The emergence and development of morality is perhaps one of the most elusive and intriguing areas of philosophy, since it is inexorably bound to sociopolitical variables. In Nietzsche’s work On The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes the historical conditions converging with general human anxiety in the formation of social life and organized political systems. From this methodological account, moral systems were developed to internalize the destructive animal instincts, although they surface inevitably in accordance to varying social positions. On the other hand, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit accounts for master-slave morality through the inescapable dialectical structures which consciousness embodies. Although each writer strives for a different account for morality, offering different versions of the lord and bondsman relations, both Nietzsche and Hegel impart a fundamental idea: the necessity of the reversal of perspectives.
In On The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes the development of moral systems as institutionalized and unnatural constructions used to secure communities under constitutional parameters. Social responsibility, he claims, is an exercise in conformity: “the task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises.... first makes men to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable.”1 Although he is arguing from a nihilistic perspective, the socialization of man is arguably the singularly most traumatic experience in human history, since it depends on favoring social justice rather than entertaining personal desires and needs.
At this point it would be integral to our investigation to mention Hegel’s phenomenological account of the master-slave dialectic, since its causes and underlying forces are closely related to those which propagate Nietzsche’s own formulation of morality. For Hegel, the constant shifting and power dynamics between the master and the slave are both inevitable and necessary, with an outcome that is a “recognition that is one-sided and unequal.”2 Like most dialectical structures, the existence of opposites creates the hostile platform from which conflict arises, namely through the master constantly trying to overcome the slave. The most fundamental similarity between the Nietzsche and Hegel’s accounts of slave-master relations is also an opinion also shared by Sartre, in that the relation is not unilateral, but rather that it is “envisaged within the perspective of conflict.”3 In other words, it is arguable to claim that such conflict arises from the instinctual desire to assert domination over another as an evolutionary defense, and is not necessarily a moral judgment. For Nietzsche, the development of any relation involving an inferior and a superior is directly linked to the realm of socialized moral development, since social groups inevitably form in complicated social, political and economic hierarchies, which are essentially artificial constructs of the challenges posed in nature.
On the other hand, Hegel’s emphasis on such challenges are not only socially constructed, but are innately contained within individual cognitive abilities. In The Phenomenology he writes that “consciousness itself is the absolute dialectical unrest,” illustrating that the plurality of the sensible world, in contrast with its intellectual representations, are “the dizziness of a perpetually self-engendered disorder.”4 In this way, Hegel views the slave-master dialectic not in terms of morality necessarily, but a reaction to the fuzzy area of reconciling the sensuous world with intellectual articulation of it. In other words, Hegel is reacting to the difficulties of language based on the impossibility of sense-certainty, and the subject of recognition between the master and the slave.
To add more complexity to this dialectical structure, Hegel asserts that the relationship between the lord and the bondsman, like many opposites, has a twofold significance. In this way, the mutual recognition of the master and the slave is a process that must “supersede the other as the essential being... in so doing it proceeds to supersede its own self, for this other is itself,”5 which succinctly describes the necessity involved in such a relation. In other words, although the master, by definition, dictates the activities of the slave, the only way in which the master’s existence is acknowledged is through “his recognition through another consciousness.”6 Thus, for Hegel, the dependence and independence of both the slave and the master form an organic unity, once they have overcome the duality, to discover the unity beyond separation.7
Rather than this organic interpretation of the lord and the bondsman, Nietzsche’s emphasis on cruelty as festival also holds very cogent bearing on the topic of master-slave morality, since much of the interplay of power takes place between debtor and creditor. When man is removed from his primitive environment of hunting and asserting his dominance for
animalistic purposes, these instincts must play out in the realm of civil society as well. According to Nietzsche, the historical event of human moralization induces the existential stress
because mankind no longer depends on animal instincts, but is conditioned to rely on the faculty of consciousness, a weaker guide. Rather than outwardly discharging these violent anxieties, human beings have conditioned to internalize these forces, creating “hostility, joy in persecuting, in attaching, in change, in destruction.”8 Since man has been removed from a physically hostile environment, such hostilities must be acted out in another realm - the moral. Morality thus appears to be the language for controlling and minimizing the impacts of this internalization, and through this hostility, master-slave relations become inevitable undertones of social structures.
While Nietzsche emphasizes bad conscience and guilt as the motivating drives for mastery and submission to authority, Sartre defends Hegel’s assertions that the propensity to fall within the dialectic is inevitable. He uses a powerful analogy of lovers, and claims that “with Hegel the Master demands the Slave’s freedom only laterally... while the lover wants the beloved’s freedom first and foremost.”9 Although the actual dynamics of master-slave relations differ in cases of love, Hegel suggests that the inclination to either submit or dominate another’s will is an inherent, ostensibly natural desire contained within the subconscious of any individual.
According to Elliot L. Jurist, the master-slave dialectic is an exercise of the consciousness which is performed in order to actualize itself. The existence of another consciousness recognizing the other is a fundamental necessity in achieving mutual recognition. The necessity of outward forms in order to realize conscious recognition is carried into the moral realm as well, as Jurist argues that the development depends both on the self, as well as the universal in the self:
“moral consciousness attempts to unite the antithesis.... the actualization of morality leads
consciousness to confront itself as aspiring to perfection, just as it must acknowledge its own imperfections.”10 From this point, it is clear where the problems of morality are derived. since the act of conscious recognition involves not only the self, but a community of values. It thus appears to be a battle between altruistic morality and egoism: the exponents of the master emphasize self-regulation over abandonment while the exponents of domination emphasize self-abandonment over regulation.
