In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche uses the “Master-Slave” morality show how the dionysiac primal whirlpool of energies of the noble and strong were repressed by the weak slave like mob; herd; plebians. This triumph of this slave-revolt is manifest in Europe - bleached by the Judaic Christian value system of self-renunciation and the desire for self-mortification – to invoke “bad conscience” to feel a warped notion of good. Judaism-Christianity, a product of the slave-revolt thus becomes an objectification of a subtle sublimated cruelty that represses man’s instinctual energies. Quintessentially, the rancorous weak tries to invert the strong’s conscience, to turn him against himself through imposing justice “dignified vengeance”; penal codes; responsibilities and outstanding debt towards the greater commonwealth; the transcendent ethical God (notions of sin and guilt); democracy upon their forgetfulness to make them behold their suffering as pleasure. Hence, the days where the strong’s idea of the good-bad dichotomy as genuinely a self-confident, valorous inward evaluating has atrophied. On the ascendant is an outward, reactive, vindictive appraisal of others filled with rancour and the will for vengeance – and herein lies the origins of all evils i.e. all absurd renunciations of the self.
Most striking in the genealogy of Morals is the constant blathering on of notions of autonomy and responsibility. Nietzsche first tries to paint an ideal of a “fully emancipated man, a master of his will, who dares make promises… [who is] truly free [possessing] a long range, pertinacious will and a scale of values, viewing others from the center of his own being [by which] he either honors or disdain them.” (pp. 191) Then, he tries to show how forms of responsibilities and duties are inculcated into man through mnemotechnics to “brand” (pp. 192) it them upon man acts like a fetter upon the individual’s autonomy and will. He gives the analogy of the individual as a debtor – the strong who “[has to] enjoin on his own conscience the duty of repayment” to the creditor – the weak or the commonwealth that provides for the day-to-day life of the individual but also bequeaths upon him “justice” if he goes against the generality. The most sublime means of ensuring an individual’s constant cognizance to his commonwealth – or constant repayment of his debt however is to constantly invoke psychological reactions of “remorse” and “pangs of conscience” (pp. 214) and to interiorize responsibility into a man’s soul (pp. 217).
As such, Nietzsche one of the conclusions from which we can infer that Nietzsche tries to draw is the badness of the polity or commonwealth constantly being portrayed as the rancorous, jealous and vengeful weak trying to level the superiority and grandiose of the noble. Nietzsche reiterates this with his lucid literary expressions of how “man [is] confined within an oppressive narrowness and regularity, [and begins] to rend, persecute and terrify himself like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage” (pp. 218).
Upon such claims Nietzsche lays, we cannot however take them as empirical possibilities but only as ideal typical scenarios. Herbert Mead in writing on the dialectic between the “I” and his famous neologism of the “generalized other” or the society’s attitudes en generale has shown that no notions of the self can emerge without prior internalization of the cultural attitudes of society because the latter functions as a cardinal substrate for all thoughts and actions. Hence, I feel that just like how Marx can hypothesize a chimerical revolution of the proletariats on the bourgeois, Nietzsche in portrayal of the human polity as an “oppressive machinery” (pp. 218) that tries to “bind the populace into the tight mold” (pp.218) and the presumption of ardent drives to emancipate ourselves or break free from the polity is far too exaggerated. First, Nietzsche’s presumptuous assumptions cannot justify the real potency of ideologies in creating purely apathetic people bereft of any desire and will to break free or the joy of living together. Also, it is simply impossible to live “fully emancipated” because all individuality is defined on the basis of a given substrate or polity. One can thus live freely in a polity, but cannot exist outside any polities. As Aristotle has most ingeniously expressed, man is a political animal who to live the best life must tame his barbaric instincts and uplift his rational prowess to attain the ultimate happiness. Hence, I question whether Nietzsche’s “full emancipation” if taken literally can actually bring man ultimate happiness.
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