Slave Morality

Slave Morality, Socrates, and the Bushmen: A Reading of the First Essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals
Author(s): Mark Migotti
Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , Dec., 1998, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Dec.,
1998), pp. 745-779
Published by: International Phenomenological Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2653721
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. LVIII, No. 4, December 1998
Slave Morality, Socrates, and the

Bushmen: A Reading of the First
Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals'
MARK MIGOTfI
The University of Calgary
This paper raises three questions: (1) Can Nietzsche provide a satisfactory account of
how the slave revolt could have begun to "poison the consciences" of masters? (2)
Does Nietzsche's affinity for "master values" preclude him from acknowledging claims
of justice that rest upon a sense of equality among human beings? and (3) How does
Nietzsche's story fare when looked on as (at least in part) an empirical hypothesis? The
first question is answered in the affirmative, the second in the negative, and the third
with the verdict "quite well". Nietzsche's interpretation of Socrates is held to vindicate
the affirmative answer to question one; his conception of nobility as spontaneously self-
affirming to justify the negative answer to question two, and historical, anthropological
and etymological evidence to support the favorable answer to question three.
In this paper I pose and offer provisional answers to three questions raised by
the first essay of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals [GM]. The leitmo-
tif of that essay is the story of "the slave revolt in morality" (GM I ?10,
270/36),2 while a prominent ulterior aim is to articulate a quite radical
I would like to thank audiences at Yale University (especially Ken Gemes), Am6lie
Rorty's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar 1994, Bishop's
University, The University of Miami, The Canadian and American Philosophical
Associations, and Hamilton College for questions that helped me improve earlier drafts of
this paper. I would like most especially to thank Rudiger Bittner, Jean Grondin, Susan
Haack, Aimee MacDonald, Eric Saidel, James Stayer, Allen Wood, and an anonymous
referee for this journal for detailed criticisms and helpful suggestions.
I refer to the first essay of the Genealogy by section number, followed by two page num-
bers, the first to volume five of the Colli-Montinari Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA], and
the second to the English translation by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New
York: Random House, 1969). For other works by Nietzsche I follow, mutatis mutandis,
the same procedure, using the now standard English acronyms for the titles of works and
referring to the following English translations: Human All Too Human I & II [HTHI &
HTHII], translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
Daybreak [D], translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982); The Gay Science [GS], translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1974); Thus Spake Zarathustra [Z], translated by R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969); Beyond Good and Evil [BGE], translated by
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1989); Twilight of the Idols [TI], trans-
SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 745

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"critique of moral values" (ibid. P ?6, 253/20). My questions are: (1) Can
Nietzsche provide a satisfactory account of how the slave revolt could have
begun to "poison the consciences" of masters?; in other words: Is Nietzsche's
story coherent?, (2) Does Nietzsche's affinity for "master values" preclude
him from acknowledging claims of justice that rest upon a sense of equality
among human beings?; alternatively: Does GM I's critique of moral values
license inhumanity? and (3) What sort of evidence is relevant to the claim
that a slave revolt in morality actually occurred?; or: How does Nietzsche's
story fare when looked on as (at least in part) an empirical hypothesis? My
answers are: yes, no, and: history, etymology, and anthropology provide
remarkably substantial support for Nietzsche's thesis.
1. Barbarian Masters, Creative Slaves
GM is a polemic concerned to reveal "the origin of our moral prejudices"

(GM P ?2, 248/16). In outline, the story told by its first essay is this: In the
beginning were the knightly-aristocratic "masters" who determined for them-
selves that they were "good", and that the weak unfortunates who lacked mas-
terly qualities were in consequence "bad". Not surprisingly, the numerous and
miserable bad grew increasingly resentful of their lot until, in a surprising
and underdescribed stroke of genius, their ressentiment became creative. The
fruit of this creative ressentiment was an unheard of new morality-slave
morality-at the heart of which is the claim that those who had previously
been regarded as wretched and bad in fact embody all that is truly good in and
about humanity. The masters, meanwhile, their own firm assumption to the
contrary notwithstanding, are, it is said, not good but "evil". Shockingly
enough, slave morality caught on in a very big way. So successful has the
slave revolt in morality been, that modern Europeans tend to assume without
further thought that certain tenets in fact specific to slave morality-for
example, the doctrine that altruism is good-are constitutive of morality as
such. Because of this unwitting conflation, it requires considerable philosoph-
ico-genealogical patience, erudition, acumen, and daring to bring to light the
priority of master morality.3
lated by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968); The Will to Power

[WP], translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York. Random House,
1969). I have often altered the translation of particular words and phrases.
As Alexander Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Har-
vard University Press, 1985] 254) points out, Nietzsche only uses the phrase "master
morality" once in his published works (in BGE ?260). Nevertheless, he speaks often
enough of "noble morality" (GM I ? 10 and A ?24), "aristocratic values and value judg-
ments" (GM I, ?? 2, 7, 16) and "nobler ideals" (ibid., ?9), and he identifies nobles with
masters unambiguously enough to warrant the use of the term as a natural and convenient
contrast to "slave morality". I shall, in any case, use "master morality" as synonymous
with "noble morality".
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The priority of noble morality is first mentioned in the middle of GM I
?2. Having briefly sketched a "bungled" kind of genealogy of morals
attributed to certain unnamed "English psychologists", Nietzsche declares
that:
...the judgment "good" did not originate with those to whom "goodness" was shown! Rather it
was "the good" themselves, that is to say, 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 con-
tradistinction to all that is low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of
distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for things (GM I ?2,
254/25-26).
Above all else, then, noble morality is self-established; it "develops from a

triumphant affirmation of itself' (GM I ?10, 270/36); it is the morality of
"self-glorification" (Selbstverherrlichung, BGE ?260, 5:209/205). When
English moral historians maintain, as Nietzsche represents them as doing,
that "originally, ... one approved of unegoistic actions and called them good
from the point of view of those to whom they were done, that is to say,
those to whom they were useful" (GM I ?2 254/25), they are, from
Nietzsche's point of view, twice mistaken. Not only is it wrong to think that
morality originates in the favorable assessment of self-sacrifice and unegoistic
behavior generally, it is also wrong to think that morality has always rested
upon the value of utility. According to Nietzsche, noble morality is essen-
tially bound up with an exuberant transcendence of the standpoint of utility, a
lofty disregard for the values of mere comfort and survival:
What [he writes] had [nobles] to do with utility! The viewpoint of utility is as remote and inap-
propriate as it possibly could be in relation to such a burning eruption of the highest rank-
ordering, rank-defining judgments: for here feeling has attained the antithesis of that low
degree of warmth which any calculating prudence, any calculus of utility, presupposes-and
not for once only, not for an exceptional hour, but for good (fur die Dauer) GM I ?2 259/26).
A crucial part of what the nobles affirm about themselves, therefore, is

their very ability to raise themselves above the common crowd and its vulgar
concern for comfort and survival. Nevertheless, the emergence of nobles and
their values would not be fully intelligible if they were not grounded in
independently specifiable features of noble lives. Let us grant that nobles just
are those who are spontaneously self-affirming and that one of the things they
affirm about themselves is this very habit of spontaneous self-affirmation.
We still want to know what it was about themselves that they affirmed in the
first place. In GM I ?7, Nietzsche tells-us that "the knightly-aristocratic value
judgments presuppose a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even
overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war,
adventure, hunting, dancing, competitive sports (Kampfspiele), and in general
all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity" (GM I ?7, 266/33), and he
speaks of an "aristocratic value-equation", according to which, "good = noble

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= powerful = beautiful = happy = God-beloved" (ibid., 267/34). We see from
these and other remarks that at the bottom of the self-affirmation of
Nietzsche's nobles is their delight in their own abundant energy and abilities,
their "feeling of fullness of power that seeks to overflow, [their] happiness of
high tension, [their] consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow"
(BGE ?260, 5:209/205). Nobles seek to give expression to their felt fullness
of power by engaging in certain sorts of activity, initially ones that demand
strenuous physical effort and involve taking large and dramatic risks-war,
adventure, and hunting, for example. By the very fact that they choose to
engage in them, nobles take themselves to honor such activities,4 and they
then instinctively begin a cycle of self-reinforcement by honoring themselves
for being so good at these honorable pursuits. They set deliberately exigent
standards of excellence and then think well of themselves when they pass
with supreme aplomb.
Because the criteria of nobility are self-appointed, noble values are, in the
end, self-generated and self-grounded. But because measuring up to these crite-
ria is often a matter of readily ascertainable fact, not debatable opinion,
because superiority in respect of strength, daring, or prowess, for example,
can to a great degree be determined objectively, we can nevertheless specify
certain features of noble lives that account for their favorable self-evaluation:
namely, their ability to hit the targets that they have set for themselves.5 The
most important feature of the activities through which nobles characteristi-
cally manifest their zest for life is, I suggest, that it is "free", engaged in for
its own sake, not demanded by material circumstance or external authority.6
4 Cf. BGE ?260, 5:209/205: "The noble type of man ... knows itself to be that which first
accords honor to things; ... Everything it knows as part of itself it honors".
5 Cf. p. 751 below.
6 The inclusion of war on Nietzsche's list of characteristic noble activities might seem to
count against the suggestion that these activities are all engaged in for their own sakes.
With Aristotle, it might be thought that "nobody chooses to make war or provoke it for the
sake of making war; a man would be regarded as a bloodthirsty monster if he made his
friends into enemies in order to bring about battles and slaughter" (Aristotle, Nico-
machean Ethics. J. A. K. Thompson, trans., Hugh Tredennick, revised trans. [New York:
Penguin Books, 1979] X 1177blO). One of Nietzsche's chief aims, however, is precisely
to highlight the gulf between a scheme of value that regards Aristotle's remark as an
ethical truism and the scheme that governed the lives of barbarian nobles. To adherents
of the former scheme, those of the latter must indeed often appear to be "bloodthirsty
monsters". Nietzsche writes that the nobles' "indifference to and contempt for security,
body, life, comfort, their appalling cheerfulness (entsetzliche Heiterkeit) and profound
joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty-all this came
together in the minds of those who suffered from it, in the image of the 'barbarian', the
'evil enemy', perhaps as the 'Goths', the 'Vandals"' (GM I ?11, 275/42). Now there is
nothing in the thesis that, as Arthur Danto puts it, Nietzschean nobles take warmaking to
be "not so much what [they] do but what [they] are, so that it is not a matter of warring
for, but as, an end" ("Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals" in Richard Schacht,
ed. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on On The Genealogy of Morals [Berkeley:
University of California Press] 13), that precludes acknowledgment that nobles might also
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Noble morality, I shall say, is a morality of intrinsic value, of lives lived for
the sake of the happiness inseparable from engaging in actions and activities
deemed worthwhile in and of themselves, together with the honor consequent
upon excelling at such actions and activities in the eyes of one's peers.7
The nobles described in GM I form a leisure class in Thorstein Veblen's
sense of that term; they belong to those classes that are "by custom exempt
or excluded from industrial occupations and are reserved for certain employ-
ments to which a degree of honor attaches."8 In two salient respects,
Nietzsche's primitive masters resemble to the point of indiscernibility
Veblen's leisured classes in the early stages of "barbarian culture": in their
orientation towards intrinsic value, with its disdain for the goods of mere sur-
vival and comfort, and in their predilection for boisterous mayhem:
The institution of a leisure class [writes Veblen] is the outgrowth of an early discrimination
between employments according to which some employments are worthy and others unworthy.
Under this ancient distinction the worthy employments are those which may be classed as
exploit; unworthy are those necessary everyday employments into which no appreciable
element of exploit enters. The conditions apparently necessary to [the] emergence [of a
leisure class] are: (1) the community must be of a predatory habit (war or the hunting of large
game or both); that is to say, the men who constitute the inchoate leisure class in these cases
must be habituated to the infliction of injury by force and stratagem; (2) subsistence must be
have valued war for the sake of extrinsic goods such as the territory, plunder, and honor
that can be obtained by waging it successfully. The case is entirely akin to, for example,
valuing athletic ability both for its intrinsic rewards and for its conduciveness to good
health. Cf. on the intrinsic value of war, Zarathustra, "Of War and Warriors": "You say
it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every
cause" (Z 4:59/74).
7 My characterization of master morality as a morality of intrinsic value has evident
affinities with Danto's description of it as a morality of "absolute and unconditioned
value" and the "categorical good" (Nietzsche as Philosopher [New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1980], 159). But I think that Danto is mistaken to add that the contrast
between master and slave morality "reduce[s] to a fairly simple and, since Kant, routine
distinction between an absolute and unconditional value, and a hypothetical or contingent
value" (ibid.). The unconditioned good for Kant is very different from the intrinsic goods
of noble morality. For Kant, the unconditioned good must be independent of circumstance
or restriction of any kind, including restrictions having to do with contingent features of
us. So for Kant a truly unconditioned good could not possibly be good for some but not for
others, while the goods valued intrinsically by Nietzsche's nobles fit just this description;
they are thought to be good for nobles, but not for commoners. Just as the former view
menial employments as unworthy of them, so they view slaves as unworthy of honorable
activity. For a Nietzschean noble, the fact that he takes e.g. leading the troops into battle
to be an intrinsically valuable thing to do does not entail that it would be good for one of
the troops to attempt the same feat. At root, the difference between Kantian uncondi-
tioned value and the intrinsic value I am attributing to Nietzsche's nobles is the differ-
ence between a "value in itself' identified by contrast to mere "value for us", and a
"value in itself' identified by reference to "us nobles"; as Nietzsche puts it in BGE: "the
noble type of man ... judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself"' (?260,
5:209/205).
8 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Random House, 1934), 1.

