Friedrich Nietzsche | Genealogy of Morals (part 1) | Existentialist Philosophy & Literature

this is the first of three videos which are going to be devoted to friedrich nietzsche's great systemic work the genealogy of morals it's divided into three different essays so I'm going to shoot one video for each one of the essays and this is one of my favorite works of Nietzsche in part because it is like I just said systematic so if you want to get a good handle on what Nietzsche is saying as a philosopher with something like a coherent system you know he has an anti systematic philosopher and he attacks many other people's systems but it does have a system of his own then the genealogy is one of the places that you would want to go to you see a lot of the same themes that he's approaching in other works like you know the Antichrist twilight of the idols Beyond Good and Evil thus Spoke Zarathustra all tied in together but in a like I said systematic way where were the different concepts of being related to each other and he's showing how they flow out of each other or connected with each other the other systemic work that you know would be of course the birth of tragedy but that's an early work so here we're seeing the mature Nietzsche grappling with one of the really important concepts the nature of goodness the nature of value in Nietzsche and morals and metaphysics and it's very important like I said to in the birth of tragedy lectures to remember that for Nietzsche epistemology or the theory of knowledge metaphysics the study of what's most real morals good and evil good and bad anesthetics beautiful ugly base Noble all these sort of things are rolled into one they're not neatly discernible from each other and distinguishable from each other the way that somebody likes a cot would try to make them or many other modern philosophers have as well so you notice that I'm beginning with this this question here and this is the the what he's starting from in the first essay or the FIR chapter this where did our conception of goodness of good as a value come from that's really the central idea motivating the entire work and it's a kind of trick question because one of the things you're going to see in each of doing in this is saying well there is more than one conception of good there's multiple conceptions of good and we want to trace out how they actually came to be and how they are in conflict and which one we actually ought to prefer or pick or guide ourselves by and also which one is predominance in our modern actually for us late modern Western culture you notice also I have three different columns here that were beginning with and the reason I did this is because Nietzsche begins by criticizing some other views and putting forth his own view in contrast to that so I think this is a very useful place to start there's also some things that aren't on the board some other views that he's not criticizing quite as much explicitly here because he considers those of used to be so fundamentally mistaken and each is actually paying a compliment to these two different groups the English psychologists and the philosophers like Herbert Spencer Herbert Spencer by the way somebody who you're probably not going to run across in too many philosophical contexts because he was a very important philosopher in the mid 19th century he was an English guy who was very influenced by utilitarianism and also by evolutionary thought not necessarily Darwinian thought and such because remember there are many different notions of evolution floating around out there at the time but this whole notion of development this whole notion of things taking place historically through a bunch of little different steps that would ultimately lead to a larger kind of jump or result so Nietzsche starts out by saying that these English psychologists were onto something he says these English psychologists whom one has also to thank for the only attempts hitherto to arrive in a history of the origin of morality they themselves are no easy riddle I confess that as living riddles they even possess one essential advantage over the books they are interesting now that's a very big compliment for nature and for him to say that their riddle means that they also don't fully understand what their own project is they they think things are a lot more straightforward than they actually are and he says one always discovers them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task namely of dragging the party on 'the use of our inner world are shameful parts of our inner world into the foreground and seeking the truly effective and directing agent so these are people who want to know what's really motivating us what's really making us do the things that we do all these great beautiful ideals that we have like nobility and charity and the Christian Way of life all these sort of things that people talk about and give lip service to what's really going on with that what's really happening in their psyche what's really at the root of this so you know Freud is coming later than Nietzsche but but Freud would also sort of fit into that wouldn't he so these English psychologists are saying things like well where did this notion of goodness come from well it came from what was useful for say the group or other people and then you would get some sort of you know good response from them good in the sense that you liked it you notice we're already starting to use good in a fairly equivocal way is that something Nietzsche is gonna pick up on here equivocal meaning ambiguous multiple ways but there are their basic idea is that you know we start out as pretty selfish creature is self-centered and we gradually become civilized by having other people you know showed his approval of our reactions when we're self-centered and showing approval of our actions when we benefit them and so if we make ourselves