Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1651505

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Between Cynicism and Idealism:

Nietzsche Against the Slanderers of Human Nature (work in progress)

By Rony Guldmann

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1651505

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Abstract:

This paper is a response to what I see as an important and hitherto

unresolved tension in the Nietzsche corpus. In many contexts, Nietzsche seems

quite cynical about human nature. Whether or not Nietzsche is a psychological

egoist is debatable. But at the very least, he displays a deep suspicion of

ostensibly altruistic or idealistic motivations. At the same time, Nietzsche clearly

rejects the economic view of human nature which has come to inform our

understanding of egoism, the picture of homo economicus inexorably striving to

maximize his gains. Indeed, Nietzsche often lauds the idealism of free spirits and

other admirable personages, while scorning the more calculating attitudes of the

bourgeois. Finally, Nietzsche often expresses his uneasiness with egoism as a

concept, suggesting that it is a historically contingent idea that obscures the nature

of human agency.

Having describing this tension, I argue that Nietzsche‘s penchant for

cynicism is best understood as but a tool by which to expose the limitations of

slave morality, and does not reveal his most basic views on human nature.

Nietzsche‘s anti-teleological conception of human action, I argue, forbids the easy

assimilation of the will to power to psychological egoism. With this in mind, I

seek to demonstrate that the Genealogy of Morals is intended to illustrate how the

concept of egoism could only have arisen out of, and is only intelligible within the

context of, slave morality, which wielded suspicion about human egoism as a

mechanism through which to caricature the hated masters and slander human

nature in general. Nietzsche‘s brand of cynicism, therefore, is to be understood as

a means of undermining a cynicism of another sort. As the secular heirs of slave

morality, modern cynics are less perspicuous and hard-nosed than they imagine.

In praising egoism at the expense of altruism, Nietzsche is actually encouraging

self-realization, not endorsing the caricature which slave morality has been made

of it. Nietzsche‘s view of human nature and is far from rosy, and his morality

may be difficult to swallow. But given Nietzsche‘s views on human agency, it

would be a mistake to interpret him as a psychological or ethical egoist, for these

views raises questions about the basic philosophical premises that underlie these

positions.

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La Rochefoucauld and those other French masters of soul searching….are like

accurately aimed arrows, which hit the mark again and again, the black mark of

man‘s nature. Their skill inspires amazement, but the spectator who is guided not

by the scientific spirit, but by the humane spirit, will eventually curse an art which

seems to implant in the souls of men a predilection for belittling and doubt.

Human, All Too Human1

We misunderstand the beast of prey and the man of prey…thoroughly, we

misunderstand ―nature,‖ as long as we still look for something ―pathological‖ at

the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even for

some ―hell‖ that is supposed to be innate in them; yet that is what almost all

moralists have so far done. Could it be that moralists harbor a hatred of the

primeval forest and the topics? And that the ―tropical man‖ must be discredited at

any price…..?

Beyond Good and Evil 2

1. Introduction

Nietzsche is an all-round elusive thinker. Yet his elusiveness may be greatest with

respect to the question of egoism. Despite all that Nietzsche says about the topic, his actual

position on the desirability and possibility of altruism of both egoism and altruism is far from

clear. It is clear that Nietzsche seeks to overthrow slave morality and its idealization of altruism,

but it is not obvious how he hopes to replace it. Certain passages suggest Nietzsche idealizes

egoism while others indicate he despises it. Some passages would seem arguments for

psychological egoism, while others claim that the very concept of egoism is confused. Is

Nietzsche of two or more minds on these questions, or is he, as one might expect, but

superficially self-contradictory? Sophisticated Nietzsche scholars know better than to reduce

Nietzsche‘s highly nuanced views to garden-variety ethical and psychological egoism.

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (trs.) (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1984), Sec. 36.

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Nevertheless, it remains difficult to articulate the nature of Nietzsche‘s attitudes toward these

doctrines. As Nietzsche‘s moral psychology is anything but sentimental, but the theoretical

upshot of his general temper is ambiguous.3

What appear as contradictions may simply reflect the unsurprising fact that Nietzsche‘s

claims regarding egoism and altruism are always informed by the subtle shades of meaning

indigenous to the particular context of the discussion. An adequate analysis of these contexts

would then reveal that superficially contradictory positions hang together in the context of his

larger project. But Nietzsche‘s own account of his project is not particularly helpful reaching this

goal. In Daybreak, Nietzsche distances himself from the deep cynicism about human nature

characteristic of Human, All Too Human:

‗To deny morality‘ – this can mean, first: to deny that the moral motives which men

claim have inspired their actions really have done so – it is thus the assertion that

morality consists of words and is among the coarser or more subtle deceptions (especially

self-deceptions) which men practice, and is perhaps so especially in precisely the case of

those most famed for virtue. Then it can mean: to deny that moral judgments are based

on truths. Here it is admitted that they really are motives of action, but that in this way it

is errors which, as the basis of all moral judgments, impel men to their moral actions.

This is my point of view: though I should be the last to deny that in very many cases,

there is some ground for suspicion that the other point of view – that is to say the point of

view of La Rochefoucuald and others who think like him – may also be justified and in

any event of great general application.4

Later in The Gay Science, Nietzsche appears to reject the agenda he embraced enthusiastically in

DayBreak:

The mistake made by the more refined among [the historians of morality] is that they

uncover and criticize the perhaps foolish opinions of a people about their morality, or of 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Walter Kaufmann (tr.) (New York: Vintage Books,

1989), Sec. 197. 3 Frithjof Bergman writes ―If one reads Nietzsche—and in particular his most basic injunction concerning

what he most wants us to do—taking for granted the assumption of egoism and the image of human

nature that such egoism generates, Nietzsche simply does not make sense! What sense could it make to

preach to those already possessed by a monomaniac self-centeredness—by only one divinity and worship,

namely of their own greatest benefit and advantage—that they should ―become themselves‖?‖ ‗Nietzsche

and Analytic Ethics‘, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1994), p. 92. 4 DayBreak 103

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humanity about all human morality—opinions about its origin, religions sanction, the

superstition of free will, and things of that sort—and then suppose that they have

criticized morality itself. But the value of a command ―thou shalt‖ is still fundamentally

different from and independent of such opinions about it and the weeds of error that may

have overgrown it—just as certainly as the value of a medication for a sick person is

completely independent of whether he thinks about medicine scientifically or the way old

women do. Even if a morality has grown out of an error, the realization of this fact

would not as much as touch the problem of its value.5

The neat distinctions articulated in these passages cannot do justice to the complex texture of

Nietzsche‘s actual thinking. The evolution of Nietzsche‘s views on morality and egoism is more

ambiguous than a transition from the psychological to the metaphysical to the normative. While

Nietzsche break with the utilitarian moral psychology of Human, All Too Human is clear, he

never really abandons his attraction toward the La Rochefoucauld-style cynicism most strongly

evinced of Human, All-Too Human. Far from being a mere ―point of view‖ which may often be

illuminating, suspiciousness about the roots of ostensibly altruistic and idealistic motivations

seems always to lie near the core of his thinking. Moreover, it is clear that Nietzsche‘s

psychological, metaphysical, and normative views hang together in ways that the above passages

fail to acknowledge. Nietzsche‘s analysis of slave morality, while centrally concerned with the

value of our values, is facilitated by distinctive views about moral psychology and human

agency. Slave morality is pernicious not merely because it is deceptive, but because it refuses to

come to terms with some basic truths about what it is to be human, and so promotes a distorting

conception of humanity and its needs.

2. Four Strains of Nietzsche

I want to explore, and hopefully go some way in resolving, the complexities of

Nietzsche‘s attitude toward that long philosophical tradition of pessimism about human nature. I

5 GS 345

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will begin by laying out four strains of Nietzsche‘s thought, which each touch on the question of

egoism from very different directions. I will then argue that the conceptual connections between

these strains are intelligible in the context of a sophisticated naturalism about human agency, and

that the unadulterated cynicism characteristic of the younger Nietzsche is profitably understood

as indicative of a less sophisticated naturalism, which Nietzsche gradually overcomes.

a. Nietzsche as Cynic

The cynic, according to Georg Simmel, is someone ―[whose] awareness of life is

adequately expressed when he has theoretically and practically exemplified the baseness of the

highest values and the illusion of any differences in values.‖6 While claiming that ―cynicism is

the only form in which base souls approach honesty,‖7 Nietzsche is himself cynical in many

respects. Thus, he laments that ―the lie of the ideal has so far been the curse on reality; on

account of it, mankind has itself become mendacious and false down to its most fundamental

instincts.‖8 Nietzsche identifies idealism with ―higher swindle‖ and ―beautiful feelings.‖

9 It is

also a form of presumptuousness, for the idealist is someone who ―assumes, by virtue of a higher

origin, a right to cast strange and superior looks at actuality,‖ and presumes that the ―‗the spirit‘

soars in pure self-sufficiency.‖10

The cynical temperament, which appears from Plato‘s Thrasymachus to Hobbes, and

from La Rochefoucauld to some strains of contemporary sociobiology, insists that things are not

as they seem, that ostensibly altruistic actions are often, if not always, expedients by which

6 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, David Frisby (tr.) (London and New York: Routledge and

Kegan Paul Ltd, 1990), p. 255. 7 Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 26.

8 Ecce Homo, p. 218 (―Preface‖, Sec. 2).

9 Ecce Homo, p. 288 (―Human, All Too Human‖, Sec. 5).

10 Twilight 131

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agents bolster their social status, disingenuously augment their self-esteem, or advance their most

private interests at the expense of the common good. Nietzsche‘s insistence that Christian love

and humility are born of unsatisfied resentment is well known, but the scope of Nietzsche‘s

suspicions extends well beyond Christianity and unto human nature itself. Citing the jealousy

and possessiveness that often accompany romantic love, Nietzsche expresses his amazement

with the fact that ―this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified so

much in all ages—indeed that this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of

egoism while it actually may be the most ingenious expression of egoism.‖11

The suspicion that

ostensibly sympathetic sentiments are egoistic at their core pervades Nietzsche‘s corpus. Here is

another, not atypical, example:

Let us reflect seriously upon this question: why do we leap after someone who has

fallen into the water in front of us, even though we feel no affection for him?

…..The truth is: in the feeling of pity – I mean in that which is usually and

misleadingly called pity – we are to be sure, not consciously thinking, of ourself

but are doing so very strongly unconsciously…..An accident which happens to

another offends us: it would make us aware of our impotence, and perhaps our

cowardice, if we did not go to assist him.12

The cynical Nietzsche may here be exposing particular forms of self-deception, rather than

building a broader case for psychological egoism. But the cumulative effect of such forays into

moral psychology is to leave his readers incredulous before most of what normally passes for

altruism. This could not have gone by unnoticed by Nietzsche, and he says little to preempt or

qualify the generalized cynicism that many of these passages seem crafted to instill.

11

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann (tr.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Sec.

14. 12

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, R.J. Hollingdale (tr.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),

Sec. 133.

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b. Critique of the Ego

Robin Small observes that Nietzsche‘s tendency to emphasize unconscious egoism

―leave[s] the notion of egoism still largely unexamined and, in particular, fails to consider the

nature of the ‗ego‘ that gives egoism its name.‖ However, Small also notes that Nietzsche ―is

aware of that issue and, although adopting the language of egoism, does not take it at face

value‖13

This awareness, thought perhaps inchoate in earlier writings, comes to fruition only

later. Indeed, Nietzsche‘s analysis of the motivations for succoring drowning persons seems

sophomoric by comparison with the moral psychology of later writings, which aspire to far

greater philosophical and psychological sophistication. Less preoccupied with impugning the

motivations of ostensibly altruistic actors, the mature Nietzsche is more concerned to scrutinize

the egoism/altruism dichotomy itself. Being more complex and ambiguous than is usually

recognized, the concepts of egoism and altruism cannot yield a rich understanding of human

nature if employed uncritically.

The younger Nietzsche, along with his major influence at the time, Paul Ree, imputes a

high degree of self-deception to human beings. But in so doing, this Nietzsche also imputes a

higher degree of self-possession that the later Nietzsche can countenance. The spontaneous urge

to jump in a river to save a fellow man is unconsciously calculated to preserve his self-image as

courageous. But such explanations are incongruous with the theoretical framework informing

Nietzsche‘s later analysis of the ego:

As every drive lacks intelligence, the viewpoint of ―utility‖ cannot exist for it.

Every drive, in as much as it is active, sacrifices force and other drives: finally it

is checked; otherwise it would destroy everything through its excessiveness.

Therefore: the ―unegoistic,‖ self-sacrificing, imprudent, is nothing special—it is

common to all the drives—they do not consider the advantage of the whole ego

(because they do not consider at all), they act contrary to our advantage, against

the ego: and often for the ego. WP 372

13

171

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Our actions are more automatic, and less calculating, than is presupposed by psychological

egoism. This doctrine is vitiated by the mistaken philosophical anthropology that underpins it.

Because the ego is only a conceptual synthesis, ―there are not actions prompted by ‗egoism‘‖

WP 371. Because ―[t]he ‗subject‘ is only a fiction,‖ the ―ego of which one speaks when one

censures egoism does not exist at all.‖ WP 370. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche goes so far as to label

the concepts of egoistic and unegoistic acts as both ―psychological absurdities.‖14

Nietzsche comes to recognize that it is impossible to determine what egoism and altruism

ultimately consist in without first scrutinizing the culturally conditioned conceptions of human

agency that structure our moral psychology.15

Yet despite Nietzsche‘s many attacks on the ego

as the mistaken presupposition of egoism, Nietzsche nevertheless frames many of his

psychological observations in the language of egoism and altruism. For Nietzsche also

announces in the Will to Power that ―there could not be anything other than egoism.‖ WP 362.

While Small is surely right that Nietzsche does not accept the language of egoism at face value,

this unwillingness is never adequately articulated. For surely, Nietzsche‘s critiques of the ego as

a substantial, disembodied subject does not render meaningless all talk of egoism and altruism.

The will to power replaces egoism as the pivot of his moral psychology, but as this term hardly

suggests disinterested beneficence, it is natural to understand it as a species of egoism, or as the

explanation for it. It would be facile to articulate Nietzsche‘s view of human nature in the terms

set forth by Hobbes or Rousseau, in terms of inherent egoism or altruism, yet it is all the same

easier to identify Nietzsche more closely with Hobbes. The often unsystematic character of

14

Ecce Homo, p. 266 (―Good Books‖, Sec. 5). 15

The seeds of this project are already to be found in earlier writings like Daybreak, alongside

Nietzsche‘s less groundbreaking observations.

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Nietzsche‘s philosophizing leaves it unclear what distinguishes his moral psychology from the

less nuanced thinking of such predecessors.

c. The Heroic Ideal

Nietzsche‘s plain hostility to utilitarianism reveals that his sympathy for psychological

egoism coexists with a powerful aversion to the notion that human beings are rational calculators

of self-interest who, in the spirit of homo economicus, tough-mindedly employ social

institutions, if not social interaction itself, as mediums through which to ―maximize gains.‖ He

famously claims that ―[m]an does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.‖ T33

Although Nietzsche sometimes suggests that individual egoism indirectly benefits the species,16

he does not have anything like Adam Smith‘s invisible hand in mind. Rather than being a

Darwinian jungle in which the strongest, wiliest, or most adaptable prevail, commercial society

represents the triumph of asceticism and herd instinct over self-realization and individuality.

