibilities; to count our prerogatives, and the exercise of them, among our duties.” (Good and Evil, §272)
The same thing that was said to have showed the moralist’s lack of human worthiness, his subservience, his cowering under duties, is what characterizes man when he “understands” it as his freely chosen privilege. And where compassion was just condemned as a downright disgusting bad habit of human interaction, compassion is now seen as a sign of a noble character:
“A man who says: ‘I like that, I take it for my own, and mean to guard and protect it from everyone’; a man who can conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain true to an opinion, keep hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence; a man who has his indignation and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, and even the animals willingly submit and naturally belong; in short, a man who is master by nature – when such a man has compassion, well! That compassion has value! But of what account is the compassion of those who suffer! Or of those even who preach compassion!” (Beyond Good and Evil, §293)
* The difference from the ordinary moralist, to whom Nietzsche attaches so much importance that he can’t imagine a greater contrast, does not lie in a rejection of the content of morality, of the duties and rules to which man should submit. Rather, it lies in the self-confidence with which the duties are accepted and the subordination takes place. And even this difference only exists in Nietzsche’s imagination – but that’s what it’s made for:
IV. Imaginings for the imaginative
It’s not that only Mr. Nietzsche and his “sovereign individual” are capable of this act of freedom. Even the most antiquated moral philosopher does not praise the enslavement of mankind, but rather the freedom of the will in which he sees the ability to recognize duties and submit to them. And one doesn’t even need to have studied them in order to acquiesce to one’s duties with a consciousness of freedom. The joke about the self-denial and self-abasement that Nietzsche couldn’t stand in Christians and moralists lies precisely in the “self-”. The moral individual is not especially engrossed in the practical subordination to the objective constraints of earning money and the force of the law. He allows himself an interpretation of his subordination, gives himself good reasons for everything he has to do, and thus has a worldview in which everything he encounters appears to be based on his insight. This does not change his situation at all; in his imagination, however, he plays the role of master of his situation. The fact that morality is a consciousness of obedience can certainly be inferred from the content of these imaginings – hence the double standard of desire and permission; but it is an inverted consciousness of this dependency in which the dependent variable pretends to be sovereign over its dependency: He decides for himself whether he is allowed or may not be; he doesn’t allow anyone to dictate anything to him other than his free insight into necessity; and he doesn’t allow himself to be cowed, but knows how to list a whole series of higher values before which he humbles himself. This stupidity constitutes the consciousness of his freedom and it is precisely this that Nietzsche upholds against the hypocrisy of morality:
“The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate . . .” (On the Genealogy of Morals, II, §2)
Still, one difference cannot be overlooked in all this. Nobody has the nerve to show off this stupidity as pretentiously, aristocratically, and in such an elitist way as Nietzsche does. However, this is not the fault of the argument, but the fact that “the herd” would make fools of themselves with this bravado. Here too success and one’s real status in life are crucial. The ability to assess the attitudes pertaining to it – whether one person pleas for compassion and mercy or another attests to his ability to assert himself – is therefore one of the lowest instincts that bourgeois individuals possess.