Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
Nietzsche and Objectivism

Unit One: January 31 - February 20

Jason-Ticknor Schwob's Review Essay:
Master and Slave
In Friedrich Nietzsche's
Geneology of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 7:14 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Jason Ticknor-Schwob Pt. 1 Review

Master and Slave

Abstract: I attempt to explore Nietzsche's procedure of genealogy and his
concepts of master and slave morality, relating them wherever possible to
material from Ayn Rand's corpus. Before starting, I explain in clear terms
that the assigned section deals only with master and slave morality, and
barely scratches the surface of Nietzsche's thought on "human nature and
values." Then I begin my analysis, first exploring Nietzsche's method of
genealogy as a historical means of uncovering a "frozen abstraction" and
attempt to show how Nietzsche anticipates the pre-moral question that is the
beginning of the Objectivist ethics. I try to explain and analyze
Nietzsche's concepts of master and slave morality, emphasizing that master
morality is not Nietzsche's main word on values and that Nietzsche is
basically trying to acquire the broad life-affirming attitude that master
morality includes but slave morality lacks. I offer an unconscionably brief
exorcism of Nietzsche's psychological monism. Lastly, I present a number of
excerpts from Rand's work and comment on their echo of Nietzsche's concepts
of master and slave morality. Throughout, my general purpose is to present
the best side of Nietzsche as it relates to master and slave morality. I am
more interested in showing how Nietzsche has already taught Objectivism
something worthwhile, and perhaps can teach it more- than I am in debating
whether Nietzsche does or does not hold some evil idea which merits his
dismissal.

Written by Jason Ticknor-Schwob

When I first began my research for this essay, it was my intention to
present a general overview of Nietzsche's theory of values, gathering
material from a large number of his works in order to present his thought as
a unified, if unfinished, vision. Unfortunately, during my preparations I
discovered that the total length of my typed notes and relevant quotations
were themselves approaching the 3,500-word limit for review essays in this
seminar. A proper treatment of Nietzsche's full philosophy of values is
impossible to even summarize within present time and space limits. I have
therefore narrowed my focus as much as possible to the issues addressed
directly in our specific readings. I feel a number of misgivings in doing
so, and I insist on taking some time to elaborate my concerns.
Nietzsche is a philosopher whom it is crucial to read in context. One
cannot, as with Kant or Descartes, read an excerpt or single work from his
corpus and take this as a handle on the author's broader philosophy.
Nietzsche's writings are full of words that shift meanings, concepts more
fully explicated in other works, and passages that are meant more to jar us
out of ordinary sensibilities than advocate a literal position. Nietzsche
clearly warns us that

If this writing be obscure to any individual, and jar on his ears, I do not
think that it is necessarily I who am to blame. It is clear enough, on the
hypothesis while I presuppose, namely, that the reader has first read my
previous writings and has not grudged them a certain amount of trouble: it
is not, indeed, a simple matter to get at their essence. (GM, 8)

In my opinions, the selections chosen in the syllabus represent an
important, but very partial and one-sided picture of Nietzsche. They
certainly are not representative of his most important statements on "human
nature and values." Even on the subject of master and slave moralities, as
apparent in my review, these writings lack many crucial qualifications and
statements found in later works. Furthermore, and far more importantly,
Nietzsche's concepts of master and slave moralities cannot be understood
without reference to other crucial concepts in his philosophy, in particular
his notions of the will to power, self-overcoming, the death of God,
overman, and the eternal recurrence. These concepts are, moreover, more
crucial to Nietzsche's thinking (and in many cases, to Ayn Rand's) than the
master and slave issues.

What must first be understood concerning his master and slave morality
theses is that they are primarily, though not exclusively, descriptive.
Though Nietzsche certainly has an agenda in mind, his purpose here is
primarily to show us a new way to look at morality, not to explicate his
particular views. This description, particularly if considered in
historical context, is intended to shake up a complacent moral status quo,
and prepare us for the need of "value-legislation." Most importantly,
Nietzsche's advice is neither primarily nor only to cast of slave morality
and accept a master morality as an alternative.