useful we get seen as good we see other people who get rewards for being good and then eventually down the line we somehow forget this and we come up with this notion of goodness by itself and by the time that we get to the present we're not really sure what it is but where things really have their origin was just in serving the group or serving other people you know who else would actually fit the bill for this would be John Stuart Mill if you read utilitarianism and you read some of his other works he lays out a kind of history or a genealogy historical account of where something came from like that so Nietzsche says here's what I like about these guys they are trying to find the shameful part of our inner world bringing to another foreground seek the truly effective and directing agent that which has been decisive in its evolution in just that place where the intellectual pride of man would least desire to find it like you know habit or forgetfulness or a blind and chance mechanic hooking together of ideas all these sorts of things what is it that really what is it really that always drives these psychologists in just this direction he asks so he's asking about their own motivation says is it a secret malicious vulgar perhaps self-deceiving instinct for belittling man is that what these guys are about or possibly a pessimistic suspicion the mistrustful 'no stuff disappointed idealist grown spiteful and gloomy and you notice nietzsche actually thinks this is better than an idealist way of looking at things where you know things like true beauty exists out there by itself and there's a perhaps a good in itself that motivates us or anything along those lines so he says a petty subterranean hostility and rancor perhaps towards christianity and Plato that is perhaps not even cross the threshold of conscious or is it maybe Allison lascivious taste for the grotesque the painfully paradoxical the questionable and absurd in existence or finally something in of each of them a little bulgaria a little gloominess a little anti christianity a little itchy a need for space Nietzsche doesn't actually give us an answer for any of these he says we don't actually need to know but you notice that keep this in mind these people are actually going to exemplify a kind of rosante mop carry to the second degree of resentment against the people who show resent him up when we get to that concept now he says I'll respect them for the good spirits that may rule in these historians of morality but it is unhappily certain that the historical spirit itself is lacking in them that precisely all the good spirits of history itself have left him in the lurch what does he mean by that he goes on and he says as is the hallowed custom with philosophers the thinking of all of them is by nature unhistorical so they're not there they're coming up with some sort of historical account meaning that there's development there's change over time there's a you know several different periods in which things are taking place but is it really based in history what does it mean for something to be based in history that's something else you want to think of that does that mean that you just go to a book and you find it there Julius Caesar cross the Rubicon therefore you know anything about the Rubicon and Caesar is automatically historical well history has to be based on some sort of foundation some sort of witnessing or at least some digging into things and acquiring and understanding how things developed and and where they they changed and why they went this way instead of this way at this juncture you might say that history is a study of the processes of human wills in action through time and so Nietzsche says these guys are really not historical their genealogy is bungled from the beginning and he says you know here's the big problem how would this forgeting take place he says Herbert Spencer actually got this we've got this you know more correct he at least understood that if you're going to say that the reason why actions became seen as good and certain character traits became seen as good certain social arrangements became seen as good is because they've worked out better for the community as a whole that's not the sort of thing that people actually forget that's the sort of thing that actually gets reinforced and brought to light and people say hey do this because that's good for the rest of us so Nietzsche says Spencer at least got that amount that sort of stuff right there's another problem with this too and here we start seeing niches own ideas coming to life he says it's plain to me now we're gonna see Nisha give his own view first of all that in all this theory the source of the concept good has been sought and established in the wrong place what's the wrong place they useful useful for another person the judgment good did not originate with those to whom goodness has been shown HSS everything that makes sense if you think about this this way in which you know these things would have to take place in order for me to have a sense of something is being good I would do something good to sum something I would do something to another person which would benefit them which would make their situation better which would have a certain usefulness for them and then they would approve of it they would reward me and I would say aha now I know what's good but why would I care about approval or a reward wouldn't I already have to have the notion of goodness in order to care about their approval or their reward that's a problem that they didn't they didn't deal with Nietzsche is actually not gonna make that criticism he's gonna say look that's not even the way it happened he says it was the good themselves that is to say the noble powerful high station and high who felt and established themselves in their actions as good that is of the first rank in contradiction to all