Friedrich Nietzsche, political physiology and the rise of post-Christian slave morality: reclaiming genealogy as morphogenetic realism

In this series, I am to do the following:

1. Demonstrate that Friedrich Nietzsche's mature work (from Thus Spake Zarathustra to the end of his career) represents an explicitly naturalistic turn in which he taught a form of non-reductive physicalism. This turn has been obscured by critical theorists such as Michel Foucault, who read Nietzsche primarily as a kind of cultural critic (Brian Leiter's summary of Foucault's misreading is helpful). The tradition of Nietzsche scholarship which has come to accept this naturalistic turn in Nietzsche's writings is primarily represented by writers such as Ian Linton Donaldson, Gilles Deleuze, Christopher Janaway, Brian Leiter, Maudemarie Clark and Nevitt Dean Reesor.

2. Demonstrate that it is within the context of this naturalistic turn that Nietzsche develops his critique of slave morality. For Nietzsche, slave morality is a moral attitude or set of moral attitudes in which one becomes so deeply affected by prolonged resentment towards one's real or imagined oppressors that one identifies the traits of the fortunate with "evil" and with the traits that characterize one's own self as oppressed as "good." Indeed, one of my main contentions is that the work of critical theorists who claim to be influenced by Nietzsche insofar as he is allegedly merely a cultural critic has made a serious misstep in failing to understand that it is within the context of this naturalistic framework that Nietzsche articulates his distinction between active and reactive modes of life as an account of why certain people adopt certain political positions to begin with.

For Nietzsche, politics is not merely language and power, but rather, Nietzsche believes humans are captive to certain psycho-physical type facts, their politics are expressions of these psycho-physical type facts, and the reason individuals adopt certain discursive regimes is because of certain psycho-physical regimes of attraction, attractors or milieus that constitute them. In this respect, I purport to engage in what John Protevi describes as a kind of political physiology, in which I look at why thinkers have emphasized certain alleged 'facts,' ignored other elements in their alleged genealogies of certain political modes, and relate these aporias and emphases back to their psycho-physiology. I am using Levi Bryant's definition of regime of attraction here:

"A network of exo-relations among objects presiding over stable state local manifestations of the objects within the network. Ex. An object remaining more or less the same color because of the constancy of lighting conditions. Alternatively, a person remaining more or less the same height because of the constancy of gravitational conditions."

Nietzsche and Marx were two of the major three figures of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" outlined by Paul Ricoeur (the other being Sigmund Freud). Despite lip service paid to Nietzsche by writers like Derrida and Foucault, it is Marx in spirit who influenced their writings and especially their followers in carrying out the affects of post-Christian slave morality. Following Marx, it is the subaltern who is given exclusive hermeneutical priority in interpreting the significance of economic and political movements, and this includes the prerogative given them in interpreting the alleged underlying motivations and significance of non-leftist and anti-leftist political movements and ideologies. Ideologies which conclude that socioeconomic inequalities may be the result of real inequalities in ability between populations are seen as "ideological" insofar as they are basically "false" perspectives on reality whose purpose is to provide spurious political legitimation for these inequalities. The rallying cry of 20th and 21st century critical theorists is "that sounds to me like something the politically dominant would say to legitimate their regime" instead of the Nietzschean hermeneutical approach that would interpret post-Marxist doctrines as what the politically reactive or inferior would say to deceive and overthrow their real or imagined oppressors out of ressentiment.

In this respect, Foucault and Derrida are not genuine linguistic constructivists, but rather, realists in the vein of Louis Althusser or Roy Bhaskar, and when they insist that all discourses are merely attempts at political legitimation, they are attempting to obscure this fact. Indeed, as Nietzsche says, ressentiment is essentially subterranean, always seeking to obscure its own motives and the fact that it is motivated by hatred and envy of the fortunate. The Marxist hermeneutician says "instead of the powerful insisting that the unfortunate submit to their narrative, it is instead the powerful who will submit to the narrative of the subaltern." Refusal or failure to submit to the narrative of the subaltern, their interpretation of the global political significance of their narrative, is typically decried as "gas-lighting." As Alasdair MacIntyre points out, political discourse in an emotivist culture is purely emotional manipulation rather than rational argumentation. Likewise, radical feminism says "instead of males imposing their interpretation of the global political significance of their narratives on women, women (that is, radical feminist women) should do this to men." It is this revenge that is dishonestly called "equality," combating "oppression," and so on. It is simply the attempt to dethrone one from his seat of power in order to impose their own. It is not rational argumentation that their own perspective more factually represents reality (although it is implied that they of course do actually believe this about their narrative) but instead dishonest emotional manipulation.

Being able to ascribe to oneself the authority to dictate the terms of the discourse gives the subaltern a feeling of power. They obscure this power by doing what Joseph Massad does in declaring that the subaltern cannot speak or articulate an objectifying discourse, as such power is only tolerable in this case. This is also the underlying motive in standpoint / perspective theory; to give the subaltern a sense of power. We can articulate this using the analogy of Jewish apocalyptic literature. Let us look at the literary features these apocalypses possessed and the psycho-political purposes it was intended to solve.

