▶︎ 0:00 Today's lecture is on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who bears a very interesting relation to degeneration theory. Just to briefly capitulate, degeneration theory was a set of ideas that were very popular in the 19th century, and they've been swept up by history and forgotten by now. But they're very important ideas and very influential ideas, and basically it was this notion that came following Darwin's theory of evolution that we're not always going in a linear progress forward, but there are certain members, certain groups of society that represent a retrograde motion.
▶︎ 0:34 They belong to an earlier time. It's often called atavism. They belong to a more primitive time of our past. And degeneration theory basically captures this fear that maybe all of us, through their influence, could regress to a more primitive stage.
▶︎ 0:47 Now, interestingly, Nietzsche, most philosophers don't use terms like degeneration. They're interested in abstract, eternal notions like the notion of truth. But Nietzsche was a very timely philosopher. He was very interested in actually, more interested in giving a cultural critique of his era than trying to get the final word on the nature of reality, what is metaphysics or the nature of knowledge, or even the ultimate morality.
▶︎ 1:11 He was a philosopher who located us in time and was dealing with a particular problem, and he actually used this term in German, Entartung, but that just translates as degeneration, a hell of a lot, more than any other philosopher I could think of. Nevertheless, his relation to degeneration theory is extremely complicated, and this is
▶︎ 1:32 A very difficult topic, because famously, the Nazis later on in the 20th century... Actually, I should not call them that for a reason that will become clear in a later lecture. I should call them National Socialists. I'll explain that later. The National Socialists, in a certain sense, some of them made Nietzsche their house philosopher. In fact, that's part of the reason Nietzsche had a bad reputation in a lot of the 20th century because the National Socialists took him up.
▶︎ 1:58 But they gave a very flat reading of him, as we'll come to see. For this course, Nietzsche is one of the heroes. Again, retracting some of the stuff I said before, generally, degenerationists tend to be what I call Manichean. They think there's the good over here as a self-standing element, there's the bad over there as a self-standing element, and it's the job of the good to eliminate the bad. Either isolate them, or really, totally eliminate them. And what we'll see is, Nietzsche is one of the heroes of this course because he rejects that picture.
▶︎ 2:30 He says, "Look, in a sense, nothing is bad in itself. Rather, evil or badness comes because of the misbalance between various items." And when you have that kind of thinking, the logic is not to eliminate the so-called bad, but rather to get the right balance. And I think that's his ultimate view. But the very flat reading, which a lot of his texts seem to allow is, he's a classic degenerationist who wants to eliminate the degenerates.
▶︎ 2:58 So this lecture is not about whether Nietzsche was an antisemite or not. That is not the key feature of it. The feature we're looking at is how he used the metaphors and tropes that were developed by previous degenerationists and he gave them this really, really interesting twist. That said, as I'm a Nietzsche scholar myself, I've written a lot on Nietzsche. I'm not going to cover up that he was an antisemite. But that's an antisemite by our standards, and I'll just say something very briefly here.
▶︎ 3:26 Today, by antisemite, we mean someone who has prejudice against Jews. And basically in the time he was writing in Germany, in the 1860s, '70s, and '80s, just about everyone was an antisemite. But in the 19th century, antisemite has a particular meaning. There was a political movement of political antisemitism. In fact the word antisemite was coined by this journalist, William Marr, I think, in the 1860s. And it became a national movement. It was a movement to get a purified Germany, and it had a very right-wing politics. And Nietzsche was very much anti the antisemites.
▶︎ 4:08 So track these two different notions of antisemite. One is prejudiced against Jews, yes, he was, as was just about everyone else. In fact, his friend Overbeck said, "Yeah, we were prejudiced against the Jews, as were all the Jews we knew." But for Nietzsche what antisemite meant is a certain right-wing political movement, and he wanted to dissociate himself from that.
▶︎ 4:29 In fact, his mentor Wagner, Richard Wagner, who we've spoken about earlier, was a notorious antisemite and was notoriously popular among the right-wing antisemites who had these political parties of the right, and Nietzsche had this break with Wagner, and he really repudiated Wagner's antisemitism. Also, his sister, Elisabeth Nietzsche, married this guy Forster, who was a raving antisemite, and because he thought Germany was infested with Jews, he went to, I think it was Paraguay, and did this pure Aryan colony, and Nietzsche was very much against Forster.
