Genealogy One and Two Notes

Preface (1-7)
- What is the value of morality? Or more specifically, the value of morality in its primarily ascetic ideal form?
- What if this morality contained its own end?
- Is this morality really to blame if a kind of human greatness is never reached?

• First Treatise (9-33)
  • Value doesn't originate from that which it is useful for, but value is assigned by "the good" as a means of distinction/distance from "the bad".
    • Higher rule in relation to lower subject, is the origin of the opposition of "good and bad" (11)
    • This good/bad is the aristocratic value judgment, and the decline of this leads to the ascetic value judgment (egoistic/unegoistic). The "herd instinct" finds a voice in this. (11)
  • Goodness was originally synonymous with the characteristics of ruling classes. Badness was a byproduct from that original goodness. Here, Nietzsche shows that language is an expression of power in etymological semblances between "good" and "nobility". (13)
  • "The priestly caste" - the cure in which they devised for their disease was more dangerous in its aftereffects (anti-sensual, transcendental metaphysics, a "no" to life). Conceptions of "evil" are birthed from this.
  • Christianity announces itself and is reified as an ideal in the world after being born out of Jewish hate, defeating other ideals (17).
    • "the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge... Israel itself, before all the world, should deny as its mortal enemy and nail to the cross the actual tool of its revenge."
  • The slave revolt begins when ressentiment creates values. Values that say "no" to nobility's "yes".
    • "This 'no' is its creative deed." (19)
  • Slave morality always needs an opposing force. It is a reactive force.
    • powerlessness, hate festering from that and spirituality birthed out of hate.
    • "a radical revaluation of their values... an act of spiritual revenge." (16)
    • They "dared its inversion", weakness became good in response to a hatred of power and their powerlessness.
    • This entrenchment into mass consciousness is shown in the process of the "slave revolt"
    • Prudence becomes their essence and characteristic of their existence.
  • Noble morality is active, its negative is a resulting "afterbirth".
    • a powerful physicality, overflowing health, cheerful-hearted activity.
    • "overloaded with power... necessarily active." (20)
    • has a "hidden base", a primal activity that occasionally needs to discharge itself. It is spontaneous, sudden. (22)
  • Power is nothing other than drive, will, and effect expressed and/or exerted.
    • We misunderstand effect to have a causing source, or subject. Morality understands power to be different from the expression of power, that there is some kind of underlying indifference/neutrality/stability that is free to exert it or not. This is a kind of "doubling", or attaching a fabrication of being or stability that action proceeds from as opposed to what is purely "doing".
    • "There is no 'being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming... the doing is everything." (25)
    • The weak profess their weakness as virtue in order for it to seem that that weakness is volitional, rather than them being weak in themselves. This kind of being needs the indifferent subject for it to perceive that its weakness is freely chosen and aspiring toward some greater, transcendental end.
    • Consider the belief of "Godly" or heavenly virtues of meekness, humility, obedience. And Nietzsche's view of self-delusion and slave morality and all its entrails as a pretext for real feelings of ressentiment.
• Second Treatise (35-66)
  • How has man become conditioned to have a sense of obligation, of duty? How does that devolve into guilt/bad conscience?
    • Forgetfulness - man's prior, necessary state.
    • Memory - man's promising and remembrance. In a pre-moral sense, these impressions were a passive remembrance. Presently, they are an active holding onto.
    • For man to have a sense of obligation, he must have some sense or faith in a personal continuity in the near future. Man has become calculable, Nietzsche says.
    • A consciousness and belief in control over one's will implies a sense of responsibility.
  • This has become an instinct for man: Conscience.
  • What dictates what man's voice of conscience expresses, man's memory?
    • For Nietzsche, pain is what is most synonymous with memory and conditioning.
    • And man's memory is inextricably tied with blood.
    • In history, the worse man's memory was, the more severe the torture was.
    • Man learns to to withhold acting on and suppress particular instincts in their association with pain.
  • How does bad consciousness (guilt) come to be?
    • Debt and punishment as retribution preceded any semblance of guilt and ascribable responsibility.
    • Punishment was originally exerted not because the injured held the injurer responsible, but instead it was an ventilation of anger over the injury onto the injurer.
    • This exertion was eventually held within bounds, dictated by equivalences between received injury and exerted pain. And this has its roots in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor.
    • To establish trust, man would impress repayment on his conscience by means of relinquishing some sense of his power as collateral.
    • Moreover, the injured could do what he wanted with the injurer within the bounds of equivalency.
      • Satisfaction of making suffer was given as a form of repayment.
      • Seeing suffer and making suffer were originally something jubilant.
    • Therefore, conscience is also born from blood.
  • What actually gives rise to indignation against suffering?
    • The senselessness or meaninglessness of it.
    • Previously, evil and suffering were justified as "cruel spectacles" for the gods, and free will was devised in order that gods interest in man would never be exhausted... because if the spectacle is deterministic, then it is boring!
  • Again, if man's evaluative eye precedes communal inclinations, then it was this instinct that was interpreted onto these forms of organization as they became predominant. To where now, everything has its determined value, "everything can be paid off."
  • But this kind of evaluation is interpreted into communal life.
    • The contract was no longer solely with a singular creditor, but with a whole. And the violator loses the benefits of community life as they are tied with such a contract. The violator is expelled from protection under the community, and all forces can vent themselves onto him.
  • But as the community power grows, the violator is no longer to be taken as threatening the integrity of the community. At this point, the violator is defended from such anger, protected by the whole.
    • Compromises and equivalencies are sought, the deed becomes isolated from the violator.
    • The relation between the powerful and the powerless works similarly, the less the violator is to threaten the power of the powerful, the more likely the powerful is to grant mercy to the violator.
  • Justice is not to be found on the ground of reactive feeling, but justice is the last thing conquered by the spirit of reactive feeling. (48)
    • The active human is always closer to justice than the reactive one is, since the reactive one is clouded by various conceptions of hatred of the powerful, guilt, etc.
    • The active also give shape for evaluation. The reactive reinterpret those shapes rather than asserting their own.
    • The active establish the law, and only once the law has been established do justice and injustice exist (50) Justice and injustice are not something that exist in themselves.
    • The freer human therefore, has always had the better conscience as well.
  • Purpose of and the origin of punishment are very different things.
    • The practice of punishment has always existed, but the purpose and meaning of punishment has varied and been interpreted onto the practice throughout history.
    • To assert a new kind of use or meaning is to over-power, or become-lord-over.
    • Therefore, all uses are signs that a will-to-power has asserted its meaning over others.
    • Punishment does not have a simple meaning, but a progressive synthesis of meanings. "Only that which has no history is definable." (53)
  • The entire history of a thing is not necessarily causally linked, but may be an arrangement of interpretations and accidents.
    • Everything is forces and processes that overpower, resistances. In every new meaning, the whole finds a new arrangement or reduction in the case of domination. (51)
  • One must resist the primary interpretation of the meaning of punishment: That punishment is meant to awaken feelings of guilt within the violator.
    • Punishment alienates, strengthens resistance, makes hard and cold (54)
    • Punishments do no signal wrongdoing in themselves, but only in certain interpretive contexts and usages.
  • Nietzsche claims that punishment was originally received without self-attribution of guilt or bad conscience, but with a submission to the punishment as a part of a larger fatalism.
  • Bad Conscience
    • Some race of conquerors suddenly took control over a population still formless, gave them form, and therefore enclosed them, blocking off the vents for their violent instincts.
    • Since these instincts have no more outward place of exertion, they are turned inward. Punishments are what enclosed man from exerting externally. This newfound growth of self-infliction of violent instincts is the origin of "bad conscience".
    • Man finding himself enclosed, having to either choose between perishing or adapting; suppressing certain instincts and therefore severing themselves from them. And yet those instincts still must exert themselves somewhere.
    • The force that creates the bad conscience and builds negative ideals is the same force that has an instinct for freedom, or the will to power. Only, that will to power is now self-directed. It says "no" to oneself.
    • Bad conscience is what presupposes the value of the unegoistic.
  • What conditions does bad conscience reach its heights?
    • We return again to the creditor-debtor relationship. Except, this takes place in clans with the present society and their ancestors. Those ancestors who made their clanship presently possible through their deeds.
    • One therefore feels a certain debt toward the ancestors. And as the power of the clan increases, the greater the feeling of indebtedness grows. And as the most powerful clans arise, the ancestors are transfigured into gods. Gods are born out of fear, therefore. Of a supreme indebtedness.
    • The Christian god is the pinnacle of such a feeling of guilt and debt.
  • Here, Nietzsche charts a path that runs from the creditor-debtor relationship to the Christian god.
    • Bad conscience turns against the debtor, consumes him, feeling impossibility. Then against the creditor, then towards nature, then existence. Then we have God, sacrificing himself for the guilt of man. Bad conscience is a will-to-nothingness.
  • Man reinterprets his animal instincts to cause pain as guilt before God, which is self-inflicted pain.
    • "He takes all the 'no' that he says to himself, to nature, naturalness, the facticity of his being and casts it out of himself as a 'yes', as existing, corporeal, real, as God... as torture without end." (63)
  • And yet, there are noble ways of constructing ideals, consider the Greek gods, reflected the noble ideals of the age.
    • Nietzsche sees gods and ideals as reflective of a society's image of themselves.
  • Anytime an ideal is constructed, another is destroyed.
  • Is reversal possible?
    • Only if we direct bad conscience away from attacking natural inclinations, but toward attacking unnatural inclinations: the will against life.

Summary/Reflective thoughts:
Nietzsche is trying to expose the "subterranean" undercurrents of morality in its following expressions; in the first two treatises, the ideas of "good" and "bad conscience". Here, he shows us that underlying these innocently appealing surfaces are an entire history of mankind being conditioned through torture and violence. The good as being reevaluated as weakness was reinterpreted in the slave revolt, where the slaves revolted against nobility and established their values as nobility's negative. Bad conscience arose through man's perpetual sense of indebtedness growing throughout history. Punishment, in large part, is the practice that tamed man to suppress certain instincts. Punishment was not primarily a holding man responsible for his crimes, but an exertion of power and a desire to make suffer.
Nietzsche also seems to take the evaluative eye (which grounds the creditor-debtor relation that precedes much) and the desire to make suffer as particular qualities of the "will to power". And moreover, when certain powers exert domination over others, and "give them form", this traps them, doesn't allow them to express their evaluative and power expressing desires externally, and those instincts still beckon. So those instincts were instead directed inwardly, man evaluating himself as eternally indebted to a god, and making themselves suffer in feeling guilt.
Nietzsche's problem with slave morality seems to be that it does not engage in its natural instincts, which is to make its own values, impose them actively, saying "yes" to themselves. But rather, it creates its values in response to another active force, it is reactive. In this they are saying "no" to themselves in saying "yes" to something other.
Earth and its history is a battleground of forces, such is the same with man and his various instincts.