That seems quite simplified, but I don’t have any strong disagreements.
But herd morality is not just hostile to higher men, it’s hostile to all positive development in mankind in general. If you glorify everything which makes weak and weary, you trap society in a prison of its own making. You’ll end up with Nietzsche’s “last men”, which is a mediocre but content population at best, and a society of mentally ill people who have to falsify life at every point in order to cope with it at worst (and this seems to be the current state of things).
Consider one instance of such: The victim mentality. Making other people responsible for you, and blaming them when your life isn’t working out. This isn’t helpful to either of you. You’d effectively be a parasite, but you’d also lack control over your own life since responsibility equals control. The will to power often manifests itself as subversive parasitism, and when the weak (that which has low darwinian fitness) only lives on because it steals surplus from that which is healthy (high darwinian fitness), the whole starts to degenerate. I believe that this is already happening.
Also, morality appears to be the laws which we want reality to adhere to. When we’re dissatisfied about life, it’s because reality is different from how it’s “supposed” to be in our heads. The most obvious solution then, is to stop lying to ourselves and eachother about reality, i.e. to remember that moral values are human ideals and not some force of the universe (like karma). If something can be changed, it’s worth fighting for. But if something cannot be changed, since it literally conflicts with reality, then one ought just to accept it.
From a perspective of “The health of humanity as a whole”, I belive that there’s a lot of beliefs we need to do away with, lest they do away with us. I do not believe that the health and well-being of humanity is zero-sum. It’s possible to better or degrade the whole all at once. Nietzsche understood all this to a much better degree than I can write here.
I guess my point is that not all preferences are livable. It’s not that ideals like “equality of outcome” aren’t appealing in some sense, rather, the attempt to fulfill them would destroy society, they’re unrealistic. Nietzsches philosophy can sound brutal, but that’s because the laws of reality are brutal. Restrict moralities to what’s actually livable and preferable, and you will find that all the “sweet” and naive ones disappear.
I will end off with a quote by Nietzsche: “Wherever one has not yet been capable of causal thinking, one has thought morally.”
But herd morality is not just hostile to higher men, it’s hostile to all positive development in mankind in general. If you glorify everything which makes weak and weary, you trap society in a prison of its own making.
Sometimes Nietzsche will use terms like “life” in e.g. “[a] tendency hostile to life is therefore characteristic of [herd] morality.” But in context this refers to the higher type (in this specific passage to the man “raised to his greatest power and splendor”). The term “anti-nature” is the same way.
This is complicated by the sense in which herd morality is considered harmful to life in an indirect way, because Nietzsche’s response to Schopenhauer’s challenge of life’s suffering is that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” So herd morality is also injurious to life generally because it hinders the Goethe/Beethoven-style aesthetic spectacle that makes life worthwhile.
Importantly, I’d say with confidence that Nietzsche’s opposition to herd morality is driven only by its direct effect on the norms of higher men, without any consideration for its good or bad effects on those of the lower men.
Zarathustra starts out with chapters like “despisers of the body” and “Preachers of death”. In “The Will to Power”, you’ll find quotes like: “A kind of self-destruction; the instinct of preservation is compromised. -The weak harm themselves. -That is the type of decadence” And: “In the doctrine of socialism there is hidden, rather badly, a “will to negate life”; the human beings or races that think up such a doctrine must be bungled. Indeed, I should wish that a few great experiments might prove that in a socialist society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots.” He also often speaks of the degeneration of the species, as if what morality is doing is a kind of eugenics which weakens the species. This is harmful to our collective health, and much in tune with “weak men create hard times” (semi-famous quote, but not by Nietzsche). I’m reading a translation here, I don’t know the original German, but I’m seeing words like “destructive elements”, “decay” and “rot”. He also calls the evaluation of peace over war “anti-biological”, criticizing Mr. Herbert Spencer as both a biologist and moralist. That he brings up biology as well as morality tells me that he’s not speaking purely aesthetically.
When Nietzsche speaks of biology, psychology, physics and evolution, most of what he says still holds up today. Unlike many philosophers before him, he isn’t basing all his ideas on a naive misunderstanding of reality and human nature. Here’s another quote from Will to Power: “In order to understand what “life” is, what kind of striving and tension life is, the formula must apply as well to trees and plants as to animals”. Nietzsche even traces back this “Will to Power” to the fundemental laws of physics.
In either case, a society which can produce geniuses and higher men must have a certain level of quality. Nietzsche must have realized that one cannot optimize for just one thing at the cost of something else, since everything is interconnected. If great men are apples, then society is the tree, meaning that harming the tree would be a bad idea.
