Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the authors who have made a strong impression on me. He is wrongly branded as an advocate of egoism, that there is no good in man, because some influential Catholic readers are unwilling or unable to recognize the many red threads that run through his writings. As the largest administrative institution in the world (at least that’s my impression), which has almost completely demoted its spiritually gifted to the sidelines in order to increase its power, this is hardly surprising:
25.09.1997 – 6:10 a.m. from Messages from the Light: “[…] The followers of the true belief in the omnipotence of the One can be found in all religions. The great religions are the reservoirs that are supposed to give us here in a materially oriented society an opportunity to satisfy our search for God.
Whenever the materially oriented intellectuals occupy leading positions in a religious community, religion degenerates into an instrument of domination of the believers. The mind is far removed from God and true knowledge. The mind is only made for administrative tasks where you have to add A and B together and compare them.
But God and the world are so complex that they can neither be sorted together nor divided apart.
The power of intuition is the basis of true magic. This thinking is extremely complex. It cannot and must not be reduced to individual factors. The cosmic interface between God and eternity: This is you!
The Islamists’ attempts to control their fellow human beings is pathological intellectual thinking and has nothing to do with Islam. The disintegration of our society is a typical sign of godlessness. The attempt to explain everything scientifically was originally legitimate. But whenever the mind reaches a point where the great unknown appears, disturbances occur. The mind tries to fill these “empty fields”, which it cannot grasp in their complexity, with excuses of some kind. The work of God is actually constantly appearing somewhere. But if it is permanently ignored, society disintegrates. In the Middle Ages, we had the counterpart to this negative and completely inadequate “description of the world”. Out of the dark, animalistic fears, out of the turmoil between different peoples who grew closer together, Christian supremacy emerged for Europe. Some Christians were truly in search of knowledge of God and tried to establish a theocracy. In the belief that God was behind everything, an attempt was made to portray everything as willed by God or as a temptation, and anything that did not fit in was destroyed in the name of God.
The individuality of the individual, his right to free choice, his right to use his own thoughts freely was completely ignored or openly opposed. The church had become an institution that explained everything analytically from the Bible and did not allow anything that did not fit in to be heard.
The “Enlightenment(!)” finally allowed “Faust” to make a covenant with the great powers of nature, with magic (Mephisto) and after society had condemned Faust’s young happiness and intellectual excursions, God once again had to serve as an emergency solution.
Society destroyed the young life that Faust had conceived with the innocent Marie. Professor Faust would like to have another free thought, but it degenerates in the dungeon of society, in the rules of reason. Consequently, Faust 2 contains only abstract fairy tales that are so confused and unreal that no one takes them seriously any more. In keeping with the sins of the Middle Ages, they all got the plague, black spots that rotted in the “sinful flesh”.
With the self-defeating “nature analysis” that ignores God, we are now quite logically at the beginning of a mass epidemic with manifestations of brain decomposition (BSE), meningitis caused by ticks and AIDS – the great cry for help from those who ruin their lives through excessive lust. […]”
Nietzsche grasped these connections very well in his own way, grasped the social structures in a differentiated way and gave free rein to each of his thoughts as they arose and made sense in the context of his writings. Nevertheless, they must basically be seen as a multidimensional coherent entity, as only then do they unfold their potential. In my own way, I have summarized some of these strands and placed them in a linear context. The page references give you an idea of the complexity of his writings, which I have simplified here. In order not to burden the reading flow unnecessarily, you should skip the citations at the beginning. You should also be aware that if you quote correctly, the spelling will be taken from the original.
Excerpt from Selected Perspectives on Altruism:
Altruism with Friedrich Nietzsche
According to Hillmann et al. (2007: 23), altruism is understood by Friedrich Nietzsche “[…] as a concealed, leveling form of egoism of weak people (…) (→ slave morality)” (ibid.). However, this formulation is only confirmed to a limited extent, as this slave morality is not altruism, unless one follows the explanations of Auguste Comte (see above) or Fehr/Gächter (see below). The following presentation of his philosophy will provide a clearer This is a differentiation between the concept of slave morality (which can be understood as a criticism of state altruism and charity in general) and what can constitute real altruism even according to Nietzsche. For even if Hillmann et al. present altruism according to Nietzsche as concealed egoism, he also formulated its opposite, real altruism!