▶︎ 5:04 Okay, so that's all I want to say on that. What I really want to talk about is, as I said, not the question of whether he was an antisemite, but how he uses and molds and changes the rhetoric of degeneration in a really, really interesting way.
▶︎ 5:17 But first, I've got to acknowledge there's a possibility of the flat reading, that he's just an out-and-out degenerationist. So I'm going to read some quotations which make him sound like he's just an old-fashioned degenerationist who thinks that these alleged degenerates are dangerous towards all and need to be eliminated. This is from his very famous essay, three essays, actually. It's in a book, The Genealogy of Morals, it's essay one, section nine. "The diseased are man's greatest danger. Those who from the outset are failed, downcast, broken, they are the ones, the weakest of the ones who most undermine life among humans, who most dangerously poison and call into question our confidence in life."
▶︎ 6:04 Note he's using this rhetoric of poisoning, very important for the degenerationist. "The sick, that the sick not make the healthy sick, that should certainly be the highest viewpoint on earth. But this would require above all else that the healthy remain separated from the sick." Earlier when I was talking about Nordau, I said Nordau seems to see two possibilities. We either isolate the degenerates or kill them. Here, Nietzsche seems to be talking about the isolationist element.
▶︎ 6:37 But it gets worse. Again, this is from his book, The Antichrist. "The weak and the botched shall perish. First principle of our charity." He's being ironic using the word charity. "And one should help them do it." That sounds like we want to eliminate them, not just isolate them. And notice this, he says, also from The Antichrist, "Compassion on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction."
▶︎ 7:09 If you recall my lecture on Darwin, I said that is why Darwin is not a hardcore degenerationist because Darwin always valued compassion. And if you have compassion, you can't have this idea of, well, we need to off or isolate those who are allegedly degenerate and inferior. But here, Nietzsche is railing, and Nietzsche is famous for railing against compassion. And many of the people like Galton who favored the eugenics movement, and a lot of them were very active in the politics in the 20th century, they also railed against compassion, because if you've got compassion, you can't have this idea we need to eliminate the so-called degenerates, the sick.
▶︎ 7:44 Again, one of the things about Nietzsche is he's so strong in his language. Part of that is because Nietzsche wants to affect us viscerally. He thinks what you consciously think, it's not really important, it's where your emotions are that really move things. Makes him different from most philosophers because most philosophers care about rational arguments. They try to move you by convincing you with reasons.
▶︎ 8:05 Nietzsche, following the person he admired as a philosopher the most, Schopenhauer, and prefiguring Freud, thought what you rationally, consciously believe isn't really all that important, that there's something working below the level of conscience at the level of emotions. And so he tried to change your emotions, so he uses very overloaded language in a case in point. "A sick person is a parasite on society." He used these notions like poison, like parasite. "Once one has reached a certain state, it is indecent to live any longer. We need to create a new kind of responsibility, the physicians to apply in all cases where the highest interests of life, of ascending life demands that degenerating life be ruthlessly pushed down and aside. For example, in the right to procreate, the right to be born, the right to live." Very strong language.
▶︎ 9:00 And one more quotation, these are all quotations which allow the possible reading that Nietzsche is just another of these flat-footed degenerationists who want to eliminate the weak, the degenerate, and sees them as a poison and infection in society. Last quotation. "The greatest of all tasks in hand," this is from his book, Ecce Homo, "The greatest of all tasks in hand, the higher breeding of humanity, including the relentless extermination of everything that was degenerate and parasitic. That would make again possible the excess of life on earth." That's a really extreme view.
▶︎ 9:39 And so, all those quotations, you think this guy is just a normal person, a normal member of the people who talked about degeneration. He wants to eliminate the degenerate. I'm going to come back with a counter view, but I've got to give you a little excursion into the heart of Nietzsche to do that.
▶︎ 9:56 And actually, I'll quote from something he said in Ecce Homo, because it'll put two pieces on the board that I think are important. This is Ecce Homo, which is a funny title because Here is Man, but of course, he's writing that, that's his own autobiography, and of course, ecce homo is exactly what Pontius Pilate said to Christ. So Nietzsche has this funny humor where he aggrandizes himself and puts himself on par with Christ. That other book I quoted from, you'll notice, is called The Antichrist. And by that, he's actually partially referring to himself.