the low-low minded common and plebeian so good in that valuation is what is noble and it's the noble people who actually assert them the saying we are the good those people over there who are making our shoes and and bringing in the harvest and carrying our weapons and you know putting up with all of our stuff they are the common they are the band we established ourselves they have to sort of suck it up and allow that to be imposed on them or they can rise up if they want they can be good if they want but then they actually have to like you know take arms and resist and since they don't they're bad so he says it was out of this pathos of distance that they first sees the right to create values grasping the concept of good and saying this is good is in niches words a creation of values a creation of valuation itself they says what did this have to do with utility it didn't have anything to do with utility the viewpoint of utility is as remote and inappropriate as it possibly could be in the face of such a burning eruption of the highest rank ordering rank defining value judgments for here feeling has attained the antithesis of that lower degree of warmth which with which any calculating prudence any calculus of utility presupposes so he's rejecting this notion of utility as itself being kind of a low common plebeian way of looking at things that's kind of important what that means is these kinds of understandings are actually going to be representative of a later kind not an original kind of valuation and not an original kind of saying this is good so how are we going to to determine this what can be our clues if we're not going to have some sort of you know imagine plausible historical account like this English psychologists do or Herbert Spencer or a pick whoever else you like how are we going to get at this how can we work our way back to this moment well it's important to remember where Nietzsche came from originally academically Nietzsche was what we call a philologist and to be a philologist at that time really even today it's still a kind of discipline where you have to know a lot of different things not just the one thing that you're studying a philologist is officially concerned with words and their origins and determining what the meanings of them are and philologists are usually concerned with ancient languages languages that are no longer in process of growth of fluctuation and which we have literary monuments for we also have other monuments as well you know we're finding more and more and more through archaeology nature was a classical full philologist so that meant that he was studying Greek Latin but you know they had other things that their resources to these this is the time when they were starting to figure out you know that there was a sort of primitive indo-european language that you know Greek Latin Sanskrit you you know Persian the Celtic languages all these you know we're tracing their of the roots back in German this but as well the Germanic languages Germans actually call this Indo German because they're Germans but now we call it indo-european or proto indo-european yeah and along with the language goes a way of looking at the world a way of life so when language changes where when language makes distinctions distinctions are being made within a world somebody like me she would say and also people you know later philosophers who are working off of nature so Nietzsche says the signpost to the right Road for me was the question what was the real etymological significance of the designations for good coined in the various languages I found he says they all went back to the same place this distinction between good as noble that is common that everywhere noble aristocratic in the social sense is the basic concept from which good is that is the sense of with aristocratic soul noble with a soul of a high order where the privileged soul necessarily developed so the very notion of having a beautiful or good or worthwhile or valuable soul is something that is developing out of the experience of nobility of their way of life and it's counterpose to common plebeian low which are finally transformed into the concept banned and he uses some some German examples he talks about schlecht which is a word for bad which is identical with schlicht plainer simple and you know it gives you so a lot of derivations of this he says with regard to a moral genealogy this seems to me to be a fundamental insight that it has been arrived at so late as a fault of the retarding influence exercised by the Democratic prejudice and the modern world towards all questions of origin what is this Democratic prejudice he's talking about well people are interested in figuring out what the origins of things are but basically just so they can tear down aristocratic idols aristocratic obstacles to a kind of democratization of thing so he says with respect to our problem if we go back to this it is of no small small interest to ascertain that through these words and roots which doesn't make good they're frequently still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be a man of a higher rank so what's going on I'm actually going to do a little bit of erasing now because we're going to need this board for making sense out of what Nietzsche is is actually saying goodness is not coming on the scene because one person is useful for another one and then they look to that person they say oh you're so good you're so useful we really love you you're what we want to be like you're what we're going to idolize that would be in some sense reactive instead be good are the noble and the noble give the valuation of good to the noble bad to the common or base and you can see this in Greek you know Palos ice close you know the noble the base or tacos is versus the Augusta's and each other traces us through a number of other languages and he says they also