Only the contemptible bourgeois, not man as such, is a cool, cautious calculating machine. In

The Gay Science, Nietzsche suggests that this overly pessimistic moral psychology is the

hallmark of ―common natures‖:

Common natures consider all noble, magnanimous feelings inexpedient and

therefore first of all incredible. They blink when they hear of such things and

seem to feel like saying: ―Surely, there must be some advantage involved; one

cannot see through everything.‖ They are suspicious of the noble person, as if he

surreptitiously sought his advantage. When they are irresistibly persuaded of the

absence of selfish intentions and gains, they see the noble person as a kind of fool;

they despise him in his joy and laugh at his shining eyes. ―How can one enjoy

being at a disadvantage? How could one desire with one‘s eyes open to be

disadvantaged? Some disease of reason must be associated with the noble

affection.‖ Thus they think and sneer, as they sneer at the pleasure that a madman

derives from his fixed idea. What distinguishes the common type is that it never

loses sight of its advantage, and that this thought of purpose and advantage is

16

See The Gay Science, Sec. 1,4.

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even stronger than the strongest instincts; not to allow these instincts to lead one

astray to perform inexpedient acts—that is their wisdom and pride.17

Far from endorsing psychological egoism here, Nietzsche holds the doctrine suspect as typical of

common natures, whose prejudices regarding human nature are a reflection of their own

mediocrity. Their egoism is contrasted not with the altruism of a Mother Theresa but with the

nobility of individuals who pursue a single goal in disregard of its difficulties, relishing hardship

for the challenges it represents. The ―noble person‖ admired here is not straightforwardly an

altruist or egoist. Unlike both these types, he is ultimately motivated by a sense of his actions‘

importance or needfulness – a ―fixed idea‖ – not the benefits he anticipate they will reap, either

for himself or for others. Nietzsche‘s cynicism thus appears to be in tension with an equally

powerful streak of idealism. While not an altruist in any ordinary sense, Nietzsche‘s prophet

Zarathustra is genuinely concerned with mankind‘s future (though in ways it cannot appreciate,

and actually resents). Zarathustra wants, like his ―wisest men‖, ―to create the world before

which [he] can kneel,‖18

and admires those acting out of steely conviction, even at great cost to

themselves. Zarathustra‘s audience is encouraged neither to pursue its advantage, nor to

recognize that it is already doing so, but to wean itself from its attachment to comfort and

convenience and embrace higher ideals. For all his reservations about both the possibility and

the value of altruism, Nietzsche genuinely embraces a certain conception of self-sacrifice. For

he admires the one ―who keeps back no drop of spirit for himself but wants to be the spirit of his

virtue entirely.‖19

Rejecting the notion that human beings are ends in themselves, Nietzsche

urges them to recognize themselves as means to the instantiation of an ideal. ―What is great in

man is that he is a bridge and not a goal..‖ Z 44,―I love him whose soul is lavish, who neither

17

The Gay Science, Sec. 3. 18

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R.J. Holingdale (tr.) (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 136 (―Of

Self-Overcoming‖).

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wants nor returns thanks: for he always gives and will not preserve himself.‖ Z44. But

Niezschean self-sacrifice differs from that of slave morality in fundamental ways. Whereas slave

morality interprets such lavishness as necessarily implying a self-effacing submission to a higher

power, Nietzsche understands it as potentially indicating a self-affirming allegiance to an ideal

or virtue. It is the sacrifice, not of one‘s interests to those of another, but the sacrifice of one‘s

identity to a project.

Following Ree, the younger Nietzsche regards vanity as arising out of habitual reflection

upon the utility of our qualities, as these are perceived by others. But for the mature Nietzsche,

positive self-feeling is not an afterthought—merely the internalization of the value that others

assign our altruism—but a core need of human agents. In emphasizing the foibles of human

vanity, the younger Nietzsche (and Ree) disregard that our sense of self-importance is always

rooted in a particular worldview in the context of which our qualities are intelligible as virtues.

The mature Nietzsche possesses a stronger sense that there may be differences in criteria of

value, and that human conflict is a product of conflicting criteria, rather than individual‘s self-

interested pursuit of scarce resources, for the concept of advantage is not intelligible in

abstraction from a heroic self-understanding founded on some broader cosmology which must be

accepted as a given if our agency is to function effectively. To employ Charles Taylor‘s term,

human agents are defined by their strong evaluators. At the most basic level, they understand

themselves as in terms of a conception of what is ultimately significant in life, a conception that

structures their interpretations of the situations to which they are responding.

The importance Nietzsche attaches to such conviction—and the possibility of its

deterioration—is evident in the evolution of his conceptualizations of slave morality. In The Gay

Science, Nietzsche describes this morality‘s motivations through the rubric of egoism and

19

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 44 (―Zarathustra‘s Prologue‖).

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altruism, accusing its adherents of hypocrisy in their celebration of selflessness: ―The praise of

the selfless, self-sacrificial, the virtuous….certainly was not born from the spirit of selflessness.

The ‗neighbor‘ praises selflessness because it brings him advantage.‖20

By the Genealogy,

however, slave morality (now labeled as such) becomes an object of genuine belief, and not

merely an expedient to its adherents‘ interests – as the sovereign is an expedient to the interests

of Hobbesian agents. As David Owen has argued, the mature Nietzsche ultimately wants to re-

evaluate slave ideals as intrinsic values, and not merely as ―instrumental ones in disguise.‖21

While it is true that Nietzsche does sometimes cast the slave revolt in morality as plotting and

self-consciously vengeful (particularly in describing the priests22

) Nietzsche‘s slaves believe – or

at least need and wish to believe – in the truth of their morality.23

They could maintain their

artificial self-esteem only by persevering in the belief that their standard of goodness – e.g.

mildness and self-effacement – is an objective one. The slaves would not, as might be expected

of genuine egoists, have been content with merely bamboozling the masters into accepting their

worldview, though this would have sufficed to secure a victory over them.

The slaves resented the masters not only for wounding their self-esteem but, more

importantly, for weakening their conviction in their right to self-esteem. Unlike homo

economicus, Nietzschean agents are ultimately concerned with their value, not merely with

20

The Gay Science, Sec. 21. 21

David Owen, ‗Nietzsche, Re-evaluation and the Turn to Genealogy‘, European Journal of Philosophy

11:3, p. 251. 22

Nietzsche describes God of Judaism during its decadent period as ―an instrument in the hands of

priestly agitators,‖ T147, and calls the Church Fathers of early Christianity were shrewd to the point of

holiness. T195 ―The so-called improvers of mankind never doubted their right to tell lies.‖ T69-70. 23

See Rudiger Bittner‘s ‗Ressentiment‘ (in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 127-138) for an interesting discussion of this tension

in Nietzsche. Bittner sees an irreconcilable contradiction between the slaves‘ need to believe in the truth

of their invented morality and their recognition of it as an invention. Bittner concludes that we must do

away with the second element, arguing that slave morality must have arisen unselfconsciously among the

slaves. This move, while intrinsically plausible, is unnecessary. Sartre offers a compelling explanation

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getting things of value. As Robert Solomon put it, Nietzsche holds that human beings ultimately

prefer a sense of self-importance to mere satisfaction.24

Retaining this sense requires that one be

partial to whatever worldview endows one‘s particular qualities with significance, and seek to

convince oneself and others of its truth, even in the face of one‘s own doubts.

In sometimes suggesting that human ideals are epiphenomenal upon the will to power,

Nietzsche is arguing that what gets misinterpreted as contact with a transcendent realm reflects

the peculiarities of individual‘s physiological and psychological constitutions. Nevertheless,

while meaning may not be inherent to the fabric of the universe, the need for meaning is, or has

become, an inescapable feature of human agency: ―Gradually man has become a fantastic animal

that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to

know, from time to time why he exists..‖25

Prior to the rise of the ascetic ideal, man ―suffered

from the problem of what he meant, the problem of the ―justification or explanation or

affirmation‖ of his existence.26

―The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the

curse which has so far blanketed mankind.‖27

This is because ―[i]f we possess out why of life,

we can put of with almost any how.‖ T33

Nietzsche‘s concern with the problem of nihilism reflects an underlying conception of

agency. For Nietzsche, ideals are prerequisites for willing itself.28

In arguing that the ascetic

for how one can both believe and disbelieve something at the same time (see the discussion of ‗Bad Faith‘

in Being and Nothingness). 24

Robert C. Solomon, ‗One Hundred Years of Ressentiment: Nietzsche‘s Genealogy of Morals‘, in

Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),

p. 98. 25

The Gay Science, Sec. 1. 26

On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Sec. 13. 27

On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Sec. 28. 28

Robert Guay takes up this point: ―To be engaged in a particular activity involves conformity to

standards that obtain independent of that performance. The possibilities of action are thus only distinct

against a context of standards; in the complete absence of any such constraint, there would be no means

by which to make sense of that activity as such‖ (‗Nietzsche on Freedom‘, European Journal of

Philosophy 10:3, p. 308). Guay draws attention to the same tension noted by Bittner (above): Nietzsche

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ideal triumphed because a counterideal was lacking and because ―man would rather will even

nothingness than not will,‖29

Nietzsche suggests that the will necessarily aims at an ideal, and

will opt for the paradoxical ideal of nihilism when other candidates are not available. Human

agents will, not simply to procure various goods, internal and external, but to instantiate their

understanding of what human existence is about. That is, while ideals may function to obscure

the contingent, animal like-nature of the human condition and, therefore, of their own origin,

Nietzsche recognizes that such distortion has, in the vast majority of cases, been indispensable

for surviving this condition. Thus, Nietzsche is concerned with our judgments as to the worth of

life; it is the ability or inability to judge life worthwhile which explains human motivation, not

egoism and altruism. T39. Egoism and altruism are therefore derivative values. Neither is

lauded or condemned as such because each carries value only insofar as it facilitates, or fails to

facilitate, optimism toward life. For morality must be understood, not simply as a response to

the problem of social organization, but also as a solution to the problem of meaning.

Yet it remains unclear precisely how Nietzsche‘s existential concerns for human beings

as strong evaluators bears on the issue of egoism. Lou Salome interpreted the difference

between the positivist Ree and the Nietzsche of Daybreak as involving ―deeply different

interpretations of the egoistic.‖ Small 200. Whereas Ree‘s egoism aspires to a ―comfortable and

happy life,‖ Nietzsche is concerned that ―[i]f one gives up a happy life, what remains of the

heroic life?‖ In the same sprit she contrasts Ree‘s sober positivism with Nietzsche‘s more

heroic, quasi-religious temper, which passionately aspires to knowledge as an ideal. 201 But

wants to maintain both that ideals are creations of the will and that willing presupposes allegiance to an

already existing ideal. As a metaphysical proposition, the first point is obviously subject to debate. As a

thesis of moral psychology, the second strikes me as difficulty to dispute: We must regard ideals as

objective (in some sense) because the mere fact that an ideal happens to be ours provides insufficient

motivation for keeping it as ours. 29

Ecce Homo, pp. 312-313 (―Genealogy of Morals‖).

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what is the theoretical content of what appear as temperamental differences? Comparing

Nietzsche‘s valorization of egoism with that of Herbert Spencer, Small suggests that Nietzsche

embraces a heroic, non-bourgeois form of egoism, an ideal is ―wrapped in poetic symbolism.‖

164-5 But given that egoism is so often associated with bourgeois attitudes of calculation, what

precisely remains of egoism once it is stripped of its bourgeois aspect? Given that the heroic is

often understood as a kind of hypertrophied altruism, the conceptual distinction between the

heroic and the egoistic is elusive.

d. Egoism as Cultural Artifact

Beyond conflicting with his idealism, Nietzsche‘s attraction towards psychological

egoism is also in tension with his insistence that the concept of egoism originated as part and

parcel of the slave morality he rejects, that it expresses a mode of perception with a particular

cultural and, in turn, physiological origin. The First Essay of The Genealogy of Morals is

profitably read as an effort to explain how the concept of egoism and its opposite assumed the

center stage of our moral tradition. Nietzsche asks how the most inoffensive, and (to his mind)

most unimpressive, human being came to be celebrated as the most admirable. How did the

Christian virtues of humility and submission become the paramount values around which so

many now organize their lives? What could have made these ideals so appealing that they could

displace the pagan‘s ―affirmative‖ virtues of pride, strength, and courage? As Bergmann argues,

self-abnegation achieved its appeal only because it was sold as a vital corrective to egoism.30

But egoism was never, in Nietzsche‘s view, a genuine danger, for the concept of egoism itself

was not even in currency prior to the rise of ―slave morality.‖ Far from being that to which slave

17

morality was reacting, egoism was its invention: ―it was only when aristocratic value judgments

declined that the whole antithesis ‗egoistic‘ ‗unegoistic‘ obtruded itself more and more on the

human conscience.‖31

Life had previously carried on without much thought given to the very

concept of egoism. The whole business of praising and criticizing proceeded unimpeded by its

absence, with the spectrum of ―good and bad‖ providing the vocabulary through which

individuals judged themselves and one another. The world was understood to consist of ―good‖

masters and ―bad‖ slaves, rather than egoists and altruists.

The slaves were downtrodden and disadvantaged in every respect, while the masters were

blessed with an optimism and exuberance that could only inspire the slaves‘ resentment. Being

too impotent to vent this resentment directly, the slaves ingeniously resorted to a ―spiritual

revenge.‖ They recast their ineluctable weakness as admirable self-restraint, a willed virtue

embraced in recognition of their place in the order of things and in reaction to human egoism,

while caricaturing the masters‘ health and vitality as this egoism, a stubborn if not malicious

rebellion against God‘s order:

[The one who is] ‘evil‘ in the sense of the morality of ressentiment‖ [that of the

slaves] is ―precisely the good man‖ of the other morality [the masters‘], precisely

the noble, powerful man, the ruler, dyed in another color, interpreted in another

fashion, seen in another way by the venomous eye of ressentiment.32

The masters‘ overflowing energy was represented by the slaves as the eruption of a diabolical

force. The unselfconscious athleticism of the Greco-Roman warrior became transformed into the

image of sneering gargoyles33

– a caricature of the masters‘ real motivations, which according to

30

Only after presupposing egoism will we be inclined to see morality as a necessary institution that

―restrains the presumptuous and overbearing‖ and ―protects the disadvantaged, weak, and frail‖

(Bergmann, p. 84). 31

On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sec. 2. 32

On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sec. 11. 33

―For ‗evil‘ conjures up a sense of threat, connotes dark, demonic forces set out to defile all purity‖

(Bergmann, p. 81).

18

Nietzsche were no more sinister than ―a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to

become master, a thirst for enemies, resistances and triumphs.‖34

Rather than indicating spite,

malice, or concern for narrow advantage, these desires flowed ineluctably from the masters‘

enviable health and vitality – their ―enthusiastic impulsiveness in anger, love, reverence,

gratitude, and revenge.‖35

Who (if anyone) was to benefit from this celebration of vitality was a

decidedly secondary consideration for the masters. It was only the slaves who imagined that

masters were somehow driven by self-love or some other vice, mistakenly inferring from the

masters‘ neglect of the slaves‘ well-being that they were self-consciously occupied with their

own.

