An introductory lecture summarizing the key ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morality.
0. Introduction
Nietzsche thinks this book is gonna be wasted on most of you, but for his rightful readers, it will free you to achieve greatness. Nietzsche wrote his books to cultivate what he called "higher men": people like Beethoven, Napoleon, and, Goethe. Now, before you get too excited, Nietzsche's got some bad news for you. Higher men are born to be higher men, they are born with noble aristocratic natures which he thinks is incredibly rare. So if your highest aspirations are just a beautiful house with a nice car, doing well in your 9-5, then this book is not for you. In fact, you might want to turn off this lecture because Nietzsche thinks herd morality is good for the herd. Now, if that doesn’t sound like you, if you aspire to a lot more, Nietzsche's still got some bad news for you. Your potential is being deliberately stunted by the herd. And If you want to achieve greatness, you need to abandon everything you've learned to call morality: altruism, equality, moderation… These values are manufactured precisely to restrain people like you. But there is some good news amidst all this bad news and the good news, is that this book will set you free.
What I'm going to do to ease you in into Nietzsche's ideas is I'm going to share with you a bit about my first introduction to Nietzsche and the Genealogy.
When I first got into college, all I wanted to be was an entrepreneur. So I dropped out freshman year, freshman spring, to build a company. And if you had asked me then and there why I was building the company, I would've told you something ridiculous, like, "I want to make the world a better place." That's complete nonsense. To this day, I've not met one single person actually motivated by that as their primary motivation. I wanted to build the company for the same reasons that Achilles wanted to sack Troy: pride, greed, glory, maybe even a bit of lust.
It didn't work. Company failed. I was very distraught. I went back to school. I got into philosophybecause I wanted to figure out what had gone wrong. And the type of thinkers that I was really attracted to were the Tibetan Buddhists as well as the Christians. People like Augustine, people like Girard. And those thinkers pulled me so much because they tried to wean me off of these worldly desires: pride and money and reputation. And instead, they tried to direct me to this other worldly set of desires: compassion, egolessness, contemplation.
And so in the middle, under their influence, in the middle of my college career, I started having this otherworldly phase. I rejected technology. I switched from Computer Science to Philosophy. I deleted all my social media. I moved to Nepal to go and practice in a Tibetan monastery.
And I thought I was making tremendous progress until I encountered Nietzsche's Genealogy. The Genealogy exposed me as not only having made no progress but actually as having deepened in my perversion. It exposed me that I was motivated by what Nietzsche called ressentiment, resentment. Resentment is the state where you feel bad, where you feel unpleasant, but there's nothing you can do about the source of that unpleasantness. And because you can't change the world, you change your interpretation of the world.
So the classical example here is Aesop's fox. The fox wants the grapes. The fox can't get the grapes. What does the fox do? The fox says, "Well, the grapes are sour anyways."
My sour grapes was my failed company. I was mad at myself, and I was envious of my peers who had dropped out, who had built successful companies. And so even unbeknownst to me... And this is why Nietzsche was so important. It's not like I was consciously planning this fox-like maneuver. Even unbeknownst to me, I had latched on to the asceticism, to the otherworldliness of Buddhism, of Christianity, of philosophy itself in order to more forcibly reject technology. Those silly entrepreneurs, don't they know all desire is suffering and all ambition is vanity?
Nietzsche exposed me as being a little more than just a little resentful loser, motivated by the same pride, the same desire for superiority, but even more perverse, because it was now packaged in this compassionate and egoless shell. And when he pointed that out to me, I started seeing it everywhere in the social world.
So one example is that I'm an acquaintance, and in freshman year, I thought he was the most selfless, most moral person I've ever met. Because every time I would see him, he would talk so passionately about welfare, about socialism, about communism, helping the poor, helping the little guy. He confessed to me, junior year, sophomore year, that what motivated that wasn't a love of the poor, but it was a hatred of the rich. So he had grown up in an upper middle-class environment, but he was in the middle class. So he was always made to feel lesser than his richer peers. And so his orientation away from wealth was not for its own sake, but to get back at the people he was envious and resentful of. Now, the funny story is, he's now in investment banking. Never had an issue with wealth and equality in the first place, or the only issue he had was that he was on the wrong side of it.
1. Nietzsche’s Project
So that was my first encounter with the Genealogy. But what I want to do now in the part one of this lecture is to properly introduce you holistically to Nietzsche's project, because resentment is only going to be the tip of the iceberg with what Nietzsche thinks is wrong with our culture.
Nietzsche's project is one of liberation. And what he wants to liberate you from is everything you've learned to call "morality": happiness, altruism, equality, compassion, asceticism. Nietzsche is going to call moralities that emphasize these values "slave morality": morality of the herd, morality of the weak, egalitarian morality, morality with a concern for the victim and the poor and the little guy. And he's going to associate that for reasons we're going to soon explore with the Judeo-Christian moral world.
What Nietzsche wants to elevate instead is what he calls "master morality": inegalitarian, elitist, which he associates with the pagan world, the Greco-Roman world. So instead of valuing happiness, he just wants us to not only embrace but see the uses of suffering. Instead of altruism, he wants us to develop a severe kind of self-love. Instead of tranquility, he wants us to embrace danger, have a taste for it. And instead of compassion, he wants us to be not only indifferent to the suffering of others but be willing to use them as a mere instrument for our own ends. And instead of asceticism, he wants us to indulge in our animalistic desires. This is the core of Nietzsche's project, what he called "a revaluation of values".
The obvious question is: On what possible grounds can Nietzsche make this suggestion? And the answer is quite simple: Because egalitarianism, because slave morality for Nietzsche produces mediocrity. It limits the production of greatness. And Nietzsche has one orienting goal in all of his writing, Genealogy included, the production of what he calls "higher men". When Nietzsche says higher men, you can have in mind people like Achilles, people like Napoleon, but what he really means are the creative geniuses: the Beethovens, the Goethes, the Shakespeares, and of course, according to Nietzsche, the Nietzsches of the world.
I read to you the chapter titles of Nietzsche's autobiography. Chapter One - Why I am So Wise. Chapter Two - Why I am So Clever. Chapter Three - Why I write Such Excellent books. Believe it or not, there's actually quite a humble and sober answer to those questions, which I'll get to when we talk about free will today.
