Nietzsche's Valuation Of Morals

Nietzsche’s first essay On the Genealogy of Morals works to study the origin and history of humanity's valuation of morals. The basis of moral values is established through etymology and semantics, by which Nietzsche establishes the early origins of good and bad. Then the focus shifts on to what Nietzsche believes to be a decline in the valuation of morals in the last two thousand years since the development of Judeo-Christian values. Nietzsche credits these values as inverting morality, and creating popular, or slave morality which we live in now. He then elaborates on popular morality’s implications of the doer and the deed, the doubling of the deed, and the relationship to free will.

Early parts of the first essay focus on the original state

This inverted morality, or popular morality, relies on a shift between good and bad, and the development of good and evil. To cause this, power has shifted into the hands of priests, and the idea of good and bad exist in relation to the distinction between pure and impure. Moreover, the influence of priests weighted culture with a heavier emotional and severe mentality, and now “the human soul has in a higher sense taken on depth and become evil” (Section 6). Nietzsche credits the Jewish people, “the people of the most downtrodden priestly vindictiveness” (Section 7) for the inversion of values. He argues that Jews felt deep hatred, and resented those above and more powerful than themselves so intensely that it caused a transvaluation of morals. In the inverted slave morality, the poor and weak are seen as good, and the powerful as evil and immoral. The concepts of good and evil come into play as well. In popular morality, good and evil are seen as antitheses where only one or the other is present in the will of the individual. Furthermore, imbedded in popular morality is the hope for salvation. Individuals trust that suffering is seen by God and will be rewarded, while evil will be punished. Especially in the emergence of Christian values, where Jesus “the ‘redeemer’ bringing victory and salvation to the poor, the sick, the sinners” (Section 8). However, Nietzsche finds this morality

He credits this as the beginning of the moral slave revolt, which is responsible for the inversion of slave morality by shifting the gaze of evaluation. Ressentiment is defined as a strong desire for revenge characteristic to the weak and powerless. In master morality, the nobles look within the self and simply see themselves as wholly good. That they are entirely good and happy within their actions: “they know better than to separate action from happiness—with them, activity is necessarily calculated into happiness” (Section 10). The doer and the doing of good and happiness are one in the same. However, in slave morality, this is reversed. Ressentiment resists the outside, and has an “orientation outwards rather and inwards to the self” (Section 10). Slave morality is based on an evaluation of outside forces on the self, towards which forces the individual is resentful of. The noble, the oppressors, are viewed as doing the deed of evil onto those below them. The individual of ressentiment “has conceived the ‘evil enemy’ […] This is the very place where his deed, his creation is to be found” (Section 10). Thus, ressentiment imposes an evil will on the powerful. Like the idea of the neutral substratum, it asserts that the powerful have the choice to do evil. Moreover, that the weak are to be rewarded for not being evil, and therefore good, as if it were a choice instead of an incapability. Therefore,