From Struggle to Intensity

8/10/2019 From Struggle to Intensity

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So, last time, we talked about the ways inwhich Nietzsche overturns thisphilosophical tradition of establishingsome relationship between the ideal andthe real.And today, we want to go on and talk about

the text assigned for this week, thesecond essay of Nietzsche's Genealogy ofMorals.The, the quotation I want to start offwith today, is from the Genealogy ofMorals.Nietzsche writes, every art, everyphilosophy may be viewed as an aid andremedy in the service of growing andstriving life.They always presuppose suffering andsufferers.

They always, every art and philosophy,always presuppose suffering and sufferers.And what Nietzsche is trying to get at inthis second essay of the Genealogy ofMorals is how suffering and sufferersestablish the notion of guilt.And how guilt functions to deny strength,and to deny, what we called last time,intensity.Every heart and every philosophy alwayspresupposed suffering and sufferers.So two parts to that quotation.The first is that you should only, you

should judge a philosophy by how it helps,if it helps you be more alive.Very important.It's not about it corresponding toreality.It's not about it matching the world.It's about its enlivening, its, itsinvigorating possibilities.The second is invigoration of some willcause suffering, and that there is just,any attempt to escape that will bedeadening, will not be enlivening.

Suffering is part of the process ofinvigoration.Now, we didn't assign for this class thefirst essay of the Geneology of Morals,but I, I do want to give you just onenotion from that first essay that isbackground to our discussion and that isthe notion of resentment.Sometimes people use the French word,[foreign].Resentment, for Nietzsche is a veryimportant concept, because it shows uswhat you can call a dynamic of reversal.

A dynamic of reversal.Nietzsche says once upon a time in theancient days the, there was no


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distinction, no moral distinction betweengood and evil.There was just this distinction betweengood and bad.Strong people, noble people said, I amgood.People who aren't like me are bad.

I, you start with I am good, because youhave a self esteem, you have strength andthen you move on to looking at people whoare different from you, and say thosepeople, they're bad.And Nietzsche says what happens over timeis that the weak, the weak who see thesenoble, strong folks and say, oh yes, theyare good, they are good, I am bad.They eventually process a reversal, bywhich they say, why am I bad, why am Ibad?

Well, I'm bad because that guy up there isgood.That guy is strong.That strong, good person makes me feelbad.Why do I feel bad?I feel bad because I don't have what thatstrong person has.I don't have that power, that intensity.That power and intensity makes me feelbad.That feeling of self denigration, of, of,of, of, worthlessness.

Eventually, they used to say, the, the,the weak person would say, what makes meweak?It's the aristocrats, it's the strongperson, it's the, it's the mighty.That is evil.Then what makes me feel weak is evil.And suddenly the weak person says, allthose strong people, those blonde beasts,the, the popular kids, the, the folks whoseem to have it all, those are evil.Why?Because they have it all and I don't haveit.They're evil, because they have what ittakes to be successful, to, to, to, todominate others.That makes them evil in my eyes, my weakeyes.So who am I then?Well, if they're evil and I'm not likethem, I must be good.What Nietzsche is trying to tread out hereis how a moral distinction comes from thedenial of strength.

That's, that's his point here, is that themoral distinction comes from the weaktrying to denigrate the powerful.


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who are anti-nationalist, like the, theuniversity students and the liberals, thesocialists, there like, it's hard to rootagainst the winning team when they speakyour language.And, and Prussia seemed to be the winningteam.

They're doing all these kinds, and even,Bismarck is even giving gifts to the left,and they say he, he creates nationalhealth insurance Bismarck did aconservative politician way back when hewas, And, and, does lots of things to makesure that he promotes domestic peace.And so there's an enormous amount ofnationalism and, and cheerleading forGerman superiority.And Nietzsche is appalled by this.He thinks it's disgusting.

He think it's a sign of the ultimatedecadence of Germany, is that they arewinning these wars, promoting business.The achievements of Germans, the Germaneconomy and military, seem to Nietzsche tobe evidence of its cultural decline.Because what you're creating is abourgeois culture that will always rewardmediocrity at the expense of greatness.Nietzsche is very much against this waveof appreciation that's sweeping overCentral Europe.He is very critical of this so-called

German State, which he thinks is imposinga kind of bourgeois morality on themajority of Europe.A bourgeois morality that againsubstitutes guilt, conscience andconvention for strength and intensity.So Nietzsche is letting, in some way, likeRosseau, as I said last time, he's thisanti-modern modern.He understands modernity very well, buthe's against its development.And he's against its development becausehe thinks that development is predicatedon a control by the by the weak of thestrong, the control of intensity.And the second essay in the Genealogy ofMorals that we've read for this week isabout how guilt works to control us.You can't have guilt, Nietzsche says,without memory.And so the second essay is really startsoff by asking how you can create memory inthe human animal.He writes, if forgetfulness were notpresent, there would be no happiness.

If forgetfulness were not present, therewould be no happiness, no cheerfulness, nohoping, no pride, no present.


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Nietzsche is a champion of forgetfulness.The man in whom this repression apparatusis harmed and not working properly, hewrites, we can compare to a dyspeptic.He is finished with nothing.That is, you have to be able to forget tobe finished with things, to let it go, to

not hold on to the past.But, what bourgeois morality does, whatChristian morality does is to creatememory in the human animal, so that we cancarry around our past, carry around ourguilt.And Nietzsche says we do this by burningin values.He wants to show us that we, that moralvalues from the Ten Commandments on, moralvalues are not ideals that we acceptintellectually, that we accept spirit,

accept spiritually.He says, no, we burn those values in.How much blood he says, and horror is atthe basis of all good things?Torture and cruelty make morality stick.It, that's where the memory comes from,because punishment makes the human animalremember these values.And he talks about, in my edition on page67, he talks about a festival of cruelty.That is that suffering goes together withmorality, because when we have moralvalues, we want to see those who violate

those values suffer.And suffering, he thinks, is theunderbelly of morality.This is what he says in the second essay.To see others suffer does one good.To make others suffer even more.This is a hard saying, Nietzsche writes,but an ancient, mighty, human,all-too-human principle to which every,even the apes might subscribe, to whicheven the apes might subscribe.Without cruelty, Neitzsche writes, thereis no festival.So again, what Nietzsche's doing here isto say, it looks like sweet, goodmorality, but it's really the triumph ofthe weak over the strong.It looks like deep spiritual values, butit's really cruelty that institutes amoral code that we are afraid to violate.And he goes on in, in talking about howthis emphasis on cruelty is not for him apessimism, this emphasis on cruelty is arealism, trying to underscore the truenature of the values to which we

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From Struggle to Intensity