But there's a much more immediate question that presents itself to us, which is -- Why? Why in the world is egalitarian morality harmful for the production of greatness? I mean, the Greco-Roman world is great. They had Sophocles; they had Aeschylus. But think about the great Christian art. Think about great Christian poetry, music. Even look at democracy. Democracy, which for Nietzsche, is an expression of egalitarianism, equality, produces greatness. So this concern just seems to be empirically unfounded.
Nietzsche's response is to say, "Let's take a closer look at these Christian great men. Let's take a closer look at your democratic greatness. And what you're going to find is you're going to find people who pay lip service to compassion, to equality in their words, but in their life, they're actually going to embody master immorality. They're deeply elitist in their life."
And the best example of this is Beethoven. Beethoven nominally was a Christian. This man did not live a Christian life. It wasn't love that motivated the production of his work. It wasn't a concern for the victim of the poor. It wasn't even abstract contemplation on the beauty of God through which he produced his music. Beethoven was ruthless. He was an asshole. He oriented his entire life around his work, which he deified, which he turned into an idol, and through which, he wanted to gain a form of pagan immortality.
I quote to you Beethoven's biographer:
Beethoven was possessed of an unswerving sense of "mission," of "vocation," filled with a deep conviction concerning the significance of his art. All else was subordinated to the fulfillment of this mission … by 1798 an elitist, almost autocratic element had entered his thought. In that year, he wrote to his friend … "The devil take you. I refuse to hear anything about your whole moral outlook. Power is the moral principle of those who excel others, and it is also mine." And in 1801, he referred to two of his friends as "merely instruments on which to play when I feel inclined. I value them merely for what they do for me." (Maynard Solomon, Beethoven)
Now, Nietzsche says, let's look at your Christian great art: The David, the Pieta, the Sistine Chapel, the cathedral in Florence. Was it Christian love that produced that? Not even close. It was the Machiavellian competition between rival patron families, like the Medicis, and the equally agonistic forces, the pagan psychological forces of the artists themselves. That's what drove the Renaissance.
Nietzsche's point then is that Christian civilization only produces greatness when it actively subverts its own fundamental principles. And he's going to make the same claim for democracy today. Democracy only produces greatness in spheres that actively reject its own ideal of equality. Let's look at two examples today in America: tech, athletics. These are spheres that still produce a lot of excellence. It's very vivacious, that has a lot of dynamism. There's nothing egalitarian about athletics. It's the only domain in the West today that you can actively advertise and be rewarded for doing so. "I want to crush the competition. I want to win. I'm the best." Tech, technology, is also deeply inegalitarian. The reason that startups work so well is because they're structured as dictatorships, aristocracies at best. It's because they don't operate by democratic consensus. It's because they don't decide on committees, it's because they actively subvert rules and conventions, sometimes the law itself, that they're able to innovate so fast. So go read the biographies of the great entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs, go read the biographies of the great athletes, like Kobe Bryant, and you're going to find the same maniacal focus, the same ruthlessness, the same disconcern for the feeling of others that you saw in Beethoven.
So now that we have a better understanding of what Nietzsche is trying to do, let's revisit his revaluation of values and see if we can become just a little bit more sympathetic to what he's trying to do. Why does he advocate severe self-love over altruism? Well, these great projects require total devotion, and they're your projects. They might have some greater end, greater ambition, but at the end of the day, they're your projects. They're projects that you can throw your identity all behind. This is why I said in the beginning, I've still not met a single person who has as their primary goal making the world a better place. At best, and even this is very rare, it's, "I want to make the world a better place."
Let's look at another set of evaluation. Why does Nietzsche advocate against compassion in favor of treating others as instruments? That's completely ridiculous. There's some immorality. Well, this all-encompassing love that you have for your own great project, this total devotion, is going to put blinders on you. So you're not going to be focused on other people, you're not going to have time to be compassionate to others, even when you do focus on other people. What total devotion means is that you treat everything in your life, including those people, as mere instruments. Again, think back to Beethoven here. People are, I don't know, a source of funding, an employee, a rival, a faceless audience member in your awesome lecture series. Nietzsche reminds us that great teacher of compassion, the Buddha himself, ruthlessly, ruthlessly abandoned his father, his mother, his wife, his child, his entire responsibility to his kingdom when his great project, Liberation, was at stake.
Let's look at the most important revaluation. What's grounding all of this is that you need to be an inegalitarian. I quote to you Nietzsche:
Every enhancement of the type "man" has so far been the work of an aristocratic society … a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata—when the ruling caste … looks down upon subjects and instruments … the other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either … the development of ever higher [humans]. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
Nietzsche's point here is that the very precondition to produce these higher men, to undertake these great projects, is to recognize that they exist in the first place. It's to recognize that there's a vast chasm of difference between Beethoven and your average artist, to recognize that some books are worth reading and rereading for your entire life, and almost nothing else is worth touching.
For Nietzsche, the telos of humanity, it's not the happiness of the majority, it's not the development of some world spirit, it's not the satisfaction of the fundamental interests of each, it's to produce a few inspiring individuals, even if that comes at great cost -- the majority. Greek society needed leisure to produce Sophocles and Aeschylus. That leisure required a large slave class, and Nietzsche does not find that objectionable.
The next obvious question is: Why should any of us, who don't share, let's call Nietzsche's highly extreme tastes -- why should any of us read the Genealogy? Well, the first reason is that even most egalitarians care deeply about having creative geniuses in their societies. We all want to reach Shakespeare. We all want to watch great athletes compete. And the Genealogy presents, I think, a really serious challenge: Is egalitarian morality compatible with the culture of excellence? But even if you didn't care about any of that, you should read the Genealogy because it's a masterwork of understanding human psychology.
Sigmund Freud himself said that, I quote:
[Nietzsche] had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived. (Sigmund Freud)
And Freud also said that he had to stop reading Nietzsche lest he be left with no original ideas of his own. That's how highly he thought of Nietzsche as a thinker and a psychologist. But there's this final reason to read Nietzsche. There's a final and terrifying reason to read him, even if we don't share his inegalitarian tastes. Tastes can be changed. And the point of this book is precisely to convince a few noble souls, a few potential higher men who would've, otherwise, wasted their lives operating under slave morality.
