This will be my last post on the philosophy books I skim-read last year. I did get through the whole list; I even signed up for a free month of Audible to finish listening to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. However, this post will conclude my foray into this arena for now.

I thought I would like Nietzsche a lot more. Honestly, I found him somewhat cynical and condescending. Below are excerpts from Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.

“The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct—what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there is no doubt about it—the sovereign man calls it his conscience.”

I like this description of conscience. Finding the right balance in our relationship to our conscience is difficult and important. We want to allow and encourage that dominating instinct we have to motivate us to skillful behaviors and actions. However, we also want to check the validity and effectiveness of our conscience with reason. This is probably each person’s greatest responsibility.

“The feeling of “ought,” of personal obligation (to take up again the train of our inquiry), has had, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and most original personal relationship that there is, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower: here it was that individual confronted individual, and that individual matched himself against individual. There has not yet been found a grade of civilisation so low, as not to manifest some trace of this relationship.”

Nietzsche viewed contractual obligations between buyer and seller as the most ancient and obvious origin for early morality. There have to be certain rules and customs that are followed to allow people to retain their property and be able to trade that property for something else in an equitable settlement. The question of how and why humans evolved the morality that they did is certainly interesting, though personally I’m much more interested in present-day utility.

“It is possible to conceive of a society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting its wrong-doers go scot-free.—“What do my parasites matter to me?” might society say. “Let them live and flourish! I am strong enough for it.”—The justice which began with the maxim, “Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,” ends with connivance at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself.—The self-destruction of Justice! we know the pretty name it calls itself—Grace! it remains, as is obvious, the privilege of the strongest, better still, their super-law.”

The ability we have to lend grace is directly proportional to the amount of power we possess. According to Nietzsche, showing grace is the privilege of the successful. The Biblical story of ‘The Widow’s Mite’ comes to mind. Giving to others when you have little is commendable. Giving out of your surplus not so much.

“To talk of intrinsic right and intrinsic wrong is absolutely non-sensical; intrinsically, an injury, an oppression, an exploitation, an annihilation can be nothing wrong, inasmuch as life is essentially (that is, in its cardinal functions) something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without such a character.”

Since I didn’t read the entirety of Nietzsche’s thoughts on morality, I am not even going to begin to try to paraphrase what his moral system looked like. However, just taking the above quote at face value, I can say that I whole-heartedly agree that morality cannot be objective or intrinsic, while I disagree that to live necessarily involves causing harm. The concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ don’t exist independently of our perception of them, and thus are necessarily subjective and conditioned.

I can more objectively talk about right and wrong in the context of a given reference point. If I have the goal of completing an Ironman Triathlon (I do!), then it is right for me to train for this by strenuously working out and eating healthy. It would be wrong for me not to do these things. If you are someone who doesn’t have this goal, then for you these behaviors might be amoral.

In Nietzsche’s quote, power seems to be the goal, which would make exploitation and oppression right, or at the very least permissible, if necessary to achieve that end. I also view empowerment as the ultimate goal of morality; however, I believe that the ultimate realization of this goal comes by expanding my self-identity to include the people in my life. Eventually, my understanding and connection could come to encompass the entire universe and then I (or more appropriately ‘we’) would be totally empowered.

I will expound more on the ethical system I subscribe to, enlightened egoism, in a future post.

Namaste.