PHL217H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Vikings, Ressentiment, Aphorism
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
PHL217 - Lecture 9 - Nietzsche
On the Genealogy of Morality - First Essay
-Noble people who were light and conquering and in charge of everything
•rule with a good vs. bad moral consequence
•can be seen today in Europeans, etc.
•no one questioned anything at the time
-Priests (aphorism 6)
•political superiority turns into psychological superiority
•priests implement self control, abstinence - not symbolic
-physicalised way of exercising power - not having sex, eating, etc.
-very unhealthy
-very conscious inaction
•notion that there’s a human possibility of holding back and holding back our animal
instincts
-more than self control - deeper, harder on yourself
•produces a metaphysics of something dangerous
•shifts from the aristocratic version
•makes the noble people much worse enemies than the viking band
-they don’t beat you with force, they beat you with an insidious and violent hatred
-much more intelligent, effective
-The Jews enter into the account
•they are a nation of priests
•society dedicated to the hatred of this viking prowess
•radical revolution - only those who suffer are the highest
-the weak, the humble rule
!1
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Tuesday, February 23, 2016
•referred to as the slave revolt
-so successful we don’t even see it anymore
-of course the humble are the rulers
•8 - Christianity conquers the world as it did with Judaism
•you cannot go back to the master morality and all become vikings
-but can we survive under the slave revolt?
-Christianity has the highest love - a man who would die for his people - born of
the greatest hatred
•Christianity is the elevation of hatred into love
•they nailed him to the cross, and tempted the world
-and they won!
-In Nietzsche’s world, if you win, you win
•it doesn’t matter what you do to win
•Christianity was a success for a time
-N was too educated to realise there was anything outside Christianity
•secularism is a twenty-first century idea and is not obvious even today
-The free thinker is someone who has outgrown Christianity
•says democracy has inherited the role of the church
•even more deeply embedded in a type of Christianity
•makes the question of Christianity stand out as marked by a strange series of
presumptions, rather than the norm
-allows us to engage the rest of continental philosophers in the wake of two
thousand years of religious history
-You take a bunch of weak people who cannot get revenge who envy the vikings and
want to be them and take their things
•they get an imaginary revenge - “you will suffer for this”
•ressentiment
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