And that's why Nietzsche writes in the way he does, not in a strict analytic philosophical form, but through rhetoric, through imagery, through aphorisms. It's because Nietzsche's goal isn't to present some kind of abstract philosophical theory, it's to help a few become liberated from morality itself. And the strategy of liberation in this specific work, the Genealogy, is to show you the despicable origins, is to show you all the perverse ways that slave morality rose to power.
The image I want you to have of Nietzsche and the Genealogy is of a health inspector rating the most disgusting kitchen that he can find. And what he wants to report back in this book is all the foul personalities, is all the sickly chefs, is all the health code violations that he's discovered to get you change your taste.
I quote you Nietzsche describing his projects in his own words:
Would anyone like to go down and take a little look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on earth? Who has the courage to do so? ... Well then! The view into these dark workplaces is unobstructed here. Wait just a moment, Mr. Wanton-Curiosity and Daredevil: your eyes must first get used to this falsely shimmering light ... [He describes what he sees in this kitchen, and he says] I can't stand it anymore. Bad air! Bad air! This workplace where they fabricate ideals—it seems to me it stinks of sheer lies. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
He's trying to take you back into what he conceives to be the most disgusting kitchen in all of the human history that manufactured these slave morals. And he thinks that that will be enough to get you change your taste.
Which is why in this lecture I'm going to give you Nietzsche raw and undiluted. And I'm going to try to read you the man himself in his own words, because more so than any philosopher in the Western tradition, Nietzsche's content is inseparable from his form -- the offensiveness, the disturbing quality, the unfair caricatures. That is Nietzsche. And that is what Nietzsche needs to get you to change your taste. So for the next two parts of the lecture, I'm going to try to reconstruct as authentically as I can Nietzsche's own arguments in the Genealogy, even if I privately disagree with them. And I'm going to leave my own issues I have with this book for the last part, part 4.
So let me summarize once again what Nietzsche's project is in the Genealogy: His orienting concern is the production of higher men. He thinks what's holding back the production of higher men is slave morality. And what he wants to do in the Genealogy is to try to show you the perverse origins of slave morality so he can change that taste.
2. Ressentiment
2.1 Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome
So in this next part, part 2, what I'm going to do is I'm going to reconstruct one of the ways that slave morality rose to power. And that way, we discussed it already, is through this mechanism of resentment. But before I do so, I need to first make you guys appreciate the drastic different moral systems between the pagan world, Greco-Roman, and the Judeo-Christian world. For the Christians, the meek shall inherit the earth. How does the Iliad begin? It begins with an ode to force. Sing muse, wrath of Achilles. The pagan gods from the perspective of the Christians are completely immoral -- they're envious, they're jealous, they're barely more mature than little children, and they treat us mortals like play things that they just kill and rape. Now, the Christian God is completely incompetent from the pagan perspective. What's your superpower? Multiplying bread? Here's another example. Chastity, we're going to talk a lot about chastity today, is a high value. It's a high virtue in Christianity, but it's sexual prowess, that is what is lionized in pagan myths. Think about Hercules going to Thespia and having sex with all 50 of the king's daughters in one night. That's what's celebrated.
For Nietzsche, the history of the West is the history between these two sides waging war against each other. I quote to you Nietzsche himself:
"Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome"—so far there has been no greater event than this battle.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
And it's a battle that has raged on for millennia according to Nietzsche with Christian morality securing an early victory in the conversion of Constantine and its installation of the papacy in Rome. But what you need to know about this battle is that the battle lines are not as clear as they first may seem. For example, the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation both are nominally Christian events, but the Renaissance, because it emphasizes sensuality, think about all the nude art and the nude sculptures represents Rome for Nietzsche. Whereas Protestant Reformation, which represents a tightening of the screw of religious prohibitions, that represents Judea. So which side you actually fall on is not going to be what size you advertise you fall on, but it's what kind of values you uphold.
If you uphold values of sensuality, of power, of elitism, of appreciation for wealth and privilege, you're with Rome. If you emphasize equality, egalitarianism, compassion, all those selfless values, if you care a lot about victims, you're with Judea. And so the irony is Nietzsche thinks that most people in most movements in modernity are Christian through and through, even if they don't realize it. Communism, socialism, feminism, animal rights activism, all of these that have as their orienting concern a concern for the victim are Christian through and through. Christian morality success is so total that we're going to discuss today how even atheism and science for Nietzsche are going to be shown to be Christian phenomenon through and through.
2.2 Good and Bad / Good and Evil
But that would be getting a bit far ahead of ourselves, I want to return to our orienting question. How did Christian morality secure such a total victory? And the clue is going to lie for Nietzsche in the words that these two religions use to evaluate. Christian morality, slave morality, evaluates things good and evil. Pagan morality evaluates things good and bad.
So Nietzsche is a philologist, that's the discipline he received training at. And philology is the study of the development of languages. And what Nietzsche finds when he looks at master morality, good and bad, is that the word good has its roots very similar to the words noble, aristocratic, high-minded, privileged. Whereas the word bad is associated with words, plain, simple, common. For example, the German word for bad is very similar to the German word for plain and simple. And what that tells Nietzsche is that master morality, when they evaluate, their first act of evaluation is self-affirmation. They are the masters. They look at themselves and they say, I'm privileged. I'm an aristocrat. I'm beautiful, I'm powerful, I am good. And then they turn to the slaves. And they say, well, you're none of that. And so you're bad, you're plain. Again, bad is not the presence of something in the way that evil is, bad is the absence of something.
But the slaves, slave morality does not evaluate in this way. Slave morality establishes the word evil first. And Nietzsche's key insight is that what the slaves label as evil is precisely what the masters label as good, because the slaves are jealous of the power of the masters. They're envious, they're resentful. Again, think back to my own example. Think back to the example of my progressive acquaintance. And so, they turn these virtues into vices. Ambition becomes greed, appetite becomes gluttony. Sexual prowess becomes lust. Confidence becomes pride. Strength becomes wrath.
