Before examining the slave morality, one must come to …show more content…
understand the master morality that led to it out of ressentiment. Like the Homeric heroes, the master is powerful and willful, a being beyond that of the normal man. However, this is not necessarily the overman that Nietzsche describes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as the morality is rigid in its understanding of good and bad, unwilling to mold and transform its own morality, like the creative overman would. Of course, the master still gets far closer to achieving overman status than the slave. Through the will to power, a human’s natural desire to exert his strength on the world, the master reaches his ultimate potential.
For the slave, the master’s will to power and happiness is devalued, because the slave does not have the values which make that possible.
This morality is born out of ressentiment, open hostility towards the master that the slave views as the cause of their suffering. Due to this, the slave morality construes the values of the master to be evil, setting up their opposite morality as all that is good and virtuous. As such, the slave does not seek to become the master, rather seeking to turn the masters into slaves as well. In the eyes of Nietzsche, the ideas of the slave morality, such as pity and humility, were brought upon by Christianity and democracy. To Nietzsche, the master morality suffered defeat due to the spread of Christianity throughout the …show more content…
world.
“God is dead”.
Due to this catastrophic event, the slave no longer has a purpose to latch on to, leading to mass nihilism, the new “will to nothingness” soon overcomes the will to power. Consequently, the unwilling last man prevails in society, a person who is imprisoned by the Apollonian, order that separates the man from his nature, unable to achieve anything beyond the act of living itself. In reaction to this, Nietzsche argues that man must continue the eternally recurring struggle between the master and slave morality, and the master must win. This victory, as well as the emergence of the overman, would stop this eternal recurrence, hoping that man does not repeat the same mistakes over and over. The new master morality, no longer bound by the rigidity of the Apollonian, intense order, would connect itself deeply with the Dionysian, the passion of humanity in its natural state. This balance allows the creator to unite with nature, bringing the arrival of the
overman.
Undoubtedly, Nietzsche’s words resonate with modern society. However, I believe that Christianity, democracy, and equality are not the ultimate cause of this slave morality. Instead, we see the herd mentality under the guise of individuality. For evidence, one must only look at current advertising practices, selling products with taglines that basically boil down to “be yourself, buy what everyone else has”. Likewise, the morality prevails in media, where society gets off by gathering together to demolish the lives of those with the master morality. The individual cannot accomplish the goal of leaving this morality, because one would only be an individual after transcending the slave morality. In this light, society can mold itself to be both individualistic and equal, with each person taking control of their life.