To begin with, I will focus on Nietzsche’s derivation and definition of slave morality. According to his observations, man is (mostly) an instinct-driven being (Nietzsche 2010: 17) who tries to ensure the preservation of his lifestyle (ibid.) in the masses, which is basically the center of his egoism, since man tries to enforce this against evolutionary changes (cf. ibid.: 325, 366). He is simply defending himself against his own nature. But it is only this defense against natural evolution, the resistance to development (human-moral and not technological), the fight against deviation from the old (breaking with traditions in their central traits; This does not refer to styles of dress or special etiquette, but to fundamental concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, good and bad, which underlie all these cultural differentiations of our society in its diverse milieus (and strictly speaking differentiate them into classes), simply as a result of a tradition that has lasted for thousands of years), describes the actual slave morality at its core. Its representatives are the “ascetic priests” (ibid.: 361), its defenders the “herd” (ibid.: 120; in the following 1 referred to as herd ) as a subordinate mass of people, the “sheep” (ibid.: 375). (ibid.: 375)-the foot soldiers of the ascetic priests. These ascetic priests are by no means just religious leaders, even if this is where their strongest or rather most traditional presence is to be found. No, the ascetic priest appears in many different forms and can be divided into five groups: (a) the religious leaders (as pope, as rabbi, prophet, etc.), the (c) economic leaders (entrepreneurs, economists in general) , the (b) political leaders (politicians, kings, dictators), the (d) scientific leaders (academics of all kinds) and the (e) cultural leaders (artists, musicians, actors, etc.). However, it should be noted that these five groups are intertwined and, at least in human history, both political and economic leaders were (and probably still are to some extent) indebted to religious leaders for justification (cf. Nietzsche 2010: 71f), while Nietzsche sees the scientific leaders (including philosophers in particular) as closest to the religious leaders, with the cultural leaders as lackeys of the other leaders (Nietzsche 2010). I will now differentiate these five groups and conclude by explaining their instruments of power over the herd and the edifice of their dominance as rulers over the ruled, while the order will follow the previous classification of the various leaders.
What underlies all these ascetic priests is the defence of their ideals, as a kind of self-preservation instinct in their “army organization” (ibid.: 384). The life of the ascetic priest is an “aberration” (ibid.: 362) in the confusion between his strength to bind the masses and at the same time to follow his religion of suffering, which keeps him in a permanent contradiction with himself and inhibits or at least slows down the path to knowledge, the recognition of reality and thus of himself. “[…] [T]he small joy [an] of ‘charity’ […]” (ibid.: 384), “[…] the awakening of the community’s sense of power [und] the annoyance of the individual […]” (ibid.) is his backing. It corrupts the “[…] mental health […] where […] [immer er] has also come to dominate […]” (ibid.: 392). Perhaps their most important representatives are the ascetic priests of the great religions.
The ascetic priests of the religions
(1) The “prehistoric religions” (ibid.), which offered human sacrifices to their god and probably just those “people” (ibid.) who were dearest to one, which he calls “first fruits sacrifice” (ibid.).
(2) The “[…] moral epoch of mankind […]” (ibid.), which sacrifices to its “[…] God the strongest instincts […]” (ibid.), “its ‘nature'” (Nietzsche 2010: 74), “[…] all belief in hidden harmony, in future bliss and justice […]” (ibid.).
(3) The sacrifice of God himself, as “cruelty” (ibid.) against himself. “Sacrificing God for nothingness – this paradoxical mystery of ultimate cruelty was saved for the generation that is just coming up: we all already know something of it. -” (ibid.)
“[Mose 2.9:] And Jehovah God made to grow out of the ground all manner of trees, pleasant to the sight, and good for food; and the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. [Genesis 3: […] (5.) But God knows that the day you eat from it [dem Baum der Erkenntnis] your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. (6.) And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to give understanding; and she took of its fruit and ate, and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. (7.) Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; and they put fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. […] (11) And he [Jehova] said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? (12) And the man said, The woman whom thou hast given me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. (13) And Jehovah said to the woman: What hast thou done? And the woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate. (14) And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou shalt be cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. You shall crawl on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life. (15) And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. (16) And to the woman he said, I will greatly increase the travail of your pregnancy; with pain you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. (17) And he said to Adam, “Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate of the tree of which I commanded you and said, ‘You shall not eat of it: Thou shalt not eat of it, the ground shall be cursed for thy sake: with labor thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life; […]”2 (emphasis added by the author)
“The findings [der Studie von Maunder/Schoemaker/Pruessner (2016)] suggest that sex has a positive effect on the hippocampus in women. Sex as a physical activity stimulates the hippocampus – and thus ensures that women can remember things that have been said and are less able to remember images. […] But of course this is not the only reason to have sex regularly. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages – for both sexes: sex makes us happy: endorphins and the hormone oxytocin are released before, during and after sex. This puts us in a good mood and makes us happy. Sex burns calories: According to a Canadian study [Frappier 2013], men burn up to 100 calories during sex and women up to 70, which is more than is burned during some sporting activities. Sex can relieve pain: Endorphins are also responsible for this. They act like the body’s own morphines, which are released to counteract pain. But be careful: sex is of course not a panacea for severe pain. Sex makes you sleep better: The oxytocin released during sex induces a resting phase after orgasm. This usually happens faster in men than in women [(Franzen/Buysse 2008)]. Sex strengthens the immune system: A long-term study by Indiana University showed that orgasm increases the number of antibodies, at least in men, and thus strengthens the immune system.” (Haase 2016)
The “[…] ‘Old Testament’ […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 72) above all a division into “[…] ‘great’ and ‘small’ […]” (ibid.), which in the further course of Nietzsche’s explanations can be understood as a class division into rulers and ruled (cf. ibid.: 80f), rich and poor, or strong and weak, on the basis of power.