The same kind of distortion will inform the herd‘s understanding of the contemporary

free-spirit, who will necessarily be regarded as evil by their complacent contemporaries:

The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance

humanity: again and again they relumed passions that were going to sleep—all

ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they reawakened again and again

the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring,

untried.36

Nietzsche argues not that the strong are genuinely evil but that they will inevitably be so

regarded by those too small-minded to appreciate their virtues. Unable to recognize the free

spirit‘s iconoclastic creativity for what it is, the herd will suspect him of harboring sinister

intentions and resent him for disrupting their equanimity in his pursuit of surreptitious advantage,

or out of an ingrained maliciousness. Nietzsche exhorts free spirits against internalizing this

misrepresentation, encouraging them to understand their mission in terms of its long-term

contribution to humanity rather than in terms of the short-term suffering it inflicts on their

myopic contemporaries: ―I love him who justifies the men of the future and redeems the men of

34

On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sec. 13. 35

On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sec. 10.

19

the past: for he wants to perish by the men of the present.‖37

Nietzsche‘s ideal human being is

not disposed toward the spontaneous beneficence of a Mother Teresa, he nonetheless contributes

to humanity, and in ways this his contemporaries will of necessity misunderstand.

Of course, the modern sensibility is more ambiguous in its attitude toward egoism that is

slave morality. Indeed, the very concept of egoism has mutated. Whereas egoism understood

theologically, as rebellion against God, against one‘s place in his order, and against the

recognition of other human beings as his creatures, it is, with the secularization of slave morality

in the modern bourgeois ethos, identified with hard-nosed concern with benefit-maximization.

Nevertheless, the instrumentalist moral psychology of homo economicus has its origins in a

distinctively religious outlook. Nietzsche believes that the rise of an instrumental conception of

human motivation can be observed in the decay of ancient Israel, which laid the fertile soil for

Christianity. This was facilitated by the ―most shameful act of historical falsification,‖ by which

Israel‘s past became interpreted under the influence of its priestly class. T149 Formerly,

Yahweh was worshiped as ―the expression of [Israel‘s] consciousness of their power, of their

delight in themselves. T147. Originally an expression of Israel‘s gratitude for its good fortune,

only later did sacrifice to God come to be understood as a means of expiating guilt and securing

reward—―a stupid salvation-mechanism of guilt towards Yahweh and punishment, piety towards

Yahweh and reward.‖ 149/26. The Jewish God became ―an instrument in the hands of priestly

agitators,‖ who ―interpret all good fortune as reward, all misfortune as punishment.‖ Only out of

a preoccupation reward and punishment could the concept of rational-interest develop.

By contrast, the earlier master morality represented an expressive rather than instrumental

ethos. The higher castes ―rule not because they want to but because they are.‖ T 190. With

36

The Gay Science, Sec. 4. 37

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 44-5 (―Zarathustra‘s Prologue‖).

20

virtue, one renounces advantage T34. For Nietzsche, the inclination to prudently deliberate

upon the probable costs and benefits of one‘s actions is to be contrasted with the sense of

necessity, of compulsion characteristic of the noble disposition. While the weak seek to derive

happiness as the reward for religious piety, ―a well-constituted human being, a ‗happy one‘, must

perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of

which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with

things.‖ T58-9.

The rise of slave morality and its concern with the egoistic introduces into our moral

tradition a misunderstanding of human nature originating in the psychological needs of the

resentful and self-loathing, who insist that ―health, well-constitutedness, strength, pride, and the

sense of power [are] necessarily vicious things for which one must one day pay.‖38

The slaves‘

willed misunderstanding of the masters led to a more general misunderstanding of human nature

itself, with the masters becoming only the most unrepentant of sinners, the ultimate symbols of

human corruption. Nietzsche is concerned that, as part of a broader shift in cultural values, the

concept of egoism distracts us from the masterly virtues by obscuring the very problems to

which they represent a solution:

Now consider the way the ―moral man‖ is dressed up, how he is veiled behind

moral formulas and concepts of decency—the way our actions are benevolently

concealed by the concepts of duty, virtue, sense of community, honorableness,

self-denial—should the reasons for all this not be equally good? I am not

suggesting that all this is meant to mask human malice and villainy—the wild

animal in us; my idea is, on the contrary, that it is precisely as tame animals that

we are a shameful sight and in need of the moral disguise, that the ―inner man‖ in

Europe is not by a long shot bad enough to show himself without shame (or be

beautiful). The European disguises himself with morality because he has become

a sick, sickly, crippled animal that has good reasons for being ―tame‖, for he is

almost an abortion, scarce half made up, weak, awkward.39

38

On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Sec. 14. 39

The Gay Science, Sec. 352.

21

In preparing us for some variety of the tough-minded suspiciousness characteristic of Hobbes

and La Rochefoucauld, the first lines of this passage seem deliberately crafted to obscure

Nietzsche‘s actual position. Nietzsche seeks to draw our attention to, and thereby call into

question, our culturally sustained credulity before this dim view of human nature, which

underpins the moral tradition he seeks to overthrow. Though themselves secular, modern cynics

are heirs to a moral psychology that originated in an other-worldly religious movement. Their

putative perspicacity into human nature is therefore suspect, for in fixating our attention on

egoism, they, like their Christian predecessors, discourage concern with man‘s overall health and

vitality. Nietzsche draws our attention to these problems by shifting the tone abruptly so as to

provoke sentiments of contempt and disappointment rather than of resentment or righteous

indignation. The central human problem is not self-centeredness but sickness, despair, and

overall underdevelopment. The needed corrective is not moral enjoinders against egoism but

some contemporary version of the master morality brought into disrepute by the slaves.

3. Basic Problems

Is Nietzsche‘s cynicism ultimately compatible with his idealism? Can his partiality

toward psychological egoism be reconciled with his views on the historical contingency of

egoism and his reservations about its usefulness as a concept? It would be convenient to dismiss

Nietzsche‘s La Rochefoucauld-style cynicism as but a stage in the development of his mature

thought. But it is unclear whether and how the older Nietzsche would correct the younger one.

For in reflecting on Human, All Too Human in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is very far from

repudiating its tone. In general, Nietzsche‘s later writings retain much of the flavor of his earlier

La Rochefoucauld-style ―predilection for belittling and doubt.‖

22

I will argue that the seemingly inconsistent strains of Nietzsche‘s moral psychology can

be profitably understood as complementary aspects of an overarching effort to rescue master

morality from the disrepute into which the slaves have cast it. To do this, Nietzsche must recast

human agency in a way that places the masters in a new, more appealing light. As Richard

Schacht put it, Nietzsche wishes to reveal ―the various possibilities that our attained humanity

opens up to us.‖40

In the process of exploding our inherited moral prejudices, Nietzsche seeks to

simultaneously expose the mistaken conception of human nature that endows these prejudices

with their superficial plausibility. In recasting human agency, Nietzsche is concomitantly

recasting what counts as egoism and altruism, reconceptualizing common moral distinctions in

order to render them meaningful to human beings as they are.

Raymond Geuss argues that the various phenomena designates as ―morality‖ by

Nietzsche are united by no more than a family resemblance.41

Against this, I will argue that the

various values and attitudes Nietzsche associates with morality – pity, asceticism, altruism,

suspicion of power – are united in deriving their appeal from a particular misunderstanding of

human agency and its possibilities. I want to interpret Nietzsche‘s Genealogy along the lines

Geuss elsewhere suggests illuminate Foucault – as ―a historical dissolution of self-evident

identities.‖42

Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate how moral concern as we have come to understand

it is intelligible only on the basis of a heretofore unquestioned picture of agency. The slaves‘

understanding of morality as a response to inherent egoism and their understanding of agency

constitute a logically interconnected whole. For the concept of selfishness as understood by the

slaves was the product of their misconceptions about the human self – ones begotten by the

40

Richard Schacht, ‗Of Morals and Menschen‘, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality,

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 428. 41

Raymond Geuss, ‗Nietzsche and Morality‘, European Journal of Philosophy 5:1, pp. 1-3. 42

Raymond Geuss, ‗Genealogy as Critique‘ in European Journal of Philosophy 10:2, p. 212.

23

peculiarities of their self-understanding. To establish the slaves‘ view of the masters as but an

expression of a contingent self-understanding is therefore to bring into the question the universal

value of any morality that is logically predicated upon this view.

I will not argue that Nietzsche is consistently lucid about the direction of that I claim can

be discerned in his thinking—that he self-consciously formulated the project in the light of which

I am suggesting he should be read. For Nietzsche is fundamentally conflicted, possessed of an

inchoate suspicion of slave morality while at the same time being under its sway, intellectually

beholden to the conceptual tools that our moral tradition has bequeathed him. Nietzsche‘s

progressively struggles to free himself from this inheritance by reinterpreting the meaning of

traditional moral concepts, in the pursuit of a language through which to express and justify a

different vision of humanity. The early Nietzsche was ―still lacking [his] own language for [his]

own things.‖43

Nevertheless, his ideas arose within him ―not as isolated, capricious, or sporadic

things but from a common root, from a fundamental will of knowledge, pointing imperiously into

the depths, speaking more and more precisely, demanding greater and greater precision.‖44

Nietzsche‘s earlier, less sophisticated, moral psychology is a harbinger of his later, explicit

attempts to unearth the philosophical presuppositions of slave morality. Given that Nietzsche‘s

very attempt to overcome slave morality is conditioned by it, we must approach Nietzsche‘s

cynicism from a retrospective standpoint, so as to untangle his mature brand of suspicion from

that indigenous slave morality and its secular intellectual heirs, like Hobbes and La

Rochefoucauld—to which some of Nietzsche‘s arguments give unwitting expression.

To untangle these, we must examine the relationship between two strains of reductionism

that manifest themselves throughout Nietzsche‘s work. The first is a naturalism involving the

43

On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface, Sec. 4. 44

Ibid., Sec. 2.

24

reinterpretation of what have traditionally been conceived as supernatural phenomenon—be it

spirituality, our sense of ourselves as ―free,‖ moral judgment—as natural occurrences to be

explained in terms of the particularities of an individual‘s physiological constitution, life-history,

and the culture. For instance, in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche observes that the ideal of

justice with its respect for the weak originated in the fact of the slaves‘ usefulness to the

master.45

Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate that habits of conduct that originated as responses to

particular conditions were thoroughly internalized and thereby misinterpreted as moral intuitions

of a seemingly ethereal origin, a misinterpretation that came to sustain a false, because

etherealized conception of human nature. Thus, Nietzsche explains the capacity for self-criticism

as reflecting, not the existence of some transcendent rational faculty, but a struggle between two

opposing drives.46

Our moral intuitions reflect habits responsive to our empirical condition.

Morality is ―the union of the pleasant and the useful,‖ and is embraced because long habit has

rendered it ―the only possibility of feeling at ease.‖47

The conviction that lying is immoral

expresses not our access as rational beings to Kant‘s intelligible realm, but the humble fact that

effective lies can involve considerable calculation and ―the path of compulsion and authority is

surer than that of cunning.‖48

What strike us as ―categorical imperatives‖ are misinterpretations

originating in the internalizations of principles that first arose as hypothetical ones.

The second reductionist strain in Nietzsche is his already-examined cynicism about

human motivation, his propensity to redescribe other-regarding and idealistic sentiments as

egoistic at base. This, second strain of reductionism is strongly connected to the first, because

45

Human, All Too Human 92, 93 46

Daybreak 109 47

Human, All Too Human 97; see also sec. 98 (―the social instinct grows out of pleasure‖), sec. 99

(Morality originates as compulsion but eventually becomes ―custom, -- later still, free obedience, and

finally almost instinct‖ before it becomes associated with virtue.) 48

Human, All Too Human 54.

25

the early Nietzsche, in line with our moral tradition, believes that the reduction of altruistic to the

egoistic follows from the reduction of the distinctively human to the merely animal. For

example, Nietzsche argues that the saint‘s the religiously-justified ideal of self-control and self-

mastery merely manifests his desire to tyrannize. The ―condition of the soul in which the saint or

embryo saint, was composed of elements which we all know well, only that under the influence

of other than religious conceptions they exhibit themselves in other colors and are then

accustomed to encounter man‘s blame.‖49

Nietzsche here naturalizes religious feeling, by

demonstrate that the saintly sensibility is ultimately an amalgam of primitive animal power-

instincts, instincts of which we would disapprove in other contexts, where the egoistic nature of

such animal-like dispositions can be readily recognized in the absence of a religious narrative

does not obfuscate their objective character.

This association of the natural with the egoistic reflects the influence of Schopenhauer on

the early Nietzsche. While Nietzsche understood himself as reacting against Schopenhauer, the

cynical Nietzsche actually adopts some of the Schopenhauerian worldview‘s most fundamental

premises. Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche denies the metaphysical possibility of altruism. But

in so doing, he incorporates Schopenhauer‘s conception of what counts as altruism, and so what

counts as egoism. It is important to note that, for Schopenhaur, egoism is not, most

fundamentally, a calculating concern with achieving our advantage, as it is usually conceived,

but the ineluctable intuition of the ontological primacy of our perspective on the world.

Calculating attitudes are derivative upon an egoism that is coterminous with life itself, with our

very sense for reality. ―[Man] is all in all to himself: and since he feels that he contains within

his ego all that is real, nothing can be of greater importance to him than his own self.‖50

49

Human, All Too Human 142. 50

Id. at 77

26

Ordinarily, the pain and pleasure of others simply strikes us as unreal by comparison with our

own. This experience does not originate in some conscious or unconscious decision to favor

ourselves, but from the basic structure of human agency as a natural, empirical phenomenon. It

originates in the fact that we are directly conscious of own subjectivity while only indirectly so

of others‘, or, in other words, the fact that our nervous system ends at our own skin. Egoism

and human agency naturalistically conceived are coextensive. ―Egoism is, both in animals and

men, connected in the closest way with their very essence and being; indeed, it is one and the

same thing.‖ Egoism exists ―in consequence of the subjectivity which is essential to our

consciousness that each person is himself the whole world‖ and ―the urgent impulse to exist, and

exist under the best circumstances.‖51

Having identified egoism with the very structure of our agency as embodied, natural

beings, Schopenhauer must conclude genuinely non-egoistic acts are not only rare and difficult,

but downright miraculous. Experiencing others‘ pain is ―mysterious‖ because ―[r]eason can give

not direct account of, and its causes like outside the field of experience.‖52

Altruism is

miraculous in involving nothing less that the removal of the difference between two agents, the

fact that one is not the other, since this difference is ―the precise raison d‘etre‖ of their egoism.

S85 Compassion ―obliterate[s] the distinction between ego and the non-ego,‖53

temporarily

dissolving the illusion of individuation. This dissolution permits a kind of contact with a higher

reality, the transcendence of mere appearance, action out of which accrues genuine moral worth.

This is because genuine altruism requires that the other‘s ―weal and woe must directly constitute

my motive; just as, ordinarily, my own weal and woe form it.‖ S85.

51

Id. at 75 52

The Basis of Morality, 103.