So where does slave morality get its concept of good? We know how it got its concept of evil. It gets its concept of good by simply flipping whatever the masters are. So you are powerful and assertive … I'm going to turn the other cheek. Your beautiful and sensual … well, I value chastity and virginity. You're strong and vivacious … well, tough luck, buddy. The meek will inherit the earth. You are wealthy and privileged, it'll be harder for you to enter heaven than a camel through the eye of a needle. The slaves, they don't hold values for their own sake, but only as a moral weapon against the masters. Again, think back to my progressive acquaintance. What's core, what's primary for him is his hatred of the rich. And so whatever's the opposite of that, it doesn't matter. Is it socialism? Is it communism? Is it welfare? It doesn't really matter. Whatever's the opposite of that, he's going to align himself to.
So for Nietzsche, this is the big difference between the master and the slave mode of evaluation.The master defines good in himself. Whatever's not that is bad. The slave defines evil in the master, and whatever's the opposite of that is good. And the slave mode of evaluation for Nietzsche is going to be the origin of both Christian morality and egalitarianism. And he wants us to see its perversion. He wants to change our taste through three ways.
2.3 Three Critiques of Slave Morality
The first is by pointing out the internal psychology of the slaves. The slaves, they're negative, they're naysayers, because their primary act of evaluation is to say power bad, beauty bad, wealth bad, privilege bad. They don't stand for anything. They only stand against things. And as a result, their own internal psychology is of a seething hate. It's of loathing, it's of envy.
So what about the master's internal psychology? Well, the masters, they're yes-sayers. Their first act of evaluation is to say, I'm awesome. I'm beautiful, I'm strong, I'm rich. This is awesome. And what this surplus of confidence provides for the master is that the master becomes somewhat indifferent, a cool nonchalance to the external world. He embraces danger. He's not easily offended at all. And even when he commits atrocities, he walks away cheerful.
I quote you Nietzsche:
[Masters] step back into the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, as jubilant monsters, who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, torture with such high spirits and equanimity that it seems as if they have only played a student prank, convinced that for years to come the poets will again have something to sing and to praise. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
The picture that Nietzsche paints of the master is of this joyful brute. And he is a brute. So he's very stupid, partially because he's never had to use his intellect. But what's positive here is his naivete. The fact that he doesn't overthink things. And if you think Nietzsche is exaggerating with that quote I just gave you, that's literally how the Iliad begins. Achilles commits murder, arson, rape, and all he can think about is his own reputation, his own immortal glory.
So the best way to think about Nietzsche's master is your high school jock. He's a physical specimen. He's on top of the social pecking order. He loves danger, extreme sports, drunk driving, body checking people in hockey. He bullies people, not because he's mad, but for him, it's fun to shove someone into a locker. And you can call all manner of obscenities to his face, partially because he's so smug and confident, partially because he's too stupid to realize what you're actually saying.
That might sound a very negative ideal for us, partially because we have been influenced by Christian morality. But it's the naive self-assurance. It's the willingness to indulge into one's simple desires. It's the natural independence. That's the first reason that makes this masterly mode of evaluation preferable to the slave.
The second reason that slave morality is despicable for Nietzsche is that they promote bad values. And Nietzsche wants to ask, how can you not promote bad values? You've simply taken what the masters like and you flipped it.
By the way, that's also the answer to the question why there are two competing moral systems in the West. It's because the Christians literally took the Greco-Roman way of evaluating things for Nietzsche and flipped it on its head.
And Nietzsche would say, let's just look at the type of people associated with these different religions, and that's going to tell you everything you need to know about them. Who created the Greco-Roman myths? Well, it was people -- it was the aristocrats, aristocratic artists: Virgil, Sophocles, Aeschylus. Who created Christianity, who wrote the Bible? Well, the Hebrew Bible is by a group of people who repeatedly suffered enslavement in exile. And the New Testament is written by a group of persecuted Jews. Each would ask, who is Greco-Roman myths for? Who are they for? Well, they're for the aristocrats. People like Caesar, they claim direct ancestry from Aeneas, from these myths. Who's Christianity for? It's emphatically, it wasn't for the aristocrats. The Roman senatorial elite were the last to convert. In the first 300 years, the early adopters of Christianity, the lower classes, the middle classes, marginalized people like women and slaves. Who were the Greco-Roman myths about? Well, they were about these larger-than-life aristocratic warriors: Achilles, Odysseus, and even more powerful gods like Zeus, who flew around everywhere zapping people with thunderbolts. Who's Christianity about? It's about the victim. It's about Moses, not the Pharaoh. It's about Abel and not Cain. It's about Joseph and not his brothers. Christianity is about a lowly carpenter whose defining moment was getting executed by the Roman state.
Nietzsche would say the Greco-Roman myths are by victors for victors about victors. Whereas Christianity is by victims for victims about victims. And he wants to ask you, is there any doubt why such a religion would emphasize meekness, chastity, poverty? And is there any doubt why our culture that has been so sufficiently influenced by Christianity is so victim obsessed? I mean, today in political conversation, how do you gain the moral upper hand? You start by listing out all the ways you're a victim: As an immigrant, I think this; as a minority, I think this; as a working single mom of 20, I think that. That's Judeo-Christian. That's not Greco-Roman. How does Achilles introduce himself? I'm Achilles, son of Peleus. You start by listing your noble ancestors. You start by listing all the ways you're a victor, not a victim.
But the even bigger issue for Nietzsche is that when slave morality elevates things like mercy, like chastity, like poverty, that's not what they're really advocating for.
I quote to you, Nietzsche in his own words:
The inoffensiveness of the weak one, cowardice itself, which he possesses in abundance, his standing-at-the-door, his unavoidable having-to-wait, acquires good names here, such as "patience," it is even called virtue itself; not being able to avenge oneself is called not wanting to avenge oneself, perhaps even forgiveness. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
For Nietzsche, the slaves aren't merciful … they're too weak to seek revenge. They aren't chaste … they're too ugly to get laid. They aren't patient … they're too cowardly to act. Nietzsche's point is that you can't confuse impotence for virtue.