▶︎ 10:30 So this is what he says in this autobiographical book, which is a real hoot, it's really over the top, and it's funny, but it contains some of Nietzsche's deepest themes. His summary of his genealogy of morals, which is a book I'll be talking about. "Regarding expression, intention, and the art of surprise, the three inquiries which constitute the genealogy are perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far." Notice he uses the notion of uncanny, we'll be coming back to that on the Freud lecture. "Every time a beginning that is calculated to mislead, gradually very disagreeable truths are heard grumbling in the distance."
▶︎ 11:10 See, part of my reading of Nietzsche, that Nietzsche is very indirect in what he says. I'm gonna emphasize this later on, he often says these very anti-Semitic stuff, but he does it not because he's really interested in the so-called Jewish problem of his day. He was actually using the figure of the Jews to subvert the Germans' identity. But we'll come to that.
▶︎ 11:32 So these texts are very complicated and very misleading. And really, he has this wonderful phrase where he says, "We are strangers to ourselves." And so Nietzsche tells various stories, they're just so stories about the invention of modern morality, but really he's trying not to get the past exactly correct, he's trying to give insight into ourselves, make us see disagreeable truths that we don't want to see, so he can't state them directly because that'll just invoke our defense mechanisms.
▶︎ 12:00 In The Genealogy of Morality, in the first essay, he opposes two moralities. One is called the master morality. This is something he attributes a bit vaguely to the ancient Greeks and also to the Romans. And the point about a master morality is it values things like strength, beauty, wealth, power, valor, honor.
▶︎ 12:23 Basically, what Nietzsche is trying to say is he thinks the ancient Greeks in worshiping their gods, which were, to use his own phrase, human, all too human, they were really valuing themselves. Think about it, who is Mars, the god of war, to Achilles? He's just Achilles more so. He's just an exaggerated form of Achilles. So think about Mars. Mars can be cruel, he can be vengeful, he can be powerful, he can be jealous. He's totally human. He's exactly like Achilles.
▶︎ 12:56 So when Achilles, in worshiping Mars, or just generally the Greek gods, the Greeks were actually projecting themselves onto the world and worshiping themselves. Nietzsche doesn't believe in the Greek gods, but he has no problem with that religion, because it's a religion where people get to affirm their lives. So that's called master morality. And there's clearly something he favors in it, namely it's an affirmation of this world.
▶︎ 13:23 And then he tells this story in The Genealogy of Morals that there were these people who were oppressed by the masters. Greek society and Roman society were huge slave-owning societies. In Greek societies, nine out of ten people were actually slaves, in, well, in Sparta in particular. So he says there are these slaves. And he says, "Look, these slaves value the same things as a master, of course." They wanted to be powerful, strong, beautiful, able to smite their enemies and all that kind of stuff. But they're in no position to do it, and that leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance, that you want X but X is totally not available to you.
▶︎ 14:00 So what do they do? Rather than try to get X, they disvalue it. They tell themselves, "Oh, it's..." Oh, I should say, one of the things Nietzsche says about master morality, it has an opposition between good and bad. Who's good? Good are us, the powerful, the strong, those who are able to avenge things done bad to them. That's the good.
▶︎ 14:22 And who are the bad? Well, for master morality, the bad is an afterthought. It's just those of us, those of, like those slaves who can't do any of that, who aren't powerful, beautiful, strong, who can't avenge themselves. And this is a really important point. It's not the job of the good to eliminate the bad. We need those slaves. We need them to do the shit work, the grunt work, et cetera. It's like the slaves are an afterthought.
▶︎ 14:47 So there's not this attempt to elimi- it's not the good's job to eliminate the bad. We need the bad. In fact, think about someone like Achilles. Who does he choose as his ultimate enemy? Not the bad, another member of the good, of the powerful, Hector. Because he makes his reputation by fighting someone worthy of him.
▶︎ 15:06 Well, that is the master morality that opposes good and bad. But there are these weak people, and particularly Nietzsche nominates the Jews. We'll come to that. And these are the people who can't act on their desires because they're weak, because they have no position in society. And that leads to this cognitive dissonance that I want these things that are totally unavailable to me.