27

Having identified egoism with human agency itself, Schopenhauer‘s analysis necessarily

places human nature in the shadow of egoism. On the Schopenhauerian criterion of altruism,

any behavior motivated otherwise than by the ―purely objective‖ desire of simply knowing that

the other has been helped qualifies as egoistic.54

Anything other that ―that pure, disinterested,

objective participation in the condition and lot of others‖55

is tantamount to egoism. For

altruism requires the very transcendence of one‘s empirical condition, the rendering non-

operational of our natural proclivities that generally contaminate our attitudes towards others‘

welfare. Schopenahuer‘s cynicism originates not in suspicions about unacknowledged

motivations, as with La Rochefoucauld, but in a certain conception of the ethical significance of

a naturalistic conception of human beings, in which egoism and the structure ofhuman agency

are collapsed. This conception is clearly operative in the following passage from Human, All-

Too Human:

[A] nature that is only capable of purely un-egoistic actions is more fabulous than

the phoenix; it cannot even be clearly imagined, just because, when closely

examined, the whole idea ―un-egoistic action‖ vanishes into air. No man ever did

a thing which was done only for others and without any personal motive; how

should he be able to do anything which had no relation to himself, and therefore

without inward obligation (which must always have its foundation in a personal

need. How could the ego act without ego?56

In denying the possibility of altruism, Nietzsche is here affirming Schopenhauer‘s identification

of egoism with agency, and the resulting conception of altruism as a super-empirical

phenomenon. Human beings are inherently egoistic merely by virtue of having desires,

regardless of these desires particular objects.57

For irrespective of its objects, desire expresses

53

Id. at 140. 54

Id. 102. 55

The Basis of Morality, 110. 56

Human All Too Human 103 57

The desire for something (wish, inclination, longing) is present in all instances mentioned: to give way

to it, with all its consequences, is certainly not ―un-egoistic.‖ Human, All Too Human 57.

28

needs originating in our constitution as natural beings, needs incompatible with the

transcendence of nature presupposed by Schopenhauerian altruism. Nietzsche may seem guilty

of what John Dewey called the ―obvious fallacy‖ of ―transforming the (truistic) fact of acting as

a self into the fiction of always acting for self.‖58

But in claiming that no on is capable of doing

―anything which had no relation to himself,‖ Nietzsche is arguing that our actions express the

logic of our physiological constitutions which is never responsive to an ethical principle that acts

on us directly, that is, independently of our physiological constitutions. Nietzsche assumes that

act as a self and acting for a self are morally equivalent because he, like Kant and Schopenhauer,

accepts that such direct influence is the sine qua non of genuine morality.

Having naturalistically rejected the metaphysical possibility of such influence, Nietzsche

must necessarily be suspicions of morality as it is ordinarily conceived. Thus, he attacks the

notion that morality is a miraculous phenomenon,59

targeting the ―worshipers of the morally

marvelous,‖ for their belief that morality is inherently ―inexplicable, absolutely unnatural,

supernatural.‖60

Nietzsche‘s skepticism about Schopenhauerian compassion is a direct extension

of his naturalism. Because our nervous system extends no farther than our skins, and as such

requires us to infer others‘ pain rather than feeling it. Our sympathies being bounded by the

limitations of our nervous system, any sympathy we feel for others is the product of analogy,61

rather than the direct experience which would require suspending the laws of nature. Nietzsche‘s

58

John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University

Press, 1988), p. 96. 59

Are these deeds of morality miracles, because, to use Schopenhauer‘s expression, they are ―impossible

yet performed‖? Human, All Too Human 57 60

Human, All Too Human 136 61

As far as our nervous system extends we protect ourselves from pain; if it extended farther, to our

fellow-men, namely, we should do no one an injury…We conclude by analogy that something hurts

somebody, and through memory and the strength of imagination we may suffer from it ourselves. But

still what a difference there is between toothache and pain (pit) that the sight of toothache calls forth.

HAH 104 ―‘To cause pain per se does not exist, except in the brains of philosophers, neither does ‗to give

pleasure per se‘ (pity in Schopenhauer‘s sense.‖ HAH 99

29

skepticism about Schopenhaerian malice is similarly motivated. We cause pain merely in order

to experience the sensation of our own power, and not to induce pain in others—of which we

have no direct intuition.62

Conceptually, then, the younger Nietzsche‘s cynicism is highly dependent upon a long

philosophical tradition, stretching from Plato to Kant and Schopehnauer, that, in various ways

dichotomizes the real and the apparent, the noumenal and the empirical, the free from the unfree.

The mature Nietzsche, by contrast, is characterized by an increasingly acute awareness that these

are false dichotomies that, in pervading traditional interpretations of the human condition, have

distorted our self-understanding as agents. This Nietzsche argues that the idea of the real or

intelligible world is not only false in itself, but furthermore falsifies that with which it is

contrasted, the ―apparent‖ world. Only if we first posit a changeless ―real‖ world is the actual

world relegated to the status of mere appearance.63

Only then does the world of our experience

then seem almost irredeemable corrupted, as contaminated by a lack of being, as a sphere of

mere becoming. Nietzsche accuses German philosophy, and Kant in particular, of re-introducing

an ideal world and thereby distorting the character the real, physical world: ―One had made of

reality an ‗appearance‘; one had made a completely fabricated world, that of being, into reality. .

.‖64

This is because ―[t]he characteristics which have been assigned to the ‗real being‘ of things

are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness…‖65

Overcoming this fabrication will permit

us to attach value to becoming in its own right, rather than merely as the process of rectifying a

lack. Once the fictitiousness of the Platonic heaven of is recognized, that to which it has

traditionally been contrasted will appear in a different light: ―with the abolition of the real world,

62

―The aim of malice is not the suffering of others itself, but our own enjoyment, as the feeling of

revenge or stronger nervous excitement.‖ Human, All To Human 103/50 63

Twilight 49 64

Twilight 133

30

we have also abolished the apparent one.‖66

Our sense that the natural is vitiated by some

inherent ontological imperfection is thus to be explained in terms of contingent cultural values.

The real world can be found lacking only against the backdrop of an ideal that, properly

understood, is ultimately an expression of nihilism.

It follows that Schopenhauer‘s ideal of altruism, predicated as it is on the intelligible-

empirical dichotomy, has distorted that with which it is contrasted, the world of humanly

possible motivations, as mere egoism. Slave morality destroys any meaningful contrast between

egoism and altruism by casting the latter as an ethereal, quasi-mystical act of self-surrender,

rather than one particular expression of physical and psychological vitality. Only on the basis of

this rarefied ideal does human desire appear irredeemably egoistic. This unreal, and unneeded,

ideal of altruism unfairly devalues every realistically human attitude, reducing all these to mere

egoism:

By virtue of these errors we have hitherto accorded certain actions a higher value

than they possess: we have segregated them from ‗egoistic‖ and ‗unfree‘ actions.

If we now realign them with the latter, as we shall have to do, we shall certainly

reduce their value (the value we feel they possess), and indeed shall do so to an

unfair degree, because the ‗egoistic‘ and ‗unfree‘ actions were hitherto evaluated

too low on account of their supposed profound and intrinsic difference. – Will

they from then on be performed less often because they are now valued less

highly?—Inevitably! At least for a good length of time, as long as the balance of

value feelings continues to be affected by the reaction of former errors. But our

counter-reckoning is that we shall restore to these actions their value—we shall

deprive them of their bad conscience! And since they have hitherto been by far

the most frequent actions, and will continue to be so for all future time, we

remove from the entire aspect of action and life its evil appearance! This is a very

significant result! When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be

so!67

Nietzsche suggests that, having recognized the structural similarities between egoism and

altruism, we will initially dismiss what has been traditionally accepted as altruism as egoism in

65

Twilight 49 66

Twilight 51

31

disguise and see no more value in ostensibly other-directed actions than in transparently self-

centered ones. But we will eventually recognize that much that is customarily condemned as

egoism is objectionable only against the backdrop of a heretofore unquestioned ascetic ideal that

divorces altruism from the feeling of power, as through the latter threatens our actions‘ moral

worth by displacing all genuinely sympathetic sentiments. The contrast between two classes of

action—between pure, Christ-like altruism and human action as it actually is—involves in act of

abstraction, whereby the essence of human action becomes reduced to what all action has in

common, that it expresses the idiosyncracies of our constitutions as natural beings. The contrast

between the inclinations and reason obscures qualitative differences between various kinds of

inclinations, reducing them to their deficiency vis-à-vis a noumenal realm. The Schopenhauerian

conceptualization of egoism and altruism manifests a broader cultural tendency to devalue the

natural. For ressentiment invented ―another world from which…life-affirmation would appear

evil, reprehensible as such.‖68

The concept of egoism facilitates this devaluation by functioning

to obscure the very great differences in the range of humanly possible motivations, reducing

them to their common status as inclinations of physiological, this-worldly origin. The

devaluation of the natural has caused human beings to misunderstand themselves in fundamental

ways: ―It is the trump-card of religion and metaphysics, which wish to have man evil and sinful

by nature, to cast suspicion on nature and thus really to make him bad, for he learns to feel

himself evil since he cannot divest himself of the clothing of nature.‖ ―The moral demands of

Christianity have from its inception, been ―exaggerated in order that man cannot satisfy them;

the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel himself as sinful as

possible.‖ 142

67

Daybreak, Sec. 148. 68

AntiChrist 24

32

Against this, Nietzsche invites us to approach the ―clothing of nature‖ with a new

openness, to recognize that the association of nature with egoism reflects a particular experience,

rather than the kind of metaphysical insight as which Schopenhuaer represents it: ―I find those

people disagreeable in whom every natural inclination immediately becomes a sickness,

something that disfigures them or is downright infamous: it is they who have seduced us to hold

that man‘s inclinations and instincts are evil. They are the cause of our great injustice against

our nature, against all nature…..it will always be the mark of nobility that one feels no fear of

oneself, expects nothing infamous of oneself..‖69

4. Teleology and the Psychology of Power

Small observes that the mature Nietzsche comes to reject Ree‘s contention that human

action is the site of two competing drives, one egoistic and the other. 82. This rejection is in fact

present already in Human, All-Too Human, where seeks to explain away what appears as non-

egoistic motivation. But the rejection assumes a different, more complicated shape in

Nietzsche‘s more mature work, where he seeks to understand both the egoistic and the non-

egoistic to a phenomenon resistant to the procrustean bed of psychological egoism. Whereas the

younger Nietzsche holds that virtues arise out of vice, the later Nietzsche holds that virtue and

vice alike express the will to power. As Small observes, the will to power represents Nietzsche‘s

rejection of the hedonistic moral psychology that the younger Nietzsche shared in common with

But it remains unclear how the will to power, which carries a sinister ring, is to be distinguished

from egoism. As Nietzsche says little to explicitly distinguish it from egoism, it is natural to read

egoism into it. Ivan Soll, for instance, interprets Nietzsche as holding that ―a will to power is the

69

The Gay Science, Sec. 294.

33

deepest and most general motive of human behavior, that the ultimate goal of all human striving

is the acquisition and increase of power.‖70

But such interpretations of the will to power are in tension with the mature Nietzsche‘s

rejection of teleological accounts of human agency, which is illustrated in the following passage:

This seems to me to be one of my most essential steps and advances: I have learned to

distinguish the cause of acting from the cause of acting in a particular way, in a particular

direction, with a particular goal. The first kind of cause is a quantum of dammed up

energy that is waiting to be used up somehow, for something, while the second kind is,

compared to this energy, something quite insignificant, for the most part a little accident

in accordance with which the quantum ―discharges‖ itself in one particular way—a match

versus a ton of powder. Among these little accidents or ―matches‖ I include so-called

―purposes‖ as well as the even much more so-called ―vocations‖: They are relatively

random, arbitrary, almost indifferent in relation to the tremendous quantum of energy that

presses, as I have said, to be used up somehow.

……….Is the ―goal,‖ the ―purpose‖ not often enough a beautifying pretext, a

self-deception of vanity after the event that does not want to acknowledge that the ship is

following the current in which it has entered accidentally?71

The notion that we seek power in the ordinary sense of the term is inconsistent with Nietzsche‘s

anti-teleological conception of action. Whatever the role of power in Nietzsche‘s moral

psychology, it is not as an object of desire. Denying that human action is most profoundly

understood in acquisitive, instrumental terms, Nietzsche argues that purposes are derivative

phenomena, compromises between our general dispositions as natural beings and the

opportunities to express it afforded by the situation. We settle upon our purposes not to advance

a calculating self-interest, but because they offer us the opportunity they offer to expend our

energies in ways congruent with our constitutions.

Our purposes are arbitrary in the sense that the situations precipitating them are

contingent, but Nietzsche also recognizes that they may also reflect a deep logic that guides us

unawares:

70

Soll, p. 168. 71

The Gay Science, Sec. 360.

34

Every animal….instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under

which it can expend all its strength and achieve a maximal feeling of power; every

animal abhors, just as instinctively and with a subtlety of discernment that is

―higher than all reason,‖ every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or

could obstruct this optimum.72

While maintaining that purposes are in some sense accidental, Nietzsche also remarks that ―[t]he

healthy human being transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his

relations with other human beings and things.‖73

The ―healthy human being‖ remains attuned to

her deepest inclinations, whatever the shifting winds of her life, and is thereby able to distinguish

the ―matches‖ that enliven her from stimuli to which she is temperamentally insensible. She

thereby retains the instinctive discernment to embed herself in situations that will draw upon her

particular energies.

Like La Rochefoucauld and other cynics, Nietzsche endeavors to expose human self-

deception. But unlike the cynics, who trace self-deception to self-love, Nietzsche traces self-

deception to the very structure of human agency – to our need to maintain the kind of activities

through which we can continue to express our natural dispositions. If purposes are compromises

between our constitution and the possibilities for expressing it which the situation holds out, the

ideals through which we justify our purposes are intellectual expressions of our temperamental

tendencies. They are the post-hoc legitimation of the patterns of activity that most animate us,

rather than revelations from the noumenal realm.

This picture of human nature is exemplified in the character of Don Quixote, who cannot

grasp how his understanding of the world and of his place within it is conditioned by his

72

On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Sec. 7. 73

Friedrich, Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, R.J. Hollingdale (tr.) (Penguin Books,

1990), p. 59 (Twilight of the Idols: ―The Four Great Errors,‖ Sec. 2)

35

idiosyncratic psychological needs.74

Imagining that he has chosen his knightly vocation as a

rational response to the world‘s many evils, the knight from La Mancha actually hallucinates

non-existent evils out of his temperamental disposition towards the knightly ideal. The

windmills he confronts are so many ―matches‖ igniting his knightly urges. As his choice of

vocation is only intelligible in a world in which knights have a role to play, Don Quixote must

mistake the windmills for giants if he is to retain his own self-understanding. While we think

ourselves motivated by our actions‘ ostensible ends, we are in fact driven by our disposition to

pursue certain kinds of ends.75

As what we normally mistake for Platonic essences are expressions of our biological

constitutions, there is certainly a sense in which we are mistaken about our own motivations. But

this self-deception, if we wish to call it such, is not that emphasized by defenders of

psychological egoism. Human ideals are not expedients to the abstract expression of power, but

expressions of the concrete ways in which we are constitutionally disposed to discharge our

energies. Nietzsche observes that

[The great human being‘s] greatness lies in the fact that he expends

himself…The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended; the

overwhelming pressure of the energies which emanate from him forbids him any

such care and prudence. One calls this ‗sacrifice‘; one praises his ‗heroism‘

therein, his indifference to his own interests, his devotion to an idea, a great cause,

74

―..suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it desires gratification – or exercise of its strength, or

discharge of its strength, or the saturation of an emptiness – these are all metaphors –: it then regards

every event of the day with a view to seeing how it can employ it for the attainment of its goal…‖

(Daybreak, Sec. 119). 75

―…why could a ‗purpose‘ not be a epiphenomenon in the series of changes in the activating forces that

bring about a purposive action – a pale image sketched in the consciousness beforehand that serves to

orient us concerning events, even as a symptom of events, not as their cause‖ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The

Will To Power, Walter Kaufmann (tr.) (Vintage Books, 1968), Sec. 666). This offers another way of

interpreting Nietzsche‘s opposition to moralities assigning moral worth to our intentions. Such moralities

are objectionable not simply because we can never ascertain the unconscious intentions that actually

move us (see Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 101-

104), but because intentions are epiphenomenal to the interaction between drive and situation. Any

interpretation of Nietzsche‘s moral psychology that assigns causal efficacy to intentions (whether they be

conscious or not) is inconsistent with his anti-teleological orientation.