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obtainable on sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the
community from steady application to a routine of labor.9
By "worthy" employments, Veblen does not simply mean "that things are
worth doing". The warrior-hunters under discussion need not be thought of as
denying that the menial tasks required for "elaborating the material means of
life"'10 are worth doing; in fact, they probably would agree that such tasks are
worth doing insofar as that means that it is good that the jobs be done. It is
just that they do not consider such employment worthy of them. The point
that I take to be common to Veblen and Nietzsche is that it is of the essence
of the nobility to legislate an "invidious" contrast between, on the one hand,
the routine activity needed to sustain the material conditions of life-valued
only instrumentally, as a necessary precondition for something better-and
on the other hand, the pursuit of "exploit", which is valued for itself and con-
stitutes that for the sake of which it is worth seeing to mundane matters.
The powerful physicality and hearty ferocity of Nietzsche's early nobles is
of a piece with their "crude, coarse, external, narrow, and altogether unsym-
bolical" (GM I ?6, 265/32) habits of mind." Although the masters do value
distinguishable qualities and activities intrinsically, they experience each
element in their "value-equation" as part of an indivisible, tangible whole;
they experience the several elements through the filter of the single "Urwert"
of "being and doing as we are and do". As a result, readers of GM cannot
experience life as Nietzsche imagines the originators of noble morality to
have experienced it; their form of life is practically inaccessible to modern
men and women. It does not follow from this, though, that the perspective of
master morality is epistemically unavailable to inhabitants of the modern
world. Master values are not so bizarre as to render it doubtful that we can
understand what it might have been like to live in accordance with them.
In GM I ?5, we are informed that:
[I]n the majority of cases [those who feel themselves to be men of a higher rank] designate
themselves simply by their superiority in power (as "the powerful", "the masters", "the com-
manders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example as "the rich",
"the possessors".... But they also do it by a typical character trait: ... They call themselves,
for instance, "the truthful" (GM ?5, 262/29).
Nietzsche's point here is not that the primitive nobles assumed strict causal
connections interlinking power, wealth, truthfulness and courage, nor that
they regarded the relevant nouns as synonymous terms. If they had held the
9 Ibid., pp. 7-8.

10 Ibid., 10.
1 Cf. Quine's charming bit of doggerel: "The unrefined and sluggish mind/Of Homo Javi-
nensis/Could only treat of things concrete/And present to the senses". ("Identity, Osten-
sion, Hypostasis", in From a Logical Point of View [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1980], 77).
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latter view, it would be questionable whether we could understand their form
of life at all. Any group that could not see that being disposed to tell the
truth and being wealthy are two different things would be at least as odd as a
group that seemed to recognize no distinction between, say, being fleet of
foot and being a good cook. If they had held the former view, it would seem
that they would have had to accept the truth of conditionals such as: (a) if one
who is poor and weak were to become rich and strong, he would then also
become truthful and courageous, or (b) if one who is cowardly and menda-
cious were to become truthful and courageous, he would then also become
rich and powerful. But on Nietzsche's account, these conditionals would have
been scarcely intelligible to anyone, master or slave, living in the epoch of
"pure" master morality. And if these claims could have been made intelligible
to the masters, they would have rejected them, just as the members of a
present day teenage "in crowd" would reject the claim that if one dresses like
the in crowd, one will acquire the other desired traits of its members.12
Nietzschean nobles before the advent of slave morality tacitly held a very
crude "unity of the virtues" thesis.
The early nobles are too intellectually primitive to be able to defend, or
even articulate, their sense that their several virtues naturally belong together,
and it is just this incapacity that will render their world vulnerable to the cor-
rosive influence of slave morality. The inability discursively to account for
themselves certainly indicates that the early masters are unreflective; but it
does not entail that their favorable self-evaluation is merely a groundless
prejudice. In fact, we have seen above (p. 747) that Nietzsche's claim that the
origin of the opposition of "good" to "bad" is found in "the pathos of dis-
tance" presupposes that the self-exaltation of the masters has a significant
basis in fact rather than fiction or delusion. "'The masters"', in Frithjof
Bergmann's words, "received bountifully from the enormously diverse and
splendid mass of happy and desirable attributes"."3 Nietzsche is not himself
committed to the noble identification of "superior in certain respects"-better
at running, jumping, hunting, dancing, fighting or commanding for
example-with "just plain superior", "intrinsically better overall", but he
clearly does regard the achievements of the nobles in respect of the relevant
activities and virtues to be real, matters of (pre)-historical fact rather than
12 At GM II ?23, Nietzsche tacitly admits that ancient Greek nobles were capable of acts
that they themselves would deem disgraceful. He insists, however, that such occurrences
had to be rare, and that their possibility had to be explained by appeal to a puzzling sort
of divine intervention: "'[H]ow is it possible?, How could it actually have happened to
heads such as we have, we men of aristocratic descent, of the best society, happy, well-
constituted, noble, and virtuous?'-thus noble Greeks asked themselves for centuries in
the face of every incomprehensible atrocity or wantonness with which one of their kind
had polluted himself. 'He must have been deluded by a god', they concluded finally,
shaking their heads..." (334/94).
13 Frithjof Bergmann, "Nietzsche and Analytic Ethics", in Schacht ed., 78.

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sheer mystification. It is indeed largely because of this basis in fact that the
pejorative view of the slavish "other" entailed by noble morality is held by
Nietzsche to be something of a logically necessary afterthought; to the
nobles, "the bad" are simply those who lack the distinctive ensemble of
desirable qualities that they have. The distinction introduced by the slave
revolt in morality, between good and evil, marks a radically different sort of
contrast.
Nietzsche takes pains to emphasize that when slave moralists deny that
the masters are good, they are using a different sense of the word "good" from
that embodied in master morality, and that in order to think of the masters as
evil, the slaves must first "dye [them] in another color, interpret [them] in
another fashion, see [them] in another way, through the venomous eye of
ressentiment" (GM I ? 11, 274/40). When the eye of ressentiment looks at the
nobles, it does not see the tightly wound skein of power, wealth, courage,
truthfulness and the like that the nobles themselves had perceived; it sees
instead only cruelty, tyranny, lustfulness, insatiability, and godlessness (GM
I ?7, 267/34). Once the ressentiment of the weak has become creative and
given birth to a new kind of morality, the slaves are able when they look at
themselves no longer to see unrelenting, unredeemed misery and wretched-
ness, but rather a new kind of goodness, constituted by the voluntary cultiva-
tion of patience, humility and justice (ibid.).
The most important accomplishment of slave morality for Nietzsche is
not its turning the tables on the masters and deeming the erstwhile bad to be
good and the erstwhile good to be evil; what is most important about slave
morality is that it does this by inventing a new type of value, impartial
value. Slave morality is the morality of impartial value in that it is the
morality of value chosen by an (allegedly) impartial subject, more precisely a
subject who is in himself neither master nor slave but can freely choose to
behave and to evaluate either as the one or as the other. Slave moralists, says
Nietzsche, "maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong
man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb-for thus they gain
the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey" (GM I
?13, 280/45).
The idealized relationship between nobles and subjects that Nietzsche
imagines to have been the norm throughout pre- and early history is most
obviously exemplified in the pre-history of one particular culture, that of
classical Greece. Nietzsche's model for the ethos of primeval man is unmis-
takably the ethos of Homeric man. So it is not surprising to find Nietzsche's
central claim splendidly illustrated by Odysseus's treatment of Thersites in
Book Two of the Iliad. After Thersites berates Agamemnon for his part in the
quarrel with Achilles and bemoans the fate of the Acheans in the war,
Odysseus intervenes with the following pronouncement:
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Fluent orator though you be, Thersites, your words are ill-considered. Stop, nor stand up alone
against princes. Out of all those who came beneath Ilion with Atreides I assert there is no
worse man than you are. Therefore, you shall not lift up your mouth to argue with princes, cast
reproaches into their teeth, nor sustain the homegoing.... You argue nothing but scandal. And
this also I will tell you, and it will be a thing accomplished. If once more I find you playing the
fool as you are now, nevermore let the head of Odysseus sit on his shoulders, let me never-
more be called Telemachos' father, if I do not take you and strip away your personal clothing,
your mantle and your tunic that cover over your nakedness, and send you thus bare and howl-
ing back to the fast ships, whipping you out of the assembly place with the strokes of indig-
nity. 14
Odysseus' message is chillingly clear: neither the views nor the well-being of
Thersites (and his ilk) are of the slightest concern to the commanders and
heroes. Odysseus does not argue the point; he states it.
In light of the "pathos of distance" separating the nobles from their infe-
riors, it needs to be asked how slave morality could ever have made its aston-
ishing incursion into noble morality, how this sublimely subtle slave revolt
succeeded in a way unparalleled by any political or economic revolt of the
poor and the weak against the strong and the wealthy.'5 The chief explanatory
14 The Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1961), Book II, lines 246-64.
15 Rudiger Bittner has argued that slave morality cannot have originated in a slave revo
the sort Nietzsche imagines. According to Bittner, Nietzsche has to be wrong, because
his story demands that the earliest slave moralists invented slave morality as a means of
compensating themselves for their wretched lives. "But", Bittner claims, "[the slaves]
cannot actually compensate themselves with a revenge they themselves consider imagi-
nary" ("Ressentiment", in Schacht, ed., 133). He infers, first that either the compensation
or the invention "has to go", and second that the one to go has to be the idea that the
slaves deliberately invented slave morality. It is, he argues, "hard to believe that [our
metaphysical and moral convictions] ... in the last resort derive from a cooked-up story"
(ibid.). Bittner concludes that "there is no slave revolt; ressentiment is not creative; and
the revenge is imaginary but not known to be so" (ibid.). I think that Bittner neglects the
degree to which the revenge of the slaves is, in effect, represented by Nietzsche as a
case of collective Schadenfreude. The slaves make themselves happy by making the
masters unhappy, and in order to do this, they need only convince masters, not them-
selves. The deepest disagreement between Bittner and me, however, concerns
Nietzsche's conception of creativity. Bittner thinks that if we are to speak of creative
ressentiment and a slave revolt, we must imagine the earliest slave moralists to be in a sit-
uation analogous to La Fontaine's fox; they must look at the lives of nobles, "know" that
such lives are healthier and happier than their own, and yet convince themselves (and
others) that the masters are in fact worse off than themselves. I think it more charitable to
interpret Nietzsche as holding, with Bittner himself, that the evolution of slave morality
was a long, slow process. Why exactly could Nietzsche not agree that slave morality
"may have dawned on the slaves and grown on them, without ever having been set up
expressly" (ibid.)? Bittner's answer is that his "pathos of creativity" demands that a slave
revolt spring from a creative act and something's being the result of a creative act is
incompatible with its "just growing on us". Though I am not prepared to argue the point
here, this last assumption strikes me as dubious. The nub of Bittner's criticism, in any
case, is that a creative slave revolt requires fully-fledged Sartrean self-deception, and I
think that this is false. It is enough that the slaves actually be motivated by their desire to
exact revenge on the masters; it is not crucial that they be aware of their true motivations.