▶︎ 15:26 So what do they do? They cleverly revalue them. They say, "Actually, you know what? It's bad to be strong, to be rich, to smite your enemies. That's actually evil, and the masters are doing it to us, they are the evil ones." And who are we? Well, we're the weak and the meek and we turn the other cheek, and that's what it is to be good. So they do this inversion of morality.
▶︎ 15:50 And Nietzsche says in particular, he puts this down to Judaism and then Judaism's successor Christianity. Very clearly Christianity says the meek shall inherit the earth. It valorizes poverty. It says a rich man, a camel can no sooner go through the eye of the needle than a rich man can enter the kingdom of heaven. So these slaves, because they can't achieve what they originally desired, try to talk themselves out of desiring it, and they say it's evil.
▶︎ 16:19 Now, notice this. So the opposition between good and bad of master morality now becomes the opposition of good and evil, of slave morality. But notice what this means. The evil is that which should not exist. Everyone should be good. And they try to convert the others.
▶︎ 16:37 For instance, the Christians want to convert the Romans, which they eventually did, into Christianity, so that everyone should become a meek, everyone should become humble, everyone should turn the other cheek. Because he says this morality was originally begun by Jews and then later taken up by Christians, this is what he says.
▶︎ 17:01 Genealogy of Morals, this is essay one, section seven. "Nothing is worthy of mention in comparison with what the Jews have done against them." That is, the mighty, the nobles, the lords. "The Jews, the priestly people, who in the end were able to obtain satisfaction from their enemies and conquer through a radical reevaluation of values, through an act of spiritual revenge." The idea is the Jews invented this morality as a way of subverting the masters, in particular the Romans, who had conquered them, et cetera. And he says, "With the Jews, the slave revolt in morality begins."
▶︎ 17:39 And then he goes on to say wonderful phrases. "Jewish hate, the deepest and most sublime hate, namely in the-" But then, and this is really important for us to see, you'll see the wheel slowly being turned here. This Jewish hate is namely an ideal-creating, value-reshaping hate, whose like has never existed on the earth. This is a big turn. Remember, a lot of the degenerationists, and we saw that with the way Wagner is involved in degeneration, and all. Degenerate can't be creative. But he's saying the Jews are creative. They created a whole new value system.
▶︎ 18:21 In fact, the punchline is the Jews created us through Christianity, but we'll come to that. He's rejecting, he's directly rejecting one of the central tropes of the nineteenth century degeneration theorists who wrote about Jews. A lot of degeneration theorists had no interest in writing about the Jews, but a lot of them did. But he's rejecting their claim that the Jews, because they don't have their own language, they only speak this, the base German jargon, or they don't have their own land, they can't be creative. There was this old German romanticism said, "Genuine creativity is locked in your language and your place."
▶︎ 18:58 So we see how Nietzsche is now reconfiguring the Jews as creating us. And there's a lot of admiration in that. It was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, meaning he thinks Jewish priests, that man first became an interesting animal. That is a very, very big compliment. And again, from The Genealogy of Morals, essay one, section seven, "Human history would be much too stupid an affair without the spirit that has entered into it through the powerless." He's configuring the Jews as people, yes, they subverted master morality, a morality that affirmed this life, but that gave us depth and made us interesting.
▶︎ 19:50 I should make clear to you what Nietzsche's objection to slave morality is. It's not that it's got God and Jesus and these people don't exist. The Greek gods didn't exist for Nietzsche either. The point is, Nietzsche thinks that slave morality gets us to disvalue our natural inclinations. We have natural aggressive inclinations, and at the extreme, Nietzsche called this the will to power, and some people like Heidegger think Nietzsche's basic thought is that everything is will to power.
▶︎ 20:17 It's a very deep metaphysics that luckily we don't need to go into and it's questionable. But certainly Nietzsche did think humans naturally strive for powerful domination. It doesn't necessarily mean domination over others, it can mean domination over one's self. Maybe we'll come to that later. But Nietzsche also, I think a precursor of Freud, that we all have deep sexual desires.
