Genealogy of the Sovereign Individual

The Genealogy of the Sovereign Individual

“ Rather, it was ‘the good’ themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, high stationed and high minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common, and plebian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values: what had they to do with utility!” (Nietzsche, 26)

“The Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spirited revenge.” (Nietzsche, 33)

Throughout the three essays comprising On the Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche attempts to tackle a problem that he perceives is the downfall and decline of modern civilization. The problem he sees lies within modernity’s valuation of morals, which have become very ambiguous and relativistic in nature. The valuation of morals within a society, that is, the valuation of what is right and wrong, or what is good and evil, must be etymologically and historically examined, so as to understand them in the context of previous generations as well as in the context of the current generation. According to Nietzsche, terms commonly used such as good, bad, guilt, conscience, and punishment are mistakenly perceived to have value in themselves; however, he notes that these terms have come to mean many different things to many different people. Primarily, Nietzsche seeks to etymologically trace the origins of the concepts known as good and evil, and he seeks to challenge the assertion of his contemporary English philosophers that good, in its origins, was named in relation to which it made others happy. For Nietzsche, this historical analysis of good is not adequate. Why would an ideal with such a seemingly high value rely on mere utility and pity of others? Shouldn’t the good have the ability to find its affirmation in itself, rather than having to rely on external forces?

Thus, Nietzsche gives way to the genealogy of good and bad, and traces its roots to the noble class. The noble class, reveling in its power, wealth, status, and happiness, thus coined the term good and ascribed it to themselves. Naturally, they would seek to affirm themselves as the good, as capable, because they are in a powerful position to do so. The low class citizens, those citizens whom the nobles ruled over and sought as lowly, incapable, and powerless, were thought of as bad. However, as we come to see later, bad in this sense is not so much a term of hostility as it is merely an antithesis of what the noble class had affirmed their lives to be. Thus, Nietzsche concludes, the concept of good was born out of an affirmation of life, out of one’s inward self, rather than out of a valuation depending on external forces. This concept Nietzsche refers to as the “master morality”.

However, those who felt branded by the term bad felt a need to revolt against the so called “good” nobles and the master morality. The lowly citizens, out of disgust for the nobles, seeing them as greedy and oppressive, gave birth to a culture of ressentiment, that is, a culture of resentment. They sought, as Nietzsche puts it, a “radical revaluation of their enemies’ values”. Everything that the nobles held to be good, namely power, wealth, status, and the like, the “slaves” came to view these as evil. Naturally, as the antithesis of their enemies’ values, these lowly citizens came to view themselves as good. However, in contrast to the affirmative valuations born out of the noble class, the valuations of slave morality were born out of the culture of ressentiment. Rather than good being a concept of affirming value, for the slave moralists, it was a term that became the antithesis for the term evil. Thus, bad went from being a mere pitiful term from the minds of the nobility to being a hostile term employed by the lowly.

It was in the evolution of slave morality from master morality, according to Nietzsche, that first made humans an interesting animal, deeper and more profound than their predecessors of the nobility. Good, in this case, came not from the shallow perceptions of the noble but rather a deeper, more profound hatred of humanity. Out of the culture of ressentiment, a new valuation of morality was born, most clearly seen, according to Nietzsche, in the Judeo- Christian culture that permeated the globe and modern civilization, such that he considers his readers to be the descendants of this culture.

However, as Nietzsche sees it, there remains a glaring problem inherent in the culture of ressentiment. No longer are we seeking to affirm our lives within ourselves; in the nature of ressentiment, we derive our moral valuations from forces outside of ourselves. For hatred of the evil morality requires there to be an opposing morality to hate. The Judeo-Christian culture is apt to focus on the evils of earthly existence in favor of preparing for the afterlife, and this example is represented no clearer than in the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche wants man to find a way to affirm himself by a turn inward, a love of oneself, rather than by a turn outward. So how is this to be done? What kind of creature is this? Nietzsche describes the process in which man becomes individual again, an autonomous being who finds valuation and affirmation within his own self, within a turn inward. A man who has free will, who finds power not within this external world but rather within his own will. This man he anoints as the sovereign individual.

“To breed an animal with the right to make promises--- is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?” (p. 57)

Indeed Nietzsche wants an animal that has the power to make promises. The right to make promises is a privilege only gained when one has gained self-mastery of his own will, for it requires first that man be able to ordain the future in advance; (p. 58) in Nietzsche’s words,

“ to be able to calculate and compute. Man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!” (p. 58)

But how is man to become calculable, regular, and necessary in such a way that he is able to ordain his own future and have mastery over his will? Through process by which Nietzsche refers to as the “morality of mores” man becomes predictable; only through a uniform set of laws and customs must man have any hope of confidently calculating his future actions and have the ability to keep the promises that he makes. Because society allows us to calculate our future on some level, it gives us the ability to keep our promises and this ability, in the eyes of Nietzsche, is the ability of a man who is a master of his own will and thus has what we call a “free” ( p. 58) will. The man who is free in this way is the sovereign individual that Nietzsche sees as having the ability to affirm his own life by means of a turn inwards.

Once man has gained this ability, he transcends the very social mores which allowed him to become calculable. Rather than existing as a faction of his society, he exists as an autonomous individual. In a sense, Nietzsche’s sovereign individual is reminiscent of the Kierkegaardian “knight of faith”, transitioning from the uncivilized individual into the civilized animal of the social morality, then making a transcendent transition into the state of the autonomous individual. Clearly, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are similar in the sense that they value the life of the single, autonomous individual who

breaks free from the bounds of social morality. Because this individual now has the right to make promises, he now longer is bound by social morality, as the terms “ autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive ( p. 59). The moral valuations of the sovereign individual come from, as stated earlier, a turn inward. As Nietzsche puts it,

“… looking out upon others from himself , he honors or he despises; and just as he is bound to honor his peers, the strong and reliable… he is bound to reserve a kick for the feeble windbags who promise without the right to do so, and a rod for the liar who breaks his word even at the moment he utters it” ( p. 60).

Clearly, Nietzsche finds the salvation of humanity in its ability to affirm itself. Humanity has already achieved the first step in this arduous process: it has crossed through the shallow realm of noble master morality into the deeper and more interesting realm of slave morality, the culture of ressentiment. The next step is the turn inwards; rather than finding a valuation of our lives through the hatred of external forces, we must gain the power to affirm our lives within our own selves, so that we become the autonomous sovereign individuals that Nietzsche describes. In way, the affirmation of one’s life and its valuation of morality is a crossing of the two different moral codes that Nietzsche describes; a task that, while paradoxical on the surface, is still worthy of human struggle. In Nietzsche’s eyes the only way for humanity to grow and evolve as a species is not to shy away or give up on the inner struggle like, but rather, to embrace the challenge and to fight it. Humanity’s existence is a constant struggle, and a struggle that must be defeated to facilitate the birth of the sovereign individual.