Thread: What is morality? It's not about being inoffensive to everybody.

Well, I picked up my Kindle with the downloaded PDF of Twilight of the Idols and tried again, and it really isn't as bad as I thought. There are parts I need to just stumble through with no comprehension, often because he's referring to people or ideas that were popular at the time but that Ive never heard of, and in parts because the terminology gets bizarre and hard to understand, but for the most part I can get through it without much trouble. I think the beginning was one of the hardest parts and I gave up too soon.

I also went back and re-read much of the Moral Dilemmas thread and realized that part of the problem there is that many people today are programmed to only think happy thoughts, and thus refuse to accept a hypothetical situation where there's no happy outcome. This could be partly because since the 70's movies all have happy endings and anytime there's a seemingly hopeless situation the hero will always save the day before the countdown runs out, and partly because PC Newspeak teaches people to always use 'empowering words'. It seeks to even the playing field by putting everyone on the lowest level so nobody has to feel bad - as in "no child left behind" (which in educational terms has caused all American children to be left behind) and discouraging competition because the losers might get their feelings hurt. I wonder if little Johnnie would really feel better to learn that all of his school sports programs were canceled so he wouldn't have to be the last guy chosen for teams? Or that the best students in his classes were not given appropriate grades to spare his feelings?

Thanks again Steph for recommending Twilight of the Idols - excellent stuff!! In casting about trying to find a different translation I also ran across the fact that Nietzsche went mad near the end of his life because of syphilis - this destroys the argument's I've heard which suggest that he was always mad or tending toward it, so his ideas should be disregarded.

** Edit

Oh sorry Meskhetyw, I missed your last post. I agree on both counts - on the web it seems the majority of people who will respond to a thread are those who disagree, and also many posts are simply responding to some side issue or semantic point rather than the main point of the thread itself. Re-reading much of it last night I see it's not as failish as I thought - unless I gauge success by how many people agree with me (which obviously Nietzsche never did, right? Quite the opposite I'd say!)

Originally Posted by Meskhetyw

Apologies to Rums for my sarcasm yesterday. Some work has been put into this thread and I assumed you were trying to score a cheap point. Looks like I overreacted.

Sarcasm isn't a bad thing, no need to apologize for that.

Just ran across this on Wikipedia, which is essentially a restatement of the article I posted at the beginning of this thread, but covers some different territory, or at least states things in different ways:

The "slave revolt" in morals

Main article: Master–slave morality

In Beyond Good And Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche's genealogical account of the development of modern moral systems occupies central place.[citation needed] For Nietzsche, a fundamental shift took place from thinking in terms of "good" and "bad" toward "good" and "evil."

The initial form of morality was set by a warrior aristocracy and other ruling castes of ancient civilizations. Aristocratic values of "good" and "bad" coincided with and reflected their relationship to lower castes such as slaves. Nietzsche presents this "master morality" as the original system of morality—perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. To be "good" was to be happy and to have the things related to happiness: wealth, strength, health, power, etc. To be "bad" was to be like the slaves over which the aristocracy ruled, poor, weak, sick, pathetic—an object of pity or disgust rather than hatred.

"Slave morality" comes about as a reaction to master-morality. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and submission; and evil seen as worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave morality as pessimistic and fearful, values for them serving only to ease the existence for those who suffer from the very same thing. He associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions, in a way that slave-morality is born out of the ressentiment of slaves. Nietzsche argued that the idea of equality allowed slaves to overcome their own condition without hating themselves. And by denying the inherent inequality of people (such as success, strength, beauty or intelligence), slaves acquired a method of escape, namely by generating new values on the basis of rejecting something that was seen as a perceived source of frustration. It was used to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness." The "good man" of master morality is precisely the "evil man" of slave morality, while the "bad man" is recast as the "good man."

Nietzsche sees the slave-morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe. Modern Europe and Christianity exist in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master and slave morality, both values contradictorily determining, to varying degrees, the values of most Europeans (who are motley). Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which he deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. He cautions, however, that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own "inner law." A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are."

A long standing assumption about Nietzsche is that he preferred master over slave morality. However, Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann rejected this interpretation, writing that Nietzsche's analyses of these two types of morality were only used in a descriptive and historic sense, they were not meant for any kind of acceptance or glorifications.[132]

Wot up peeps! I'm necro'ing my long-dead thread to add this postscript (hey, now that's an extended discussion, huh?) --

I haven't stopped thinking about the issues I brought up here, but I also haven't made any further headway in understanding them better --- until now. The purpose of the thread was as a group effort to help me understand the vague ideas that I was groping toward, but it never really functioned that way unfortunately. Most responses, rather than trying to help clarify the vagueness of my original groping question, instead either picked specific nits with it or went off on tangents completely unrelated to my purpose. I think that's to be expected though, this is some pretty deep territory I was wanting to explore, and we haven't been taught how to successfully navigate it. As I mentioned somewhere above, we were instead taught to "be nice" all the time, to avoid anything resembling the so-called "bad emotions".

Just today I stumbled across a page that clarifies it much better. Part of the problem with the thread is that I framed it in terms of morality, which led the whole thing astray. I believe the author of the page I'm linking to below puts it much better by instead discussing empathy versus niceness.

To my point then - I'll just drop a couple of excerpts here - these both taken from a book called The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, and I believe these excerpts were both penned by Michael Meade:

If the First Layer of human interaction is the common ground of manners, kind speech, polite greeting, and working agreements; if the Third Layer is the area of deeply shared humanity, the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of all people, of the underlying, fundamental oneness of human love, justice, and peaceful coexistence; then the Second Layer is the territory of anger, hatred, wrath, rage, outrage, jealousy, envy, contempt, disgust, and acrimony.

It is the Via Negativa, the field of Conflict, the plain of Discord, the hills of Turmoil. And, the Second Layer always exists between the First Layer the Third….

All three layers are necessary for a society to continue, for a relationship to endure, for an individual to endure….

We know that the decency of the First Layer must be kept intact most of the time, for the sake of social survival. The First Layer doesn’t have to carry true emotions, hard-learned insights, or personal authenticity. But if an individual or a society stays only in the surface level of life, a huge shadow starts to grow in the Second Layer.

— from pages 285-286 in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

The population of the Second Layer includes a high percentage of giants, hags, trolls, boxers, bears, street criminals, cops, vultures, gargoyles, streetwalkers, and outraged motorists. The sidewalks are cracked, the stores are closed, the lights don’t work, and there is no one who’ll listen to you.

When people avoid entering this territory, they begin attracting shadowy figures who will one day explode into their life. Or, like a TV evangelist, they are completely drawn to the figures of the night. Cultures that try to shut out the Second Layer wind up with overcrowded prisons, high crime rates, huge black markets, and, finally, riots in the streets.

There’s more bad news. The only way out of the First Layer, the only way to break the spell of niceness when it has shifted from ensuring life’s continuance to insulting life’s purpose is to enter the Second Layer.

Furthermore — and don’t blame this on me — the only way to find the next location of the Third Layer is by traversing the battle-scarred, dog-infested terrain of the Second Layer.

— from pages 287-288 in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

Here's the page: The difference between deep empathy and niceness

The author goes into more depth explaining things. Actually her site is really excellent for exploration, it helps clear up a lot of similar issues that plague today's "can't we all just be nice" attitudes and extremist reactions to second layer emotions, such as either willful avoidance or getting completely stuck in them and going into rage fueled rants all the time or trolling people. Grasping and aversion, as I believe the Buddhists call it. Calm acceptance is a much better approach to these necessary things that frighten us.