36

a fatherland: all misunderstandings…He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself

up, he does not spare himself – with inevitability, fatefully, involuntarily, as a

river bursting its banks is involuntary.76

Nietzsche does not accept altruistic characterizations of the great man‘s expenditure of his

energies. But nor does he characterize it as a surreptitiously egoistic gambit. This is because, at

base, this expenditure is a structural characteristic of life itself, and not the object of any

particular kind of desire. A river does not use a riverbed in order to flow, but rather flows

through it simply because it is water‘s nature to fill up the empty spaces towards which gravity

draws it. Similarly it is the nature of human moral perception to seize upon aspects of the

situation that legitimate the activities towards which one is disposed. Don Quixote‘s

predisposition towards knightly ideals inclines him to interpret the windmills‘ blades as the arms

of giants, to fixate upon the respects in which the blades resemble arms of giants while ignoring

the more numerous respects in which they do not.

The fact that altruism and idealism have a natural explanation in our physiological

constitutions does not vitiate their authenticity as elements of our experience because the

selective perception exemplified in Don Quixote need not be self-conscious or calculating. We

are persuaded of our interpretation of the situation much as we are enraptured by a piece of

music. Our very engrossment in the situation preempts reflection on this absorption‘s rational

grounds. A task‘s very power to engage us is experienced as evidence of its intrinsic

significance, a sign that it is inherently ―compelling.‖ As William James aptly observed, the

unconscious premise of our thinking is ―nothing which I can feel like that can be false.‖77

The

further we become engaged in a situation, the more our sense of our actions‘ meaningfulness is

76

T109 77

William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume II (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1950),

p. 308.

37

corroborated, the less likely we are to reflect upon our commitments. 78

The more Don Quixote

becomes engrossed in tilting at his giants, the less energy he has available to consider that these

might actually be windmills, the more reasonable the attack must strike him. Our first-person

experience of our agency is not, most primordially, instrumental. While we obviously plot

objectives and their means of attainment, such calculations are derivative upon a sense of loyalty

to one‘s dispositions and, therefore, to the ideals in which they are consciously experienced.

Like Don Quixote, we cannot recognize the ―matches‖ providing an outlet for our dispositions

for what they are, as mere stimuli facilitating his engagement in the situation at hand. For they

would cease to be effective did we so conceive of them. To the extent that we are to remain

effective as strongly evaluating agents, we must understand our actions as response to the

situation‘s needs, not expressions of our own.

As is well-known, Nietzsche rejects the moral tradition of evaluation the worth of an

action in terms of the intentions that accompany it:

…everything that is intentional [about an action], everything about it that can be

seen, known, ―conscious,‖ still belongs to its surface and skin—which, like every

skin, betrays something but conceals even more. In short, we believe that the

intention is merely a sign and symptom that still requires interpretation—

moreover, a sign that means too much and therefore, taken by itself alone, almost

nothing.79

Nietzsche‘s suspicion toward the ―morality of intentions‖ has sometimes been interpreted as

involving the thesis that our actual motivations are unconscious rather than unconscious, and that

we are therefore determined in a way that precludes moral responsibility. But positing

unconscious intentions would not be a particularly radical break with the moral tradition, which

has always recognized the possibility of such motivation. Nietzsche‘s rejection of the ―morality

78

For this reason, particularly healthy individuals are more likely to be unreflective. As Nietzsche

observed, spiritual progress depends the weak. It is the weak and self-doubting who do the most to

advance humanity (see Human, All Too Human, Sec. 224).

38

of intentions‖ bears not simply on whether we may, as conscious actors, be properly blamed for

our egoism, but on the very structure of this alleged egoism. From the beginning to the end of

his writings, Nietzsche is keenly aware of what Ree refers to as ―the difference between the

appearance and reality of human nature.‖80

But Nietzsche‘s understanding of what this

difference consists in evolves in important ways. During the ―cynical phase,‖ this is the

difference between our appearance as altruists and our reality as egoists. But as Nietzsche‘s

thought develops, the difference becomes one between our appearance as teleologically

motivated and our reality as bundles of instincts seeking discharge. Like Nietzsche of Human,

All-Too Human, the mature Nietzsche insists that every action has a foundation in ―personal

need,‖ that an action must have ―some relation‖ to the agent. But Nietzsche‘s conceptualization

of these needs and this relation has changed. For these needs now consist, not in a conscious or

unconscious objective—but the disposition to discharge our strength in particular ways.

Nietzsche seeks to understand human agency not in terms of unconscious rather than conscious

motivations, but in terms that altogether dispense with the teleological language of motivation.

Thus, Nietzsche argues that

The will no longer moves anything, consequently, no longer explains anything – it

merely accompanies events, it can also be absent. The so-called ‗motive‘: another

error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an

act, which conceals rather than exposes the antecedentia of the act. T60

The temptation is to imagine that the act‘s antecedentia possess the structure of a motive, so that

unconscious motivations wield conscious ones as tools in the service of their egoistic ends. But

that is to anthropomorphize what must ultimately be understood as natural forces operating

according to a non-teleological language. Our actions are most fundamentally expressive, not of

conscious or unconscious motives, but of what Nietzsche calls cause-creating drives, which

79

BGE 132

39

structure our conscious understanding of the situation and self-understanding in a way that

legitimates actions according to these dispositions:

A particular kind of cause-ascription comes to preponderate more and more,

becomes concentrated into a system and finally comes to dominate over the rest,

that is to say simply to exclude other causes and explanations. – The banker thinks

at once of ‗business‘, the Christian of ‗sin‘, the girl of her love. T62

While we are strong evaluators, our strong evaluations originate in causal forces that cannot in

themselves be understood in the language of strong evaluations. Our strong evaluations reflect

the sorts of activity toward which we are physiologically disposed. These normative frameworks

lend intelligibility to these dispositions by embedding them in a narrative about the good.

Morality is thus the legitimation of who we are. For ―we want to have a reason for feeling as we

do – for feeling well or for feeling ill. It never suffices us simply to establish the mere fact that

we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact –become conscious of it – only when we have

furnished it with a motivation of some kind.‖ T61 Human beings have developed in such a way

that their manifold and sometimes contradictory instincts function through a strongly evaluative

consciousness. This is precisely why Nietzsche regards consciousness as a potentially great

liability. To the extent that our instincts depend on the maintenance of a cultural worldview,

they are vulnerable in the face of our cultural worldview‘s disintegration. The will is inherently

normative, since it is experienced by us as response to the nature of the situation interpreted in

accordance with a worldview expressive of our biological drives.81

80

Ree 143 81

See also DB 119 – Moral evaluations are only fantasies based on physiological processes unknown to

us. ―Totality of drives‖ The causes which we believe motivate us are actually inventions of our drives:

Every drive requires seeing the world in a particular way.

Our drives comment on our experiences: They impart our experiences with the significance to which we

consciously react. Our motives are responses to this significance, which itself is a reflection of our drives.

40

Rather than being an unconscious force deviously manipulating our conscious purposes

towards surreptitious ends, the will to power is but the more or less well integrated totality of our

unexamined dispositions to act on ideals expressive of our constitution (and interpret the

situation accordingly). If we ignore the teleological language in which Nietzsche sometimes

indulges but theoretically eschews, the upshot of Nietszche‘s doctrine is only the uncontroversial

thesis that biological organisms respond differently to different stimuli. The absence of effective

stimuli leaves us unfulfilled, prompting us to seek new conditions that will facilitate re-

engagement in the situation and re-absorption in the moment. Human beings‘ perennial

―selfishness‖ appears differently against this backdrop, as it now consists in no more than our

disposition to become engaged by some situations and deadened by others, and our consequent

attraction to the former and aversion to the latter. William James observes that much that gets

characterized as self-interest is an expression of interests that cannot themselves be properly

characterized as egoistic. These consist in basic impulses that are constitutive of what we are,

rather than motivations instrumental to the attaining of one‘s self-interest:

Our interest in things means the attention and emotion which the thought of them

will excite, and the actions which their presence will evoke. Thus every species is

particularly interested in its own prey or food, its own enemies, its own sexual

mates and its own young.

Well, it stands not in the least otherwise with our bodies. They too are

precepts in our objective field—they are simply the most interesting precepts

there. What happens to them excites in us emotions and tendencies to action

more energetic and habitual than any which are excited by other portions of the

―field.‖ What my comrades call my bodily selfishness and self-love, is nothing

but the sum of all the outer acts which this interest in my body spontaneously

―What then are our experiences? Much more that which we put into them than that which they already

contain!‖

41

draws, from me. My ―selfishness‖ is here but a descriptive name for grouping

together the outward symptoms which I show. When I am led by self-love to

keep my seat whilst ladies stand, or to grab something first and cut out my

neighbor, what I really love is the comfortable seat, is the thing itself which I

grab. I love them primarily, as the mother loves her babe, or a generous man a

heroic deed. Wherever, as here, self-seeking is the outcome of simple instinctive

propensity, it is but a name for certain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention

fatally, and fatally provokes the ―selfish‖ response…..But my thoughts, like my

acts, are here concerned with the outward things. They need neither know nor

care for any pure principle within. In fact the more utterly ―selfish‖ I am in this

primitive way, the more blindly absorbed my thought will be in the objects and

impulses of my lust.82

As embedded organisms, our actions are continuously directed toward modifying our

environment. We are, in this respect, ―outer-directed,‖ the ego to which our activity is typically

imputed is an illusion, the hypostasis of what are but so many outer-directed instincts. This

distortion was facilitated by the ―internalization of man‖ wrought by slave morality, in

consequence of which we are disposed to imagine that a subject exists independently of our

activity, for whom the latter is a mere expedient.

In sometimes suggesting that ideals are epiphenomenal to the will to power,83

Nietzsche

encourages the conclusion that their biological origin vitiates their value as moral commitments.

But Nietzsche also opposes the moral prejudice according to which ―everything of the first rank

must be causa sui.‖84

T47 The fact that our first-person ethical commitments are expressions of

ordinarily unrecognized organic needs does not necessarily compromise their authenticity,

rendering them somehow unreal. Such cynicism is not merely a moral psychology but also an

82

William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume I (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,

1950), p. 320. 83

The ignorant, to be sure, the people – they are like a river down which a boat swims: and

in the boat, solemn and disguised, sit the assessments of value.

You put your will and your values upon the river of becoming; what the people believe to

be good and evil betrays to me an ancient will to power.

It was you, wisest men, who put such passengers in this boat and gave them splendour

and proud names – you and your ruling will! Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 136 (―Of Self-

Overcoming‖).

42

ontology. The cynic prioritizes abstract characterizations of action over the concrete ones,

reducing the significance of what appear as concrete ethical commitments to their genesis in a

more abstract propensity—the pursuit of pleasure, power, self-interest, etc. In rejecting

teleology, Nietzsche‘s mature naturalism preempts such reduction, because the abstract

propensity is not to be understood in motivational terms.

The cynical interpretation of Nietzsche originates commits the same error that guides

some interpretations of natural selection, which anthropomorphize our genes as puppet-masters

controlling our conscious intentions in the service of their own perpetuation. But once we we

eschew anthropomorphism, it becomes clear that natural selection speaks not to the possibility,

but merely the preconditions of altruism, by explaining why the conditions under which we may

experience genuine altruistic sentiments are heavily circumscribes by our evolutionary history,

that an individual‘s continued altruism is a product, not of ethereal moral commitment, but of

circumstances that activate one‘s altruistic instincts. The selectivity of our altruism logically

flows from our being, from the fact that we are natural organism. It is not an expedient by which

we navigate towards our advantage.

Nietzsche‘s conception of human nature does metaphysically preclude Schopenhauerian

morality, which Small describes as ―a selfless benevolence that is unconditional and

indiscriminate.‖85

But the ―discriminatory‖ character of ordinary altruism no longer interpreted

as evidence of surreptitious egoism, because this character is assigned a new meaning from

within an anti-teleological conception of agency. The naturalism of the early Nietzsche was

actually contaminated by teleological notions that are at home within the moral worldview he

comes to reject.

84

T47 85

SMALL Xxxiii

43

Nietzsche‘s positions are difficult to discern precisely because he is often conflicted

between slave and master morality in ways he does not recognize. This is evidenced in his

propensity to describe human agency in teleological terms like striving, abhorrence, discernment,

that have no place within his considered philosophical anthropology. Nietzsche‘s tendency to

anthropomorphize our drives and thereby identify a motivating intention is an inheritance of

slave morality, which indulges the innate human propensity to seek ―a cause for [our] suffering;

more specifically, a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering..‖86

But slave morality also

prepares the ground for its own overcoming. The practice anthropomorphizing of our drives

culminates in a level of self-reflexivity characteristic of free-spirit, who can recognize the true

structure of his agency and thereby pierce the veil of slave morality. As we penetrate the

mystique that normally enshrouds our ends, we recognize that our energies need not be

expressed through the purposes into which they are habitually channeled, and thereby expand the

scope of our agency.

Nietzsche‘s conflict is on display in the following passage:

Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one‘s power upon others;

that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel

one‘s power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure;

pain always raises the question as to its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop

with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who

are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to

thinking of us as causes)…

Certainly a state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable, in an

unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still

lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty; it is

accompanied by new dangers and uncertainties for what power we do possess,

and clouds our horizon with the prospect of revenge, scorn, punishment, and

failure.87

86

On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Sec.15. 87

The Gay Science, Sec. 13.

44

In emphasizing the structural similarities between benefiting and hurting, Nietzsche reduces what

appears like a qualitative difference in intention to a quantitative difference in power, implying

that beneficence and malice are different means to an identical end, the exercise of power – one

presupposing more power, the other requiring less. In the same spirit, the second paragraph

suggests that beneficence is preferable to malice only by virtue of its greater agreeableness for

the agent, not for moral reasons. Nietzsche‘s cynicism might seem strident and unqualified here.

But the second paragraph also hints that benefiting and hurting may not be as qualitatively

similar as was implied earlier in the passage. As only the weak need be preoccupied with

exacting recognition for their power, only they will be filled with anxiety that it may not be

forthcoming – and with recriminations when it is withheld. More powerful individuals are

spared such sentiments and so can afford a less calculating, more genuinely magnanimous

attitude towards others. Consider the following passage from Ecce Homo:

Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of

strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.—If one had the

slightest residue of superstition left in one‘s system, one could hardly reject

altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a

medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation—in the sense that

suddenly, and with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes

visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one

down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one

accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with

necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice.88

Strength for human beings consist in well-integrated instincts, which permit one to experience

one‘s will as an act of obedience to a the situation‘s demands, the surrender of the calculating

ego to that sense of necessity that feels inherent to the situation. Inherent in every will is ―the

straining of the attention, the straight look that fixes itself upon one aim, the unconditional

88

Ecce Homo, p. 300 (―Thus Spoke Zarathustra‖, Sec. 3).

45

evaluation that ―this and nothing else is necessary now..‖89

Nietzsche understands agency as a

self-perpetuating, and typically self-deluding, commitment to an ideal. While potentially

complacent in our unwillingness to reflect upon the origins of these ideals in our own nature, it

does not follow that we are insincere in our embrace of them.

