Nietzsche Discussion 5/13

riedrick Nietzsche (1844-1900) is introduced in chapter 7, ‘Nietzsche For and against’.  He is described as a postmodernist but also of someone that portrays views identical to a deconstructionist on the topics of knowledge and interpretation.  The author in this chapter asks the reader to be aware of the two misconceptions of Nietzsche. One is that he was admired by Nazi and thus must be an anti-Semite.  The other misconception is that even thought he has some views that are deconstructionist views he is in fact not a deconstructionist.
Chapter 7, ‘Nietzsche For and against’ describes several characteristics of Nietzsche.  One view is that he believes people enjoy inflicting pain and take pleasure in cruelty.  He also is described as believing that the only explanation of human behavior as the will to power that consists of pleasure and pain.  On the topic of morality, Nietzsche believes that humans are not naturally moral but that the discovery of guilt is what makes human beings.
After the brief summary of Nietzsche, his text ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ than begins with the preface.  In the preface Nietzsche explains several of his views and relations with different books and people.  Nietzsche claims that one thing all humans care about from the heart is bringing something home.  This is interesting because I believe it means that the task of a person’s life is to provide for their home or bring something to their home that shows their power or worth.  He continues with saying that “we are all strangers to ourselves’.  This is interesting because here Nietzsche is claiming that not even humans understand what their actions or other peoples actions actually mean.    In the preface, he also brings up the idea of the origin of moral prejudices from his examination of the book ‘Human, All-Too-Human, A Book for Free Spirits’ and than continues by claiming he separates theological prejudice from moral prejudice.
His text becomes very interesting when Nietzsche says he began to realize the great danger of mankind.  He says there is a problem with other philosophers and that is that they have a low estimation of pity.  He sees a problem with the value of pity and of the morality of pity.  This thus opens up his ideas of finding a critique of moral values and putting everything into question.  Than the interesting part comes when Nietzsche says that he has a project which is to examine different aspects of humans with new and open eyes, more importantly he searches for a hidden morality.  I believe this is implying for the reader to also do the same while reading his text.  He puts out a warning in the preface stating that the reader must read this text critically in order to understand it.  Is he than claiming that we are not all capable of understanding his text?
The first essay, “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad” begins with criticizing English psychologists as historians of morality. Nietzsche says there is no historical spirit in them though, it is lacking.  Nietzsche than introduces the task of investigating the origin of the concept and judgment ‘good’.  He says that the source of the concept ‘good’ had been established in the wrong place.  This idea is very interesting because it claims that those who originally decided that certain actions were good were only using them to make them themselves better and thus those actions are not really good actions.  The noble, powerful, high-stationed and high minded are the ones that determined what was good and that was that they were the good ones compared to everyone else.  These ideas are very interesting because Nietzsche is here claiming that all values and names of values were thus wrongly determined because it was the noble and powerful people that came up with what these values are.  They came up with a setting that revolved around themselves and thus made everyone else (the low, low-minded, common and plebeian) seen as inferior.  In contrast, Nietzsche than explains that the common, plebian, and low people are than coined as being ‘bad’.  One interesting point Nietzsche makes on this topic is that the origin of language itself is an expression of power on the part of the rulers.
In part 5 of the first essay, Nietzsche explains that the prejudice between good and bad goes further by explaining that the good or the truthful ones.  This than places the noblemen being the ones that all others are suppose to trust in comparison to the bad which are the lying common man.  Than the most interesting part of Nietzsche text begins when he distinguishes the common man as those who are dark-colored and/or black-haired men.  Nietzsche claims that “the distinguishing word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-haired, in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabitants”.
Nietzsche continues his examination of language by discussing pure and impure.  He relates pure to good and the impure to the bad.  Nietzsche states “the pure one is from the beginning merely a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that produce skin ailments, who does not sleep with dirty women of the lower strata, who has an aversion to blood—no more!”’.  Another interesting part of Nietzsche’s first essay is his discussion of the noble and the Jews.  He is trying to explain here that the Jews took an act of the most spiritual revenge toward the Nobles by flipping the moral values to good as being the poor and bad as being the noble and powerful ones.  Nietzsche claims that the Jews began the slave revolt in morality that has been victorious. Nietzsche examination of this revolt and the Jews is very interesting because he is agreeing that they won and that their views are what all people view now.  However, Nietzsche completely disagrees with their views and is not happy about their accomplishment.  He believes that the ‘redemption of the human race is going forward; everything is visibly becoming Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized’.
An important part of Nietzsche’s text is his discussion of this slave revolt in morality.  He claims that all the readers are blind or misguided when it comes to understanding what he is saying.  Nietzsche says the war of the slave revolt has been going on for over 200 years but no one would know that because we as humans have been led on by the misguided-ness of the Jews. The slave revolt doesn’t look at whats outside or what is different.  Another important part of Nietzsche text is when he examines the Greek words that are used to describe the common man to be unhappy and ‘pitiable’ and the words that are used to describe the noble to be the happy ones.  Nietzsche explains that the man of ressentiment is not upright nor naïve, nor honest with himself, rather the man of resentment calls a nobleman’s good, evil.
While Nietzsche is explaining the difference between a noble mans morals compared to a man of ressentiment’s morals.  From this an odd part of Nietzsche’s text is developed when he discusses the noble man and how they are calm and respectful when they are in their own environment, however when the noble man leaves his own environment he becomes a blond beast.  I thought it was very interesting and valuable how Nietzsche compares his beliefs to philosophers and psychologists.  He strikes down their beliefs in order to show his own.  The author made me think of racism and obviously the Nazi’s in this first part of his text.  Particularly when he talks about the problem with the Jews and also when he states that the color black relates with a common man and not the noble.

Discussion Questions:
1. What exactly is Nietzsche talking about when he discusses the great danger to mankind in preface part 5 and relates it to the idea of nihilism? Why is this significant when reading Nietzsche?
2. What is Nietzsche talking about on page 907 when he discusses the old, cold, and tedious frogs?
3. On page 909, Nietzsche talks about the notorious case of buckle, what exactly is he trying to get out about Henry Thomas Buckle’s ‘plebeianism of the modern spirit’?
4. When Nietzsche is talking about the Jews, is he portraying the views of a Nazi?
5. What do you think of Nietzsche examination of the man of ressentiment?

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