do it by a typical character trait there's there's two kinds of superiority here for the good of the Noble there is a superiority in power but there's also a superiority in soul so they actually hold power and by means of this power they impose their will they impose this valuation but they also do this by expressing that they have a different kind of character than the base they call themselves and this is a very important point the truthful he says this is so this is so above all of the Greek nobility whose mouthpieces Thea Janus the root of the word point for this s Flo's signifies one who is one who possesses reality in a certain sense the nobles are saying we possess being to a higher degree we are more than you are not just we're greater than you not just you know we're all human beings but we happen to have possessed a greater value they're saying we are something that has more being than you and your way of life so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit he does a lot of etymology here he says to this rule that a concept of noting political superiority always resolves itself into a concept anemic superior in his soul it is not necessarily an exception although it provides occasions for exceptions when the highest caste is at the same time the priestly caste and here he's introducing really important concept and valuation that he's going to talk more about in in section 2 which we'll look at in the next video he says when you have a priestly caste if that caste is on top so you might think for instance about the Brahmin class being above the cachet TRAI class in post-conquest India right he says then another valuation between the pure in the impure the good or the pure and the impure or the bad so we have the the noble and now we're talking about the noble priests class they impose another evaluation good as being pure bad or evil as being the impure holy and the unholy and he just says look at first this is not really about in a holiness in a sort of transcendental sense this means pure and impure in he says the pure one is from the beginning merely a man who washes himself who forbids himself certain foods that produce skinny elements who does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower strata who has an aversion to blood no more hardly more on the other hand to be sure it's clear from the whole nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy remember so time.i aristocracy hear ye antithetical valuations couldn't precisely this instance soon become dangerous deepened sharpened and internalized so already here what we're going to call it transvaluation of values is beginning to take place and it's not taking place by what nietzsche is going to call the slave revolt of morality it's taking place within the noble class itself a portion of that class is imposing a new sort of valuation and how do the priests do this he says there's from the very first something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies and in the habits ruling them which turned them away from action and alternate between brooding and emotional explosions habits which seem to have as they're almost invariable consequence that almost intestinal intestinal morbidity and nourished neurasthenia sorry which has afflicted priests at all times but as to that which they themselves devised as a remedy for this morbidity most one not assert that has ultimately proved itself a hundred times more dangerous in its effects than the sickness it was intended to cure the priest is in a certain sense a person who is set apart and they're set apart because they are different from the noble ruling warrior kingly who are healthy able to impose their will on others the priest is less able to do that but the priest compensates by finding something greater or at least seeming to be greater the priest opens up the possibility for the first time of what we might call a transcendent dimension and he says you know he criticizes what he calls the entire anti sensuous metaphysics of the priests the priests are the ones not the philosophers originally the priests are the ones to start talking about a world beyond this world a reality underlying this reality and he says you know you've talked about the auto hypnosis you know there's a sort of fool themselves the only two comprehensible society with all of this together at the radical cure for it nothingness or God for the priests everything becomes more dangerous not only cures and remedies but also arrogance revenge acuteness prolific I see love lust to rule of virtue disease the priestly class adds a deeper dimension to human existence it really only becomes truly human with the advent to that because it only becomes historical in any meaningful sense I think for from each other with with this transformation so he says it's only fair to add that it was on the soil this essentially dangerous form of human existence the priestly form that man first became an interesting animal but only here to the human soul and a higher sense acquired depth and become evil and these are two basic respects in which man has hitherto been superior to other beasts having depth and having the possibility of evil so let's skip ahead a little bit now he's gonna start talking about reason to MA and he's actually going to carry out a shift that's a little bit ambiguous here in this part and we want to try to keep things as distinct as possible he starts talking about the priestly motive al uation and how it's different from the nightly aristocratic one and how it can develop into its opposite especially when these the priests and the warrior and jealous opposition to each other he says the priests are the most evil enemies why because they're the most impotent that's kind of paradoxical so let's say that one more time the priests are the most evil enemies but why because they are the most impotence it's because