Despite the cynicism that colors Nietzsche‘s analysis of power, it is clear that Nietzsche‘s

admiration for the power of the powerful goes beyond that which one would accord the stronger

bodybuilder, whose moral experience is qualitatively indistinguishable from that of a weaker

competitor. In attributing morally questionable emotions to the weak, Nietzsche concedes,

perhaps despite himself, that quantitative differences in power may produce a qualitatively

different moral consciousness. Being powerful, in the sense of being well-positioned to discharge

their energies, the strong need not be preoccupied with acquiring power as such—with becoming

well-positioned to do so. One self-consciously seeks power only to the degree that one first lacks

it. One who has power simply expends his energies, rather than seeking to produce the

conditions under which to do so.

What Nietzsche characterizes in a sinister light, as an exercise in power, could be re-

described in more neutral terms – as our unobjectionable need to ―make a difference‖ in the

world, to feel that we and our deeds somehow ―count.‖ Still under the sway of slave morality,

Nietzsche suspects that, as fallen creatures, we are prone to esteem power at the expense of the

ends for which it is exercised. But struggling towards a perspective ―beyond good and evil,‖

Nietzsche implicitly assigns power a new meaning, describing it as a sense of efficacy rather than

the ability to control, as it is crudely understood. Efficacy need not presuppose control for the

strong. Like the sun addressed by Zarathustra in the Prologue, whose rays beam forth in all

directions, the strong can establish and maintain their relevance for others in ways that benefit

89

Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 19.

46

rather than harm them.90

The upshot of Nietzsche‘s analysis is merely that, given the universally

human need to maintain the sense of efficacy, strength is the sine qua non of altruism.

Slave morality cannot recognize that altruism presupposes strength because it defines

genuine altruism ascetically, as involving the extirpations of the passions. Only on this

conception of altruism does our need to maintain a sense of efficacy render us egoists, because

sympathy and self-affirmation are here mutually exclusive. But this conception draws its

plausibility from the experience of the powerless, who, having to self-consciously seek power in

the abstract, conceptualize power as the object of desire. Less preoccupied with the need to

express power, the powerful can afford to conceptualize their aims concretely, seeking not power

as such but the power to act on specific virtues, towards specific goals in which they have

genuine conviction. While such conviction would wane with the loss of a sense of efficacy, it

does not follow that the powerful must experience their human relationships as expedients to

power.

This, however, is the predicament of the weak. Having established that anything like the

unselfconscious altruism idealized by slave morality presupposes what its adherents themselves

lack, namely strength, Nietzsche argues that altruism as it is actually practiced by its loudest

advocates is but sadism in disguise. The weak and sickly relish ―the happiness of ‗slight

90

According to Ivan Soll, Nietzsche holds that we derive satisfaction not from others‘ suffering per se but

from the mere awareness of our power to cause suffering (‗Nietzsche on Cruelty, Asceticism, and the

Failure of Hedonism‘, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1994), p. 175). The satisfactions of cruelty are a subset of the satisfactions that

accompany causing anything happen to someone else, which are in turn are a subset of those that

accompany causing anything at all (p. 179). Cruelty draws its distinctive appeal from the fact that others‘

suffering offers particularly convincing evidence of one‘s causal efficacy, which is corroborated by one‘s

success in forcing someone to experience something (pain) against their will (p. 186). Soll argues that

Nietzsche holds out ―sublimation‖ as a means of rendering our instinctive cruelty less objectionable,

allowing us to dominate others without humiliating them (p. 181). Soll does not describe the precise

nature of such sublimation, but it might involve, not simply overriding another person‘s will (as in the

infliction of pain) but transforming it. Rather than forcing others to experience what they do not wish to

47

superiority,‘ involved in all doing good, being useful, helping, and rewarding, [which] is the

most effective consolation for the physiologically inhibited, and widely employed by them when

they are well advised: otherwise they hurt one another, obedient, of course, to the same basic

instinct.‖91

Far from reducing all of our sentiments to the same currency, Nietzsche holds that

both malice and what commonly passes for altruism express weakness because what is morally

problematic in each, anxious preoccupation with one‘s own importance, is the natural outgrowth

of weakness.

5. The Perception of Egoism

But what precisely facilitated the perception of egoism, such that the thesis of

psychological egoism could have achieved such widespread acceptance? How precisely did a

culture come to misunderstand the structure of human agency in a way that obscures its character

as will to power?

Nietzsche‘s masters did not recognize each other as egoists, despite the fact that their

ways were far from genteel. Much like athletic contestants, they required tenacious,

uncompromising opponents in order to exercise the virtues upon which they prided themselves –

courage, self-assurance, resilience. Like contestants, they were too engrossed with overcoming

the resistance offered by each other‘s actions to protest these as ―egoism.‖ For others‘ obtuseness

was a presupposition of their own overcoming. The Homeric Greeks, whom Nietzsche admired

for respecting rather than demonizing their enemies, did not restrict the agonistic ethos to the

arena, but instead conceived of life in general as a contest with the greatest stakes, one

intensified by the possibility of a sudden, violent death. If the slaves were less thrilled at the

experience, we stimulate in them previously absent desires. Our power would be manifested in an agent‘s

transformation, rather than in his capitulation.

48

sound of approaching marauders, cringing for their lives rather than cheerily sharpening their

blades, this is because they could not experience a tussle with a Roman Legion in a similarly

meaningful way. What the robust masters welcomed as an invigorating challenge, the more

delicate and sedentary slaves begrudged as a demoralizing frustration.

Conditions inimical to the flourishing of some persons may be indispensable for that of

others:

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask

yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense

with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some

kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence

do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth

even of virtue is scarcely possible. The poison of which weaker natures perish

strengthens the strong—nor do they call it poison.92

Though we normally conceive of our actions‘ helpfulness or harmfulness as clear-cut matters,

the meaning of another agent‘s actions is often established retrospectively by the nature of our

response. What we initially resent as an intrusion on our peace of mind we may later welcome

as an opportunity for engagement, if we succeed in deriving meaning from it. Every obstacle can

in principle be employed to realize certain virtues by those resourceful enough. To the extent that

we succeed in doing so, our activity could be said to absorb others‘ ―egoism‖, incorporating it

into our self-understanding as an occasion to express that for which we stand. What we

viscerally resent as egoism is a function of our inability to exploit such resistance. Self-assertion

does not always offend, for we may well desire, and indeed require, the resistance it offers. The

coefficient of adversity offered by persons and things creates possibilities for expending our

strength that we might not otherwise encounter. The slaves‘ resentment of the masters‘ self-

assertion is thus a direct reflection of the fact that they lacked the strength and resilience to relish

91

On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Sec. 18. 92

The Gay Science, Sec. 19.

49

the adversity it offered. They experienced this self-assertion as a limit to their comfort and

safety, rather than as a possibility for asserting themselves in action. Every human being, like

every inanimate coefficient of resistance, is potentially both a limit and an opportunity. Which of

these aspects is most salient depends on our ability to derive meaning from adversity.

The more undeveloped is one‘s ability to exploit adversity, the more problematic must be

others‘ unpredictability and spontaneity. A morality directed principally against egoism will

appeal foremost to those needing to keep tight control over their life-circumstances, individuals

too frail or rigid to exploit to relish adversity and uncertainty as opportunities. Demoralized to

the point that they could not be invigorated by life‘s vicissitudes, the slaves became preoccupied

with ensuring the satisfaction of their basic needs and erected a morality that placed a premium

on these ends at the expense of masterly virtue. Egoism was introduced into our moral

vocabulary because of the slaves‘ unsportsmanlike attitude towards life93

.

Preoccupied with physical and psychic survival, the slaves were unable to appreciate the

virtues inspiring the masters to action and so reduced the meaning of the masters‘ actions to their

unwelcome effects on themselves, mere egoism. In so doing, they arrived at what Nietzsche

laments as the ―detestable petty conclusion‖ at the origin of all morality: ―what harms me is

something evil.‖94

To justify this reduction in their own eyes, the slaves had to cast master

morality as an empty conceit. What the masters held up as conviction and tenacity, the slaves

dismissed as obtuseness and insensitivity. What the masters considered legitimate pride in their

victories, the slaves dismissed as smug self-satisfaction. The masters‘ celebration of life became

93

I am here in agreement with Raymond Geuss, who interprets Nietzsche as arguing that the slaves‘

―fascination‖ with unconditional obligations ―arises out of an extreme need for order and predictability

which is a frequently encountered trait of weak and helpless people who face a potentially dangerous and

unstable environment, and who are understandably ready to grasp at virtually any means to introduce

regularity into their world‖ (Geuss, ‗Nietzsche and Morality‘, p. 4). 94

Daybreak, Sec. 102.

50

a rebellion against the eternal, or, at best, willed ignorance before the other-worldly cosmology

informing the slave‘s more sedentary conception of the good. The masters were misrepresented

by the slaves as concerned with a form of self-satisfaction logically unconnected to any

conception of the good, as ravenous wolves, gluttonously obsessed with power and pride—as

individuals who did not hold themselves accountable to principles or ideals.95

Dewey‘ ―obvious fallacy‖ of ―transforming the (truistic) fact of acting as a self into the

fiction of always acting for self‖96

is more than a crude philosophical blunder, but the direct

outgrowth of slave morality, whose caricature of the hated masters set the stage for a more

general misunderstanding of human agency within our moral tradition. The slaves needed to

misunderstand the masters as calculatingly seeking satisfaction rather than unselfconsciously

95

While some commentators interpret Nietzsche as a skeptic who regards master morality as no more

veridical than slave morality, there is reason to think otherwise:

When the noble mode of valuation sins against reality, it does so in respect (of the

sphere) with which it is not sufficiently familiar, against a real knowledge of which it has

inflexibly guarded itself: in some circumstances it misunderstands the sphere it despises,

that of the common man, of the lower orders; on the other hand, one should remember

that even supposing that the affect of contempt, of looking down from a superior height,

falsifies the image of that which it despises, it will at any rate still be a much less serious

falsification than that perpetrated on its opponent—in effigy of course—by the

submerged hatred, the vengefulness of its opponent. (On the Genealogy of Morals, First

Essay, Sec. 10.)

Brian Leiter‘s interpretation of Nietzsche‘s much-debated and much-misunderstood ―perspectivism‖ is

useful here (‗Perspectivism in Nietzsche‘s Genealogy of Morals‘, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche,

Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 334-357). According to Leiter,

Nietzsche construes knowing on analogy with seeing. Just as every spatial vantage point requires that

certain aspects of the visual object remain hidden form view, so every epistemic perspective reveals

certain aspects of a thing while obscuring others. However, while no perspective is complete, it does not

follow that all are equal. Some perspectives are more encompassing, incorporating more of the object‘s

aspects than do others. And some perspectives falsify their object by positing the existence of non-

existent qualities. Along these lines, we can say that the masters were limited in their ability to

understand the profoundly different life-world and values of the weak, just as the slaves could not

appreciate masterly ideals. But while the masters‘ epistemic limitations produced indifference and

insensitivity, the slaves‘ limitations induced them to falsify the masters, to posit dark, malevolent

intentions where none existed. 96

John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University

Press, 1988), p. 96.

51

expressing virtues. For recognizing the masters‘ virtues as such would also have involved

recognizing their own inadequacy with respect to them. To construe the masters‘ as

embodiments of a dark, malignant force called ―evil‖ preempts just this recognition,97

facilitating

97

Robert Solomon argues that resentment is ―notable among the emotions for its lack of any specific

desire‖ because even the revenge at which it ostensibly aims would not satisfy it (Solomon, p. 103).

Interestingly, Solomon concludes the very same passage by dubbing resentment ―the ultimate emotion of

self-preservation (p. 104). This might seem contradictory, as resentment would then appear to involve a

desire for self-preservation. But these seemingly incompatible claims are in fact reconcilable on the

interpretation of resentment that I am proposing. Resentment aims not to physically change anything in

the world, but to cognitively deny the resented party‘s self-understanding (and the ideals upon which it is

predicated), and to thereby preserve that of the resenting party (and its ideals). The revenge for which

resentment seemingly pines is only a means to this end. This is illustrated in Tertullian‘s hope that he

will be present when all those having espoused masterly ideals are disabused of their conceits through the

pain of hellfire. Until that day, he and other Christians must relish such images ―by faith‖ (On the

Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sec. 15) – the faith that the masters‘ self-understanding will eventually

be undermined. The slaves were offended less by the masters‘ actions than by the conviction with which

they entertained their self-conception, their visceral certainty that they embodied inherently noble ideals.

The slaves resented what Maudemarie Clark calls the masters‘ ―easy sense of superiority‖ (‗Nietzsche‘s

Immoralism and the Concept of Morality‘, in Richard. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 25), which in and of itself sufficed to undermine the

slaves‘ self-image. By labeling the masters evil, the slaves hoped to magically deprive them of their

―self-proclaimed goodness‖, to strip the masters of their self-conception, whether through actual hellfire

or at least in the slaves‘ imagination of it. Resentment is indeed a highly philosophical emotion, as

Solomon argues (p. 116). Unlike envy, which aims to acquire something, resentment aims to institute an

ideal, imbue individuals with conviction in it, and undermine belief in rival ideals. Bittner‘s ―sour

grapes‖ interpretation of resentment, the idea that ―ressentiment is at work where people who are

unhappy, who wish to improve their lot and who are incapable of doing so, invent a story according to

which they really are well off‖ (Bittner, p. 130), radically understates what is at stake in resentment,

which is one‘s self-conception rather than one‘s well-being.

Bernard Williams‘s treatment of resentment suggests that the emotion functions not to preserve

the self or one‘s self-understanding, but to preserve an individual‘s sense that his resentment is justified.

In resentment, the resenting party attempts to maintain its fantasy that the resented party somehow

acknowledges it, to magically ―change the agent from one who did not acknowledge me to one who did‖

(Bernard Williams, ‗Nietzsche‘s Minimalist Moral Psychology‘, in Richard. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche,

Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 244). This is the case because,

as blamers, we have an interest in thinking of the offending party as wholly responsible for the harm he

has wrought. To sustain this perception, we must imaginatively cast it as a kind of pure, disembodied

intention to injure, one removed from the matrix of causal forces that might dilute its responsibility (and,

correlatively, the justice of our resentment). This imaginative uprooting is facilitated by what Williams

terms ―double counting‖, the conceiving of the offending agent not only as the harmful action but also as

this action‘s cause as a disembodied, and therefore gratuitous, desire to inflict pain.

It seems to me, however, that ―double-counting‖ functions not simply to isolate the agent‘s will

from the causal forces that would render it less morally culpable, but also to isolate it from the ideals that

would render it less morally objectionable. Resentment imaginatively divorces the agent‘s action from

the broader ethos of which it is an expression. The issue of responsibility becomes pertinent only once

the action in question is cast in an objectionable light. The resenting party seeks to magically transform

52

the desire ―to direct one‘s view outward instead of backward to oneself...[which] is of the

essence of ressentiment.‖98

The slaves misunderstood human agency out of their need to

preserve their self-esteem. For in disregarding the ideal element of the masters‘ actions, the

slaves could fully indulge their resentments over the harm these actions wrought, and thereby

distract themselves from the fact that they were so easily harmed. Rather than recognizing

human agency as embedded, and, with this, recognizing action as the realization of virtues and

ideals in a situation, slave morality cast action as an instrument through which a disembodied

self extracts advantages from a situation.

