notes on morality

master morality

focuses on pursuit of excellence. Aristotle uses a word which can be translated either as "virtue" or as "excellence," and one might think that these are two completely different notions, the idea of "virtue" being a moral notion, whereas the idea of "excellence" is more practical/prudential and has nothing to do with morality. The idea is, however, that these two things are not opposed; what we are doing when we pursue morality broadly-construed, master morality, is we are pursuing our own excellence. Virtues are excellences. When Aristotle goes on to list the virtues we not only find things like honesty and trustworthiness, but also wittiness, being a good friend, being congenial. The idea is that in pursuit of being a really good person, a beautiful person, everything gets taken into account, and there is no reason to privilege some particular virtues or traits over others; it takes the whole package. Aristotle calls this the unity of the virtues, the idea that a really good admirable person is going to have not just one virtue, but all of them in proper proportion. Nietzsche rejects Aristotle in this sense. He sees Aristotle and his two illustrious predecessors, Socrates and Plato, as already belonging to the period in Greece which is, in his words, "decadent," it's already on the downward slide. The conception of virtues and the conception of excellence that Nietzsche really admires can be found much more in Homer than in Aristotle. The idea is the celebration of warrior virtues, warrior virtues understood metaphorically. Nietzsche often talks about his own writing and the courage it takes to write, to express your opinion, to examine yourself and to overcome yourself. None of this has anything to do with killing people. What it amounts to is a kind of celebration of a certain kind of pursuit of excellence, which Nietzsche wants to claim has disappeared from the moral scene, and he illustrates it by the fact that we tend to distinguish between the moral virtues and what we call excellence or some kind of accomplishment.

slave morality

emphasizes self-denial. What Nietzsche calls "slave morality" is what we simply call "morality." This morality has, in effect, eclipsed master morality. Slave morality, just as master morality, gets traced back to the ancient world. Nietzsche point our that the people who originated this morality were literally slaves. One can imagine, for example, one brilliant Hebrew slave thinking to himself, "why do we always have to be the inferiors in this social arrangement?" In terms of its logic, slave morality, as Nietzsche puts it, is a reactive morality. It is an attempt to reject, to turn upside down the excellence morality pursued by the masters. For example, the masters think that wealth is a wonderful thing, but then in the New Testament we read that it's easier for a camel to get trough the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven. So then wealth, rather than being a virtue and a benefit, is a real liability. One looks at the masters with their superior education, and one comes with the idea that ignorance is better, ignorance is even bliss. One sees the warriors of the aristocratic class with all their power and fighting ability, but the New Testament tells us that meek shall inherit the earth.


Master morality pursues excellence, pursues one's own conception of what it is to be a great person, what it is to be admirable, and it is not so much comparable, as it is "here is what I can be." Slave morality, to the contrary, is reactive-- the slaves see the masters and they envy them, they feel inferior to them, and consequently they come to resent them. Resentment is a very clever emotion. What the slaves at some very brilliant point in history learn to do is to turn masters' values upside down. What masters would call good, the slaves now refer to as evil. Wealth, power, education, even freedom, are no longer viewed as something to be desirable, but rather as something to be avoided. On the other side of it, masters make a distinction between good and bad. Bad means failure. Bad means pathetic. If a master fails to achieve what he sets out to achieve, that's bad, and of course, he looks down (the metaphor is significant) at all these people who are not even in a position to try to achieve the things the master aspires to, and he sees them as bad, meaning pathetic. It is interesting to note that Aristotle doesn't even allow for the possibility of slaves and other non-aristocrats to be happy; they might be good slaves, or they might even be in some sense good people, but nevertheless they cannot achieve the kind of happiness/fulfillment/excellence that the masters insist upon. On the other side, if the slaves emphasize evil as the primary category, they have a notion of good which is in many ways dependent on the notion of evil, because if what is evil is what the masters consider good, and if these are things to be avoided because they make you in some sense a worse person, then to be good is, in fact, to have less of these things, or best, none of these things. The ultimate result of this is a kind of self-denial. What we get is the phenomenon of asceticism. We learn that the good is self-denial, that denying oneself is a good thing in itself.