The selections from The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil are
certainly among Nietzsche's more systematic reflections, and lend themselves
most to contemporary analysis. But Nietzsche, who distrusted systems in
general, is not necessarily at his best while systematic. Nietzsche wishes
to be analyzed, yes, but first encountered: Many of his insights are meant
to take the form of shocks to get us to consider the world from new angles.
(This does not necessarily mean that Nietzsche is an irrationalist or
indifferent to the truth of his theories)

Since I do not feel the material I will comment on is adequate to the
subject of Nietzsche's views on "human nature and values," it is my
intention to write a commentary on the subjects absent here as soon as
possible and post it to this cyberseminar. Until then, please take my
review as a narrow commentary on the issues of master and slave morality.
For those wishing to get a broader view on Nietzsche's theories on "human
nature and values", I suggest the following selections: The Birth of
Tragedy, Sections 4 and 15; The Gay Science, Section 341;Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, First Part; Twilight of the Idols, "Morality as Anti-Nature";
The Antichrist, Sections 1-11; Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism from
Dostoevsky to Sartre, all selections from Nietzsche.

In writing the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche is attempting not primarily
to illustrate the truth of a moral theory but to bring into question a
common way of dealing with "morality." The Genealogy opens up with a
polemic against Paul Ree's The Origin of the Moral Emotion, a work which
purports to demonstrate a certain origin of "morality." According to this
theory, altruistic acts were praised and called "good" by those who received
aid; subsequently, this description was elevated from a description of
useful practices to the level of a "moral" act good in and of itself. (One
may think Ree's theory an obscure and inconsequential target, but Mill makes
a similar claim in Utilitarianism) Nietzsche criticizes this as hopelessly
inadequate. His particular objection is not the content but the implicit
principles behind this sort of theory.

Nietzsche criticizes this as nothing more than a product of an unexamined
abstraction of "morality." If one presumes the existence of morality and
identifies this with altruism and utilitarianism, then by definition the
origin of morality must be something along these lines. "[T]he initial
derivation contains all the typical and idiosyncratic traits of the English
psychologists- we have 'utility,' 'forgetting,' 'habit,' and 'error'...."
(GM, 3) Nietzsche proposes to do responsibly what Ree does irresponsibly:
to inquire into the origins of morality without assuming an ahistorical
continuity of definitions or reading current views back into the past.
Michel Foucault writes in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" that

"[I]t is obvious that Paul Ree was wrong to follow that English tendency in
describing the history of morality in terms of a linear development- in
reducing its entire history and genesis to a concern for utility. He
assumed that words had kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a
single direction, and that ideas retained their logic; and he ignored the
fact that the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles,
plundering, disguises, ploys." (Foucault, 141)

While Foucault puts an unnecessarily postmodernistic twist to his statement,
("ideas retained their logic") the central point remains valid. Meanings
change over time, concepts become blurred together, a word with one
connotation overtakes a similar word with another. The interpretation of
constitutional law, for example, is heavily dependent upon the precise
meanings of words such as "liberty" or "welfare" at a given place or time.
One cannot simply take the word "liberty" and apply its current connotations
to all concepts to which this word has been given. (consider "liberty vs.
power", "liberty vs. license", "liberty vs. duty", "liberty vs. security")
This is particularly the case when a word- in this case "morality"- lies at
the center of a scheme of values.

Nietzsche uses philological evidence in an attempt to demonstrate that our
concept of "morality" has no such easy origin. Persons such as Paul Ree run
together the concept of "morality" with a word that has itself evolved and
suffered multiple translations. By searching for other ways in which
morality has been framed, particularly its original framing, one tears the
mask off the automatic equation of "altruism" and "morality." The linguistic
fiction perpetrated from the accepted synonymy of these terms shields
contemporary morality from even the very possibility of criticism.
(Consider the games Kant was able to play- and what conclusions he managed
to smuggle in- with the word "morality" in the Grounding for the Metaphysic
of Morals)

Nietzsche's genealogy serves, first, to separate the content of morality
from the subject itself, by showing the actual, historical development of
different and indeed opposite conceptions of morality in history. The
second purpose is to show the historical contingency of "moral" valuations
altogether; that, is, Nietzsche hopes to dispel the aura of morality "in
itself" and any intuitive morality of altruism by showing the purposes for
which morality has been used, and by showing that morality originated in
pursuit on values.

There is no other way: the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one's
neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly
and taken to court- no less than the aesthetics of 'contemplation devoid of
all interest [see Kant's Critique of Judgment]' which is used today as a
seductive guise for the emasculation of all art, to give it a good
conscience. (BGE, 33)

In Objectivist terms, the first purpose "reveals a fallacy which may be
termed the 'fallacy of the frozen abstraction'... in this case, substituting
a specific ethics (altruism) for the wider abstraction of 'ethics.'" (V, 81)
As for the second purpose, Rand reminded us that "to challenge the basic
premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one
must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?" (V, 15)
Chris Sciabarra argues that for Rand:

