Nietzsche may be the most misunderstood Philosopher. His name often generates a general sense of unease and controversy. Some of said controversy is a necessary backlash which befalls all radical thinkers, a sort of conservative pearl clutching at ones own cultural values. The controversies surrounding Nietzsche often involve his sexism, link to Nazism and his concepts of the Ubermensch and will to power. These and many others are often misunderstood and in some cases like the link to Nazism are outright untenable. But I will only deal with one here, that being the dichotomy of Slave Morality and Aristocratic Morality.
Whether you circumnavigate the world of Anti-Christian values with him or stop in the first foreign port, you will view your port of departure in a new light and see its sickness laid bare. The value of his critiques of modernity and Christianity are unmatched and set up the foundation for the post modernists who — sometimes misguidedly — continue his mission. Nietzsche’s ideas are sometimes defended with the claim “he is just misunderstood”. I have no intention to do that, Nietzsche’s ideas — being exactly contrary to the values held most dear in Christian cultures like ours — are indeed highly controversial but nonetheless the controversy aimed at him is often based on misunderstanding.
Nietzsche’s main target in his critique of Christianity — and by extension the whole western world at the time — is what he identifies as central to it, slave morality. Before moving on to the morality of the “slave” It is best to define what is meant by the term, which I find best as defined by its contrast to its opposite, so we shall start there. Nietzsche defines the opposite of the slave as the Aristocrat or the Master. The aristocratic types simply act and do as they will, the slave on the other hand has no worldly power or capacity to overcome the aristocracy so they rely on argumentation akin to when a smaller kids ball is taken by a much stronger kid, they appeal to reason or fairness saying “that’s mine”. As the dialectic is the slave’s only weapon against the aristocrat, they become highly proficient in it, if the aristocrat takes the bait and justifies himself by moral criteria shaped by the slave, he may internalise those values and begin judging his own strength as suspect.
The morality of the slave as he defines it, is the inversion of the aristocratic morality: turning gluttony, strength and sexual conquest into temperance, weakness and chastity. The slave’s inversion does not create new values out of strength but redefines strength itself as a vice and turns power into guilt. To Nietzsche the key difference is that the slave morality was built from a reactive resentment toward those more powerful than them, in contrast to aristocratic morality where they actively affirm themselves from a position of intrinsic power and then denote their opposite as unhealthy.
Nietzsche thereby shows the unhealthy origin of slave morality and then goes on to show the unhealthy outcomes to individuals and societies who practice it and compares it to the overflowing health of the aristocratic types. Importantly Nietzsche is not saying we ought to return to aristocracy, as he believes aristocracy of the past particularly that aristocracy exemplified in Homer with the likes of Achilles and Diomedes was naïve, it did not justify its values, it simply acted on instinct without the need for justification. Nietzsche pushes us to confront the sickness caused by the long-standing dominance of slave morality and the apparent overflowing health of the aristocratic types so that we can take what is life enhancing and discard what denies life of its inherent value.