I want to take a step back here and just point out something interesting because the Christian thinker, René Girard, also came to the exact same conclusion that at the heart of Christianity, what made it special was that it emphasized the victim. It protected the victim. But of course, given that he's a Christian thinker, he sees that as a reason that Christianity is true and not as a reason to critique Christianity as Nietzsche does here. And it's actually structured as a very brilliant and compelling critique of Nietzsche, which I'm not going to go into now, but I'll link my lecture in the description below if you want to watch that later on.
We need to turn to the third issue that Nietzsche highlights with slave morality. And that's hypocrisy. And there's no better expression for Nietzsche of this hypocrisy than Christian love. Nietzsche thinks that Christian love purports to be this voice of objective justice, but is really just the pagan desire for vengeance in another form. And the way that he's going to make this argument is quite clever. He's going to latch on to a strand of theological thought that conceives of God's punishment, even God's punishment, as a manifestation of God's love. That makes a lot of intuitive sense. We punish people all the time who we want to be better. We punish our kids so that they morally improve. We punish our employees 'cause we want them to be better. What Nietzsche is going to focus on is a specific type of punishment. Punishment in the afterlife, punishment in hell. What's the purpose of God's punishment? Are you going to still tell me it's love even if these people have no possible outlet of improvement? That's the wedge where Nietzsche smells hypocrisy, and he's going to cite three influential Christian writers to make his point.
The first writer that Nietzsche cites is Dante, who writes on his gates of hell, "I too was made by eternal love." If you read the Inferno, you know there's not a lot of loving going down there. It's a torturous hell. And so why? Why is that love? Some theologians think that when you desire sin, what you're desiring is to be away from God, and therefore the Inferno is really giving you what you want. And so that's why it's love. But Nietzsche's not convinced at all. Nietzsche says, you're telling me I'm getting impaled by a spike for all of eternity with no possibility of moral progress because God loves me? What Nietzsche reads instead into the structure of the Christian afterlife is the pagan desire for vengeance.
And he cites his second thinker, Aquinas, to make his point:
Thomas Aquinas the great teacher and saint. "The blessed in the kingdom of heaven," he says meekly as a lamb, "will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful to them." (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
Nietzsche's reading here of Aquinas is that the saints in heaven are like spectators in an otherworldly coliseum eating popcorn and laughing and pointing out at all the sinners being punished in heaven.
Now, I think this is a terrible misreading of Aquinas, especially if you read the passages here around the Summa. But the third thinker that he just cites I think is the most compelling of them all. And that's Tertullian. So Tertullian did end up breaking from the church. However, he still remains one of the most influential early Christian writers. He introduced the word "trinity" and he's still considered by Christians today the father of Latin theology, so this isn't just some random guy that Nietzsche just pulled out of a hat. So what I'm going to read you now is Nietzsche's selected quotation of Tertullian, talking about how excited he is in watching the sinners be punished.
That last day of judgment … how vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? what my derision? Which sight gives me joy? Which rouses me to exultation? As I see so many illustrious monarchs. whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those … governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world's wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers … that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more "dissolute" in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers. not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows; unless even then I shall not care to attend to such ministers of sin, in my eager wish rather to fix a gaze insatiable on those whose fury vented itself against the Lord.
(Tertullian, On the Spectacles)
Nietzsche wants to ask you: Does that sound like love?
So those are the three reasons why that Nietzsche dislikes slave morality and elevates master morality. Slave morality is life-denying, it promotes bad values, and it promotes bad values that the Christians themselves don't even believe in.
2.4 Invention of Free Will
Now, slave morality is indeed going to invert the values of master morality, but it has one more trick up its sleeve, which is that it invents the notion of freedom, free will to further blame the masters and praise themselves. And Nietzsche makes this point by using the famous picture of birds of prey. So eagles and hawks hunting little lambs. So this is the famous sentence that describes the psychology of these lambs, how the lambs react being hunted.
The lambs say among themselves:
The lambs say among themselves "these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is as little as possible a bird of prey but rather its opposite, a lamb, isn't he good?" (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
What Nietzsche is trying to do here is to show you how ridiculous it would be if lambs blamed eagles for hunting them and how even more ridiculous it would be if lambs praise themselves for not hunting other lambs. Why is it ridiculous? Nietzsche thinks. It's because moral blame, moral praise requires you to have been able to do otherwise. It requires the idea of free will.
But of course, it's in the nature of the eagle to hunt, and it is in the nature of the lambs to be hunted. The lamb couldn't even hunt if it wanted to. So the lamb invents this idea of choice, of free will, to further praise itself and blame the eagle. And of course, in this analogy, in this metaphor, in this imagery, the lambs they're the slaves, the birds of prey they're the masters. And Nietzsche's view is that slavish and masterly humans are just as different from each other, this is his inegalitarianism talking as eagles are from lambs. And just like animals, it is our natures, it's not our free choice, that determines our actions. The masters are naturally strong and they can't help but bully people, rape, burn, and pillage. The slaves they're naturally weak. Again, don't confuse incompetence, impotence for virtue. And so they couldn't even do that if they wanted to.
The strongest reading of Nietzsche here that he doesn't believe in free will at all. Remember what I said in the beginning of the lecture, that there's actually quite a humble and sober answer to his questions in his autobiography, why I'm so clever were so wise. This is that answer. Nietzsche thinks that he was fated to do this, and that's humble; again, because Nietzsche doesn't praise himself for being so clever, he's just fortunate. So in the master mode of evaluation, without this idea of free will, people are fortunate or they're pitiful, which is why the master has a lot of compassion for the slave. It's only when you add in free will is this idea of blame come into play.
Nietzsche's attack on free will, a whole other can of worms, and it's super interesting. How does Nietzsche reconcile it with his agential theory with no free will? How does the will to power guy not believe in free will? I don't have time to go into that right now, but I filmed an interview with one of the world's leading Nietzsche Scholars, which again I will link in the description if you're interested.
The key insight I want to emphasize here is that free will, again, is what makes something praiseworthy or blameworthy. Vegetarians don't blame lions and eagles for eating meat. They blame us because we can do otherwise, and that's what he is getting at here. So the slaves not only invert the system of morality, they add this notion of free will.