By trying to hold on to everything imaginable in life, almost at all costs, religion becomes a religion of sufferers, as changes inevitably cause some things or people to leave life, or people simply lose sight of themselves. In this morality of suffering, by clinging to the old and fighting development, they receive confirmation of their suffering from the great religions. Through this religious rejection of natural evolution, the development of man, society, nature as such and all associated facets of knowledge, the dogmas of religions invert man’s attitude towards the environment and negate the actually necessary development into a resistance to their existence. Formerly natural values are reversed, good becomes evil, development is seen as a danger and no longer as an opportunity, joy becomes suffering, love becomes hate (cf. ibid.: 82), mercy becomes revenge (Nietzsche 2010: 72-111).
The ascetic priests of the religions maintain their position by comforting the masses, their flock of people who seek their salvation in religion by alleviating their moral suffering, whereby they have admittedly also contributed to a certain development. Thus God sacrifices himself for the people, is the “creditor” (ibid.: 299) of their debts and provides a consolation for their suffering. Thus, the religious believer owes allegiance to his dogma and if he refuses this (by resisting this inhibition or deviating from the masses, no longer wanting to be a sheep), he deserves the “punishment” (ibid.: 302)-cf. the instruments of the ascetic priests below (Nietzsche 2010: 190f, 282, 330ff, 377). However, it should be emphasized that religions as such are not the problem of these abuses, but rather their dogmas, which are derived from them (cf. ibid.: 73):
“The newer philosophy, as an epistemological skepticism, is, hidden or open, anti-Christian: although, to finer ears, by no means anti-religious.” (Nietzsche 2010: 73)
The ascetic priests of the economy
The basis of the general slave morality, a “utilitarian morality” in Nietzsche (2010: 211), is the invention of possession and property, “the thrill of the infinite” (ibid.: 160) and “[…] a kind of tropical tempo in the vying for growth […]” (ibid.: 216), an “exploding” (ibid.) egoism (cf. ibid.), as a metaphor of the capitalism of modern man, a principle of the ever richer rich (the propertied, the “human[en]” (ibid.: 309)) and the ever poorer poor (cf. ibid.: 183). The basis of this society is the ” s c l a v e r e i ” (ibid.), the subjugation of the weak and the education of man to the weak, the sheep, to the “self-destruction[ung]” (ibid.: 203) of his self “through work” (ibid.)3 in humility and diligence, as the only possible purpose in life (thus also Mauss4 1990: 174). In particular, the “machinal activity” (Nietzsche 2010: 382)5 to distract from the fact of suffering, through “absolute” (ibid.) regularity (cf. ibid.), “[…] punctual, senseless obedience, the once-for-all way of life [und] filling the time [in] ‘impersonality’ […]” (ibid.), on the best way to forget one’s own self, to keep people’s sensibility muted (Nietzsche 2010: 382; cf. also Mauss 1990: 161). The foundations of this morality of the rulers are the past dominance of religions, or rather their dogmas, but even more deeply anchored in the “feeling of guilt” (ibid.: 305) and the morality of life as a requirement of life, “[…] of personal obligation […]” (ibid.) in the “[…] relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor […]” (ibid.), which is even “[…] older than […] the beginnings of any social forms of organization and associations […]” (ibid.: 306; cf. ibid.: 210f). According to her morality, everything has a price,”[…] everything can be paid off’[6] – the oldest and most naïve moral canon of justice, the beginning of all ‘goodness’, all ‘fairness’, all ‘good will’, all ‘objectivity’ on earth” (ibid.: 306). According to this principle of equalization, the “powerful[…]” (ibid.: 307), the possessor, has the right to “force” (Nietzsche 2010: 306) the less powerful, the non-possessor, to “equalize” (Nietzsche 2010: 306) and to punish in case of resistance (see below in Instruments of the Ascetic Priests) to his “prerogative [als] most powerful” (ibid.: 309).