▶︎ 20:38 And he says Christianity teaches us that those desires, the desire to dominate, the desire to stand out, sexual desires are an affront to God, and it tells us we need to suppress these desires. So what he holds against Judaism and Christianity is that he says it's a disaffirmation of life, because the basic thought for Nietzsche is that we as humans are composed of nothing but these different drives. He was very diverse in his drive. There can be sexual drives, drives to domination, drives to knowledge, et cetera. Humans for him are nothing but a collection of drives.
▶︎ 21:11 His objection to Judeo-Christian morality is that it teaches us to repudiate those drives because many of those drives, aggressive drives, sexual drives, are seen as an affront to God. But he does say that Judeo-Christian gave us death.
▶︎ 21:28 And I'll quote one more of him talking on the Jews. "The Jews were that priestly people of ressentiment." Ressentiment is what happens when you have desires, like you want to be rich, famous, be able to smite your enemies as the original Jewish people were, the slaves were, but you can't do it, and then you start having resentment for those forces that stop you being able to choose your desires. So, "The Jews with the priestly people of ressentiment, par excellence, in whom there dwelt a popular moral genius without parallel." "Just compare the people who with related talents, for instance, the Chinese or the Germans with the Jews and in order to feel what is first and what is fifth rank." There, he's deliberately citing his German audience. Remember he's writing in German and most of his readers are German. And he's saying, "You're fifth rank. The Jews were first rank."
▶︎ 22:22 The Jews were first rank because they created the world we actually live in, the world of Judeo-Christian values. I should say one thing that's very important about Nietzsche, and this I think is an absolute act of genius on Nietzsche. Nietzsche thinks the core of Judaism or the core of Christianity is not its metaphysics, it's not its belief in God, it's not its belief in eternal souls, et cetera, it's its values. And its principle values for him are the value of compassion, you must love your neighbor as you love yourself, and also the value of truth.
▶︎ 22:57 So one of the charges he makes is a lot of people who are secular atheists, they're really Christians. And I've actually debated with people about this, people who think, people who are from scientific backgrounds, are famous what we call village atheists, and I say, "You think you've gotten over Christianity, but that's because you just contract Christianity to the smallest base, these questions of what actually exists. Is there a God? Is there a mortal soul? Was there a divine act of creation?" But Nietzsche says, "That's just the trappings of Christianity." I'm not saying you have to follow Nietzsche on this, but it's a really interesting idea. He says, "No, the core of Christianity is not its metaphysics, what exists or doesn't exist. The core of Christianity is its morality."
▶︎ 23:46 And think about secular atheists, super atheists like Hitchens or Dawkins. What do they value above all else? They value truth and they value compassion. In fact, the reason they value scientific truth so much is because truth is valuable in itself, but they think it's through science we get all kinds of inventions that can ameliorate suffering. For Nietzsche, that means they're just Christianity without Christian metaphysics. It's a really sophisticated and a super interesting point.
▶︎ 24:14 In The Genealogy of Morals, he actually does this passage where he says, and I think this is a bit of a joke and I'll come to it, that the Jews actually invented Christianity as a strategy to overcome the Romans. The Romans are too strong. They're the ones with the arms and their military muscle, et cetera. Jews are these little pathetic people in Palestine. We can't beat them with force of arms. So those suckers, we're going to get them to subvert their, we're going to turn them into lambs.
▶︎ 24:46 This is what he says in The Genealogy of Morals in section eight of the first essay. "Does it not belong to the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge, of a far seeing, subterranean, slow working, and pre-calculating revenge that Israel, before all the world, should deny as its mortal enemy and nail to the cross, the actual tool of its revenge?" Referring to Jesus Christ. "So that 'all the world,' inverted commas, namely all the opponents of Israel could take precisely this bait without thinking." Notice that it ends with a question mark. It's asking you a question.
▶︎ 25:29 Now as a matter of fact, I don't think Nietzsche believed this conspiracy theory at all. In fact, if you've been listening carefully you'll see there's two different versions of this. This Jewish slave revolt was, one is, these people were poor and weak and couldn't get revenge on their enemies, et cetera, and that led to what we call cognitive dissonance. It means their life was meaningless. They needed to give it meaning, so they invented this whole morality that it's good to be weak, it's good to be meek, it's good to turn the other cheek, et cetera. So there the aim is to give their life meaning.