Thus, their aim is to give only their perspective ascendancy and value in order to avenge their bad fortune against the oppressed. This is contrary to a Nietzschean perspective which values multiple perspectives:

"let us guard against such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality;’ ‘knowing in itself,’ for these demand that ‘we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction…these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’."

Michael Callon's sociology of translation is a helpful corrective to this. As we will see below, we will insist on taking multiple perspectives as our means of conducting genealogy, and examining the same historical events through the lens of multiple perspectives. For example, rather than taking the exclusively subaltern-perspective view of Edward Said, whose Orientalism is an instrument of slave morality used to portray European knowledge of the "Orient" purely in terms of a unilaterally conducted and unprovoked attempt at domination, we will examine the actual historical events and relationships which obtained between Muslims and Christians throughout the medieval period, and how both perceived one another. This will allow us to see the actual differentials and derivatives that constituted these relationships. This will involve several crucial conceptual distinctions drawn from the speculative realist ontology of Levi Bryant:

"Difference Engine: Synonym for “object”. All objects are difference engines insofar as they harbor the power or capacity to produce differences in the form of local manifestations.

Diffraction Pattern: (Karen Barad) Synonym for “translation”. The process by which objects in exo-relations weave their differences or acts together to form new exo-qualities.

Domestic Relation: (Graham Harman) Relations that make up the internal composition or structure of an object independent of other objects. In onticology synonymous with endo-relations, endo-composition, endo-structure, or virtual proper being.

Endo-Qualities: Qualities or local manifestations that arise from an object alone, independent of any exo-relations to other objects.

Endo-Relations: Relations that make up the internal structure of objects, independent of any relations to other objects.

Entanglement: To replace the word “network”. A heterogeneous set of objects inter-acting with one another in a collective.

Exo-Qualities: Qualities or local manifestations that only exist through exo-relations among objects. Ex. Color. Color requires exo-relations between the properties of an object, photons of light, and a neurological system to occur.

Exo-Relations: Relations between discrete and autonomous objects. Often responsible for the production of qualities in local manifestations."

Examining events and historical processes through multiple perspectives will involve insisting that reality is both multi-perspectival and multiply stratified, thus requiring us to take seriously the subjective orientations of various actors. As we will see, slave morality causes its practitioners to engage in what Bryant calls the "hegemonic fallacy":

"Any philosophy that treats one particular type of entity as the origin of the most significant differences within being. Atomism is a variant of the hegemonic fallacy insofar as it privileges atoms as the source of all difference in the world. All variants of anti-realism and idealism commit the hegemonic fallacy insofar as they treat mind, society, language, etc., as the major source of difference in the world."

More specifically, slave morality emphasizes that it is the "master" who defines reality, and they themselves define cultural reality as constituted entirely by the "master" in order to portray themselves as victims to legitimate their revenge-motivated assault on their real or imagined oppressors. As we have seen elsewhere, this is a characteristically "Hegelian" move, as Deleuze notes in his book on Nietzsche, insofar as portraying the master/slave relationship as one in which the master defines his own reality in terms of his alleged desire to oppress the subaltern is itself an attempt at mastery of the master through a distortive perspective, and this, through an attempt the subaltern imposing his own distorted perspective on the history. Both perspectives are purely partial and therefore distorted and incomplete, of course, but there is a crucial volitional difference between master and slave that Nietzsche notes:

"The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance – this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself – is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all, – its action is basically a reaction. The opposite is the case with the noble method of valuation: this acts and grows spontaneously, seeking out its opposite only so that it can say ‘yes’ to itself even more thankfully and exultantly, – its negative concept ‘low’, ‘common’, ‘bad’ is only a pale contrast created after the event compared to its positive basic concept, saturated with life and passion, ‘we the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!’ When the noble method of valuation makes a mistake and sins against reality, this happens in relation to the sphere with which it is not sufficiently familiar, a true knowledge of which, indeed, it rigidly resists: in some circumstances, it misjudges the sphere it despises, that of the common man, the rabble; on the other hand, we should bear in mind that the distortion which results from the feeling of contempt, disdain and superciliousness, always assuming that the image of the despised person is distorted, remains far behind the distortion with which the entrenched hatred and revenge of the powerless man attacks his opponent – in effigy of course. Indeed, contempt has too much negligence, nonchalance, complacency and impatience, even too much personal cheerfulness mixed into it, for it to be in a position to transform its object into a real caricature and monster. Nor should one fail to hear the almost kindly nuances which the Greek nobility, for example, places in all words that it uses to distinguish itself from the rabble; a sort of sympathy, consideration and indulgence incessantly permeates and sugars them, with the result that nearly all words referring to the common man remain as expressions for ‘unhappy’, ‘pitiable’ (compare deilo/v, dei/laiov, ponhro/v, moxqhro/v, the last two actually designating the common man as slave worker and beast of burden) – and on the other hand, ‘bad’, ‘low’ and ‘unhappy’ have never ceased to reverberate in the Greek ear in a tone in which ‘unhappy’ predominates: this is a legacy of the old, nobler, aristocratic method of valuation that does not deny itself even in contempt (– philologists will remember the sense in which oi+zurov,24 a1nolbov,25 tlh/mwn, 26 duvtuxe~ in, 27 cumfora/28 are used). The ‘well-born’ felt they were ‘the happy’; they did not need first of all to construct their happiness artifi- cially by looking at their enemies, or in some cases by talking themselves into it, lying themselves into it (as all men of ressentiment are wont to do); and also, as complete men bursting with strength and therefore necessarily active, they knew they must not separate happiness from action, – being active is by necessity counted as part of happiness (this is the etymological derivation of en’pra/ttein) 29 – all very much the opposite of ‘happiness’ at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, and those rankled with poisonous and hostile feelings, for whom it manifests itself as essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, ‘sabbath’, relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs, in short as something passive. While the noble man is confident and frank with himself (gennaˆ iov, ‘of noble birth’, underlines the nuance ‘upright’ and probably ‘naïve’ as well), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors, everything secretive appeals to him as being his world, his security, his comfort; he knows all about keeping quiet, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily humbling and abasing himself. A race of such men of ressentiment will inevitably end up cleverer than any noble race, and will respect cleverness to a quite different degree as well: namely, as a condition of existence of the first rank, whilst the cleverness of noble men can easily have a subtle aftertaste of luxury and refinement about it: – precisely because in this area, it is nowhere near as important as the complete certainty of function of the governing unconscious instincts, nor indeed as important as a certain lack of cleverness, such as a daring charge at danger or at the enemy, or those frenzied sudden fits of anger, love, reverence, gratitude and revenge by which noble souls down the ages have recognized one another. When ressentiment does occur in the noble man himself, it is consumed and exhausted in an immediate reaction, and therefore it does not poison, on the other hand, it does not occur at all in countless cases where it is unavoidable for all who are weak and powerless. To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget (a good example from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no recall for the insults and slights directed at him and who could not forgive, simply because he – forgot.) A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man; actual ‘love of your enemies’ is also possible here and here alone – assuming it is possible at all on earth.30 How much respect a noble man has for his enemies! – and a respect of that sort is a bridge to love . . . For he insists on having his enemy to himself, as a mark of distinction, indeed he will tolerate as enemies none other than such as have nothing to be despised and a great deal to be honoured! Against this, imagine ‘the enemy’ as conceived of by the man of ressentiment – and here we have his deed, his creation: he has conceived of the ‘evil enemy’, ‘the evil one’ as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the ‘good one’ – himself! . . . "

It is this "effigy" that is particularly important in our understanding Nietzsche's beliefs about the uniquely distortive ressentiment plays in the discourse he articulates of his master. Indeed, as noted elsewhere, the absurd claim by Joseph Massad that the slave is unable to articulate such an objectifying discourse is not only itself part of the slave's discourse, but the means by which he obscures the fact that he articulates such an effigy-oriented discourse to dethrone the master in the first place. Indeed, it is important to relate this concept of 'effigy' and The Four Great Errors with the tendency of slave moralists to make the active appear reactive and the reactive appear active. Understanding the errors in causation that is characteristic of the Four Great Errors must be understood in terms of the tendency to invert the relations between the active and reactive. The Marxist account of "reification" is historically one of the most important instances of this. 

This is what characterizes Marx as diametrically opposed to Nietzsche as one of the great hermeneuticians of suspicion -- each says "How convenient" of the other's narrative, and each attempts to convince the other that what they think is active is really reactive or unnatural. Furthermore, they attempt to argue that even if the "reactive" slave is reactive, they are only reactive in response to tendencies among the master that are themselves reactive (even though these tendencies are actually active tendencies of spontaneous essences in Bryant's sense of the term rather than being reactive in response to an ideology.

We must be aware of this covert Hegelianism in Foucault, Said and radical feminism. It is "Hegelian" insofar as, as Deleuze notes in his work on Nietzsche, it involves a distortion of the nature of the master/slave relationship by resentfully insisting that it is the insatiate, godless master who is the one who is tormented by ressentiment. This is a kind of reaction formation, to use the language of Sigmund Freud, as well as projection, and it is a great instance in which the psychological state true of the subaltern is attributed to the master when it is far truer of the former. This element is projection, but it is also reactive formation insofar as the subaltern misinterprets his own hatred of the master as a kind of love (think of Tertullian's "love" of his enemies manifest in anticipating being witness of their torments on Judgment Day). So also Foucault's perverse insistence that all "knowledge" of the subaltern by the master entails domination of the subaltern. Knowledge is "power" but not all power is domination. Moving from a minus situation to a plus situation is not always an attempt at sadistic domination. To insist that it is is itself a mode of sadistic domination and revenge conducted by the subaltern.