The ascetic priests of politics
Those “in command” (ibid.: 119) are the “moral hypocrites[ler]” (ibid.) of society, “[…] a genre of public and artistic speech.[ner] […] from the pulpit” (ibid.: 190f). They regard the herd man as the only permissible kind of human being. Their tool is the constitution and the herd-man in need of orders as such, whereby this morality is referred to as “herd-animal morality” (ibid.: 124). The organization of herd-animal morality is that of a Christian democracy in which “[…] ‘compassion[…] with God’ […]” (ibid.: 125) is a central component. These commanders, in conflict with the other commanders (regarding “Buddhism” (ibid.)), proclaim “[…] the ‘general welfare’ […]” (ibid.: 165; cf. ibid.: 127f) as a socialist virtue of society and as an “[…] involuntary event for the chastisement of tyrants […]” (ibid.: 183). (ibid.: 378) and thus divide people into origin (bloodline) “and race[…]” (ibid.) and thereby create a sense of inhibition in the masses.
The ascetic priests of science
Among the scientists, the need for self-expression prevails above all, especially among the philosophers (cf. ibid.: 19f), while their manifestation of growing knowledge is more a “drive” (ibid.: 20) of “ignorance!” (ibid.) and they lose sight of the actual purpose of the discussion through their diverse “interpretation[en]” (ibid.: 56). They determine the perspectives of research, according to the “[…] principle of the ‘smallest possible force’ […]” (ibid.: 28) and lose sight of the big picture in their diversification of research (cf. ibid.: 132) into ever smaller sub-areas and disciplinary demarcation in determining the foreign position as the fundamentally wrong one (simply because it is a different perspective), which can probably be found increasingly today in the exaggerated belief in statistics (cf. Wehr 2014). And so the scholar behaves according to the masses in the benevolence of the authorities, and dutifully falls into “rank and file” (Nietzsche 2010: 133), obeying the authorities (Selke 2013), not least because of his “[A]bhängig[keit]” (Nietzsche 2010: 134) to them:
“‘Where man has nothing more to see and to grasp, there he has nothing more to seek’ […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 28)
Only the refutation of the “[…] theory of ‘free will’ […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 31), of individual freedom, as a confirmation of social determinism, seems to be much more an “attraction[…]” (Nietzsche 2010: 31), an impulse of the scientist, than that it serves a real progress of knowledge, but rather a misunderstanding. Thus, “[…] ‘freethinking’ […]” (ibid.: 76) “[…] has dissolved the religious instincts […]: so that they no longer know what religions are good for, and only register their presence in the world with a kind of blunt astonishment, as it were” (ibid.)-though Nietzsche does not limit this to scientists alone. His undoing is the “mediocrity of his kind” (ibid.: 134) which stems from the “Jesuitism of mediocrity” (ibid.). It stems from the pen of the “religion of pity” (ibid.) which seeks to suppress any uniqueness, the unusual in people and tries to reduce the strength of its “bow” (ibid.) – metaphorically the range of this uniqueness of the strong human being, which could reach the masses, the sheep, seduce them to knowledge and lead them to spiritual independence – or even tries to abolish it completely, which culminates in the “[…] de-selfing and depersonalization of the spirit […]” (ibid.: 135), “[…] the ‘disinterested cognition’ […]” (ibid.).