of their impotent he's impotence he says their inability to actually like take on the warrior class and push them down and fight them on their own terms and also inability to get the warrior class to recognize you know that the priest actually you know maybe know more or can do more in certain respects he says it's because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions so the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred that's a really important point when you have depth that depth can be filled by love that depth can be filled by admiration or that depth can be filled by hatred and the priest can hate to a degree to an extent that's really impossible for the warrior because the warrior doesn't have that depth of soul even though they are you know among the great class or things like that and he says human history would be altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit that the impotent have introduced into it so what is this the spirit he talks about spiritual revenge and now we're going to see the common or what he also calls the slave introduced a new set of valuations into morality now he's talking very much about about Jews in this and you want to be very careful in understanding this check out associated with anti-semitism and sort of a a particularly virulent racist German centered anti-semitism that ultimately led to the the Holocaust and the death camps and world war two in general you know the whole nationalist socialist movement it's a little bit unfair to push nietzsche automatically into that if you actually read this carefully in part because he's gonna see the culmination of judaism actually in christianity first off so christianity is gonna absorb this this this development that's taking place in judaism and he's also going by other people's conceptions in ancient times of what was happening in in judaism so he talks about a priestly people and the reason why is time with the Jews in particulars they sort of embody the both priestly preoccupation and this sort of emphasis on the the slave choice says this alone was appropriate to priestly people the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengeance vengeance vengeance it was the Jews who was inspiring consistency so he's saying they did something that was unparalleled in history they dared to invert the aristocratic value equation good equals noble equals powerful equals beauty equals happy equals loved of God and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth saying the wretched alone are the good the poor impotent lowly alone are the good the suffering deprived sick ugly alone or pious alone or blessed by God blessedness is for them alone and you the powerful and Noble are on the contrary the evil the cruel the lustful the insatiable the goblets to all eternity and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed accursed it and the damned they says one knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation what does he mean there he means Christ Christ is action sort of embodying this valuation and it's very interesting to think about this if you read the Old Testament particularly if you read you know things like the book of Judges or some of the books of the prophets are you really going to get the sense of what nietzsche is talking about here that in every single case it's always the powerless the weak who are good who are beloved by God and the powerful are always bad wicked you know the rich are always terrible no you're not actually going to get that conception also even if you read the Psalms you know yes the the pious faithful good acting you know reliable person who is lowly is beloved by God but so is the prince in the New Testament if you read it a certain way there's this complete revaluation if you push it in the direction of you should always be you know totally meek humble absorb any insults that are thrown your way pray for your enemies then you would get to something like what Nietzsche's is talking about and in this revaluation with the common or slave morality it becomes no longer a matter of good on top of evil it becomes good or good on top of bad it becomes the noble person is the evil person and then the commoner is defined as good by not being noble by being their opposite by being not evil so whereas with the noble valuation the good person asserts their goodness and then defines the others as bad and Contra distinction to them it's the evil that's defined first and then the good only follows from that a sort of shadow of it in the revaluation that's taking place in what nature called slave morality so he says how did this happen he says once should that imagine it grew up is the denial of that thirst for revenge no other reverse is true love like the love that you see in the New Testament grew out of it as its crown as its triumphant crown spreading itself farther and farther into the purest brightness and sunlight driven as it were into the domain of light and the heights and pursuit of the goals of that hatred what are the goals of that hatred well to dominate in every single case each one of these things is an expression of somebody's will somebody's will to rule somebody's will to dominate the weak can only rule can only dominate by subjugating the strong and the only way that they can subjugate the strong is by trans valuing the valuation that the strong have and sort of catching them in a net a net of morality a net of making them out to be no longer the good but instead the evil and what Nietzsche saying is that in the New Testament and all these these sort of you know works that are coming out of this it's not really love that is driving this so he's attacking a Christian idea and it's very good that God is love that Christianity is fundamentally about love and saying no what really fundamentally Orient's it is actually hatred revenge and the lust to