3. While Nietzsche slave morality as having its origins in Judaism and seeing its culmination in Christianity, I argue that it is specifically during the medieval period in the West that the slave revolt in morality begins. The "ascetic priest," during this period, is envious of the physiological and political superiority of the well-constituted, and their asceticism, particularly in the realm of sexuality, is an envy-fueled and resentment-fueled imaginary revenge against those whom they regard as more fortunate. This personality type will be articulated in terms of Theodore Millon's conception of the masochistic personality and its sub-types.

For Millon, at least some of the masochistic subtypes represent inverted and veiled forms of sadism meant to produce pity and guilt in the more fortunate. I will also explore the political reasons which Theodore Millon gives for the exclusion of masochistic personality disorder in the DSM, and why it typically only showed up in the appendices of its various editions. I will also explore why some psychiatrists might suspect that it is not a valid category or disorder, and suggest that it is because the masochism of which Millon speaks is influenced by culture, and that it is in societies in which asceticism is practiced that this type is seen, particularly the medieval Western Christian society in which guilt and self-reproach are seen as virtuous.

I think the medieval Christian conception of sex is important here:

"The Protestant Reformation was in significant part a protest against the perceived antinatalism of the late Medieval Christian Church. It was a celebration of procreation that also saw contraception and abortion as among the most wicked of human sins, as direct affronts to the ordinances of God. This background makes the Protestant “sellout” on contraception in the mid 20th Century all the more surprising, and disturbing.

As the Augustinian monk, theologian, and “first Protestant” Martin Luther viewed his world in the second decade of the 16th Century, he saw a Christianity in conflict with family life and fertility. Church tradition held that the taking of vows of chastity—as a priest, monk, or cloistered sister—was spiritually superior to the wedded life. In consequence, about one-third of adult European Christians were in Holy Orders.

Tied to this, Luther said, was widespread misogyny, or a hatred of women, as reflected in a saying attributed to St. Jerome: “If you find things going too well, take a wife.” Most certainly, the late Medieval Church saw marriage and children as “hindrances” to spiritual work. At the same time, Luther argued that spiritual discipline had broken down, with vows of chastity frequently not observed. His voice joined lay complaints about certain bishops who kept concubines, monks who caroused in the taverns, and priests who preyed sexually on their parishioners, without serious rebuke."

One of the most important characteristics of Nietzsche's account of ressentiment is his articulation of a distinction between active and reactive modes of power in psycho-physiological terms. That is, individuals who are physiologically well-constituted define themselves as "good" spontaneously and their opponents as "bad" only insofar as these latter are not well-off, and perhaps, insofar as they oppose those who are well-constituted. On the contrary, those who have high levels of what contemporary psychologists would call neuroticism, are "reactive," and their mode of valuation consists in defining the traits of those of whom they are envious and towards whom they are resentful as "evil," and only in opposition to those with these traits do they define themselves as "good." As Ian Donaldson argues, Gilles Deleuze has done an important service in articulating this distinction in Nietzsche for us, but his distinction between active and reactive modes of power has been largely ignored by critical theorists, when it is in terms of this distinction that we are able to determine the kinds of psycho-physiologies and motives behind certain forms of political activism.

As such, this section will consist of an exposition of the following passage from Twilight of the Idols:

"To call the taming of an animal its "improvement" sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts that dogs are "improved" there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has "improved." In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a kennel, the most perfect specimens of the "blond beast" were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were "improved." But how did such an "improved" Teuton look after he had been drawn into a monastery? Like a caricature of man, a miscarriage: he had become a "sinner," he was stuck in a cage, tormented with all sorts of painful concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, hateful to himself, full of evil feelings against the impulses of his own life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a "Christian." "

The debtor/creditor model of entitlement and desert plays an extremely important role in medieval Christian thought, particularly with respect to sexuality. Instead of feeling entitled to sexual fulfillment, the medieval Christian experiences infinite guilt before God and feels 'entitled' to nothing but condemnation. They are nonetheless compensated for giving up their sexuality in celibacy through the belief that celibacy is superior to marriage (this is a distinctly Roman Catholic view of the moral priority of celibacy over marriage).

When we speak of an organism being weak, sick or reactive, we mean specifically an exaggerated attempt at compensation, a kind of compensation that is wrought of desperation. We mean compensation the way Alfred Adler meant it, as a basic function of biological wrought psychological. In this respects, all actions are attempts at compensation, an attempt to maintain or reach equilibrium through feedback loops. Ressentiment is simply an unusually reactive and defensive attempt at maintaining or regaining equilibrium through compensation. We can speak of "compensation" in a double sense, including not merely an attempt to maintain equilibrium but also legal compensation in terms of Nietzsche's creditor/debtor relationship.

4. I argue that slave morality today manifests itself in:

a. Anti-racism activism - Nietzsche and the mythology of the blond beast.

