Chapter 6 - Ressentiment and morality

Summary

Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that there is an intimate connection between Nietzsche’s ostensibly historical diagnosis of the vicissitudes of ressentiment in the second and third essays of On the Genealogy of Morality and his critique of contemporary European morality. Commentators often quote his remarks, in the Genealogy’s preface, that his historical analysis of the “origin of our moral prejudices” (GM, Preface, 2; translation modified) is to serve a deeper, philosophical and critical purpose:

I was preoccupied with something much more important than the nature of hypotheses, mine or anybody else’s, on the origin of morality (or, to be more exact: the latter concerned me only for one end, to which it is one of many means). For me it was a question of the value of morality.

(GM, Preface, 5)

[W]e need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined – and so we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed and changed.

(GM, Preface, 6; last emphasis mine)

Nietzsche’s suggestion, in the preface and throughout the text of the Genealogy, is that there is a tight link between a correct understanding of the origin of “morality” and a proper appreciation of at least some of the grounds warranting a negative judgment of its value. But, as has often been remarked by critics, prima facie this confidence seems quite misplaced. Even if Nietzsche succeeds in showing that morality owes its original emergence to disreputable motivations, this would only impugn its value if it could be shown that morality cannot have, or at any rate has not, acquired in the course of its history sufficient rational authority that is independent of those putative original motives for its adoption and propagation. Barring such a demonstration, one might charge Nietzsche with having lapsed into a version of the genetic fallacy: a conflation of the question of the causes or grounds of the original adoption of some practice with the question of its current justification. There are two ways in which Nietzsche might respond to this worry. He could either abandon or at least qualify as hyperbolical his claims about the importance of the genealogical method, and concede that genealogy can at best serve as a propaedeutic, loosening our psychological allegiance to morality by highlighting its pudenda origo, while the real reasons for rejecting it are to be found elsewhere, for example in its instrumental disvalue with respect to ends Nietzsche happens to rate highly. His remark that a correct diagnosis of the “origin of morality” is only “one of many means” towards a “critique of moral values” might be thought to relativize the importance of genealogy in something like this spirit, as do some passages in the notebooks (WP, 254, 257; KGW VII.3.34.69). Alternatively, Nietzsche could stick by his stronger pronouncements in the preface of the Genealogy and insist that the link between the allegedly disreputable psychological origins of morality and the content of that morality is not merely causal but constitutive, so that the content simply cannot be understood apart from those motives. To have understood the original motives would on this account be tantamount to grasping an omnipresent, essential feature of morality, and assuming that those original motives are justifiably exposed by genealogy as disreputable or odious, genealogy would indeed be, as Nietzsche claims, more than mere history; it would simultaneously be an instrument of critique. A third interpretive option would be to attribute to Nietzsche the view that certain features of morality’s origin which make its original manifestation particularly objectionable, while not constitutive of morality tout court, are nevertheless frequently or typically associated also with its later manifestations, and wherever this association is present, this gives us further grounds for rejecting it, in addition to whatever other objections we or Nietzsche may have against morality even where it has emancipated itself from its original motivations. In this chapter I want to examine the philosophical basis of the second and third lines of response, which seem to me to capture most of Nietzsche’s explicit characterizations of his enterprise in the Genealogy and elsewhere: “You can look behind every family, every corporate body, every community: everywhere, the struggle of the sick against the healthy . . . These . . . are all men of ressentiment, . . . [which is] inexhaustible and insatiable in its eruptions against the happy” (GM, III, 14). In this and many other passages Nietzsche asserts the persistence of a psychological pattern that figures centrally in his account of the origins of morality, and such a psychological continuity is necessary for genealogy to be relevant as a form of critique. Since Nietzsche claims that morality has its origins in the complex psychological condition of ressentiment, my first aim in this paper will be to articulate a reconstruction of what this condition involves (section 2). The challenge is to produce an interpretation of ressentiment that is coherent and can plausibly be attributed not only to those individuals and societies among which morality initially took hold, but also to (some or many of) its later adherents. Moreover – and this makes such a reconstruction even more challenging – it should tell us something about why ressentiment is objectionable. This issue will be addressed in section 3.