dominate pretty interesting to think about is in many respects Nietzsche is kind of like a shadow augustine you know a inversion of Augustine and and his you know recognition that yes there is this lust to dominate in all of us and we have to somehow bring it under control otherwise love can actually come through and we always have to be suspicious of it so now he says why are you talking about nobler ideals let's stick to the fact the people of one or the slaves or the mob or the herd or whatever you like to call them and this has happened through the Jews very well and that keeps no / no people ever had a more world historical mission the Masters have been disposed and again you can see that Nietzsche if you want to accuse him of anti-semitism it's an anti-semitism that is not really like rooted in his in his heart and his thought it's rather more or less saying well I mean the Jews happen to many of the people that this took place through but this kind of development is taking place and it happened it just happened you know more with them but it happens in any any culture where they where the common start to become the ones who dominate the masters have been disposed of the morality of the common man is one and he says the redemption of the human race from the masters is going forward everything is being visibly judaized but then he says Christianized mob eyes and they says what are the words matter so it's not a racial thing that he is thinking about here it's a dynamic of development it's essentially a political and cultural thing that he's focusing on and he has something really interesting he says does the church today still have any necessary role to play does it still have the right to exist or could one do without it and he says is very interesting it seems to hinder rather than hasten this process so organized religion which people think of Nietzsche's being you know the great at one of the greatest enemies of he actually seems to think at least here that organized religion tends to hold back this process why because at least with organized religion you can have some of this stuff going on rather than just a slave morality now we get to a crucial point here in section 10 the slave morass the slave revolt and morality begins and here he introduces this concept of resentiment so now I need to do a bit more erasure again because now we have a key idea to think through and what does result of us you can you can you know transpose it in English and say resentment but it's not just resentment there's a whole dynamic that's taking place so result them all first of all it's any product of two things a desire for revenge and impotence to carry it out so it's when people desire to hurt to retaliate but they're unable to do so when they've been pushed down and they can't push back up that they start to undergo resultant and he says the result amounts of nature's that are denied the true reaction was the true reaction of deeds and compensate themselves with imaginary revenge so that's another key things there's compensation with imaginary yeah and it doesn't always have to be an imaginary just in the sense of like you know in your head it can be taking revenge in other ways later on putting somebody in jail tearing them down destroying their reputation those could all be or writing a book about them and saying these people are such you know terrible people nowadays it could take place through videotaping them I suppose now like it says slave morality is not an affirmation of itself how does it develop its from the nut from the outset it says no to what is outside to what is different what is not itself and there's no is its creative deed so resentiment is a great big know so things it's not affirmative it's only the firming through denying it's only defining itself by taking the other and making the other evil and then making itself good in response so like he says in order to exist slave morality always first needs a hostile external world its action is fundamentally reaction now he talks more about the the noble thing I'm going to skip over this and get back to rosante lumps so he says well the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself the man arose on tomate is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself his soul squints his spirit loves hiding places secret paths and back doors everything covert entices him as his world his security his refreshment he understands how to keep silent how not to forget how to wait how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble a race of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree so he says the noble person by contrast can't take one's enemies accidents or one's misdeeds seriously for very long that's a sign of strong full nature's in whom there's an excess of the power to form to mold to recuperate and to forget such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others here alone nature says is genuine love of one's enemies love of one's enemies being means not really taking notice of what they do to you because you're so strong that they can't really hurt you anyway now the person of Rozonda mom doesn't do that he says that the the person of result in love brings in the enemy in a very different way for the first time and he says I'm going to go on with this yeah here we go I'll come back to normal in a moment where is this left us where is this Broadus - he calls it the Dominion and leveling of European man of modern culture so what is what does he actually taking place with that lets actually let's go back and talk about the the noble he says the noble if this is easy to understand if you look at things like Homer or other other Greek write writings and epics or if you look at other cultures epics as well he says the same men worst held so sternly in check among their their equals by custom respect usage gratitude and even more by