In a world without strong people, there cannot be strong leaders.
In 1885, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a high school teacher turned German nationalist and rabid antisemite. Nietzsche so disapproved that he did not attend the wedding.
In 1886, Förster and Elisabeth left for Paraguay with fourteen German families to establish a vegetarian and teetotal colony, Nueva Germania, that admitted only “racially pure” Germans. While Elisabeth played the princess, the heavily indebted Förster drank heavily and became depressed. In 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in San Bernardino.
Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave morality of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the “good European”, a cosmopolitan, supra-national individual who transcends petty national and religious prejudices and strives to unite Europe through a new, higher cultural synthesis. In 1886, the year that Elisabeth left for Paraguay, he wrote to his mother from the Swiss Alps, “Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.”
Beyond Good and Evil
In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, an antisemite who had been publishing antisemitic literature and propaganda while neglecting Nietzsche’s work.
In that year, Nietzsche also published a new work, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), which consists of 296 aphorisms organised into nine chapters. As the title suggests, this is not a work of normative ethics (what is good and evil) but of meta-ethics (what is meant by “good” and “evil”).
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche portrays the life-denying Western religion, morality, and philosophy as rooted in a “herd mentality”, and calls for the abandonment of binary morality. After the death of God, there can no longer be a universal perspective. Therefore, there can no longer be an objective truth. Although philosophical systems purport to be objective, they are no more than the “involuntary and unconscious memoirs” of their prejudiced authors. “Truth” is no more than “the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live”.
Master vs Slave Morality
Beyond Good and Evil also introduces the dichotomy between master morality and slave morality. Slave morality is often confused with herd mentality, but can be understood more precisely as a component and expression of herd mentality. If slave morality arises out of the resentment-driven inversion of values created by the weak in revenge against the strong, herd mentality is the broader mediocrity that enforces conformity and suppresses individuality.
For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of Judeo-Christian slave morality over the older Greco-Roman master morality. Master morality originates in the strong, and is marked by values such as pride, nobility, courage, truthfulness, health, creativity, and joy. Slave morality, on the other hand, is the envious and vengeful reaction of the mild and mediocre to the oppression of the masters, to create an inverted morality by turning their weakness into virtue and the values of the masters into vice.
Thus, slave morality is marked by values such as humility, meekness, conformity, patience, compassion, and pity. Christianity is called the religion of pity, which deprives us of strength and makes suffering contagious. In master morality, the good is whatever is good for the masters; in slave morality, it is whatever constrains and emasculates the masters. By pretending that humility and docility are a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence and subjugation. Thus, pride becomes a vice or sin, humility is elevated into a supreme virtue, and the son of God washes the feet of his disciples and allows himself to be crucified like a common criminal.
What This Means for Us
Slave morality is a cynical and pessimistic inverse morality that involves the systematic subversion of the old, natural master morality. It seeks not to transcend master morality, but, through “priestly vindictiveness”, to emasculate and enslave the strong by persuading them that their strength is an evil. Democracy, with its fixation on equality, is in fact the heir to Christianity, even if most democrats would rather trace their lineage to Ancient Athens.
But for all that, the old Greco-Roman morality, because it reflects reality and the natural impulse, cannot be vanquished, and vies with the inverted Judeo-Christian morality. Modern man is confused because he has constantly to juggle their contradictions, while himself being neither Christian nor Ancient but drifting in an ill-defined no-man’s land.
For Nietzsche, “a people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men.” Therefore, a good and healthy aristocracy should not feel “that it is a function but rather an essence and highest justification”. If, on the other hand, we took slave morality and the herd mentality to their ultimate extravagance, “there would be no commanders or independent men at all…”
After the publication of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wintered in Nice. In February 1887, a powerful earthquake shook the Ligurian coast, killing over two thousand people. Nietzsche did not feel fear, but a sense of ironic detachment: the earth had shaken, but his book had failed to achieve his intended “earthquake of ideas”.
Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.