As is well known, Nietzsche holds that the idea of a disembodied subject is the corollary

of slave morality, which required this idea in order to heap moral opprobrium upon the masters,

who would otherwise be understood as natural forces, which might be lamented but could not be

resented. Just as one might mistakenly conceive of lightning as existing independently of its

flashing, so slave morality mistakenly conceives of the self as existing apart from its actions.

The issue of free will speaks to the question of slave morality‘s justification. But beyond

speaking to slave morality‘s justification, Nietzsche‘s reinterpretation of human agency also

addresses slave morality‘s value. For the picture of a disembodied self also supports the idea of

egoism, and therefore legitimates slave morality as a response to egoism. Like Nietzsche‘s

lightning that exists independently of its flash, the self so conceived was understood to possess

interests standing over and above its interest in the situation, interests for which its actions are

the nature of the offending party‘s intention in order to distract itself from the intention‘s ideal

component. To this end, the slaves needed to see themselves, rather than masterly ideals, as the masters‘

ultimate motivation. 98

On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sec. 10.

53

calculatingly chosen expedients.99

Nietzsche seeks to delegitimize slave morality by

redescribing the reality to which it is purportedly a response.

Nietzsche seeks to do this by contextualizing what gets interpreted as egoism as a natural

phenomena, rather than the capitulation of a noumenal self to natural forces. On an embodied

conception of agency, the qualities we sometimes condemn as selfishness are also constitutive of

selfhood itself. Some degree of insensitivity before others‘ needs and vulnerabilities is but the

corollary of the continuity of concern that is definitive of agency itself. As Nietzsche

emphasized, qualities that some lament as egoistic are, in other contexts, not only tolerated but

admired. One person‘s obtuseness and insensitivity are another‘s conviction and tenacity.

Whether we understand an agent‘s actions as expressing selfhood or manifesting selfishness

depends on the background conception of the good against which we interpret their meaning.

We readily forgive others for having neglected our welfare when we ourselves embrace the

ideals motivating them to action. Being in the service of what we regard as a higher end, their

inflexibility is understood as epiphenomenal to their virtues, and is not resented as egoism.

Embracing these virtues ourselves, we feel that it is incumbent upon us to tolerate their

unfortunate side-effects when they are acted upon by others.

The moralism of slave morality is morality unmored from any positive ideals through

which we might identify with others, despite their actions cost for us. The slaves inveigh against

selfishness as though motivated by an ideal of angelic perfection, but these accusations are but

distractions from their basic emptiness.100

Their cynicism concerning the masters, and human

99

―What I demand is that one should take the doer back into the deed after having conceptually removed

the doer from the deed and thus emptied the deed; that one should take doing something, the ‗aim,‘ the

‗intention,‘ the ‗purpose,‘ back into the deed after having artificially removed all this and thus emptied the

deed‖ (The Will to Power, Sec. 675). 100

One important difference between masters and slaves is usefully articulated in terms of Alisdaire

MacIntyre‘s concept of virtue – which was possessed by the masters but not by the slaves. A virtue as

54

nature as such, reflects the nihilism resulting from this emptiness, the slaves‘ sense that nothing

in the world is so important as to redeem suffering and those responsible for it. What the slaves

advertise as their commitment to simple human decency betrays hostility to life itself: ―Morality

has it has been understood hitherto – as it was ultimately formulated by Schopenhauer as ‗denial

of the will to life‘ – is the instinct of decadence itself…‖101

At base, slave morality condemns not

any particular range of conduct and attitudes, but the structure of life itself as becoming. Egoism

and human agency become coterminous for slave morality, which identifies the perspectival

structure of our agency, our inescapably partial view of the world, with our original sin. But this

identification presupposes a misbegotten ideal of the true self, whose adoption functions to

distort our understanding of the self as it actually is. Thus, Nietzsche identifies the foundation of

Shopenhauerian morality as the fantastic picture of a being whose ―will is anterior to his

understood by MacIntyre is ―an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to

enable us to achieve those goods that are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents

us from achieving any such goods‖ (After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2003), p.

191). Internal goods are forms of satisfaction the experience of which presuppose one‘s genuine

allegiance to the moral tradition within which the practice generating the good is intelligible. By contrast,

external goods (money, for example) do not presuppose any such allegiances. External goods are

connected to our actions extrinsically – as their intended outcomes – rather than intrinsically, as their

meaning. Nietzsche describes the slaves as deracinated social atoms who are only capable of appreciating

external goods. They are ―intent on narrow utility‖, ―begging flatterers, above all liars‖. Far from being

genuine virtues in MacIntyre‘s sense, the qualities cherished by slave morality – ―the warm hart, patience,

industry, humility, friendliness‖ – are valuable only instrumentally, as means to external goods, ―the only

means for enduring the pressure of existence.‖ By contrast, the masters display qualities that MacIntyre

emphasizes are prerequisites for virtue. They are the ―truthful ones.‖ ―It is the powerful who understand

how to honor; this is their art, their realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and tradition—all

law rests on this double reverence—the faith and prejudice in favor of the ancestors and disfavor of those

yet to come are typical of the morality of the powerful‖ (Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 260). MacIntyre

accuses Nietzsche of ―[mythologizing] the distant past in order to sustain his vision.‖ According to

MacIntyre, ―What Nietzsche portrays is aristocratic self-assertion; what Homer and the sagas show are

forms of assertion proper to and required by a certain role. The self becomes what it is in heroic societies

only through its role; it is a social creation, not an individual one‖ (p. 129). As the above statements

suggest, this criticism is unfair. While Nietzsche may have valued heroic culture for the self-assertion

(and self-overcoming) it facilitated, he was well aware that such assertion was intelligible only in the

context of a broader ethos, which was not of the individual‘s own making. 101

Twilight 56

55

existence‖102

—that is, a being who exists, and is therefore capable of acting, independently of his

physiological and psychological constitution.

The contemporary free-spirit will be misunderstood by his contemporaries for much the

same reason that the masters were misunderstood by the slaves. As Nietzsche understood,

individuals with strong convictions, great ambitions, or creative potential will provoke the

resentment of their unexceptional peers, who will belittle these traits as egoism. The free spirit‘s

self-expression undermines the self-understanding, and self-esteem, of creatively sterile

personalities. For in expressing himself, he also affirms ideals that threaten the herd‘s conviction

in its ideals, the values through which the mediocre glorify their complacency as law-abiding

uprightness, or steadfast commitment to God and Country. Though he deprives none of their life,

liberty, or property, the damage he wreaks on the self-esteem of the herd is real. While the free-

spirit understands himself as pursuing self-realization rather than self-interest, the herd will

interpret the former as the latter because ―[w]hat is new….is always evil, being that which wants

to overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties.‖103

The herd is motivated to impute good or evil to individuals in accordance with their level

of social and cultural conformity. ―When men determine between moral and immoral, good and

evil, the basic opposition is not ‗egoism‘ and ‗selflessness,‘ but rather adherence to a tradition or

law, and release from it.‖104

But being disinclined to recognize itself as a herd, it cannot accuse

free spirits of upsetting its smug herd-like self-satisfaction through their example. The herd is

therefore more likely to express its resentment by accusing the resented party of egoism,

wrapping its recriminations in terms that allude to egoism, for example, through claims to the

102

Human, All Too Human 39 103

The Gay Science, Sec. 4. 104

Human, All Too Human, Sec. 96.

56

effect that the accused party is eroding society‘s ―moral fiber‖ through its self-indulgent

excesses.

6. Egoism and Inwardness

The great irony is that while the slaves inveighed against egoism, their entire mode of

perception was egoistic, since they interpreted the meaning of others‘ actions in terms of their

disruptiveness for them. While the slaves portrayed the masters as deviously cunning, it was

actually the slaves themselves who were so. It was only with the priestly form of life that ―man

first became an interesting animal,…only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire

depth and become evil.‖105

Only the slaves could have erected a morality opposed to self-

interest because only they were so intimately familiar with self-interest as a concept. Teetering

on the brink of despair, the slaves had to take an intense interest in their personal welfare if they

were to survive physically and psychically.106

Contemptuous of comfort and convenience, the

masters were concerned with embodying heroic virtues and relatively indifferent to this quest‘s

long-term impact on their health and safety, or that of others (Achilles is an obvious example,

here). What the slaves accepted as paradigmatic of desire – concern for one‘s advantage or,

exceptionally, for that of others – reflects a degenerate condition in which virtue has become

meaningless, so that relief from suffering and the provision of modest pleasures become primary

goals. The slaves‘ happiness was ―essentially narcotic,‖ consisting in ―rest, peace, ‗sabbath‘,

105

On the Genealogy of Morals, Sec. 6. 106

It is often emphasized how the slaves‘ belief in an independent subject arose either out of the seduction

of language, or out of their psychological need to blame the masters. Yet this belief‘s genesis may also be

explained through the structure of the slaves‘ own self-understanding. Out of the self-absorption

necessitated by their weakness, the slaves conceived of the self as a disembodied subject whose interests

are served by its deeds – rather than as an embodied agent consisting in its deeds.

57

slackening of tension and relaxing of limbs.‖107

Robust and optimistic, the masters would have

experienced as inimical the comforts whose equitable distribution was of such intense concern to

the slaves. Engrossed in overcoming resistance, the masters were too unselfconscious to love

themselves as did the slaves, and so could not have transferred this love unto others, or even

understood what this would require of them.

Nietzsche holds that modernity is not fully secularized because it surreptitiously retains

conceptual frameworks, including a conception of agency, that are of Christian origin. Slave

morality‘s secular heir, the ―petty bourgeois,‖ might seem to represent the overcoming of slave

morality. While slave morality renounces egoism as sinful, the bourgeois sanctifies it as the

tough-minded pursuit of rational self-interest. But while the bourgeois ethos rejects egoism, it

retains a conception of agency within which the ―psychological absurdities‖ of egoism and

altruism can appear meaningful. Their common defect of Christianity and the bourgeois ethos

lies not in their embrace of egoism or altruism to the exclusion of the other, but in their mutual

acceptance of the egoism-altruism dichotomy itself. Unduly concerned with his private property,

the bourgeois appears selfish by comparison with the public-minded environmental activist who

seeks to preserve a natural habitat. But the difference between the two lies not between hard-

nosed egoism and starry-eyed idealism but in the activist‘s ability to respond to – which means,

to be stimulated by – objects lying beyond his immediate possession or control. The ―selfish‖

bourgeois does not value his personal possessions over public resources because they are his but

experiences them as his because they evoke in him feelings considerably stronger than anything

else. As we observed in an earlier section, there is no special sensation by which to distinguish

altruistic from egoistic motivations, no Manichean struggle between egoism and altruism

transpiring within us, either consciously or unconsciously. The average person‘s much-lamented

107

On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sec. 10.

58

egoism consists only in the nature of the stimuli to which he can respond, the tenacity with which

a limited segment of the world claims his interest attention. What gets decried as egoism is often

but a manifestation of exhaustion or rigidity – not an ontologically primitive tendency to

maximize gains or preserve oneself.

Individuals whose identifications revolve around security or expediency will, as

Nietzsche observed, be incredulous before broader ideals and suspect that persons who

ostensibly embrace them are surreptitiously pursuing advantage, or else are so naïve as to have

been mystified by an ethereal moral principle. For more dynamic persons, however, whether

they experience a particular act of altruism as self-sacrifice or self-overcoming is a function of

their ability to broaden their identifications. These efforts‘ success is difficult to predict – as

difficult as it is to know oneself – and so we may come to resent demands to which we initially

responded with enthusiasm or, conversely, become enthusiastic about actions we embarked upon

begrudgingly, out of moral obligation. The line between self-affirmation and self-denial is clear-

cut only for persons identifying exclusively with comfort and convenience. Such agents may

have no choice but to become self-consciously calculating in an effort to preserve the narrow

conditions under which they can act at all. Only for them are the possibilities exhausted in

selfishness – which really means inertia – and selflessness – the abnegation of their nature. The

dichotomy of self-interest vs. self-sacrifice is meaningful only to the extent that self-realization is

impossible or undesired. Nietzsche opposes not egoism or altruism as such – both are ineluctable

aspects of human action – but the model of agency that reifies them into separate motivations,

and thereby obscures the flexible character of our identifications.108

Being creatively sterile, the

108

Responding to Maudemarie Clark‘s befuddlement that Nietzsche could see too much altruism and pity

in the world (the opposite being more nearly the case), Leiter argues that Neitzsche is troubled not by the

actual extent of altruism in the world (which is minimal) but by its prevalence as an ideal, which hinders

the emergence of Neitzsche‘s higher types (Leiter 2002, pp. 298-300). However, while Nietzsche is

59

―egoist‖ resigns himself to his present identifications, misinterpreting his mediocrity as hard-

nosed insight into his rational self-interest.109

The ―altruist‖ rejects these identifications as petty

and selfish, but in so doing he becomes alienated from parts of himself that might have been

sublimated into something nobler had it been recognized and cultivated as the seed of a unique

virtue.110

Nietzsche‘s La Rochefoucauld-style ―predilection for belittling and doubt‖ is not

intended to promote indiscriminate cynicism about human nature, as though the insincerity of

what pass for our most high-minded sentiments offers incontestable proof of the depravity of

human nature as such. This is to misunderstand the scope of Nietzsche‘s concerns. Beyond

exposing the insincerity of what slave morality advertises as altruism, Nietzsche aims to dissect

the form of life for which considerations of altruism and egoism are pivotal. Being born of

weakness, the ideal of altruism is normally a tool of the weak, a means to their power. But it

does not follow that the altruism of the strong, of those who do not make an ideal of altruism, is

similarly insincere. After all, Nietzsche wants to stress, not downplay, what he takes to be the

very great differences between human beings. The essence of the slave revolt in morality was to

devalue power, to convince mankind that differences in its quantity cannot impinge on one‘s

quality as a human being. In imputing identical motivations to all humans, the cynicism that is

the modern outgrowth of slave morality carries that task forward by obscuring morally important

worried about the ideal of altruism, he is also concerned with the self-understanding that this ideal subtly

reinforces. Slave morality not only discourages self-love but caricatures it as loathsome. It obscures the

value of egoism by misrepresenting its nature. In so doing, it harms the higher types‘ self-understanding,

not only by inducing guilt but by seducing them into accepting a self-limiting conception of their own

agency. 109

Like asceticism, such hard-nosed selfishness presupposes a level of reflexivity that arose historically,

as part and parcel of the ―internalization‖ of man. 110

―At bottom I abhor all those moralities which say: ‗Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself!‘

But I am well disposed toward those moralities which goad me to do something and do it again, from

morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as

60

distinctions between persons, landing us in precisely in the nihilism from which Nietzsche seeks

to rescue us.

Nietzsche‘s brand of cynicism, if we still wish to call it such, is only a means to an end.

In exposing the hypocrisy of slave morality, it serves to debunk the slaves‘ criterion of moral

worth, the scheme according to which we have traditionally divided praiseworthy from

blameworthy actions and attitudes. In questioning this criterion, Nietzsche paves the way to a

new morality, revealing much of what gets labeled egoism as a degenerate expression of the will

to power. Whereas adherents of slave morality will respond to this revelation by attaching to the

will to power the pejorative connotations they had hitherto appended to egoism and reaffirm their

suspicions about human nature, Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate that egoism is objectionable

because of its degeneracy, not because it (like all else) expresses a power-drive. While

indispensable for the purpose of revealing the structural similarities between ostensibly different

sentiments, and thereby exploding the pretensions of slave morality, the cynical stance can be

abandoned once we recognize the nihilism of reducing these sentiments to their structural

similarities. Much of what we have known as egoism will remain lamented, but this will be for

the low degree of power it expresses. Altruistic acts will continue to be performed, but the

meaning we attach to them will change, as will our broader self-understanding.111

well as I alone can do it. When one lives like that, one thing after another that simply does not belong

such a life drops off‖ (The Gay Science, Sec. 304). 111

―It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral

ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think

that the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to

learn to think differently – in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently‖

(Daybreak, Sec. 103). We might say that, like punishment, altruism was moralized by slave morality.