mutual suspicion and jealousy and who on the other hand their relations with each other show themselves so resourceful and consideration self-control delicacy loyalty pride and friendship that's what they display to others on their same rank to the ones who are different than them they are just like you know devastators there are their conquerors they come in they're barbarians but they have culture at least at their own stratum what does culture mean for us what does culture mean for Western culture Western democracy Western development all these sorts of things Nietzsche says supposing that that what at any rate is believed to be the truth really is true the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey man to attainment civilized animal a domestic animal then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and rose on two-month cruise through whose aid the noble races and their ideals were fine they can found it and overthrown as the instruments of culture as development as going higher and higher and higher when really things have been brought lower and lower and lower so he says how would we know if that's the case have things really been getting better and better and better as we've democratized as we've found everybody who's marginalized and brought them into the limelight made space for them and not allowed them to be bullied or exploited or pick whatever you like by the strong what has happened but you said something really interesting here and now we get to another issue that's very closely tied with resultant law and that is what we call Neil ISM Nietzsche says what does culture mean to us now what does culture actually provided us what is it actually given to us he says one may be quite justified in continuing to fear the blonde Beast at the core of all noble races and then being in on one's guard against it but who would not a hundred times sooner fear where one can also admire than not fear but be permanently condemned to the repellent site of the ill constituted dwarfed atrophied and poisoned and is that not our fate he's asking this about Western culture in general is that not our fate that we've been condemned to you know no longer have nobility present is something that we can look up to what today constitutes our anticipated antipathy to man for we suffer he says from man beyond doubt not fear for rather that we no longer have anything left to fear in man that the maggot man is swarming in the foreground that the tame man the hopelessly mediocre an insipid man has already learned to feel himself as the goal in the zenith as the meaning of history as higher man that he has indeed a certain right to feel thus insofar as he feels himself elevated above the surface of ill constituted sickly weary and exhausted people of which Europe is beginning to distinct today as something at least relatively well constituted and he's still capable of living at least affirming life you can see how much self-loathing is involved in this this culture you know and if we were going to transpose this into today you know is our own culture Nielsen ratings and American Idol and pick whatever other you know sort of leveling things you like where we make everything about what a majority of people think and we turn people essentially just into consumers and voters does that actually produce much of great value culturally Nietzsche would ask us and he goes on and he says this is how things are the diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger our greatest danger he says for the sight of him makes us weary we can see nothing today that wants to grow greater we suspect that things will continue to go down down to become thinner more good-natured more prudent more comfortable more mediocre more indifferent here's where he says something interesting more Chinese more Christian because talking together this notion of sort of like an imperial China where everybody knows their place and nobody's disturbs anything well then he's bringing up you know sort of cultural Christianity along with this he says here precisely is what has become a fatality for Europe together with the fear of man we've also lost our love for him Nietzsche thinks that genuine love for man is not possible in results amount that you know it may posture that way amazed the words of love to harness people in to put them down to deprive the powerful of their power but we but it doesn't really love we have lost our love of him or reverence for him our hopes for him even the will to him we've lost our capacity to choose something higher he says the sight of man no makes us weary what is nihilism today if not that we are weary of man so he's giving you a definition of nihilism that is not exactly the same as what he talks about in other works but it's it's weariness of the human condition as we know it in our culture because of these transformations that have taken place that we yeah I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit he's got some great stuff discussing resulta month but I want to skip ahead to the section 16 where he's drawing a conclusion he says let us conclude the two opposing values and what he means my values are systems of values good and bad which is what the noble person evaluates in terms of good and evil which is what the base person the slave the common person evaluates in terms of these two values have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years and though the latter value has certainly been on top what does it mean the latter value good and evil with evil being the noble and good being the person who's you know not rocking the boat the mediocre that's been on top for a long time there are still places where the struggle is yet undecided now here he's gonna say something very important particularly for anybody who would be attracted to Nietzsche's thought and want to try to think it out he says one