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5. Natural History of Morals
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Beyond Good and Evil, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Good and Evil
Knowledge, Truth, and Untruth
The Individual and the Crowd
The Dark Side of Modernity
Women and Men
Summary
Analysis
Now applying a more specific lens to science and scholarship, Nietzsche expresses his concern over a disturbing development: the scholar’s rejection of philosophy. Young scholars have begun to reject and consider themselves independent of philosophy, for a variety of reasons, some shallow and some more significant. Nietzsche grants that much of the blame is philosophy’s, as modern philosophy has failed to provide modern science with guiding ideas. While science continues to grow and develop, philosophy is a shell of itself, unable to instruct other branches of knowledge.
Having alluded previously to the relationship between the sciences and philosophies in an era of materialism, Nietzsche now tackles this problem directly. As he has already demonstrated, philosophy in the modern era has most certainly failed at its task. This has not only led to science overtaking it, however, but has also distorted science too, a failure that Nietzsche argues most people have failed to notice. The reader should note that “science” here refers to scholarship in general, including the humanities and social sciences as well as the natural sciences.
Themes
Nietzsche expounds upon the obstacles to the development of the modern philosopher, beginning with scientific specialization. As a specialist the philosopher quickly becomes siloed in his discipline and is unable to attain a commanding view over the sciences, the necessary vantage point for genuine philosophy. In a herd society the philosopher is nothing more than a hermit, one who does not feel they have the right to pass judgement. This, to Nietzsche, is precisely backwards. A true philosopher must engage in society as much as they stand apart from it, despite and indeed because of the risk such a lifestyle requires.
Nietzsche argues that the breakdown of the relationship is closely connected to specialization, itself a product of modern herd society. Too focused on minutiae, philosophers cannot create values, so they instead take materialist theories of the world as given explanations. Nietzsche returns to his earlier claim that the philosopher must carefully negotiate their relationship to the crowd, engaging with it, but from a distance.
Themes
In opposition to the philosopher, Nietzsche provides a sketch of the scientific man. This individual is not “noble” and independent but accepts their place in society and works industriously in a narrow field. A mediocre person, the scientific man seeks to repress everything uncommon and unusual. While Nietzsche welcomes the spirit of objectivity that the scientific man ushers in, this spirit instrumentalizes the individual: they are but “the most sublime type of slave” and cannot serve as an example to humanity at large. The scientific man is a skeptic by default, as skepticism expresses the degeneration of the will in the weak modern individual, a degeneration that extends to many other individuals and parts of society too.
Nietzsche’s scientific man closely resembles the herd man and is indeed a particular subcategory of that general type. Nietzsche implicitly contrasts the narrow-minded scientific man to an older kind of “noble” polymath; the latter has a genuine curiosity and ambition that herd society has all but eliminated from the former. The root cause of this, of course, is herd society’s elimination of the “noble,” which Nietzsche sees as the same thing as the lack of powerful wills in that society.
Themes
Nietzsche finds the degeneration of the will in Europe to be closely connected to national and racial identity, and the mixture of the latter in particular. He finds France to have the weakest will and strongest skepticism, while Germany, England, and Spain still possess stronger wills. Italy is as yet undecided. The most powerful will by far, however, Nietzsche finds in Russia. Nietzsche sees Russia as a likely conqueror of a weak, sickly Europe, though he would prefer that the threat of domination would force Europe to become strong once again. Either way, he predicts that the politics of the 20th century will take place on a much greater scale: that of dominating the entire world.
Nietzsche once again points to race and racial “dilution” as the source of the lack of will in Europe, though he fails to clearly explain what he means by racial “dilution.” He then turns to geopolitics, arguing that these questions, far from being merely philosophical, have a decisive impact on world affairs. Nietzsche is far from the only person to make such claims about the threat that Russia posed to democratic Europe in the 19th century, but his hope that it will lead Europe back to aristocracy one way or another is quite unusual. His prediction of a conflict of world domination in the century to come may strike the contemporary reader as eerily prescient.
Themes
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Nietzsche offers in contrast a different, distinctly German kind of skepticism, drawing on the example of Frederick the Great. This skepticism has an “audacious manliness” and conquers despite its reservations, never losing its sense of self in the process. To Nietzsche, this is precisely what is most vital and redeemable in the German spirit, unlike romanticism. This spirit will be embodied by the philosophers of the future, although it will not suffice to explain them. Nietzsche also calls these philosophers critics and experimenters; as critics they are distinguished from skeptics by their firm methods, values, and goals. Critics, however, are merely instruments of philosophy, one among many aspects of true philosophers.
The skepticism Nietzsche attributes to Frederick the Great refers to the latter’s accomplished record of military conquest despite being more interested in music and the arts. This, to Nietzsche, is a self-overcoming that indicates true power of the will and an honest recognition of the will to power. Here one sees at least a virtue Nietzsche wishes to maintain and uplift, one he sees as essential to the morality of the philosophers of the future. Such a principled and motivated skepticism is in fact not even really skepticism, which is why Nietzsche refers to its supporters as “critics” instead.
Themes
Establishing a distinction between philosophical laborers—scientific men—and philosophers, Nietzsche returns to the idea that the philosopher must look down from a great height; only from there can the philosopher “create values.” Philosophical laborers, on the other hand, work with values already given to create new, temporary truths, and do not express the will to power like true philosophers. The philosopher of the future, rather, is by definition opposed to the present and is tasked with “being the bad conscience of their time.” Opposing specialization, the philosopher must choose greatness: being noble, independent, different, and apart.
Nietzsche describes once more his imagined role for the philosopher in society, positioned at the top of a hierarchy of nobility. His distinction between working with past values and making entirely new ones, however, both contradicts his doctrine of eternal values and ignores the degree to which many of the philosophers whose greatness he acknowledges, despite their flaws, did both simultaneously. His program for the philosophers of the future, on the other hand, is absolutely clear.
Themes
Being a philosopher cannot be taught but must be learned from experience. Experience, however, is devalued in modern society, making the creation of new philosophers a demanding and difficult task. Here Nietzsche finds an instructive example in great artists, who, like the philosophers of the future, understand that the freedom of creation is experienced as necessity and constraint. Reaffirming his belief in an order of rank of the soul, Nietzsche claims that the highest, most difficult philosophical problems will repel those who are not destined to solve them. A right to philosophy must be cultivated in an individual, who is the expression of generations of the development of virtues.
In reaffirming the primacy of experience, Nietzsche once again strongly rejects philosophical systems which attempt to find truths or values outside of experience (specifically that of Kant). He returns once more to the idea of productive constraint, offering the example of artists not only as evidence of this concept, but also as proof of the unity of opposites too, as creative freedom emerges from discipline, not in spite of it. Nietzsche’s concept of rank is less clear; his nobility clearly does not align with that of the established (if disempowered) European nobility of his time; instead, it seems to envision something more ephemeral. Unfortunately, the connection between the noble attitude and the inborn nature of nobility is one that Nietzsche leaves unexplained.
Themes