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mechanism offered by the Genealogy is guilt; masters lose their grip on their
own morality by being made to feel guilty for being masters and adhering to
master morality. As Nietzsche puts it in GM III, ? 14, "men of ressentiment"
could achieve "the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge ... if they
succeeded in forcing their own misery, forcing all misery, into the con-
sciences of the fortunate so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of
their good fortune and perhaps said to one another: 'it is disgraceful to be for-
tunate; there is too much misery"' (370-1/124, emphases in original). How,
though, was the job begun? It may be that the first step is to persuade the
nobles that they are accountable for their lives and their values, but it still
needs to be asked how masters could ever be persuaded of anything by slaves,
given that they rarely speak to them at all and tend, when they do, to remain
in the imperative mood.
We will not find the solution to Nietzsche's puzzle if we follow Richard
Rorty in thinking of his bellicose masters as "narcissistic and inarticulate
hunks of Bronze Age beefcake".'6 Nietzsche's nobles are not inarticulate-
Odysseus, for example, is disturbingly eloquent in his excoriation of Ther-
sites-but rather dialectically incompetent. It is only because they are articu-
late that they can be argued into granting that they are free to choose whether
and how to allow expression to their deepest urges to act, and it is only
because they are dialectically incompetent that they can be argued into grant-
ing this point, which Nietzsche himself believes to be false and pernicious.
A precondition of the masters' being coaxed into examining the Trojan
Horse of slave morality was their having already developed amongst them-
selves the practice of settling certain issues by persuasion rather than by
force. Not only does Nietzsche represent his nobles as articulate, he also
describes them as, in their relations with one another, wonderfully
"resourceful [erfinderisch] in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty,
pride, and friendship" (GM I ? 11, 274/40). By frightful contrast, in their rela-
tions with the bad or the alien they could (and often apparently did) behave
"not much better than uncaged beasts of prey" (ibid.). Master morality thus
operates (without a second thought) according to a double standard; conduct
that would not become a noble in his dealings with peers is not regarded as
similarly disgraceful vis a' vis those beyond the pale.'7 Before the advent of
16 Richard Rorty, "Against Belatedness", London Review of Books, 16 June-6 July, 1983: 3.
17 In GM I's most incendiary passage concerning the propensity of nobles periodically to
exempt themselves from their own standards of civilized behavior and return to the inno-
cence of a "predator conscience" (GM ?11, 275/40), Nietzsche speaks of the nobles'
releasing their pent-up aggression on "das Fremde" (the foreign or alien), rather than on
their inferiors. Furthermore, the fact that the marauding warriors are depicted as
"returning from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, molestation, and torture, exhil-
arated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student prank, convinced that
the poets will have much to sing about for a long time to come" (ibid.), suggests that
Nietzsche has in mind an expedition such as that of the Greeks to Troy rather than a day
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slave morality, this double standard is held not to have given the nobles any
pause; they practiced it, Nietzsche would have us believe, with a good con-
science.
Nobles are infected with bad conscience when they become convinced-
more accurately "half-convinced"-that they are not simply responsible for
certain things as nobles, but are responsible for being noble, for living the
lives they do. When this happens, they are half way to being (half)convinced
that they are not justified in thinking of themselves in the way that they had
done. The inability of the masters to justify themselves before the bar of
impartial value is the result principally of their inability intellectually to
defend two features of their outlook: the double standard that allows the bad or
the alien to be treated ignobly, and the powerful physicality that infuses the
activities that nobles value intrinsically.
2. Socrates and the Demise of the Ur-Nobles
In addition to recognizing amongst themselves the difference between persua-

sion and force and to acknowledging a peer-relative sense of responsibility,
Nietzsche's master class typically contained within it a priestly caste. The
priesthood, as Nietzsche presents it, is a species of nobility that pays special
attention to the value of purity. Initially, this element in the value-equation
is, like all the others, construed in easily graspable, tangible terms. "The pure
one"', Nietzsche writes, "is from the beginning merely a person who washes
himself, who forbids himself certain foods that produce skin ailments, who
does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower strata, who has an aversion
to blood-no more, not much more" (GM I ?6, 265/32).18 Nevertheless, he
to day diet of less dramatic brutalities inflicted upon the weak by the strong. I do not,
therefore, think it obvious that master morality's double standard entailed that dealings
between nobles and their subordinates were governed by no remotely humane standards
at all. As Moses Finley says, a propos of life in the world depicted by Homer, "we simply
do not know how rights were determined when commoners were involved, whether
between noble and commoner or between commoner and commoner. Neither Homer nor
his audience cared about such matters and we have no other source of information" (The
World of Odysseus, revised edition [New York: The Viking Press, 1978], 112).
3 It would, I shall state dogmatically, be uncharitable to take these and kindred remarks as
conclusive evidence of what William James aptly called "medical materialism" (In The
Varieties of Religious Experience [New York: University Books, 1963], 10 ff.). As
regards the point at hand, Nietzsche is clearly concerned to claim an important link
between ritualistically enforced physical cleanliness and priestly authority; but he shares
neither the crude reductionism, nor the crude progressivism characteristic of so many
late nineteenth and early twentieth century attempts to identify the confusion of hygienic
with spiritual categories as a distinctive mark of primitive culture. Simplistic attempts of
this sort have been ably criticized by Mary Douglas (in Purity and Danger: An Analysis
of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966], chapter
one, and Nietzsche's advocacy of "the most amicable and fruitful exchange [between
e.g.] philosophy, physiology and medicine" (GM I ?17 ) has, I would argue, more in
common with Douglas's subtle approach to the theme of purity and pollution than it does
with the views she attacks. At the very least, Nietzsche seems to have been proven right

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goes on to say, "there is from the first something unhealthy in ... priestly
aristocracies and in the habits ruling in them which turn them away from
action and alternate between brooding and emotional explosions ..." (ibid.).
Because they become used to turning away from action, priests begin
ineluctably to spiritualize the notion of purity to the point at which it
demands as much abstention as possible from the physical and the sensual
altogether. It is because of this readiness to deprecate "merely" physical activ-
ity, that the "priestly mode of valuation can [easily] branch off from the
knightly aristocratic and then develop into its opposite" (GM I ?7, 266/33).
For the priestly mode of evaluation to develop into the opposite of the
knightly-aristocratic mode is for it to develop into slave morality. Nietzsche
thus finds in the very idea of a priestly form of life the beginnings of a solu-
tion to his self-created puzzle, the beginnings of an answer to the question,
How do the nobles get persuaded by slave moralists in the first place?.
Nietzschean masters are rendered susceptible to the lure of slave morality by
dint of their familiarity with the priestly form of nobility. If, however, the
presence of priests among masters is to help explain the growth of slave
morality, we would seem to need an account of how brawny, marauding war-
lords ever could have come to harbor brooding, neurasthenic priests in their
midst. Although Nietzsche says nothing about this in the first essay of GM,
the compressed account of the origin of the belief in gods found in GM II ? 19
offers a starting point from which a textually plausible view can be extrapo-
lated.
According to GM II ? 19, pre-historic tribes "recognized a juridical duty
towards earlier generations" (327/88). The members of such tribes believed
that "it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors
that the tribe exists-and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and
accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater,
since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful
spirits, to accord the tribe new advantage and new strength" (ibid., 327/89).
As long as the tribe prospers, therefore, so waxes the debt that the living owe
to the dead, especially the longest dead, the founders of the tribe, until,
Nietzsche maintains, "in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured
into a god" (ibid., 328/89). The role of priests and their characteristic value of
purity can be accounted for within this scheme along the following lines:
initially, ancestors and gods may be propitiated by sacrifices and accom-
plishments of a familiarly predatory and aggressive sort; with time, though,
in the contention that the relationship between physical and spiritual purity provides a
useful angle for the study of cultural anthropology. See, for example, the detailed and
fascinating study of the relationship between purity and pollution in the worldview of the
Nahua of Mesoamerica, found in Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian
Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1989), chapter four.
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there grows a sense that the metaphysical "otherness" of these specially pow-
erful beings demands that they be treated with commensurately refined and
mysterious forms of respect, with, for example, buildings, sights, sounds and
smells dedicated to them alone.19 The priesthood thus becomes that depart-
ment of the nobility that takes charge of commerce with gods and spirits,
leaving the knightly aristocrats to deal with mortal humans and animals.
Nietzsche holds in GM I, that slave morality entered world history in the
culture of ancient Judaism20 and that its success is epitomized by the triumph
of Christianity.21 Even if we accept these claims for the sake of argument,
however, we do not get much closer to a resolution of the difficulty under
consideration. The origination of slave morality in Hebrew theology cannot
account for its insinuation into masterly circles, for it was not through
widespread conversion to Judaism that slave morality achieved its conquests.
Granted that Christianity sought and achieved widespread conversion, its his-
tory can perhaps help in providing an explanation of how the popularity of
slave morality swelled to global proportions; but conversions to Christianity
cannot count as examples of slave morality's reaching knightly-aristocrats in
the first place. The late Hellenistic and early Roman world within which
Christianity emerged and grew was already familiar with the crucial notions
of impartial value and anti-sensual purity, it was a culture within which mas-
ter morality had already been contaminated by slave morality's characteristic
mode of evaluation. In fact, I do not think that the key to Nietzsche's solu-
19 Once again, Nietzsche's conjecture finds support from an up-to-date authority. The
Homeric scholar G. S. Kirk speaks of the Olympian gods undergoing a process of "de-
carnalization" between pre-Homeric times and the epoch that witnessed the composition
of The Iliad and The Odyssey. A striking example of this process is the transition from a
conception of animal sacrifice as serving the gods in the most visceral and literal way
imaginable, to a conception of it as functioning in a more symbolic, gestural way. At one
time, Kirk writes, sacrifice was conducted in the belief that the gods depended upon
mortals for "the coarse hunger-allaying smell and smoke of burning suet, spiraling to
heaven from the fat-encased thigh-bones roasted in preliminary ritual down below" (The
Iliad: A Commentary, Volume II [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 10).
Homer, by conspicuous contrast, "spares his audience any suggestion of meat-savour-
sniffing in the golden halls of Olympos" (ibid.). When Homer's gods require sustenance,
they turn to nectar and ambrosia, nourishment that is uniquely suitable for them and for-
bidden to mortals, and when Homeric heroes dedicate oxen and so forth to the gods, they
are presumably manifesting piety by sacrificing something important to them, the humans,
not by giving the gods something that they, the gods, need in any straightforward or literal
sense.
20 Cf. GM I ?7: "In connection with the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative
provided by the Jews through this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall
the proposition that I arrived at on a previous occasion (BGE ?195)-that with the Jews
there begins the slave revolt in morality" (268/34).
21 Cf. GM I ?8: "What is certain, at least, is that sub hoc signo [viz., Christianity] Israel, with
its vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again
over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals" (269/35).

