In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche argues that Christian values have corrupted European society and triggered a regressive cultural crisis in late 19th-century Europe. Nietzsche believes that humans are innate predators, but modern European society doesn’t offer a healthy outlet for people’s violent predatory instincts—essentially, human beings’ primal need to feel the satisfaction of exerting power over their prey. To Nietzsche, the “ascetic” ideology of Judeo-Christian doctrine—centering on “poverty, chastity, and humility,” or practicing restraint from life’s pleasures—masks a perversion of human culture that makes it profoundly sick. To Nietzsche, most aspects of modern European human culture—including religion, philosophy, science, and law—aren’t progressive but merely express the sadistic human urge for power and ultimately make people suffer. Nietzsche thus argues that European culture is in crisis because the Christian values on which its founded don’t allow people to experience joy in living as we are meant to and instead forces us to manifest our inherent sadistic impulses in harmful ways.
Nietzsche believes that humankind has an innate drive to feel powerful, which is a part of our survival instinct. Prior to large societies, human beings had to hunt, kill, roam, and conquer territory in order to survive. But Nietzsche is clear that there’s nothing wrong with this—human beings are simply hardwired to thrive off of conflict and cruelty, because it keeps us alive in the harsh, predatory natural world. Nietzsche argues that the primal human is a “beast of prey”: we are hardwired to be predatory as a means of survive. Hunting and killing are essentially cruel behaviors, but without such instincts, humans wouldn’t have survived the early days of our existence. Early humans were also “nomadic,” instinctively seizing and protecting territory to survive. When people form small, isolated societies, they still practice “murder, arson, rape, and torture” outside the domain of their own territory, which are manifestations of an innate drive for violence and power. Historically, humankind thought there was nothing immoral about possessing these power-driven instincts. In fact, expressing such instincts give people a profound feeling of “joy” and “freedom” in acting true to ourselves. But Nietzsche notes that many powerful people in modern Europe assume that recent human civilization has triumphed by “taming” our “animal” selves (and our violent lust for power). To Nietzsche, this is a lie, because our instincts can’t be changed. Instinctive, predatory human tendencies to express power, violence, and cruelty only become more dangerous to humanity when we try to suppress them.
Nietzsche argues that modern European culture, which centers on Christian values of “poverty, chastity, and humility,” doesn’t have healthy outlets for humankind’s predatory, sadistic impulses, so these impulses inevitably emerge in more damaging ways. In Nietzsche’s view, the law was originally designed to allow people to live full and active lives and carve out areas where conflict and aggression were permissible—but the modern European conceptions of justice exert “vengeance” on criminals in far more damaging ways. The European legal system is based on ideas of credit and debt, meaning that a person who breaks a law owes a debt to society—and justice is characterized as a legal right to inflict pain on the criminal in equal proportion to the debt owed. To Nietzsche, such a practice is evidence of the sadistic impulse in humankind emerging as resentful vengeance rather than healthy conflict. Christian religious leaders—or “ascetic priests”—promise to help those who suffer, but Nietzsche argues that they only cause more suffering as their followers deny their natural instincts. Essentially, ascetic priests exert power by falsely depicting themselves as healers who will lead others to “bliss” in the afterlife. Nietzsche believes that practicing the “ascetic ideology” of Christian values makes people suffer, because it forces them to feel guilty every time they feel their natural aggressive urges. Such people believe that they are evil, or sinful, for being human and having a natural instinct to exert power and thrive in the world. In exerting power, the ascetic priest feels a sense of mastery, which brings them joy—but their followers perpetually suffer because they believe that their inevitable instincts to exert power are evil, meaning they feel perpetually “unworthy.”
Even many nonreligious thinkers (such as secular philosophers) embody the “ascetic ideal,” arguing that humans are at their best when they use their rationality and suppress their “animalistic” emotional and bodily feelings. Such practices appeal to philosophers because they enjoy thinking and therefore want to rid themselves of distractions like commerce and romance. The desire to feel mastery over their emotions allows philosophers to exert their power (over emotional and bodily “distractions” in life), and they feel happy in being able to do so. As such, they tend to argue that cultivating “reason” is fundamentally better than getting bogged down in the messy emotional encounters of life. For many people, however, the same practices of restraint from life’s daily pleasures only make them deny the aspects of life that will actually make them happy and fulfilled.
Nietzsche believes that we would experience life with profound “joy” if we accepted that we simply are power-driven beings, and we cultivated healthy public outlets to manage our innate desire for conflict and violence. Nietzsche argues that some historical cultures, like the Ancient Greeks, recognized and even embraced the “beast of prey” in humankind and were thus more progressive than modern Europeans. The Ancient Greeks provided healthy public outlets—like “war,” “violent festivities,” and public executions—for humans to express the cruel aspects of our nature. Harsh as they seem, Nietzsche believes that such “bizarre cruelties” are actually beneficial because they allow us to feel a healthy “joy” in expressing our natural instincts. Modern European culture—which has no such outlets—forces people to turn their instinctual cruelty inward on themselves. Instead of being expressed and released, this self-directed cruelty festers and continues unchecked, which causes great “pain” and “misery.” Thus, contrary to the modern belief that Christian morality is progressive, Nietzsche argues that modern European culture founded on this value system is actually regressive and damaging to humanity.