That seems quite simplified, but I don’t have any strong disagreements.
But herd morality is not just hostile to higher men, it’s hostile to all positive development in mankind in general. If you glorify everything which makes weak and weary, you trap society in a prison of its own making. You’ll end up with Nietzsche’s “last men”, which is a mediocre but content population at best, and a society of mentally ill people who have to falsify life at every point in order to cope with it at worst (and this seems to be the current state of things).
Consider one instance of such: The victim mentality. Making other people responsible for you, and blaming them when your life isn’t working out. This isn’t helpful to either of you. You’d effectively be a parasite, but you’d also lack control over your own life since responsibility equals control. The will to power often manifests itself as subversive parasitism, and when the weak (that which has low darwinian fitness) only lives on because it steals surplus from that which is healthy (high darwinian fitness), the whole starts to degenerate. I believe that this is already happening.
Also, morality appears to be the laws which we want reality to adhere to. When we’re dissatisfied about life, it’s because reality is different from how it’s “supposed” to be in our heads. The most obvious solution then, is to stop lying to ourselves and eachother about reality, i.e. to remember that moral values are human ideals and not some force of the universe (like karma). If something can be changed, it’s worth fighting for. But if something cannot be changed, since it literally conflicts with reality, then one ought just to accept it.
From a perspective of “The health of humanity as a whole”, I belive that there’s a lot of beliefs we need to do away with, lest they do away with us. I do not believe that the health and well-being of humanity is zero-sum. It’s possible to better or degrade the whole all at once. Nietzsche understood all this to a much better degree than I can write here.
I guess my point is that not all preferences are livable. It’s not that ideals like “equality of outcome” aren’t appealing in some sense, rather, the attempt to fulfill them would destroy society, they’re unrealistic.
Nietzsches philosophy can sound brutal, but that’s because the laws of reality are brutal. Restrict moralities to what’s actually livable and preferable, and you will find that all the “sweet” and naive ones disappear.
I will end off with a quote by Nietzsche: “Wherever one has not yet been capable of causal thinking, one has thought morally.”
Sometimes Nietzsche will use terms like “life” in e.g. “[a] tendency hostile to life is therefore characteristic of [herd] morality.” But in context this refers to the higher type (in this specific passage to the man “raised to his greatest power and splendor”). The term “anti-nature” is the same way.
This is complicated by the sense in which herd morality is considered harmful to life in an indirect way, because Nietzsche’s response to Schopenhauer’s challenge of life’s suffering is that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” So herd morality is also injurious to life generally because it hinders the Goethe/Beethoven-style aesthetic spectacle that makes life worthwhile.
Importantly, I’d say with confidence that Nietzsche’s opposition to herd morality is driven only by its direct effect on the norms of higher men, without any consideration for its good or bad effects on those of the lower men.
Zarathustra starts out with chapters like “despisers of the body” and “Preachers of death”.
In “The Will to Power”, you’ll find quotes like: “A kind of self-destruction; the instinct of preservation is compromised. -The weak harm themselves. -That is the type of decadence”
And: “In the doctrine of socialism there is hidden, rather badly, a “will to negate life”; the human beings or races that think up such a doctrine must be bungled. Indeed, I should wish that a few great experiments might prove that in a socialist society life negates itself, cuts off its own roots.”
He also often speaks of the degeneration of the species, as if what morality is doing is a kind of eugenics which weakens the species.
This is harmful to our collective health, and much in tune with “weak men create hard times” (semi-famous quote, but not by Nietzsche).
I’m reading a translation here, I don’t know the original German, but I’m seeing words like “destructive elements”, “decay” and “rot”.
He also calls the evaluation of peace over war “anti-biological”, criticizing Mr. Herbert Spencer as both a biologist and moralist. That he brings up biology as well as morality tells me that he’s not speaking purely aesthetically.
When Nietzsche speaks of biology, psychology, physics and evolution, most of what he says still holds up today. Unlike many philosophers before him, he isn’t basing all his ideas on a naive misunderstanding of reality and human nature.
Here’s another quote from Will to Power: “In order to understand what “life” is, what kind of striving and tension life is, the formula must apply as well to trees and plants as to animals”. Nietzsche even traces back this “Will to Power” to the fundemental laws of physics.
In either case, a society which can produce geniuses and higher men must have a certain level of quality. Nietzsche must have realized that one cannot optimize for just one thing at the cost of something else, since everything is interconnected. If great men are apples, then society is the tree, meaning that harming the tree would be a bad idea.