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tion to his problem is to be found in the Genealogy itself; it is to be found
elsewhere in his work, in his interpretation of Socrates.
The earliest slave moralists were, it might be said, in need of a Thersites
of genius, one possessed not only of the audacity to talk back to his supe-
riors, but equipped as well with a powerful intelligence and great personal
magnetism. Socrates, as Nietzsche portrays him, is just such a figure, an
ugly and irritating plebeian, whose characteristic mode of inquiry by cross-
examination was impertinent by the standards of noble Athenian taste; he
was, we read in the Twilight of the Idols, "the buffoon that got himself taken
seriously" (TI "The Problem of Socrates [PS]" ?5, 6:70/31). According to
Nietzsche, Socrates got himself taken seriously by "discovering a new kind of
agon" (ibid., ?8, 71/32), a dialectical agon; he "fascinated in that he touched
the agonistic drive of the ancient Hellene-he introduced a variant form of
wrestling between young men and youths. Socrates was also a great erotic
(Erotiker)" (ibid.).
Socrates commanded the attention of nobles by presenting them with an
incontestably impressive yet deeply perplexing form of life. In virtue of their
inability to understand him or to defeat him in the game of question and
answer, Socrates' noble contemporaries were forced to admit that where
Socrates was concerned, they were no longer in charge of the situation. Since
being a noble, being "one of us excellent specimens of humanity", was sup-
posed to include within it precisely the wherewithal always to be in charge
insofar as that was humanly possible, this admission brings with it, to use a
helpful anachronism, a jarring dose of cognitive dissonance.
For example, when Alcibiades declares that Socrates is the only man
capable of making him feel ashamed of himself, Nietzsche would, on my
interpretation, propose a two level account of this phenomenon. First, Alcib-
iades is ashamed of himself by the standards of master morality. The nobles
whose favorable self-evaluations constituted master morality took "one of us"
to be extensionally equivalent to "one good at anything humanly worth being
good at". Since Alcibiades can't "prove Socrates wrong" when the latter
'compels him to agree" that he is living his life according to priorities that
he cannot defend,22 he would, if Nietzsche is right, have to conclude either: (a)
that he was not as noble as he had thought, which would occasion shame, or
(b) that the practice of justifying one's choices with reason and argument was
not something worth a nobleman's attention, or (c) that he, the noble Alcibi-
ades, need not care whether or not he is able intellectually to defend himself
against the plebeian Socrates. Option two is foreclosed for Alcibiades because
he (presumably) does recognize that it is frequently incumbent upon nobles to
justify actions and decisions to other nobles, for example in councils of war
22 Plato, Symposium. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1989) 216b-c.
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or on other matters of public policy. The problem with option three is that
Alcibiades has already been seduced into caring very much how he fares in the
eyes of Socrates; he has been smitten by Socrates's strange new brand of
eroticism, and the experience of shame by his own noble standards therefore
follows naturally upon his being at a loss for words in the face of Socratic
interrogation.
For Nietzsche, the inability of an Alcibiades to close his mind to the
demands of Socratic dialectic is already symptomatic of decay on the part of
the noble morality of fifth century Athens. Socrates, he writes, "understood
...[that] the old Athens was coming to an end, ... [that] the instincts were
everywhere in anarchy", and that as a result "all the world had need of him"
(TI, PS ?9, 6:71/32-33).23 We discover, in short, that the robust appearance
of noble morality was deceptive; its naive exuberance and unexamined self-
confidence turn out to have been inherently fragile and subject to endogenous
disintegration.24
Because of the undiagnosed and only inchoately felt degeneration of fifth
century Athenian noble instincts and values, Socrates was able to radicalize
the practice of defending oneself with reasons in two ways: he demanded that
his interlocutors justify themselves to Socrates, a plebeian, and he demanded
that they justify the fundamental principles according to which they lived,
rather than simply justifying particular, local matters against the background
of an unquestioned code of noble conduct.
Once ashamed as a noble in virtue of not being able to defeat Socrates in
his novel agon of the elenchus, a figure like Alcibiades is ripe for experienc-
ing further shame-this time bordering on guilt-for not adopting the stan-
dards of evaluation Socrates is proposing. When, in the Symposium, Alcibi-
ades bemoans his "personal shortcomings", he is speaking as one already in
some way convinced by Socrates, one who has been forced to agree that
"reason=virtue=happiness" (ibid., 69/31), that one should never voluntarily
harm another, even if one has been wronged, and that the established exem-
plars of wisdom, courage, piety and justice are in fact ignorant of what wis-
dom, courage, piety and justice truly are. Alcibiades' problem is that he is
not wholehearted in his commitment to Socratic principles.
... the moment I leave [Socrates's] side, [he explains], I go back to my old ways: I cave in to
my desire to please the crowd. My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from
him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply ashamed, because I'm doing nothing
about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should.25
23 Cf. also the remark from the lecture 'Socrates and Tragedy", held at Basel on the second
of February 1870, that "Socratism is older than Socrates" (KSA 1, 545).
24 I would like to thank the referee for this journal for alerting me to the relevance of this
line of Nietzschean thought to my purposes.
25 Ibid., 216c.

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Alcibiades thus bears witness, not only to the loosening grip of noble values
on their adherents, but also to the emerging con-fusion of master and slave
morality, for he himself does not separate the two distinct sources of shame
that a Nietzschean analysis reveals, but speaks rather of a single disconcerting
experience of inadequacy in the face of Socrates.
3. Justice, Equality, and the Pathos of Distance
In this section, I turn from issues internal to Nietzsche's account of the dual
origins of modern morality to a question concerned with the nature and conse-
quences of his objections to slave morality. I do this, in the first place to but-
tress the claim that GM I is not, certain textual appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, primarily concerned to disparage the servile values of "the
thoroughly modern moral milk-sop" (GM I P ?7, 254/21); its more subtle
and interesting aim is, I will suggest, to reveal to us that we (present day
inheritors of European culture) are confused about our moral condition. We
assume that our basic principles of moral evaluation fit together coherently,
while if Nietzsche is right they do not;26 if Nietzsche is right, our moral
world includes two quite different sorts of value, the intrinsic and the impar-
tial, with two quite different sources, the spontaneous self-affirmation of the
strong and the creative ressentiment of the weak. The second reason for dis-
cussing Nietzsche's moral critique is that a widespread and not wholly
unfounded interpretation of it holds that Nietzsche himself, like his postulated
Ur-nobles, is implacably hostile to any form of egalitarianism. But if the
more enduring contribution of GM I lies where I find it, in the diagnosis of
confusion and the posing of problems rather than in the propounding of a
counter-ideology, then the question of just how objectionably elitist
Nietzsche himself is can be separated from the philosophically more pertinent
question of whether his best insights entail objectionably elitist conse-
quences.
One must resist coming away from GM I with the impression that
Nietzsche takes the slave revolt in morality to have been entirely successful.
26 Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, both of whom are criticized in GM, are quite
explicit about their confidence in this assumption. Kant famously asserts that "ordinary
knowledge of morality" is sufficient of itself "to discern what I have to do in order that
my will may be morally good" (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, James W.
Ellington Trans [Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1981], 15IAk403), while Schopenhauer
maintains that, despite the "different forms" in which they may "clothe" it, all moral sys-
tems in fact agree on the "fundamental principle of morality", which is most concisely
expressed in the formula: "Neminem laede, imo omnes, quantum potes, juva" ("Harm no
one, but help everyone whenever you can"). (On the Basis of Morality, E. F. J. Payne
trans. [Providence RI: Bergahn Books, 1995], 69). From Nietzsche's perspective, Kant,
Schopenhauer and the whole tradition of post-Socratic Western ethics have tried to run
before they could walk; they have assumed that the difficult philosophical problem was
that of justifying morality, rather than that of identifying and understanding it. Cf.
Bergmann, op cit., 91 and BGE ?186 (5:105/97).
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In fact, he tells us that "the two opposing values 'good' and 'bad', 'good' and
'evil' have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years;
and although the latter value has certainly had the upper hand for a long time,
there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided" (GM I ? 16,
285/52). Master morality, though long on the losing end of the struggle, has
not yet been utterly defeated or wholly assimilated; it is embattled, but not
dead, less akin to Latin than to the avoidance of split infinitives.
And just as it is wrong to think that Nietzsche regards the slave revolt in
morality as entirely successful, so it is wrong to think, with T. M. Scanlon,
that he regards it as an unambiguous "psychological disaster".27 Nietzsche
does regard slave morality as psychologically dubious in virtue of the fact
that, as he sees it, its adherents are essentially deceived about the originating
and sustaining causes of their deepest moral attitudes. Nietzsche takes slave
moralists to be essentially deceived because their commitment to slave moral-
ity could not survive recognition of their true motivations for endorsing it.
Slave morality (unlike master morality) does not recognize the desire for
revenge as a morally acceptable justification of action or judgment. So if it is
true that slave values arise, not from a spontaneous (perhaps divinely
prompted) recognition that civilized morality must seek to transmute the
primitive lust for revenge into the impartial desire to see justice done, but
rather from a thirst for revenge by the weak against the strong, then the
adherent of slave values cannot acknowledge this truth about himself without
being trapped in a pragmatic self-contradiction; his own morality would brand
the source of his commitment to it as unacceptable.28 The slave moralist
convinced by Nietzsche's diagnosis of his true motivations is, indeed, in the
same predicament as that of the erstwhile noble forced to recognize that he is
at a loss to know how to reply to Socrates: in both cases, someone is com-
pelled to acknowledge in himself an irrecusable inadequacy according to the
standards of his accepted scheme of valuing, and in both cases this state of
affairs ineluctably prompts a reluctant re-evaluation of the scheme of valuing
in question, in order to make the inadequacy rectifiable, at least in principle.
To the extent therefore that Nietzsche straightforwardly disdains pure slave
morality, he does so largely because of what he takes to be its necessary dis-
27 T. M. Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism", in Utilitarianism and Beyond,

Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
106.
28 In an unpublished note from the fall of 1887 Nietzsche describes as "liberating" the
insight that "morality is just as 'immoral' as any other thing on earth; morality is itself a
form of immorality" (WP ?308/12:9[140], 415). He means that lucidity about the conflict
between the actual motivations of slave moralists and the standards of evaluation
endorsed by slave morality can and should free one from "slavish" adherence to the lat-
ter. Further passages that emphasize the self-deception required by slave morality's
"revaluation of values" are found in GM I ?14 and WP ?306 and ?311 (12:7[6], 273 and
12:9[147], 421-22).

