Nietzsche — On the Genealogy of Morals

*<<Trevor L. Hoag // Dr. Diane Davis // Rhetorical Theory and Ethics // Nietzsche—On the Genealogy of Morals>>*

In his Genealogy, Nietzsche investigates the “the value of [moral] values themselves” by tracing a “history of morality” (GM 20-21), departing from a tradition invested in uncovering a priori, ahistorical moral truths. Nietzsche begins by analyzing the judgments “Good and Evil/Bad” (24). He claims that “it was ‘the good’ themselves,…the noble, powerful,…who felt and established themselves and their actions as good” (26). Thus, aristocratic individuals valued themselves as “good,” and saw that which was below them as “bad.” Moral distinctions were equivalent with class distinctions. Nietzsche argues that this value judgment was reversed through a “slave revolt in morality” (36). Because the slaves felt a festering ressentiment towards their masters, a desire for revenge, a revaluation took place. In contrast to the masters, the slaves valued lowliness as “good” and denigrated strength as “evil” (40). The masters’ “good” was revalued into the slaves’ “evil,” and the masters’ “bad” or “base” was revalued into the slaves’ “good.”

Furthermore, the weak created the concept of a subject who is “free,” that stands “behind” all activity and can choose between courses of action. The weak “ardently” believe in this subject (45); it comforts them with the thought that they choose to be weak, and provides an excuse to blame (as well as punish) the strong for expressing their strength (as though it could be otherwise). Nietzsche rejects this version of the subject, arguing that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; [that] ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction” (45). Therefore, he criticizes the “disease” of blame and humanity’s rampant desire to punish, offering instead a conception of cosmological “innocence” (83, 137). He suggests that a more noble response to transgressions would not be blame or punishment, but “beautiful” mercy (73), and he imagines a society that would be capable of “letting those who harm it go unpunished” (72). Nietzsche articulates this ethics of forgiveness further by pointing out that the strong “actively forget” transgressions against them (57), in contrast to the prodigious memories of the weak—though the “birth” of this heightened memory (as a mechanism of forging memories of punishment, as well as tallying blame through debits and credits) led to the ability to promise, promises through which the sovereign individual can master fate by fulfilling them (59-60).

Against Nietzsche, Levinas argues that human beings are always without self-possession. Rather than a “sovereign individual, like only to himself…and supramoral” (59), Levinas posits a subject who is constituted through the moral, and fabricated so as never to be autonomous. He writes that “responsibility for the other can not have begun…in my decision” (OB 11). Thus, whereas the Nietzschean individual is autonomous, and constituted with the power to promise, the Levinasian subject is already responding to, promised to, the Other prior to decision. Indeed, the Levinasian subject is created through the promise; what brings this subject into being is a “telephone [call] from the beyond” that cannot be refused (GM 103). Therefore, Nietzsche would argue that Levinas weaves slave morality and bad conscience into the fabric of human existence—by describing everyone as already “hostage” to pity for the Other, and affected by a will that is always turned backward and/or inward (against itself) in self-effacing guilt (84).

This concept of guilt (as well as that of debt) can be explicated to further contrast Levinas and Nietzsche. Whereas Nietzsche argues that “the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin [in the relationship] between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor” (70), i.e., in economic relations, Levinas argues that guilt and debt are etched into human existence as such. He writes that the subject is exemplified by “an indebtedness before any loan” (OB 111), that is, an obligation one has to the Other for no reason. One is always already indebted, and not only can this debt not be paid off, but attempting to pay it only increases the debt.  Moreover, the Levinasian subject is always automatically responsible for everyone: she is “under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything” (116). She has no choice but to respond to the ethical demand of the Other, and is always feeling the strain of this call, this burden, this persecution. This notion certainly contrasts with the unremorseful, innocent, dancing “subject” valued by Nietzsche. Whereas for Nietzsche, morality has a history that can be investigated, for Levinas, ethics is even “‘older’ than the a priori” (101). He re-inscribes ethics back into metaphysics, making it prior to any “representation effected by memory or history” (14), and thus would incur the Nietzschean label of (high) ascetic priest for positing the universality of guilt. And, of course, for Nietzsche, “[t]hat someone feels ‘guilty’ or ‘sinful’ is no proof that he is right” (GM 129).

In response, then, to Nietzsche’s question “Has man perhaps become less desirous of a transcendent solution to the riddle of his existence?” (155), Levinas says “No.” For him, Desire is desire for (or from) the transcendent, for what resides “prior” to the event of representation in subjectivity, and never for power. Moreover, one imagines Nietzsche accusing Levinas of harboring an icy, nihilistic, “disgust with life” (67) by positing a disinterested ethicity “exterior” to the forces power, and for repeating the flawed syllogism “There is no knowledge: consequently—there is a God” (156). One is thus left with the riddle as to why Levinas thinks that the “Nietzschean man” is the highest articulation of the attempt to attune to what is otherwise than being (OB 8).  For how does Levinas square his proclamation of the “impossibility of escaping God” as the metaphysical/ethical call by a persecutory Other (128) with Nietzsche’s fiery denunciation that, as a value, God “turns out to be our longest lie” (GM 152)?  “Rome against Judea,” indeed (52)…