Where attempts have not been made to reconcile the two moralities, they may be described as follows:—All is GOOD in the noble morality which proceeds from strength, power, health, well-constitutedness, happiness, and awfulness; for, the motive force behind the people practising it is “the struggle for power.” The antithesis “good and bad” to this first class means the same as “noble” and “despicable.” “Bad” in the master-morality must be applied to the coward, to all acts that spring from weakness, to the man with “an eye to the main chance,” who would forsake everything in order to live.
With the second, the slave-morality, the case is different. There, inasmuch as the community is an oppressed, suffering, unemancipated, and weary one, all THAT will be held to be good which alleviates the state of suffering. Pity, the obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, and humility—these are unquestionably the qualities we shall here find flooded with the light of approval and admiration; because they are the most USEFUL qualities—; they make life endurable, they are of assistance in the “struggle for existence” which is the motive force behind the people practising this morality. To this class, all that is AWFUL is bad, in fact it is THE evil par excellence. Strength, health, superabundance of animal spirits and power, are regarded with hate, suspicion, and fear by the subordinate class.
Now Nietzsche believed that the first or the noble-morality conduced to an ascent in the line of life; because it was creative and active. On the other hand, he believed that the second or slave-morality, where it became paramount, led to degeneration, because it was passive and defensive, wanting merely to keep those who practised it alive. Hence his earnest advocacy of noble-morality.
(C.) Nietzsche and Evolution.
Nietzsche as an evolutionist I shall have occasion to define and discuss in the course of these notes (see Notes on Chapter LVI., par.10, and on Chapter LVII.). For the present let it suffice for us to know that he accepted the “Development Hypothesis” as an explanation of the origin of species: but he did not halt where most naturalists have halted. He by no means regarded man as the highest possible being which evolution could arrive at; for though his physical development may have reached its limit, this is not the case with his mental or spiritual attributes. If the process be a fact; if things have BECOME what they are, then, he contends, we may describe no limit to man’s aspirations. If he struggled up from barbarism, and still more remotely from the lower Primates, his ideal should be to surpass man himself and reach Superman (see especially the Prologue).
(D.) Nietzsche and Sociology.
Nietzsche as a sociologist aims at an aristocratic arrangement of society. He would have us rear an ideal race. Honest and truthful in intellectual matters, he could not even think that men are equal. “With these preachers of equality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For thus speaketh justice unto ME: ‘Men are not equal.’” He sees precisely in this inequality a purpose to be served, a condition to be exploited. “Every elevation of the type ‘man,’” he writes in “Beyond Good and Evil”, “has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society—and so will it always be—a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings.”
Those who are sufficiently interested to desire to read his own detailed account of the society he would fain establish, will find an excellent passage in Aphorism 57 of “The Antichrist”.