"Exactly the opposite is true of the noble one who conceives of the basic idea ‘good’ by himself, in advance and spontaneously, and only then creates a notion of ‘bad’! This ‘bad’ of noble origin and that ‘evil’ from the cauldron of unassuaged hatred – the first is an afterthought, an aside, a complementary colour, whilst the other is the original, the beginning, the actual deed in the conception of slave morality – how different are the two words ‘bad’ and ‘evil’, although both seem to be the opposite for the same concept, ‘good’! But it is not the same concept ‘good’; on the contrary, one should ask who is actually evil in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The stern reply is: precisely the ‘good’ person of the other morality, the noble, powerful, dominating one, but re-touched, re-interpreted and reviewed through the poisonous eye of ressentiment. Here there is one point we would be the last to deny: anyone who came to know these ‘good On the Genealogy of Morality 22 30 Gospel according to Matthew 5.43–4. men’ as enemies came to know nothing but ‘evil enemies’, and the same people who are so strongly held in check by custom, respect, habit, gratitude and even more through spying on one another and through peergroup jealousy, who, on the other hand, behave towards one another by showing such resourcefulness in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship, – they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey in the world outside where the strange, the foreign, begin. There they enjoy freedom from every social constraint, in the wilderness they compensate for the tension which is caused by being closed in and fenced in by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who perhaps go away having committed a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student’s prank, convinced that poets will now have something to sing about and celebrate for quite some time. At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: – Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings – in this requirement they are all alike. It was the noble races which left the concept of ‘barbarian’ in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it (for example, when Pericles, in that famous funeral oration, tells his Athenians: ‘Our daring has forced a path to every land and sea, erecting timeless memorials to itself everywhere for good and ill’).31 This ‘daring’ of the noble races, mad, absurd and sudden in the way it manifests itself, the unpredictability and even the improbability of their undertakings – Pericles singles out the r9aqnmi/a of the Athenians for praise – their unconcern and scorn for safety, body, life, comfort, their shocking cheerfulness and depth of delight in all destruction, in all the debauches of victory and cruelty – all this, for those who suffered under it, was summed up in the image of the ‘barbarian’, the ‘evil enemy’, perhaps the ‘Goth’ or the ‘Vandal’. The deep and icy mistrust that the German arouses as soon as he comes to power, which we see again even today – is still the aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries (although between the old Germanic peoples and us Germans there is scarcely an idea in common, let alone a blood relationship). I once remarked on Hesiod’s dilemma32 when he thought up the series of cultural eras and tried to express them in gold, silver and iron: he could find no other solution to the contradiction presented to him by the magnificent but at the same time so shockingly violent world of Homer than to make two eras out of one, which he now placed one behind the other – first the era of heroes and demigods from Troy and Thebes, as that world retained in the memory of the noble races, who had their own ancestry in it; then the iron era, as that same world appeared to the descendants of the downtrodden, robbed, ill-treated, and those carried off and sold: as an era of iron, hard, as I said, cold, cruel, lacking feeling and conscience, crushing everything and coating it with blood. Assuming that what is at any rate believed as ‘truth’ were indeed true, that it is the meaning of all culture to breed a tame and civilized animal, a household pet, out of the beast of prey ‘man’, then one would undoubtedly have to view all instinctive reaction and instinctive ressentiment, by means of which the noble races and their ideals were finally wrecked and overpowered, as the actual instruments of culture; which, however, is not to say that the bearers of these instincts were themselves representatives of the culture. Instead, the opposite would be not only probable – no! it is visible today! These bearers of oppressive, vindictive instincts, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan population – represent the decline of mankind! These ‘instruments of culture’ are a disgrace to man, more a grounds for suspicion of, or an argument against, ‘culture’ in general! We may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the blond beast at the centre of every noble race and remain on our guard: but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned? And is that not our fate? What constitutes our aversion to ‘man’ today? – for we suffer from man, no doubt about that. – Not fear; rather, the fact that we have nothing to fear from man; that ‘man’ is first and foremost a teeming mass of worms; that the ‘tame man’, who is incurably mediocre and unedifying, has already learnt to view himself as the aim and pinnacle, the meaning of history, the ‘higher man’; – yes, the fact that he has a certain right to feel like that in so far as he feels distanced from the superabundance of failed, sickly, tired and exhausted people of whom today’s Europe is beginning to reek, and in so far as he is at least relatively successful, at least still capable of living, at least saying ‘yes’ to life . . . ""

"The first assumption in my theory on the origin of bad conscience is that the alteration was not gradual and voluntary and did not represent an organic assimilation into new circumstances, but was a breach, a leap, a compulsion, an inescapable fate that nothing could ward off, which occasioned no struggle, not even any ressentiment. A second assumption, however, is that the shaping of a population, which had up till now been unrestrained and shapeless, into a fixed form, as happened at the beginning with an act of violence, could only be concluded with acts of violence, – that consequently the oldest ‘state’ emerged as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery, and continued working until the raw material of people and semi-animals had been finally not just kneaded and made compliant, but shaped. I used the word ‘state’: it is obvious who is meant by this – some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race, which, organized on a war footing, and with the power to organize, unscrupulously lays its dreadful paws on a populace which, though it might be vastly greater in number, is still shapeless and shifting. In this way, the ‘state’ began on earth: I think I have dispensed with the fantasy which has it begin with a ‘contract’. Whoever can command, whoever is a ‘master’ by nature, whoever appears violent in deed and gesture – what is he going to care about contracts! Such beings cannot be reckoned with, they come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration or pretext, they appear just like lightning appears, too terrible, sudden, convincing and ‘other’ even to be hated. What they do is to create and imprint forms instinctively, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are: – where they appear, soon something new arises, a structure of domination [Herrschafts–Gebilde] that lives, in which parts and functions are differentiated and related to one another, in which there is absolutely no room for anything that does not first acquire ‘meaning’ with regard to the whole. They do not know what guilt, responsibility, consideration are, these born organizers; they are ruled by that terrible inner artist’s egoism which has a brazen countenance and sees itself justified to all eternity by the ‘work’, like the mother in her child. They are not the ones in whom ‘bad conscience’ grew; that is obvious – but it would not have grown without them, this ugly growth would not be there if a huge amount of freedom had not been driven from the world, or at least driven from sight and, at the same time, made latent by the pressure of their hammer blows and artists’ violence. This instinct of freedom, forcibly made latent – we have already seen how – this instinct of freedom forced back, repressed, incarcerated within itself and finally able to discharge and unleash itself only against itself: that, and that alone, is bad conscience in its beginnings."

Since one of the most essential components of Christianity is that the Gospel is to go out to all the nations as an expression of the "time of the Gentiles," there is a distinctly trans-national and trans-racial component in which moral equality of all people groups and populations is emphasized. This is expressed strong in the ethnic reasoning of early church writers (such as Tertullian and Justin Martyr). Eventually, this abstract moral equality of all men before God transforms into an injunction for the actual socioeconomic equality of all men in the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and those influenced by them. What is particularly notable about the post-Christian slave revolt in morality launched by Rousseau and Marx is that it is characterized, unlike Christian slave morality, by Nietzsche's concept of "pessimism of indignation." Although Christians who are affected with slave morality had previously tended to blame themselves for their own misfortune due to their own sinfulness, the repudiation of the concept of sinfulness entails that the subaltern is taught to blame everyone else for his problems and to see himself as purely innocent. The subaltern does not therefore see himself as a sinner before an omnipotent God, but as a sinless, impotent God himself who is alone allowed to define the words and language that come to constitute discursive regimes. Basically, it is only the subaltern who now has the right to diagnose misadventures of subjectivity. We will look at this further when we look at how Deleuze critiques the dogmatic image of thought as preoccupied solely with questions of truth or correspondence, rather than taking seriously the possibility for thought to go wrong because of misadventures such as malice, stupidity, and so on.

I will pay especially close attention to the false narrative painted by post-colonialist writers like Edward Said and Joseph Massad, who attempt to argue that the West has always historically been attempting to oppress the "East," and that relations between the East and West have historically been much more complicated than they have realized. For them, Europeans as a kind of active Demiurge impose a view of reality that allegedly paints false pictures of Muslims, but they pay inadequate attention to the actual Muslim behavior that generated these stereotypes. Furthermore, part of slave morality is to pretend that the subaltern is dumb and mute, when in fact they are perfectly capable of objectifying the oppressive other through a narrative of their own creation, and, in fact, this is precisely what slave morality is and it is what Massad is doing even as he denies it (indeed, precisely by denying it).

b. Mental health activism - I argue that Nietzsche's distinction between active and reactive is best understood in terms of contemporary nosology in terms of "vulnerable" types of personality syndromes such as vulnerable narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and secondary psychopathy. This does not mean that all leftists are mentally ill, as personality disorders constitute a spectrum.

Instead, it only means that those who advocate slave morality will tend to have abnormally high levels of hyper-sensitivity, ressentiment, envy and hatred of the more fortunate. Furthermore, the mentally ill become a subaltern in their own right who are defined as "good" by virtue of having been oppressed, and the "able-minded" and "neurotypical" become the villains for their good fortune.

The extreme linguistic idealism that repudiates all forms of naturalism as "essentialism" has obscured this Nietzschean distinction between active and reactive modes of life. Although present in Gilles Deleuze, other Nietzscheans such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida both communicate a linguistic idealism which would see Nietzsche's political physiology as merely one discourse among many, rather than a potentially accurate account of a mind-independent reality.

Combining Nietzsche's political physiology with Theodore Millon's personality typology, I argue that not only are "vulnerable" reactive modes of life such as vulnerable narcissism, secondary psychopathy and borderline personality disorder useful in our analysis, but we must also take seriously previously obscured personological-temperamental categorizations such as negativistic personality disorder, depressive personality disorder and sadistic personality disorder. These characterizations have previously been obscured by being included only in the appendices of various editions of the DSM.

c. Intelligence - This will involve a look at Linda Gottfredson's "Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life" and "g, Jobs and Life." We will also take a look at Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of the Nations (2002) and IQ and Global Inequality (2006) to get a sense of the national consequences of differences in IQ and how such differences result in real inequalities that are not merely the effects of differential or discriminatory treatment based on variation in standardized test scores.

d. Socioeconomic status

-And IQ.

-As allegedly a better predictor of violent crime instead of race. Race remains a very helpful predictor of violent crime, oftentimes far superior a predictor than socioeconomic status. Where oppressed races are concerned, the reason SJWs want to insist that socioeconomic status is the primary or even sole cause of differences in crime rates, is because of slave morality. In accord with the principle of the pessimism of indignation, they insist that oppressed minorities must not be held accountable for their violent actions. Instead, rather than being victimizers, such individuals, when they are violent criminals, can only be understood as victims themselves.

e. Sex - This will be a discourse on feminism and its relation to the masochistic (covertly sadistic) discourse of the medieval ascetic priest, and how the latter is similar psychologically to the second wave feminist. It is an exposition of the following passage from Ecce Homo:

"I am not willing to have myself torn to pieces: the perfect female tears to pieces when she loves...I know these amiable Maenads...Ah, what a dangerous, creeping, subterranean little beast of prey she is! And so agreeable at the same time!...A little woman, bent on revenge, would run over destiny itself. — Woman is unspeakably more evil than man, more clever also; goodness in a woman is already a form of degeneration...All so-called “beautiful souls” have a physiological ill as their basis — I do not say all there is to say, lest I become medicynical. The struggle for equal rights is in fact a symptom of illness: every doctor knows this. The more womanly a woman is, the more she fights tooth and nail against rights in general: the natural state of things, the eternal war between the sexes, certainly assigns her by far the first rank. — Has anyone heard my definition of love? It is the only one worthy of a philosopher. Love — in its means, war, in its basis, the Friedrich Nietzsche 47 deadly hatred between the sexes. — Has anyone heard my answer to the question how a woman is cured — “saved”? One produces a child for her. A woman needs children, the man is always only a means: thus spake Zarathustra. — “Emancipation of women” — this is the instinctive hatred of the dysfunctional, that is, unfruitful woman, toward one who is functional — the struggle against “man” is always only a means, a pretext, a tactic. By elevating themselves as “woman per se,” as “higher woman,” as woman “idealist,” they want to bring down the general rank and level of women; there is no surer means for that than higher education, trousers, and political voting-cattle rights. Basically, the emancipated are the anarchists in the world of the “eternal feminine,” those who have missed the boat and whose deepest instinct is for revenge...A whole species of the most malevolent “idealism” — which, by the way, also occurs in men, for instance in Henrik Ibsen, that typical old maid — has as its goal the poisoning of good conscience, of the natural love between the sexes...And so as to leave no doubt concerning my honest as well as strict conviction in this matter, I will yet impart a clause from my moral codex against vice: with the word vice I take arms against every kind of anti-nature, or if you prefer fine words, every kind of idealism. The clause reads: “The preaching of chastity is a public incitement to anti-nature. All despisal of the sex life, all defiling of the same through the concept of “unclean” is the very crime against life — is the actual sin against the holy spirit of life.” "

-Source of racial inequalities in beauty standards as socially imposed.

f. The metaphysical template (so to speak) of the subaltern becomes the tabula rasa. The moral equality of all men before God (as in Christians) and the political equality of all men before the state (in Locke and other social contract theorists) becomes a real, metaphysical equality of all men with one another, and so any socioeconomic inequality or any inequality whatsoever in good fortune becomes the fault of those who are the most fortunate, who are then required to recompense the less fortunate. Beginning with Rousseau, this eventually took a primarily Marxist turn in which the misery of the less well-off is seen as the result of oppression by the rich, but the metaphysical template, beginning with writers like Foucault who see Nietzsche as a cultural critic, becomes with a kind of tabula rasa according to which there is a primordial equality of all men that is only upset by the oppression of the most fortunate.

5. Frequent reference throughout this series will be made to Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Four Great Errors" from his work Twilight of the Idols, as this forms one of the most important theoretical frameworks in terms of which the illusions he believes are prevalent among subalterns are generated. 

Indeed, I argue that contemporary Spiritual Marxism is not an authentically secular movement at all, but is a kind of heretical Christian sect that immanentizes Christian eschatological concepts, and ends up being guilty of actually the same Four Great Errors with which Nietzsche charged Christians, and for exactly the same reasons: Slave morality is rooted in envy of the fortunate and the desire to give this envy the appearance of virtue requires fundamentally confusing (oftentimes inverting) cause-effect relationships, inventing imaginary causes, and believing in free will or at least some form of the power of contrariety. The Marxist concept of "reification" and the social constructionism prevalent among structuralists and post-structuralists, and advocates of the linguistic turn in philosophy among contemporary continental philosophers, Durkheimian constructionism, Boasian constructionism in anthropology, etc. are all instances of this expression of slave morality, which now dominates Western social science.