Rather than this complex psychological compulsion to comply in master-slave relations, Nietzsche illustrates this morality as a raw, animalistic power play. Since human beings are no longer vexed by the issues of securing food and shelter, these territorial instincts must transpose themselves onto the echelon of social rank and position. For instance, in debtor and creditor relations, the pleasure of punishing the debtor increases with the rank of the creditor. More succinctly, Nietzsche affirms that “the creditor participates in a right of the masters: at last he, too, may experience for once the exalted sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat someone as “beneath him.””12 In other words, the desire for the creditor to punish the debtor who is socially inferior to him does not necessarily involve itself in any moral imperatives, but rather is the result of the internalization of animal instincts.
Similarly, the festive results of this grand internalization of animal instincts, according to
Nietzsche, occurred historically partly for the “festival plays for the gods.”13 Tracing back to the emergence of Greek morality plays, Nietzsche begins to flesh out the most ironic and futile creditor/debtor relationship through the paradox of Christianity. In order to alleviate the strains of the confines of society, God is a figure who discharges guilt and the overwhelming bad conscience which drives many individuals to submit themselves entirely. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter succinctly describes Nietzsche’s attitude the history of religions is but “a systematic case history of sickness employing religious-moral nomenclature,”14 without any positive, philosophical results. Furthermore, the debtor/creditor relation between the Christian God and the christian is a failure, a self-perpetuating paradox of irredeemable penance: “God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himself.”15 In this sense, religion as a mediator for bad conscience is the ultimate failed cause - instead it pontificates artificial moral codes and envelops consciousness with an even more futile straightjacket. Thus Nietzsche holds religion largely accountable for the most self-destructive form of master-slave morality, since the mechanisms of Christianity function predominantly to solidify bad conscience and institutionalized guilt.
Even Hegel believes that Christianity is one of the greatest sources of unhappiness. In many ways, The Phenomenology articulates that an unhappy conscience is exacerbated not only through the desire to reconcile life and the spirit, but also because of the problem of overcoming the impossibilities of sense-certainty. Judith Butler incorporates this duality in terms of the master and the slave, where “unhappy conscience seeks to overcome this duality by finding a body which embodies the purity of its unchangeable part.”16 For Butler, the physical body bondsman belongs to the lord, but it is a kind of belonging that is both irreconcilable and based on a vicarious notion of existential substitution. Butler’s reading of Hegel then makes a fundamental connection to the Nietzschean analysis of the Christian paradox: “ the minister reformulates the
dialectical reversal and establishes the inversion of values as an absolute principle... pleasure is temporally removed from pain, figured as its future compensation.”17 The philosophical crux of this analysis is that the promise of such compensation only furthers the sense of guilt through debt - Nietzsche’s Christian paradox lends itself invariably to the master-slave dialectic.
Although Nietzsche, in principle, tends to gravitate towards a critique of how Western political and social spheres operate, it is difficult to see any other alternative other than the ones presented to us. The account of the internalization of man undoubtedly causes some profound psychological effects on the human being, but these innate hostilities and anxieties are already hardwired into the biological system of each individual. Regardless of what situation an individual may find himself in, Nietzsche imparts the idea that the reversal and shifting of such mores is imperative. In her essay entitled “Genealogy, the Will to Power, and the Problem of a Past,” Tracy B. Strong asserts that “slave morality is thus not just the noble morality stood on its head - a reversal of the structures of domination. It is structured in a different manner and thus is a different way of being in the world.”18 In this way, a kind of rational sovereignty is attainable, despite the pressures of social expectations. This reversal of perspectives is the most optimistic idea which Nietzsche suggests - the overturning and questioning of existing social and political ideals to create an individual space, despite the inevitable anxieties of existence. Hegel, to a certain extent, also accomplishes a similar goal in his evaluation of the spirit. Cognition and its conscious awareness enables the individual to be perpetually seeking new avenues of thought, through the constant turning over and recollection of new information. The consequences of perpetually accepting institutionalized moral codes could make “consciousness in its full abjection like shit, lost in a self-referrential anality,”19 a frightful mess in its own way.
Thus the two accounts of morality and the master slave dialectic appear to be more similar, or compatible than they seem initially. Through the concept of guilt and bad conscience, and the internalization of animal instincts into the form of social mores, the paradox of Christianity becomes as apparent as the realities of the relations between the lord and the bondsman. Despite the complexities of socialized groups, and the systems of morality that develop, Nietzsche and Hegel assert that the reversal of perspectives is the fundamental shift necessary to overcome the burden of the dialectic. In this way, both writers attempt to reconcile the universal and the self in accordance with the self-generating complexities of moral life - a unique component of the human condition.
Bibliography:
Butler, Judith (1995) Stubborn Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel on the Unhappy Consciousness. In Dennis King Keenan (Ed,) Hegel and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. New York: State University of New York Press, 2004
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. (coursepack)
Hyppolite, Jean.Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
Jurist, Elliott L. Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture, and Agency. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000.
Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang. Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, from Basic Writings of Existentialism. ed Gordon Munro. New York: Random House, 2004. (coursepack)
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington State Press, 1943.
Strong, Tracy B. Genealogy, the Will to Power, and the Problems of a Past. In Christa Davis Acampora (Ed,) Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. United States: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006