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honesty, the fact that believers in it cannot (if Nietzsche is correct) allow
themselves to confront their own motivations for believing. At the same
time, however, he regards slave morality as the vehicle through which "man
first became an interesting animal" (GM I ?6, 266/33), and as that without
which "human history would be altogether too stupid a thing" (ibid. ?7,
267/33). So whatever his exact attitude to pure slave morality and pure mas-
ter morality, it cannot be captured in the crude terms of wholesale approval or
disapproval. He remarks, indeed, that "today there is perhaps no more decisive
mark of a 'higher nature', a more spiritual nature, than that of being ... a
genuine battleground of these opposed schemes of value" (ibid. ? 16, 286/52).
We must, then, distinguish between being scornful of slave morality as a
whole, which Nietzsche is, and being wholly scornful of slave morality,
which he is not. Once we are clear about this, I think we can begin to
respond to the widespread perception that a Nietzschean pathos of distance
precludes a universalistic commitment to the practice of justice. In Philippa
Foot's version of this criticism, what tells against Nietzsche's being
sufficiently concerned for universal justice is his approval of "the experience
the feeling ... of being not just apart from but higher than those who belong
to 'the herd' .29 Foot suggests that the pathos of distance may be inimical to
the practice of justice on the grounds that that practice may require "a certain
recognition of equality between human beings" (ibid.). The sense of equality
she has in mind is said to have to do with "thinking that one is always,
fundamentally, in the same boat as everybody else, and therefore that it is
quite unsuitable for anyone to see himself as grand" (ibid.).
Since Foot distinguishes the sense of equality that she thinks may be
required for justice from "a pretence of equality of talents" (ibid.), it would
seem that the former sort of equality is supposed to be acknowledged indepen-
dently of skill. Perhaps what Foot is thinking of is an equal worthiness of
certain sorts of consideration independently of any differentially distributed
abilities. I suspect that Charles Taylor has something along these lines in
mind when he speaks of "the universal attribution of moral personality" as
"one of the most fundamental insights of modern Western civilization".30
According to Foot, then, Nietzsche's moral philosophy is disturbing because
it traces this (alleged) insight back to the ressentiment of slave moralists and
accordingly finds the idea of a skill-independent equality to be "utterly despi-
cable".3' I think that the second half of this conclusion is unproven at best.
In section ten of the Genealogy's first essay, Nietzsche urges his readers
not to "overlook the almost benevolent nuances that the Greek nobility for
example bestows on all the words it employs to distinguish the lower orders
29 Philippa Foot, "Nietzsche's Immoralism", in Schacht ed., 9.

30 Charles Taylor, "The Diversity of Goods", in Sen and Williams eds., 130.
31 Foot, op cit., 9.
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from itself; how they are continuously mingled and sweetened with a kind of
sorrow (Bedauern), consideration, and forbearance, so that finally almost all
the words referring to the common man have remained as expressions signify-
ing 'unhappy', 'pitiable"' (GM I ? 10, 271-72/37). Immediately before this
passage, he favorably compares contempt to hatred as far as the degree of
"falsification" carried out on its object is concerned. "There is", he writes,
...too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking away
and impatience involved in contempt, even too much joyfulness, for it to be
able to transform its object into a real caricature and monster" (ibid.). The at-
titude described here is significantly more subtle than the haughty disdain of
those who think themselves "grand" for those whom they take to be con-
temptible and small that Foot sees in the pathos of distance. Foot's
Nietzscheans come very close to being the sort of people who put on airs,
whereas Nietzsche's "higher natures" are the sort of people whose sense of
superiority comes so naturally and gracefully that they have neither time nor
need for putting on airs. Nietzsche's nobles, like Max Scheler's, "ha[ve] a
thoroughly naive, unreflected consciousness of self-worth and fullness of
being, a consciousness of these things that is obscurely present throughout
[their] waking li[ves]. This consciousness is entirely different from pride,
which results precisely from the experienced diminishment of this naive sense
of self-worth and is a particularly artificial and adaptive 'clinging fast' to
one's own value".32
Foot insinuates that Nietzsche's approval of "some men looking down on
others" brings with it a willingness to "sacrifice" or "write off' the
mediocre,33 thus paying no attention to the "sorrow, consideration, and for-
bearance" that Nietzsche finds embodied in the vocabulary with which Greek
nobles described their inferiors. When Foot takes it that because they feel
higher than the herd, Nietzschean nobles, when looking down on its mem-
bers, must do so with a sneer, she misses the possibility, mentioned above,
of looking, with distinctly mixed emotions, both down at and away from
them. In Nietzsche's view, when nobles look away from those for whom
they have contempt, they are doing so precisely so as not to be tempted to
sneer at them in the sense that Foot, justifiably, finds obnoxious; "it is", he
writes in Daybreak, "often no small sign of humanity not to wish to judge
another and to refrain from thinking about him" (D ?528, 3:303/209).
32 Max Scheler, "Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen", in Gesammelte Werke III
(Bern: Francke Verlag, 1955), 46-47. Cf. BGE ?287: "Among artists and scholars today
one finds enough of those who betray by their works how they are impelled by a pro-
found desire for what is noble; but just this needfor what is noble is fundamentally differ-
ent from the needs of the noble soul itself and actually the eloquent and dangerous mark
of its lack" (5:233/228).
33 Foot, op cit. 7.

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Let me call the view that Foot's Nietzsche finds despicable-that a skill-
independent sense of equality has moral significance-"moral egalitarianism".
So described, moral egalitarianism acquires something approaching a definite
meaning only to the extent that the moral significance of equality is given
some content. A weak moral egalitarian thesis is that everyone is entitled to
some sorts of consideration simply in virtue of being human; a stronger one
is that the consideration to which one is entitled in virtue of being human is
paramount, so that to refuse to bestow it, to violate a moral entitlement, is
to behave in a distinctively heinous way. The weaker moral egalitarianism
can plausibly include an entitlement to be granted some sort of worth by
one's fellows among those that belong to the human birthright. The stronger
one demands something like the Kantian view that the sort of worth that
belongs to "humanity insofar as it is capable of morality" surpasses in kind
any other sort, so that people (and any other rational beings there may be)
have dignity, while anything else of value has only a price.34
It is not plausible to think that anything recognizably Nietzschean could
be beaten into compatibility with stronger forms of moral egalitarianism, but
it would be hasty to dismiss out of hand the possibility that Nietzsche's
moral critique is compatible with a weaker version of the egalitarian outlook.
I shall contend that certain prominent Nietzschean themes do in fact tend to
support judgments that are, in a crucial class of cases, extensionally compati-
ble with those of a weak moral egalitarianism. The judgments I have in mind
are those that condemn violations of universally held moral entitlements. I
describe the Nietzschean condemnations, not as coincident, but as extension-
ally compatible with those of a weak moral egalitarianism because I want to
acknowledge that Nietzschean grounds for condemnation will be different
from those of a true moral egalitarian. So, strictly speaking, what I defend is
the compatibility of Nietzsche with an ersatz weak moral egalitarianism, not
with the thing itself. My claims are: (1) that Nietzsche has the resources to
condemn just those violations of universally held moral entitlements that
will be condemned by a moral egalitarian, but, (2) that his grounds for con-
demnation will not grant the sort of importance to the concept of a univer-
sally held moral entitlement that is constitutive of moral egalitarianism.
A morally egalitarian condemnation of A's violation of a moral entitle-
ment of B's demands a certain pride of place for B in the evaluative scheme of
things; it requires that our condemnation of A be anchored in his mistreat-
ment of B. One might, however, disdain A's action on grounds that leave B
more or less out of the picture; one might disapprove of what A did because
it was motivated by stinginess or pusillanimity or ressentiment. The latter
sort of response to violations of universally held moral entitlements is the
4 Kant, op cit. 40/435.
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one I want to advocate for those of us attracted equally to the gist of
Nietzsche's moral critique and to the core of moral egalitarianism.
That Nietzsche prizes strength and disparages weakness is scarcely contro-
versial. That he regards generosity and magnanimity as particularly admirable
expressions of strength is a less well appreciated fact,35 and this lack of appre-
ciation invites uncharitable interpretations of his notorious esteem for ambi-
tion, adventure and struggle.
Certainly [he writes in The Gay Science] the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agree-
able, in an unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still
lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty.... It is only for the
most irritable and covetous of devotees of the feeling of power that it is perhaps more pleasur-
able to imprint the seal of power on a recalcitrant brow-those for whom the sight of those
who are already subjugated (the objects of benevolence) is a burden and boredom. ... An easy
prey is something contemptible for proud natures. They feel good only at the sight of unbroken
men who might become their enemies and at the sight of all possessions that are hard to come
by (GS ?13 3.385/87).36
According to this passage, a tendency to take advantage of the weakness of

another, so far from demonstrating a commendably extra-moral delight in
one' s own strength, is in fact a sign of insecurity, a contemptible refuge for
those lacking sufficient pride in themselves and their abilities.37
I do not pretend that the considerations I have advanced in the last few
paragraphs suffice to refute the charge of anti-egalitarianism that Foot and
others level at Nietzsche. I do claim that there is nothing glaringly incoherent
about the project of trying to get "beyond good and evil" while retaining a
role for a weak form of moral egalitarianism; what one needs to do is affirm
that ways of treating people that violate their moral entitlements-for exam-
ple, their entitlement to security of life, limb and property, or more generally
their right to be granted some sort of worth simply in virtue of being
human-are bad; not "evil" with all the distinctive (and distinctively hard to
articulate) overtones of that concept, but rather: bad in the master morality
sense of base and contemptible. To aspire to a view of this sort would be to
35 Cf. D ?556: "The good four.-Honest toward ourselves and whoever else is a friend to us;
brave towards the enemy; magnanimous towards the defeated; polite-always: this is
what the four cardinal virtues want us to be" (3:325/561).
36 Cf. GM I ? 10: "How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies! ... For he desires
his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one
in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! (273/39).
Martha Nussbaum draws attention to this aspect of Nietzsche's conception of strength in
her insightful article "Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche's Stoicism" (in Schacht, ed., 139-67,
esp., 151). I share Nussbaum's conviction that the real Nietzsche is neither tough but
unsubtle, nor tender but soggy. Like her, I do not think that Nietzsche's moral critique
can be properly understand and fruitfully debated as long as the principal choice is
assumed to be that between a "boot-in-the-face Fascist" on the one hand, and a "noble
and innocuous quasi-Christian moralist" on the other (ibid., 140).

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try to value something prized by slave moralists, but to do so in the self-
affirmative manner characteristic of masters.38
4. Impartial Value, the Bushman, and the West
I need now to clarify a presupposition that has been guiding my interpretation

from the start: namely, that GM I is intended, inter alia, as an historically
serious reconstruction of the roots of modern Western ethical consciousness.
In saying that Nietzsche means to be telling an historically serious story, I
mean that he commits himself to claims that demand evaluation in the light
of historical or anthropological evidence. Granted, GM is not simply a piece
of historical research. Nietzsche is more concerned to promote his moral cri-
tique than to further historical understanding for its own sake. But if I am
right in thinking that the philosophical heart of GM I's moral critique is the
claim that the idea of impartial value originated in self-estranged ressenti-
ment, while the phenomenon of intrinsic value originated in a self-affirming
"active force" (GM II ? 18, 325/87), then it follows that the soundness of the
critique depends in large part upon whether this crucial claim about origins is
true.
I shall not here defend this view about the historical seriousness of GM I,
nor will I offer a full-dress argument for the truth of Nietzsche's central thesis
about the origins of modern morality. Rather, I will bring empirical evidence
to bear on Nietzsche's "slave revolt hypothesis" from two different directions.
First I shall argue that the hypothesis receives initial support from certain
enduring facts of language use in English and other European languages. In
so doing, I will be expanding upon suggestions found in GM I ??4 and 5, as
well as in a modest way responding to Nietzsche's proposed prize question:
"What light does linguistics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on
the history of the evolution of moral concepts?" (GM I, ? 17 289/55). I shall
then state and contest an objection according to which the notably egalitarian
modes of life typical of foraging societies constitute a knock-down counter-
example to Nietzsche's conjecture. Such cultures appear to falsify the slave
revolt hypothesis because they: (a) never developed the distinction between
superiors and inferiors that is an essential precondition of a slave revolt, but
(b) behave in ways that indicate a firm commitment to the fairness and equal-
ity that Nietzsche apparently regards as emerging only from a slave revolt in
morality. I discuss the moral attitudes and social practices of the erstwhile
"Bushmen", or San, of Southern Africa as a case in point.39
38 Cf. GM II ?23: "... 'folly', a little 'disturbance in the head', this much even the Greeks
of the strongest, bravest age conceded of themselves as the reason for much that was bad
and calamitous-foolishness, not sin! do you grasp that?" (334/94).
39 The term "Bushman" derives from the Dutch "Bojesman", and was used by the Dutch
settlers of southern Africa to refer to one of the two quite different native groups that
they had found upon arrival. I have retained the word in my titles because, as Richard
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i
According to Peirce, an hypothesis is an attempt to account for something