▶︎ 26:01 Here, this is called the strategic interpretation. The interpretation is, oh no, they just invented this whole crap just to subvert these Romans. I don't think Nietzsche believes that. But I think Nietzsche's screwing with his German audience. Remember I said, I had that initial quotation where he talks about Ecce Homo? In Ecce Homo he says, "Everything is here is twisted and it's uncanny, and there are secret passageways so to speak, and it's not what it appears to be."
▶︎ 26:29 He is screwing with his German audience. His German audience is of a Germany that only lately came into existence. Because before the unification of Germany around 1872, 1874 under Bismarck, Germany was like 39 different little states, principalities, et cetera. And I think I mentioned this in an earlier lecture, there were northern Germans who were Protestant, there were southern Germans who were Catholic, southern Germans who spoke Bayerischer Deutsch couldn't understand someone from Hannover who spoke high German.
▶︎ 27:09 What did the Germans have in common? They belonged to different states, they belonged to different religions that had often been at war with each other. The one thing they had in common was, they're not Jews. So Nietzsche's screwing with his German audience by saying, "You are the Jews. The Jews invented you. This Christianity that you so prize is a Jewish invention."
▶︎ 27:31 Remember? As I said, Nietzsche begins The Genealogy of Morals in the preface by saying, "We are strangers to ourselves." Well, he's telling the Germans, "You are strangers to yourself. You revile the Jews, you are the Jews." I'm not denying he was prejudiced against Jews, I'm not trying to say he was an anti-Semite. I'm trying to say he wasn't really interested in the Jewish question. He was interested in subverting his German audience.
▶︎ 27:55 And one way we can track that is this. People like Wilhelm Marr and Wagner, the really big anti-Semites of the late 19th century, they were saying, "The Jews of today are a problem. Something needs to be done today about the prominence of Jews in our society." Whereas Nietzsche's not saying anything about the current Jews. He's saying, "2000 years ago, the Jews made you and you are the Jews."
▶︎ 28:22 One of the things Nietzsche tries to do in his work, and I mentioned this with Wagner, is he tries to get at us at this emotional affective value level. So he tries to bring our emotions into play, because he thinks that you don't convince people with arguments, you convince people by changing their affective relations. He wants people to change their affective relations to the current morality, to Christianity. And by Christianity, I just don't mean belief in God and Jesus. I mean even the secular version that had this incredible valorization of compassion and truth.
▶︎ 28:57 Remember his chief objection to these Judeo-Christian values is he thinks they teach us to eviscerate ourselves. They teach us that they're egoistic, that our strong drives need to be, to use a term that Freud will use a lot, repressed. So this is how he describes what people are manufacturing values in the Genealogy of Morals. "Would anyone like to go down and take a look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on Earth? Into those dark workplaces, there is a cautious, malicious, quiet whispering and muttering out of all the corners and nooks."
▶︎ 29:35 To the readers of the day, this is clearly a reference to Jews. That Jews are these subterranean people who are working in darkness and trying to subvert us. "They are lying. A sugary mildness sticks to each sound." Remember how Wagner went on about the horrible singing of the cantors in the synagogue? "They talk of love of one's enemies and sweat while doing so. They are miserable. All these whisperers and nook and crannied counterfeiters. Enough, enough, I can't stand it anymore. Bad air, bad air. This workplace where they fabricate ideals, it seems to me to stink of sheer lies."
▶︎ 30:14 Now, I really want you to clock, he wants this visceral reaction to the idea that these Jewish fabricators of these new Judeo-Christian values are liars. But that's not really his objection. In fact, in some place he says, "The problem is not with a lie, it's to what end a lie is told." Remember, he had no problem with the Greek gods, because the Greek gods are there to affirm themselves. The problem with the Christian Judeo God is that it's a disaffirmation.
▶︎ 30:44 The Greek gods are like the Greeks, just an exaggeration of them. The Christian God is nothing like us. He's omnipotent, omniscient, and allegedly omnibenevolent. Nothing like us. So he says, "Worshiping that god is a repudiation of this life." Okay, so now I
▶︎ 30:59 I want to come to Nietzsche's relation to degenerationism and what I previously called the Manichean view. He's configured the Jews and Christians as the beginnings of a degeneration that leads to the modern world, a modern world which he thinks teaches us to deny our very natures, our aggressive natures, our egoistic natures, and desire to be dominant in our sexual desires. So you might think, oh, Nietzsche wants a return to the earlier values, that he wants to go back to master values. But one of his books is actually called Beyond Good and Evil, so you might think, oh, beyond good and evil, that is, let's go back. But he says beyond and he means something future.