2.5 Ad Hominem
And I really want to emphasize just how significant this is -- that Nietzsche thinks that ressentiment or psychology not only can determine our position on values -- is chastity good? Is chastity bad? It can actually determine our metaphysics -- is there free will or not?
So I quote you Nietzsche:
Every great philosophy so far has been … the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; in short, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the true living seed from which the whole plant has always grown. In fact, to explain how the strangest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really come about, it is always good (and wise) to begin by asking: at what morality does it (does he) aim? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
What Nietzsche is saying here is that it is our interest, it is our psychology; it is things like resentment that affects philosophy that determines our philosophical worldview. The example we already discussed, it's because the lambs want to blame the eagles, that's why they invent this notion of free will. It's not because they started from first principles and reason that free will is true.
This, I think, is one of the most important insights of this book, because the implication is ad hominem arguments where you criticize not the thought, but the thinker, or at the very least, you look at the thinker for how the thought was formed is not only valid, but it's necessary. They're necessary, again, because we don't reason from first principles, because we don't start from empiricism, but because our ideas are helplessly shaped by our interest by our psychology. And this is why Nietzsche had to spend so much time discussing who the master was, what his psychology was; and who the slave was, what his psychology was.
And I want to suggest that this extends even to the most philosophical of minds. So Nietzsche asks, not in the Genealogy, but another book called Twilight of the Idols, he asks, why does Socrates like ideas so much? Why does Socrates devalue the material world? Why does Socrates elevate an abstract realm of forms? Nietzsche's answer is that Socrates is ugly.
I quote you Nietzsche:
Socrates was a plebe. We know, we can even still see how ugly he was … The anthropologists among criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monster in face, monster in soul … When a foreigner who was an expert on faces came through Athens, he told Socrates to his face that he was a monster—that he was harboring all the bad vices and desires. To which Socrates answered simply: "You know me, sir!" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)
What Nietzsche wants to say here is this: "If I had the ugliest nose, but the biggest brain in all of Athens, I too would spend all my time thinking. I too would devalue the material world and elevate this world of abstract ideas. I too would rank beautiful bodies as less beautiful than contemplating the idea of beauty. I too would suggest the philosopher king. That's how deeply this runs for Nietzsche, that even the shape that Socrates thought is determined by who he is -- his ugliness. And that's why, again, the ad hominem isn't just valid, it's necessary for us to properly understand the thought.
All right. Let's summarize what we've covered so far in Part 2. Slave morality inverts the value system of the masters; it introduces this idea of free will, which further blames the masters, praises themselves. And that's the answer, at least one of the answers, for why Nietzsche thinks Christianity won. It's by inverting the Greco-Roman value system, the pagan value system, that they were able to appeal to the resentment of the vast underclasses that felt disenfranchised from pagan religion.
I don't find this totally convincing, and I want to start laying the seeds of why that is by asking you guys to start considering this question: For egalitarian movements, socialism, communism, Christianity, feminism, is resentment the essence of these movements, or is it merely a likely perversion?
Before I tell you my own answer to this question, there's another account, there's another mechanism by which slave morality appeals not just to the slaves, but also the masters. That's the ascetic ideal, that's what we're going to investigate in this next part -- Part 3.
3. Asceticism
3.1 The Priests
Before I introduce you to the ascetic ideal and what that means, there's a new class in this war between master and slave that I need to introduce you to, and those are the priests. And there's three important things you need to know about the priests.
The first is that the priests are the leaders of the slave revolt and they're leaders because they share a common attribute, the slaves, which is that they're sickly. When Nietzsche calls the priest and the slave sickly, he does mean physically ill; he does mean that they're timid. But what he really has in mind is sickly of spirit, that they're negative, they're gloomy people, they're naturally depressive, that's what when you think about it. So these priests like the slaves don't have the same natural lightheartedness of the masters. What they do have, this is the second characteristic you need to know, is something that neither the slaves nor the masters have, which is that they're very smart, they're very interesting, they're very intelligent. And so even though Nietzsche is ultimately is going to side against these priests, he's a lot more complementary than you think because those were the group of people that made man interesting. The third quality is that the priests also share a quality with the masters themselves, and that is that they have a very strong will to power. So will to power is a central idea in Nietzsche. Let me read to you how Nietzsche describes in his own words:
Every animal … instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can vent its power completely and attain its maximum in the feeling of power. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
The interpretation to the will to power, there's many, that makes the most sense to me is that more often than not, even if we're not aware of it, we do most things out of a desire to increase our feeling of power. So it's not a blanket metaphysical thesis, it's not even a blanket psychological thesis that everything is will to power. It is simply the much more reduced, but still interesting point, that more than meets the eye is motivated out of power.
So those are the three qualities of the priest: like the master, they have strong will to power; like the slave they're sickly; unlike master and slave, they're very smart. And the closest approximation we have to priest would be someone like the intellectual today, especially the progressive intellectual. Someone who sides with the victim against the oppressor.
3.2 Social Control
So the priests are going to have their own ideal, and Nietzsche calls that the ascetic ideal. Also, a version of slave morality, but has a different emphasis and focus than is good and evil mode of evaluation we discussed in Part 2. The ascetic ideal seeks to deny oneself with all the natural desires of life: food, water, sex, sleep, pleasures, but also to deny himself of the social desires: money, reputation, honor. So just like the good and evil scheme, this is a form of slave morality because it's about limiting the ego, it's about making oneself more egoless, but it has a different emphasis because the good and evil scheme, primarily the emphasis is social, whereas this is a lot more individualistic. It's by denying oneself. So what you should have in mind here when he says ascetic ideal, think mystics: Buddhist mystics, Sufi mystics, a Christian monk who goes into the desert for 30 days to pray.
Obviously, the first question we need to ask is: How is this the will to power? You said the priest has high will to power but their primary thing is to deny themselves. How is that will to power? It's high will to power in two ways. The first way is that asceticism is the way by which the slaves convince others of their political legitimacy. So an example of this is one of my favorite TV shows, Game of Thrones, has his character called The High Sparrow. So the High Sparrow was the leader of one of the most powerful religious sects in the capital city, and he would always be really out of place in every scene he was in because he was surrounded by the political elite, amongst the aristocrats, who were decked out in these elegant outfits, but he was always wearing rags. And he was always shown to be doing menial labor, like sweeping the floor. And his rhetoric is a lot more humble: oh, this, for the people; this, for the gods.