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7. The Value of “Egoism”

The falsification of human agency has come to structure our contemporary self-

understanding, thereby hindering the self-realization of free-spirits. In regarding human beings

as beholden to insatiable self-aggrandizement, slaves and cynics alike mistakenly presume the

existence of a substantial self to be aggrandized. Consisting in no more than the sum of its

deeds, the embodied, Nietzschean self is maintained, not aggrandized, through action. As there

is no ―doer behind the deed,‖ no doer would remain in the absence of the deed. We would be left

lethargic, withered, empty shells of persons did we cease to expend our strength as befits our

constitutions. For this reason, Nietzsche can claim that ―If we accept self-defense as moral, then

we must also accept nearly all expressions of so-called immoral egoism [as moral?]: we inflict

harm, rob or kill, to preserve or protect ourselves…‖112

This equation of aggression and self-

defense seems outrageous, an Orwellian sleight of hand. Surely, there is a meaningful

distinction to be drawn between self-defense and malice. But as an effective expedient for

activating our energies, aggression can be vital to our psychic survival, which may be threatened

even when life, liberty, and property are not. In promoting the illusion of a substantial self, slave

morality obscures the broader context of aggression and malice – as means of self-preservation.

Nietzsche does not idealize persons whose psychic survival requires aggression. Even the non-

malicious sportsmanlike aggression of the masters may be too crude a mode of self-affirmation

for their contemporary heirs, the free spirits. But Nietzsche wants us to recognize what is at

stake in malice, that it is but the diseased expression of a morally unobjectionable need to

maintain one‘s sense of self. Moral enjoinders will fall on deaf ears when the self‘s survival is in

question.

What could be understood as a natural expression of vitality was reinterpreted as a way of resisting

nefarious, ―selfish‖ forces obtruding from within the self.

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While more refined than the sometimes brutish masters, the latter-day free spirit will

similarly be resented by his contemporaries, who will overlook the fact that, for the free spirit,

the alternative to the aggressive self-realization is not mere mediocrity but disintegration. A self-

absorbed concern for self-realization is inescapable for highly individuated persons, whose

energies cannot be channeled down conventional avenues. Whereas the slaves‘ self-absorption

is necessitated by their overall weakness, that of free spirits is necessitated by their creative

potential, or, rather, by the position of weakness into which their creative potential has thrust

them. It is for this reason that the ―value of egoism depends on the physiological value of him

who possesses it...‖113

The egoism of the weak is but a disguised drive to self-preservation, the

lowest form of the will to power.114

That of the strong is a prerequisite to self-realization.

Individuality is pursued not as an egoistic self-indulgence but as the only solution to a vital

problem, as an attempt to maintain a sense of self in an original way because one cannot do so

through conventional avenues. The creative genius is like ―someone who has completely lost

his way in a forest, but strives with uncommon energy to get out of it in whatever direction, [and]

sometimes discovers a new unknown way: this is how geniuses come into being, who are then

praised for their originality.‖115

Free spirits are more entitled to their egoism than are average

natures because, for free spirits, egoism is a response to an alienation that others will never

know.116

In encouraging us to understand ourselves primarily in terms of egoism and altruism,

slave morality seduces us to overestimate our level of self-integration and thereby underestimate

112

Human, All Too Human, Sec. 104. 113

Twilight of the Idols, p. 97 (―Expeditions of an Untimely Man,‖ Sec. 33). 114

The Will to Power, Sec. 774. 115

Human, All Too Human, Sec. 231. 116

In Ecce Homo (p. 292, ―Dawn‖, Sec. 2), Nietzsche describes egoism as a self-protective tendency,

identifying it with self-preservation and the restitution of one‘s energies.

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our need for self-realization. The picture of human beings as substantive egos pursuing a generic

self-satisfaction (rather than potentials requiring realization in action) blinds us to the danger that

our drives may be poorly integrated with one another. Each of these will then seize the helm of

our consciousness temporarily, propelling us towards stimuli that feed it until a confluence of

external events and physiological changes deposes it from power, clearing room for other drives

to take their turn in guiding us. All our drives are weakened in the process, as this chaotic

infighting between them leaves us perpetually ambivalent and distracted, incapable of

establishing the conditions under which our drives can be integrated and satisfied. The result is

decadence, the incapacity for resisting whatever trivial, momentary pleasures can assuage this

alienation.117

If we escape this fate, the reason may be that our societies have molded us in accordance

with their needs. Exploiting the ―instinct in every virtue that refuses to be held in check by the

over-all advantage of the individual himself,‖118

the social order strengthens those drives that

serve its purposes, at the cost of our overall development:

…for educational purposes and to lead men to incorporate virtuous habits one

emphasizes effects of virtue that make it appear as if virtue and private advantage

were sisters; and some such relationship actually exists. Blindly raging

industriousness, for example—the typical virtue of the instrument—is represented

as the way to wealth and honor and as the poison that best cures boredom and the

passions, but one keeps silent about its dangers, its extreme dangerousness…..

How often I see that blindly raging industriousness does create wealth and

reap honors while at the same time depriving the organs of their subtlety, which

alone would make possible the enjoyment of wealth and honors; also that this

chief antidote to boredom and the passions at the same time blunts the senses and

leads the spirit to resist new attractions.119

117

In decadent states, ―one loses one‘s power of resistance against stimuli—and comes to be at the mercy

of accidents: one coarsens and enlarges one‘s experiences tremendously—‗depersonalization,‘

disintegration of the will‖ (The Will to Power, Sec. 44). 118

The Gay Science, Sec. 21. 119

Ibid., Sec. 21.

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Slave morality blinds us to these dangers. The fear of being branded selfish or self-indulgent

deters us from realizing our unique virtues, whose expression will most certainly be branded as

egoism by the herd. The culturally inculcated presumption that we are social atoms consenting

to be governed solely out of self-interested considerations blinds us to the possibility that we

have already abdicated our potential for self-realization, by identifying ourselves with vitality-

sapping social roles.120

Our religiously inspired desire to be less selfish than we imagine we are

disposes us to sacrifice our development in order to be more useful to some social institution or

goal. While normally interpreted as the regulated pursuit of self-interest, capitalism actually

trades on these inherited instincts, affording us opportunities to become ―productive members of

society‖ and so allay the dread of being ―good for nothing.‖ Morality ―trains the individual to be

a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function.‖121

The ostensible aims

of morality may be unobjectionable. But as a cultural institution it functions to diminish

individuals‘ sense of self-worth and exploit the resulting insecurity in order to induce greater

social conformity.

8. The Value of “Altruism”

In praising selfishness, Nietzsche is encouraging not petty self-centered acquisitiveness

but the courage to recognize and cultivate our individual potentials, the ―self-reverence‖ that is

too rare among human beings.122

In criticizing altruism, Nietzsche is condemning not charity

and helpfulness as such but the broader ethos of which these are symptoms, the presumption that

the self is fundamentally unworthy, that its realization is therefore a needless self-indulgence

120

As David Owen puts it, Nietzsche criticizes herd-morality for ―construing agency in non-expressive

terms‖ (‗Nietzsche, Re-evaluation and the Turn to Genealogy‘, European Journal of Philosophy 11:3, p.

260). In so construing it, slave morality obstructs self-realization by obscuring that there is anything that

needs realizing. 121

The Gay Science, Sec. 116. 122

See Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 287.

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(mere ―inclination‖, to adopt Kant‘s term), and that we best serve mankind in becoming

oblivious to our potential. Selflessness as criticized by Nietzsche is the practice of living

―thoughtlessly and modestly‖ in relation to ourselves. For Nietzsche, selflessness means

impersonality (―autonomy‖, in Kant‘s lingo – freedom from personality). Charity and

helpfulness, as we have come to understand them, are but means of cultivating impersonality. In

dissociating altruism from the expression of intelligence and imagination, the ethos of boy scout-

style benevolence prevents self-sacrifice from evolving into self-overcoming, inhibiting a narrow

conception of our interests from broadening into a more expansive one.

Rather than categorically rejecting the Golden Rule, Nietzsche gives this old idea what

seems like a perverse twist:

…a higher and freer viewpoint, it seems to me, is to look beyond these immediate

consequences to others and under certain circumstances to pursue distant goals

even at the cost of the suffering of others – for example, to pursue knowledge

even though one realizes that our free-spiritedness will at first and as an

immediate consequence plunge others into doubt, grief, and even worse things.

May we not at least treat our neighbor as we treat ourselves? And if with regard

to ourselves we take no such narrow and petty bourgeois thought for the

immediate consequences and the suffering they may cause, why do we have to

take such thought in regard to our neighbor?123

We should pursue neither others‘ nor our own welfare, but self-realization. We will have been

adequately altruistic in goading others towards this ideal. Whether self-realization is helped or

hampered by suffering naturally depends on the circumstances. As it is impossible to generalize

about the value of suffering, it is impossible to generalize about the value of relieving it. In some

cases, others can truly benefit from such relief. In others, our ―altruism‖ will only undermine

them, depriving them of the opportunity to develop their unique strengths.124

Nietzsche opposes

123

Daybreak, Sec. 146. 124

Nietzsche writes that ―the noble human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from

pity, but prompted more by an urge begotten by an excess of power‖ (Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 260).

See Oliver Conolly‘s ‗Pity, Tragedy, and the Pathos of Distance‘ for a discussion of Nietzsche‘s

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only that species of altruism that categorically rejects the value of suffering for the sufferer. Pity

is a nihilistic emotion announcing that no worldly ideal can justify suffering and, correlatively,

that suffering is always meaningless except so as to preempt greater suffering for others (as in

utilitarianism). It is ―the very essence of the emotion of pity that it strips away from the

suffering of others whatever is distinctively personal. Our ‗benefactors‘ are, more than our

enemies, people who make our worth and will smaller.‖125

Pity sees no value in suffering

because it recognizes no value in the self-overcoming for which it creates the opportunity.126

While a potentially brutish emotion, pitilessness can also be a sign of respect, and indication of

one‘s faith in another individual‘s capacity to transform pain into growth.

9. Conclusion

Nietzsche seeks to eliminate both egoism and altruism as ideals and substitute self-

realization in their place. By revealing these ideals‘ bankruptcy, Nietzsche hopes to aid the free

spirit in resisting the herd‘s caricature of him as petty and self-centered. He exposes the self-

satisfied character of Mother Theresa-style altruism not out of cynical delight but to promote free

spiritedness as the genuine alternative to the self-centeredness lamented by slave morality. If

ambiguous attitude toward altruism (European Journal of Philosophy 6:3, pp. 277-296). Conolly argues

that Nietzsche‘s primary, and most effective, argument against pity is that it fails to recognize tragic

suffering as such – suffering that, resulting as it does from an individual‘s particular character flaws, is

necessary for his self-realization. If this is indeed Nietzsche‘s position, there is no reason why he would

object to relieving non-tragic suffering. It can hardly be argued that every instance of suffering is equally

relevant to one‘s self-realization. 125

The Gay Science, Sec. 338. 126

Martha Nussbaum interprets Nietzsche as objecting to pity because of its false cognitive structure.

Nietzsche opposes pity because it ―acknowledges as important what has no true importance [the worldly

things from the absence of which the agent is suffering], as seriously bad what is not seriously bad

[suffering]‖ (‗Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche‘s Stoicism‘, in Richard. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy,

Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 145). I would argue that the cognitive

structure of pity is best described as nihilistic, rather than false. There is no fact of the matter when it

comes to the meaning of one‘s suffering. The value of suffering is a function of one‘s resolve to

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Nietzsche does little to clarify the distinction between self-realization and selfishness, this is in

order to draw attention slave morality‘s unwillingness to distinguish them. Those beholden to

slave morality will read Nietzsche superficially. Presuming that he accepts the traditional terms

of the debate, they will conclude that whereas they oppose egoism, Nietzsche celebrates it as

inescapable and good. But Nietzsche‘s praise of ―egoism‖ is calibrated to direct our attention to

the reality that the concept has historically served to caricature, and thereby reveal the caricature

for what it is. ―Egoism‖ has been slandered like the victim of yellow journalism. Certain of its

features have been exaggerated while others have been downplayed; all have been taken out of

context of ideals that serve as their backdrop.

Nietzsche celebrates pagan morality not to resurrect it in its original form, but to illustrate

through it the ideal element of what has been unfairly discredited as egoism. By exposing the

nihilistic ethos that has heretofore shaped our understanding of both egoism and altruism,

Nietzsche shows how self-affirmation and virtue can coexist. The contemporary free spirit will

be warlike only in his opposition to blind convention. Like his pagan forbearers, whose vitality

was caricatured as ruthlessness, he will find his willingness to assume responsibility for his life

slandered as self-indulgent narcissism by the herd.

On the other hand, let us not make Nietzsche too palatable. While slave morality may

have obscured the true meaning of what gets decried as egoism, it does not follow that egoism

should never be cause for worry – but only that our worries will have to be more sophisticated

than slave morality seemed to require. While the caricature of self-realization bequeathed to us

by slave morality should be rejected, the human and social costs of free-spiritedness are real.

Though less acquisitive and socially ambitious than most others, the free spirit may unjustly

overcome, and realize, oneself through it. To feel pity is to feel that this is either impossible or

unimportant.

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devalue the sympathetic sentiments that give meaning to many people‘s lives.127

Enraptured by

his own ideals, he may become insensible to the pain his actions, or, more likely, his inaction,

can cause others. Like Don Quixote, one can become blinded to the havoc one wreaks in the

name of an ideal. Both Greco-Roman masters, who idealized warlike courage, and the

contemporary free spirits, who cherish iconoclastic creativity, may quite mercilessly hold others

up to their ideals. Let the weak and cowardly perish under the sword; let the sensibilities of

bourgeois philistines be shocked. That this intolerance flows from one‘s more rugged

conception of the good, rather than malice or unprincipled selfishness, will be irrelevant to those

who suffer from it. Nor should the cost of self-realization to the free spirit himself be

overlooked. In seeking to realize his unique potential, he forgoes normal human satisfactions in

pursuit of what may be but a phantom of his imagination. As Nietzsche understood, for every

person who successfully realizes himself, many more degenerate in a futile attempt to assert

themselves against the forces of tradition. What has been slandered as selfishness is in their case

the ultimate self-sacrifice.128

127

Raising the possibility that Nietzsche‘s ideal of self-realization might turn out to be unshocking,

Philippa Foot argues that while so much is suggested by much of Nietzsche‘s writing, Nietzsche cannot

accommodate the ideal of justice (‗Nietzsche‘s Immoralism‘, in Richard. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche,

Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 3-14). I would add that,

beyond precluding such political ideals, Nietzsche cannot accommodate a host of ordinary sentiments

premised on human equality. This, I would argue, is the more serious objection to Nietzsche, since there

is no reason to read Nietzsche‘s celebration of the ―pathos of distance‖ as a political prescription for the

modern world (though it was certainly political in its original, non-sublimated incarnation). 128

See Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 29: ―Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong.

And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably

not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.‖