that would otherwise be surprising. In an 1878 paper, he offers the following
example of the sort of thing he has in mind: "fossils are found; say, remains
like those of fishes, but far in the interior of the country. To explain the phe-
nomenon, we suppose the sea once washed over this land. This is [an]
hypothesis".40 Consider now the continued presence in English of a number
of ambiguous words and phrases that fit the following two descriptions:
(i) the central ambiguity in question is that between an evaluative and a

descriptive sense.
(ii) from the perspective of a wholeheartedly egalitarian morality, the

evaluative content runs directly contrary to what would have been
expected on the basis of the descriptive sense.
The words "noble" and "common" can serve as examples. The Oxford
English Dictionary [OED] has as the second entry under "noble": "illustrious
by rank, title, or birth; belonging to that class of the community which has a
titular pre-eminence over the others", and as the fourth: "having high moral
qualities or ideals; of great or lofty character." The potential for discrepancy
between the two senses is nicely exploited in a citation, dated 1829, from a
work by Kenelm H. Digby entitled The Broad Stone of Honour, or the True
Sense and Practice of Chivalry. "The soldiers of Pavia", writes Digby, "were
far more noble than their Emperor, Friedrich II, when they remonstrated
against his barbarous execution of the Parmesan prisoners". Under
"common", the OED has twenty-three entries, divided into three main groups.
The first group (of nine) entries rings changes on the general sense
Lee observes, it is the name by which these people "became known to the world" (The
!Kung San [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 29). But I have chosen to
refer to them as the San in the text, since there seems to be a consensus amongst those
who work on and with the people in question, that the term "Bushman" has acquired an
unpleasantly derogatory connotation (see Lee, 29-31 and Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled
With Flies [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989] 26-32; but note that George
Silberbauer in his 1981 Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press] chooses Bushman over San to refer to the larger group to
which the G/wi, who are the focus of his study, belong). As it happens, even San is not, as
Lee remarks, "an entirely satisfactory term", since it has a connotation signifying
"rascal" in Khoi-Khoi, the language spoken by the other native people found by the
Dutch in the seventeenth century, and it is not used by any of the people referred to by it
to refer to themselves. But in the absence of any single term that does cover just the
people under discussion and is used by those people themselves, it seems to me that "San"
is, at the risk of sounding mealy-mouthed, the "safest" term there is for my purposes.
40 Charles Sanders Peirce, "Deduction, Induction, Hypothesis", in Collected Papers, Vol-
umne 2. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1932) paragraph 625.

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"belonging equally to more than one'',4 the second group (of six) is intro-
duced with the phrase "of ordinary occurrence and quality, hence mean,
cheap", while the final grouping contains various technical senses, from
mathematics and the law amongst other areas. The homonymy covering the
first two groups is pretty clearly not accidental, but conforms to the follow-
ing logic: nothing that is too common, in the sense of shared equally by
many, can be very distinguished(!) or desirable. The most revealing of entries
in the second group is sense fourteen, according to which, "common" when
predicated of "ordinary persons, life, language, etc." means "lower class, vul-
gar, unrefined".42
These ambiguities of "noble" and "common" cannot be explained away as
a theoretically unpromising peculiarity of the English language, as the ambi-
guity of "poor" between "indigent" and "substandard" can perhaps be; for the
same ambiguity occurs in other European languages; in, for example, the
German "vornehm" and "gemein"43 and the French "noble" and "commun".
Why should single words yoke together, on the one hand a politico-genealog-
ical conception of superiority with a meritocratic, characterological one, and
on the other hand, an evaluatively innocuous concept of being shared with an
evaluatively charged term of moral and social opprobrium? The slave revolt
hypothesis interprets these ambiguities as what the English anthropologist E.
B. Tylor called "survivals", remnants of a time before good and evil, linguis-
tic analogues of Peirce's inland fish fossils. What today might seem a grossly
tendentious yoking of disparate senses was once, according to Nietzsche, the
unhesitating fusion of elements regarded as natural brethren.
In GM I ?5, Nietzsche adverts to the distinctive and not easily translatable
meanings of the ancient Greek "agathos",`"esthlos", "deilos", and "kakos" in
support of this view. The Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon [L&S]
gives four primary meanings for agathos: (1) well-born, gentle, (2) brave,
valiant, (3) good, serviceable, and (4) good in a moral sense; two for esthlos:
(1) brave, stout, noble, and (2) morally good, faithful; three for deilos: (1)
41 The definition is Dr. Johnson's.

42 "Vulgar" is itself a word that exhibits the ambiguity under discussion, and it is not there-
fore surprising to find that "common" appears regularly in the OED's entries for it. Many
of these senses are evaluatively neutral, for example, "common or usual language, ver-
nacular", "in common or general use", "of common or general kind", while others are
strongly disparaging, for example entry thirteen: "having a common and offensively
mean character; coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement or good taste; uncultured,
ill-bred". While we're at it, "mean" (as an adjective) offers yet another instance of the
phenomenon. It has a large number of senses clustering around "intermediate",
"moderate", "of average value, as in 'mean pressure, temperature' etc.", and it can also
be predicated of things to mean "poor in quality, of little value, inferior, petty, unimpor-
tant, inconsiderable" and of persons, their characters and actions to mean "destitute of
moral dignity or elevation, ignoble, small-minded".
43 According to the etymological conjectures favored by the OED and others, "gemein" is
cognate both with "common" ("ge-mein", like "co-mon") and with "mean".
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cowardly, hence vile, worthless, (2) low-born, mean, (3) miserable, wretched,
with a compassionate sense;44 and five for kakos: (1) ugly, (2) ill-born, (3)
craven, base, (4) worthless, sorry, unskilled, (5) morally evil, pernicious.
From a Nietzschean perspective, the distinctions made by L&S are useful and
intelligible only to us, inheritors of the slave revolt trying to understand the
language and culture of ancient Greece. What is notable about the way the
words were used in their natural habitat is the fact that they unproblematically
blend together aesthetic, ethical, and socioeconomic qualities.45 If Nietzsche
is right, the very possibility of sharply distinguishing the descriptive from
the evaluative senses of terms of this sort does not become a live option until
slave morality has developed to a suitably sophisticated level.46
44 Note in passing the support that this third sense gives to Nietzsche's contention, can-
vassed above, that "almost all the [ancient Greek] words referring to the common man
have remained as expressions signifying 'unhappy', 'pitiable"' (GM I ?10, 271-72/37).
45 The modem lexicographer's need to provide, for agathos, esthlos, and kakos, a separate
entry stressing that the words can mean "morally" good or bad as the case may be, is for
the Nietzschean a particularly apt example of the lack of philosophico-historical depth
that GM attempts to combat. When, for example, Liddell and Scott offer as citations illus-
trating the fourth listed sense of agathos, passages from Theognis and Plato, as if in the
same breath, they are, according to Nietzsche, eliding exactly the gulf to which attention
needs to be drawn. If Nietzsche is right, Theognis is a spokesman for noble values, while
Plato is involved in a campaign to undermine them.
46 As to the question whether Nietzsche is right on this point, there seems something of a
scholarly consensus that he is. Walter Kaufmann's translation of GM includes, at I ?5, an
editorial footnote that cites Gerald Else in support of Nietzsche's view. Else writes, inter
alia, that "Greek thinking begins with and for a long time holds to the proposition that
mankind is divided into 'good' and 'bad', and these terms are quite as much social, politi-
cal, and economic as they are moral" (Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument [Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1957], 75). To Else could be added Moses Finley, op cit., and
William Prior, Virtue and Knowledge: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Ethics (New
York: Routledge, 1991). The former notes that in the world of the Homeric poems,
"'warrior' and 'hero' are synonyms, and the main theme of a warrior culture is con-
structed on two notes-prowess and honour. The one is the hero's essential attribute, the
other his essential aim. Every value, every judgment, every action, all skills and talents
have the function of either defining honour or realizing it" (113), and maintains as well
that "it is self-evident that the gods of the Iliad were the gods of heroes, or, plainly spo-
ken, of the princes and the heads of the great households" (139). The latter characterizes
the Homeric hero as "a person of noble rank who functions in a highly stratified society
according to a strict code of conduct. He lives for glory, which he achieves by the
display of virtue or excellence, particularly excellence in combat, and which is accorded
to him by his fellow heroes in the form of gifts and renown" (9).
It is perhaps worth anticipating an objection to the effect that the Nietzschean view
for which I am claiming scholarly confirmation is in fact so well-known and accepted as
to be insignificant rather than striking. It seems to me sufficient in reply to point out that
Nietzsche expounded these ideas at a time in which no less an aficionado than Gladstone
was able to find in Homer, not only "the 'essential germ' of the form of constitution
enjoyed in Britain and America" (Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980], 202), but also a remarkable degree of
convergence with Christian theology. Richard Jenkyns reports that Gladstone thought it
"evident that Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto (he used the Roman names) were a memory
[sic!] of the Trinity, Apollo was a relic of belief in a Messiah, as can be seen from his

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Etymology and usage cannot on their own establish the crucial
Nietzschean connection between the emergence of impartial value and the
expression of ressentiment. What systematic ambiguities of the sort I have
looked at can show is (a) that our (still) current moral language is not mono-
lithic, but stratified, and (b) that the older semantic stratum embodies an aris-
tocratic scheme of value, while the younger one shows an accelerating ten-
dency to identify the truly moral with a distinctively impartial, egalitarian
mode of evaluation. Such ambiguities alone cannot show (c) that it was
ressentiment that sparked the formation and spread of the egalitarian scheme
of value.47
Since (c) is evidently a more controversial and characteristically
Nietzschean thesis than is (a) or (b), the interest of the evidence I have been
portraying as favorable to the slave revolt hypothesis might appear to be dis-
appointingly scant. In fact such an appearance would betray an overly crude
understanding of what (a) and (b) amount to in the context of Nietzsche's
overall project.
Agreed, it is no news to point out that Western culture was once warmly
hospitable to aristocratic modes of life that have fallen since into severe dis-
repute. Nietzsche is offering something more subtle than this. He is, on the
present interpretation, drawing attention to the subterranean persistence of the
older scheme of value within a culture that is on the whole ever more self-
consciously committed both to purifying the moral realm of contamination
from considerations of brute force, or wealth, or beauty, or mental or physical
dexterity, ... or anything else that does not belong properly to morality, and
to championing the moral equality of persons. Once aware of the
stratification of our moral language, we could of course take steps to expunge
the anomalous evaluative usages in an effort to carry on ethical life in the
exclusive terms of an austerely impartial, rigorously purified conception of
moral value; or we can begin to rethink the nature and foundations of moral
value. The latter response requires us, in Nietzsche's terms, to open ourselves
to the battle between noble and slave modes of evaluation.
Nietzsche notoriously holds that the cost of response number one, of try-
ing to carry on ethical life in ever more purely egalitarian and impartial
terms, is a descent into a ruinous and pathetic form of nihilism, and one
reason he is convinced of this is that he believes (c). My own more modest
claims on his behalf are (1) that if (a) and (b) are true then the question, What
is it that accounts for the emergence of the impartial, egalitarian mode of
evaluation? needs to be asked, and (2) that Nietzsche's answer-call it "the
double character as Saviour and Destroyer (a page is allotted to demonstrating that