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The Repression of Human Nature ThemeTracker
The Repression of Human Nature Quotes in On the Genealogy of Morals
[U]nder what conditions did man invent for himself those judgements of value, Good and Evil? And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present advanced human welfare, or rather have they harmed our race? Are they a symptom of distress, impoverishment and degeneration of life? Or, conversely do we find in them an expression of the abundant vitality and vigour of life, its courage, its self-confidence, its future?
The knightly-aristocratic values rest upon a powerful physical development, a richness and even superabundance of health, together with what is necessary for maintaining life, on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the journey—on everything, in fact, which involves strong, free and joyous action.
The slaves' revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values—a resentment experienced by those who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to obtain their satisfaction in imaginary acts of vengeance. While all aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says ‘no’ ab initio to what is ‘outside itself,’ ‘different from itself’ and ‘not itself;’ and this ‘no’ is its creative act […] its action is fundamentally a reaction.
What is it precisely which I find intolerable? That which I cannot deal with alone, which makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! That something foul comes near me; that I must inhale the putrid odour of the entrails of a rotten soul!
Nietzsche uses this metaphor because he believes that the prevailing moral code in modern Europe characterizes aggression and power-seeking behavior as evil. To Nietzsche, however, these are fundamental aspects of human nature inherited by modern people from our ancient ancestors (predators who instinctively derived satisfaction from hunting and killing). He thinks that modern European culture forces people to repress their aggressive instincts, which makes them suffer, and that this suffering prevents them from thriving and experiencing life with joy and stunts humanity. He symbolizes this stultification by imagining that Europe isn’t full of healthy, happy people who are actively living as fully realized human beings. Instead, it’s full of people who are forced to hold back a part of themselves, so they aren’t really living but suffering and dying, and their corpses are giving off “bad air.” The metaphor of bad air thus represents humanity’s regression or decline in modern Europe.
Beyond Good and Evil—at any rate that is not the same as ‘Beyond Good and Bad.’
In Ancient Greece and Rome, there’s no real concept of evil. A person is “good” if they are free to embrace their human instincts and pursue strength, power, and joy. A person who’s not able to do so is simply unlucky: they’re not endowed with social privilege, or they’ve been bewitched by the gods, or they’re a bit foolish. In that sense, there’s no such thing as a fundamentally evil person, or fundamentally evil behavior. The opposite of being good is more like being less good—or “Bad”—as in worse off. However, when oppressed people develop their rival moral code, they characterize their oppressors as fundamentally evil for being strong, powerful, aggressive, and experiencing joy from such behavior. Thus, the concept of “evil” enters the picture. So, going “Beyond Good and Evil” means going beyond a way of seeing natural, human power-seeking behavior as “evil” in and of itself. This is what Nietzsche longs for in his own culture.
The breeding of an animal that is free to make promises—is not this precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set for itself in regard to man? Is not this the essential problem of man?
How much blood and cruelty lies at the foundation of all ‘good things!’
Enmity, cruelty, the delight in persecution, in attack, destruction, pillage—the turning of all these instincts against their very owners is the origin of the ‘bad conscience.’
Indebtedness to God: this thought becomes his instrument of torture.
What is the meaning of ascetic ideals?
Every animal […] strives instinctively after the most favourable conditions: those under which it can exert its full strength, and experience its greatest feeling of power; every animal also instinctively abhors (and with an acute sense ‘surpassing all reason’) any kind of disruption or hindrance which obstructs or could obstruct his path to this optimum (it is not his way to ‘happiness’ of which I speak, but his path to power, to action, the most powerful action, and in point of fact in many cases his way to misery).
We know the three great catch-words of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility chastity; and if we look closely at the lives of all the great productive, creative intellects, we will find these present again and again, in some measure.
There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a ‘knowing’ from a perspective, and the more emotions we express concerning a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘idea’ of that thing, our ‘objectivity.’
Look into the background of every family, of every institution, of every community; you will see everywhere the struggle of the sick against the healthy[.]
‘I suffer: someone is to blame’—all sick sheep think this. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, ‘Quite so, my sheep, it must be the fault of someone but you yourself are that someone, you alone are to blame—you yourself are to blame for yourself;’ that is bold enough, false enough, but one thing is at least attained thereby, as I have said: resentment is—diverted.
The hypnotic sensation of nothingness, the peace of deepest sleep, anaesthesia in short—this is regarded by the sufferers and the absolutely depressed as their supreme good[.]
Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.