And this transfiguration of the spirit of the scholars is the fact that “[…] ‘Everyone […] is himself the most distant’ […]” (ibid.: 248). And they find their humiliation in the words of the philosophers “Thomas Hobbes” (Nagel 2005: 19)-the compulsive preservation of the system-, “David Hume” (ibid.: 20)-justification through self-preservation for the good of the majority, or rather the dogma they follow-and “Locke” (ibid.: 195) which attempt to transfigure human “nature” (ibid. 236) and through their “scientific[…] equity” (ibid.: 310) both “[…] hatred, envy, ill-will, suspicion, rancor, revenge […]” (ibid.) in the tradition of “[…] resentment […]” (ibid.) as “justice […] sanctify” (ibid.).And the greatest mistake is the fight against her “active […] feeling” (ibid.: 311), the basis of initiative, the willingness to act, as a result of which she has lost faith in herself and in her “[…] self-anesthesia […]” (ibid.: 396) already “[…] fear[ing] [to] come to terms …” (ibid.: 398):
“The active, the attacking, overreaching man is still a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive man; it is not at all necessary for him to misjudge and prejudge his object in the way that the reactive man does, must do. That is why the aggressive man, as the stronger, braver, nobler, has at all times had on his side also the more sensitive eye, the better conscience: conversely, one can already guess who has the invention of the ‘bad conscience’ on his conscience in the first place – the man of resentment!” (Nietzsche 2010: 311)
And their proximity to the “ascetic ideal” (Nietzsche 2010: 402) is expressed most clearly in the “impoverishment of life“7 (ibid.: 403f) of a “scholar” (ibid.), whereby he has even become a reinforcement of this ideal instead of seeing through it through knowledge and resisting this new dogma (cf. ibid.: 402), which usually shows itself in the guise of positivism (ibid.: 131)8:
“[…] the affects [und Emotionen] have become cool, the tempo has slowed down, dialectics have taken the place of instinct, earnestness has been imposed on faces and gestures (earnestness, that most unmistakable sign of laborious metabolism, of struggling, hard-working life).” (Nietzsche 2010: 403)
The ascetic priests of culture
Even “the artists” (Nietzsche 2010: 344) are anything but independent, less so than the scholars, dependent on the favor of a “patron[s]” (ibid.), in his service, in order to grant their visions undisturbed freedom (cf. ibid.: 344f):
“In our very popular, that is to say, rabble-rousing age, ‘education’ and ‘Bildung’ must essentially be the art of deceiving – of deceiving about one’s origins, the inherited rabble in body and soul.” (Nietzsche 2010: 219)
Even “the musician” (Nietzsche 2010: 346) now becomes an “[…] oracle, [einem] priest, [dieser] ventriloquist of God […]” (ibid.) and proclaims the ascetic ideals and also celebrates the “cruelty” (Nietzsche 2010: 302) in the “S t r a f e ” (ibid.: 305) as a “[ f ] e s t l i c h e ” (ibid.) act. C. W. Mills (1962: 388) would probably speak here of the American Boy, while its most essential counterpart is the “[…] co-modiant […] of this ideal […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 409), which arouses “mistrust” (ibid.) and is capable of making the masses think.
The instruments of the ascetic priests
The instruments of the ascetics have thus already been reflected in the preceding explanations. The ascetic priests are both bearers and servants of these ideals of suffering and exploit the masses’ need for harmony (cf. ibid.: 19, 74) in their favor and disguise their intentions in the dogmas they place as self-fulfilling “[…] truth[en] […]” (ibid.: 23), whether these are of a religious, economic, political, cultural or other nature. “[…] [U]nser[e] [Körper sind] only a social construction of many souls […]”9 (ibid.: 33) with the will to self-preservation, the “will to power” (ibid.: 27).
Man’s need for harmony, especially that man who only feels secure as a sheep in the flock, is susceptible to the “foreground belief[s]” (ibid.: 26) of these various dogmas, “positivism” (ibid.: 23; cf. ibid.: 23f) with its “[…] compassion [als] most pleasing disguise” (ibid.: 36). He gains his followers through “linguistic affinity” (ibid.: 34), which lays the foundation for the “[…] ‘unfree will[s]’ […]” (ibid.: 36), which both exists and does not exist (cf. ibid.: 36), because ultimately life is a distinction between “[…] strong and weak wills” (ibid.: 36), non-free or unfree wills (cf. ibid.).
Due to man’s upbringing as a herd creature, he recognizes in every deviation a resentment against his existence (“[…] every contact is bad contact, except that with his equals […]” (ibid.: 44)). His own existence is adorned in “[…] magic and sugar in those feelings of ‘for others’, of ‘not for me’ […]” (ibid.: 52) with which the “[…] moral […] prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance […]” (ibid.: 53) is mere imagination. For this reason, there is no one truth, as it is always bound to a morality, or rather its dogma (cf. ibid.: 54). Thus, even “[…] ‘the old man’ […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 75) “an eternal child” (ibid.) trapped in his dogma of truth(s). In the guise of these truths, ideals of beauty and values are inverted and the human being is shaken to its foundations, but controlled under the constant protection of the majority under the guidance of ascetic priests, which in the way they are implemented borders on arbitrariness (cf. ibid.: 80ff, 109). In this education of man, as a sheep in the flock, also lies the chastisement of man “[…] within an ecclesiastical and courtly guideline […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 109) to enslave his spirit (cf. ibid.). In this “herd-utility” (ibid.: 121) as a liberating worker and consumer society lies their redemption through work, through service to the ruler, as the meaning of their lives, the redemption from suffering. And those who fight back, who refuse to follow the system of suffering (e.g. because they are not satisfied with mediocrity and strive for higher, nobler values, or simply want to look at the whole and not just specific areas (cf. ibid.: 217, 277)), are threatened with exclusion or even persecution (cf. ibid.: 147):
“Today, conversely, where in Europe the herd animal alone comes to honor and distributes honor, where the ‘equality of rights’ could all too easily be transformed into the equality of injustice: I want to say into a common war against everything rare, foreign, privileged, the higher man of the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative power and dominion […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 147).
