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Comparing Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil

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In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (GM), Friedrich Nietzsche resumes his work on a theme he had already addressed in his previous book, Beyond Good and Evil, which is about concepts of ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘evil’. In this essay that he titled ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’, Nietzsche analyses the relations of strife between what he considers to be the three social classes that constitute a society, that is to say the masters, the priests and the slaves. It is clear that the masters are strong while the slaves are weak, however it is more complex to place the priests, that one could argue are ‘weak nobles’ while others see them as ‘strong slaves’. This essay argues that Nietzsche’s essay offers a very interesting explanation for …show more content…

The slave resents because he is suffering of the master’s contempt towards him. Ressentiment is defined as a feeling of “bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly” , which is exactly how the weak feel when they are subjected to the good will of the strong. As a result, the priest and the slave have found a way to accomplish their - so far- ‘imaginary’ revenge , establishing their morality and force on masters. This revenge does not consist in brutally defeating master morality and rather occurs in a passive-aggressive way. It consists in fact in defining the slave’s most hated enemy not merely as ‘bad’ but as ‘evil’, so by following the logic that the slave is what the master is not, the slave becomes ‘good’ . As ressentiment is a creative form of expression of the hatred and jealousy that the weak has for the strong, and of the slave’s desire to take revenge on the master morality, one can argue that such feeling is at the origin of the creation of ‘responsible evil’ concept and of the new ‘Christian’ morality, values and virtues that followed. Finally, Nietzsche explains that masters have ‘active forces’, meaning that they are able to assert themselves and to take action, whereas the slaves have ‘reactive forces’ , so they do not – and cannot - act by themselves, and are thus doomed to respond and react to the master morality. With the creation of ‘responsible evil’ and the rising slave morality, the active forces of the master are turned into reactive forces similar to the slave’s , so the master is dragged down at the slave’s

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