But Nietzsche's point, and anyone who has watched that show knows, it's precisely his powerlessness that gives him his political power. It's asceticism itself that provides him his political legitimacy in ruling that religious sect. And the mechanism is this, if you see someone who has denied life's most important desires: sex, money, reputation, honor, even food, and you think, well, he must have gotten something else, he must have transcended, he must have gotten a higher ideal. So that's how this mechanism works. That's how denying oneself is an active securing political legitimacy.
Here's another example, and it's a personal one, and it comes from the Tibetan monastery that I practice in. So every few weeks, you would have an opportunity to ask, one of these great living masters who, you know, selfless, secure in its enlightenment, a question. So it's like office hours. But it's a lot more ritualistic than office hours, so what you got to do is you enter the room and you got to do a prostration. You know what prostration is? You put your hands like this, go like that, you kneel on the floor, bend your head to the ground, that's kowtow. That's one prostration. You do three prostrations. You wobble feebly in front of the master. You kneel on the floor. The master is sitting in his golden cushion chair, and you get to ask your single question. That's also how we're are going to do our Q&A today, by the way.
And I think if Nietzsche saw me do that, he's want to slap me in the face and say, "This is the guy you're trying to learn how to be selfless from. This is the egoless guy." And Nietzsche's critique would be, the Tibetan Buddhists, they can talk about egolessness, they can talk about compassion all they want. Look at the society they built. Look at the feudal order. Look at the large serf class they had serving these supposedly selfless nobles. Look at their system for corporal punishment. Look at their hierarchical rituals, you can't even get a question out without kowtowing three times. Nietzsche's critique is that the feudal theocracy of Tibetan Buddhism is propped up precisely by their asceticism. So it's not a cessation of desire, it's actually willing very strongly. I think that's a good critique; I think that's an interesting critique. I think it goes a bit too far. I don't think it's just will to power, but I'm going to save the reasons why I think so again into the last section.
3.3 Willing Nothingness
So that's the first way in which the ascetic ideal for Nietzsche represents a will to power, a form of social control. But Nietzsche's surprising insight or his surprising claim rather, is that even for the ascetic who's meditating by himself, no sociality whatsoever, in the forest. Even that is will to power. And that represents will to power because it represents the ideal situation, the ideal conditions under which the ascetic priest can pursue his great project.
How this actually works is going to be a lot more easily understood when we look at the philosopher first, because the philosopher, again, the intellectual also participates in this priestly ideal. So what we're going to do now is going to first examine how ascetic ideal helps the philosopher do his great project. And then we go back, the ascetic ideal, in the ascetic.
I quote you Nietzsche:
Poverty, humility, chastity … look at the lives of all great fruitful inventive spirits close up—one will always find all three to a certain degree. Certainly not, as goes without saying, as if these were their "virtues" … but rather because their supreme lord [philosophy] demands it thus of them, demands prudently and relentlessly: he has a mind for only [philosophy] and gathers everything—time, energy, love, interest—only for this, saves it only for this. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
Nietzsche's point is this: poverty, chastity, humility. The philosopher does not choose these because he's virtuous. He chooses these because these are the conditions that allow him to do his great work.
Let's take poverty, for example. The philosopher's orientation is not to make money; he's not to focus on making money. Even if you offered him possessions, he's not going to want them. Why? Because having possessions comes with obligations, it comes with demands. So he didn't choose to be poor because it's virtuous, he chose to be poor because that's not his focus in life, that's not where he directs his will to power.
Obviously, we want to push back against Nietzsche here and say, but isn't having truth-seeking rather than money-making as your primary goal; isn't that virtuous? And Nietzsche's going to say, "There's a lot of issues with truth-seeking as your primary goal." And we're going to talk about that very soon. But even if it were more virtuous to live a truth-seeking life than a money-seeking life, that's not why the philosopher chose it. The philosopher chose it because his disposition, his circumstance, his resources better suited him to exercise will to power in the domain of truth.
So I've had a lot of personal experience here where I've been up close and personal with the top intellectuals as well as the top capitalists in the world. And they hate each other. The capitalists think the intellectuals are poisoning the well of ideas, and the intellectuals think the capitalists are hoarding all the resources and they see a vast chasm of difference between each other. But when you get up close and personal, especially when you look at the elite of both, the similarity I think, and I think Nietzsche is right here, is greater than the difference. They all have that maniacal focus. They all have that unrelenting drive to succeed, to win out. They all have a super strong will to power.
And I suspect that Nietzsche is right, that the only thing that made them go one way or the other is not because, I don't know, capitalism can help everyone or because truth seeking is the most virtuous life. It's because their dispositions, their circumstance, their relationships, their resources better predispose them to exercise their will to power in one domain rather than the other.
And the same story goes with humility. Philosophers are not more humble because they're moderate. It's the exact opposite. Their immoderate pursuit of the truth is why they are humble, because they don't want to get bothered by people. So that's why they don't advertise themselves. That's why they don't display their name on things. Chastity, the last virtue, I think is the most interesting. So Nietzsche asks us, why are so many of the great philosophers chaste? They don't have wives. Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rousseau. I mean, Socrates had a wife, but Socrates literally chose the most annoying woman he could find to test his resolve. So that doesn't really count. So that's the question, why do philosophers not get married? And I think Nietzsche has a very interesting answer here. It's because most people get married to have progeny, to have kids. To have their name live on. But the philosopher already has a channel for his name to live on, and it's through his books. So again, it's not like the philosopher's more enlightened. It's not like the philosopher no longer cares about his name living on after his own death. It's that he's found a better will to power route to exercise that same desire.
So the ascetic ideal, the philosopher, is an expression of the will to power because it's by rejecting the usual demands of life -- money, sex, name -- that the philosopher can fully devote himself to truth at all costs. That's what his ascetic ideal is: Truth at all costs to life.
I'm going to go on a little tangent here, but only because it's so interesting.
