The Return of the Master: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals"

Abstract

i) Nietzsche has taught us to be wary of origins, and to despise every account which recalls 'the origin' as the ideal moment of some essential value or truth. In the very first aphorism of Human, All Too Human, for example, he exposes the glorification of the origin as a metaphysical subterfuge. For he claims that one evades all the complex problems of historical emergence'How did reason come from unreason, or altruism from egoism, or disinterested contemplation from out of covetous desire?' when one assumes the conceptual and historical priority of the favoured term as a privileged origin which precedes all dissociation. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche tells us a story of Masters and Slaves to describe the origin of our most basic moral values. But given his earlier strictures against 'the origin', I think we have good reason to maintain an ironic distance from Nietzsche's account. Even though Nietzsche seems to praise the Master far more highly than the Slave, we cannot read the Genealogy as if it were a straightforward historical narrative which laments a lost origin. Nietzsche certainly does use the conflict of Master and Slave as an analogue to specific historical situations where, for example, the triumph of Christianity over the classical ideal is said to embody the triumph of the Slave. But as I will suggest, in a deeper sense the terms 'Master' and 'Slave' refer to basic modalities of individual existence, and in this respect they are 'types' which still concern us all. In fact, Nietzsche makes it clear from the very beginning of the Genealogy that in this enquiry the issue of the origin is entirely subordinate to the issue of value. And so he poses his guiding question as follows: