Dante Guevara PHIL 1301.

2501 May 4, 2011 Moral Perspectives To have a better comprehension of Nietzsches philosophy, one has to treat him as a moralist, a hard critic of religion, and also as someone who always had something to say about the issues that have always concerned philosophers like truth and knowledge. To understand how Nietzsches interpretation of ressentiment works, one must first learn the two distinguishable social classes and their moral perspective: the master and the slave. Arthur Danto in the book by D.J. OConnor A Critical History of Western Philosophy comments, There are two main types of moral perspective, master-morality and slave-morality. The latter is generated by fear and by inadequacy. In any given group, certain individuals will tend to dominate over the rest in virtue of having traits of character which their fellows lack; and these leaders are resented and feared by those obligated to defer to them (393). Nietzsche measures up the analysis of the two classes as generative of different types of moralities, which, in turn produce distinctively different moral values. The first class, the masters, are people having or showing qualities of high moral character, such as courage, healthy appearance, and display grand or imposing personality, together with all the conditions that guarantee its preservation. The masters consider themselves good because they always exceed others in a variety of social relationships. Whether it is through intellectual superiority or in terms of brute strength, the masters always emerge on the top of the social ladder. The victories come to them naturally and any blockade, any challenge, or any opposition is surmounted without effort. The masters see their enemies and opposition as good challengers to calibrate their

own strength and nobility, and helps them to vindicate themselves even more gratefully and it is this exultant feeling of superiority that allows the master to designate themselves and everything they do as good, and everyone and everything else as bad. Like in the discussion between Cephalus, a wealthy Greek citizen and Socrates about wealth and its merits and demerits. Socrates steers the conversation away from wealth onto justice and Cephalus reluctant to speak about this topic quits the conversation, leaving Polemarchus to continue the argument. Polemarchus argues that justice is giving a man that which he deserves. Through a series of very clever manipulations, Socrates makes Polemarchus admit before the audience around that the just man is a thief. Thrasymachus, not content with the easiness that took Socrates to win the debate, poses his own definition of justice which is the interest of the stronger. Thrasymachus starts a full debate, asserting that injustice benefits the ruler class. Socrates refutes him, offering true rule as just rule, for it is conducive to harmony, unity, and strength. The debate ends with Socrates probation of the advantages of justice and injustice. At the end, Thrasymachus and the audience are satisfied that the just man is happy, and the unjust is not. However, Socrates, as always, acknowledges that he still knows nothing about the nature of justice, but only something of its relation to virtue and not vice, wisdom and not ignorance, and of its utility over justice. The second social class, the bad people, are the slaves. Arthur Danto writes, Slaves are impotent and cannot impose their terms on the world. So their morality, as already indicated, is based on weakness rather than strength (394) According to Stumpf, This slave morality [] is essentially the morality of utility, where goodness refers to whatever is beneficial to those who are weak and powerless. For the slave morality, the

man who arouses fear is evil and for the master morality it is precisely the good man who is able to arouse fear (375). For Nietzsche, slaves are all those people who are inferior or suppressed in some way. The slaves wish to better their status, but they cannot, because those better off, the masters, are powerful enough to stop them. The slaves have no alternative but to obey the masters. The slaves are at the nobles mercy and for the most part the slaves are subjects to the command of others. However, Nietzsche answers that through the instrument of religion, the ressentiment felt by the disenfranchised, the slaves, has won an immense revenge. He identifies the religious priests as a group displaying the noble traits that despised the masters. The reason why the priests hate the nobles is because due to them, the priests are not able to have truly superior class. The priests are simply always one brick under in the pyramid. However, the priests are aware that if the conflict between the two classes was to escalate into an open, violent war, the masters would overwhelmingly triumph. According to Bittner, [N]ietzsche defines ressentiment as a psychic mechanism, more specifically, as a reactive feeling to certain experiences. It is not only a self-absorbed feeling of pity, or a mere awareness of ones misfortune. As Nietzsche tells us, it takes two for ressentiment (129). Nietzsche, accuses Christianity of depreciating the body, impulse, instinct, passion, the free and unlimited exercise of the mind, esthetic values, and so on. Unlike the masters, which habitually display their thoughts and ideas, and instinctually act out their drives and desires, the priests are never allowed to freely express their emotion or discharge their energies and aggressions. Values such as weakness and slowness are not very admirable; therefore, the priests through religion must transform these values into more laudable virtues: slowness into prudence;

impotence, which cannot retaliate, into kindness, etc. According to Stumpf, The weak have created a negative psychic attitude toward the most natural drives of man. This slave morality is, says Nietzsche, a Will to the denial of life, a principal of dilution and decay. But a skillful psychological analysis of the herds resentment and its desire to exact revenge against the strong will show [] what must be done and one must resist all sentimental weakness: life is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression. Nietzsche wanted particularly to emphasize that exploitation is not some depraved act, that it does not belong to an imperfect or primitive society, instead it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary function (375,376). Nietzsches dislike for Christianity comes principally from his view of its supposed effect on man, whom it depicts weak, submissive, resigned, humble or tortured in conscience and unable to develop himself freely; he also blamed particularly Christianity for this dishonest morality; although, he admits that it has contributed to the refinement of man and at the same time he sees in it a resentment, which is characteristic of the herd instinct or slave morality. Christianity, he argues, aims at taming the heart in man. As stated by Rusell, He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear: I am afraid my neighbour may injure me, and so I assure him If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly display the contempt for him which of course I feel. It does not occur to Nietzsche [] that a man should genuinely feel universal love because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference (767). As mentioned by Nietzsche on Twilight of the Idols: Or, how to Philosophize with the Hammer, [he] recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as instruments of the Greek dissolution, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek (Cahn 1100). Nietzsche kept attacking Socrates in his later works. A significant group of people in fifth century Athens felt that it was rationalism itself that was annihilatory and hazardous, as

men searched the wisdom glorified in tradition for the dubieties of speculation. Himself associated with the sophist movement; Socrates was put to death for impiety and corrupting the morals of Athenian youth. Nietzsche saw him as the author of a decadent movement in a different sense, the corrupter of the brilliant sophist culture, even if he was the guardian of Greek civilization, which had been set on a self-destructive path. Socrates took on the duty of correcting the dangers of personal excess, not by a return to the traditional order, but by means of rational debate. He neglected the authority of the poets in saying, 'not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration'. In applying the methods of philosophy to ethical questions, he established a reputation as one of the most original and seminal minds in history. Nietzsche saw him as trying to curb the violence of instinct by means of debate. Socrates argued that by going after a socially desirable moral virtue necessarily follows from a direct understanding of one's own real interests, which turn out to be incompatible with the unrestrainedly egoistic passion which governed many of his contemporaries. Nietzsche saw one effect of this as to set up an artificial ideal by which real life was to be weighed and found wanting. The underlying motive of such a standard was to alter some of the power relationships within society. Those who attack established values may generally be thought of as suffering, in some way or other, from the existing order, and aiming to replace the old values with others more personally advantageous and congenial. Socrates belonged by origin to the lowest folk; Socrates was rabble. One knows, one can still see for oneself, how ugly he was (Cahn 1100). Nietzsche lays stress on Socrates physical ugliness and plebeian descent, factors contributing to a resentment of the existing order.

Compared to Lockes theory of knowledge, who assumed that if he could describe what knowledge consists of an how it is obtained, he could determine the limits of knowledge and decide what constitutes intellectual certainty; Nietzsche understanding of knowledge has to be seen through perspectivism. Perspectivism is the view that our knowledge and understanding are conditioned by how we view things. For example, to view a house, one has to be either on the front, behind, on the side or on top of it. One cannot view a house from every angle at every time all at once. So, we do not see the house, only a perspective of it. Hence, knowledge happens within a specific perspective. There is no such thing as knowledge of the whole, only the part one can relate to given ones perspective.

Works Cited Bittner, Rdiger. Ressentiment. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht, 127-138. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994. Cahn, Steven M. Classics of Western Philosophy 7th Edition. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. 2006. OConnor, D.J. A Critical History of Western Philosophy: ed. Nietzsche by Arthur Danto, 384-401. New York, NY: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan Public Co., Inc. 1964. Russell, Bertrand A History of Western Philosophy. New York, New York: Pulished by Simon and Schuster 1945. Stumpf, Samuel E. Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy 2nd Edition. United Stated of America: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1975.