Apollo's rape of Marpessa was 'not of a sensual character'). Was Minerva the Logos or
the Holy Spirit? Did Latona represent Eve or the Virgin Mary? How curious that the
poems contained no mention of the Sabbath!" (ibid., 203).
47 I am grateful to Allen Wood for showing me the force of this point.
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creative ressentiment conjecture"-has much to recommend it. I should per-
haps add that a full defence of this second claim would require more argument
than I can provide here; for present purposes I maintain only that it has an
initial plausibility.48
ii
If the story told in GM I is meant to be history of some sort on some level,

what exactly is it supposed to be a history o?49 The short answer implied
throughout this paper is that it is a history of Western morality. Using an
outdated but more revealing designation, GM I can be described as attempting
to lay bare the ethical significance of Christendom by laying bare its true ori-
gins. Just as Homer provides Nietzsche with the model for his terminus a
quo, the knightly-aristocratic mode of living and valuing, so is his terminus
ad quem, the "modern moral milk-sop", unmistakably represented by that
familiar nineteenth century intellectual who responds to a waning conviction
in the truth of Christian metaphysics with an ever more rationalized and spiri-
tualized "cling[ing] ... to Christian morality" (TI "Expeditions of an
Untimely Man", ?5 6:113/69). In spite of this historically and geographically
specific ambit, however, certain of GM I's central claims seem to have wider
implications. For example, the view that impartial value emerges from the
slave revolt in morality appears on the face of it to entail that no culture
untouched by such a revolt should be familiar with that sort of value; and this
in turn entails that the presence of impartial value requires the prior existence
of the severely hierarchical social climate in which master values flourish.
It is because of these consequences that the egalitarian peoples such as the
San of southern Africa seem to constitute a knock-down counter-example to
the thesis that a conception of impartial value depends upon a slave revolt in
morality. For it is widely agreed (1) that such peoples have never developed
the sort of hierarchically organized form of life that is supposed to be neces-
sary for the existence of noble values, and (2) that they demonstrate in their
most firmly entrenched customs a strikingly high regard for peaceable and
equitable group relations; they appear not simply to have happened not to
develop distinctions of rank amongst themselves, they actively see to it that
48 In GM I ?15 Nietzsche cites Thomas Aquinas and Tertullian in support of his account of
the role of ressentiment in the formation of slave values in general and Christian values in
particular. What Nietzsche finds self-incriminating in these authors is their evident glee at
the thought that prominent among the joys of the saved in heaven will be the pleasure of
witnessing the tortures of the damned, in particular those of erstwhile persecutors of the
faithful.
49 I owe this way of putting things to Susan Haack, as indeed I owe to her the whole idea of
testing Nietzsche's claims against the example of the Bushmen/San.

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"there are no distinct haves and have-nots",50 that physical hostilities are rare,
and that actions or attitudes likely to increase the risk of hostility in any form
are assiduously discouraged by "unspoken social laws".51 Richard Lee goes so
far as to say that the egalitarianism of the San "is not simply the absence of a
headman and other authority figures, but a positive insistence on the essential
equality of all people and a refusal to bow to the authority of others".52 In
short, the San seem to abide by something very like an impartial respect for
each other, even though this outlook cannot have originated in a slave revolt
in morality.53
To make matters worse, there are elements of San culture more reminis-
cent of Nietzschean nobles than of his slaves. The San take an intense and
vital delight in music and dance,54 are immensely skilled and enthusiastic
hunters, are known for their elaborate and beautiful paintings on the walls of
caves and on rockfaces, and are inveterate story-tellers. Their world, in other
words, despite the absence of political hierarchy and economic complexity
suffers from no lack of "vigorous, free, joyful activity" of just the variety
Nietzsche prizes when it is engaged in by Homeric Greeks and their like.55
50 Lorna Marshall, "Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions among the
!Kung", in Richard B. Lee, and Irven DeVore, eds., Kalahari Hunter Gatherers
(Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), 357.
51 Ibid., 351 and 370-71.
52 Lee, 457.
53 The view of San life that I am taking as canonical is not universally shar
sen, for one, argues at length that the San are not nearly so "fiercely egalitarian" (Lee,
24), as they are standardly portrayed to be. He maintains that the San today can appear
"even to careful observers [to be] ... superficially classless" only because "they are
incorporated as an underclass in a wider social formation that includes Batswana,
Ovaherero, and others" (Wilmsen, 270), and he attributes the long entrenched "myth" of
the primitively peaceable and egalitarian San to, roughly speaking, -a desire to find
concrete examples upon which to build a "critique of civilization". For Wilmsen, in short,
the image of the San that I accept here is scarcely more solidly grounded in the actual
lives and history of the people in question than was the 18th and 19th century image of
the noble savage. As far as I can see, if Wilmsen is right, then the San do not pose nearly
as direct a threat to the slave revolt hypothesis as I am assuming they do for the sake of
argument. So I do not think that I need take a stand as between Wilmsen on the one hand
and Lee and Marshall on the other.
54 Laurens van der Post writes that "music was as vital as water, food, and fire to [the
Bushmen]. ... We never found a group so poor or desperate that they did not have some
musical instrument with them. And all their music, song, sense of rhythm, and movement
achieved its greatest expression in their dancing (Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of
the Kalahari [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958], 225-26).
55 In addition to all this, van der Post provides evidence that, while they may not have
developed a barbarian fondness for conquest on their own, the San can respond to
attacks from others in the manner of masters rather than slaves.
What, indeed [writes van der Post] could be prouder than the Bushman's reply to the
young Martin du Plessis, a boy of fourteen who was sent into a great cave in a mountain
near my home ... where the Bushman was surrounded in his last stronghold by a power-
ful commando? The boy, almost in tears, besought him to surrender, promising to walk
out in front of him as a live shield against any treacherous bullets. At last, impatient that
772 MARK MIGOTI

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And it is hard to imagine that they do not value these self-expressive sorts of
activity intrinsically by contrast with the (presumably instrumental) value
accorded to the "menial tasks" devoted to "elaborating the material means of
life". But if the Sittlichkeit of the San is to qualify as a form of master
morality, it is a master morality without masters, since there is no evidence
that San contrast themselves and their excellences with anything perceived as
"low, low-minded, or plebeian".
To be sure, if a commitment to peaceable egalitarianism entails a com-
mitment to the impartial value characteristic of slave morality, then the
nature of San culture falsifies the slave revolt hypothesis. But what of the
conditional that grounds the damaging inference?
One reason to think that Nietzsche would not have accepted it is that his
own moral anthropology recognizes an epoch of peaceable egalitarianism that
precedes the emergence of master morality. In GM I ?5 he refers to "the
commune" as "the most primitive form of society" (264/31); in Beyond Good
and Evil, he distinguishes the "pre-moral" phase of human history, during
which "the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences",
from the genuinely moral phase, governed by the aristocratic habit of deter-
mining the value of an action by reference to its "ancestry" or "origin"
(Herkunfi) (BGE ?231, 5:50/44-45); and in Human All Too Human he char-
acterizes the first stage of human morality, "the first sign that an animal has
become human", as that in which "behavior is no longer directed to ...
momentary comfort, but rather to ... enduring comfort", and contrasts it with
a "higher stage" in which "man acts according to the principle of honor"
(HTH I ?94, 2:91/50). For Nietzsche, in other words, we find in the very
beginning of moral history groups of early humans struggling to survive and
reproduce, and doing so in conformity with "The First Principle of Civiliza-
tion", that "any custom is better than no custom" (D ? 16, 3:29/16). Though
different particular groups developed different particular customs, all of them
his refusal was not accepted, the Bushman scornfully said: "Go! Be gone! Tell your chief
I have a strong heart! Go! Be gone! Tell him my last words are that not only is my quiver
full of arrows but that I shall resist and defend myself as long as I have life left. Go! Go!
Be gone!" (van der Post, 46).
The preference for death before cowardice and dishonor exhibited here seems
entirely of a piece with that of an Achilles, a Hector, or the heroes of the Norse or Irish
sagas. Note, though, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's contrary conclusion that "it is not in
[the] nature of [Bushmen] to fight" and that "they would much rather run, hide, and wait
until a menace has passed than to defend themselves forcefully" (Elizabeth Marshall
Thomas, The Harmless People [New York: Alfred A., Knopf, 1970] 21). Marshall
Thomas goes so far as to say that "Bushmen deplore and misunderstand bravery. The
heroes of their legends are always little jackals who trick, lie, and narrowly escape,
rather than larger animals such as lions (who in the Kalahari are something of a master
race)" (ibid., 22). Wilmsen would take Marshall-Thomas's evidence to be indicative, not
of anything intrinsic to San culture as such, but rather of the subjugated position into
which the San have been forced over the past several hundred years by other native
Africans and by Europeans.

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agreed on two fundamental ideas: "that the community is more important
than the individual and that a lasting advantage is preferable to a transient
one" (HTH II ?89, 2:412/231). Only after the human species had maintained
itself in groups of this kind for some time did the knightly-aristocratic inven-
tors of master morality enter the scene. Nietzsche's description of this earliest
form of ethical life as that of "the commune" strongly suggests that he takes
it to be egalitarian in nature.
Nietzsche's willingness to allow that a morality of, as they might be
called, ur-communities constitutes a form of ethical life distinct from both
the master morality that breaks from it, and the slave morality that in turn
breaks from master morality, means that he need not be troubled by the dis-
covery of groups such as the San whose attitudes and behavior cannot be
smoothly assimilated either to the ethos of the masters, or to that of the slave
revolt. In fact, adding the hypothesis of a morality of ur-communities to
Nietzsche's theoretical framework enables at least two striking features of San
culture to turn up on the credit rather than the debit side of Nietzsche's
theoretical ledger.
The nature of Nietzschean ressentiment, and the brief account of the ori-
gins of the state found in GM II ? 17, should lead us to expect ur-communi-
ties to be marked by the relative absence of the sort of ressentiment alleged to
have engineered the slave revolt in morality, and by the presence of forms of
political power that function without recourse to a state. According to GM II
? 17, the function of the oldest "state" (the scare quotation marks are
Nietzsche's) was to "weld ... a hitherto unimpeded and unshaped populace
into a fixed form" (324/86). The scare quotation marks are there, Nietzsche
explains, because he takes himself to be talking about nothing more than
"some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, orga-
nized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible
claws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers but still form-
less and nomad" (ibid.). What we know as the state, in other words, is
descended from something invented by barbarian nobles, and so cannot be
supposed to figure in the lives of communities that have experienced no
admixture of master morality.56
56 It might be thought that Nietzsche's references to pre-noble ur-communities are inconsis-