And the punishment that follows this deviation as a representation and body of the “slave morality” (Nietzsche 2010: 270) by the masses as representatives of the ascetic priests, or rather of the dogmas to which both the sheep and the ascetic priests are committed, represents this safeguarding of collective coercion, the predictability (cf. ibid.: 293) of man as a sheep in the flock and combating uniqueness as an independently thinking being.
But without this uniqueness, these rule-breakers and outsiders (see Stifter in Sigmund (see above)), slave morality would again lose its basis for existence, since it only finds its legitimacy in resistance to the individuals, this “counter- and outside world” (ibid.: 271) of independent spirits. And in their “personal obligation” (ibid.: 305) to their truth, they must obey their ascetic priest, the mouthpiece of their dogma, and punish the outsider in an act of festivity, the triumph and benevolence of their truth.
The penalty
The “[…] fear of one’s neighbor” (Nietzsche 2010: 122) creates this “moral[…] appreciation” (ibid.) of the independence of spirit, of uniqueness “and self-responsibility” (ibid.: 123), of the individual’s “thirst for knowledge” (ibid.: 359) of the individual, as a danger against the self, against their own herd and above all their dogma (their slave morality), their all-surpassing truth, their need for “[…] ‘equality of all before God’ […]”10 (Nietzsche 2010: 154), which now pervades mistrust (especially among atheists), this rule-breaker, the uncooperative, remains (cf. ibid.: 307):
“Moral judgment and condemnation is the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited on those who are less so, also a kind of compensation for the fact that they have been badly considered by nature, finally an opportunity to get spirit and to become fine: – malice spiritualized.” (Nietzsche 2010: 154)
Thus, it is only through this instrumentalization of man for the purpose of punishment by the ascetic priests, the “[…] very great haters in the history of the world […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 267; cf. ibid.: 266), man has become an evil being, while only the suffering, the submissive poor and “powerless” (ibid.: 267) are the good ones, as good sheep of their ascetic priests, and this “[…] secret black art of a truly g r o s s e n politics of revenge […]” (ibid.: 269):
“God of vengeance, Jehovah, God of vengeance, shine forth! Arise, judge of the earth, repay the arrogant for their deeds! Until when will the lawless, Jehovah, until when will the lawless rejoice, will bubble over, speak foul things, boast of all who do iniquity? […]” (Salmos 94 – http://www.bibliaonline.com.br/elb/sl/94 [2014.01.08: 19:54h])
Thus the “mnemonic technique” (Nietzsche 2010: 295) is used, “[…] ‘burn something into the memory so that it remains in the memory: only what does not cease to remain in the memory’ […]” (ibid.) in order to ensure that even the most obtuse remains aware of this punishment, in fear, of his morality of suffering, of subservience to the ruler (the “master morality” (ibid.: 208; cf. ibid.: 208f)), the stronger and his sole right to revenge and punishment of the lower (cf. ibid.: 299f), to force them as the weaker to “equalize” (ibid.: 299) (cf. ibid.: 306f). But how can this truth of justice through pain be a satisfaction, does it not again lead to suffering, hatred and revenge, according to the principle of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth or “punishment as a declaration of war” (ibid.: 318; cf. ibid.: 301)? But everything has its price and can be paid by the rich, the possessor, “[…] the oldest and most naive moral canon of justice […]” (ibid.: 306; cf. ibid.: 309) or at least the frugality of “shame” (ibid.: 152):
“[…] the inventor of the ‘guilty conscience’. With him, however, the greatest and most sinister illness was introduced, from which mankind has not yet recovered, the suffering of man in man, in himself: as the result of a violent separation from the animal past, a leap and fall, as it were, into new situations and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against the old instincts on which his strength, pleasure and fearfulness had been based until then.” (Nietzsche 2010: 323)
However, punishment in no way makes a person a better person. He is tamed, but the proclaimed improvement is even more likely to turn into its “opposite” (Nietzsche 2010: 321):
“[…]; by quenching the pain that the wound causes, he simultaneously poisons the wound – that is what he knows how to do, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, in whose orbit everything healthy necessarily becomes ill and everything ill necessarily becomes tame.” (Nietzsche 2010: 373)
Judges and the converted punished thus persist in their “resentment[…]” (Nietzsche 2010: 375) against the foreign, the unknown and the uncontrollable, which by its very nature appears uncooperative (cf. ibid.). Thus the herd, the cattle of the ascetic priests, must be controlled and punished if they deviate from the prevailing moral code in order to submit to the masses again:
“The alleviation of suffering, the ‘consolation’ of every kind, – that proves to be his genius itself: how inventively he understood his task of consolation, how unhesitatingly and boldly he chose the means for it! Christianity in particular may be called a great treasury of the most ingenious means of consolation, so much that is quick, softening, narcotic is heaped into it, so much that is most dangerous and daring is ventured for this purpose, so fine, so refined, […]” (Nietzsche 2010: 377)
The cattle of the ascetic priests
A group of people who willingly submit to the “will” (Nietzsche 2010: 32) of the stronger, the representative of their dogma, precisely this ascetic priest (cf. ibid.: 32f). Their language11 is a mark of distinction and a signal of their similarity (cf. ibid.: 34, 36) and their compassion for one another, their (Christian) charity.