▶︎ 31:54 So the Jews have done this inversion of morality, he calls it. He actually calls the people, the Jews, a people born for slavery. And he says, "The Jews have brought off that miraculous feat of an inversion of values," that is, a moving from master values to slaver values, "thanks to which life on earth has acquired a novel and dangerous attraction for a couple of millennia." Again, he's complimenting them. Yes, they've given us these life-denying values, but it's made man dangerous and made him attractive in various ways.
▶︎ 32:27 So his rhetoric is very, very complicated. And really what I think Nietzsche wants is he doesn't want to go back to the masters. In fact, in the Genealogy of Morals, he configures the masters as primitive brutes, and it doesn't sound like that's what he wants to return to. Really we should think of what Nietzsche wants as an Aufhebung, to use a Hegelian term, of master and slave morality. He values master morality because it's life-affirming and of course it can lead to direct action. But he values slave morality because it makes humans complicated, it makes them complex.
▶︎ 33:06 And so I'll quote from that book, Beyond Good and Evil. "In an age of disintegration, human beings have in their bodies a heritage of multiple origins. It is we who contain in ourselves both the background of the master morality of the Greeks and Romans, and our present Judeo-Christian morality. That is, opposite are not merely opposite drives and value-standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lives will on the average be weaker human beings." So that again sounds like, oh, we've been turned into weakness by these Judeo-Christian values, sounds like degenerationists.
▶︎ 33:45 But very soon after saying that, in the same book, Beyond Good and Evil, he says, "In a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities which have hitherto prevailed or still prevail on this earth, I find certain traits recurring regularly together and connected with one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves to me and a radical distinction was brought to life. There is master morality and slave morality." And this is what I want to emphasize: "And I would at once add, however, that in all higher and mixed civilizations, there are attempts at the reconciliation of the two moralities." And this is generally a thing about Nietzsche. He'll deal with the opposites, but he's not the Manichean who wants to eliminate one. He's the one who wants to find a balance between the two.
▶︎ 34:35 In his very first book, which is a very confused book called The Birth of Tragedy, he often talks about the Dionysian, which has to do with primal urges, with sexuality, and then he talks about the Apollonian, which has to do with reason and form. And when you first read it you think, oh, he's really favoring the Dionysian, and he's poo-pooing the Apollonian which he associates with Socrates, the arch rationalist and one of his great enemies. But if you read it carefully, he's championing the Dionysian not because that's the good one and that should prevail. It's just that the Apollonian, the idea of the valorization of reason that starts with Socrates and culminates in Kant, that has already won, so he's championing the Dionysian not to eliminate the Apollonian. What he really wants is a balance between the two.
▶︎ 35:22 And that's where I say he's different from the degenerationists. Nietzsche is a philosopher who doesn't want to eliminate anything. He wants to incorporate everything into a greater whole.
▶︎ 35:34 Now I want to come to the chief passage, which shows his relationship to degenerationist theories, because of the type I'm mentioning. Not the eliminationist, not the isolationist, but the incorporation into a greater whole which makes him counter to the whole rhetoric of degeneration theory. He is a philosopher, the only philosopher who constantly talks about degeneration, but he's not that flat-footed degenerationist. And I'll give you the very title of the passage. It's from a book of his called Human, All Too Human. This is in book one, section 224. It is called Ennoblement Through Degeneration.
▶︎ 36:13 Well, to an audience in the 19th century, that makes no sense at all. There's nothing ennobling about degeneration. The people who talk about degeneration like Morel and people who talked about the weak, et cetera, people like the eugenicist, Galton, etc. Even Darwin, the way he talks about it, he just didn't really think anything ennobling in the weak and the so-called degenerate. The very title is a provocation.
