Nietzsche on Natural History of Morals

Beyond Good and Evil summary

• Philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately in arbitrary extracts or in accidental eptiomes, for example, as the morality of their environment, their class, the spirit of their time. In all “science of morals” so far one thing was lacking: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. What the philosophers called a “rational foundation for morality” was merely a scholarly variation of the common faith in the prevalent morality, a new means of expression. Morality is, in essence, will to power.
• Moralities are a sign language of the affects. There are moralities which are meant to justify their creator before others. Some moralities are meant to calm him and lead him to be satisfied with himself. With some moralities, he wants to wreak revenge. With some moralities, he wants transfigure himself and place himself way up, which are moralites used by creator to forget.
• Every morality is tyranny against “nature”; also against “reason”; but this in itself is no objection as long as we do not have any moralities which permits us to judge every tyranny and unreason is impermissible.
• Essence of morality consists of compulsion. For example, utilitarian say “submitting to capricious laws”, and anarchists say, feeling “free”.
• Every artist knows the feeling of letting himself go his “most natural” state. He knows how he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts.
• What is essential “in heaven and on earth” is that there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction. Something that for whose sake it is worthwhile to live on earth. For example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality, something transfiguring, subtle, mad and divine.
• The moral imperative of nature for philosophers like Kant is “you shall obey - someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”. It is addressed to people, races, ages, classes, above all to the whole human animal, to man.
• Morality of industrious races. Industrious races find it troublesome to endure leisure, which is English instinct. English instinct invented the concept of weekday and weekend. Weekend is a kind of fasting, which makes they hunger for working again.
• Under the pressure of Christian value judgements, the sex drive sublimated itself into love in Europe.
• Morality of Plato. Plato sees nothing in bad actions but the unpleasant consequences and really judges, “it is stupid to do what is bad”. Plato did everything he could in order to read something refined and noble into the proposition of Socrates who above all is himself.
• The ancient theological problem of “faith” (instinct) and “knowledge” (reason) is whether regarding the valuation of things, instinct devers more authority than rationality. Rationality wants us to evaluate and act in accordance with reasons, with a “why”, which is in accordance with expedience and utility. The problem is an ancient moral problem that first emerged in the person of Socrates divided thinking people. Socrates instially sided with reason: what he did with his life was laughing at the noblemen for using instincts, and not reasons. But at the bottom, he had seen through the irrational element in moral judgements.
• A reader today picks about five words at random out of twenty and “guesses” at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words, just as we rarely see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form. It is so easy for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. Our senses find it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different. The later would require more strength and “morality”.
• In herds of men (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), there is always a great many people who obeyed, compared to a small number of those commands. Obedience has been exercised and cultivated, that the need for it is now innate in average man as format conscience that commands: “thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something. In today’s (19 century) Europe, commanders know no other way to protect themselves against their bad conscience than to pose as the executors of more ancient or higher commands. On the other hand, herd man gives himself being only permissible kind of man, and glorify his attribute, which makes him easy to get along and tame. The commander who commands unconditionally (opposite of “pose as the executors of more ancient…”), strikes the herd man as immense comfort and salvation. For example Napoleon.
• In an age of mixes of races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple, opposite, conflicting drives and values. Such human beings most profound desire is that the war (opposite drives and values) in them should come to an end. Happiness to them is in agreement with a tranquilizing, being resting state. But when the war (opposite drives and values), with his powerful and irreconcilable drives, rise of self-outwitting, self-control, has been inherited or cultivated, then those magical, incomprehensible, and unfathomable ones arise. For example, Leonardo da Vinci.
• Europe now (19 century) is of one mind: plainly, one now “knows” in Europe what is good and evil. The instinct of Europe (herd) believes it knows, glorifies itself and calls itself good. The herd’s morality resists possibilities of higher moralities with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, “I am morality itself and nothing besides is morality.” The visible expression of this morality: the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement.
• We (free spirits, new philosophers) see the democratic movement a form of the decay political organization, and a form of the decay, namely, making man mediocre and lowering his value. We are spirits strong and original enough to provide the stimuli for opposite valuations and to revalue and invert “eternal values”. We need to teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to put an end to the so called “history”, the nonsense of the “greatest number”.
• Socialist ideal of turning man into the perfect herd animals with equal rights and claims. Anyone who has once thought through this possibility to the end knows one know of nausea that other men don’t know, but perhaps also a new task.