They are “[e]ntrusted[…]” (ibid.: 45) about resistance and fail to recognize their own blunting (cf. ibid.: 66f) towards the “Christian nomenclature” (ibid.: 67), which further strengthens them in their dogmas to willingly follow this “hidden” (ibid.) principle of love. And if a moment of realization does smolder, they are usually willing to extinguish it quickly (cf. ibid.: 113), willingly lining up in rank and file according to the mediocrity they have sworn to uphold (cf. ibid.121) and only his strictest defender is really the good, stupid, not too stupid to carry out the work imposed on him, his burden, but not so clever as to be dangerous to anyone, at least not to any of his ascetic priests – “[…] because within the slave way of thinking, the good must in any case be the harmless person: he is good-natured, easy to deceive, a little stupid perhaps, un bonhomme” (ibid.: 212). In their “habitual praise ” (ibid.: 259) of their mediocrity, they deny themselves, for this pleasure in self-mortification is part of their cruelty, their small pleasures (cf. ibid.: 383), their morality of suffering:
“Man, the bravest and most suffering-accustomed animal, does not deny suffering in itself: he wants it, he seeks it out himself, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose for suffering. The senselessness of suffering, not suffering, was the curse that had hitherto been spread over mankind – and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning!” (Nietzsche2010: 411)
And in their illness (cf. Nietzsche 2010: 358), as self-fighting and despising sheep of their shepherds, the ascetic priests, they feel the “[L]honor[e]” (ibid.) of their existence. And precisely those who recognize themselves most strongly here, who feel that they belong in it, are the “weakest” (ibid.: 368) among human beings, “[…] who undermine life among human beings the most, who poison and question our trust in life, in human beings, in ourselves the most dangerously” (ibid.: 368; cf. ibid.: 252), unable to assume the position of others
(cf. Nagel 2005: 118) persisting in its “emotional conditioning “12.
Those who do not feel that they belong to this ideal sheep13 and yet do not decide to “act” (Nietzsche 2010: 227) are doomed by “[…] [t]he problem of the waiting” (ibid.), as they usually miss the moment of their opportunity to promote their society, fail to put a drop in the water and bring movement back into the rigid following of the ascetic priests “- ‘to break out’ […]” (ibid.). For “[t]he active, the attacking, overreaching man is still a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive one” (ibid.: 311) as reflected, for example, in the “comedian” (ibid.: 409), an approach to the strong man:
The strong person
In this sense, “the s t a r k e man” (Nietzsche 2010: 183) represents the outlier from the herd, the affront to the ascetic priests as representatives of their dogma. He breaks the rules of the community, dares to educate himself, even to declare independence and make his own decisions (cf. ibid.: 47f):
“[…] – and he can’t go back! he can’t go back to the compassion of the people either! – -” (Nietzsche 2010: 48)
He tries to understand the hidden elements of society, to fathom the underlying truth, far from the pre-written dogmas of the ascetic priests. He sets himself apart from the opinions of the masses, especially those of the ascetic priests. The strong man is forced to follow his own “legislation” (Nietzsche 2010: 216) and places the ideal of individuality, the affront against the morality of suffering, the dogmas of the masses, he dares to develop outside the prescribed boundaries (as demanded by Comte (see above), among others) and takes “responsibility[ung]” (Nietzsche 2010: 227) for his own life (Nietzsche 2010: 227). As an active person, as a strong person, he is characterized by the following qualities: Loyalty to principle, rule without violence, the sense of fairness, he loves life and enjoys it (apart from the morality of suffering), he follows his goals (cf. ibid.: 235f):
“A man who says: ‘I like this, I take it as my own and want to protect it and defend it against everyone’; a man who can lead his cause, carry out a decision, keep faith with a thought, hold a woman, punish and throw down a bold man; a man who has his anger and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, even the animals gladly fall and belong by nature […].” (Nietzsche 2010: 235f)
He goes his own way without willfully forcing others to cooperate with him or to submit to him or his dogma: “[…] in short, a man who is by nature H e r r, – if such a man has compassion, well! t h i s compassion has value!” (Nietzsche 2010: 236) This special man is capable of reminding even the masses of their own hidden “self” (ibid.: 294), who has “power over himself” (ibid.) and has not ceded it to a veiled dogma (cf. ibid.). An ability which he calls “[…] ‘self-overcoming’ […]” (ibid.: 410).