[I]n the history of normative philosophy the primary question of ethics has
usually been: What values ought one to pursue? But for Rand, to begin
ethical theory with this question is to commit the fallacy of reification.
Rand explained that most philosophers have taken the existence of ethics for
granted, reifying the historically given codes of morality, but never
considering their existential function. (Sciabarra, 237)

Walter Kaufmann writes that

Nietzsche revolutionized ethics by asking new questions. As he saw it, his
predecessors had simply taken for granted that they knew what was good and
what was evil. Moral judgments had simply been accepted as incontrovertible
facts, and the philosophers had considered it their task to find reasons for
them." (Shakespeare, 208)

Hence Rand's approach to morality is anticipated by Nietzsche. As
Objectivism stresses, almost all of the "new" moral codes that developed as
Christianity atrophied (Hume, Smith, Kant, Comte. Mill, etc.) amounted to a
secularization of a Christian moral content. That content was thus able to
remain unchallenged because "morality" was assumed necessarily to be about
being nice to others and the only question was about how to justify it.
Whatever else one may say about Nietzsche, in this case he serves as a
direct precursor.

Nietzsche proposes to show that morality as a concept, contra defenders of
the status quo, has a history; that moral principles have been different in
degree and in kind; they are not necessarily altruistic. Secondly,
Nietzsche wants to attack the notion that morality is something to be
pursued in a deontic manner. "One becomes moral- not because one is moral.
Submission to morality can be slavish or vain or selfish or resigned or
obtusely enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of desperation, like
submission to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral." (D, 97)
Genealogical and philological evidence indicate that "morality" was
originally associated with what are called "prudential" actions and are not
grown from any "moral faculty". People build and maintain moralities in
order to do something. Particularly, Nietzsche hopes to demonstrate that
"altruistic" moral commitments have their origins in not-so-innocent roots,
and that these codes persist and remain because of what they accomplish, not
because of any intrinsic "morality" to them.

Nietzsche, who believes that all human drives are a form and fulfillment of
a "will to power", (meaning, essentially, the feeling of success, overcoming
struggle, asserting will over one's current state, one's environment, one's
society etc.) posits the origin of master and slave moralities in the
circumstances which confront an individual or group. Master morality is, at
it were, the "natural" expression of the will-to-power. When an individual
does not have the power of others crushing down upon him, he is free to
challenge himself, and develops a morality of power seeking. This morality
begins with the positing of "good." Nietzsche's best presentation of this
viewpoint is in The Antichrist:

What is good? Everything that heightens the power in man, the will to
power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.
What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is
being overcome. Not contentedness but more power; not peace but more war; not virtue but
fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtu, virtue that is moraline-free). (A,2)

To a master morality, good, it is important to note, is a primary. "Bad" is
a negative, a mere lack or failure to experience the good. Master morality
does not see "bad" as something attractive, but merely pathetic. At the
risk of sounding un-academic (Hell forbid!), one could say that for master
morality, everything that isn't cool simply sucks.

It is worth noting that master morality is a category of moralities, not a
single morality itself. What master moralities have in common is their
focus on a positive goal. Beyond this, they do not necessarily agree, and
Nietzsche details many priestly, ascetic, and tyrannical moralities that
obviously do not fit any of his own preferences. It is crucial to note that
Nietzsche does not approve of all master morality. Kaufmann stresses
Nietzsche's portrait of Indian morality under "the law of Manu," clearly
characterized as a "master morality," which is obviously despised by
Nietzsche. (TI, 3) (how, for Nietzsche, one chooses a more specific
morality must wait for another time)

By contrast to master morality, slave morality begins among the oppressed,
those whose ability to express their will to power is blocked, usually due
to being oppressed by others.

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes
creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are
denied the true reaction; that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an
imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant
affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is
'outside,' what is 'different,' what is 'not itself'; and this No is its
creative deed. (GM, 10)

Slave morality is essentially reactive. The first experience of the slave
is not the fullness of life but the terror at the oppressor: hence the
oppressor becomes the focus and becomes known as "evil." "Evil" is thought
as a primary: it is powerful, attractive, "sexy" and forbidden. "Good" is
that which is left to the slaves: meekness, weakness, herd-spirit, which
serve to further the survival of slave qua slave. The slave, since he
cannot achieve anything in life, creates a "heaven," a "moral universe,"
where the order of real life is termed upside down. Everything lowly that
the slave cannot on earth rise above is glorified as an eternal, spiritual
good. Everything that aids the slave in getting a few crumbs from the
oppressors, charity, altruism, pity, is likewise canonized. The idea is
essentially parallel to Rand's analysis of the New Left; when the leftists
found out that they were incapable of producing shoes, they made it a virtue
to go barefoot.

