Genealogy Of Morality Nietzsche

Through his On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche evaluates power relationships. He unravels the relationship of master/slave, creditor/debtor, and artist/philosopher to address the ranging aspects of power that have mounted on society. Intellectuals and higher authorities easily lord over their subordinates which emphasize a major power dynamic in society that philosophers like Karl Marx would argue need to be overthrown. Marx argues class structures should be eliminated as a bourgeois society should turn into a communist society. Therefore, power gaps would no longer exist. However, Nietzsche would claim human beings, by nature, desire ultimate power by having control over the weaker. Is it possible to overthrow a power dynamic

He writes, “The equivalence is provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly making up for the wrong (so, instead compensation in money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure is given to the creditor as repayment and compensation” (Nietzsche 41). Compensation is pleasure, and that pleasure is a form of violation toward the inferior. Nietzsche continues, “the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought…the enjoyment of violating” (41). Holding a higher status in society is pleasurable within itself because power is held over the debtor without a sense of

The right the creditor possesses means the right to mistreat the debtor as a form of compensation. The mistreatment is to invoke pleasure for the creditor because the debtor owes him something. The creditor has control over the debtor and, “the creditor could inflict all kinds of dishonour and torture on the body of the debtor, for example, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt” (Nietzsche 40-41). The debtor owes the creditor which can extend beyond possession—any form of pleasure for the creditor by violating the debtor is a form of compensation. The “rights of the masters” allows for this system of paying back to the creditor. Nietzsche argues, “compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty” (41). Punishment to the debtor, either by the creditor or other authority, is a form of pleasure, and because the inferior was violated, his debt is paid as humiliation and harm were