Thus, as a natural powerful man, he is a threat to the ascetic priest, who may also have sprung from the strong man and abuses his natural power to impose his will on others, his right of the strongest, the master morality, based on the morality of suffering, a slave morality. In this sense, it would not be inconceivable for society to have a”[…] consciousness of power, in which it might allow itself the noblest luxury that exists for it – to let its injurer be s t r a f l o s .” (Nietzsche 2010: 309). To show oneself as power-conscious and to show mercy instead of revenge in the form of punishment and to show strength, to grant the rule-breaker, the one who dares to think and become intelligent, his freedom and let him go.
This would be real altruism and not revenge for the preservation of past structures (whose best-known representative is probably “Thomas Hobbes” (Nagel 2005: 19)) and moral concepts embodied in their only truths. And so it becomes clear that the strong person can be both an egoist and an altruist, in an up and down between faithful asceticism and priestly representation of these, or unfaithful enjoyment of life and assumption of “self-responsibility” (Nagel 2005: 129) and “consideration” (ibid.: 134) for the interests of others through his respect for them by granting them and letting them go.
In this sense, Friedrich Nietzsche (cf. 2010: 50f) advocates a holistic approach to the world around us and, above all, the consideration of the totality of the consequences of an action:
“[…] one’s enthusiasm is tortured by doubt, indeed one already feels one’s good conscience as a danger, as a kind of self-concealment and fatigue of finer honesty; and above all, one takes sides, fundamentally sides against ‘the youth’. – A decade later: and one realizes that all this, too, was still – youth!” (Nietzsche 2010: 50)
The instruments of ascetic priests invert the actual truths of nature into many truths of embodied dogmas, divide man into behavior and custom and only allow their boundaries to be considered realities of life, thereby alienating man from himself (cf. Nietzsche 2010: 83).
And as graceful as the rulers may appear today, following the law of history, they were always first a “barbarian caste” (ibid.: 206) which learned to strengthen its will and dominate others. Primarily through concealment and the instrument of punishment as a mnemonic device, their rule is unnatural, a Hobbian leviathan. If their rule is of a natural kind, their instruments are real love and knowledge, but it is precisely these that the ascetic priests advertise as their ideals in order to conceal their real intentions, while the natural ruler, the strong man, exemplifies them and does not peddle them (cf. ibid.: 233, 236, 252, 285):
“A person’s estimations of value reveal something of the state of his soul, and in what it sees its conditions of life, its own need.” (Nietzsche 2010: 222)
And so Nietzsche (2010: 302) also emphasizes his rejection of this pessimism (cf. ibid.) of the masses as well as the ascetic priests in order to counteract this “weariness of life[…]” (ibid.) to counteract it. Here, the “A f f e c t ” (ibid.: 374) can provide a remedy, the emotion as a strong, undamped affect, which as a perceived positivelyIt is a way of breaking the cycle of suffering and possibly allowing mercy to prevail and undermining the instrument of revenge, to break through the punishment, to allow an alternative, a different and deviating way of acting and to let the human being develop further and not to be further inhibited and blinded by the same affect, only in a negative form, especially revenge, as Gandhi once warned (Nietzsche 2010: 285, 374).
Source Fig. 2: own illustration; notes: The red lines mark the lines of conflict between strong and weak people. The horizontal conflict line marks hierarchical differences based on power and influence, such as those found in political parties, religious offices, company departments, scientific prominence and cultural awareness. For example, the employee has to subordinate himself to the head of department, and the regional politician to the state minister. The vertical line of conflict here distinguishes specifically between deviation from the dogma of the masses and can contribute to a considerable increase in welfare through a sense of responsibility and cultural maturity or, in the case of an immature person, lead to abuse of power and the assertion of his interests and contribute to damage to overall welfare through brute force. A limited legitimization of the Leviathan thus exists. Nevertheless, this permanent prevention of too much change in society inhibits its development and thus ensures a strong dampening of overall welfare, whereby the possible positive climate is damaged by a few immature and power-obsessed actors. Specific explanations can be found in Nietzsche’s account (see above).
Reflection by Friedrich Nietzsche on the discourse overview