Ressentiment is a key term for Nietzsche. It indicates the envious eye of
the inferior who gazes up at the superior and becomes consumed with revenge.
It is his primary objection to socialism, Christianity, and much else: all
these belief systems entail a heaping of scorn upon everything good. This
concept can also be found in Ayn Rand's writings, though under a new name:
hatred of the good for being the good. In the "Age of Envy" and elsewhere,
Rand presents this phenomenon as the worst of all evils. She defines it as
"hatred of that which one regards as good by one's own (conscious or
subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value
or virtue one regards as desirable.(O, 1) In my opinion, these concepts are
identical.

Nietzsche does not believe that the matter of master and slave morality is
simply a matter of either/or. "There are master morality and slave
morality- I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures
there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and
yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both, and
at times they occur directly alongside each other- even in the same being,
within a single soul." (BGE, 260) "[L]east of all," Kaufmann writes, "does
he claim, as is often supposed, that every man is either a master or a
slave." (Shakespeare, 213)

To sum up: master and slave morality are the manifestations of the same
will to power among those capable and incapable of expressing it. If power
can be expressed, the result is a master morality that places "good" first
and views bad as the failure of the good. Slave morality, however,
confronts a life of suffering and concludes that everything powerful,
successful, and ultimately life itself are evil. Good is the lack of evil,
it is renunciation, made into a "sour grapes" virtue by those who can
achieve nothing else. Slave morality is poisonous because it turns back
upon itself, because it leads to a denial of the earth and is
characteristically nay-saying. Master morality is to be preferred, but just
living by a master morality is not enough; the question of what values to
create is not answered in the Genealogy and only somewhat explained in
Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche's theory is open to one very important, and in my view correct,
Objectivist objection. The problem lies in the psychological monism of
Nietzsche's concept of the "will to power." Nietzsche's claim that everyone
is at all times motivated by a desire for power (unless "power" is construed
so broadly as to be meaningless) seems arbitrary. Nathaniel Branden's
article "Isn't Everyone Selfish?" seems to deal adequately with this sort of
argument, other objections aside. There are other ways to construe the
concept of a will to power. Nietzsche sometimes speaks of it as a
cosmological principle, and at other times presents it not as the particular
nature of human desire but rather a way of understanding desire generally.

These speculations, however, are beyond the scope of this essay.
However, this should not be taken to automatically sink Nietzsche's
philosophical effort. A genealogy, to succeed in its endeavor, need not be
literally true: it need only provoke us into "thinking otherwise," to use a
phrase from Foucault's The Order of Things. Nietzsche's genealogy certainly
allows us to "unfreeze" the abstraction of morality and opens up the
possibility of a non-altruistic morality. This, of course, is not a lesson
Objectivists need to learn, but it serves as an indicator of Nietzsche's and
Rand's similar thinking on this subject, and should point to the possibility
that Nietzsche is deserving of serious study by Objectivist scholars.
Nietzsche's presentation of master and slave morality is another matter.
While Nietzsche's arguments based on psychological egoism may fail, Rand
presents nearly identical concepts based on an ethical egoism rooted in her
ontology of human consciousness. Nietzsche's conception of what an
individual will do or fail to do and Rand's conception of what an individual
should do if she doesn't want to fail are quite similar. The remainder of
this essay will explore some of the parallels that relate to Nietzsche's
master morality/slave morality alternatives.

Rand worked on- and eventual abandoned, a treatise to be entitled The
Moral Basis of Individualism. between writing The Fountainhead and Atlas
Shrugged. The foundational principle of this work was to be man's primary
alternative of accepting a 'life principle' or a 'death principle.' The
life principle is expressed in "the nature of man- the primary matters of
his existence- the rational process- the particular qualities of man as
creator... Show how the 'action spark' has the same application today as in
the primeval jungle." (J, 244) The death principle, by contrast, is "The
only other possible way of survival- through the brains of others." (244)
In other places, Rand characterizes these divisions as Active Man and
Passive Man, producer and parasite, creator and second-hander. The central
theme of The Fountainhead is the opposition of Howard Roark, the creative
architect, to various varieties of the 'second-hander.'