might say it is even risen it has risen to even higher and thus become more and more profound and spiritual so that today there's perhaps no more decisive mark of a higher nature a more spiritual nature than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposed values what that means is that nature is saying that one of the marks of spiritual profundity in a person is that both of these two valuations are still fighting within that person he's not saying that the you know blond beast the the Superman who you know totally you know poses their will on everybody else and creates new values and all that sort of stuff he's not saying that is the deepest thing he's saying that really we ought to feel this tension this conflict not just outside of us in the culture where we say oh I'm going to go this way or I'm going to go this way but going right down the middle of our very that we can't extricate ourselves so easily from this situation we ought to feel torn between these two different valuations so he says the symbol of this struggle and now he's going to give us a little bit of history his Rome against Judea Judea against Rome there is hitherto been no greater event than this struggle this question this deadly contradiction Rome felt the Jew to be something like anti nature itself the Jews stood convicted of hatred for the whole human race according to the Romans how on the other hand of the Jews feel about Rome a thousand science tells us but it suffice us to recall the apocalypse of John the last book of the vine the Bible also called the Book of Revelations if you actually read through that book it is not a particularly loving book compared to other parts of the New Testament it's more like and then those bastards are going to get what's coming to them it's much more like other apocalyptic books and if you wanted to pick a book that might exhibit results in law that might actually be the book for you I don't think you're gonna find that much result amant say in Matthew compared or you know on certain letters compared to what the revelations and he says for the Romans were the strong and Noble and nobody stronger and nobler has ever existed on earth or ever been dreamed of that's an interesting thing for me to say cuz you know we could have talked about the Mongols could have talked about other groups but he took the Romans for that every remnant of them every inscription gives delight if one only Divine's what it was that that was there at work the Jews on the contrary were the priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence in which there dwelt an unequaled popular moral genius he says what only has to compare similarly gifted nations like the Chinese or the Germans with the Jews to see which of them this is a really interesting thing which of them is of the first rank in which of them is a fifth rank what does Nietzsche's saying here the Jews when it comes to like moral determinations first rank the Germans fifth rank which of them one for the present Rome or Judea there can be no doubt considered a whom one vows down in Rome itself today as if they are the epitome of the highest values and not only in Rome but over half the earth everywhere that man has become tamer desires to become tame three Jews and one Jew s Jesus of Nazareth the fisherman Peter the rug weaver Paul and the mother of the aforementioned Jesus named Mary Rome has been defeated beyond a doubt he says so he's tracing out a history yeah a genealogy right a moral valuation then he says okay so for a long time Rome was subjected in the Renaissance he says things started to come back to life and why did they die out the Reformation he says Judea immediately triumphed again thanks to that thoroughly plebeian result about movement called the Reformation and to that which was bound to arise from it restoration of the church with the French Revolution now the French Revolution was anti-clerical right anti religious shouldn't that have been maybe a restoration of the noble idea no because it was democratic with the French revelation Judea once again triumphed over the classical idea and this time in an even more profound and decisive sense the last political noblesse in Europe that of the French 17th and 18th century collapsed under the popular instincts of rose on Tomaso nature saying result amount was behind the French Revolution as well greater rejoicing more uproarious enthusiasm had never been heard on earth and then he says Napoleon of course appeared the most isolated and late bored man there's ever been and in him the problem of the noble ideal is such made flesh one may well wonder what kind of problem it is Napoleon the synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman Napoleon sort of imposing his will and values kind of you know the way the the noble did before but doing so in the service of an empire and a bureaucracy and a democratized regime which is that of the rebel in some more twists and turns that we see going on in this study of the genealogy of morals Nietzsche is going to examine the history of these developments he's been flush out a little bit better this notion of the the priestly caste he's going to develop this notion of resentiment slave morality in greater detail so that's what we're going to be looking at in the next couple chapters

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 134,123

Rating: 4.8991418 out of 5

Keywords: Enemy, Morality, Existentialist, Lecture, Strong, Lesson, Priest, Force, Culture, Modern, Ethics, Existential, Good and Evil, Sadler, Slave, Value, Moral, Nietzsche, University, Student, Hierarchy, Philosophy, Ancient, Origin, Ressentiment, Ethical, Noble, History, Transvaluation, Language, Weak, Introduction, Geneaology of Morals (Book), Good and Bad, College, Talk, Education

Id: MlojPJr4-Vo

Length: 57min 8sec (3428 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 12 2013