tent with his account of the origin of the state in GM II, ? 17. For that account is devel-
oped in the course of articulating "a first, provisional statement of [an] hypothesis con-
cerning the origin of 'bad conscience"' (321/84), and according to that hypothesis bad
conscience was "a serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the
most fundamental change he ever experienced-that change which occurred when he
found himself finally (endgfiltig) enclosed within the walls (in den Bann) of society and
peace" (ibid.). Does this mention of "society and peace" not imply that Nietzsche here
identifies the origin of the state with the origin of socialization llberhaupt, that he sees no
substantial difference between hierarchically structured human society and human soci-
ety as such? In a word, no.
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If conformity to custom is not enforced by a super-ordinate authority such
as the state, it must presumably be enforced by all against each and each
against all. It follows from this, I think, that the bonds that bind egalitarian
ur-communities together could not long survive any significant growth in
ressentiment on the part of its members. Not that Nietzsche would portray ur-
communities as free of ressentiment as such; that would run counter to his
view that the experience of ressentiment is strictly coeval with the emergence
of a distinctively human animal."7 What is variable across time and type
according to Nietzsche is the manner in which ressentiment is experienced and
handled. In GM I ? 10, for example, we are told that when ressentiment
appears in a noble, "[it] consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate
reaction, and therefore does not poison" (273/39). It is the latter, venomous
form of ressentiment that would be intolerable in an ur-community. For sup-
posing it to crop up in an individual or sub-group, it would be directed either
against other individuals or sub-groups, or in some generalized way, against
the community as a whole. In either case, the persistence of "undischarged"
ressentiment would severely handicap the mechanisms of consensual decision
making and behavior enforcement demanded by a morality of ur-communities.
Notice, for a start, that Nietzsche, translated more literally than he is by Kaufmann,
speaks of man finding himself "conclusively under the spell of society and peace", and
notice also that he refers twice in the opening sentences of GM II ?17 to identifiable
"populations" (Bev6lkerungen) that are conquered, subjugated, and re-formed by more
powerful and hierarchically minded invaders. Notice, finally, that Nietzsche maintains
that punishments figure prominently among the "fearful bulwarks with which the political
(staatliche) organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom" (ibid.).
These three points, it seems to me, not only permit, but positively encourage a reading of
Nietzsche's argument in GM II ??16-17 according to which life in primordial egalitarian
communities precedes life in hierarchically structured state-governed communities, while
it is the cataclysmic advent of the latter form of society that demands the instinctual
repression responsible for the growth of bad conscience. Life in a pre-hierarchical state
is comparatively unformed, not yet fully "under the spell of society and peace", which is
to say that such communities lack the sort of sharply defined political identity made pos-
sible by the institutionalized authority of law and the state. Chief among the "bulwarks"
of social order we can expect to be missing from ur-communities will be publicly
enforced and codified practices of punishment. Kaufmann's free translation of "in den
Bann der Gesellschaft und Frieden" as "within the walls of society and peace" makes the
interpretation I wish to defend rather hard to bring into view, for it would seem that
groups must be located either inside or outside such walls, with no third location possible.
On my view Nietzsche's language draws attention, not only to the fact of being in a con-
dition of society and peace, but also to the means by which this condition is achieved;
namely by a kind of mental captivation reminiscent of a magical spell. This subtlety
allows one to hold that egalitarian ur-communities are peaceful societies (rather more
peaceful in fact than the militaristic societies that succeed them) without yet being
"conclusively under the spell of society and peace", i.e. without regarding society and
peace as conditions that have to be-the phrase is for once le mot juste-hegemonically
enforced. I would like to thank the referee for this journal for bringing this point to my
attention.
57 I am assuming here that ressentiment in its most generic form can be identified with the
turning inward of an instinct denied outward discharge spoken of in GM II ? 16.

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We should, consequently, expect the members of ur-communities to share
with nobles the habit of dealing with immediately experienced ressentiment-
the immediate response to perceived encroachments, humiliations, inequities
and the like-by means of similarly immediate, outwardly directed action.
When measured against these two consequences of Nietzsche's overall
scheme, the San turn out to fit the profile of an ur-community rather nicely.
That the San have no indigenous counterparts to state power and authority, as
these are understood in the West, is beyond serious dispute. One simple and
compelling reason for this, as George Silberbauer notes, is that the San's
basic political unit, the band, is subject to regular dispersal into smaller
household-like groups during seasons of scarcity. "A centralized, hierarchical
structure, with specialized personnel and roles would", Silberbauer observes
cogently, "be unable to function when the band separates".58
More remarkable than the absence of a state within San culture is its
pointed refusal to tolerate just the sorts of festering grievance that feed the
ressentiment ascribed by Nietzsche to the originators of slave morality. An
impressive number of San ethnographers have drawn attention to a variety of
"venting" practices that serve to sustain cooperative harmony and inhibit per-
nicious hostility.
Silberbauer, for example, divides the relationships that an individual G/wi
has with his or her kin (which will typically include the entire band to which
the individual belongs) into "joking relationships" and "avoidance/respect
relationships". Avoidance/respect holds between an individual and his or her
parents, opposite sex siblings, and children past the age of seven or eight;
while joking relatives include the individual's grandparents, same sex sib-
lings, opposite sex siblings-in-law, and cousins.
An avoidance/respect relationship [writes Silberbauer] ... requires that those so related should
?ao (v.t., to be reserved or respectful toward, to be scared of) one another. Their proper
behavior is characterized by:
Not sitting close together and generally avoiding bodily contact if not of the
same sex.
Being careful not to swear or make bawdy remarks in the obvious hearing of
those in an avoidance relationship.
Not touching their possessions without permission; if an object is to be passed
between avoidance relatives, an intermediary should, properly, be used and a
direct transfer avoided.59
Because of the restricted nature of their interaction, direct conflict between

avoidance relatives is, Silberbauer notes, "effectively prevented".60
58 Silberbauer, op cit., 168.

59 Ibid., 143.
60 Ibid., 175.
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It is within joking relationships, then, that G/wi conflicts will be articu-
lated and resolved, and it is of the essence of the joking relationship, Silber-
bauer argues, to allow disputes to be conducted in such a way as to minimize
the dangers of escalation and lasting resentment. "The behavior appropriate to
the joking relationship", he explains, "permits free and trenchant public criti-
cism of the actions of a joking partner and imposes an obligation to accept
the criticism without the kind of resentment that might exacerbate the
conflict".61 Writing twenty years earlier than Silberbauer about the Nyae Nyae
!Kung, Lorna Marshall came to the entirely similar conclusion that the
!Kung's vigilant attention to "getting things into words" is something that
"keeps everyone in touch with what others are thinking and feeling, releases
tensions, and prevents pressures from building up until they burst out in
aggressive acts".62 Richard Lee, meanwhile, remarks of the Dobe !Kung, that:
they have evolved elaborate devices for puncturing the bubble of conceit and enforcing
humility. These leveling devices are in constant daily use-minimizing the size of others' kills,
downplaying the value of others' gifts, and treating one's own efforts in a self-deprecating
way. Please and thank you are hardly ever found in their vocabulary; in their stead is a
vocabulary of rough humor, back-handed compliments, put-downs, and damning with faint
praise.63
On balance, then, the reasons for thinking that egalitarian peoples such as
the San constitute counter-examples to the slave revolt hypothesis do not
appear to be strong; if such peoples are to be located on Nietzsche's concep-
tual map, they should be counted as living examples of ur-communities, not
as practitioners of a slave morality without a slave revolt.64
If such is the proper response to the threat of falsification posed by peace-
ably egalitarian societies, it might justly be demanded that I provide a more
richly specified account of the concept of impartial value than that upon
which I have relied so far. For if a strong commitment to treating everyone
alike together with a pronounced aversion to arrogance and a tendency to shun
competition do not add up to a commitment to impartial value, then just
what does? What I have to offer on this head in the remainder of this essay
will be preliminary in character; just enough, I hope, to justify confidence in
the search for something more satisfying.
I begin by stipulating that a minimum condition for a moral outlook's
including a commitment to impartial value is that it bear a sufficiently strong
resemblance to the relevant ideas of the obvious exemplars of Nietzschean
slave morality: the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the central figures
61 Ibid., 172.
62 Marshall, op cit. 355.
63 Lee, 458.
64 I do not suggest that Nietzsche himself had a clear idea of the ways in which life in egali-
tarian communities such as the San can be brought to bear on his slave revolt hypothesis;
my point is just that it can be so brought to bear and that it is instructive to do so.

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in Western moral philosophy from Socrates to Schopenhauer. This stipula-
tion presupposes that the canonical exemplars of slave morality exhibit
enough unity amongst them to make the proposed condition theoretically
useful; a consequence that has (to my mind) the merit of opening the slave
revolt hypothesis to a further source of empirical evidence. For if it were to
turn out that what divided, say, Aquinas from Kant from Mill, was more
philosophically significant than anything that united them, that would be
evidence that the presupposition was false. By the same token, however, to
identify a network of concepts or commitments which there is reason to think
are common to the canonical slave moralists and which are of genuine philo-
sophical interest, is to have the materials for a satisfying answer to the ques-
tion: What does it take to be committed to impartial value? The answer
would be that it takes familiarity with these concepts and commitment to
these views, the ones integral to the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament,
and Socrates, and all the others on the list.
When introduced in the first section of this paper, the concept of impartial
value was characterized as "value chosen by an impartial subject, one who is
in himself neither master nor slave, but can freely choose to behave and to
evaluate either as the one or as the other" (cf. above, p. 752). This account
implies that a commitment to impartial value is bound up with a commit-
ment to a certain conception of agency. Of a piece with impartial value is the
conception of a distinctively moral sense or locus of agency. What are the
conditions of moral agency? What are the legitimate grounds of appraisal of a
distinctively moral-as opposed to aesthetic, athletic, epistemic, prudential,
...-sort? These are questions that will occupy thinkers within the culture
labeled by Nietzsche, with malice aforethought, the culture of slave morality.
I suggest, in short, that impartial value is an umbrella concept comprising
the nest of ideas and assumptions about value that generate the kind of ques-
tion just listed. As a defence of the theoretical utility of this notion that I am
ascribing to slave morality and denying to the San, this, I hope, will do for a
start.
By examining and rejecting the idea that the egalitarian culture of the San
might pose a knock-down counter-example to the slave revolt hypothesis, we
have, it seems to me, been brought to recognize a deeper and more precise
sense in which the history of GM I is a history of western morality. For it is
evident, I think, that Nietzsche's most interesting and defensible historical
claim is that it is distinctive of our culture, the culture that has roots in both
the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric epics, that self-affirmation and intrinsic
value entered it by way of a knightly-aristocratic leisure class, and that it
underwent a slave revolt that introduced a reactive morality of impartial value.
Whether having this history is our fortune or our misfortune is as maybe;
more to the point for Nietzsche as I read him is that it is ourfate.
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CONCLUSION
I have argued (1) that Nietzsche can provide a satisfactory account of how
slave morality could have got off the ground, (2) that his taste for noble val-
ues does not preclude him (more pertinently, someone influenced by his
views) from acknowledging claims of justice that rest upon a sense of equal-
ity amongst human beings, and (3) that the conjecture that the moral con-
sciousness of the modern West has been decisively shaped by a slave revolt in
Nietzsche's sense has enough empirical support to warrant further investiga-
tion. Central amongst the historical questions to be pursued in such future
inquiry will be that of what evidence there is that ressentiment plays the role
that Nietzsche assigns to it in generating the ideals of slave morality. Central
amongst the ethical questions will be that of the role to assign to notions
such as that of equality in a skill-independent sense or of a moral entitlement
within a scheme of value that is self-affirming and free of self-deceptive
ressentiment. In addition, we are left with the exegetical issue of identifying
more precisely Nietzsche's views with regard to the historical and the ethical
questions. I hope in this paper to have broken the surface on these matters; I
make no claim to have plumbed the depths.

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Slave Morality

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Slave Morality, Socrates, and the Bushmen: A Reading of the First Essay of On the

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2653721

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Slave Morality, Socrates, and the

The University of Calgary

SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 745

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1. Barbarian Masters, Creative Slaves

GM is a polemic concerned to reveal "the origin of our moral prejudices"

lated by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968); The Will to Power

746 MARK MIGOTrI

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Above all else, then, noble morality is self-established; it "develops from a

A crucial part of what the nobles affirm about themselves, therefore, is

SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 747

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748 MARK MIGOTII

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SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 749

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9 Ibid., pp. 7-8.

750 MARK MIGOTTI

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SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 751

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752 MARK MIGOITI

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14 The Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 753

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754 MARK MIGOTTI

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2. Socrates and the Demise of the Ur-Nobles

In addition to recognizing amongst themselves the difference between persua-

SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 755

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756 MARK MIGOITI

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SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 757

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758 MARK MIGO7TI

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SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 759

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3. Justice, Equality, and the Pathos of Distance

760 MARK MIGOTfI

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27 T. M. Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism", in Utilitarianism and Beyond,

SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 761

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29 Philippa Foot, "Nietzsche's Immoralism", in Schacht ed., 9.

762 MARK MIGOTi

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SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 763

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4 Kant, op cit. 40/435.

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According to this passage, a tendency to take advantage of the weakness of

SLAVE MORALITY, SOCRATES, AND THE BUSHMEN 765

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4. Impartial Value, the Bushman, and the West

I need now to clarify a presupposition that has been guiding my interpretation