Nietzsche thinks we got this ascetic ideal truth at all costs from Christianity. And you can see how it's a religious idea. That I'm going to be pursuing a transcendental ideal, namely truth against all other demands of life. I'm going to sacrifice sex. I'm going to sacrifice family, reputation, just for truth. That's a Christian idea for Nietzsche. If that's the case, then the ascetic ideal -- truth at all costs -- is also what gave birth to science and atheism.
So think about the early atheist writers. Think about the early scientists like Galileo and how much persecution, how much life they needed to sacrifice for their ideal of truth. So in this way then Nietzsche thinks Christianity committed suicide.
I quote to you Nietzsche:
What actually triumphed over the Christian god? … Christian morality itself, the ever more strictly understood concept of truthfulness … translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality)
So it's the Christian desire -- truth at all costs, which gave birth to atheism and science that ended up destroying Christianity.
And I just want to make clear, and this just shows us how different Nietzsche's value system is to ours. When most people say Christianity gave birth to science, they mean that as a praise of Christianity. When Nietzsche says that, he means as a critique of science, that science still operates under this religious faith -- truth at all costs, that it itself cannot justify. Why are we going out and finding out what all the Beatles are doing? That is not a normal mastery desire. In Nietzsche's own position is that no value should have that transcendental absolute status. X at all costs is always bad-- let alone truth because for Nietzsche, what sustains life, what sustains life's core commitments is illusion. And so truth at all costs is going to be deeply harmful for life. All right, that's the tangent. I hope you found it interesting.
Let's go back to our conversation about what the ascetic ideal means for the ascetic himself. Again, we saw what it meant for the philosopher. For the philosopher, the ascetic ideal -- denying one's demands of life meant the greatest conditions to pursue his own great project. And Nietzsche thinks that's exactly what it means for the ascetic as well. The next obvious question is, what is the ascetic's great project? And Nietzsche has a brilliant, but I think wrong answer here, like most of philosophy: willing nothingness. The philosopher denies life for the sake of pursuit of truth.The ascetic denies life for the sake of denying life. The philosopher is chaste because he doesn't want to get nagged, he wants to focus on his work. The ascetic is chaste for chastity's sake.
That's so uncharitable. Why does Nietzsche, how could he possibly describe the ascetics as willing nothingness? I think the first thing to say in defense of Nietzsche is that's what ascetics themselves tell you if you listen closely. I mean, think about the goal of Buddhism: cessation of desire. I'm not talking about the later developments of Buddhism, the Mahāyāna, the Vajrayana. Think about Theravada Buddhism, early Buddhism. What cessation of desire meant was poofing out of existence. You obtain nirvana, you still live, but when you die, it's called Parinirvana: the final Nirvana, and you just leave. And that makes sense. Life is a cycle of suffering. Let's end life. I mean, that's a bit of a simplification, but not by much.
And I think Nietzsche sees this common strand amongst all the world's mystical traditions. This life is suffering. This life is evil. This life is bad. We need to find a way to end it. Of course, what Nietzsche thinks is actually going on here, what Nietzsche thinks is actually happening is that some people are predisposed to make that judgment because of their natures. Because they're naturally sickly, they're naturally gloomy, they're naturally depressive. If you read the commentary on the Buddha's early life, you'll know that he's a naturally gloomy depressive figure. But not all of us are like that.
So when someone tells you all life is suffering. For Nietzsche, again, think back to ad hominem, think back to Socrates is ugly. That tells you a lot more about who they are and what life is. So here's an example, in this Tibetan monastery that I was at, I talked to a meditator, a practitioner who was in her 60s and she had practiced for about 35, 40 years. And she told me, after 30 years of practice and reading and meditation, I finally sensed that the Buddhists were right. I finally could see for myself that at the core of all desire was suffering. And Nietzsche's reading of that is that she didn't learn some objective truth. She got tricked. She's naturally healthy. She's naturally healthy. She doesn't have to interpret the world as all life is suffering. But if you, all you hear for 30 years is all life is suffering, all life is suffering, all life is suffering. That's what you're going to start to see in everything. So she was healthy and then she was made sick by the priests who are spreading their natural sickliness.
Of course, many ascetics are going to reply -- you got it wrong, we're not ending life to end life. We're not willing nothingness to will nothingness. We're willing to transcend this reality. This reality, subjectivity itself is an illusion; the ego, that's an illusion. We want to get to the objective reality. That's what we're trying to do. And again, I think Nietzsche has a brilliant but ultimately wrong response here, which is that he says, objective reality is an oxymoron. Think about it all reality requires some form of subject. All life is necessary perspectival. It's from a certain perspective for Nietzsche. There's no God eyes view to escape to. And even if they were, it would be one among many perspectives.
So when you tell me I want to transcend perspectives, I want to get to objectivity, I want to leave subjectivity, life itself is subjectivity. What you're really telling me is you want to end life and we're back to willing nothingness. And by the way, this is another intuition that Nietzsche thinks science got from religion. This desire to get to an objective realm, this desire to seek perspective-less truths and Nietzsche thinks that's totally misguided.
All right. So we solved the puzzle of the ascetic. And the answer to the riddle is this: Man would much rather will nothingness than not will. What Nietzsche is saying here is that our will to power is so strong that we would actively use our will to power to will nothingness than just to stop using our will to power. So the Buddhists, they're not ceasing desire. They're desiring cessation. Think about how active, how will to power Buddhist monastic life is.
I'm going to give you one last example to really drive this home. Do you know what the first law from the first council of Nicaea was? This is one of the most important events in all of early Christian history, convened by Constantine himself, establishing court doctrines of the faith. The literal first law, first canon law, was do not chop your penis off. And the reason was because too many early ascetics in Christianity were chopping their penises off. And that's exactly what Nietzsche has in mind here. Man would rather will nothingness than not will. In this domain,willing would be having sex, not willing would be being chaste but with the penis attached, actively willing nothingness is actively chopping it off.
And I do think it's a very interesting insight that early ascetics would rather actively chop their penises off than just leave it on and not use it. And Nietzsche's reading here again is that our will to power is so strong. I mean, think about the balls it takes to chop off your balls. That's will to power right there.
All right. So we solved the riddle of the ascetic ideal. What appears to be not willing is really the will to power directed in two avenues: social control or the willing of nothingness, which means again, life denial, denying one's core in