Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
Nietzsche and Objectivism

Unit One: January 31 - February 20

Stephen Hicks' Introductory Essay
on Human Nature and Values
In Friedrich Nietzsche's
Geneology of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 8:33 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Hicks' Part One Introductory Essay

[Moderator's note: This essay kicks off our discussion of Part One of the
syllabus, with readings from Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of
Morals. Jason Ticknor- Shwob and Diana Hsieh will be providing the review
essays, and I will be writing the summary at the end of the discussion.
Eyal Mozes and Thomas Gramstad will comment on Jason's review, and
Christopher Robinson and William Dale will be commenting on Diana's review.
All active participants and faculty are welcome to jump into the discussion
with informal posts responding to issues raised, addressing the questions
that Stephen Hicks has asked, raising new topics, etc.]


Nietzsche on Human Nature and Values
Stephen Hicks

Our purposes in this course are to learn more about Friedrich Nietzsche's
philosophy and to compare it to Objectivism.

To that end we will be reading a representative sample of Nietzsche's
writings. As we proceed through the readings and discussion we will attend
to standard interpretive questions about Nietzsche, such as whether he is a
systematic thinker, a determinist, a relativist, an egoist, an
individualist,
a nihilist, a proto-Nazi, an anti-Semite, and so on.

Attending to those questions will help to prepare us for our discussion of
the similarities and differences between Nietzsche's and Ayn Rand's views.
To that end I suggest that as we go along we each keep a list of significant
similarities and differences.

Our procedure in this CyberSeminar will be different than that in previous
ones. Instead of my writing a summary post at the end of each unit, I will
write an introductory post at the beginning of each unit. I will suppose
that everyone is familiar with the main themes from the readings, and in the
introductory post I will highlight those main themes and pose several
questions to frame our discussion. This, hopefully, will help us get more
quickly to the interesting philosophical and interpretive issues and help us
free up time for some focus on issues of method.

Masters and Slaves

BGE [Beyond Good and Evil] contains Nietzsche's first major presentation of
his master/slave morality thesis. GM [The Geneology of Morals], published a
year after BGE, is Nietzsche's most systematic presentation of the
master/slave thesis.

Nietzsche's main theses are that:

1. Moral codes can be divided into two types: master and slave moralities.

2. Master morality praises strength, creativity, independence,
assertiveness, and related traits.

3. Slave morality praises weakness, passivity, dependence, humility, and
related traits.

4. The two moralities are underlain by different psychological and
biological natures and express themselves in different lifestyles, modes of
action, and cultures.

5. Moral codes are part of a given psycho-biological type's life strategy
of
survival and increasing its power.

6. The battle between the master and slave moral codes is of long
genealogy.

7. Historically master morality dominated first.

8. Master morality declined and slave morality ascended.

9. Currently the slave morality is winning.

10. The major symptoms of this are the cultural dominance of socialists,
democracts, Judeo-Christian priests, egalitarians, and the like.

11. The slave morality's dominance is a threat to the advancement of man.

12. Master morality or a new form of it needs to be rejuvenated.

Questions for discussion:

On point 1:

a) Are the two types either/or or more-or-less characterizations? I.e.,
for Nietzsche, is everyone deep-down either a slave or a master, or are we
all mixes and degrees of the two sets of traits?

On points 2 and 3:

b) Nietzsche never praises the masters for their intelligence or deep
thinking. Instead he assigns to the slaves the virtue of intelligence. He
regularly describes the slaves' leaders as cunning, as having devised
long-term strategies, as having interesting depths of mind, and so on. Why
is intelligence on the side of the slaves?

On points 4 and 5:

c) Nietzsche holds that one's moral philosophy is an expression of a
psychology, and in keeping with his biological focus, that one's psychology
is an expression of one's biological heritage. Is this reductionism? Is it
deterministic?

d) By emphasizing weakness and passivity, how can the slave morality
possibly be a life- and power-enhancing strategy?

On points 6 and 7:

e) Why do a genealogy of morals? Why not say instead: Here are the
opposed
values and virtues of the master and slave moralities, and here is why the
slave morality is false and the master morality true? Why should their
origins be anything more than of historical interest?

f) What is the point of the philological evidence about words' original
meanings and their difference from contemporary meanings?

g) There is a traditional Athens-versus-Jerusalem opposition in cultural
history. What is the significance of Nietzsche's choosing Rome instead of
Athens to oppose to Jerusalem?

On point 8:

h) How, given the characteristics of masters and slaves, could the slave
morality possibly have won? If everything the slaves stand for is
psychologically and constitutionally alien to the masters, how could the
masters have given up or bought into the slave morality? Nietzsche said the
slaves' weapon was their moral code, but how could it have been effective?

On point 9:

i) Nietzsche cites many examples as evidence of the dominance of slave
morality. For example, he points out that the chief slave, the Pope, now
sits in Rome. (Nothing like planting your flag in the middle of the enemy's
camp to demonstrate your victory). How good is his reading of the European
social climate of his time? Would the vigor of the capitalist economic
sector, of science, of technology, of the lively artistic communities count
against him? Is his pessimistic reading of his culture accurate or more an
expression of a personal alienation?

On point 10:

j) Is Nietzsche offering a psychological or historical/cultural thesis
about
the origin of slave values? Is he saying, e.g., that all cultures contain
members who have weak constitutions, and slave moralities are an expression
of those weaker constitutions? Or is his use of the history of Judaism
especially significant -- i.e., is he saying that our current slave morality
is a result of the Jews' existential situation as slaves in Egypt?

On point 11:

k) Does Nietzsche's supposed reduction of morality to psychology imply a
relativism or perspectivalism? Are slaves really bad, or is it just that
they seem so from Nietzsche's alien psychology? E.g., is the increasing
numbers or dominance of the bunny population really a decline for organic
life, or merely something distasteful from the perspective of another
species, e.g., that of the badger?

l) If we take Nietzsche not to be a relativist and to be saying that the
slaves really embody everything that is bad in and for man, is Nietzsche
saying that mankind would be better off if there were no slaves? Or should
we take his biological emphasis this way: a culture's life cycle has a
growth and a decline phase, and the slaves are a necessary part of that
cycle, and so to be evaluated simply as one phase in the cycle of life? Or
should we say that the slaves are good, because they're the fertilizer for
future growth or because the masters will emerge stronger from the conflict
with them?

On point 12:

m) Nietzsche doesn't tell us what form a new or rejuvenated master morality
will take. Is it in any way predictable, or do we just have to wait for the
Zarathustras to emerge and see what they generate?


Please feel free to pick and choose among these questions to address, and to
add others.


[Stephen Hicks]


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Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
cybersem@objectivistcenter.org

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

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