Rand abandoned the use of the language of the 'life principle' and 'death
principle' later in life, probably because she thought it would be an
implicit endorsement of some form of subjectivism in ethics. (I intend to
write at another time on Nietzsche's degree of "subjectivism") Yet the
climactic speech of Atlas Shrugged, contains the following very Nietzschean
passage,

"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means
and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he
practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It
demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity
without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but
with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to
define the good: the good is that which he is not." (AS, 1025)

Just as much as Nietzsche, Rand defines a slave morality whose essence is
life-denial. Notice that in defining the altruist morality she sets up evil
as the primary concept, evil as the negative derivative: precisely in the
image of slave morality's "good and evil", according to Nietzsche
Altruism, for Rand as well as for Nietzsche, is slave morality's primary
manifestation. Rand sometimes uses language that suggests a perverted will
to power. "The moral imperative of the duty to sacrifice without
beneficiaries, she writes, "is a gross rationalization for the image (and
soul) of an austere, ascetic monk who winks at you with an obscenely
sadistic pleasure- the pleasure of breaking man's spirit, ambition, success,
self-esteem, and enjoyment of life on earth." (PWNI, 19) This is
Nietzsche's method of uncovering motives.

To Rand, the 'mystics of spirit' realize the death principle by claiming
that the good "is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond
man's power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man's consciousness
and nullifies his concepts of existence." (AS, 1027) The idealists of
religion and Platonism, in Leonard Peikoff's words, "regard reality as a
spiritual dimension transcending and controlling our world of nature, which
latter is regarded as deficient, imperfect- in any event, only partly real."
(Peikoff, 30) "There are those born of consumption of the soul:" says
Nietzsche of the metaphysical idealists, "hardly are they born when they
begin to die and long for doctrines of weariness and renunciation." (Z, 157)
Nietzsche and Rand both complain about this exiling of value to another
world and as a result bemirsching this one. Nietzsche described such
world-views as "latent nihilism." Rand's objections to Christianity are
similar.

Of Christian sin, Nietzsche writes that it is a "form par excellence of
the self-violation of man, was invented to make science, culture, every kind
of elevation and nobility of man impossible; the priest rules through the
invention of sin." (WP, 90) Nietzsche argued that Christianity's concept of
sin is a device to torture and enslave the higher men, those who do not
think like slaves. "To declare that man is a free, moral, independent, and
responsible entity- and then to load him with the responsibility of some
undefined sin which he did not commit, that is, to load him with guilt and
evil about which he has no choice," writes Rand to Isabel Paterson in 1948,
"is a monstrous thing in terms of morality." (L, 209) When Rand
systematically rejects every principal element in Christianity one can
clearly hear the Xerox machine running in the background.

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin?
What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider
perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of
knowledge- he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the
knowledge of good and evil- he became a moral being. He was sentenced to
earn his bread by his labor- he became a productive being. He was sentenced
to experience desire- he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The
evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy- all
the cardinal values of his existence." (AS, 1026)

This is from Atlas Shrugged, Rand's major work- in the only place where she
explicit comes out and tells Christianity top go to Hell. With this in
mind, consider this passage from Nietzsche:

"Christianity... has waged deadly war against this higher type of man; it has
placed all the basic instincts of this type under a ban; and out of those
instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the
typically reprehensible man, the 'reprobate.' Christianity has sided with
the all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of
whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself; it
has corrupted the reason even of those strongest in spirit by teaching men
to consider the supreme values of the spirit as something sinful... " (A, 571)

This is certainly not the last thing one can say on the subject of master
and slave morality considering Rand and Nietzsche. Certainly, the specific
conclusions they reach are rather different. There is, however, only so
much one can do in one essay. It is a workable beginning.

A note on references:

In most cases, citations of Nietzsche's works are references by section
number or passage title, not page number, in order to accommodate those
using a variety of editions and translations. I have used Walter Kaufmann's
translations by preference, though I have been able to find the full text of
the Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo only in an anthology of inferior
translations.

Other authors cited, including Rand, have been referenced on more
traditional lines. Authors cited from an anthology are cited by the
author's name and the page number of the anthologized version.

Works by Nietzsche (in many editions)

A The Antichrist
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
D The Dawn
EH Ecce Homo
GS The Gay Science
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra
GM Towards a Genealogy of Morals
WP The Will to Power

Works by Rand

AS Atlas Shrugged, Random House 1957.
J Journals of Ayn Rand, Harriman, Ed., Dutton 1997.
L Letters of Ayn Rand, Michael S. Berliner, Ed., Dutton 1994.
O The Objectivist, volume 10, Number 7, The Objectivist, July 1967.
P Philosophy, Who Needs It, Signet 1984.
V The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet Books, NY, 1964.

Other authors

Foucault, Michel
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Cornell
University Press, 1977.
Kaufmann, Walter
>From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Anchor Books, 1959.
The Portable Nietzsche, introduction, Penguin Books, 1982
Peikoff, Leonard
Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridan 1993.
Sciabarra, Chris
Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

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Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
Moderator: William Thomas
Email: cybersem@objectivistcenter.org

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
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