▶︎ 36:41 And I will read certain parts of this passage. "History teaches us that the race of people is best preserved where the greatest number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their custom and indisputable principles." So he says what preserves is a certain kind of homogeneity. But then he goes on to say, "It is on the more unrestricted, more uncertain, and morally weaker individuals that depends the spiritual progress of such communities. It is they who attempt all that is new and manifold."
▶︎ 37:17 So this is his move. His move is to say, yes, look, a certain kind of strength and homogeneity of society leads to a stable society. But that stability, at a certain point, can become sclerotic. And you need the infection of something different in order to mix things up and to get change and to make progress.
▶︎ 37:39 And this passage really brings home the point. "Precisely on this sore and weakened place, the community is inoculated with something new. But its general strength must be great enough to absorb and assimilate this new thing into its blood. Deviating nature are of the utmost importance wherever there is to be progress. Every wholesale progress must be preceded by a partial weakening."
▶︎ 38:10 So this is the central point I want you to see. He thinks we need the degenerate because they are, in some sense, different from us, they find new pathways, they find new ways to creativity and if we are strong enough to incorporate them, we can have a stronger whole. And he says this not just for the macrocosm of society, he says it for the microcosm of the individual.
▶︎ 38:35 And I'll quote again from the same passage, "Something similar happens in the case of individuals. A deterioration, a mutilation, even a vice, and above all a physical and moral loss is seldom without its advantage." Again, same passage later on, "It is precisely the weaker nature as the more delicate and free that makes all progress possible at all. A people that is crumbling and weak in one part, but as a whole still strong and healthy is able to absorb the infection of what is new and incorporate it to its advantage."
▶︎ 39:15 So this is a totally non-Manicheistic notion of health and progress. He says, look, yes, there are these degenerate natures but they're, because of their differences, the ones that provoke change. So you can really see Nietzsche's. Here's one model of health. One model of our health is no infection and here's the infection, poisonous elements, and remember, Nietzsche uses all this, meta, all these tropes of people being poisoned and infection, etc. Sounds like a flat degenerationist.
▶︎ 39:45 But a flat degenerationist said, "Oh, real health is having zero infection, keeping out the poison, keeping out the infectious elements." No. Nietzsche's idea of health is quite opposite. He says if you're really healthy, you're strong enough to take in the infection, to take the poison. If you're weak, the poison will destroy you and kill you. But if you're strong, you can incorporate the poison into a greater whole. And that is the means of progress.
▶︎ 40:13 This famous quotation that all we Nietzsche scholars utterly hate, because it's in every bloody movie you can bloody see, "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Well, that'll give you the background to that. And I'll have two last quotations from Nietzsche, to make this point that he thinks sickness and illness is a means if properly incorporated into a greater strength.
▶︎ 40:39 He says, and this really sounds a bit like Freud, "It is a valuable morbid states that they show us under a magnifying glass certain states that are normal, but not easily visible and normal." So he actually says the sick is actually a window into the strong, into the healthy. And then he goes on to say in the same passage, "Health and sickness are not essentially different as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena. This is silly nonsense and chatter that is no good any longer. In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence, exaggeration, disproportion, the non-harmony of the normal phenomena constitutes the pathological state."
▶︎ 41:35 He's actually quoting there from a physician. This was a passage from his notebooks. A very famous physician, physician of the 19th century called Claude Bernard, and Claude Bernard made this point and Nietzsche really liked it, that we shouldn't think of the sick as some kind of weird pathogen that has come in, but sickness comes from an imbalance between various elements of the body. And from a book of his that he never actually published that his sister put together some of his notebooks, it's called The Will to Power, "Just as 'evil'," and he put evil in inverted commas, "Just as 'evil' can be considered an exaggeration, disharmony, and disproportion, the 'good' may be a protective diet against the danger of exaggeration, disharmony and disproportion."
▶︎ 42:20 So remember, on my reading, Nietzsche is like Baudelaire, except he's a philosopher, so he's bloody explicit about it. But Nietzsche and Baudelaire reject the idea that there are us healthy norms and there are those sick degenerates. He says the sick degenerates is actually a window into us. We're not so different from them, it's just that we might have better balances. But ultimately, what they both say is, these elements are not separable from us. Don't have this dream of eliminating the degenerate, of isolating them. Basically, you need to incorporate the sickness, the infection, the poison into a greater whole.