While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying of Yes to oneself, slave-morality begins by saying No to an “outside,” to an “other,” to a “not-oneself”: and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the evaluating glance — this necessary looking elsewhere instead of back upon oneself — just belongs to resentment: in order to arise, slave-morality always needs a counter- and outer-world; put psychologically, it needs external stimulation in order to act at all — its fundamental action is reaction. The reverse is the case with the noble way of evaluating: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks out its opposite only to utter to itself a yet more joyous Yes — its negative concept of “base,” “common,” “bad,” is but an afterbirth, a pale notion in relation to its positive ground-concept, thoroughly drenched with life and passion, “we noble ones, we good, we beautiful, we happy ones!” [. . .] How much awe noble persons have before their enemies! — and such an awe is already a bridge to love… Indeed, such persons require their enemies for themselves, as their distinction, and endure no other sorts of enemies than those who have nothing that is contemptible about them, and much that is to be honored![. . .] — Nietzsche[1]
Despite some of his own rhetorical formulations elsewhere in the same book from which the above passage is taken, upon thoughtful analysis what Nietzsche calls “noble morality” does not mean a morality that is confined to any particular class of society, such as that of the feudal lords of the Medieval period of European history. Nor, given the same sort of thoughtful analysis, does Nietzsche mean by “slave-morality” any sort of moral system confined to those who have been enslaved, such as Blacks were enslaved in the Confederacy until the end of the Civil War in the United States.
That is, when thought with full clarity and stated without rhetorical flourish what Nietzsche calls “noble” or “master” morality is not at all the morality of slave-masters. Rather, by “master morality” he means, as the above passage clearly suggests, no more and no less than a morality that “grows spontaneously” from the soil of self-affirmation — from “a triumphant saying of Yes to oneself,” as Nietzsche puts it in the first line of the citation above. In short, it is morality free of all resentment toward those to whom one stands in opposition, and filled instead with an awe that opens toward love for those into combat with whom one enters—that is, awe and love toward one’s “enemies.” The morality of those who begin with the affirmation of their own dignity and worth does not resent enemies; it celebrates them, joining joyfully together with them to form one and the same human community.
In definitive contrast, the morality of those who define themselves as not like those “others” does not celebrate such “others.” Rather, it resents them, as Nietzsche also says in the passage above. What is more, precisely by defining themselves negatively against such antecedent, deeply resented “others,” the proponents of slave-morality project themselves as “better” than such “others” and seek to establish and exercise controlling coercive power over them. Accordingly — as paradoxical as it may at first seem — those who set themselves up as actual slave-masters are not at all those who embody Nietzsche’s master-morality, but are instead those who embody his slave-morality.
In sum, what Nietzsche calls “slave-morality” most fully manifests itself in the resentful establishment and exercise of what I have long and often called coercive power, which stands in the sharpest possible contrast to what I have just as long and often called capacitating power, which manifest most fully in what Nietzsche calls “master-morality.”[2]
Capacitating power is institutionalized in the morality of masters precisely in the sense of that term at issue when we speak of master-carpenters, master-masons, master-cellists, master-teachers, or the like. A “master” in that sense is someone who has truly “mastered” some art or craft. What Nietzsche calls “master-morality” is the morality of just such genuine masters.
In contrast, as what is used to justify claims to a right to exercise coercive power over those it projects as “others,” what Nietzsche calls “slave-morality” might better be labelled enslaving morality. It is the morality of those who lack any genuine gifts, and can only react with resentment against anyone who is so gifted.
Nietzsche
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“Resentment, like water, always flows downhill.”
Even more often and for a longer time than I have spoken of the difference between “coercive” and “capacitating” power, I have seen and said that about the flow of resentment.
The capitalism dominant around the globe today is dependent on just such a downward flow of resentment. Resentment flows continuously forth from capitalism in the same way a mountain brook flows continually forth from its underground wellspring. Not only is the global capitalist market system itself issue forth from the wellspring of that resentment of the “other” that defines what Nietzsche calls “slave” morality, which I have suggested above might better be called “enslaving” morality. In addition, that same global capitalist market system also plants, nurtures, and feeds resentment toward one another among those it enslaves, in that way working to assure the continuation and expansion of its own coercive control over those it thus enslaves.
Last year (2023) a number of books appeared that contain attestations to the central role that such the combination of such lateral as well as downward flow of “othering” plays in our contemporary global system. I will end today’s blog by simply citing a variety of such attestations, leaving it to my readers’ own ears to free themselves from their chains and hear the underlying resonance of the following diverse citations with one another — and resonance, as well, not only with what I say above in this post, but also and even more with what Nietzsche says about “noble morality” and “slave morality.”
Just listen!
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[I]t is the rhetoric of color-blindness that produces the vision of Whiteness without Blackness — as if race could mean anything without an Other. Whiteness wants the Other, needs it, makes it by means of law and whip and fable[…] — Jeff Sharlet[3]
The historical narratives of Othering, or stories that wound, culminate in a past that is not past, in parallel patterns of present-day policing, prison, and punishment practices aimed at Black and Indigenous queer, trans, gender nonconforming, and Two Spirit people. — E Ornelas[4]
[. . .] Workers with incomes higher than the cutoff to receive benefits like food stamps or Section 8 housing support sometimes resent their taxes going to those poorer than themselves.
[. . .]
[. . .] Almost everything in capitalist culture and society’s teachings stresses the value, significance, and righteousness of individual responsibility, entrepreneurship, market discipline, and initiative. Every captain of industry, finance, or commerce likes to claim their place at the top is a result of their own efforts and skill. Every worker scraping by paycheck to paycheck supposedly needs to work harder or get training for skills “the market” requires. Poor people are supposed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The examples are endless. While it is true that individuals are responsible for their actions, propositions that leave it at that share the effect of erasing the social character of production by making every individual’s situation strictly a personal matter. They all blunt workers’ understanding of the social structures that constrain and shape their individual lives and prospects. When times get hard, this often results in unwarranted self-blame as well as resentment toward other workers. — Michael Zweig[5]
“Exterminate all the brutes” [… is] a fateful line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899, which tells the story of a colonial ivory-trading mission in central Africa. Conrad drew on numerous examples of Europeans setting out to “civilize the savages” as a high-minded excuse for asserting the right to their lands, wealth, and bodies. Inevitably, that civilizing urge tipped into a blinding drive to wipe out the natives — a conclusion foretold as soon as one group of people set themselves up as biologically superior to all others.
— Naomi Klein[6]
Naomi Klein
A NOTE TO MY READERS: On the same general theme, please also see my following two earlier posts on this blog, available through the “Archive” at the top of this blog site: “On Masters and Mastery,” posted on September 25, 2023, and “The Mastery of Slaves,” posed on October 9, 2023.
[1] Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), from aphorism 10 of the 1st treatise, in my own free, inclusive language translation.
[2] The distinction between coercive power and capacitating power is one I discuss at length in parts of my book The Irrelevance of Power, available in the “Store” at the top of this blogsite.
[3]The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2023), p. 167.
[4] “Telling ‘Our Stories’: Black and Indigenous Abolitionists (De)Narrativizing the Carceral State,” in Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies, edited by Scott Branson, Raven Hudson, and Ray Reed (Oakland: PM Press, 2023), p. 22.
[5] Michael Zweig, Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press 2023), pp. 87-88.
[6] Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023), p. 268.