6. I intend to make frequent reference to the history of East Asian culture to demonstrate what a society looks like when slave morality is not a pervasive element in it, and in which an obsession with equality does not exist. Ultimately, I follow Nietzsche in arguing that belief in socioeconomic and political "equality" in the writings of post-Christian, post-Rousseau political activism is typically rooted in hatred of the fortunate and a desire for revenge, and that "equality" is nothing other than an expression of this desire for revenge.

Thus, it is ultimately the application of The Four Great Errors, rooted in resentment and articulated in terms of slave morality, that ends up turning the whole world upside down throughout the Western social sciences. For example, IQ is largely the result of genetics rather than culture. Social constructionists invert this. Socioeconomic status, especially in first world countries, is mostly the result of high IQ rather than the other way around. Social constructionists invert this and invent imaginary causes to explain it: that IQ differences are the result of malnutrition (which they can be in third world countries, to be sure), that they are rooted in cultural differences (East Asians allegedly have high visual-spatial IQs because their written language requires it, rather than the language itself being a result of high IQ), that it is the result of inadequate education (instead of a cause), and so on.

-Of particular interest is the relation of high IQ to socioeconomic status among East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, beginning in the 19th century and exploding into the 20th and 21st centuries, and the relation of these contingencies to predictions made by Francis Galton in the 19th century that something like this would happen. Thus, we will make continual reference to Richard Lynns' "The Chosen People."

Nietzsche's political physiology is a "physiology" insofar as it is grounded in the Nietzschean-Deleuzian idea that the immanent realm is a field of forces constituted as a continual flux, and that this flux requires inequality as the transcendental ground of any activity whatsoever. Inequality is here understood as being identical in meaning to "difference," and it is this ubiquitous, pervasive and inevitable difference-inequality in fact that results in difference-inequality in value. I then go on to argue that Nick Land's neo-reactionary appropriation of Gilles Deleuze's metaphysics is the only consistent way in which a Nietzschean worldview or metaphysics can be mobilized.

Ultimately, I argue that Nick Land's accelerationism follows from an application of Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, as a metaphysical work, to the political realm. It vindicates projects such as (for example) Richard Lynns' advocates of eugenics through novel technologies. In particular, I argue that Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition can helpfully deconstruct contemporary slave morality insofar as it employs the fallacious mode of reasoning of 'recognition' by comparing politically incorrect views today with more obviously absurd, so-called scientific doctrines or pseudo-scientific doctrines of the past, rather than attending to the haecceity of the evidence. Ultimately, allegedly anti-representationalist Foucauldians like Joseph Massad, Edward Said, and Foucault himself, end up generating their own essentialisms in an attempt to impose their own power on others, and this oftentimes takes place precisely through the denial that they are capable of imposing power, which is very typical of slave morality.

I believe that, just as Deleuze argues that the expectation that the 2nd law of thermodynamics will issue in the eventual heat death of the universe, thus producing a transcendental illusion of the equality or unity of all things, so also, the belief in the moral equality of all men before God eventually comes to generate a transcendental illusion of real equality in fact rather than mere equality of value. Thus, "all men are created equal" is turned from a moral principle to an empirical fact, and everything in Western social science is used to attempt to legitimate this.

This belief in the real, empirical equality of all humans is hugely problematic for a truly dialectical (in the Deleuzian sense of a positive dialectics, rather than a Marxian "negation of a negation") view of reality, despite efforts made by Marxist biologists like Richard Lewontin to generate a truly dialectical biology. Levi Bryant's admiration of Lewontin is understandable, but Lewontin's critique of pre-formism as a form of essentialism does not accomplish the work which he thinks and hopes it does, and belief in the moral equality of all men before God produces in him a transcendental illusion whose purpose is to transmute this moral equality into empirical identity. Thus, as Deleuze says of Boltmann's work in thermodynamics, identity is seen as preceding difference rather than the other way around. Unfortunately for leftists, the idea that difference precedes identity, by definition, means that inequality will precede identity, and these differences in fact inevitably issue in inequality of value.

What leftists tend to do, including Lewontin, is to assume that there is something like a "virtual being proper" that constitutes a point of equality between complex adaptive systems, or rather, equilibrium, and there is some reactive ideology that interrupts what would otherwise be an equilibrium, and we must correct this reactive disruption in order to restore the equilibria of the virtual beings proper. But such equilibrium is totally foreign to a Deleuzean account of reality, with its emphasis on non-equalities between the transcendental precondition for the emergence of any complex adaptive system whatsoever.

Originally published here: https://www.tremr.com/Duck-Rabbit/friedrich-nietzsche-and-the-rise-of-post-christian-slave-morality